Barrelhouse Reviews: A Rupture in the Interiors by Valerie Witte
Living in a human body is complex and nuanced. Acknowledging these subtleties is a way of embracing full existence, including life’s enigmas.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger
A sobering reminder that the mountain and the mosquito will be here long after we are gone.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Way Back by Russell Karrick
It seems the way back for Karrick is a matter of allowing for beauty in every moment, even in what he might initially find irritating or ugly.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Ardor by Alyse Knorr
An adventurous collection, filled with humor and optimism, Ardor is a future-thinking text.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Freedom House by KB Brookins
The crux of Brookins’ resistance: to find beauty in the fight, and to acknowledge that imagining is good, but having is better.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Charm Offensive by Ross White
Realizing that you are driving, or perhaps living, toward an unattainable life fuels the collection’s philosophical musings.
Barrelhouse Reviews: If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin
These poems are saturated with images of Antigone, autonomy, and the diaphanous film that stands between us and death.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Saint of Everything by Deborah Keenan
The stones are burdens given to the speaker, but also accepted. Women are taught to abide. Taught to carry.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Incantation by David Crews
The fluidity of the sea finds an equivalent in the fluidity of memory. Crews constructs a world (and a love) that transcends time’s usual strictures.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Every Single Bird Rising by Xiaoly Li
Here, memory is both personal and communal. The four sections of the collection cross time and space, braiding together difficult experiences.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Feast by Ina Cariño
It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so their English reaches for oracular truths.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Driftwood 2023 Anthology
So many author interviews start with “welcome to the pages of Driftwood.” New readers will feel the warmth of that welcome.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Phoenix Song by LD Green
Green’s “songs” communicate the possibility of finding pleasure and connection in a body previously dismissed as a myth.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen, by Tommy Blake
“The Internet is not your friend—you shouldn’t let it tend to you so soon.“