Book Reviews & Recommendations

Seu crafts a beautiful balancing act through out the collection between high-poetic diction and visceral imagery, the body dissected and made whole again, the interplay between generational and personal trauma, and the sticky impact of past on present.

In Michael Credico’s debut collection of short stories, Heartland Calamitous, he takes us from fever-dream to fever dream in a strange and fragmented Midwest.

When you hear a book is about motherhood, you might immediately imagine its filled with Hallmark Sentimentality, pedantic and often unrealistic advice about self-care and bonding, and overly archetypical depictions of women-as-natural-caregiver. This is not the case when it comes to Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross.

Once upon the 1990s, Beth Lisick’s gritty, party-croaking narrator, Edie, was at the center of San Francisco’s artsy-weirdo-punk-party scene for no other reason than simply existing in that space, serving drinks, and understanding all the right references.

Difficulty Swallowing by Kym Cunningham

In her debut collection of autobiographical essays, Difficulty Swallowing, author Kym Cunningham takes on some of the world’s biggest and baddest systematic issues and finds a way to ground them in the personal, the concrete, and make them even more haunting as a result.

In his new novel Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed mixes dystopia with myth, the Old West with the Old Testament, and creates a narrative that is full of both humor and dread.

Within the four plays readers will encounter a traveler, a mermaid, bureaucrats assigning lonely hearts pre-selected beaus, scientists and tarot readers, and frustrated writers conversing with literary constructs. The pieces in this collection are transparently influenced by the author’s life, a new turn for Stetco, in which she turned parts of herself into absurd, fantastic, and beautiful artifice.

These are reads that will evoke complicated emotions and questions within the reader, and ring bells close to home for anyone who tends to stray from the paths of what their society deems conventional thought patterns and experiences.

The collection walks between the margins of our conflicting desires to find love, to feel connected, and our animal need to unburden ourselves and live independently. These poems are not something, as the speaker in the first poem so beautifully states, that one can leave alone, and come back to without them having moved or changed in someway.

NEW MYTHOLOGIES is an apt name for this collection. Each poem resonates with the air of the eternal, and yet they resonate with the now, just as all good fairy tales and myths do. Anything is possible within these pages.

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