shanehoyle, Author at Newfound

Beauty Eases Pain in Judy Jordan’s Poetry Collection “Hunger”

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry collection “Hunger” by Judy Jordan (Tinderbox Editions, 2018) is an honest, intimate account of a woman and her pain. The speaker in the poems faces homelessness after an accident that injured a spinal disk in the small of her back. When the hospital bills became too expensive and she fell behind on payments, the hospital seized the narrator’s bank account. Every dollar to her name is given to the hospital, leaving the woman alone, impoverished and homeless. She goes into the forest where she lives in an abandoned greenhouse, with hordes of plants and insects for Jordan to describe in detail. Our speaker is injured and unable to provide for herself, breeding a physical and spiritual hunger.

Jordan uses the protagonist’s unique situation as a playground for poetry and imagery, giving us thick, clamoring descriptions to guide us through this chaotic situation.

Erasure and Apocalypse in Claire Wahmanholm’s “Night Vision”

In Claire Wahmanholm’s poetry chapbook “Night Vision” (New Michigan Press, 2017), the world is transformed and brought to its most primal state after some catastrophic events that readers may never be quite sure of. The chapbook includes 30 poems—21 prose poems and nine erasure poems. (Erasure poetry is a form where an entire page of found text will be erased until only a few words remain. These leftover words form a poem.)

All nine erasure poems in “Night Vision” come from the wildly popular “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, setting a reader expectation of wonder at the universe.

Loss an destruction are detailed instead, through Wahmanholm’s gripping yet elusive prose.

Jeff Jackson’s “Mira Corpora” Mixes Journal Entries with Fantasy

When’s the last time you picked up an old notebook?

My notebooks are filled with angry stanzas that could hardly qualify as poetry, doodles of samurai where there should be algebraic equations, and the occasional short story. If you flipped through my old journals and diaries, you could probably learn a lot about me, because I used my journals as a getaway from reality. Or maybe your journal is your archive of your reality.

“Mira Corpora” (Two Dollar Radio, 2013) is a collection of surreal journal entries by Jeff Jackson, a celebrated author and playwright. The book “is a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories” according to Jackson’s website.

Geoff Manaugh Reconstructs Our Minds in “A Burglar’s Guide to the City”

If you’ve ever gone through a parkour phase, you’ve probably looked at a building and thought, “I can climb that.” If you’ve ever seen “Ocean’s Eleven,” you’ve probably thought about how cool breaking into a bank vault would be. Geoff Manaugh argues that humans are addicted to parkour videos, heist movies and crime novels because the people who climb buildings, break into them, or destroy them are misusing the architecture that we see around us everyday.

“Lords of St. Thomas”: A Thrilling Novel of Family and Sacrifice

Jackson Ellis describes a tender, thought-provoking family legacy in “Lords of St. Thomas” (Green Writers Press, coming to paperback April 2018). The reader gets an account of the fictional Henry Lord and his family in St. Thomas, Nevada. Here the Lords struggle with family bonds, tragedy and fear of the inevitable. The book is also an important record of history, depicting the consequences of the building of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Author: shanehoyle