Posted inBook Reviews

Book Review: ‘What Feeds Below’ by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s third novel, What Feeds Below (Boozhoo Books), is immediately engrossing. The narrator, Petra, is likable and big-hearted. 

She and the city she lives in survive on tourism. Petra and her bestie Jade give tours of the Void, a miles-deep chasm at the edge of the city where an advanced ancient people lived. It is full of mysterious wonders and it is deadly beyond comprehension. 

Eventually, a job goes wrong. Petra, who never wanted this life — she wants to be a doctor — now has to find a way to rescue her much braver, more experienced partner.

Posted inBook Reviews

Book Review: ‘Carousel’ by Sarah Minor

The concepts of time, memory and perspective are elusive and finicky. In Sarah Minor’s Carousel (Yale University Press), our speaker attempts to guide us through all manner of experiences that may lead us closer to an understanding. Carousel, billed as “an essay on seeing,” is an ambitious and artful collection of vignettes that weave together […]

Posted inBook Reviews

Book Review: ‘The Natural Order of Things: Poems’ by Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly has a system: the award-winning poet and University of Iowa associate professor brings poems to her reader that are accessible and welcoming. Then, they build into an overwhelming and holy crescendo of piercing, evocative vignettes. Kelly’s latest, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press), is hearty, nourishing. The crescendo in this collection brings […]

Posted inArts & Entertainment

Book Review: ‘Burnt Mountain’ by Emily Wilson

The most prominent, consistent feature of these poems are the heady — even baroque, indulgent — descriptions of the natural world. (I wrote “descriptive” three separate times in my notes.) In “Heath Obscure” Wilson writes of “sumptuary / crumble underfoot” and “the meanly / spangled mollusk grays.” In another poem, “Attention,” Wilson describes “the butte […]

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