Book Review: Raised By Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller

April 13, 2026April 14, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

BOOK REVIEW:
RAISED BY FERNS
BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Raised by Ferns begins with an epigraph by Diane Seuss:

I am so hungry

for the song that grows tall like a weed

grows, and grows.

Zeller yearns for her words to grow, and they do. They dig roots down to briny delta water. They spindle outward like invasive but naturalized blackberries that are common in the Pacific Northwest.

Maya’s story begins in the myths she has been told, in the wondering of, “What’s Real, What’s True, What’s Worth Retelling” (20). She was born into the hands of midwives. She was cradled in Mayan-wool blankets her German-born father imported from Guatemala to the US. Her rural childhood taught her the necessity to forage, accept the ghosts of worn down farmhouses like additional family members. She and her family lived itinerantly, a mobile and hybrid lifeway able to call various shelters home.

Zeller’s ability to find home in a variety of ways also informs her writing. Her prose is fed by her poetry. Her poetry is nourished in nature. Her human nature is scribed in stanza, strophes, and verse-filled metaphors. Her stories are a herstory; a seed that begats its next iteration:

The Himalayan blackberry came to the United States from Eurasia

in 1885, and it spread into the hills….

Cancer spreads not like a military but like a blackberry….

Cancer isn’t militant so much as fruitful – it produces globules of black gold.

The globules of berries are not unlike the beads of sand on my fingers while I eat berries on the beach near where I was born (21-22).

And so, Zeller’s prose is born through her ecopoetics.

Maya recalls her parents as “free spirits” and she and her siblings as semi-feral, but there is more than meets first glance (25). A father with addiction, a boy-home escapee, a mother stepping out of a Midwest confined in Catholicism; both were determined to do things differently than their previous generation. Perhaps, this desire to do things differently has rubbed off on Zeller as well. She vacillates between what Wallace Stevens states as “of two minds” (8). To have, and to have not. To choose a lifeway, or to choose another life. To gain education painstakingly, or to pretend one has always had privilege and access. As an adult, Maya now knows both painfully well.

Zeller states, “I learned early the advantage of keeping my opinions to myself, and then later to be heard I’d have to yell them…. I learned to search for patterns and shape them to my advantage (27). Maya’s navigation gives her strategy in her writing, what she reveals and what she weaves. This she learned through books, the public library often was her teacher. Libraries gave access to things, worlds, and concepts that otherwise would not have been available. For young Maya the library was what, “some kids in cities might anticipate the ice cream truck… new flavors. I could almost taste the books” (28). Books and the stories they held were her cherry-on-top.

In her writing, Zeller is, “not interested in another pastoral that shows you the honey but not the sting” (33). She wants the real, “the pus and entrails,” the busted stitches to the finished quilt (33). Like the squares that are darned together to make a whole, each essay is part of the patchwork that makes her memoir.

Folks often ask Zeller, “how [she] got from there to here” (40); it’s not a vertical trajectory. It’s muscle memory, like water in a flood plain, it remembers. A fibrous rhizome that spores out in order to survive. Maya has gotten where she is through hard work, elder knowledge passed onward, and personal tenacity. What engages her is to find wonder. Curiosity in the wild, in glancing through fern leaves, in observing her own children – this is what feeds her well.

As her reader moves through her various essays, Zeller peals back her pain. The discovery that her life partner is having an affair, the nudging on her psychosis that the friend is more than a friend. Her world is up-ended, but she has, “had a lot of practice in overcoming shit” (226). Yet, the full reveal takes time. There is more to it all and she asks of herself, “What does the body know that we don’t? (229).

As a child, she learned to lean on herself and the world she created through storytelling. As an adult, she, “learned, by unlearning to love… that her mind and blood and babies” half belonged to him (230). How could she reclaim her stardust, her hours, her life? She could do so by writing her own herstory. That is what Raised by Ferns is, a telling, a gathering of all the things she has thus far learned.

In her Epilogue Zeller wonders what is both “Real and Not Real” (231). What are the myths she has been told, what are the stories she has created, and what is the legacy she hopes to carry forward for herself, her children, and her reader?

There are times of epiphany, when once something brought pleasure, she realizes a thing she normally loved needs to be left behind. These are the tough but necessary goodbyes. Maya explains, “I couldn’t help but note some proximal off-ness,” a layer that must be shed (231). She knows, “the body holds each fact” and needs to flush itself of dead skin, even one that has been intertwined with her own.

This is the moment, she asks her ex-partner to be honest with her when he is unwilling to be. To be direct with what he wants when he is only capable of directly being hurtful. It takes more than two and a half years, but Zeller learns to make amends with herself knowing that – most importantly – she needs to be honest and direct with herself rather than accept, “the Numb” (235). Maya lays it plain, “I’m navigating something psychologically unmooring – something complex and monstrous and technical and ineffable” (239-240). An unraveling of the stability she was determined to create as a reaction to the “free spirit” and unsteady ground of her own childhood.

