Flock and Family: A Review of Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
Flock and Family A Review of Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life The Salt StonesBy Helen Whybrow304 pp. Harper Collins, $26.00Released June 2025 When I think of creative nonfiction focused on nature and seasons, my mind goes...
A Little Blue Cabin on the Iowa River: Finding a Home ‘that Carries You Forward’
A Little Blue Cabin on the Iowa River Finding a Home ‘that Carries You Forward’ Off Izaak Walton RoadBy Laura Julier272 pp. University of New Mexico Press, $19.95Released March 2025 Laura Julier’s Off Izaak Walton Road is an extraordinary memoir in which the...
Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts
Stories of the Street Reimagining Found Texts Stories of the StreetBy David Lazar136 pp. Nebraska Press, $24.95Released November 2024 Recently, I taught a workshop in hybrid forms, focusing on the ways that prose and poetry must sometimes collide if we...
What We Mean When We Talk About Squirrels: A Few Contemplations on Points of Tangency
What We Mean When We Talk About Squirrels A Few Contemplations on Points of Tangency Points of TangencyBy Scott Russell Morris226 pp. Cornerstone Press, $24.95Released September 2024 Squirrels are infrequent visitors to my yard in my little spot in the...
Two Reviews of Phillip Lopate’s Recent Books
Listening to the Silence Meditations on the Messy and the Mundane in A Year and a Day by Juliet Way-Henthorne By Phillip Lopate 216 pp. New York Review Books, $17.95Released October 2023In A Year and a Day, Phillip Lopate holds a mirror up to the messy, often...
Thoughts on Thot: Fragments, Echoes, Bullets, Hauntings
Thoughts on Thot: Fragments, Echoes, Bullets, Hauntings By Chanté L. Reid96 pp. Sarabande Books, $17.95Released October 2022Chanté L. Reid’s Thot, though only 80 pages, is immense. Reid jam-packs the pages of her book-length essay in scope, emotion, thought, and...
Precious Cargo
I have come all the way to New Orleans for this gumbo. It is nestled in a bowl in front of me, just shy of overflowing its banks. But, having just read Chris Arthur’s collection of essays, Hidden Cargoes, I see the gumbo differently.
Glorious, Golden, and Contemporary
Anthologies encourage us to look back and absorb vast swaths of literature. A good anthology can function as a shortcut to being well read and grant writers a stronger sense of historicity—something particularly valuable for essayists…
The Ways We Remain
Following Ned’s 2019 death from cancer, his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and his graduate school classmate John T. Price resolved to bring his published essays together as a collection (something the writer had planned to do himself but never got to finish)…
Who Do We Talk To?
For the past year, I have clicked on the Bookshop link to buy a book for every Zoom reading I attended. I agreed to receive a review copy from four publishers. I say yes, I can peer review this book for a university press. In the middle of the pandemic, I have no friends. I have no family. But I do have one hundred and fifty collections of essays per day per day squared…