“Allisa Cherry’s debut collection, An Exodus of Sparks, offers readers a riveting account of faith, loss, and fierce familial love. Using vivid and precise detail, clear syntax, and a diction both biblical and contemporary, Cherry achieves an emotional clarity that sizzles on the page and cuts to the heart.”
“Woman Pissing takes Picasso’s bravado-soaked declaratives and subjects those claims to a bloodletting. Cooperman’s narrator invokes Julian Barnes’ assertion that Picasso dramatically simplified art. One page later Cooperman demonstrates thus: Because Bonnard kept watching the sky, it became a dozen different colors. / How hilarious that Bonnard cannot paint a sky blue! thought Picasso.”
“When you open the door to Toni Morrison, the book begins, you look genius in the face. The multiple facets of the phrase open the door are characteristic of the linguistic dexterity Verdelle and Morrison enjoyed. Over two-and-a-half decades, Verdelle literally opened the door to Toni Morrison many times, a surprising development in Verdelle’s life as a young novelist, and her memoir figuratively opens the door on Morrison as a writer, mentor, and friend.”
Enjoy this audio recording of a review of Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s book, Isako Isako, by Katharine Coldiron from Vol. 31:2 of CALYX Journal! Buy the full issue here. Buy a copy of Isako Isako here. Katharine Coldiron’s work has been published in Ms., the Times Literary Supplement, BUST, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in