Zeller realizes it is difficult and a false equivalency. She questions, “How can I help my children trust themselves, develop ways to cope and self-regulate in a world that isn’t getting better?” (241).

Her answer is that she still has hope in a world with snow falls, an ocean replete with sea stars, and summer-time blackberries that stain lips with sweet.

READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

RAISED BY FERNS

BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

AVAILABLE THROUGH PORPHYRY

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue.

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: missed connections with tall girls by Gwen Aube

April 6, 2026April 9, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
missed connections with tall girls
BY GWEN AUBE

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

It’s the poet’s right, according to the Russian Futurists, to use “arbitrary and derivative words”. For Myakovsky, in fact, it was a “social command”, a requirement to translate colloquial speech onto the page following increases in literacy after the Revolution. Similarly, as trans presses do away with the market-oriented eyes of cis editors, beautiful phrases lurch out of Omegle chat rooms in knee-high socks and cat ears. We are blessed with language that is not only geared towards trans audiences, but would hopefully piss off, confuse, and be unintelligible to most cis ones.

Gwen Aube’s missed connections with tall girls is a book that spoils us with such language. A collection of vignettes of “oddball trannies”, it is filled to the brim with bawdy colloquialisms, manifestos, and general debauchery of every kind. It has “girldick”, HSTS vs AGP kandi, traps, “kkkanada”, and blood pacts. It is the sounds of dolls awkwardly crowding into bars, Montreal train yards, and half-bird girls smuggling away hamburgers. It is a book that is warm, and loud, and will make you cackle so heinously your roommate asks what you are choking on.

The poetry is funny, and carries so much character, that it is hard to realize how earnest it is. Aube brings the poetic voice of a self-identified “flop-house bitch”, yearning after eponymous “missed connections” of a cast of stragglers, vagabonds, and cast-off trans women. The politics of the poetry throughout are a working-class evangelical trannyism, with shade reserved for those that would scorn solidarity for the sake of upward mobility i.e., girls on their snobby stealth or true transexual bullshit.

The first section holds stories of rebuffs and missed connections underscored by class or social anxiety, but transitions to a second interspersed with a chorus of all-caps stanzas laying out the voice of “AN OLD GENDER CRITICAL FRIEND”. Aube’s double ventriloquism satirizes the far-right conspiracy theorist while simultaneously proclaiming the warmth of T4T collectivism:

COME YE NEEDY AND BROKEN
GIRLS—BRAID TOGETHER YE
WEARY BODIES— BATHE IN

THE GIGGLING COVENANT—

Aube explores the part Western transsexuality plays in the imperial project. When a group that relies on solidarity for its survival finds state legitimization, what purpose could it serve? The poet reflects on the infamous but mythological “Lockheed girl”, on the CIA-backed PEN International giving Aube a literary award, and on the fact that western queer claiming of the Greek Galli opens Mount Ida for Canadian mining interests. Among this horror, the poet longs for pre-legitimization, to be declared a “freak unfit for labor” outside the tools of the Western project. Yet, the voice proselytizes this is the place we stand once again, amid an apocalyptic “HETEROGENOUS REJECTION” which leaves “PURSES CUT, OUR TEMPLES DESTROYED, OUR CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED”. But this is rarely a poetry collection settling into despair, and it is here, in this post-Revelations world, that bourgeois trans life rediscovers its fetishized “underground”, reapproaching the place where “LOVE WINS” is more than a bumper sticker.

However, Aube’s poetic voice is too compassionate to assert that a direct confrontation with fascism will be a net positive if it creates class love among trans women. The third section is, among other things, a guide on mogging the welfare office. In the different presentations Aube’s narrator has in the chapter, wearing a fur coat to the welfare office, getting stared at for the holes in her shoes by “the state itself”, or living off arts grants “before I even had a book out”, we see the poet leveraging what is meant to be a static class/caste system. Combined with For Herma, the longer ekphrastic poem making up the last section of the book, it becomes clear that, for the poet, love already overwhelmingly exists in trans life when it is separated from capitalist values. The poet works to reckon with “tranny wiping poopy ass—tranny attending the PTA meeting—tranny pushing the stroller” but is easily able to resolve to “find some boy in an alley and groom him to be my daughter”. For Herma makes connections to family in all its forms, it is the poet’s reckoning with growing into an elder through queer or conventional motherhood. A deep love orbits the vignettes and portraits of the book, for all the girls that she fails to connect with, for Nevada, casey, syb, and for the traps and dolls that populate the book’s pages. It becomes clear that uncoupled from institutional validation, bourgeois aspiration, and the nuclear family love is still intertwined with survival. However, it is a love that is subject to state indifference, if not violence, and generally deserves the downfall of the West to prosper.

