Most Wanted:
A Gamble in Verse
by Jeffrey Encke
Reviewed by Stephen Page
I just got home from an all-night card game after a Monday Night Football tailgate party. I can’t say how wonderful it was to play poker and read poetry at the same time.
These cards would be good for anyone who likes to shuffle the deck once and a while, whether it be poker, rummy, cribbage, crazy eights, go fish, 3 card brag–or, if you buy two decks and set aside the 2’s to 8’s, pinocle.
These cards are fun, …

Family Albums
By SUSANN COKAL
LEAVING ROCK HARBOR
By Rebecca Chace
292 pp. Scribner. $25.
THE HOUSE ON SALT HAY ROAD
By Carin Clevidence
285 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
Long ago and far away, Aristotle called poetry (by which he meant imaginative writing in general) “a more philosophical and serious business than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.” He was describing the difference between the events we know to have happened to such-and-such a person on such-and-such a date and the wide scope of human reactions to those events. And, by extension, …

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
Reviewed by Stephen Page
Demeter is the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and fecundity. She is often depicted in artwork as carrying corn, shafts of wheat, or the horn of Cornucopia (or a combination). She governs harvestable food for the people and plant life for the earth. The myth goes something like this, depending which version of the myth you read: Demeter bears a daughter named Persephone. When Persephone is a young maiden, Hades, the Greek god of the underworld spies her picking flowers in a field …

The female protagonists in Mary Akers’s collection of short stories, Women Up On Blocks, live maledominated lives. They feel trapped, yet are in the situations they are in because of decisions that they made during certain periods of their lives.
The first story, Medusa Song, begins as a story of child neglect:
She scrambles the eggs while the baby howls at her knees. To drown out the racket, she hums and jabs the fork into the yolks… then does a quick sidestep when the baby lunges for her knees.
His little fat hands …

Bongo provides a US mailing address and forwards your purchases to you overseas
Via Lifehacker

Happy Monday everyone! Start off your week with one of Sugar & Spice’s winter promotions. Log on to the Sugar and Spice website to view all the delicious treats they have to offer! My personal favorite is the dark chocolate, walnut cantucci, Cantucci cioccolato alle noci. I think one of my goals this week will be to try to stop by and load up on cantucci. I love to dislpay them in large glass jars or serving bowls. They never fail to look amazing and are so inviting when I …

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By Cati Porter
Mayapple Press. 59 Pages. $14.95
Reviewed by Stephen Page
Cati Porter’s Seven Floors Up is about wifehood, womanhood, and most expressively, adulthood. Porter reveals in varied forms of verse the roles of a contemporary married mother.
The narrator of the poems has a husband, two children, a cancer-ridden dog, a mother, a stepmother, a mother in law, and a couple of people in her extended family who are terminally ill. She often reflects on how she got to where she is, and in her everyday occurrences she inadvertantly divulges to …

A Collection of Reflection
The Wine-Dark House by Rustin Larson
Blue Light Press. 101 Pages. $15.95
Reviewed by Stephen Page
Rustin Larson’s The Wine-Dark House is ample with poems. There is certainly sufficient poetry to fill an afternoon of reading. The speaker in the poems is on a quest, a search for something: tranquility in life, redemption for deeds done, or existential meaning—possibly that spiritual plane some people call nirvana.
When a person is pondering the past, memories do not usually appear in consciousness in a linear fashion, beginning from the first memory …

Home Of The Brave
“Stories in Uniform”
Edited by Jeffery Hess
Press 53, 331 pages. $19.95
Reviewed by Stephen Page
With Home of the Brave, editor Jeffery Hess puts together a collection of short stories about people in the U.S. military. The period covered is from World War II to the present. Although many of the stories refer to war, very few depict actual battles.
Let me reiterate that these are stories about people—humane stories, humanistic stories, stories about humanity.
This book will …