This Week’s Reviews

The Urban Forager
Elisa Callow | Prospect Park Books | 9781945551420 | March 2019
The Urban Forager [has] a sentimental quality more reminiscent of spiral-bound church cookbooks and tea-stained notecards stuffed in recipe boxes than the glossy, full-bleed, uber-designed volumes in bookstores today. That’s exactly the point. It showcases the heterogeneity of these neighborhoods while reflecting the ways that most home cooks actually cook.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

River
Esther Kinsky | Transit Books | 9781945492174 | September 2018
“Pondering the intricate meaning of words, especially those learned through a second language—and with it the acquisition of new understanding—is a recurrent feature in River. A feature every translator and conscious language learner will be familiar with.”—Reading in Translation

Doomstead Days
Brian Teare | Nightboat Books | 9781643620022 | April 2019
“Teare writes that ‘it was the first disaster / I could walk to’ and this recognition is crucial. It collapses the vast scale of climate change to intimate distance, acknowledging that human consciousness, despite its abstract capabilities, is most alive to what it can touch. It also refers to his writing method: to walk, notebook in hand, recording what he sees, following footpaths into thought paths.”—Colorado Review

Space Struck
Paige Lewis | Sarabande Books | 9781946448446 | October 2019
“Online, month by month, I watched it happen: a new genre of poem was emerging, but I had no clue who was responsible. . . . What looked like a genre, I soon realized, was all the handiwork of one poet. Their name is Paige Lewis. . . . Don’t doubt them.”—Poetry Magazine

Mentors
Francis M. Naumann | DoppelHouse Press | 9780999754467 | June 2019
“Naumann’s writing is entertaining and authentic. He sings the praises of those who formed his own character as well as embraces their flaws. From the bordellos to the classrooms and from high rises to high on the hills of France and Italy, this story offers a unique and riveting view into the world of art history and the people therein.”—Seattle Book Review

Wounds into Wisdom
Tirzah Firestone | Monkfish Book Publishing | 9781948626026 | June 2019
Wounds into Wisdom fairly glows with the light that sometimes emerges from a charismatic teacher, but Rabbi Tirzah Firestone is also hard-headed, plainspoken and, above all, deeply courageous. This is not a touchy-feeling self-help book; rather, it is a stirring call to action.”—Jewish Journal

“Muslim”: A Novel
Zahia Rahmani | Deep Vellum Publishing | 9781941920756 | June 2019
“Rahmani’s ‘Muslim’ extends beyond her and her time. Her book is about how outcasts are made by society with accusatory fingers, pointing at what could be a religion, an ethnicity, a community.”—Asian Review of Books

Blood Sisters
Kim Yideum, trans. Jiyoon Lee | Deep Vellum Publishing | 9781941920770 | July 2019
Blood Sisters poses a hugely important question about how we narrativize our experience of the world as we experience it, in private and public spheres—how we negotiate our sense of self and our sense of others; how we make sense of a historical event that an individual cannot possibly experience in full.”—Asymptote Journal

Re-Bisoning the West
Kurt Repanshek | Torrey  House Press | 9781937226985 | September 2019
“Impressively informative and exceptionally well written . . .  an extraordinary and detailed history of species restoration of paramount importance for community and academic library collections, as well as the personal reading lists of the non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.”—Midwest Book Review

Frame of Mind: Punk Photos and Essays from Washington, DC, and Beyond, 1997—2017
Antonia Tricarico | 9781617757198 | Akashic Books | June 2019
“Unique and highly recommended.”—Midwest Book Review

Chicken Rising
D. Boyd | Conundrum Press | 9781772620344 | April 2019
“As visually accomplished as it is emotionally blunt.”—NB Media Co-op

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