Book Review: A Little Daylight Left by Sarah Kay

September 9, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
A LITTLE DAYLIGHT LEFT
BY SARAH KAY

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sarah Kay’s second collection A Little Daylight Left, written a decade after her debut No Matter the Wreckage (2015) tempts us with that liminal dimension between dusk and, “the moment when the streetlights come on.”

Told in three sections her verse dances, “with everyone [she’ll] love” – herself, her father, her brother, and her grandchildren yet to come. This is where she plays between remembrance, loneliness, and the world she creates through her poetry.

Kay’s poetry is world building. In “Ode to the Two Girls in the Outfield of the Tee Ball Game” (7-8), the narrative voice and her friend are more than teammates. They have abandoned the game at hand. Instead:

fingers interlaced or braiding blades of grass,
there is no left or right here. Just field.
Just butterflies & bees (7).

Unlike the uniformity of the greens, and the crowd, they are like dandelions – golden. For the girls, “the sky is laughing” until their shared-space shatters.

Soon
someone will call our names
someone will summon us back to earth
… remind us of the rules (8)

And it is from this memory-space she declares, “I want to be able to see where we once were” – innocent and upon the cusp of knowing.

“Raccoon” (9-10) also enlightens her reader of another innocence-lost point in time.

& for a moment, I am a sorceress.
For a moment everything is possible…
& the ‘cats’ disappear
& the trash is double-bagged…
& the aunties are trying to explain the difference
between a pet & a wild animal…

& later,
when I am old enough to know the animals you can keep
from the ones you cannot,
when I am old enough to know
a cat from raccoon,
a sorceress from a lonely girl,
magic from survival (10).

These are the revealing moments, our ‘aha’ moments between curiosity, knowing, and societal imposed self-censure.

“Ars Poetica” (13-14) claims Sarah Kay’s place on the page as a means of recovery from trauma, she and her family have survived 9/11. They were evacuated from their downtown NYC apartment upon that fateful day. However now that they are home, it is time for thirteen-year-old Kay to begin her bat mitzvah preparation – her emergence as a young Jewish woman. But rather than being guided by her Rabbi into this unknown, it is Kay who becomes the sounding board to her faith-leader.

she slides me
the first fountain pen
I have ever held
& tells me it is mine
… she asks how I plan to relate
… to everything that has happened

as though proximity might make it mine
instead she says
You know only Rabbis are allowed
to handle certain bodies
I went down because they said
they needed help … identifying but
there were barely any
bodies
the dust the ash (13).

It takes Kay over twenty years to write about her rabbi’s confession because in her own early writing she only knew, “how to write love letters & send them into space” (14).

So, it is from this safe space she admits that now, as an adult, she “can’t tell you want any of the [Hebrew] words mean.” Yet she knows that as she recites them with her father standing next to her, that those words conjure his father, who now is no longer. And it will conjure her father, “when he isn’t singing next to me any longer”. It is from, “this search of mercy” that she poetically finds the space where she learns to set these struggles down upon the page.

Part II leads Kay’s reader into adulthood, sexuality, and an understanding of how relationships can make us question who we once were, what we have become, and in what shape we will be in the future. “Beginning is a Season” (31) stops the reader within the moment before a pendulum swings.

I want to stand in the doorway in between
I understand &
I am understood…
knowing that to be undone by someone
supposes a past in which you were once done or at least doing
as opposed to being unloved which supposes
nothing at all (31).

Heartbreaks, numbness, and recovery introduce her reader to an emotional pain that, we as humans, can all relate.

“Allow Me Just This One” (52-53) tries to move beyond post-love.

sometimes a fragment still floats back…
from a long day of the world
treating me exactly the way I fear I deserve
& I am too tired to fight myself,
my heart unclenches enough to remember (52).

Kay confides, “I learned to write – looking for light, / running an eager hand across a moment for as long as it allows.”

She looks at this memory, as if in a rearview mirror, “sifting through the ruins of our time together / for what trace of beauty still shines through” (53). Despite the hollowness she feels, she knows she still is alive because of the pain she can express through her poetry.

Part III leans toward prose poetry and sets a stage that gives flesh to Kay’s multiracial background. “TSUBU” considers her maternal Japanese side of her family (67-69).

