This Week’s Hot Reviews

Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-Flung Path
Katharine Coles | Turtle Point Press | 9781885983589 | November 2018
“Tense, abundantly researched, and heartbreaking, this narrative drills into a dead marriage and finds characters so alive that they challenge Coles’s perceptions of her own marriage.”—Foreword Reviews

The Meaning of Blood and Other Tales of Perversity
Chuck Caruso | Global Book Sales/Cloud Lodge Books | 9781999587307 | November 2018
The Meaning of Blood promises a descent into a netherworld of blood and perversity, and it delivers on this as well as something even more heinous: the idea that ordinary people crave blood and perversity just as much as violent perverts. . . . Long after the unexpected has been established as the only possible outcome, stories continue to surprise. Prose mimics the camera, microphone, and soundtrack of a movie set, without sacrificing the written word’s unique ability to express characters’ thoughts and feelings.”—Foreword Reviews

In Country
Hugh Martin | BOA Editions | 9781942683704 | November 2018
“In the Iraq edition of wartime for American soldiers, fear of being blown to pieces by hidden explosives frequently loses out to the wiliest enemy of all—boredom. This is the wartime footing—six years in an M1A1 Abrams tank—that Iraq War veteran Hugh Martin makes use of to create his own masterful poetry.”—Foreword Reviews

Permanent Exhibit
Matthew Voller | BOA Editions| 9781942683681 | September 2018
“[O]ffers not only a comment on the digital norms we’ve created but a critique, perhaps, of our failure to fully explore the creative possibilities such spaces offer us.”—Fiction Advocate

The Caregiver: Poems
Caroline Johnson | Holy Cow! Press | 9780998601038 | May 2018
“Offer[s] honest and moving accounts of [Johnson’s] own journey as caregiver to her aging parents.”—Michigan Quarterly Review

The Fifth Woman
Nona Caspers | Sarabande Books | 9781946448170 | August 2018
“[I]ncredible. . . The Fifth Woman is an ecosystem of grief; a circular cloud of emotion, memory, and experience that bends towards the surreal, exploring, or so it seems, every nook and cranny of the aftermath of the death of a loved one.”—Empty Mirror

The Moment Before Drowning
James Brydon | Akashic Books | 9781617756252 | July 2018
“James Brydon’s brilliant The Moment Before Drowning isn’t an easy read. Not because of its style, which is sensuous and elegant, but because of its subject matter: the brutality behind war’s front lines. . . . [a] heart-wrenching novel.”—Mystery Scene Magazine

Clues from the Animal Kingdom
Christopher Kennedy | BOA Editions | 9781942683643 | September 2018
“Kennedy’s words elicit emotional pangs that leave us more truthful than we were before. It is the lucidity of his language, the emotional force of his poems, that leave such a remarkable impression.”—Heavy Feather Review

Flem
Rebecca Rosen | Conundrum Press | 9781772620283 | October 2018
“A layered, colourful, and addictive piece of hallucinogenic comic art on the world. It is a book that deeply penetrates your body and settles in your bloodstream like a clot. It gives you a beating, moves and yet disturbs you.”—Bruzz

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