Ferocious and Featherlight
Ferocious and Featherlight Pondering Womanhood in Yoke & Feather Yoke & FeatherBy Jessie Van Eerden212 pp. Dzanc Books, $17.95Released November 2024 Jessie Van Eerden’s Yoke and Feather explores what it means to be a woman of faith without...
Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging
Dispersals On Plants, Borders and Belonging Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and BelongingBy Jessica J. Lee288 pp. Catapult, $26.95Released March 2024 In Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the various processes and...
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…