(Because their parents were their parents)
my mother & her siblings learned to eat
rice with chopsticks…

Tsubu, the Japanese word for a sole, lingering grain of rice, “is one of the only words [Sarah knows]” (67). It is this one, that clings to your side of your mouth, the side of your face. It makes others’ laugh. It makes you have humility.

(because [her] mother is [her] mother), and upon her hospice bed, she tells Sarah a story. Monks only need three grains of rice to survive their journey. The first is nourishment and survival. The second is for abundance and gratitude. The third is for sharing (68).

But then, near her end, Sarah’s mom explains, a fourth grain – a tsubu – is necessary. “The tsubu is necessary so we have humor at ourselves so we know we have no control but it is ok we know nothing it is what gives us curiosity & wonder & serendipity.”

(because her daughter is her daughter) Sarah knows her mom loves her, and continues to have her own humor despite her physical pain. Her mom teasingly calls her, “Sarah dippity” and reminds her to trust universe (69).

The final poem of Sarah Kay’s collection is, “Miles from Any Shoreline” (87-88). Along this shoreline of loneliness, the sole grain left clinging, she is greeted by other-than-human relatives. For example, a starfish left alone on the asphalt, most likely discarded by a seafaring fowl; and three hawks who glide and land upon her windowsill. Two take off and one stays behind to eye her through the pane of glass. These moments of inter-species contact dare her, “to pick up when the universe calls” (88), because there still is, A Little Daylight Left (2025).

Sarah Kay is a writer, slam poet-performer, and educator. She lives in New York City. She is of Japanese and Jewish American heritage. This cultural legacy empowers her poetry, her classroom, and the community she creates through her language.

One of her next public performances of her poetry will be at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan through their Contemporary Writers Series on September 17, 2026.

A LITTLE DAYLIGHT LEFT

BY SARAH KAY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

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: Come Back to the Dollar General, Harry Dean, Harry Dean! by Jason Ryberg

August 21, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
COME BACK TO THE DOLLAR GENERAL, HARRY DEAN, HARRY DEAN!
BY JASON RYBERG

A BOOK REVIEW BY SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS EDITOR CHRIS BULLOCK

In the middle of nowhere, the payphone suddenly rings. Who is on the other end of the line? With no information, it could be a scam call, it could be someone in trouble, it could be a butt dial, it could be a finger dial. If all the world is a stage, if we are living in an opera, it could be God, the director, calling with a change to the scene, or to remind us of our lines. It could be the outside world, pushing in on our carefully curated reality.

Faced with limitless choices, we shut down and rot away alone. Flooded with information, we yearn not to think, jealous of animals and children. With personal histories only an internet search away, there is always a reason not to trust and open up. I have specified that I would only like to interact with those who share my interests, politics and personality type, and in doing so, I shield myself from chance and serendipity, and live a thoroughly Zizekian simulation. For excitement, I arrange a travel itinerary to a developing country, and make sure to take a retouched picture of my legs on a clean beach. I don’t even have memories of my trip, because I was watching artificial videos the whole time. I only have a picture I took of my sandy legs, only because that is what you are expected to do.

However, life outside the small screen is infinite and chaotic. It can be boring, but boredom is the soil wherein the creative seed takes root. Ryberg’s world is the world, without customized searches or corporate algorithms. Moments which occur then vanish, leaving only words on a page. Time which cannot be replayed over and over again in your hand, but rather this is a movie which is trying to shake you awake, but you dig your headphones further into your skull. The payphone is ringing, the director, or God, is on the other end. Do you pick up the phone, or just let it ring?

Genre writing, or “fan fiction” and streaming series, may seem like art, but the characters are set and predictable, and fans will judge it on how well it sticks to formula. Poetry, on the other hand, confronts us with mystery and uncertainty. The first few poems start innocently enough, until we find ourselves addicted to ambiguity, and the curated environment fades in interest, compared to the cloud of unknowing.

