Tag Archive

Tomlinson’s fictional stories reveal hard truths of mountaintop removal mining and other subjects

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM

Fiction offers a close look at the truth in Jim Tomlinson’s group of short stories, Nothing Like An Ocean. When he delves into issues such as mountaintop removal coal mining, marriage difficulties and the loneliness of single people, he gets to reality—the heart of the subjects.
In lovely prose, Tomlinson reveals the interiority… »

Memorable characters, narrator’s insights immerse reader in House’s latest novel

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM

With a magic wand of words, Silas House casts his readers into the mind of a 10-year-old boy, Eli Book. This is the age when a child’s experiences begin to inform his life and his emotional makeup jells. Eli’s formative period is 1976, at the end of the Vietnam era, when all… »

Collection offers taste of Kentucky’s best poets

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM
Kentucky writers, natives and transplants produce work from contrasting locales, backgrounds and history. As George Ella Lyon explains, “a lot of forces intersect in Kentucky. East and west, north and south. We’ve been seen as Frontier and as Backwater, traditional and renegade. We’ve got mountains and rivers, flatlands and bluegrass; we’re landlocked… »

Poems in ‘Seed Across Snow’ lift mundane into profound

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM

A poem is an experience of high pleasure—an invitation into the mind of an artist, to evoke comparisons, conclusions, epiphanies. These promises are fulfilled by Kathleen Driskell’s latest poetry collection, Seed Across Snow.

Beginning with “Overture,” the poet lays out the principle themes and reflections. Driskell draws her reader close, takes him with… »

Memoir speaks on lessons of failure, solitude and uncertainty

BOOK REVIEW
By MARY POPHAM
Alone in a rowboat in the middle of an ocean, Tori Murden McClure is in solitary confinement—time to reflect on her life and what has brought her to this trial. Having already obtained an degree from Smith College, a master’s in divinity from Harvard University, a juris doctorate… »

Carefully crafted novel provides insight into early settlers’ lives and deaths

BOOK REVIEW
By MARY POPHAM
Nearly 30 years in the writing, Richard Taylor’s important historic work, Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War, is poetry. Meticulous research and love of his native Kentucky by its former poet laureate are obvious. Taylor’s description of a walk through nettles, trees that tolerate high water, the scratching of birds… »

BOOK REVIEW

Novel portrays one woman’s struggle to overcome lost youth
By MARY POPHAM

Early in her new novel, At the Breakers, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall mentions two classics, Persuasion and Middlemarch. These titles foreshadow that her subject will mainly delineate women’s roles and their relationships to others: mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, co-workers and employers. Examining from many… »