A review of She Doesn’t Seem Autistic by Esther Ottaway

Ottaway explores the way that women are often taught to mask emotions which can make diagnosis difficult.  The book is also deeply personal, putting the reader directly into the experience and incorporating a welter of complex emotions, sensations, and perspectives that are powerful. Poetry is the right medium, embracing the complexity through rhythm, structure, imagery, and an engagement in the senses that creates immediacy.

An interview with Robert McKean

Robert McKean spoke via email with Caitlin Hamilton Summie about his latest novel, Mending What is Broken, published by University of W. Alabama/Livingston Press on August 20th. While also a writer, Summie is also McKean’s publicist. Their conversation focused on his new book but also included a few questions about craft, as McKean always writes about the same fictional place, across all his books. Each book, however, works as a stand-alone.

A review of Anamnesis by Denise O’Hagan

O’Hagan manages a delicate balance between immediacy and nostalgia with a light hand that feels natural, inviting the reader into the moment to share in the meaning making. There are layers of desire pervading the work, time and space condensing, folding into itself in sudden revelations that come into a quiet scene with the force of empathy

A review of A Random Caller – Cancer Poetry by Heather Cameron

Cameron is very creative and is able to reveal a lot in the different ways she writes and sets the poems. For example in one poem she utilises pieces of dialogues which are obviously spoken at the time of the diagnosis. In this section there is also a very poignant poem titled “A Letter to my Body”. We sometimes see our body as a different entity and we question ‘it’,or get angry with ‘it’ thinking or saying “how can you do this to me?”.

A review of The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker

Rediker is a professor, activist, and historian of the Atlantic slave trade. Writing in a contemporary and progressive way, he reveals this man’s courageous cry against the unfairness, brutal cruelty, and inexcusable ambivalence toward slave labor in all its forms. Lay is presented as an exemplar, and the author tells us how he was determined to devote “a study all its own” to Lay after discovering him in previous research. 

A review of I walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle

Still hammering away at the keyboard at age 74, T.C. Boyle still maintains his place as America’s grand poobah of literary fiction, particularly displaying his mastery in the short story genre; and this most recent collection of 13 tightly crafted slices of life intermixed with occasional forays into his beloved magical realism  prove that he is still at the top of his game.

A review of The Swift Dark Tide by Katia Ariel

There is a clear narrative arc that drives the reading forward quickly, but the writing is so sensual and languid that it creates a resistance to that progression. So much transformation happens in the gaps between the action – looking at the ocean, in the silent space of memory, in a moment after birth while looking into a newborn’s face, or even small moments of mindfulness such as noticing the pure green of a paediatrician’s jumper, or a seaweed crown “mossy garlands the circumference of an adult head” floating on the surface of the water.

A review of One Day We’re All Going to Die by Elise Esther Hearst

Deceptively easy to read, One day we’re all going to die is a rich, complex book that encompasses family and connection, friendships, privilege, survival in the face of inherited trauma, Judaism, culture, modern life, and the healing power of creativity.  If that seems like a lot, it doesn’t feel like it.  Hearst handles it all with ease, and the book is a light-hearted joy.