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An Action Adventure Sports Novel

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Guest Post by Lorraine “Lorrie” Morales

If you’re looking for a great story from a self-published author, check our Jim Malner’s Big League. The book is an action adventure sports novel and a great read for anyone who loves hockey and mystery.

David Stone, an undrafted walk-on player, dreams of playing in the NHL. Riley Sawyer, the league’s number one draft pick, is Detroit Red Wings favorite to lead the team to the Stanley Cup. Their meeting at the summer training camp is a battle, not only on the ice, but against Russian mobsters and professional assassins. The boys will discover what real team work is in professional sports and the world of organized crime.

Big League by Jim Malner. Self-published, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lorraine “Lorrie” Morales is a published author from Alberta, Canada
Press: https://www.lorriemorales.com.

Fresh Fiction from Gilbert Allen

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Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.

A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.

The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

At Home In The Dark With Carol Morris’s ‘Into The Lucky Dark’

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Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Into The Lucky Dark by Carol Morris, who is part of the Diane Wakoski circle, is much like being invited to coffee at a friend’s house where every time you go there you can be yourself and when you leave you feel like more yourself than ever before. Morris believes that life is a struggle but to read her poems and look at her utterly delightful artwork in this book, it would seem that life is also a place that we seem to haunt long before getting to the ghostly stage of things. This takes a bit of getting used to. It takes a while to read Morris’s poems because to languish in their harsh settings of bars and other meetings/gatherings is to feel the freeze, feel the edges of being an outsider even to oneself and then find the self in the touchstones of such leaving: “Houses in which my talents were useless” (from “A June Divorce”) to finding art and abstractions which make concrete sense. [Read more…] about At Home In The Dark With Carol Morris’s ‘Into The Lucky Dark’

The Wishing Tree

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Guest Post by Robert Lamb

It was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “War is hell.” If you have any doubt that the general was dead right, run and get a copy of The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. You’ll see war up close and personal in his excellent account of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Hamilton, a Richmond, VA writer and former Peace Corps volunteer, shows us through the eyes of a young Christian girl in Armenia how war unleashes unspeakable human savagery in the name of ethnic cleansing.

It is April 1915 and the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which has lasted for centuries, is on the verge of defeat by the allied forces of Great Britain and the Arabs. In the novel’s first few pages, the heroine, Valia, a teenager, sees her parents, siblings, and neighbors, all Christians, murdered by Turkish “police soldiers,” and flees for her life.

Thus begins an odyssey the reader won’t soon forget. The author’s account of Valia’s struggle to stay alive and hopeful is a hymn to the human spirit, and the story is nothing short of realistic and gripping.

Adding a nice touch of realism, even Lawrence of Arabia and Arab Prince Faisal make cameo appearances near the story’s end.

OK, film producers; you can’t say I didn’t give you a heads up on this novel.

The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. Winter Goose Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Robert Lamb is the author of four novels and a book of short stories; he review books for the New York Review of Books; and he has a website at www.robertlamb.net.

A Speaker to Root For

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Magazine Review by Katy Haas

During the first few months of the pandemic, I couldn’t read anything. My attention span was gone and anything I did manage to read left my mind immediately. But that ended when I sat in the park and read Dorothy Chan’s Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019) from cover to cover. My locked-away ability to read had found its key. Already a fan of Chan’s work, this just helped solidify my love for her poetry even more, and I’m always more than happy to check out any of her newly published poems. The October 2020 issue of Poetry gives the gift of her poem, “Ode to Chinese Superstitions, Haircuts, and Being a Girl.”

The poem flows in a rush, like a held breath finally exhaled. Chan begins with the Chinese superstition “it’s bad luck / to get a haircut when I’m sick” and leads into the role the speaker fulfills as a daughter, as a girl, as someone who “always bring[s] / the party, cause[s] the trouble . . . .” While there are specifics tied to her own self, culture, and family—her brother’s fate, her mother’s thoughts on her future, her father’s opinion on how “good Chinese girls” wear their hair—Chan leaves the reader plenty of room to relate to her words. If we don’t feel like her, we can still root for her and her “short skirt,” her “forehead forever exposed.”

A Playful Conglomeration of Experiments

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Guest Post by Shamae Budd

Patrick Madden’s third collection of essays is a playful conglomeration of experiments (in form, in collaboration, in thought). Interspersed among more traditional personal essays, you will find a menagerie of borrowed forms. The collection opens with an essay masquerading as an eBay listing for “Writer Michael Martone’s Leftover Water.” (Or is it an eBay listing masquerading as an essay? We can’t be sure, which is half the fun.) You will find blackout poetry (“Insomnia”), an essay written with the help of predictive text algorithms (“Unpredictable Essays”), mixed up proverbs (“The Proverbial ____” ), and a series of “Pangram Haiku.” [Read more…] about A Playful Conglomeration of Experiments

Inside Out & Back Again

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Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Inside Out and Back Again is a novel in verse by Thanhhà Lai. This book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2011 and a Newbery Honor in 2012.

Through a series of poems, 10-year-old Hà takes the readers through one year of her life in 1975. It was a life-changing year, beginning with her life in Saigon, then fleeing South Vietnam on a ship as Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Hà and her family were in a refugee camp before resettling in Alabama, and the family struggled to start a new life there. Hà struggled with the language and fitting in at school.

