A review of trying x trying by Dora Malech

The paronomasia here and all over trying x trying is astounding, and the cryptic title – trying x trying – likewise highlights Malech’s elusive cleverness, her coy, seductive use of words, her dexterity with language. Dora Malech’s verse makes you think of an acrobat who makes it look so easy, flying through the air, swinging on the trapeze, gracefully contorting, spinning, landing in a seemingly single effort. 

A review of Eject City by Jason Morphew

Morphew’s background as both a poet and songwriter resonates throughout the collection. Some poems carry a musical cadence; others resist rhythm altogether. Morphew is unafraid to let his poems falter, stutter, or collapse into silence. He is a true artist—a virtuoso who is unafraid to take risks. He transforms his despair and life’s experiences into art—whether of body, of heart, or of legacy.

A review of Suicide by Édouard Levé

The narration in particular demonstrates Levé’s artistry. The book’s speaker addresses his friend, recounting a wide range of events, conversations, and thoughts that took place before the suicide. But wait—he, the narrator, is recounting incredibly specific details about his friend’s life, quoting conversations, explaining worries and trains of thought that his friend, not the narrator, experienced.

A review of Sentence by Mikhail Iossel

The stories in Sentence thrive in the midst of foreclosed freedoms, a confining environment but never without a sense of curiosity and interest. Sentence may forego periods for the brief spaces allowed by commas, but the narratives are well-structured, darkly humorous, nostalgic, investigative in regards to the surreality of trauma, survivor guilt and paranoia.

A review of Bequeath By Melora Wolff

Bequeath is a project of probing questions from the past and reifying them in the present through the burden of worry Wolff inherited in girlhood from her mother and felt, but never completely understood, even in adulthood. Her essays are the incarnation of that “delicately durable circuit” established in childhood sending into her “consciousness each day the sanctity of memory.”

Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer

Gold Digger is a bristling invitation. A challenge and a call to attention. It demands an opening of the eyes and ears to lives lived vivid and vital despite the social context in which they are lived. This is a collection as galvanising as it is refreshing, and I congratulate Lisa and Gazebo Books on its publication.  If you identify as a woman, you will feel seen in these pages. If you neither identify as a woman nor have spent any of your life socialised as one, prepare to have your eyes unpeeled.

A review of Alighting in Time by Lynne Wycherley

As her poetry and prose articles indicate, she is concerned about the little-known risks of the wireless boom and works to build awareness of the dangers.  While her recurrent theme is the threat posed by modernity to the rhythms and solace of nature, her poems are not overly didactic nor depressing.  They are uplifting and also reader-friendly; she includes footnotes to explain  potentially unfamiliar terms.