Ryberg’s poetry is where we encounter spirits disguised as strangers, parking lots which set the scene for the third coming of Christ since the second coming was not promoted enough and turned out to be a dud. Like a blues musician, all you own can fit in a matchbox, so you can pack light and hit the highway at a moment’s notice, take a seat on a bench and the locals wonder if you are famous. Ryberg’s poetry is a demonstration of Whitmanian particle physics, wherein we exchange atoms with every human, even the ones we cannot control. Ryberg’s world is the Confucius scholar in rags, treating every person he meets as a teacher with something memorable to impart. The Taoist master who is both drunk and wise, the mystic who sees divinity in everyone.

Ryberg creates poetry which perfectly mirrors life as I have discovered it to be. Each line like each moment can be a surprise, and no moment is boring if you are open to inspiration. Even disappointment becomes impetus to write, instead of asking to see the manager. If the manager is God, or some omnipotent alien power, do you really want to escalate the ticket? What if you are the problem?

Someone is calling you back into the Dollar General, but your mind is distracted by a one minute video of artificial people, played on repeat. The payphone is ringing at the edge of the parking lot, but you are afraid to pick it up, not seeing the number or name of the caller. Ryberg’s poetry is about being open to the moment in all of its uncertainty and mystery, a reality which cannot be documented or livestreamed, but remembered and written down later.

Just like atoms, we exchange memories with poets, subverting corporate algorithms, private equity neighborhoods, and sanctimonious marketing strategies.

We pick up the phone and have a conversation with the writer of the opera. I ask you, who was on the other end? All you can do is shake your head, shrug, and write a poem before we hit the road.

COME BACK TO THE DOLLAR GENERAL, HARRY DEAN, HARRY DEAN!

BY JASON RYBERG

AVAILABLE THROUGH SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS

Chris Bullock, otherwise known as Tall City, has self published a few volumes of his work, and has been presenting his poetry at open mics and showcases for quite some time now, even reading for audiences with a rudimentary grasp of English. He has written and been published by South Broadway Press, has displayed art and curated exhibitions at The Lab on Santa Fe, has toured the country a few times with The Nicotine Fits, has sung his poetry inspired lyrics along his autoharp at venues and open mics, has spun original beats for freestyle rappers in Colorado and New Mexico, has studied in China on scholarship from community college, among other activities, and has recently decided to get a little more serious and diligent about something.

Book Review: Creekwater Mansions by Ian Hall

August 21, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
CREEKWATER MANSIONS
BY IAN HALL

A BOOK REVIEW BY HUGH BLANTON

Ian Hall’s debut collection of poetry, Creekwater Mansions, has a striking originality that betrays no pastiche to any of the Kentucky masters that came before him. He’s fulfilling a tradition rather than furthering it. The poems here are not organized so much as tumbled forth—we get the Civil War, his distaste for city life, a walk through an automobile junkyard—and the reader cannot predict, despite Hall’s preoccupations, what the next subject will be. He’s the polar opposite of poets of silence like Keats and Celan, his poems are filled with profusions such as a house disemboweled of its copper wire or Colonel James Garfield (the future President) defeating the Confederates in Eastern Kentucky in 1862. Hall plunges into image with meticulous abandon:

     Jumper cables like macabre spaghetti,

                  pistons, schismed manifolds: a Gettysburg

     of tinker & shrapnel to paw through. But this junkage,

                  this totaled zip code, does not trouble

     the squirrels, who are like clockwork

                  laying next season’s supper away in the dark

     escrow of tree holes, a clobbered sedan.

His eye turns toward each new observation with whimsy and excitement; he’s an unrhyming Frost with each poem as complete as a Wendell Berry novel.

Creekwater Mansions is a debut collection, but Hall has established himself as a poet of place, even while he takes us on infrequent sojourns out. Cultural depictions of Appalachia often only show the pitiably downtrodden and they miss the humor that Hall finds. His virtuosity is in the precision in which he states their cases, even when the case he’s making isn’t complimentary: “That place is rotten/ with southpaws & anemics.” He’s referring to Letcher County where a candidate he liked lost an election. He goes on: “I won’t beat a dead horse & bring up how tectonically// stupid they are.” But he still takes pride in where he’s from:

Our national flower: an auger bit.

