Elevate Difference

Reviews by Lisa Bower

Lisa Bower holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, has strange allergies to things like poultry, and is a displaced NYer who’s lived everywhere from Nawlins to da Bean. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in The Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Subtropics, The Mississippi Review, and Rattle.

The Keening

A. LaFaye’s The Keening is one part poem, and one part novel. Though the narrative is strong, it is the layered, considered language, and the dance with fantasy that make this novel something special. Both a modern-day ghost story and young adult novel, the book is complex, something that can’t be tied to just one genre. This book’s protagonist, Lyza, lives with her father on the fringe of a Maine fishing village.

A Little Middle of the Night

Molly Brodak’s poetry collection A Little Middle of the Night is wide in its range: big dog topics like perceptions of art and the weight of tragedy are sifted through by a careful and talented poet.

The Wave-Maker: Poems

If Elizabeth Spires' poetry collection, The Wave-Maker, presents a single image, it is something deceptively simple, like the flick of a blouse hanging on a clothesline. Difficult subject matter such as death, aging, and the meaning of life are examined by peering in to closely examine the minutiae.

Hotel Iris

Having been forced to drop out of school to work at her family's seaside hotel in Japan, a young woman named Mari suffers through days marked by routine. She cleans rooms, minds the desk, and attends to the needs of the guests. The novel Hotel Iris explores what happens when a girl breaks free of a life of controlled repetition, only to fall victim to an even more brutal cycle of submission and domination.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen

Forget fairytales and fables that threaten rape and violence to women who go off the beaten path, deny their parents, or refuse to marry. Marilyn Chin's novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, doesn't lock away its female protagonists into a tower so a prince can climb up their hair and doesn't ask the women to honor and obey their parents.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

If you want to read a book that is punch-you-in-the-gut beautiful, then pick up Yoko Ogawa's novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. This novel is a careful meditation on memory and communication.

Hymn to the Immortal Wind

Mono's fifth studio album, Hymn to the Immortal Wind, is a gauntlet of an album: while listening to the tracks, the listener will sit up a bit straighter and lean, as if trying to get closer to the band's intoxicating rock-classical pieces. Pianos and strings vibrate along with guitars to produce an album that is as concise as it is full.

Six Radical Politics Buttons

Making nice is not the focus of Bitter Pie’s products. Instead, with such loudmouth, all-CAPS statements as “Shut Your Pie Hole” and “You’re the Reason for the Jihad,” these buttons are certainly radical and proud with their politics. These buttons are small enough to place on a bag strap or on a lapel, and grouped together, they could be quite stunning, especially for the politically conscious. The one downfall to these pieces is that the images are not always crisp and the font is not always clear.

Invincible Summer, Volume II

Reading Nicole Georges’ collection of zines, Invincible Summer, is like opening a time capsule to not only the writer’s life, but also the community and time period in which she lived.

The Lyrics

Fanny Howe’s poetry collection, The Lyrics, includes poems that thrive on the lyric poem’s conventions; the poems include both the personal world of the speaker, as well as the universal world. Each poem is also a lyric by itself; each lyric comprises The Lyrics spoken about in the title.

Broken World

Don’t be fooled by the title of Joseph Lease’s collection of poems, though the world may be “broken,” the collection spends its time rebuilding, rationalizing and living despite it. Repetition fuels the elegy, “Broken World (for James Assatly),” a poem built in sections, a poem that works to remember a friend and writer who died of AIDS.

Check the Rhyme

Talk about a breaking silences; we finally have an anthology speaking to women of diverse backgrounds, backgrounds usually ignored or tokenized in more traditional publications. Check the Rhyme is a new anthology and one of the first dedicated not only to women of diverse backgrounds, but to both “female poets & emcees.” What do I think? I say: Hallelujah, Hallelujah; thank the stars this anthology exists! For one of the first times, female emcees and poets speak about issues as diverse as hip-hop, hair, Hurricane Katrina, and Black history.

Artistic Native American Postcards

Transformation and prayer highlight Swaneagle Harijan’s art. Her paintings are rich with color and focus on women in a many states of being.

Bitch (Issue #34: Green)

Trust Bitch to subvert their very own issue’s theme! In their Winter 2006 issue, they approach what has been become a trend in the magazine world from Elle to Vanity Fair: the “Green issue.” Thankfully, in the spirit of their moniker, the magazine offers a creative response to the very definition of what “green” might entail.
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