Intimate, brave, frank, piercing, and wholly dazzling. Just a few initial words to describe Anna Laura Reeve’s debut collection of poems, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press 2023). Reeve writes with an unflinching honesty that all but hurts, and her words cut with a sharp and precise knife. Yet her phrasing […]
“Burning Eden” by Sarah Bewley
September 20, 2023 by 2 Comments
Burning Eden (Level Best Books 2023), by Gainesville, Florida, first-time novelist and award-winning playwright Sarah Bewley, is a skillfully plotted, character-driven police procedural with a surprisingly tender heart given the rising death toll. The novel also has an evocative gloss of Southern Gothic about it, adding to its impact and richness. After all, the story […]
“Counting Souls” by Donald R. Buchanan
September 10, 2023 by 2 Comments
Tom Love, the protagonist of Donald R. Buchanan’s fine novel, Counting Souls, is a hardscrabble farmer in western North Carolina who is charged with collecting the 1830 Federal Census for Macon County. His job creates a situation like The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek and The Giver of Stars, where packhorse librarians had cause to go […]
September Read of the Month: “Sister, Mother, Warrior” by Vanessa Riley
September 10, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Vanessa Riley offers a stunning picture of Haiti’s history and founding through the eyes of several key women in her novel Sister Mother Warrior (William Morrow 2022). Riley’s superb research and careful crafting of characters bring the story of Haiti’s liberation from foreign rule to life. Riley, the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for […]
“Dear Outsiders” by Jenny Sadre-Orafai
September 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai (University of Akron Press 2023) is a vibrant tale of two siblings whose often idyllic childhood on the coastline of an unnamed sea changes abruptly. Written in lyrical phrases encapsulated in short prose poems instead of the more traditional paragraphs and chapters, the collection tells the story of the siblings’ […]
“Hillbilly Madonna” by Sara Moore Wagner
September 4, 2023 by Leave a Comment
An exquisite, powerful work by a young poet, Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press 2022) by Sara Moore Wagner is an endlessly complex collection of poems to be relished slowly. Each poem demands special attention as the individual verses convey their own unique tales within well-wrought lines of compelling intensity. The poems, mostly written in free verse […]