Reviews

Tolase is a Poet of form, weaving the poems into forms like acrostic, sonnets, ekphrastic etc. His usage of form throughout creates an open space for readers.

What he found was a little chunk of plastic, something that could have been a kitchen utensil, the foot or the arm of something, a piece of something bigger, some meaningless trash. No, that’s not quite right. For us, it’s meaningless, but for the kid it’s not. It’s everything for that kid. – From Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s “Trash”

Blackman’s writing feels as though you are present with her, sitting on a southern porch with a glass of sweet tea, listening to her grandfather in a rocking chair with a photo album reminiscing about how music brought two disparate communities together—Black and White during from the 1940s to the 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee.

We are presented with a pragmatic statement that honest writing requires artistic integrity, or at least a soundness of intention—knowledge that, for many of us, came only from trial and error, and an omnivorous literary appetite.

In Bryan Washington’s novel Family Meal, food is the simulacra, the ultimate symbol, of intimacy and well-being. And, these characters are defined by extremes — the feast and the fast. 

Love simply isn’t the fairy tale we were promised as children. The Disneyfication of “true love” amplified the idea of happily ever after as an effortless union of Prince and Princess. But in reality, if you’re running home at midnight and losing a shoe, you’re probably drunk…or escaping a predator.

The book is, in its way, something offered to all those left still mentally or spiritually “hungry” from the COVID-19 experience.

Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps the novel’s title truly is a simple condemnation of men in general. But what about the women?