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Time is a Snake’s Tongue by MaryAnn L. Miller

Review By Sarah Van Clef

MaryAnn L. Miller, in Time is a Snake’s Tongue, writes of a specific incident in a specific place and time in the author’s life, yet she reaches readers’ hearts with her words and images, which echo into our present day.

Birds are a favorite image of Miller’s. In several poems, they appear as high schoolers in a marching band walking in a parade, as survivors against the threat of overdevelopment; signs of the future. For example, a red-tailed hawk is driven from its territory by a housing development but returns to kill bunnies in a backyard in the poem called “Red Tail.”

Miller’s poems consider the impact of racism on an individual, adeptly merging scenes from the past with present consciousness. Her poem, “My Armor Is Silence,” encapsulates the sentiment of this chapbook: My verbs are wishes. / As long as I’m / quiet, I will be okay. / My mouth is shut / but my skin shouts.

Other poems reference prejudice in its varied forms. Miller also uses images of a bird to tell the story of a human in “Trans-specied.” The first stanza begins with a ‘tweet’ from the cradle. Later, the character jumps, ‘trying to get more air.’ Near adulthood, he grows ‘wings’ and a ‘feathered neck.’ Even though the nest calls to him, he flies, speaking with his ‘beaking lips,’ searching for the food of a hawk, ‘rodents, hatchlings, small bony fish.’ His transition is complete. There’s the suffering of Native Americans at the hands of deceitful white people, youth taunting the aged, and the fear of Communism knocking at the door during the Cold War. There are Catholic nuns frightening children, white Italian parents’ dread of a dark-complected child, and memories of racism that prohibited a neighbor from drinking from a family water glass.

Miller employs creative punctuation and line breaks, underscoring the social critique integral to the pieces. There is meaning between the commas and periods. There is meaning between the words that becomes recognized only by reading aloud. It takes some effort to understand the message, the truth in these words, these images, these poems. Just like it takes effort to recognize injustice, past, present, and ongoing.

Sarah Van Clef is a the Reviewers Editor of Philadelphia Stories. She is an Adjunct Professor in English Writing and Community Literacy across multiple colleges across New Jersey.

Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold

Review By Beth Toner

To read Beth’s review of Circle of Hope, click HERE.

Beth Toner is a nurse, writer, and erstwhile theater nerd who still hasn’t figured out what she wants to be when she grows up. As a strategic communications professional, she has spent the last 30 years writing other people’s stories, and now she’s writing her own. She worked as a stringer for community newspapers early in her career, when 20 dollars felt like a fortune for sitting through municipal meetings and writing coverage only the township supervisors read. Her nerd’s heart is particularly proud of having her short story, “Homemade,” selected for publication in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds VI. She has written and performed several versions of her solo show, Beautiful Disasters, at the Reading (PA) Five-Minute Fringe Festival, the Harrisburg Fringe Festival, and Caveat in New York City. Beth is also a second-career registered nurse with a passion for exploring how storytelling can prevent professional burnout and improve patient care. When she’s not working her day job or volunteering at the local free clinic, you can find her walking trail races while younger, faster folks greet her with “good job!” and “on your left!” She lives in Pottstown, Pennsylvania with her husband and their son.

Lost, Found, Kept by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann won Trio House Press’s inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award for LOST FOUND KEPT: A MEMOIR (January 2025). Book Pages named it one of the Best Memoirs of 2025. Her essays, feature articles and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Bellevue Literary Review, Nashville Review, Memoir Monday, Psychotherapy Networker and PSYCHE to name a few. Deb is a clinical psychologist who lives in Havertown, PA. For more info: http://lostfoundkept.com

 

Review By Jennifer Rivera

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s Lost, Found, Kept is an exceptional memoir that blends unflinching honesty with such tenderness that you come away not only knowing the author’s story but feeling it in your bones. At its surface, this is a book about confronting a parent’s compulsive hoarding and all the logistical, financial, and emotional chaos that comes with it. But beneath that is something far richer: a layered exploration of love, family bonds, boundaries, and the objects, both literal and symbolic, that tether us to our histories.

From the opening pages, Kossmann draws us into her dual role as both a clinical psychologist and a daughter caught in an intricate web of loyalty and frustration. She doesn’t shy away from showing the reader the grim realities of her mother’s home: the overgrown yard, the blocked windows, the absence of running water, but she never reduces her mother to her illness. Instead, she paints her as a multifaceted, often witty, sometimes infuriating, but ultimately human figure who shaped Kossmann’s life in profound ways. This balance between exposing hard truths and maintaining compassion is one of the memoir’s greatest strengths.

The book is divided into three sections, “Lost,” “Found,” and “Kept,” which reflect the arc of Kossmann’s emotional and practical journey. In “Lost,” we get vivid childhood recollections from growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to the move from one house to another, and the complicated dynamics with her father, stepfather, and sister. Kossmann’s vividly described details bring these memories to life, whether it’s the smell of her mother’s Wind Song perfume or the exact shade of pink shag carpeting in her teenage bedroom. These scenes not only ground the reader in time and place but also reveal the roots of the family patterns that later manifest in the hoarded home.

