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

Lisa Ashley reviews...
 

The Heart of It
by Alan Perry

Perhaps the best gift of this new collection is how the poems often pique our curiosity, enticing us into our own imagination as we engage, providing an ending that gives us precious freedom to claim our own story within the one Perry crafts for us.
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

Salt Upon the Water
by Lyn Dickens

Lynn Dickens' writing is fluent and often poetic. She captures the characters of Clarissa and Will and their interactions beautifully, and she captures, too, the unrest, the dangers, and the rough nature of the early beginnings of the first small free-settlement that would grow into the now-thriving state of South Australia.
 

TonyInterruptor
by Nicola Barker

Her idiosyncratic prose is full of long sentences, parentheses, italics, and block capitals, and her characters are often eccentric. There has been, for example, a woman who breeds wild boars and whose daughter is a part-time nudist and pornographer (Wide Open), and a man who slept inside a horse's carcass (The Behindlings). The characters in TonyInterruptor, however, are more-or-less normal, although perhaps more introspective and prone to philosophical argument than most of us.
 

Mona's Eyes
by Thomas Schlesser, translated by Hildegarde Serle

Having run more tests, the doctor can make no clear diagnosis, so he suggests hypnosis (which Paul rejects), then weekly blood and arterial tests, eye tests, and a consultation with a child psychiatrist. He does not mention the possibility of a relapse, but when Henry, who is not "the sort to run away from questions, however dreadful they might be," hears what has happened, he fears that his granddaughter may go blind.
 

Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

In Paris, at the Montparnasse Cemetery, she comes across a huge multi-colored sculpture of a fat cat "sporting the name Ricardo on its belly." She learns later that it was created by Niki de Saint Phalle, who is well-known in France and who built her Tarot Garden in Italy, sleeping each night inside her huge model of The Empress from the Tarot pack's Major Arcana.
 

Everything Lost, Everything Found
by Matthew Hooton

Jack's father has worked his way up through Ford's car manufacturing empire in Muskinaw and has been given a two-year contract as managerial assistant to the foreman of Ford's Brazilian rubber plantation. He shows Jack around the plantation where the trees, unlike those in the jungle, are planted in strict rows, attended by American and native employees, and are doomed to failure from insect attacks, fungal blight, and exposure to fierce sunlight.
 

Raising Hare
by Chloe Dalton

The Covid pandemic stopped all that and "flung" her home to the countryside, where she owns an old barn she has converted as "a project [she] could fall back on" if "swings in political fortune" affected her work. Confined there, she is anxious, restless and struggling to cope with the sudden change of pace. It is mid-February, with the snow-melt still on the ground, when she hears a barking dog and a man shouting and goes out to investigate the disturbance.
 

A Great Act of Love
by Heather Rose

So, it seems that Caroline's French father, Jacques-Louis Colbert, has been arrested, tried for murder, spared the death penalty but sentenced, instead, to life in the distant English penal colony on Norfolk Island. His story and his horrific experiences become part of the book; so, too, does the account of his childhood as the son of a French aristocrat and the way he and his older sister, Henriette, were smuggled from France to Scotland after their parents were beheaded in the French Revolution.