It is an important book for anyone interested in what trans poetics can do. If the goal is to repudiate fishy girls that run away with boys, or the ones that tell you to fuck off in doctor’s offices, if it’s to support the spirit of grooming as a beautiful plot to increase the warmth of the trans project, then it succeeds. It’s a book I felt too bougie, too Statesian, and a little too young to fully get. Aube’s hilarious writing is a layered satire, using joy and irony to explore transness and class at multiple levels. If it stumbles anywhere, it’s that the written poetry can’t match the energy of Aube’s readings, existing between page and voice to demand gathering. It is a book inline with Bambara’s irresistible revolution, proselytizing love in the corners where the state can’t or won’t reach, a collection that dreams pretty, audacious, blasphemous dreams. Dreams that are summed up best in some of the final lines of the book:

“let no woman be without sister…

let rains bless the women

which have made themselves women

for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”

MISSED CONNECTIONS WITH TALL GIRLS

BY GWEN AUBE

AVAILABLE THROUGH LITTLE PUSS PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.

Book Review: SOFAR by Elizabeth Bradfield

March 23, 2026March 24, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
SOFAR BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sofar is Bradfield’s fifth collection of poetry and it demonstrates how her craft has come so far. In it she intertwines her love of nature, her understanding of ecology, and how the waves off Alaskan shorelines as well as her Cape Cod home have shaped her. The sea floor, its swells and dimples, peaks and trenches are, “proof/ that what’s hidden can still be sensed” (3).

She comments on her life, how her emotions list like a boat, swaying from one side to the other. Tipping, “At/ the edge of what felt right. And now, / here we are” – she learns to float, to lean into herself and her being, to selvage after a storm (5). To pick up the pieces that have been discarded like flotsam.

Bradfield notices seasonal changes and “the change” of her body. Both are unexpected (6). She compares this strangeness with the surging emotions of her adolescent self as compared to the retreat that she now is experiencing upon reaching five decades. Her poems give testimony to her coming out and her understanding as a queer woman in a misogynistic world. Each tide are transformative and, “as capable / of damage as any / ungiving thing” (6).

In “Marlinspike” she observes herself and the many lives she has had, as boat hand, as naturalist, as poet – “despite the fact [that she] was a girl” (27). Bradfield is compelled to go forward to keep moving, to follow her bait line so she, “can drift at last / from what holds us tight, what / binds us to such boring normalcy” (27). And clearly in stating this her life’s path is everything BUT a complacent normal.

Rather she embraces her voyageur-self. “Vagus means wandering. My days vaguer / and vaguer. Was it yesterday or last year…. Where did time go?” (46). Bradfield recognizes she is buoyed, lifted up and jettisoned. An estrogen-related propulsion, a uteral roam within a world she wishes to explore.

Her sights are added by, “Ded Reckoning” (48).

To know where you are and when

you’ll get where you’re going,

to deduce via reckoning, look to landmarks…

The known….

Which hold unknowns.

And through these renderings Bradfield has come to, “know / roughly where [she is]” (48) proving that life lessons are a constant moving equation.

In “Held/Treasured/Secret” Bradfield carries fragility within her. She knows life is fragile like a paper nautilus. She cups it in her hand, fingers curl shell-like. By doing this, she understands that what she holds dear is a responsibility. Picking it up, carrying it this far, requires a vigilance. Yet decerning when it must be set down is the ultimate lesson of letting go.Elizabeth Bradfield furthers these lessons as an educator. She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and is the Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Gunnison. Her work is heavily lauded. Interpretive Work won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry. Approaching Ice was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry was a winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award. She also is the Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided in which Ekphrastic Poetry is in conversation with artwork.

SOFAR

BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

AVAILABLE THROUGH PERSEA

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: What the River May Bring by Erin Robertson

February 15, 2026February 19, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

BOOK REVIEW:
WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA BY ERIN ROBERTSON

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Robertson gathers her words to advocate for the land and the confluence of both the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers. During her time in the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge she was embedded with biologists, collaborating with her craft through the Artist-In-Residence program “Voices of the Wilderness”.

Her poetry draws us in, witnesses to her experiences upon this land, and helps us envision her impressions of interior Alaska. It all begins, “when the float plane’s buzz fades” as she first settles into her sub-arctic residency. She meets the, “devoted swans, tender loons, [and] dancing cranes.” She follows moose tracks and moss lined trails. These relationships with the other-than-human creatures she encounters bring her company.

Glaciers, and clouds, and wild country greet her. Upon arrival in the Alaska Interior she leaves behind “creature comforts” and chooses a new freedom; trading suburbia, her partner and children, for a growing winter white and jagged mountains. It’s a new opening, a new era of possibility for her. “Wilderness Eve” seems to recollect a childlike wonder, a new version of awaiting gifts below a Christmas Tree:

waiting to see

what this wilderness holds

sleepless and sleepy

dreaming the space

and the silence (21).

Her time in Alaska and her observations while there is an unveiling where she comes to realize:

I knew I hit the lottery

but hadn’t quite known

how many riches there’d be (25).