In “Found,” Kossmann shifts into the present-day urgency of managing her mother’s unraveling situation. Here, the memoir takes on the rhythm of a real-time crisis, as she and her sister navigate unpaid bills, disconnected phones, and long-shut-off utilities. Her professional training as a psychologist helps her maintain a certain level of calm, but Kossmann doesn’t hide the toll it takes. She finds humor in these moments, too, a dry, knowing wit that keeps the narrative buoyant even though the circumstances are grim.

“Kept” is arguably the most moving section, in which Kossmann reflects on what’s worth holding onto.  Not just in terms of physical belongings, but also memories, values, and relationships. She takes inventory of the items from her mother’s house that matter to her: childhood photographs, a four-poster bed, family jewelry, and pieces of art with personal history. These tangible keepsakes become metaphors for the emotional throughlines of the memoir. In choosing what to preserve, she models for the reader how to honor the past without being consumed by it.

What makes Lost Found Kept especially compelling is Kossmann’s narrative voice. She writes with a kind of intimate clarity that makes the reader feel trusted, as though they’ve been invited not only into the family’s living room, but into the guarded spaces where family stories are kept under lock and key. Her prose is graceful but never flowery, sharp when it needs to be, and suffused with empathy even when her patience is tested.

While hoarding has been examined in popular culture, often with a sensationalist or voyeuristic lens, Kossmann’s memoir refuses to exploit. Instead, it offers a rare and humane perspective that acknowledges the pain of mental illness while still recognizing the agency and dignity of the person living with it. She doesn’t pretend that love makes the cleanup easier, nor does she suggest that resolution is neat or complete. Instead, she leaves space for the reader to sit with the mess, both the physical disorder and the emotional turmoil, to appreciate the strength required to face it.

The final pages of Lost Found Kept leave the reader with a quiet sense of hope. Not from a tidy fairy-tale ending, but a steadier kind born from doing the hard work of showing up, setting boundaries, and choosing what to carry forward. The memoir lingers, not just for its story but for the way it challenges the reader to reflect on their own “lost,” “found,” and “kept.”  What people, places, and possessions define us.

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann has crafted a memoir that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. It’s about hoarding, yes, but it’s also about survival, forgiveness, and the enduring threads of connection between a mother and daughter. Honest without being cruel, emotional without tipping into sentimentality, Lost Found Kept is a beautifully written testament to the idea that in the wreckage of the past, there are still treasures to be found.

Jennifer Rivera is a Latina writer and certified dog trainer. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Monmouth University in May 2024. Her prose and poetry have been featured in The Monmouth Review.

Possible Happiness by David Ebenbach

 

Photo of David Ebenbach by Justin Gellerson

Reviewed By Mary Miller

In 1989, junior year, Jacob Wasserman would be transformed from a quiet, shy, and, in his own estimation, “two-dimensional” loner to a member of The Pack. In the fluid manner of teenage relationships, a well-timed joke leads to a new friendship, which leads to a last-minute party invitation, which ultimately engenders the formation of a friend group that will become the focus of Jacob’s life, along with the inevitable group drama, romantic entanglements and jealousies, competition, and power struggles. Unspoken roles and responsibilities are fluid, and change quickly and often without a clear cause or purpose. The one nonnegotiable is loyalty to the group. Jacob, with a fractured family and limited social experience, is particularly in need of and vulnerable to the kind of togetherness The Pack implies.

The Pack is solidified, and complicated, through before-school hangouts, marathon evening telephone calls, parties thrown and attended, and nights on the dance floor at the iconic alternative/punk club Revival, whose siren song drew hordes of Gen X teenagers and young adults to the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and which provided a venue for all the drama, angst, and, as Ebenbach aptly describes in a running theme throughout his novel, the happy/angry joy/rage embodied in much of the music of that time.

His increasing enmeshment in The Pack leads to challenges for Jacob. He wants to maintain his pre-Pack work friendships, but is not sure how to do so. He is drawn to one girl in The Pack, but so are others—including his closest friend. The economic differences between Pack members are stark. Inevitably, the Pack members pair up into couples, either by desire or default, threatening the integrity of their bond. At the same time, Jacob needs to navigate his pre-Pack world, which is marked by complex family relationships, self-doubt, and debilitating anxiety. Belonging to The Pack, and having his first serious girlfriend within its confines, sometimes felt healing, yet sometimes led to new struggles that awakened Jacob’s anxiety, when he “would feel a keen howl of loneliness; or he would walk down his street and suddenly wonder whether he belonged there; or he would just wake up feeling a sense of being disconnected from the world.”

In Possible Happiness, Ebenbach provides a visit back to the high-school years, and for those of us who were Philadelphia-area teenagers in the late 1980s or early 1990s, reading this book is like stepping into a time machine. It rings true. Younger readers, as well as older ones, will connect with the narrative as well. This insightful coming-of-age novel provides a timeless look at that strange era in all of our lives of inevitable change, when we try on personalities like clothing while we try to figure out what feels right as we decide who we are going to be, and our friendships define us more than do our families. The writing is honest; the characters feel like people we know, or knew.