     Our anthem? The occasional

     clangs from a rip-roaring game

     of horseshoes. & even though it violates

     the Establishment Clause, blacking out

     off Goldschlager & praying you barf

     up a truck payment is our bonded

     religion.

Hall’s obviously not entranced by his own designs, he would not make a good classical lyricist. He ingeniously indulges his free verse and in fact the only thing approaching the formal in this collection is a single quasi-sonnet that we wouldn’t even know was a sonnet except that “Sonnet” is in the title. Hall doesn’t fall for the trap of trying to impose form on unruly subjects.

There’s much tribute and elegy to coal miners in Creekwater Mansions. In “The Coalblacked Jacobins” a group of miners are preparing to strike and one of the miners addresses the mine owner: “I don’t aim to keep pickaxing/ years off my life so some Philadelphian’s daughter can get college/ learnt & trot around in jodhpurs. I want my due.” Hall writes of the children in Harlan County schools who gave up saying the Pledge of Allegiance back during the bloody coal mine strikes of the 1930s and instead sang the Pete Seeger song “Who’s Side Are You On?” (written by Florence Reece, a union leader’s wife). The miners themselves sang songs of protest during drunken nights of the strikes, “their baritones/ gruff with silicosis.”

Hall gives us his version of Aesop’s “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” in a scathing indictment of city life: “& best of all, you never had to deal with the sidewalks/ full of malnourished loons, each blubbering help me, my per-frontal/ cortex is on the fritz.” He also takes a shot at urban Gen Z’s propensity for depression and psychotherapy, saying country doctors “would only prescribe/ push-ups, aggressive doses/ of contact sport.” Hall describes city folk during his brief stay with them:

     At soft dark the alarms cluck

     hen-skittish & everyone has their own boutique

     neuroses. Shit, most people here are in mad love

     with their own prattle. They misknow

     the lowliest smudge on a spectacle lens

     for profundity—the sun going

     tweed behind clouds at twilight.

The “in mad” inversion and the “misknow” serve to raise the temperature of his blow torch’s flame.

While fellow Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren’s poems are vast, stately mansions in which you slowly visit room after elegantly furnished room, Hall’s are bare-wood, corrugated tin roof shacks, with occasional clapboard cottages thrown in. Warren rarely allowed himself to be entertaining, he was far too intent on being poetic and ranted on about the Civil War as though it had never ended. Hall is a poet of wit and cranky passions, he rarely reaches for abstractions. His few attempts at lyricism come off more like pot banging music: “Bugs suicide in citronella./ This is gnarly terroir, but all are battened// blithe to mattresses.” Hall speaks relentlessly in his own voice, or, since he’s a newer poet, what the reader is encouraged to construe as the voice of poet in rural informality. Such a voice is gratifying when it doesn’t take itself seriously.

There’s a subtle subversive element in Hall’s violations of decorum—here he takes a shot at the snobs over in Western Kentucky: “we hayseeds/ from too far east of the bluegrass being a hazard/ to property lines & public safety.” With most of his poems taking place in Eastern Kentucky, you can still make of his poetry a travelogue and Hall the overworked guide getting on to the next Civil War battlefield park, on to the next salvage yard, and on to the next county fair. “West Kentucky—shit—out there it’s so flat// you can watch your dog run away for a week.” Hall moves gracefully between levity and tragedy, a lot of his poems are elegiac for grandfathers, fathers, his own childhood. Rural poets have a tendency to pass themselves off as sages and backwoods naturalists who have learned the nutritional content of every berry and root, but there’s a complete lack of pretension in Hall. And while it’s always been fashionable to be a poet in exile, Hall firmly claims his Kentucky home. As a newer poet he’s disconcertingly shrewd and avoids the grandiloquent windbaggery of many of the southern gentlemen poets who came before him. And The younger Hall already knows something that the older Robert Penn Warren never learned: when to shut up.

Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Creekwater Mansions is his debut collection of poetry.

CREEKWATER MANSIONS

BY IAN HALL

AVAILABLE THROUGH EASTOVER PRESS

Hugh Blanton’s latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.

