A Review of Christine Hale’s A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice
A few Friday nights ago, I drove to a Burbank-area urgent care center after a week long crying jag left me reeling and in search of help. Call it what you will—emotional break, anxiety attack—but I found myself filling out my patient intake forms and thinking, of all things, of Christine Hale’s new memoir, A...
A Review of Angela Palm’s Riverine
I grew up a river rat, near the banks of the Cahaba. Dad took me down to the river, an eight-year-old made of bones, where I paddled my first Dagger boat. The only rule was that I had to keep my head above the chicken water, what with all the waste dumping. You didn’t want...
A Review of Peter Selgin’s The Inventors
I’m a sucker for literature that pursues an unanswerable question, all the better if that pursuit takes some idiosyncratic course, as with Peter Selgin’s new memoir, The Inventors. Recently published by Hawthorne Books, and a finalist for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Graywolf Press Prize for Nonfiction, and the AWP Award Series for Creative...
A Review of Patrick Madden’s Sublime Physick
A 352-word essay took me two years to write. It started with a prompt at a low-residency workshop, then expanded into a long essay (per a professor’s suggestion), then written into a nonfiction manuscript, then removed from said manuscript, and finally rewritten at another low-residency workshop with another prompt, two years after the first. Instead...
A Review of Blair Braverman’s Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube
At 19, I moved to Las Vegas with my boyfriend Scott. Things were fine before the move, but after arriving in Nevada—1,300 miles from home—something seemed off. While Scott and I waited for a cab, other men glanced at me, and Scott locked his eyes on my body to signal ownership. He didn’t like my...
Review of Amye Archer’s Fat Girl, Skinny
I’m working on a memoir about mental illness, and, at times, the process feels like a long, combative, and slightly schizophrenic therapy session. One part of me lies on the couch, reluctant to divulge details. The other part of me sits in the chair, pen poised, grilling my prone self: What did you mean by...
A Review of Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land
Growing up in the spreading shadows of the Rocky Mountains, I saw Terry Tempest Williams as a literary godmother. My fingers traced over her quote on a sun-bleached sign in Mesa Verde National Park, and I sat on the floor of a crowded ballroom to hear her read. When my grandmother developed breast cancer, I...
A Review of B.J. Hollars’ This Is Only a Test
It’s the first real day of spring, all sunshine and budding tulips, ideal for reviewing a book of essays on disaster. I’ve finally settled in the coffee shop sofa, blocked out the grinding soundscape of Frappucino production and “Africa” by Toto, when two men sit behind me—one younger, one older. The younger man talks. The...
A Review of Bernadette Murphy’s Harley and Me
Ostensibly, Bernadette Murphy and I have little in common. A mother of three, the author of Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life, is a tattooed associate professor who took up motorcycling in midlife. As for tattoos and children, I have neither. I’m thirty-two and check the box beside...
Review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words
On my fifth day in Italy, I accuse an Italian man of stealing my clothes. His basket, overflowing with clothing, is blocking the dryer into which I placed my clothes, and none of the garments are visible through the glass window. Scusi! I say, and that’s it—the extent of my Italian. I am all out...
A Review of Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s second memoir follows Descanso For My Father: Fragments Of A Life, which won the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and International Book Award for Best New Nonfiction. Turning now to his mother’s story, Fletcher opens Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams with a trip back to Albuquerque after nearly a decade away...
A Review of Maggie Messitt’s The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa
Sometimes a writer can be loudest by being the most quiet, an effect brilliantly achieved by Maggie Messitt in her first book, The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa. Unlike Messitt, I never could stay quiet or porch sit long enough to listen. Messitt was twenty-four and on an indefinite leave from...
A Review of Patrice Vecchione’s Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination and Spirit in Everyday Life
Patrice Vecchione has experience prompting writers, whether university students, community members, or elementary school students. Over the years, though, she has noticed a shifting relationship among them to the imagination. Individuals who used to respond to going outside to look at the clouds with descriptions of “elephants parading, a dragon biting its own tail, a...
A Review of M.J. Fièvre’s A Sky the Color of Chaos
On April 9, 1968, Kansas City high schoolers, dressed in white shirts, ankle socks, and saddle oxfords, peacefully marched in front of City Hall out of dismay that their city wouldn’t close public schools for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. Next thing, police threw tear gas. Then the city exploded with firebombs, gun battles, and...
A Review of Amy Ferris’s Shades of Blue
Shades of Blue is a book about depression, the blues, and suicide, yet it manages not to be depressing because of its humor, hope, and courage. This anthology of thirty-four personal stories, edited by Amy Ferris, concerns what’s locked up inside us. Ferris is open about her own struggles, her young girl attempt to kill...
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