Rebecca Hart Olander

I Carry My Mother by Lesléa Newman, Headmistress Press, 2015, 108 pp/, $10.00   Lesléa Newman’s latest book, I Carry My Mother takes as its subject the death of the author’s mother and the process of grieving this loss. In this unflinching, layered account, Newman opens a window on a human experience deeply her own

Doesn’t the name bring to mind a dangerous woman at a table in the back corner of a smoky bar? The kind you walk into after disembarking from a six-month stint trawling the ocean, your skin indiscernible from salted cod? Aren’t you both afraid and compelled by her, cloaked as she is in her dark

Dinner with Emerson by Wendy Mnookin,Tiger Bark Press, 2016, 108 pp/, $16.95     Wendy Mnookin’s fifth collection, Dinner with Emerson, is organized according to the four seasons. It begins with spring and runs through the year, followed by a fifth section, “Another Spring,” that features poems in a season that stretch beyond “Winter.” There

Admit One: An American Scrapbook by Martha Collins, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 104 pp/, $15.95 Last spring’s release of Martha Collins’s Admit One: An American Scrapbook, is the third in a series that includes the volumes Blue Front and White Papers. The trilogy as a whole wrestles with race and racism in America from