There are few seasons of life as consequential and poignant as the high-school years. Life for a t  teenager is full of confusion, marked by periods of clarity; sadness, punctuated by moments of joy; and isolation, highlighted by sporadic episodes of belonging. Not only the inner demons unleashed during this time, but also myriad outer forces, define these years: imperfect families, social minefields, treacherous high-school halls. The friends made in those years shape us and reveal us; they change us, sometimes dramatically, sometimes rapidly. Despite widely varying experiences, locales, and encounters, there is one universal: the high-school years, and those with whom we spend them, are transformative.

In a recurring theme, Jacob has always wondered what lies at Fern Rock station. He has never taken the train that far, but he has always wondered, with such a bucolic name, what would be at the end of that train line: an actual rock blanketed by ferns? More city? Something else? Yet in the end, how much does it matter? As with this point in time in Jacob’s life—an unfinished time of evolution and change, during which “he couldn’t help feeling that he was still very much getting to know himself, and that there was probably a lot more to come”—the mystery may be an inextricable element of its essence.

Mary Evangelisto Miller (left) is a freelance writer and editor based in Bucks County. She has been self-employed as a medical editor for 22 years. Mary holds a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and English from Temple University and a master’s degree in English and Publishing from Rosemont College.

 

Review: Even the Dog Was Quiet by Margaret R. Sáraco

 

Review By: Nicole Conti

In Even the Dog Was Quiet, Margaret R. Sáraco crafts a haunting and emotional collection of poems that delve into the fragility of memory, the weight of loss, and the resilience of love. From the very first moments, the book establishes a poignant tone with jarring imagery of a burning house, a powerful metaphor for the slow, inevitable destruction that time and loss inflict on everything we hold dear. Yet, in the face of such loss, what remains is memory. Throughout the collection, Sáraco reflects on how love—whether for family, fleeting lovers, or friends—lingers in the fragments of memory we preserve, like echoes of a once-thriving home now reduced to ash. Her poems emphasize the importance of remembering, of holding onto the pieces of our past that define us, even when everything else is lost.

In reference to The Unlocked Door, Sáraco’s poetry serves as a “dose of fresh air cleansing a complex world.” Her work focuses on small, flickering moments, whether jagged with grief or buoyed by the sweet imagery of fruit, wine, and morning glory elixirs. These moments allow the reader to fully immerse themselves in her world, where each memory is carefully dissected and preserved. Sáraco grabs these small moments, milks every detail, and then delicately lays them out on the page, using beautiful poetic devices and vivid sensory elements. In many ways, her poems form a kaleidoscope of personal moments, frozen in time. She alludes to this in the poem Tall Ships, where she writes, “a moment in time caught with oils on canvas or a poet’s words.”

Sáraco skillfully orchestrates these themes of loss and love with mood. Take, for instance, the contrast of frigidness and warmth in Bobby and the Bonfire. The poem captures a heartbreak that shifts into a heartwarming end—the coldness of young heartbreak dissolving into warmth when the speaker gifts a ring to her future daughter. In ‘Between the Sheets’, the mood is heavy, cold, and sharp, underscoring the tragedy of loss with lines like:
“His words fall on our bed, gray shards
now next to my inexperienced and young body, mournful and
scared.”

Here, the sharpness of grief and regret is palpable. The poem’s coldness contrasts sharply with the warmth of memory in ‘Pink Hula Hoop’, where, despite the surrounding grayness, a glimmer of hope in the memory of her son’s childhood toy glistens, high up in the trees. It is a reminder that, even in the most somber of memories, brightness and hope can emerge.

Saraco’s writing is also glazed with poetic devices that further the beauty of these moments. The line “the day she dies in her sleep” demonstrates her skillful use of sibilance and alliteration, a technique she’s perfected throughout the book, as seen in phrases like “Slicing flesh… wrapping pounds of fillets in wax paper and plastic wrap while sweat drips down her face.” Some of her other notable uses of alliteration include “sun-starved skin,” “boots, battling bluefish,” and “disease disrupting our days.”

With the ‘End So Close, We Only See Beauty’ is another example of Sáraco’s brilliance, particularly in her metaphor of the bright green parakeet, stark against its sterile environment, “monochrome of confinement.” It echoes her mother’s vibrant spirit, which stands in sharp contrast to the cold, limiting space around her. In ‘Cookies’, Sáraco taps into sensory detail with lines like, “it’s filled with brown and black shoes that smell like grandma’s old leather bag left out in the rain.” This sensory detail pulls the reader into a world where memory and the senses are inextricably linked.

Beyond memory and love, Sáraco touches on other significant themes, including the struggles of an immigrant family and feminism, particularly in Dear So and So, where she explores the myths designed to keep women compliant. The collection traces the threads of girlhood and womanhood, showing how they intertwine throughout life.

In Recycle, 2017, she ponders, “Why do I despair amid such beauty?” The book itself answers this question: we despair from beauty. It’s the pain that spills from love—the beauty of it, but also the great despair in its loss. This is why remembering is so important: because, in remembering, we hold onto the beauty of love and the pain of its absence.

