The Tears of Things (Madville Publishing 2025) by Catherine Hamrick is an exquisite, sensory-rich and sensitive body of poems that vividly capture with what it means to love, lose, fall, get up, and do it all again. Hamrick’s language is consistently vibrant, and often unique—for example, “slick-tripped” in a poem about winter ice entitled “Fat […]
Read of the Month: “Resurrected Body” by Elizabeth C. Garcia
August 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
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 […]
Donna Meredith interviews Elizabeth C. Garcia, author of “Resurrected Body”
August 5, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Introduction: So, how long have I known Elizabeth Cranford Garcia? Many years. Don’t ask how many. Let’s just say I stopped expecting the face of the person I was then to look back at me in the mirror. Or to use Liz’s metaphor, perhaps at some point I have been resurrected into a stranger’s body. […]
“Rural Astronomy” by Georgann Eubanks
July 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Reading Georgann Eubanks’s Rural Astronomy (EastOver Press June 2025) felt like revisiting a hometown after a long absence—some of the landscape has changed, some of the houses sport new shutters, some of the memories are bittersweet, and the territory is both comforting and strange. It’s no wonder that Eubanks leads readers through a literary journey […]
“Museum of the Soon to Depart” Poetry by Andy Young
July 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment
The eighty-eight pages in Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2024) by Andy Young flow with exquisitely phrased words of grief and loss. Yet, no matter how beautifully written, the poems are nonetheless quite somber. The dying and death of the narrator’s mother from brain cancer, coupled with poems about plagues, […]
“Everything Is Ghosts” by Tyler Robert Sheldon
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
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 […]