Feed Me
By Erika Nichols-Frazer
Casper Press 2022
224 pages

Erika Nichols-Frazer’s memoir, Feed Me eases the reader into an up-close journey of what happens when a young girl’s relationship to food, a body’s nourishment, is interrupted.

Tiny Extravaganzas
By Diane Mehta
Arrowsmith Press 2023
113 pages

Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader’s attention, lush settings and private musings—these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta’s work, Tiny Extravaganzas.

Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity
Jehanne Dubrow
University of New Mexico Press
147 pages

Imagined as six galleries in an atelier, Exhibitions displays her unflinching analysis of the ways specific artworks coexist within the atrocities of their time. On exhibit are the creations of writers, poets, artists, dramatists, architects, glassblowers, and craftsmen contextualized by the terrors they witnessed, endured, or inherited.

Lessons and Carols
by John West
Eerdmans Publishing Co.
207 pp.

Order is a luxury, it seems to me. Being able to count on what will happen when, and in what way, is something many people would like to take for granted, as it carries with it the promise of security and even a measure of control.

lithopaedion
by Carrie Nassif
Finishing Line Press
pp. 34

Carrie Nassif’s lithopaedion births itself through moody, atmospheric, earthy language as the speaker traverses a country landscape in search of an absent mother.

Site of Disappearance by Erin Malone
Ornithopter Press
88 pages

Even memories buried for decades are not dead—only sleeping.

Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival
JoeAnn Hart
Black Lawrence Press
175 pages

In Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival by Hudson Prize winner JoeAnn Hart, we have eighteen charming and devastating stories about the greatest horror of our time: global extinction and annihilation due to climate change. Hart’s keen eye and nimble voice explores eco-terror/climate anxiety through a myriad of grounded, deeply human permutations. Some stories are more successfully executed than others, but overall, the collections sings.

I’d Rather Be Lightning
By Nancy Lynee Woo
Gasher Press
pp. 128

Nancy Lynee Woo has reduced the ratio of aching beauty, as compared to impending doom, down to the least common denominator and it is us.

On the Road to Lviv
By Christopher Merrill, translated by Nina Murray
Arrowsmith Press 2023
103 pp.

Christopher Merrill’s On the Road to Lviv follows the architecture of the epic. He introduces individual voices that represent various viewpoints, and he embeds history and public figures from both centuries and decades past and from contemporary times as well. In this way, the reader is a witness to present-day events unfolding as a continuation of geographic and generational hostility in the setting of Eastern Europe.

Learning and Teaching Creativity
By Dan Hunter
Radio Ranch Press
296 pages

In his new book, Learning and Teaching Creativity, Dan Hunter invites us to take our brains out and play with them from the inside out. It is a masterful guide in learning how these “thingies” work. Every page in this inspirational handbook is a passionate exposition of the enabling connection between a teacher’s curiosity-fueled imagination and their students’ ability to learn to grow theirs. Citing current neuroscience, credible exemplars, and his work with students, Hunter interweaves his assertions with practical exercises that help us experience the delight in imaginative growth.

A penetrating light
Valediction | poems and prose by Linda Parsons
Madville Publishing
79 pages

Linda Parsons’ Valediction takes full advantage of all the qualities and connotations light casts upon our world. The warm glow of a blaze, of autumn, of human radiance, and of life coming to an end.

The Fine Art of Camouflage
By Lauren Kay Johnson
MilSpeak Books, 2023
254 pages

In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Lauren Kay Johnson refers several times to Greg Mortenson’s 2007 best-seller, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time. This intertextuality shines a sharp light on the unvarnished Afghanistan Johnson reveals in her fantastic new memoir.

Tamp
By Denton Loving
Mercer University Press
62 pages

When a poet invites you on an intimate tour of his native Appalachian countryside: Go. Such is the invitation Denton Loving extends to us with Tamp, his bittersweet, atmospheric second collection.

Tender Machines
By J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press
68 pp.

What must we do? What do societal norms expect of women, and of all of us? And if we reject these circumscribed norms, what are the alternatives?

When We Were Twins
By Danuta Hinc
Plamen Press
232 pages

Good novelists write stories for readers to be heartily entertained. Exceptional novelists write stories for readers to become deeply thoughtful witnesses.

Flash Fiction America:
73 Very Short Stories
by James Thomas (Editor), Sherrie Flick (Editor), John Dufresne (Editor, Florida International University)

W.W. Norton
304 pages

If a novel is a deep dive down into the ocean of story, flash fiction is often a jump into a swimming hole: short, sharp, brisk, done. Even when engulfed, you can see the pond walls and river banks. The water might be warm, or cold, or filled with life. You might even touch bottom.

will the story never stop

stand proud, grow, wait

And our land is decorated with bloodied fragments of cement walls.

It’s so hard to live when they’re killing you.