Reviews

After the Floods

      As dogs and crows discuss the wreckage of New Orleans, magic is the order (and disorder) of the day in Bruce Henricksen's After the Floods, a novel of hardship and loss, hope and recovery. Henricksen brings such fey charm to this spiritual comedy, with tender feeling for all of his searchers flying from despair toward hope and occasionally back again. Sometimes the reader feels she has wondered into Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota, sometimes John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans. It’s a short, thoroughly enjoyable flight of fancy, filled with sweet wisdom about the way we lean on—and crash into—one another.
Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

      After the Floods is a poignantly written novel about tragedy, recovery, personal growth and community.
Jeff Warner, Hibbing Daily Tribune

      Henricksen’s readers readily ride his magic raft all the way up the Mississippi from the Delta to the fictional town of Cold Beak, Minnesota . . . The resulting hybrid is more “Northern Exposure” than Mesabi Range, but in Henricksen’s world even stranger and more wonderful things are possible.
Lucy Vilankulu, Minnesota Literature

From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright

      Longtime Wright fans and newcomers alike will appreciate this collection of nearly fifty poems contributed by national luminaries such as W. S. Merwin, Stanley Plumly, and Galway Kinnell, as well as local lights . . .  From the Other World also contains a moving personal endnote by Robert Bly and an annotated list of suggested further readings.
Katrina Vandenberg, Minnesota Literature

      From the Other World “is a fine collection that echoes Wright’s own person, place, and voice. . . As the editors suggest in their introduction, ‘He showed us our damaged world and another, longed-for world as well. He taught us to see beauty without ignoring suffering, and in doing so he helped us to live.’ As they thank their mentor, we thank them for reminding us of what poetry can be.”
Larry Smith, Review Revue, Vol. 4, Issue 4 (2008)

Staying Blue

      Gibbons Ruark takes seriously the ancient and careful art of poetry, and he knows that the way you say something is a large part of what you say. Here is poetry that aspires to Brodsky's definition: poetry is what language hopes to become. This thirty page chapbook may be the best book of poetry, full-length or otherwise, published this year.--Fred Dings, World Literature Today.

I love the trim way the poems of Staying Blue move and the way Gibbons Ruark paces the whole gathering... There's a clean, lively language at work here...while those poems lodged in Irish landscapes, both physical and literary, shine with authenticity... Powered by such energies, Staying Blue stays satisfyingly alive from start to finish.--Eamon Grennan

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