“‘Why did it have to be me?’ The stray echoed the words of the story. ‘But she was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person,” (Rose). Margot and Mama live in an isolated cottage in the woods where they eagerly await the visit of strays, people who get lost in …
“With henching, you know where you stand,” (Walschots 202). Anna is a hench, meaning she takes temp jobs for the world’s more dastardly (or starting-up) villains to make money. It isn’t honest work, but in this economy a person has to survive any way they can. But once she becomes permanently injured after a well-known superhero …
“Well, when she does all the thinking and knowing, won’t I be … dead?” (Jackson 241). Twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Richmond lives an ordinary life. Orphaned and living with her maiden aunt Morgen, Elizabeth spends her days working at a museum and living off of her dead mother’s inheritance, but strange things have started to occur. Threatening letters …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “Every day, I want to reach / inside my chest, dig my fingers in, / and pull my rubs apart: / let me breathe / until I burst,” (“Ritual for Release,” Bates-Hardy, 9). In Anatomical Venus, Courtney Bates-Hardy writes a collection of poetry where she takes …
“Which is better?…The grief of death of the ambiguity of indefinite loss?” (Wallace 76). In the small town of Euphoria a suburban couple, Blue and Culver, have disappeared, but only their estranged friend Fir seems to care. Without any help from the police, Fir enlists the help of their friend Fain as they begin their search. …
I received this book from Playwrights Canada Press in exchange for an honest review. “Lily: They’re all dead now,” (Act 1, Prologue, 14). An adaption of Ann-Marie Macdonald’s novel of the same name, the play follows piano tuner James Piper and his thirteen-year-old wife Materia Mahmoud, their four daughters Kathleen, Frances, Mercedes, and Lily. Dark secrets are unearthed …
I received this book from the editor in exchange for an honest review. “Despair followed me like a lingering shadow. The passage of days and nights became a seamless blur, rendering the concept of time inconsequential…Believing death to be my sole escape, I grappled with the realization that both suicide and homosexuality were considered sins,” (“Convert” by Gemma …
“Rarely in life does one occasion upon irrevocable proof of a higher power. But sometimes a coincidence stretched not just the bounds of credulity, but possibility,” (Malla 15). After surviving a plane crash, an unnamed narrator and another survivor, K. Sohail, find themselves stranded on an island anything but deserted. Holding a Wellness Couples retreat, …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “By not claiming space for my art, I am the aporia, the one feigning uncertainty, the one who pretends to others like I don’t know what it is I want to do,” (Purdham 187). A long time advocate for people with disabilities as …
“The basic story was far from original. But in the hands of two visionary creators like David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks took the familiar and transformed it into a series no one could have anticipated,” (Burns 2). In Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks, Andy Burns takes a look at the early nineties show Twin Peaks and how …
Sarah O'Connor 