Robertson marvels at nature’s natural wonders. For her, the Yukon River inspires just like Georgia O’Keefe’s infamous cloud-scapes or French Impressionists’ swirling lines. The river:

It bends and dapples and distorts…

Adding and subtracting shades (27).

Still, “You never know what / the river may bring… Everything comes down the river / if you watch long enough” (29). And yet, like the old adage, one can never step in the same river twice, its purge and rejuvenation brings new waters that can both cleanse and drown.

In her poetic meanderings, Robertson also takes on the persona of “Other Animals” like otter, caribou, peregrines, and Swainson’s Thrush. She watches their lives, their passage onto new territory, and their passing into the beyond. It’s a moment, a flicker, a stillness juxtaposed to the more rapid pace of her life back “home” in Colorado.

Fire, too is a constant, not only in the Alaskan Interior but throughout the Mountain West like Robertson’s home upon the Front Range. She notes:

after the fire

naked birches are

black and white tapers

all blown out (56).

Even after a “Severe Burn” she comments on the stark beauty:

The burn dazzles

despite a blackened past (57).

Seemingly, it is a reality that we all have to come to accept because out of destruction, the ashes can reinvent a newness, a regrowth, another possibility.

Robertson’s experience as an Artist-In-Residence is a testament to her “Vocation” (105). She embraces where this has taken her:

so many options open

when you go where you’re called

when you do what you love

when you toss every last bitter pill aside…

the earth is humming

with so many ways to play

what will you try next? (105).

This is the challenge that she sets before us. In her closing poem, “Accounting for Awe” she sets us straight, like one hiking boot in front of the other and asks:

What is the sum of these days of devotion?

An accounting of the endless ways to direct awe.

Anywhere you look there’s a one-inch bit of wonder…

To not let it all burn yet (107).

Here is our reason, in our act of love for nature, we will find compassion for ourselves.

Boulder County Poet Erin Robertson carries this love for nature and compassion forward. She is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes. Her work can be found at http://www.erinrobertson.org

WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA

BY ERIN ROBERTSON

AVAILABLE THROUGH RAW EARTH INK

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Brooklyn ave. Hymnal by Andy Riley

January 29, 2026January 30, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL BY ANDY RILEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

One of my main impressions of Andy has always been that he prints chapbooks like other poets print rejection slips. The first time I met him, at Wolverine Publick House in Fort Collins, he was carrying a bundle of self-printed books for the reading. Later, when he invited me over for homemade absinthe, he had more from the past year for me, from the “early years”. While I have long delighted in his exciting cacophonic phrasing and interesting imagery, what I have most admired from him was the nonstop DIY ethic which kept him writing and printing instead of waiting for approval.

Thus, it is with great pleasure I am reviewing Andy Riley’s debut 87-page serial poem Brooklyn ave. Hymnal. A book about moving to Seattle that is so rife with character observations and daily ennui, chronic pain and stunted sex drives, that truly it will leave you searching for an answer to the question, why would you move to Seattle?

Maybe it’s so Riley could “get out to see Red Pine” from Seattle or live on the street of the “high school where sir mix a lot went”, perhaps it’s so he could live a ten-minute walk from “three old growth trees”. Or maybe Riley moved to Seattle for the same reason anyone moves anywhere, to see something new and make sense of it, to turn around and produce a work of art grounded deeply in a place and time that hadn’t grown dull from repetition. What we receive is a poem facing down the alienation and loneliness of being literally ungrounded. We receive addresses to the dead and separated, to long distance friends, and the ever-aloof state of Colorado.

We are introduced to a poet navigating public space and the struggle for connection between strangers. I delighted in the man in camo pants trying to train surf, the howler under the tunnel on the light rail, and the couple who waves back at the narrator from under the bridge. The poem builds us a world of characters vying for attention, a series of exhibitionists mirroring the short, showy writing of the poetry itself.

Having read shorter renditions of Riley’s writing, the sometimes-eclectic chapbooks he described as his “EPs”, I was excited to see how his style would take to a book-length poem. The use of short sequences allows for concentrated bursts of energy sympathetic to his style, while the relationality allows for an opening up into moments of satori. One of my favorite sections in the poem is election day which both contains the rapid fire “bodily steam footfalls mirage/ like climbing a ladder” and the wide-open couplet “hate of the unknown is traditional/what of this hate of the known”. The book also shares my love of nouns you can grind your teeth on. Brooklyn ave. uses to full effect the regional “noggins”, the scientific yet punk “oxytocin boot black”, and a whole quatrain about “priapism”. More space allows Riley more exploration in word choice and sound, and it’s lovely to see him opt for a yummy and timely dialect.