Book Review: Spirit in the Dark by Gary Copeland Lilley

August 5, 2026August 5, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
SPIRIT IN THE DARK
BY GARY COPELAND LILLEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Poet Gary Copeland Lilley has written several collections including Raven on Moaner’s Bench (Four Way Books, 2025), The Hog Killing (Blue Horse Press, 2018), The Bushman’s Medicine Show (Lost Horse Press, 2017) , Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008), Black Poem (Hollyridge Press, 2005), The Reprehensibles (Fractal Edge Press, 2004), and The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004).

Spirit in the Dark: Poems is his forthcoming chapbook that weaves his blues guitar rhythms, his North Carolina rearing, and his Pacific Northwest home. Gary has had a storied life, once serving in the US Navy Submarine Force he now battles memories with his pen. As a poet, his language is melody which he hopes resonates through his readers’ ears, and transforms into body swaying, and feet tapping. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his partner and fellow poet, Tess Gallagher. He is the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference and teaches as Poetry Faculty through Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Spirit in the Dark (2026) haunts it’s reader through a common arch, poems titled <<Spirit in the Dark #1-5>> which are in conversation with each other and dispersed throughout the collection.

“Spirit in the Dark #1” introduces Lilley’s reader to the lies told by the “mercy-spirit,” but the inescapable truth is that we all come to die (2). The only promise given by the “dark song” is that we all struggle to decipher what our walks in life will reveal. We all wish we had the ability to foretell, to sing and say the necessary things in the exact moment they would lend clarity. But, often those words only come in afterthought.

In “The Daze We Rolled Our Own Cigarettes” (3) Lilley speaks of the moments in life where there are glimpses of contented perfection. The vulnerability of a dog exposing her belly for scratches, the first cup of black coffee, and a good song rendered from a 12-string guitar. These are the things that ground us, these are the things that call us back from “the cross of two roads,” the one chosen, the one discarded.

“Spirit in the Dark #2” (7) narrates another tongue-tied moment when the poet recalls, “What I wish I’d said to everybody” but instead who’s words are elusive, just like the slipping away of a “low horizon.” What the poet knows is, “that marriage & / blood are stronger than death” where this eternal connection still lives on in “all of us / revolutionaries dead or alive, all us sinners, saints, siblings.” These ties bleed through Lilley’s creative community and transform into eulogized verse.

“Wolf Moon” is a stream-of-consciousness poem detailing a night-ride road trip (8). Sitting shot-gun is the devil, poking the poet with “argument-weary” thoughts in these “small hours of morning.” The darkness pulls the earth taunt as he drives toward, “the Great Dismal.” What saves him from this inner-dark-spiral is the gospel that blares from his radio and the “half-moon” light that catches his attention. Are these the “God-touched” moments we wait for in order to continue on that sweet desolate road? Or are we all due to end in the great swamp of our self-doubting minds?

“Spirit in the Dark #3” is a eulogy to Mama Daisy. This matriarch is remembered at every family gathering whether reunion, holiday, or wake – “there is an absence” without her presence. Memory “captures & re-captures” it is not the “remainders, the living” but rather the “missing part” that provides the “clear-eyed, sharper view” knowing we can do this life alone or together, but together is better (15).

Throughout this third section of Lilley’s collection he remembers particular folks in his life. His past selves reappear in ars poetica poems that peel back the layers of what he has learned (17). His brother-man, Daniel Anderson, who paratrooped into various unacknowledged wars in “anywhere-South-America” only to survive and not tell what had happened (18). And, “the old-man-janitor” who “doesn’t have any luck left” understands that sometimes, “what life offers you [is that] there’s nothing left but to swallow the spit” (19). These characters that re-visit Lilley through his poetry demonstrate the breadth of experiences and the spirits that has met.

“Spirit in the Dark #4” is the hope that exposes herself in jazz, gospel, and poetry. These revelations of clarity bend the poet, knee to sacred ground, in prayer with the understanding that, “in all [these] things [he is] saved.” Music and words are redemptive, and for these things, “in the end” he understands who he really is (26).

“Spirit in the Dark #5” recalls the underlayers of life for those who live upon the fine line of have-vs-have-not. We all have choices, some are fine, some are bad, some are worse. Lilley wonders upon the page as he observes “Mike,” who’s polemic choices have driven destructive decisions: Is it better to hustle so that a mother doesn’t have to sell her body for her children’s next meal? Is it better to bring a gun to a machete fight? Is it better to stand and take the swings, or run from the threats? Is it better to play nice or accept what comes your way, “when you ask for it” (29).