Many details of this book were inspired by Thanhhà Lai’s own life. She also fled Vietnam at the age of 10 at the end of the Vietnam War, and moved to Alabama. The poems in this book will make you laugh and they will also make you cry. They will make you want to read this book all in one sitting, and when you get to the end, immediately want to read it again, but slowly this time to savor all the words. This book is powerful, poignant, and moving, worthy of all its awards.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhhà Lai. HarperCollins, 2011.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Picking Up the Fragments

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Guest Post by Elizabeth Basok

Hildr Fragments, written by Dani L Smith, is a collection of poems covering relationships, notably a lengthy relationship that was both co-dependent and abusive.

Smith is a British expat living in South Korea; she meets a fellow expat, an older Canadian, who proves to be problematic from the start of their relationship. The author is forced to pull herself from the relationship after years of gaslighting (“even when I caught you in a lie you somehow succeeded in making me second-guess myself and making me feel crazy”), cheating, and even physical abuse. The author covers all the heavy aspects of leaving an abusive relationship from losing your household belongings, “11 drunken, psychotic messages within one hour,” and the time that she will never get back.

The word “Hildr” means “battle” in Old Norse, and we see the author battle with the desire to stay in an abusive relationship, her attempts to break from her abuser’s hold over her, her recovering from a miscarriage, and ultimately freeing herself from abuse and looking onward to the future.

Hildr Fragments by Dani L Smith. Independently published, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Basok is a lecturer at The Ohio State University. Her Instagram is @lizbasok.

Life and Death in ‘Light Through a Pane of Glass’

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Guest Post by Nora Aronson

There is little between the word and the flesh in Thomas Cook’s daunting and terrifying Light Through a Pane of Glass. “There is perfection in the early dark / the smell of moist figs,” he writes in “Three Meditations,” yet life and death lurks beneath this observation, as it does beneath so many others in this debut collection.

Cook has been the editor and publisher of the longstanding journal Tammy and their chapbook press. His poems have appeared widely, and in several chapbooks, but until this collection there has not been a full understanding of his poetic project, which comes, anachronistically, on the heels of pastoral philosophers such as Lorine Niedecker and James Wright—this book features its own “Journey Westward,” has its own “deep water”—while it also pursues an existential agenda in poems such as “Two Figures”:

Afraid to accept a purer perception,
they busy themselves
with the intelligible world,
leaving much lost;
a thought, persists

Are we dearer in absence, you and I?”

Light Through a Pane of Glass will leave you thirsty in the Mojave Desert and abandon you to the Midwest. It is unflinching in the face of inheritance, addiction, and death. In it, you will smell figs, taste dates, and be grateful for afternoon onions. It will make you real.

Light Through a Pane of Glass by Thomas Cook. Big Table, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Nora Aronson is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her first book, Instances of Calamity, was a finalist in the Uninterrupted First Book Contest. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, Exhume Magazine, and Terra Firma.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Let. Goings. Disappear.

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Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Let.

Timothy Liu wrote the most beautiful homage/obituary for poet Linda Gregg, published in The New York Times (“Linda Gregg, Poet of Taut, Vivid Verse, Is Dead at 76,” March 27, 2019) and Plume (“My Own Private Parthenon,” Issue #93, May 2019). Look these up if you have not read them. Let your tears flow, but not only for Gregg, who is known for her “chiseled in marble” poems, but for Liu, whose language explores the ruins of these, also a very serious poet; yet different, a very tongue-in-cheek poet. I imagine him exploring various surfaces and various crevices with his tongue, letting it slide and ride and taste all life has to offer. He does this in his latest book of poems, Let It Ride. He takes us to scenes exploring the aftermath of ecstasies of the body in low-brow and high-brow places, in City Mouse and Country Mouse places. Liu is a poet who rides in both places and steps back to let us also see the scene. [Read more…] about Let. Goings. Disappear.

A Handshake Between Time Periods

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Guest Post by Jack Graham.

It’s incredibly rare that a novel can leave you feeling as ecstatically powerless as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being, a strikingly well-crafted novel following the tribulations of both Naoko Yasutani, an early 2000’s teenager and of the more contemporary character of Ruth—an uninspired author reading the diary of the aforementioned Japanese teen.

Ozeki’s texts demonstrate a handshake between two separate periods within time, misting and tearing apart any conceptions of what it means to be ‘contemporary.’ The reader is simultaneously inundated with early references to popular and zany Japanese Maid Cafès and Hello Kitty merchandise (a Japanophile’s dream) in the form on Nao’s diary whilst Ruth provides a far more grounded account of modern normality—one of mundane and domesticated living.

When reading from the perspective of Nao, a readership is forcefully delved into an environment mostly motivated by suicidal thoughts. Being a Western reader, it became increasingly intriguing to be given some understanding into a Japanese mindset in regards to the romantic sentiments surrounding self-killing, one very foreign to my own.

On the other side of the coin, however, Ruth is a character who lives a decade or so after Nao’s accounts, the physical embodiment of dramatic irony. As a reader of Nao’s diary, she can locate Nao within time, using the internet as a tool to fixate her somewhere after 2001 but prior to the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Incident of 2011—she’s a literary archaeologist of sorts. It is through Ruth that I, the reader, was stripped of all control. It is at Ruth’s pace of reading that we unveil the life of Nao, it is only at the will of her determination that I found myself turning the page, heavy with anticipation.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Random House, 2013.

Reviewer bio: I’m Jack Graham, currently studying my Masters in English Literary Studies at Durham University.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.