issue 34 > nonfiction
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Book Reviews
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Elizabeth Coleman. Proof.
review by Sharon IsraelProof, Elizabeth J. Coleman’s first book-length collection of poems, proves she is a conjurer of emotion through her surprising language and imagery, as well as her passionate connection between the personal and universal.
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Therése Halscheid. Frozen Latitudes.
review by Barbara DanielsTherése Halscheid’s Frozen Latitudes takes readers into the deep cold of a father’s thirty years of aphasia and dementia after open-heart surgery went badly wrong and also into the counterpoint to this narrative, his daughter’s sojourns in Alaska.
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Sarah Kennedy. City of Ladies.
by Courtney D. WatsonFans of Sarah Kennedy’s 2013 novel The Altarpiece will be riveted by City of Ladies, Book Two in her Tudor-era The Cross and the Crown historical fiction series. Like its predecessor, this beautifully written novel is filled with historical details that bring to life an exciting period of English history. One of the many hallmarks of this excellent series is the depth of Kennedy’s descriptions of 16th century England; the vividness and consistency with which the author illustrates her heroine Catherine Overton’s world rivals Hilary Mantel and thrills the reader on every page.
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Essays
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Dolce Far Niente
by David Slavitt...Maintain a solemn countenance and keep your mouth shut. Your associates may
find you spooky but they will respect you and even fear you.The other option is to spout nonsense as copiously as you can. Here and there you can inject small but absurd truths to which few will object because they never know whether you’re kidding and will give you the benefit of the doubt....
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from Under the Sign of Leo
by Elaine TerranovaNew Jersey was always the other side. It was summer there and that’s when I did my growing. We boarded the ferry, mother, father, brothers, I, passage to another world. A bootblack stropped with his cloth my father’s high crippled shoe, finding a rhythm, back and forth. The grown-ups quarreled and complained. Do you have the lunch, do you have your hat, do you have to go to the bathroom? We tugged straw suitcases in our wake. Then, like a musical command, fast but not too much, we breached the water and came to Camden where we paid again and climbed up to the waiting railway carriage. It took off with its fat head of steam, wobbling on skinny steel tracks. No one to wave or see us off, Mommie, Daddy, Leo, Sidney, the Baby, all accounted for, a family, a set.
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Art
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Romare Bearden, Humanist Artist
by Donald KuspitTo grasp the import and importance of Romare Bearden’s art, I suggest that one compare Picasso’s Three Musicians, 1921 and Bearden’s Baptism, 1964, also a picture of three musicians. Both works are modernist, in the sense that they are abstract. But in the Picasso geometry seems to stifle the humanness of the figures.
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