Gary Copeland Lilley’s final poem in the collection is “Miles, in a poem: Ars Poetica” (31). Lilley is a Miles Davis as opposed to a John Coltrane admirer. Like Miles he believes, “that notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you” do play. Those silent pauses, the liminality, “resonates into that void.” Davis as to horn-note, Lilley as to word-poem; “the greater amount of open space… [the] more deliberate.”

Spirit in the Dark conjures the wisdom of his matriarchal family, the secrets of Carolina swamps, the knowledge learned over a lifetime. His verse-melodies hum these stories from strumming guitar, wheel-worn roads, and scratches of pen.

SPIRIT IN THE DARK

BY GARY COPELAND LILLEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH FINISHING LINE PRESS

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

Book Review: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

June 12, 2026June 15, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 2 Comments

BOOK REVIEW:
IS IS ENOUGH
BY LAUREN CAMP

WHEN QUESTIONING OUR FATHERS:
A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Lauren Camp begins her collection with an epigraph by Anne Carson:

Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.

And this, Camp reminds herself throughout these pages as she grapples with her father, who years ago as a Jewish-Iraqi immigrant to the United States, has now been diagnosed with senile dementia.

Is Is Enough is Camp’s ninth book of poems. She has many accolades because of her craft having been Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park (2024), Poet Laureate of New Mexico for a three year term (2022-2025), and the winner of the Dorset Prize.

In her poem, “Sanctuary” Camp begins her recollections (5).

I collect another phrase
for safekeeping….
Now he learns the equation
for why I tell him this beginning.

Lauren seems to focus with her own “apple-sized eyes” as she exhales out her father’s “black of day” losses. He reals with his new life within the diaspora. It is supposed to be his sanctuary. Meanwhile, he remembers his origin, exiled from the village he called home and can’t quite seem to embrace this new homeland.

All the while Lauren’s father’s condition reveals itself. The living between two dimensions, no longer a place of origin verses a place of being, but now the dimension of reality verses the imagined past. “Prognosis” details this realization, not necessarily for her father, but for her family members (36-37).

My father reminds me
of my father….
For something
to do, we name…
Name hope
as a pleasantry….
We are not
doing nothing. We are planning
the task of letting go

Lauren and her family contend with their own memories of their father. The colossal figure he once was, juxtaposed to a man whose body is intact but whose mind falters. Past collides with the present and “what just happened” transcends “the future.”

This intermixing of time as to reality, perspective as to interpretation is reiterated in, “Given” (40).

Endlessly governed by the endless.
Tangled lines, private pause. Invaluable hours. This is all

Worth repeating: the rise and collapse. It is still enough for today,
and what will come next will come next.

The same threshing.

Once again “Given” could be taken in a variety of contexts. The tangled lines of immigration gateways, visas, green cards, passports stamped. The hours spent determining one’s value in order to be allowed to enter. The decisions will be made, and what comes next is out of one’s hands. This too can parallel her father’s dementia which is governed by an endless decline. His private pauses turn his ability to use words into silence. Memories are worth repeating so as to prolong them from being forgotten. Yet, those struggles of reminder tire his body, which has had enough for the day.

In, “So Much to Reduce” (48-49), Camp and her husband go through the contents of her father’s apartment. So many things gathered representing her father’s total lifespan, now to be condense into a few bags of junk, to be dispersed amongst the family, to be donated, to be thrown in the trash.

We’ve got three rooms and three days to garbage
or fondle the traces… [of her father’s]
panoramic past.
…. The messages he’d written
in margins….
with every vision he had of himself

These versions of her father are a mystery to Lauren and her family members. They only reveal themselves once he is not there to impose his presence upon them. Rather, they peel back like a layer of onion, a sting to the eyes.

As Lauren goes through his things, she knows:

I’ll never mention any
of this to my father, or I’ll lie, or half-lie,
or pretend

She does not want to make him more vulnerable than he already is within his own dementia. It would be a killing of the father before his body truly gives up.