In the title poem, ‘Even the Dog Was Quiet’, Sáraco teaches us the value of memory, not just as a means of preserving the past. The speaker writes everything down so the heart can remember when the mind has forgotten. Through this collection, Sáraco shows that memory is all we have left when everything else is gone. Toward the book’s conclusion, she reflects with envy on her son’s precise memory and muses about how we will all be reduced to “reminders of life’s past.” In this reflection, there is an irony: Sáraco, herself, has created a lasting memorial—Even the Dog Was Quiet—a book of memories that will endure long after the moments they describe have passed. In Sáraco’s own words, “Really, we are here for a moment, and then we are gone.” But her work has left many of her memories- which deserve to be remembered.

Nicole Conti

 

Review: In the Museum of My Daughters’ Mind by Marjorie Maddox

 

Review By: John Sweeder

Majorie Maddox’s chapbook, The Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, is a collection of 34 ekphrastic poems that were originally inspired by the author’s 2018 visit with her studio-artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafter, to Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum’s (AVAM) exhibition entitled The Great Mystery Show.  Influenced by her daughter’s subsequent artwork, Maddox features 18 of Anna Lee’s surrealistic paintings as well as the mixed media, photographs, and paintings of six other contributing artists, several of whose works have also appeared in the AVAM.

Maddox’s poetry explores the themes of positive human relationships, both interpersonal and intrapersonal, as well as the significance of imagination and creativity, improvisation, memory, nostalgia, grief, isolation, and alienation. Incorporating many of the repeated images contained in eighteen of her daughter’s surrealist paintings, Maddox embeds visual symbols—often numbers and letters, words and brief phrases, as well as concrete images and symbols such as chairs, chessboards and sunlight into her poetry, thus melding visual art with poetic language in an emotive symbiotic dance to deepen illustration her relationship with her daughter’s creative process.

In her pantoum, “The Choice,” Maddox uses her daughter’s visual metaphor contained in Hafter’s painting entitled “The Library” to explore one’s intuitive imagination using bibliographic tools—books, bookcases, floors, and ceilings—to seek truth, “The ancient why of creation”—all the while purporting that there is no set path to take in the pursuit of knowledge since we, “hold the pen and paintbrush” to create our own “Open Sesames.” The poem’s narrator further proposes that we not fret about making poor decisions since “splatter[s are] choices, not… mistake[s].”

In “High Top” Maddox, responds to her daughter’s surrealistic painting of the same name. Both artist and poet engage in an imaginary conversation as if seated across from one another in empty chairs separated by a table and chessboard, all of which are precariously balanced upon a seesaw, a “compass-needle pole.” The narrator-poet-mother asks her daughter: “Are we still we in this unseen grief/that keeps trying/ to listen to soul/ and scream?” Anna responds with her metaphorical “King’s Pawn Opening.” The two opponents in this fantasy chess match are unsettled for the moment, suggesting an estranged relationship. Yet, because of their long family history (“knee-deep in nostalgia”), a reproachment has begun: Mother “can almost see [her] breath;/ daughter “can almost touch [her] words.” Their unspoken grief remains on the table unresolved; however, both are “waiting for [each other’s] next moves.”

A lighter, more optimistic tone is struck in Maddox’s poem, “Sun on South Street.”  In this straightforward pantoum, the narrator enables us to imagine what life is like living in a “small quiet room” in a “Big busy city.” Exploring the contrasting themes of isolation versus “camaraderie” and light versus “dark,” we learn that days can be “brightened by the waves of strangers,” “the neighborly sun,” and “outside flowers” on balconies displayed for all to enjoy.

Hafer’s painting, “The Letter E” is an abstract tribute to the creative, right-brained random learner who does not “absorb new information” in a rigid sequential manner. Maddox adapts the theme of her daughter’s work to create an ironic poem of the same name whose narrator morphs into the didactic elementary school teacher we all recognize, the anachronistic school marm who proclaims, “Creativity’s the one transgression/ I won’t allow,” further arguing that curiosity and extraneous questions are no more than “time-wasting, silly digressions…[and] enemies of order.”

Maddox is inspired by the “tender but unsettling portrait” of a pig-tailed pre-pubescent girl holding a black cat, painted by Margaret Munz-Losch. In Maddox’s poem, “Black Cat,” a third-person omniscient narrator tells us that we, as unwanted voyeurs (perhaps the girl’s parents), enter her “stark room.” The anthropomorphized cat she cradles in her arms stares at us with its “bright feline eyes” thinking she doesn’t want us there. The girl’s dull skin squirms like a “pattern of maggots,” her eyebrows are perched like flies above her “dead-sea eyes,” and her tied-up hair is uncombed — all of which the narrator tells us we “cannot see.”  These imagined attributes are symbolic of the alienation that many young preteens experience—that is, they want (and maybe need) their own space to develop and mature. Thus, in the lives of young tweens we adults become as welcome as an “infested larvae of plague” hatching into them.