The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

Riley’s adjective phrasing, which delights in novel syntax while also bending the grammar of sentences, help him create metaphors from bite sized lines of language. Lines like “no flower columbine”, “smack gridlock/migraine-iacal car-ships” or even the simple “ATM smoke shop” recreate adjectives from modifiers into carriers of essential natures for each of the nouns. The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

The only places of the book that confused me were moments of rhyme where the poet slips into a register more reminiscent of Shelly and Dickinson than Weiners or Spicer. Compared to the breakneck speed at which the poetry generally moves the section “the dawn nay dies/it flies.” or “ah/T-shaped wisteria” felt lethargic. However, the register never seems to be employed without irony or self-awareness and there are plenty of moments where rhyme or abstraction is seasoned to taste in the poem. There are also brilliant sections subverting form such as the telegram-like “when I speak” section. Overall, the spots that stick out and interrupt the flow of the poem are done with subtlety and creativity that brings the larger project in balance with itself.

We may never know why one moves to Seattle. However, we do know what one does with the experience. Riley gives us an istoria making sense of public space and loneliness in a large explorative sequence. Brooklyn ave. Hymnal is an assertive ennui filled poem making sense of the daily mess that we each navigate to produce art. The creativity and power of his style is on full force here while his craft remains a love letter to poets like John Weiners and Frank O’Hara that have long informed his work. It’s a delight to have such a strong showing from such a young western poet.

BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL

BY ANDY RILEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PILOT PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Mountain Bluebird Magazine.

Book Review: In the Soup by John Calderazzo

November 14, 2025February 15, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
IN THE SOUP BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Calderazzo is an accomplished Nature Writer and emeritus professor within the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. In The Soup is his latest poetry collection. Expressed in three sections Calderazzo relays how he feels, in the soup, in the thick of life-after-retirement on the “Big Day,” as he is “Gathering Voltage,” and one “Windy Day at the Dump.”

Calderazzo begins with his titular poem, “In the Soup” – a psychedelic homage to his inner-man found at the bottom of a can of turkey noodle soup. Calderazzo ponders the ingredients. What makes a man, what makes the contents of life, what inspires our mindfulness? The ensuing pages hope to reveal these answers.

PART I: BIG DAY

“Second Coming” wonders about our connection to fading stars and skies laden with floating feathers that cascade like snowfall (13). Calderazzo takes up his lament for extinct and endangered species. The Passenger pigeon, “that once blocked the sun” now, “bearing down on oblivion” (13). Will their eradication be the future for howling wolves and roaring grizzlies? The same goes for unshackled rivers, and sludge gray oceans. What will their fate be as climate change deepens? Some may deny these cause-and-consequence actions but, “even the wind-bitten crew of / the farthest-out whale boat… began to comprehend / what we had done” (14).

In “The Secret Life of Mountains: Front Range of the Rockies,” Calderazzo explicates his home-place in a meditation of tercets:

Deep in,
a lupine meadow
scored with trails

softens, mists over,
dousing spot-fires
of glacier lilies (33).

It is Spring. The Front Range is emerging into new life. The:

Pasque flowers
close their petals
like eyelids folding (33)

into meditation,
relieved from
the trespass (34)

This is Calderazzo’s means of telling his reader to “Go lite” and “Think Like a Mountain” as Aldo Leopold implores. Yet to also take on John Muir’s challenge, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” but do so with care in order to preserve their beauty, and to protect them from “boot scrape” and drone’s “beauty-lust” (34).

PART II: GATHERING VOLTAGE

“Way Stones” told in three numbered stanzas stories acts of subtle environmental activism. Beginning with his friend who knocks over cairns – the way stones marking paths on trails. His friend, who shakes his head in disgust and kicks the keystones which topple in disarray, demonstrating that he prefers, like Robert Frost, to take the road less travelled by. However, Calderazzo actually doesn’t mind them. The stone pyres, “suggest a tall dance / with gravity” marking where, “The trail / goes this way… [and] Death is that way” (43). Calderazzo notes that in other lands, cairns value prayer, offer blessing, and lead the way, “A last ride / through the stars,” which is entirely a different matter.

PART III: WINDY DAY AT THE DUMP

“Windy Day at the Dump” is a necro-pastoral poem which details environmental decline’s connection to humanity by listing the things discarded within a landfill. The poem documents Calderazzo’s personal letting-go of things and moments in his life that now decay within the dump’s depths. Medical records of a last parent to die, the draft of a youthful novel too embarrassing to recycle, love letters, a broken wall clock, a fizzling floor lamp. These objects mark his passing of time and are his mile markers of maturation. They are the cairns that lead the way to his end flight (68-69).

Calderazzo’s closing poem of his collection, “Passing through” is his quest through Wingo, Kentucky in search of his final resting place. However, “The casket shop has moved” and so he decides to, “pass on a casket, thank you.” Instead he chooses for his final destination to be a “high flower valley” surrounded by “peaks of snowlit fire.” He prefers for his ashes to “zephyr off while friends & family / lift their arms & sing” (87). And in this way those who would remember him, mimic his chosen poetic lineage as they burst into a Whitman-like mighty yawp.