All the while Lauren stands,

At his bedroom door between mercy
and endurance and wish again for this once
boisterous man: his conflict, his rampant
substantial regret.

How does one parent turn to child and grown child now becomes the adult in the room? These kinds of questions are unanswerable, they just come to conclusions of their own.

The last section of this collection proceeds through Lauren’s morning. Her father is in hospice, he has only days to live. She plans for funeral arrangements as he still breaths, dressed in a bright orange shirt. When it happens, she writes his obituary – given this job because she is the poet of the family. She knows she will miss the many details that built him into legend. In her grief, she seeks solace and goes to a garden, whether this is physical space or mental is not the matter (64). Rather she went there:

to hear the running
of a small bird…
that single gibbering prayer…
the light against pine bark.

Because in so doing, she witnesses “all the plurals,” and “listened to the ordinary” and came to overflowing emotion, knowing she was at least there in the testimony of her father’s life.

Is Is Enough seems to be a question: is being, is existing enough to make a mark upon the world and in our community’s reach? What will our legacy be? Is it unfolding for us or are we active participants within it? Perhaps as we are in the midst of it, we will never know. Only in the aftermath and other’s contemplation of it can those questions be rendered.

READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN CAMP

IS IS ENOUGH

BY LAUREN CAMP

AVAILABLE THROUGH TEXAS REVIEW PRESS

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

Book Review: Tough Poets Review 02

June 8, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02

A BOOK REVIEW BY ERIK MORTENSON

The best word I can come up with to describe Tough Poets Review is eclectic. Editors Kathleen Cullen and Rick Schober have done a remarkable job of offering readers a diverse range of work that truly holds something for everyone. As an academic, I am someone who will certainly read an introduction first. This issue lacks one. But perhaps that is for the best—rather than being given a direction or having the goals of the editors explained, the volume sort of left me on my own to encounter the material firsthand. It was a slightly disorientating experience, but ultimately a rewarding one, as it allowed each work to amend and “play off of” the ones that came before it. Meaning emerged not just in response to a particular work under consideration, but in the interstices between them, and themes, images, ideas, and sensations worked together to create a nexus of allusion that was just as productive in the main as it was in the particular.

The issue contains a variety of genres, with poetry and short prose pieces being dominant. But there are several interviews as well, along with provocative visual images and reproductions of fine art. But this list hides a number of subgenres that challenge assumption and open up new ways of thinking about the material. Some of the poems, for instance, use interesting typography or are ekphrastic responses to visual material. Further blurring boundary distinctions, the volume includes quite a few prose poems, as well as experimental prose work, including various essays that challenge the format. There are interviews, but some are in the form of dialogues or conversations. And this eclecticism extends to date of publication as well. While most of the work in the issue is contemporary, it also includes previously published material like excerpts from Sven Birkerts’s Daybook.

A glance through the Contributors section at the end of the volume is likewise revealing. Emerging artists (new to this reviewer at least) exist alongside mainstays like Lydia Lunch; more academic writers exist alongside poets, novelists, visual artists, and others. Some present themselves as established writers and artists, some are students, while others are people working in a variety of fields such as carpentry who are nevertheless creators. If that is not enough, the issue is surprisingly international in scope, with contributors from countries as diverse as China, Brazil, Iran, Ireland, Nigeria, the UK, and the US, among others. This diversity makes for an interesting mix, with cultural perspectives, “takes” and artistic approaches multiplying in a dizzying array.

If you like your reading varied and feel that juxtaposition is intriguing and productive, Tough Poets Review is a journal worth seeking out and keeping an eye on. I am convinced that these engaging issues will continue to provide much food for thought as disparate voices are collated into issues that are fresh, exciting, and above all thought-provoking. I will certainly be watching.

TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02

AVAILABLE THROUGH TOUGH POETS

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He earned a PhD from Wayne State University, taught as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany, and helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department at Koç University in Istanbul. His scholarship focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, with books on Beat writing, Cold War imagery, literary translation, and Allen Ginsberg. He is the author of the memoir Kick Out the Bottom: A Shared Account of a Detroit Mystic and has published translations in Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines.

