In conjunction with reading, I find it extremely important to be able to talk about what I’ve read to a greater extent than “I liked this book” or “I didn’t like this poem.” I find it important to delve deeper, into themes, into intentions, into meanings. I like to refer books more extensively in this matter so that the review is less about whether I liked the book or not, and more about the WHY of the matter. Those reviews will be posted here.
Via the main REVIEWS page, you can view ALL reviews that I have posted. However, for ease, these reviews are also categorized by genre. If you are searching for, say, reviews of poetry collections, simply hover your mouse over the REVIEWS button and select the “Poetry Collection” option.
David Dodd Lee has been there with me since the beginning—not since the beginning of my reading and loving poetry, but of my writing poetry and taking that progress seriously. Of taking poetry seriously, and the idea that there was something to be taken from poetry, to be understood, to be had. Like a…
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When I think of highways, I think of other cars, the open road, corn fields. I think of how limitless, how borderless these highways can be, allowing us to go straight, turn left, or turn right, as we please. But there are also barricades: toll roads, No U-Turn signs, and Detour Turn Left/Right; these…
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I don’t know about you, but in my mind, perception and grief are united. This is not to say that one cannot exist without the other, but only that our perceptions vary based on our state of mind—especially when we are talking about grief. On an average, typical day, we know very well that…
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Sometimes I find myself thinking so much about what poetry is or what it can do that I forget to think about how it can make me feel. Perhaps that is the sign of a lesser poetry, a poetry with holes in it: one that goes through the motions, the mechanics, of writing, but…
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Let me begin by playing a round of Two Truths and a Lie… We all know how this works, right? The speaker shares two truths about themselves, and a lie, but the lie must not be easily distinguished from the two truths, and the other players are supposed to guess which statement is a…
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Do you ever find yourself in a reading slump? Or too unreasonably busy to even consider finding a way to fit reading in? And when you finally do have the time and energy, do you find yourself searching for that writing style that just throws you back in, every time? Well, this summer, as…
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In Kristy Cambron’s A Sparrow in Terezin, the second novel in the A Hidden Masterpiece Novel series, two central female characters, Sera James and Kája Makovsky, bridge the gap between a past genocide and a present-day criminal investigation. Kája previously fled her home, escaping the Holocaust; Sera is dealing with a situation that may…
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In the quiet moments, when we stop to take a breath and think, we may realize that all of our thoughts, our questions, our hopes, are connected—that is to say, back to two main ideas: Where am I going? and Where have I been? Again, as if to say something toward longevity, What am…
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Readers, let me explain first that I am not one to contest reviews, whether overly positive, unconstructively negative, or anything in-between. But when a review makes a claim that is societally problematic, I have to respond—not to the review as a whole, but to its thematic issues. A week ago, a review appeared for…
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When we spend a lot of time reading poetry, I know we can become critical of the pursuit of love and the defining of boundaries in poetry—but sometimes, a poet chooses to address these exact topics, and they get everything right: they create something new, something meaningful, something entirely worth reading, whether it is…
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