(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

Pond
by Claire-Louise Bennett

To reach for another Irish analogy, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens twice. Pond is a book in which nothing happens again and again and again.
 

The River at Night
by Erica Ferencik

Erica Ferecik writes vividly about the wilderness and especially about the river. Once the white-water rafting begins, she captures the turbulence, danger, thrills, and terrors of this adventure with a sometimes breathtaking realism.
 

The House Between the Tides
by Doug Johnstone

This is a fast-paced story with plenty of excitement, twists, and surprises. And Doug Johnstone uses the Orkney Islands, their remoteness, their ancient stone-circles and tomb-burials, their harsh beauty, and their close-knit community to make a fascinating setting.
 

Landscapes
by John Berger

Just occasionally, there are passages such as his description of his encounter in a field with two donkeys, where he shows he can be a superb story teller, but these moments are rare.
 

Jennifer Finstrom reviews...
 

What Will Keep Us Alive
by Kristin LaTour

When I finished reading Part One (which includes one of my favorite poems in this collection, "Lot's Young Wife"), I wrote the word "choice" on a blank page in the back. Underneath it, I wrote "escape," and following an arrow, the words "their opposites?"
 

Black Pearl: Poems of Love, Sex and Regret
by Albert Degenova

I found the idea of regret connected to time and its passing in many of these poems, and once I began reading for this idea of time, I found it almost everywhere and could almost imagine I heard a clock ticking as I turned the pages.
 

Cosmophagy
by David Oestreich

I found the idea of regret connected to time and its passing in many of these poems, and once I began reading for this idea of time, I found it almost everywhere and could almost imagine I heard a clock ticking as I turned the pages.
 

Gilbert Wesley Purdy reviews...
 

Garden Time
by W. S. Merwin

The words are simpler now, the images simpler. This, too, is part of what Gardening Time says. He meditates upon the scene on a porcelain cup, remembers a stone lantern he once coveted, a cowbell once given him as a present. The poet approaches being submerged in the river. Intellectual complexities are falling away.
 

and discusses...
 

Eclectica Anthologies, Mind Dances, and Such...

I was late coming to the Internet experience. Just prior I had lived several years as a quasi-hermit in a broken down cabin in a patch of tropical forest. It had no telephone and no television, limited electrical, and the finest neighbors. My bookshelves were the nursery for the local anole lizard population who passed freely in and out of the chinks in the walls.