Review: “Cooking with the Muse”
Title: Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare Authors: Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla Publisher: Tupelo Press, April 1, 2016 Hardcover, 494 pages ISBN, 1936797682 / ISBN, 9781936797684 Link to purchase: http://www.tupelopress.org/ Or http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Muse-Sumptuous-Gathering-Seasonal/dp/1936797682/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464723265&sr=1-1&keywords=cooking+with+the+muse My copy of Cooking with the Muse arrived, cornucopic and gorgeous, after much...
Read MoreReview: Trophy Wife, “Sing What Scares You”
Countless albums sit on history’s shelf, but exceedingly few create their own place in time. A place where we can revisit, enriched each time. While I will doubtless miss out on many albums that will carve their places after I am gone, I am fortunate to be alive today to visit the timeless place created by Trophy Wife‘s sophomore effort, Sing What Scares You. Have you ever felt as if language lacked the power and nuance to express a feeling as it sprouted inside you? Like the feeling of spotting a young girl at a charity auction reading a comic strip titled Bizarre Gender-Swapping...
Read MoreReview: “In Vitro” by Leland Jamieson
As in his earlier book, Twentieth Century Bread, in In Vitro: New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11, poet Leland Jamieson paints a vivid landscape using rhyme and diction. A formal poet by nature, his best efforts are tightly-crafted examples of form meeting function. With his verse, he explores childhood memories, extols the beauty of nature, and contemplates the history of human life on earth. Jamieson’s poems about his youth are often sprawling but packed with detail, such as in the sestina “Sunshine,” where he begins with a compelling image: My cousin Jack and I, arms out...
Read MoreReview: A Whale’s Tale
Combining fiction with zoological information, in A Whale’s Tale, Daniel S. Janik explores the undersea world of the Pacific Humpback whale. The book is described on the back as a “Read-Aloud, Color-Me-Please Book.” It follows a particular whale from his birth until he begins his own family. The idea for this book is a noble one: to interest children in the natural world through a character with whom they can identify. The narrative, however, could pose problems for young readers, whether they’re reading it themselves or listening to an adult. Some of the...
Read MoreReview: Chansons of a Chinaman
As he writes in the poem “The Calm Clam,” poet Changming Yuan yearns “to be a voice empowered / For all around me.” In his collection, Chansons of a Chinaman, he strives “To translate my loud pain / Into a muted pearl,” to reconcile his Chinese ancestry and his American life. To do so, Yuan, whose work has appeared in Wild Violet, draws from history, mythology and natural imagery. In natural images he finds personal comfort and resonance, as demonstrated in the poem “Name Changing.” Here, he defends his choice not to Anglicize his name, which...
Read MoreReview: A Tiara for the Twentieth Century
Write what is hardest to say, my poetry instructor in grad school used to urge us, and Suzanne Richardson Harvey does precisely that. In A Tiara for the Twentieth Century: The Collected Poems of Suzanne Richardson Harvey, the poet tackles subjects ranging from motherhood, family relationships and aging to bulimia, AIDS and homelessness. Whether approaching a big issue (such as the aftermath of Chernobyl in “The Wheat Fields of Chernobyl”) or celebrating small marital moments (in “The Merits of Dining at Home”), her phenomenal word choice enables her to find the...
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