Maddox’s final poem, a sestina with the oxymoronic title, “Wild Rest,” was inspired by her daughter’s painting of the same name. In this work, the narrator begins by posing and answering the following question, “What does it mean to rest…in “a world so wild?” Maddox claims that through daily measured breathing, relaxed contemplation in a “well-worn chair,” and reliance upon our imagination, we should let our mind “wander out amidst the trees.” By exploring a “paradox of renewal,” we learn that “passive breezes [can] become wind” and that “rest [can become] a carnival tour of the spontaneous,” replete with roller coaster rides, fun houses, and Whack-a-Mole games. Maddox wants us to “Be still and know” and recognize “that breath and wind are cousins.”

As careful readers of literature, we are drawn to Maddox’s chapbook for a few reasons.  First, we readily identify with her motivation in creating this work. In her book’s introduction, “Entering the Gallery,” she tells us directly that she is “looking to escape [her] fears” of dying prematurely from heart disease and wants to spend the remaining time she has left with her daughter.  Many of us identify with this sense of urgency in reconnecting with loved ones while we still can. Time is both short and precious. Next, like Maddox and her daughter, we too enjoy visiting art museums, even small, intimate ones that may contain only a modest number of paintings like the ones in this chapbook. But when art and poetry challenge us to look and read more closely, when art and poetry become melded together, our aesthetic experience is enhanced. Through Maddox’s skill in creating the impressive array of interpretive poetry contained in this collection—poetry that ranges from free verse to sestina, poetry that utilizes the evocative tools of sensory imagery, metaphor, repetition, alliteration, internal and end rhyme—we want to seek out more of her work, and trust that she remains with us for years to come, continuing to engage creatively with her artful daughter, carrying on the centuries-old tradition of ekphrastic poetry.

John Sweeder

 

Review: Glassman by Steve Oskie

Review By: Margaret R. Sáraco

In this semi-autobiographical novel that takes place in Philadelphia and on the Jersey Shore, author Steve Oskie and his main character, Mark Glassman, have much in common: both dropped out of college, have the same taste in music, grew up in Philadelphia, and worked many jobs.

Mark’s journey to adulthood will keep a reader engaged while scratching their heads about his aimlessness. He works a series of odd jobs he is unqualified for, though sometimes he has a talent for something that surprises Mark and the reader. One of his prospective employers remarks in the novel saying, “Is it kosher for me to fire you before you start the job?”Clearly his resume turns into a document of failures.

During off hours, Mark imbibes enough recreational drugs and alcohol to keep himself numb. He fancies himself as a writer, something that simmers throughout the novel but comes across as a real chore to get him motivated. Mark seems to be a smart man with a lot of dumb ideas. Mark educates himself by reading and analyzing Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint, The Universal Baseball Association (a novel by Robert Coover), and The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. During an amusing exchange, he gets caught by his foreman on a construction site reading Goethe’s novel during his lunch break.

Oskie lets the reader see the inner workings of his main character, who can shatter like glass. Mark pursues two women at the same time, although when dealing with women, words like terror and horror come to his mind. At first, his eye set upon Sarah Sloane. He then falls in love with Teresa Devlin, then ping-pongs his affections back to Sarah while more women enter and depart. At one point, Mark reflects: “I was still under the impression that I would never get anywhere with women simply by being myself, taking a genuine interest in them, and becoming a good person.” His fear of relationships harkens back to his parent’s divorce years before and the resulting trauma. He makes it his mission to disassociate himself from his parents and their expectations.

Mark can’t and won’t grow up, however, readers can’t help rooting for him. Because everyone in some aspects of life refuses to grow up too, readers patiently wait to see if Mark will figure out his life. While this coming-of-age story takes the character longer than most to mature (Mark’s mother would agree), Glassman is worth the wait.

A writer, spoken word artist, and activist, Margaret R. Sáraco taught middle school math for 27 years before publishing her poetry books, If There Is No Wind and Even the Dog Was Quiet with Human Error Publishing. She is a poetry editor for the Platform Review, an online literary journal.

 

ONLINE Bonus – Book Review: House Parties by Lynn Levin

House Parties by Lynn Levin

Review by Regina Guarino

 

House Parties is the debut short story collection of Lynn Levin, an established poet and English faculty member at Drexel University. In this 443-page collection, each of the 20 stories tell of the ordinary lives of ordinary people in search of connection. In her poetic use of language and her tender execution of character, Levin shines with her appreciation of our common humanity.

Her use of beautiful syntax, images, and metaphors elevates the tone of these masterful glimpses into character’s lives. Poetry shines through the stories, in lines that live in the imagination and beyond the page. Descriptions delight the senses and convey the beauty of humanity through the beauty of language.

In Little Secrets an English instructor yearns to reconnect with her former poet/professor lover, describing their relationship “as split and withered as a dead squash vine, and he would come to trample on its remains.” With stunning irony, the story ends, that connection dead despite her best attempts, but with another blooming.

Baby and Gorilla presents the story of a former addict with a criminal record, working in a gorilla costume, meeting a teen mom “bug-eyed, jumpier than a grasshopper, high as the moon.” Her voice is “hot with menace. Her gaze is like the muzzle of a gun.” Yet, in another ironic ending, this encounter becomes the one in which the gorilla-costumed man finds connection.

The Dirty Martini is a memorable story of a middle-aged man who seeks respite from the boredom and resentment he feels in career and marriage. Following the lead of a roguish colleague, the man makes one bad decision after another and runs into predictable trouble after predictable trouble. Because of Levin’s nimbleness in drawing motivation of the man, his wife, and his friend, we feel sympathy for him, as he seeks to fulfill his need for humanity in a self-defeating manner.

The lonely rabbinical student in Frieda and Her Golem seeks connection even as she guards her solitude. She learns how to imbue a substance like river clay or ground meat with life and creates a helpmeet to fulfill her need for a partner. Ironically, the Golem develops more and more the ability to relate to people out in the world, something Frieda herself cannot manage.  Finally, when the Golem takes on a mind of her own, Frieda must take drastic action.

Evermay Blair tells the story a teacher, so wrecked with guilt that he becomes ill and changes his lifestyle. He says, “A storm of blackbirds banged inside my head.” Yet the connection he needs, with his conscience, with another human being eludes him. Levin’s skillful narration evokes tenderness in our hearts for him.

Each story in this collection makes a fascinating read. The characters make decisions they know to be not quite right, yet they are compelled to do so anyway. In the end there comes no happy ending for them. But there is a gentle landing.  And, by the end of the collection, for the reader a profound appreciation of human nature.

Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. She is the author of nine books, most recently, her debut collection of short stories House Parties (2023). Widely published as a poet, Levin’s five poetry collections include The Minor Virtues (2020); Miss Plastique (2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Fair Creatures of an Hour (2009), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium (2005), a finalist for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (2000). She is co-author, with Valerie Fox, of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (2019, 2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in writing/publishing. She is the translator, from the Spanish, of Birds on the Kiswar Tree (2014), poems by the Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales. Levin is also the producer/director of the 2017 video documentary Life on the Napo River: A Glimpse of the Ecuadoran Amazon, Its People, and Their Traditions.

 

Regina Guarino (left) is a writer with an MFA from Drexel University. She formerly studied linguistics and instructed learners of English as a second language. She lives in Delaware with her cute dog, Chipita. Her interests include languages and cultures, gardening, and herbal remedies.

 

ONLINE Bonus – Book Review: One Day I Am A Field by Amy Small-McKinney

One Day I Am A Field by Amy Small-McKinney

Review By Margaret R. Sáraco

 

Author Amy Small-McKinney wastes no time inviting us to enter a world of grief as she accompanies her husband on a journey who has been living with dementia. The poet is a consummate storyteller. Most of the poems are set in and around their home and medical facilities and the timeframe is during the pandemic in 2020. Therefore, their ability to move about is limited, which affects their lives greatly because of the anxiety of living in uncertain times, in addition to her husband’s illness. She dedicates One Day I Am A Field to Russ’ memory, who sadly dies of Covid. While Small-McKinney is losing her husband, the reader becomes an observer. Their story unfolds in ordinary places where extraordinary things are occurring in a sensitive landscape. Throughout the collection, she remembers for herself first and then for her husband.

In her opening poem, “The Doctor Said We Need to Return In Two Months After Further Testing Including Bloodwork,” she writes, “How do I mourn a husband who sits beside me?/Who cannot remember.” Feelings range from love and care to fear, frustration, and despair. It is in this space the poet finds grief, patience and sometimes encounters regret.  In “During The Pandemic You Are Dying At Home,” her use of repetition emphasizes what the illness means for both, their isolation littered throughout the book. We venture with husband and wife down an unflinching road.

This is not the life I planned.

Now the sky closes its doors and trees shrink

into fetal positions. Your body shrinks.

You forget where you are where

you are going. Your hospital bed tries to explain:
You don’t belong anymore.

 

This is not the life we planned.

We are breezeless our window won’t open.

She moves from “This is not the life I planned” to “This is not the life we planned” recognizing the I and we in their relationship moving the reader along towards their final goodbyes.

Many of her images and metaphors are startling and beautiful. In “Clematis Vitalba,” a reference to the familiar climbing flowery vine, known as “old man’s beard” or as Small-McKinney references, “Traveller’s Joy” ushers in much more than flowery thoughts.

I want to bury myself inside the dark. Stand aside

invented light. While the world falls apart,

my husband’s brain swells with lakes.

 

Small-McKinney’s artistic prowess is apparent throughout her book. Not only does she express her day-to-day struggles, and her husband’s, but does so while wielding and winding language to fit her experiences and then in her work embodies the love and care of someone who is slowly fading away.  “My husband’s brain swells with lakes” is a remarkable line that lingers even as you move to the next page, the next poem and long after the book is read. And, yes, to articulate one’s deepest emotions is what poets do, but it is not a simple task. One could hope for the author it might be healing, and helpful to those who will or have walked similar paths. The poet uses her words like a fluid conduit of thought and sentiment which might makes the reader imagine these poems may have written themselves. For instance, in “Noir” McKinney makes a leap from memories of her mother who confesses, “I didn’t hold you enough, uncomfortable with touch” to the writer’s desires concerning her daughter:

When my daughter was born, I held her

as a cloud holds on to rain as long as it can

Later in the same poem, she brings us into a reflection with her husband, sounding a seed of regret and connecting the dots between the generations. There is never enough time, and her realization is poignant with the line, “I don’t hold him enough.”

And since skin on skin breaks open all sorrow—

no—a turning away or fear of becoming

him, I don’t hold him enough.

The poet’s transition moving away from him as he grows more ill, is heart wrenching and honest. In “Devotion” she tells the reader of how life used to be. These thoughts and ideas are relatable to those who have experienced grief. Her careful spacing leaves emptiness where something existed before.

Our daughter was born just before my body closed. Her father wore face paint—

characters in plays they acted out together. Danced in the living room to Springsteen,

feet on feet.                             How it was.

 

Last night I moved into          became a guest in my own life.

A stranger, no longer my home.

About a third of the way into her book, Small-McKinney includes seven poems with similar titles. Five are called “Grief,” another “A Woman Named Grief” but it is her poem, “Grief: Two Parts” in which the poet comes to terms with her husband who is almost gone and then gone within the confines of the poem. And there are additional spaces for grief in much of her work. In the title poem of the collection, “One Day I Am A Field.” She writes,

What is remembered when blinded?

Try to wake to the sun’s flash of denial.

The problem: I am grief’s land.

One Day I Am A Field is a book where heart and poet meet with profound insight on what is it like to be a caregiver to someone you love, losing them one poem at a time. The love she expresses makes the going that much harder, but the reader will feel richer from having shared Small-McKinney’s experience.

Amy Small-McKinney is the author of two full-length books and three chapbooks. Her newest chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was published by Glass Lyre Press (April,2022). Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2016). Small-McKinney’s poems also appear in several anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2023). In 2019, her poem “Birthplace” received Special Merits recognition by The Comstock Review for their Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest, judged by poet, David Kirby, and again, in 2021 for her poem, “Bench, Ducks, & Inn,” judged by poet, Juan Felipe Herrera. On 10/2/23, her poem “Love/Furious” appeared in Verse Daily. Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner, Philadelphia Stories, and Matter. Small-McKinney has a degree in Clinical Neuropsychology from Drexel University and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. She resides in Philadelphia, where she has taught community poetry workshops, both privately and as part of conferences, as well as independent students.

 

Margaret R. Sáraco (left) writes about love, family, politics, and nature. A poet, short story, and memoir writer, she grew up in New York and lives in New Jersey. Margaret began her professional writing career as a magazine columnist writing about feminism, music, health, and contemporary events. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals. Margaret’s poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice received Honorable Mentions in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Her debut poetry collection, If There Is No Wind (Human Error Publishing, 2022) is available where books are sold. Even the Dog Was Quiet will be published in the Fall 2023.

 

 

ONLINE Bonus – Book Review: Dwell Here and Prosper by Chris Eagle

Dwell Here and Prosper by Chris Eagle

Review by Samantha Neugebauer

 

At eighteen, while a first-year student at Villanova, Chris Eagle became the primary caregiver for his father, Dick Eagle, after he suffered a stroke in his Delco home. Permanently disabled, Dick tried a “ludicrous version of independent living” before accepting that he needed to enter an assisted living facility. Last spring – nearly twenty years later – Tortoise Books published Dwell Here and Prosper, Chris’s debut novel inspired by the many diaries his late father kept during that multi-year period.

In terms of point of view, Dwell Here and Prosper diverge in two important ways from recent autofiction titles. First, the author himself is not the novel’s main character or narrator; it’s Chris writing in Dick’s voice. Secondly, as Chris explains it in the novel’s introduction, narrator, Dick, is not exactly his father:

“My narrator Dick is not Dick Eagle in any simplistic or straightforward sense. Pieces of Dick’s backstory come from other residents. Dad crossed with three or four or five guys I met walking the halls of his building, sitting outside in the yard with him. Dick is a common type of man you meet in assisted livings…”

Still, the novel begins with both the aforementioned introduction (by Chris) and a preface (by Dick), situating the story in a sort of memoiristic haze. Nevertheless, once chapter one gets rolling, the most absorbing features of social realistic fiction are in full swing. Dick is wiry and honest, with a dark sense of humor about the absurdities and negligence that goes on in the various dysfunctional facilities he stays at. He’s also extremely observant making his world and its characters come to life through the tiniest bodily details and habitual mannerisms: nurses with “their purses swinging from their chubby elbows,” a flight of pigeons who “divebomb straight to any spot where the sense food’s been dropped,” and a night nurse “whose complexion is seal-gray and strangely moist as if he rubs petroleum jelly on his face when no one’s looking.” At times, Dick can be comical and hopeful about his condition. The novel begins by Dick telling us that he is working toward getting out of the assisted living, and yet, poignantly, he also admits later:

“In lieu of sheep, lately, I’ve gotten in this unwise habit of counting all the two-handed activities I’ll likely never do again: tie my shoelaces, putt, butter bread, drive a car, cut a steak, fondle two tits at the same time. The stroke struck two years ago last Friday. Arm’s a worse conundrum than the leg. I’ve tried a thousand times, but I can’t figure out how I could manage on my own with only the one functioning hand.”

 

Throughout the book, readers may wonder why Dick’s fellow residents stay at these facilities, especially those who are on the younger side and seem healthy enough. Dick wonders this too, and his curiosity leads him to many discoveries about the complexities of human nature and mental illness. In one case, after a period of quasi-investigative journalism, Dick befriends “The Thinker,” a forty-two-year-old former professor and Penn graduate who stands out from the other residents because he always has his nose in a book. The Thinker’s room is full of stacks of books and also, oddly, a one-armed mannequin from Wannamaker’s dumpster.

The Thinker also keeps notebooks with extensive (“walls of tiny words”)  – “Amphitryon: harassing both sides (Greek)…Umbrageous: offering shade, easily offended…,” which Dick tries to make sense of. Finally, Dick asks The Thinker why he stays, and The Thinker explains that the situation “buys him twenty-thirty years…of reading. Writing.” On the one hand, it’s a fascinating assertion because the professor is right: assisted living is a situation that gives him nearly infinite time to do what he loves most.

Like other institution-based stories, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted,  Dwell Here and Prosper has plenty of quotidian descriptions of the nuts and bolts of assisted living life from the cuisine to medicine distribution to the ways in which residents barter and bride for extra cigarettes. Cigarettes are a ubiquitous feature of Eagle’s novel, in ways comparable to how the cigarette was its own kind of character and cultural signifier in Mad Men. In the preface, Dick mentions that he and his son had considered naming the book Butt. In truth, the power and presence of the cigarette in the novel says as much about the residents of the facility as it does about the novel’s mid-nineties setting. While there are many other markers of the time period, such as certain expressions and ways of talking and the triumphs and losses of local Philly sports teams, the omnipresence of the cigarette adds authentic sensory fabric to Dick’s accounts of the last century. The cigarette was already on its way out and becoming less socially acceptable by the mid-nineties, yet it wasn’t completely gone from mainstream society either. Nevertheless, smoking was– and still is–most prevalent among those on society’s margins, like the misfits, outcasts, poor, and ill who populate Dwell Here and Prosper. Some residents smoke through their weekly cigarette allotment right away, while others, like The Thinker, show “discipline” by allowing himself only three cigarettes a day. In depicting each resident’s personal relationship with the cigarette, we learn something about each resident’s relationship with time itself, too.

Reading this book, I was reminded of essayist Freddie deBoer’s observation that “we’ve built a society where there are more ways to be a loser than a winner.” ‘Loser’ is a harsh word but a fitting one to describe the way most of society views the residents of Dick’s assisted living facility. Although Dick makes the most of his situation, in no way is the assisted living facility existence one to envy. In fact, Dick’s mind is saved partially because he finds a purpose in writing and recording the details of his experience. While this is admirable, it also speaks to  deBoer’s point because part of his argument is that “the arts” are one of the other ways not to be a “loser.” Everyone in the facility can’t be like Dick, or even if they could, they might not have the talent or temperament for it.

An assisted living facility is a specific kind of purgatory; by definition, it’s a place for people who require full-time help but not enough to be in a nursing home. In his novel, Chris Eagle is both honoring his father’s memory and throwing light on the state of these facilities, which share characteristics with our psychiatric hospitals, but are not exactly the same. Without being didactic, it’s clear the author believes that these residents deserve more options for happiness and inclusion in society. These days, Chris Eagle lives in Atlanta, where he is a professor of Health Humanities at Emory University. It’s easy to imagine how the experience with his father might have inspired his academic – as well as his creative – interests. Lucky for us, Eagle is also working on a collection of short stories set in Delco.

Chris Eagle is the author of Dwell Here and Prosper (Tortoise Books, 2023), a novel based on the diary his father kept while recovering from a stroke in a highly dysfunctional assisted living facility  in southeastern Pennsylvania. His short stories have also appeared in AGNI, Louisiana Literature, and Sortes. Originally from Delco PA, Chris has lived in Berkeley, Paris, Antwerp, Pasadena, Sydney, Berlin, Chicago, and Atlanta. He now lives back in Delco, where he is currently at work on a short story collection set in his hometown.Chris Eagle received his Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 2009. He taught at Caltech, Western Sydney University, DePaul University, Loyola Chicago, and Emory University before retiring from academia in 2024. He is a former Fulbright scholar, Chateaubriand scholar, and Mellon fellow. His areas of research include Health Humanities, Disability Studies, Bioethics, Trauma Studies, and the field of Dysfluency Studies which he helped to found with his monograph Dysfluencies and his edited collection Talking Normal.

 

Reviewer: Raised in Northeast Philadelphia, Samantha Neugebauer now lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a research assistant at Georgetown University and Georgetown University in Qatar. Previously, she taught at Johns Hopkins and NYU in Abu Dhabi. Learn more about Samantha at her website: samanthaneugebauer.com.