Reviews

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“Magical, Mathematical, Intricate, and Seductive”: Carlene Gadapee’s review of CARDIAC THRILL by Meg Kearney

Cardiac Thrill
Meg Kearney
Green Linden Press, 2025
22 pp.

The term “cardiac thrill” is a medical one, referring to a palpable vibration felt most often over the precordium (chest wall over the heart and overlapping the stomach), and it is often related to turbulent blood flow. It usually indicates an underlying disturbance, signaling possible heart disease. What Meg’s poems do, however, is something even more heart-felt: she tackles mortality head-on, with nods to Grandma and her father, the Pope, poets William Matthews and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Neruda and Yeats, among other notable figures. What do they –and we—have in common? We all have heart issues. Maybe not medical ones, per se, but we have loves and losses, worries and dreams.

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“That Amorphous Me”: A review of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s A Stranger Comes to Town by Erika Nichols-Frazer

“The world that I had forgotten was indeed a frightening place,” Schwartz writes. She invites readers to consider, who are we if not our memories, our experiences, and the people we surround ourselves with? What makes an identity? “A lot of people live without knowing much about the truth of their lives,” Marzino’s mother says.

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“Heart-Light”: a review of Denton Loving's Feller by Jake Lawson

Feller
Denton Loving
Mercer University Press, August 2025
336 pp.

Located and informed by natural settings, many of the poems in Feller search beyond geographical boundaries—you’ll find songs of memory and longing, joy, gratitude, a search for peace, and much more. By the end of reading the collection, you’ll feel as if you have made a new, dear friend, someone to laugh with, someone to offer wisdom through hard times.

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“Contact Points”: Alive Day by Karie Fugett reviewed by Andria Williams

I shuddered as Fugett read down an itemized list of how much wounded veterans could receive per lost body part, how OxyContin (manufactured by Purdue, now discontinued) was marketed in deceptive ways that downplayed its potential for addiction, how Karie navigated a cheapskate military bureaucracy to make sure her husband got full compensation for his lost limb.

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Carlene Gadapee’s Review of Patrick Donnelly’s Willow Hammer

Willow Hammer
Patrick Donnelly
Four Way Books, 2025
86 pp.

Donnelly’s deft handling of the personal and universal tragedy of [sexual violence] is profound. He turns to mythology as a vehicle to carry the reader on the path of terrible discovery and to discuss the horror; the speaker’s not being present and not witnessing first-hand the destruction that the violence causes makes it somehow both more terrible and mythic at the same time.

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“All they wanted was sugar in the sun”: Allison Renner’s Review of How to Love a Black Hole by Rebecca Fishow

How to Love a Black Hole  
by Rebecca Fishnow
Conium Press (March 4, 2025)
88 pages

What stands out in How to Love a Black Hole is the masterful way in which Fishow blends beauty and melancholy. The writing is introspective, filled with moments of quiet tension and powerful imagery that often leaves an undercurrent of unease.

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