Book Review: Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster by Tim Mayo

May 27, 2026May 30, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER
BY TIM MAYO

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

This is how I feel: I don’t turn to poetry when things are good. The refuge of poetry lies where the world has deserted, where I have failed to make way under the direction of prose. The first poems I fell in love with were “I Go Back to May 1937,” “History of a Tough Motherfucker,” “Vera, From My Childhood,”. These are poems that are close to you, that sound like things people might tell you over a cigarette, testaments to the fact that whether we choose life, life has chosen us. This is a similar poetics to Tim Mayo, who in his book Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster writes “the business of poetry is not po-biz”.

Mayo writes, to misuse his words, “from the very bottom/ of the old wishing well.” Set in hospital beds and rehab centers, from the bare-faced grief of losing a daughter to the “Anthropology of Old Age”, it is poetry that feels dragged from the ends of the earth to keep its reader and writer warm. Despite the poet’s remark in “The Sunshine” that “It’s not like I had one of those episodes,” (a near death experience), “and I suddenly feel warm and fuzzy,” the poetry feels decidedly Orphic, from an underworld where death is always resting nearby.

Mayo’s narrators write alongside a chorus of ghosts collected from a lifetime. The poet writes they are not “a soft touch poet with a heart of gold,” but I can’t help feeling the counselor from the book’s latter half bleeding through. In “The Why Answers”, a narrator, fading in and out of consciousness on “medicine mixing meant to keep me alive,” remarks, “suddenly I want to love in a way/I never knew.” The book is populated with elegies orbiting the realization of death, where the approaching end forces us to appreciate the mess of living. To me, there is a basic desire in these poems to provide fuel to the fire, to discover reasons to live.

The book is split into three sections concerned with the ends of consciousness. The first, a collection of elegies and portraits, imagines the “heightened state/slackened to a palatable point,” the place where the living mind can’t follow the dead. In the second, collections of direct addresses after a near death experience, prove that “memory is life.” The third takes place within the society of a psychiatric hospital, where the poet is Cassandra, trading with figures to “advise…how to thwart the tragedies and mishaps…already lived.” The poetry in this book is largely past-tense, trading on the preparation for a tragedy that has already struck.

Though, of course, this is a simplification. The book is interspersed with landscapes and portraits set apart from the rest, operating as introductions and footnotes. A heron insists on reality despite our attempts to resurrect the dead, a hurricane floods unseen, elms grow despite their apparent extinction, and an eagle rests outside the window of a complicated psychiatric hospital society. The interjected poems speak to nature’s seeming indifference, either to human despair or human fantasizing, or perhaps to gifts to which we are oblivious of in our groping for safety, a “bouquet of storm-fed jetsam/the jumbled world must have offered us.” All of them struggle to make sense of disaster and recomplicate the human griefs at the book’s center.

The book finds some formal variation. Poems like “A Game of Cards,” where a character conceit emitted from wisdom and memory becomes “a higher force from a not so ancient past,” then secretes back into an off-kilter reality, feels playfully loose and winding. Other poems, such as “Self-Portrait with Trache,” with its “Grief is a black parrot in my throat,” find itself downstream from Dickinson in a more pruned lineage. It’s hard to notice at first the way the collection is sculpted, with memories seeming to wind in an out of their own accord, but Muscle Memories gives itself over to second and third readings, where the relationship to death throughout the book is repeatedly complicated, welcomed, mused about, and feared.

Modern poetry seems obsessed with space, with stanzas blown to pieces, erased and abstracted, or left to secrete on the page. Entering Muscle Memories I was nearly overwhelmed by the welcoming received from the writing. It’s a collection, again, not interested in “po-biz”, that I feel is all business. The collection has no time to waste between the reader and the portraits of loved ones in the book, the proximity to death in the collection requires immediacy, making sense of days when “you just lived./Each day must have been the same.” It is a book, in some ways of twilights, and any reader interested in survival after survival, in “Muscle Memories of Disaster”, will find refuge here.

MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER

BY TIM MAYO

AVAILABLE THROUGH BAINBRIDGE ISLAND 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: 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

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

Book Review: missed connections with tall girls by Gwen Aube

April 6, 2026May 27, 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

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