Reviewed by Dawn Major In The Cicada Tree, Georgia author Robert Gwaltney’s debut novel, dark secrets lurk beneath the town of Providence, Georgia, secrets of obsessions and betrayal, secrets that must be unearthed. Donalbain, from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, said, “There’s daggers in men’s smiles. The near in the blood, The nearer bloody.” The Cicada Tree (Moonshine […]
“The Places That Hold,” by John Davis Jr.
February 16, 2022 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro A trim, eloquent book of fifty-one well-wrought poems, The Places That Hold (Eastover Press 2021), by John Davis Jr., is rich with evocative images which will captivate and charm readers. His accessible phrases are subtly complex, weaving more than a bit of mystique into his nuanced layers. With his poet’s […]
David Bottoms’s “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump”: Forty Years Later
February 10, 2022 by 1 Comment
Essay by Steven Croft After forty years, David Bottoms remains a poet of Georgia who, like other great Southern writers of place, e.g., Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, is able to make the markedly regional universal. Author of nine full-length books of poetry, Bottoms increasingly asks through the arc of these books, to quote Wallace Stevens in […]
Steven Croft
February 9, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Steven Croft studied creative writing at the University of Georgia with Georgia author Warren Leamon. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, North of Oxford, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and other places and has […]
February Read of the Month: “Take a Left at Tomorrow,” by Renee Anduze
February 3, 2022 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith The wild rebellion against authority that characterized the Sixties burns through the pages of Renee Anduze’s coming-of-age novel, Take a Left at Tomorrow (Twisted Road 2021). Those who lived through the decade’s changes will appreciate how expertly Anduze paints the mood of the time. Those born later will experience the upheavals […]