I have been a little delinquent in updating this site over the last few months as I worked on several projects. Some of those project were book reviews.
First up, is Selah Saterstrom‘s powerful and eloquent short book, Rancher. Containing one long essay about sexual assault, both in the author’s history and in history more broadly, the book explores how communities accept and even facilitate sexual assault and how individuals heal. The illustrations by H.C. Dunaway Smith feel both abstract and biological. Though the subject challenges readers to think about sometimes dark and traumatic experiences, I can’t recommend this one enough.
Read my review of Rancher here.
Rancher is available here from Burrow Press.
Next, I reviewed Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s novel A Cigarette Lit Backwards. A coming of age novel featuring a punk girl in the mid-Atlantic region and set in the punk scene of the early 2000s, this book is funny, a little wacky, and kind of a cautionary tale (though I’m not sure it’s intended to be). It captures some of the irony of punk culture, though the main character is kind of a poseur, which may ultimately make her a very authentic punk character.
Read my review of A Cigarette Lit Backwards here.
My most recent review on Full Stop is Christopher Brean Murray’s poetry collection, Black Observatory. Historical, place-heavy, and a little goth, the poems in this collection are accessible by feel new. Some of the images of out of way places made me want to go exploring and the few prose poems worked well as stories. I really enjoyed this collection and I can see why it was selected for the Jack Adam York prize.
Eric James Aldrich 
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