Tara Lynn Masih’s exceptional short story and novella collection How We Disappear (Press 53, 2022) presents a sprawling range of characters, unique voices, and exotic settings. Take the first story, “What You Can’t See in the Picture.” The protagonist is a woman with a most unusual career, stemming from her super power: she can recognize […]
“The Orchid Tattoo” by Carla Damron
September 20, 2022 by 1 Comment
The pages of Carla Damron’s The Orchid Tattoo (Koehler Books, 2022) whiz by so fast, so easily, I have to say it is one of the best nail-biters I’ve read in a while. Not only that, this well-crafted thriller features a smart, likeable hospital social worker—Georgia Thayer—as protagonist. She is pitted against a human trafficking […]
“The Murderous Sky: Poems of Madness and Mercy” by Rosemary Daniell
September 19, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Steven Croft Its possibilities for expression limitless, poetry can evoke many things, but as an art form it reverberates especially affectively within crisis: take for example the poetries of Homer or Sylvia Plath. Rosemary Daniell, who identifies as a Southerner, has been one of the South’s bravest poets and nonfiction writers for decades. […]
September Read of the Month: “Loving the Dead and Gone,” by Judith Turner-Yamamoto
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s debut novel Loving the Dead and Gone (Regal House, September 2022) is a 2020 Petrichor Prize finalist. There’s more than one aching heart in this excellent story exploring the generational effects of love, loss, betrayal, and redemption. The story opens with middle-aged Clayton finding a young man’s body after someone smashed into the […]
If You Want to Understand Code-Switching, You Need to Read Jean Toomer’s “Cane”
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Toomer’s groundbreaking 1923 work reflects the complexity of racial performance By Lee Williams As the Harlem Renaissance skipped to a run, the South Georgian characters of Jean Toomer’s Cane demonstrated what present day Black Americans know all too well: to survive the collisions of racial trauma or violence, one has to switch identities. Constantly. Published in 1923, […]
Claire Hamner Matturro reviews “No Names to Be Given” and interviews the author Julia Brewer Daily
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
THE BOOK Julia Brewer Daily’s, novel, No Names to Be Given (Admission Press, 2021) is an evocative and sensitive novel about three young women from vastly different backgrounds who face unwed pregnancies in the 1960’s Deep South. Sandy, Faith, and Becca become roommates in a New Orleans maternity home hospital for unwed mothers and gradually […]