Reviews
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 1: A Review of Atomic Theory 7: Poems to my Wife and God
By locating questions of faith and doubt within the atomic, these poems enact a theology where the divine resides within instead of above the physical world.
Review of Melissa Reeser Poulin’s Rupture, Light
Melissa Reeser Poulin’s latest chapbook, Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press), is a journey down the fathoms-deep well of human experience. The poet’s word choice and lines are clear and clean like cold water––and just as refreshing. Poulin plunges the reader into wanting, anticipation, anxiety, and joy.
Song of a Captive Bird: A Review
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
To Remake the World: A Review of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
The Afterlives of American Evangelicalism: A Review of Interior States By Meghan O’Gieblyn
"To be a former believer," she writes in her evocative first essay collection, Interior States, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime." Each of her fifteen essays, wide-ranging in their content, contains an element of that circling back around: to her Midwestern evangelical childhood or to her time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where the threading began to unravel.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
At the moment, the assumption to question is that we humans have a right to be on earth and that it will indefinitely support us. When the very ground is taken from beneath our feet, where can we stand? What is left to us, when the familiar forms of our physical existence are taken away? Nothing, perhaps—yet I wonder.
Review of The Divine Magnet
Niemeyer foregrounds the ways the letters reflect the writer’s intense moral and spiritual concerns. “That these letters … read much like homilies is a key to their power and genius,” he claims, departing without apology from those who find them more manic than ministerial.
Review of Getting to Gardisky Lake
As I carried Paul J. Willis 2016 collection, Getting to Gardisky Lake with me for the last several weeks, I found innumerable mantrams among the poems, grounding myself amidst Willis’ stories of the wilderness, the classroom, of aging and of loving. It seems there is nothing his poetry does not touch...
Soul Bare: Stories of Redemption
As Sexton reminds readers at the beginning of her collection, “The very Word of God is, after all, a collection of broken stories about broken people just like us.” God will not be shocked by your failure, fear, or anger. Your wounds are welcome before God and God’s people.
Mystery and Befuddlement in Jae Newman’s Collage of Seoul
Collage of Seoul begins with words we do not hear, words meant only for God. From the start, we know these poems will be both personal and private. Part of the mystery here is the deep mystery of another’s life and heart. Then, the shadow of the plane in the trees gestures toward the mysterious presence of God, and, as the poet wrestles with God, “there’s comfort in the fading echo,” he says, “the tail of the plane vanishing / into layers of mysterious clouds.”
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