Perhaps it was no accident that I finally had a chance to read Tyler Robert Sheldon’s latest poetry collection, Everything Is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2024), at Christmastime. Just like the Christmas Eve of Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ immortal Christmas tale, this book is populated by ghosts of past, present, and future. The poems […]
“Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder” by Brandi Bradley
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder (Rumor Mill Press 2025) is not your mama’s police procedural, folks. In this sequel to Local Monsters, author Brandi Bradley has crafted a particularly riveting mystery by going heavy on character development instead of hitting the reader—boom, boom, boom—with chronological facts and forensics. Told from alternating points of […]
“The Welcome” by Hubert Creekmore edited by Philip “Pip” Gordon
April 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pip Gordon calls The Welcome (UMiss Press 2023), Hubert Creekmore’s “most radically significant work,” and both terms seem important to understanding what makes this novel noteworthy. Gordon discovered that, perhaps because the novel went so completely out of print, there was surprisingly little academic work on it, despite its recognition as an important example of […]
Read of the Month: “Upon the Corner of the Moon” by Valerie Nieman
April 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pagan rituals, visions and prophecies; commingling of myth, religion and history; poets, princes and perpetually plotting monarchs; sibling rivalry; siege and conquest. In her new novel Upon the Corner of the Moon (Regal House 2025), veteran North Carolina writer Valerie Nieman uses all this rich material—and more—to dramatize the backstory of two of Shakespeare’s most […]
“Distant Relations” by Cheryl Whitehead
April 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Cheryl Whitehead is both a gifted poet and a gifted storyteller—and these can be two distinct, albeit complimentary talents. In Distant Relations (Loblolly Press 2025), Whitehead weaves these dual talents together into an always engaging, often uncanny collection of poetry rich with family, nature, culture, and transcendency. Her verses reverberate with turmoil and grace, all […]
“The End of Tennessee: A Memoir” by Rachel M. Hanson
March 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Few would deny that Hanson is an exceptional wordsmith. The prose in her memoir, The End of Tennessee (U of SC Press), regularly slips into the poetic as she details her tragic coming-of-age that resulted in estrangement from both of her parents and even her siblings. That Hanson was dealt a poor hand early in […]