Calderazzo’s collection, In The Soup (2025) by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio nods to his literary community and those who came before him. Through this gathering, he enters their company, and encourages others to tell their stories, communicate to the public about the importance of wilderness preservation, and find those ancient cairns while trekking among high mountains around the world.

IN THE SOUP

BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

AVAILABLE NOW!

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

November 12, 2025November 14, 2025 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

A BOOK REVIEW BY LIZA SPARKS

Compost Your Despair is Hayden Dansky’s love letter to Palestine, community organizers, to the “queer and weird and trans and disabled,” to the “dark and indigenous,” to “those of us who live in liminal spaces, or are kin to it,” to their past self, to anyone who feels empathy, anyone with a heartbeat.

The speaker in these poems writes with a fierce urgency that begs us to pay attention and asks us to move our bodies towards action.

In “Now That I Have a Voice,” the speaker defiantly asserts:

So let them
Burn me
with the rest of them
Burn me like they did
my ancestors before time and place
made me white
Burn me like the heathen they call
me for my love, desire, joy
Burn me with the rest because
now that I have a voice
I will never close
my mouth

These poems tumble down the page like spoken word and it does feel like Dansky is speaking just to us. They capture our attention. They invite us in to the prayer. This poetry is a communal act—a protest poetry spoken on the street.

They write in, “Until They Hear Us:”

What else can we do
besides scream from every corner

There is not a lot of excess in these poems; there is not flowery language, sentimentality, romanticization of struggle. They write with a conversational language that seeks to be understood. In “Climate” they write:

it really, really matters how we treat
each other

There is the examination of complexity and Dansky struggles with their own positionality of privilege and oppression. They write:

Peace is a process of
relationship to self
just as much as
relationship to other.

They write, in regards to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,

I will scream that this is not
my Judaism.

These poems demand a megaphone.

There is not the promise of peace or justice, but an impulse towards it. In “Until They Hear Us,” the speaker repeats, “I will try” and “I can try.” It is a vulnerable and humble sentiment. In times like these, what else is there to do but try? Trying is the first step towards action.

There is a force in these poems that is driven by the musicality of repetition, like the drumbeat of “Burn me” in the final stanza of “Now That I Have a Voice.” The speaker is not afraid to write in defiance of powers that will oppress them and the people they love, and they will say it again.

In the poem, “Climate” the speaker struggles with the power of words. What can words actually do in “a burning world.” They write, “How can I trust these words.” Yet, Dansky is driven to speak, to write, and to share. There is a deep desire to be heard. There is a fierce drive to express.

These poems bring to mind the Audre Lorde quote: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” With that same sentiment—Dansky must speak, must write, must share.

There’s a hunger in the speaker to understand the past and the present, to make sense of the trauma and their position and responsibility.

In “Nex” there is a firm defiance against the powers of hate:

Our bodies are resistance.
Our love is survival.
Our identities are our anchors,
always in transition.

“Nex” is addressed to Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student, youth, and precious soul who died as the result of anti-LGBQTIA+ policies. Dansky’s poems do not exist merely on the page, but are in deep conversation with the world around them.

And although the world around them is apocalyptic, there is hope in these poems. In “A Pandemic Note to the Creative Organizers,” the speaker writes:

You are not alone.
When you listen
you will remember
you never have been.

and in “A Pandemic Note to Self,” the speaker asserts:

Fall into the earth like it’s your home
It has always been.

Dansky’s impulse towards social justice is driven by a deep love for their fellow humans and for the world. In “Gaza” they write:

called by a deep love
of all humanity
of a belief
that nobody will be free
until we all are.

Compost Your Despair asks the reader to look at their own privilege and positionality—What drives you? What moves you? What do you love?

In “Pride,” Dansky reminds us that

Pride is not complacency

our lives are choices
and we are choosing to stay

Dansky’s poetry asks the reader: What are you choosing to do with your life? What are you choosing to do with your voice?

compost your despair

BY HAYDEN DANSKY

AVAILABLE NOW!

Liza Sparks (she/her) is a student in the 2025-2026 Poetry Collective at The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Liza follows her literary obsessions and collects books the way toddlers collect rocks and pinecones (beloved friends, sacred treasures). She is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee.

Book Review: Leaf Manifesto by Laurel Radzieski

October 20, 2025October 22, 2025 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

WILD NATURE, WILD WOMEN, A WILD ECOPOETICS:
LAUREL RADZIESKI’S LEAF MANIFESTO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Laurel Radzieski welds her pen to manifest an embodied poetics and advocacy for the wild. Wild nature. Wild Women. This collection is unique because she plays upon the page physically and artistically in form, as many of these poems take shape within female curves. The growth from within is her child, and in this way the verse thrives.

The collection follows a flora lifecycle. Each section reminds the reader of this beginning to end: Seed, Germination, Sprout, Seedling, Sapling, Tree, Flowering, and ultimately the tempestuous Fruit. Radzieski sets out upon her poetics journey stating, “One day I said aloud / I might like to be a tree” (11) and so she entices her reader to figure out what this may mean.

