There is no question that McCooey is a creative and sophisticated poet. In this collection he turns questions and lists into poems. He also has included various narrations and short poems which are precise and concise with manicured lines. One of the poems, “Your Life as a Movie”, cleverly shows the many ways we find meaning in life against its illogicality and incongruity.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of The Animals of My Earth School by Mildred Kiconco Barya
Mildred Barya’s The Animals of My Earth School does that: it gets under the skin and into the psyche in a labyrinthine hall of mirrors, the reader like the writer seeing our human selves as animals and the animals as human reflections.
A review of We Arrive Uninvited by Jen Knox
The author effectively balances an almost all-female cast of characters without falling prey to literary cliches or devolving into a feminist manifesto. In this intimate book centered around different ways of seeing and knowing, Knox takes on the challenge of trying to decipher the messy relationships that women have with each other and does so seamlessly while also highlighting the challenges of female agency in America over the past century.
A review of Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing
How Skelley is able to write lines that simultaneously describe, illuminate, juxtapose, and contradict is anyone’s guess. There is an intimacy, a voyeuristic quality to this work overall, as we turn each page, as if we’ve happened upon these poems, found them stashed away in a jean jacket pocket or borrowed them from a friend, like that treasured indie rock vinyl record. The lines are meant to be savored and shared. This is a collection that slows down time, forces the reader to stop and linger awhile.
A review of T by Alan Fyfe
Fyfe does a terrific job in capturing both the seductive pull of T’s need and his rapid decline and things begin to disintegrate. Told in third person narrative, with T’s point of view, the story follows T’s various attempts to score, sell, find a place to live, and in some odd way, to find meaning. To say that T’s world is grungy would be an understatement, but Fyfe’s writing is consistently rich and poetic.
Fiction as Palimpsest: The Revelatory Lie: Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, the Lovers
And so we enter into the fiction with both curiosity and fascination, which Gammon masterfully both milks and sustains as she gives us the details, enough to keep us guessing, like voyeurs, like amateur sleuths, as though we might deduce the truth from her fiction—it’s seduction and frankly ingenious.
A review of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk
As Uschuk probes the wounds of contemporary existence, we see how deeply she understands human suffering. Fortunately for readers, the author also brings abundant love for this difficult, complicated world that somehow keeps going. As “The Essential Shape” (100) reminds us, “Spinning, the earth begins” again, and “shapes itself with fingers of light.”
An Inner Habitat for Searching: a Review of Rewild by Meredith Stricker
I do not think Rewild suggests that love will save the human race. Rather, it brings us to consider that by participating in love we will save love, perhaps contributing to its existence and triumph in the cosmos—animism from an earlier human understanding of the world, wielded against indifference. We can infer the possibility of a universe without mankind.
A review of SEO 2023: Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies by Adam Clarke
Clarke’s book is an impressive, comprehensive guide that dexterously navigates the complex and often cryptic universe of SEO. It’s a challenging task to make such a technical subject palatable to a diverse audience, but Clarke manages to do so with aplomb.
A review of The Lottery and Corruption in the U.S. by Harold Rosen
Reviewed by Dale Shelabarger Lottery Corruption, U.S.A by Harold Rosen AuthorHouse November 2020, Paperback, 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1665506649 The game of chance has fascinated humanity for centuries, creating a compelling narrative of luck, fate, and fortune. And none is more…