Public Republic

By Marianne Schnall Blue Mountain Arts, 2010 Reviewed by Lauren Kearney, Bulgaria Daring to be Ourselves is a profoundly empowering book filled with quotes written by some of the most influential women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Jane Fonda, Cameron Diaz, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Melissa Etheridge, Natalie Portman and many more. […]

Debra Fox It is Barry George’s palpable regard for the cast of characters who inhabit the urban landscape in his haiku collection, Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, that makes it so powerful. Whether he is describing a conductor, a window washer, an accused teen, or a homeless man, George suggests they are all deserving […]

Barry George Brian Russell’s Meeting Dad is a memoir of his efforts to reconcile with his natural father. The story unfolds with a sense of urgency and anticipation. Russell is a fourteen-year-old living in Buffalo; Bob Jaycox is a salesman now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his second wife and family. In the […]

Drew Logan This is a new book of poetry by Jeanie Thompson, a painter of lush images with words from Alabama. She is the managing director of the Alabama Writers Forum and I was thinking about moving to Alabama until I found out she also teaches at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. I live in […]

Photo: delgaudm With her novel “Glass Butterflies” Ludmila Filipova has asserted herself as a capable and experienced author ready to enter unknown and virgin territory. “Glass Butterflies” is written in modern style and contains both attractive and clear messages. It stands out among the most precious achievements of the contemporary Bulgarian prose, a phenomenon which […]

Photo: procsilas Ancient myths from both Bulgaria and the world, historical sources along with a lot fictionalized past, quoted manuscripts with lost ends, roads that cross, and characters in whose destinies events from more than a century and a half ago come together: these are only some of the ideas behind “The Parchment Maze”. The […]

Reviewed by Charlotte Pence Marilyn Kallet, author of fourteen books, opens her anticipated selected poems with “Jonah on Oprah,” a dramatic monologue that epitomizes how through wit, rhythm, and imaginative metaphors her poems arrive at insight: “I’ve lived through gut-wrenching / remorse, got swallowed up by it. // Now I understand I can’t run / […]

Maggie Creshkoff Pat Valdata is a poet and uses her words as a poet would, deftly weaving the story of a Hungarian immigrant family in the early decades of 19th century America. Their triumphs and tragedies over three generations are mirrored by events on the world stage; and their personal loves and losses are echoed […]

“I too will slice open the belly of a great heaving.” Jenny Boully