Throughout Leaf Manifesto Radzieski prompts us with questions: “What is a woman?” (15). And provides multiple choice answers, that only lead to more internalized questions. Through this feminist lens she taunts her reader to poke at their own preconceived perceptions. “Who gets to be a woman?” (16). “What use is a woman?” (17). “What’s it like to be a woman?” (21). Once again, she tests her reader through a True / False dichotomy. She dares us to shade in our answer fully with a #2 Lead Pencil.

In “How to Identify as a Tree” (38), Radzieski considers identity, origin, and belonging. “Consider what others would want to know about your bark patterns and inner rings.” Yet how a tree-body-person may appear doesn’t describe the within. Rather, “roots and family tree” nudge toward fuller truths. Especially as it oft happens, “If you are on unseeded land, know the history of the ground, how it got that way.” In this way, Radzieski alludes to those who came before us. She acknowledges that the land of her manifesto is of indigenous origins and birthright.

Throughout her collection, Radzieski offers up Ven Diagrams. In “Woman Tree” (69), she encloses what these two entities have in common: branches, limbs, mistakes, leaves, organs, roots, flesh, rings, family, pain, and flowers.” At least with this last word, she ends on hope.

Radzieski’s final poem in the collection, “Past Life Regression” (121) is a haiku:

Fallen walnut. Such
a long way down, but then
soft idea of grass.

This seasonal form representing a walnut tree’s lifespan, culminates in a fruit-nut’s finality. Not eaten, but allowed to cascade to an end-place. Tranquility lands in grass. Her bed, which begins again the tree’s lifecycle as the seed buries into soil knowing she will sprout once more.

Laurel Radzieski won the Halycon Award from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio for this collection. It is her second full collection of poetry. Other poems have found a home in Rust + Moth, The New Your Quarterly, and Atlas. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania and is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University.

LEAF MANIFESTO

BY LAUREL RADZIESKI

AVAILABLE NOW!

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: “Tributaries” by Aspen Everett

June 17, 2025 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Tributaries: A Beautiful Opportunity to Lose Our Way

BY BRICE MAIURRO

The first thing I heard in these poems was a heartbeat. In his opening poem “All Water Has Perfect Memory”, an allusion to a Toni Morrison line, the rhythm for me was that same rhythm at the start of Dark Side of the Moon. The book begins with the sense of a heartbeat growing louder and louder each moment. Everett’s first collection of poetry, Tributaries, continues to carry that heartbeat, and the sorrow between its beats, throughout this literary confluence of moments. Moments among a greater sense of we, the ecological we.

In his poetry, Everett’s time is the earth’s time. These poems are not contained to the one-hundred-ish years of a human life but zoomed out and slowed down. They connect us to a very clear something greater than our singular journey as a human being on this planet. It is hard to tell where he ends and the rest of Mother Earth begins. He reminds us of this truth for all of us. The poems are in conversation with one another, compounding the complex yet approachable mezclado of this book. The Osage dance with the Cottonwoods dancing with the stream below them, all tributaries feeding into the heart of this poet. Everett is spellcasting here; calling in the healing of the earth and sounding the cautionary canary for its woes.

In addition to spellcaster, Everett serves as field guide, death doula, and eternal student in these poems. These poems are “always hungry” to listen more. In these poems, our fellow living beings, the Great Horned Owl, Coyote, the Bison, are much more teacher than metaphor. There is an admirable equanimity in Everett’s work (and play). He explores the distance between here and home, where home is the same home we find in “eco-”. Everett, as are we, is water, in the words of Toni Morrison, “trying to get back to where it once was”.

“Poets, remember to listen”, says Everett in “Populus deltoides”, “to breathe in the vanilla of resin”. Everett has a knack for imagery (see lines like: “blue hunger”; “cloudless teeth”). He sets scenes magically, and then returns to the reader in a very direct and curious way, as if it were a conversation over a cup of shade grown coffee. I find the agrarian salt-of-the-earth wisdom of these poems reminiscent of Wendell Berry, a fellow poet captivated by the rural. Everett himself is from the “windtossed flatlands of southeast Kansas”, which he visits often in this collection. The poems are biography; confessional poetry of the landscapes and experiences that shaped him and his words.

The poem “Geraniums” in particular stood out to me, with visceral lines like “a blackbird flies backwards from tinted window”. In very intentional moments, Everett captures the core of surrealism: not to immerse the reader in a dream, but to attempt to liberate our colonized minds. Everett has a poetic conviction. When he says “it is better to speak in chrysanthemums”, he speaks from experience. He “plants the seeds in the mouths of everyone” he meets.

Shorter poems like “Pine Trees Covered in Snow” show us that Everett can be potent while being concise. These interludes to longer readings act as heartpunches, steering the collection along.

