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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.

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.

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.

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.