Reviews

Fall 2014 / Spring 2015

 

 

 

Tales from the Eternal Café
by Janet Hamill

Three Rooms Press, 2014; 188 pages; $15.
ISBN-10: 0989512509/ISBN-13: 978-0989512503, paper
http://threeroomspress.com/authors/janet-hamill/

Reviewed by Diana Manister

With the publication of her new book,Tales from the Eternal Café, Janet Hamill achieves with a straightforward prose style what she has previously accomplished in poetry: a challenge to the way we habitually view reality. Her tales move along like conventional linear narratives until the reader realizes he is on a staircase in an Escher painting, navigating impossible conditions that appear in ordinary events: the artist Mark Rothko returns from the dead, for example, at a retrospective of his paintings at the Guggenheim Museum and engages the story’s narrator in deep conversation. In another tale, a travel diary of a trip to Tangiers takes off on a magic carpet ride to the other side of logic.    Read Review

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Plague Doctor in his Hull-Shaped Hat
by Stephen Massimilla

Austin State University Press, 2013; 118 pages; $16.00
ISBN-10: 1622880072 / ISBN-13: 9781622880072; paper
http://www.stephenmassimilla.com/books.html

Reviewed by Ronnie Norpel

The evocative images in Stephen Massimilla's new poetry book,The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, swirl like the clouds in Van Gogh's Starry Night. The vivid hues and sounds in this collection will inspire readers to make many connections and associations, sometimes without even realizing it. That Massimilla is a painter as well as a poet is no small matter: he knows just how much pigment to use and exactly where to place his self-ground colors. Read Review

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIRAL
by Suzanne Parker

Alice James Books, 2013; 80 pages; $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-938584-01-5; paper
http://alicejamesbooks.org/ajb-titles/viral/

Reviewed by Ronnie Norpel

Suzanne Parker's Viral has an immediacy and a currency which makes it unputdownable. That's hard to say about poetry, but Parker's word-tales pull us away from the internet even as we expect them to go viral. Read Review