Tag: C&R Press

How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, a poetry collection by Quincy Scott Jones, reviewed by teri elam

How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, Quincy Scott Jones’ poetry collection, crawls into the bloodstream, lays in wait, inching up the heat. His is an in-your-face look at race and culture, as much eulogy as history lesson, as much elegy as admonition. Jones, incinerator and extinguisher, understands the assignment he has given, coaxing…
Selling the Farm, a C&R Press lyric memoir by Debra Di Blasi, reviewed by Aimee Parkison

Selling the Farm, winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, defies traditional notions of genre. This lyrical memoir is a biography of a family farm veiling the autobiography of a writer using craft to locate her family in a place lost to time. The author is hidden in the landscape of her childhood. In the setting…
“Welcome to the California Club”: Two Californias, a C&R Press short story collection by Robert Glick, reviewed by Feliz Moreno

There are nuggets of gold sprinkled throughout Robert Glick’s debut story collection Two Californias. The characters in these stories traverse the length of California’s North-South stretch of landscape in a way that feels both intimate and transitory: teenagers working in a pharmacy in the San Gabriel Valley, a Cal graduate student traveling to Topanga Hills…
The Miracles, the third poetry collection by Amy Lemmon, reviewed by Leonard A. Temme

Amy Lemmon’s new book of poems, The Miracles, dedicated to her two children—her two miracles—tells the story of a smart, accomplished woman struggling with grief and loss in today’s urbane world. The book is in five sections: Prelude, Fugue, Riff – A, Riff – B, and Coda, terms that imply that music is important to…
Leonard Temme Reviews Laura Catherine Brown’s Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is an intimate, compelling, tightly plotted, enjoyable novel about an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship. The mother is the fifty-five year old Mary. The daughter is the thirty-year old Ann, the name shortened from Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment. Well before the novel begins, the daughter rejects her exotic name for…
While You Were Gone, a novel by Sybil Baker, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

While You Were Gone is a lovely read. It’s thoughtful, and deeply felt, and well-written, and structured with competence. It gently crosses a few genres: women’s fiction, Southern Gothic, literary homage, and what I indelicately think of as Dead/Dying Parent Lit. It balances between the three narrating consciousnesses of three sisters raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee,…
Lessons in Camouflage, a poetry collection by Martin Ott, reviewed by Micah Zevin

Can we ever leave war behind and not remember its images, its roles, and deaths, or will it forever follow us? What goes missing and what will ever be recovered? When we exit the battlefield, there are other fights to be fought, whether of the mind or the body, or other seemingly mundane life tasks…
An Excerpt of Laura Catherine Brown’s Comic Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, daughters and motherhood. Unable to conceive and, because of her husband Joel’s youthful conviction for marijuana dealing, unable to adopt conventionally, Ann and Joel pinned their hope on Jessica, an unwed pregnant girl who offers them her baby.…
“Lennon and the Spectacles of Fandom”: An Interview with Christopher Bundy by Daniel J. Cecil

I recently re-watched Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. I was house sitting for someone with a television. It was on Netflix. Sue me. I don’t know why I chose that movie in particular. There were hundreds of things to choose from–but there I was watching this strangely pre-9/11 post 9/11 film. Maybe I wanted to…