Category: Reviews

Laura Van Prooyen’s second poetry collection pauses in the middle of family life to consider the attachments we form and the paths that lead us to them. Our House Was on Fire concerns a love that has matured and a family that has grown to include children, but though the setting of the book is domestic, the voice of their speaker is anything but domesticated.

I’m oddly comforted by the photo of Jonathan Lethem that adorns the rear flap of his latest short story collection, Lucky Alan. Gone is the ultra-hip young author who stared almost defiantly at me from the flap of The Fortress of Solitude. Could I ever be as sharp as that guy? As astute? As literary? As Brooklyn cool?

David Mason’s fifth book of poetry, Sea Salt, explores the ineffable degradation of the surface while the internal core remains intact. The poems use “salt” as an over-riding metaphor to define a world that is slowly being eaten away by time and the elements. The lines in most every poem within this volume are plain-spoken, clear, rhythmically assured and cut to weigh against each other. The voice is confident and employs vivid metaphor to express regret, loss, and joy. Poetry, after time and the elements do their bidding, is what remains.

In 1978, a Pacific Southwest Airlines jet and a Cessna collided in the air over the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. It remains the deadliest accident in California aviation history.

In Does Not Love, James Tadd Adcox holds his characters at a clinical distance from the reader. This is certainly by design. As the copy on the back cover notes, the novel is set “in an alternate-reality Indianapolis overrun by big pharma.”

A Distant Father by Antonio Skármeta is a spare but arresting novella. A master at work, Skármeta proves that it isn’t necessary to painstakingly draw every individual

Twenty years ago, those of us who longed for physical violence had to either beat each other up in the front yards of our rural houses, as my best friend and I often did, or resort

Reviewed by Robert Long Foreman                       Ancient Oceans of Central

Reviewed by Ariell Cacciola                       After the People Lights Have