I often have a hard time with questions posed in poetry, finding them to be navel-gazing or overdramatic shenanigans, however I found myself enamoured of the questions Everett poses. Questions like “Do horses hide in my blonde waves?” where the goal seems not to send you into a philosophical spiral but to invite you into the great curiosity and wonder of this poet. Phrases like “amanita dreams” have me asking my own questions with that same curiosity – what is an amanita dream? What colors would I find there? What shamanic doors can be opened by being more curious about the world of our fungi friends?

In the words of our Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, “it hurts to become”; this collection pushes through the pain of the Anthropocene becoming something more alive, revealing limbs reaching for a better world. The poems in this collection are never so binary to choose to be a meditation on climate grief or to choose to elevate the natural world. They are a both/and, a queering, an honesty. There is a beautiful disobedience that Everett encourages us to join him for, where we too “ignore the no trespassing warnings”, “follow the river” and lose our way.

Purchase “Tributaries” by Aspen Everett

Brice Maiurro (he/they) is the Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press. Hailing from Lakewood, CO., he is the author of four collections of poetry, including Stupid Flowers and The Heart is an Undertaker Bee. His poetry has been published by South Florida Poetry Journal, Denverse, The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and Poets Reading the News. Website: www.maiurro.co

Book Review | Another Death Bed by Jasmine Maldonado Dillavou

June 2, 2023May 28, 2023 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou
A review by Chris Bullock

“a moment of pause with things that matter”
Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou

Another Death Bed (but this one is more comfortable, and the sheets just came out of the dryer)

During my time “studying” in China, I learned to see art not as much a hustle and grind, but rather as way of being. While taking an introductory Mandarin class, most classmates said they were pursuing business and politics, which only elicited a nod from the teacher, a middle-aged guy from Shanghai. When I said I enjoyed art, he gave a pause and a grin, then said an artist is blessed because an artist is never bored. From others there I got the same impression, a few said they wanted to be friends with an artist because an artist thinks differently than most, offering refreshing if unpredictable conversation. I had a local Chinese musician buddy who offered me drugs, guns, and often spoke his mind. When I said I was studying education, he interrupted me to say “Chris, you are not teacher. You a fucking artist.”

Artists, poets, and other rabble often share with us the process of discovering themselves and the world, and Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou, or Jasmine, offers that insight of a sitting in her brain as life unfolds. She rummages through the closet for an old stackable chair and offers us a seat in her mind, and she points out things which are as new to her as to you. You might expect to read a few pieces and set the book down, but time has suddenly passed and you have finished the book and wondering if there is something you missed. These are notes in the head of a creative, and as she puts it “a moment of pause with things that matter.”

I had first made her acquaintance upon returning from China to Colorado Springs, and attending a monthly discussion salon put on by Non Book Club Book Club. I had lived in the Springs and never found it repressive or backwards, rather I had come upon the same inspiration that has made it attractive to artists since the Broadmoor School. It was a bohemian life, piecing together rent how I could, playing concerts, going on tour, attending poetry readings, wandering art galleries and alley ways. In contrast to Denver, where quite a few were on hustle and grind mode and unwilling to open up for fear you might plagiarize and profit, in the Springs I found a tight knit and relaxed misfit milieu wherein just seeing differently made you different. Similar to my time in China. Fucking artists.

A few things had changed since my time away, however. All these creative students and faculty from UCCS were not only putting on events, but also inviting you out to see it. Living downtown, meeting up just to chat about what we are up to. Trying out unusual ideas, without even a business plan or a merchandise table. It is true what Denver diehards might say, the Springs could be boring, but it also encouraged you to do something to fill the boredom, even if as in her case, “riding a Lime Scooter the wrong way down Bijou Street with a big black hat on.”

This collection is the writer discovering her mind as it emerges, and sharing it with you. An invitation to sit in her head on an extra chair pulled from the storage closet, a place which is rough around the edges and unaccustomed to guests, but will make do if you show up. A peek into Tejon Street bars, rubbing elbows with the most normal people imaginable, as an artist with other oddballs making things happen in warehouses, restaurants, bookstores, parking lots, on the street, wherever there is an emptiness screaming to be borrowed and occupied temporarily. Art for art’s sake, after which the observer can’t point out any details but just feels like something invisible has changed.

One moment it is “the girl whose thighs don’t touch leaves the bathroom in front of me at the punk show” and the next is finding graffiti in the bar that says “I want to be dead with my dad”. One moment it is living your Boricua being and all the cultural weight and expectations, the next you are really just an artist and you are your “own greatest fear,” writing down your mind as you uncover it. Even after the tour is done, I am still in the chair on a dusty studio floor, and one of the legs of the chair is off-balance. But instead of complaining about it, I just rock a little, for art’s sake.

To grab a seat of your own, you can pick up the book in Colorado Springs at True North Art Gallery, Garfield Gallery, or Westside Stories. Or you can contact her on IG @jasminrunswithscissors or Jasminedillavou.com and if you are feeling extra boring, try Amazon.

About the Reviewer

Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver.