The opening poem, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” sets the soul-baring tone for Elizabeth C. Garcia’s stunning collection, Resurrected Body (Cider Press Review 2024). No wonder this book won Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize! The phrasing of Garcia’s first poem will cause most mothers to recall those scary, cringeworthy moments in the delivery […]
“Deep Water, Dark Horizons and Other Stories, plus” by Suzanne Hudson
July 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Deep Water, Dark Horizons and Other Stories, plus, a sampler of Suzanne Hudson’s literary career, is in honor of her receiving the 2025 Truman Capote Prize. The collection of specially-chosen morsels, published by Joe Taylor (Livingston Press of University of West Alabama) introduced by Sonny Brewer, and dedicated to Joe Formichella, notable pillars of her […]
June Read of the Month: “NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy” by Brooke Champagne
June 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Part of the story behind Brooke Champagne’s astonishingly good essay collection, NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy (UGa Press 2024) is a dog. Well, not just Nola herself, the “brindled, emaciated pit-boxer” that Champagne and her husband adopted after Hurricane Katrina, but moreso her particular expression, born of jealousy and/or inadequacy, when […]
Read of the Month: “The Bright Years” by Sarah Damoff
April 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
The Bright Years (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Sarah Damoff shimmers as an exquisite, poignant portrait of a family crumbling as their painful pasts push their way into the present. It is a story of addiction and recovery. Of love and loss. Of forgiveness and redemption. Set in Texas, The Bright Years takes readers on […]
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 […]
Focus on Resource Extraction with “Beyond Buffalo” and “Filling the Big Empty”
March 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
This month Southern Literary Review is focusing on the damage resource extraction causes to the environment and to people and the communities they live in. Two fine environmental novels share the honor of March Book of the Month. The first is Beyond Buffalo by Betsy Reeder. It shines a light on the psychological damage following […]