The Ill-Fitting Skin
Shannon Robinson
Press 53 (May 2024)
242 pp.

This collection explores relationships through the lenses of surrealism and magical realism, presenting a series of tales that are as imaginative as they are reflective.

Devout, a Memoir of Doubt
Anna Gazmarian
Simon and Schuster
178 pp

“The message was clear: Doubt was an enemy…[In] a live action Christian TV show called Bibleman…Doubt is a personified villain with a cape, the archnemesis of the show’s hero, who has a six-pack.”

Away, Away
Mark Pawlak
Arrowsmith Press, 2024
97 pp.

We are on a road trip, a purposeful meander, one that focuses on the esoteric and the sublime found on strange road signs, restroom notices, and other evidence of human habitation.

Daybreak
By Matt Gallagher
Simon & Schuster/Atria Books (February 20, 2024)
256 pp.

Coming to Ukraine had been Lee’s idea: “What else you got going on?”

So as Not to Die Alone
By Lisa Johnson Mitchell
Finishing Line Press (January 2024)
70 pp.

Mitchell navigates the strains and tensions within families with sensitivity, delving into themes of resentment, grief, and the weight of responsibility. Through moments of humor and honesty, she deftly balances the complexities of these relationships, offering readers a nuanced portrayal of human connection.

Hereverent by Katie Manning
Agape Editions
78 pp.

What have we always done with ancient scripture but read into it, seeking old answers that still hold true?

Adieu
By Gail Hosking
Main Street Rag (February 2024)
40 pp.

There is breathing room along this journey for us to relive memories “stored for some upcoming storm” …

Gridlock
By Brett Beibel
Cornerstone Press (April 2024)
190 pp.

The characters in these stories exist in a world shockingly similar to ours… but slightly off. There are names dropped in ways you’d never expect, like meeting Karl Rove at a bar in Iowa or smoking weed with Eugene McCarthy.

Dual
Matthew Minicucci
Acre Books ( 2023)
102 pp.

The speaker considers the notion of duality, how it is the “not singular, not plural of things.” This idea controls the collection; we are charged with contemplating the two-ness of things, how they fit, the interplay between them, but as both separate and distinct parts.

the wild delight of wild things
by Brian Turner
Alice James Books
100 pages

Like a series of book reports on essays out of Scientific American, we begin to learn in a haphazard way that we learn to trust, about the world we walk on, the water we swim in, the clouds we pass through as we course across this blue and green planet. But in each mode of transit Turner returns us again and again to our own water, air, fire, and light—to our own eyes and to seeing.

A Brief Natural History of Women
By Sarah Freligh
Small Harbor Publishing (2023)
55 pages

With many stories framed as “brief natural” histories, this book explores women’s love, loss, pain, and desire.

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.