Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak by Elizabeth Knapp (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019). In her second poetry collection, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, Elizabeth Knapp springboards from the pop and political zeitgeists of the … Read More
Be with Me Always by Randon Billings Noble (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). “But then I met J, and my heart emptied its pockets,” writes Randon Billings Noble about meeting her husband in the essay “Ambush” from her … Read More
Orders of Protection by Jenn Hollmeyer (University of North Texas Press, 2019). When Salamander first published Jenn Hollmeyer’s short story “Step Off at Ten” in the spring of 2012, the editors were taken with the story’s subtle power … Read More
Sex & Taipei City by Yu-Han Chao (Red Hen Press, 2019). The Taipei of Yu-Han Chao’s debut story collection Sex & Taipei City both bustles and glistens. It’s a city of industry and aspiration—skyscrapers and metro trains, prep … Read More
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018). House of Fact, House of Ruin by Tom Sleigh (Graywolf Press, 2018). Fady Joudah is the Palestinian-American translator of two of the poet Mahmoud Darwish’s books … Read More
Extravagant Rescues: Poems by Brett Foster (Northwestern University Press, 2019). First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, Brett Foster was my classmate in the Graduate Creative Writing program at Boston University. In 2015, Brett died from … Read More
Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare by Lola Haskins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). The word asylum, the title of Lola Haskins’ capacious, questing new book of poems, pivots on a curious and seemingly contradictory double meaning. Merriam-Webster defines an … Read More
Not Dead Yet and Other Stories by Hadley Moore (Autumn House Press, 2019). When my husband and I are back in his hometown, we make a daily visit to New Bethany, the senior living home where his grandmother … Read More
The Arrangements by Kate Colby (Four Way Books, 2018). “Were we born with eyes / or when we saw ourselves // seeing?” Kate Colby asks in “The Beholder,” a poem that appears early in The Arrangements (Four Way … Read More
Let Me Out Here: Stories by Emily W. Pease (Hub City Press, 2019). If the cover image of Emily W. Pease’s new short story collection—a stone-faced little girl staring squarely at the camera, legs planted on a desolate … Read More
House is an Enigma by Emma Bolden (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018). Emma Bolden’s House is an Enigma lives inside a continual unfolding, moving fluidly and fluently between outer surfaces and the meaning-making within, centering on the … Read More
Bad Harvest by Dzvinia Orlowsky (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2018). The title of Dzvinia Orlowsky’s sixth book, Bad Harvest, evokes the Holodomor, the man-made famine that affected and killed millions across the grain-producing Ukraine during Soviet occupation, presumably including … Read More