REVIEWS
Slices of Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic with Jenny Carey and Gianna Russo’s All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic
by Jay Aja
Saw Palm contributor Gianna Russo offers a quiet snapshot of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with her new poetry collection, All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic published in 2022.
Read the entire review.
by Jay Aja
Saw Palm contributor Gianna Russo offers a quiet snapshot of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with her new poetry collection, All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic published in 2022.
Read the entire review.
David Kirby's Help Me, Information
by Samantha Chianese
David Kirby’s Help Me, Information is a book of poems that fits into the tradition of American lyricism and odes while also bringing a fresh, contemporary voice that makes the book difficult to put down.
Read the entire review.
by Samantha Chianese
David Kirby’s Help Me, Information is a book of poems that fits into the tradition of American lyricism and odes while also bringing a fresh, contemporary voice that makes the book difficult to put down.
Read the entire review.
Juli Delgado Lopera's Fiebre Tropical
by Emily Dovovan
Fiebre Tropical is about a 15-year-old girl who gets yanked from Colombia and everything she knows to move to Miami. The rest of her family gets swept up in an Evangelical church. Our narrator Francisca is too punk rock for the Jesus craze – until she catches feelings for the pastor’s daughter. It’s a debut novel by a trans writer, Juli Delgado Lopera, published by an indie press.
Read the entire review.
by Emily Dovovan
Fiebre Tropical is about a 15-year-old girl who gets yanked from Colombia and everything she knows to move to Miami. The rest of her family gets swept up in an Evangelical church. Our narrator Francisca is too punk rock for the Jesus craze – until she catches feelings for the pastor’s daughter. It’s a debut novel by a trans writer, Juli Delgado Lopera, published by an indie press.
Read the entire review.
Andrew Furman's Goldens Are Here
by Ashleigh Ray
In his novel, Goldens Are Here, Andrew Furman takes his readers on a journey backwards through time to the year 1961 with all its glories and pitfalls. The highlight of this novel is its refreshing and nuanced depiction of Florida in the 1960s from the point of view of a Jewish-American family, the Goldens. Throughout the story, we follow the Goldens after they move south to tend to an orange grove in Florida. With their sickly son and young daughter in tow, Isaac and Melody Golden struggle to find their place in this Southern society. The challenge only becomes greater as they find themselves the target of vandalism when racial slurs are cut into the bark of their orange trees. Read the entire review.
by Ashleigh Ray
In his novel, Goldens Are Here, Andrew Furman takes his readers on a journey backwards through time to the year 1961 with all its glories and pitfalls. The highlight of this novel is its refreshing and nuanced depiction of Florida in the 1960s from the point of view of a Jewish-American family, the Goldens. Throughout the story, we follow the Goldens after they move south to tend to an orange grove in Florida. With their sickly son and young daughter in tow, Isaac and Melody Golden struggle to find their place in this Southern society. The challenge only becomes greater as they find themselves the target of vandalism when racial slurs are cut into the bark of their orange trees. Read the entire review.
Vanessa Blakeslee's Perfect Conditions
by Macey Sidlasky
Traveling has never been easier! Or cheaper! Just recently, Vanessa Blakeslee’s short story collection Perfect Conditions was published, and each piece is unafraid to grab you by the hand and drag you into its world. From dystopian societies to a water company ruining a couple’s honeymoon in Tahiti and the arrival of Jesus on Ecuadorian beaches, the best thing about this collection is not the vastness of the points of view it practices or its complex characters and their dramas, but the vastness of the globe it tackles. Read the entire review.
by Macey Sidlasky
Traveling has never been easier! Or cheaper! Just recently, Vanessa Blakeslee’s short story collection Perfect Conditions was published, and each piece is unafraid to grab you by the hand and drag you into its world. From dystopian societies to a water company ruining a couple’s honeymoon in Tahiti and the arrival of Jesus on Ecuadorian beaches, the best thing about this collection is not the vastness of the points of view it practices or its complex characters and their dramas, but the vastness of the globe it tackles. Read the entire review.
Nathan Holic's Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City
by Alexis White
“This is you, and you are it. They call you ‘Orlando.’” Focus on place is one of the central traits of Nathan Holic's Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City. This novel takes readers on a walk through Orlando, Florida alongside the main character, Marc, as he struggles with his depression, anger issues, and past. The story revolves around Marc’s failing business and relationships. Although he was once a popular man with nothing but opportunity in his future, post-college life has left Marc pessimistic and angry at the world.
Read the entire review.
by Alexis White
“This is you, and you are it. They call you ‘Orlando.’” Focus on place is one of the central traits of Nathan Holic's Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City. This novel takes readers on a walk through Orlando, Florida alongside the main character, Marc, as he struggles with his depression, anger issues, and past. The story revolves around Marc’s failing business and relationships. Although he was once a popular man with nothing but opportunity in his future, post-college life has left Marc pessimistic and angry at the world.
Read the entire review.
Devin Murphy's Boat Runner
by Erika Staiger
Saw Palm contributor Devin Murphy’s chilling debut novel tells the story of Jacob Koopman, a Dutch boy coming-of- age in Nazi-occupied Europe. Inspired by Murphy’s own family history, Boat Runner follows Jacob as he transforms from a teenager caught up in the seductive ideology of Hitler Youth to a young man searching for a purpose in a war-torn world. Fueled by anger and grief, Jacob joins the German Navy where he is forced to confront the true darkness inside the Third Reich and himself. Boat Runner asks big, complicated questions like to what extent are we responsible for actions taken under duress? Is it possible to be a good person in a world ravaged by war? And how do we move on from tragedy? Read the entire review.
by Erika Staiger
Saw Palm contributor Devin Murphy’s chilling debut novel tells the story of Jacob Koopman, a Dutch boy coming-of- age in Nazi-occupied Europe. Inspired by Murphy’s own family history, Boat Runner follows Jacob as he transforms from a teenager caught up in the seductive ideology of Hitler Youth to a young man searching for a purpose in a war-torn world. Fueled by anger and grief, Jacob joins the German Navy where he is forced to confront the true darkness inside the Third Reich and himself. Boat Runner asks big, complicated questions like to what extent are we responsible for actions taken under duress? Is it possible to be a good person in a world ravaged by war? And how do we move on from tragedy? Read the entire review.
Craig Pittman’s Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country
By Philip Booth
Truth be told, if the subtitle of Craig Pittman’s entertaining, eminently well-researched, occasionally freaky and often laugh-out- loud funny book were a thesis, it’s one that the author only partly proves. Should we call it a half truth, like the come-ons issued by developers during the Florida land boom of the 1920s who offered sun-baked acreage on the cheap, failing to mention that the actual lots were located in alligator-packed, mosquito-infested swampland? Read the entire review.
By Philip Booth
Truth be told, if the subtitle of Craig Pittman’s entertaining, eminently well-researched, occasionally freaky and often laugh-out- loud funny book were a thesis, it’s one that the author only partly proves. Should we call it a half truth, like the come-ons issued by developers during the Florida land boom of the 1920s who offered sun-baked acreage on the cheap, failing to mention that the actual lots were located in alligator-packed, mosquito-infested swampland? Read the entire review.
Alissa Nutting's Tampa
by Dennis Mont'Ros
When avant-garde filmmaker Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Spring Breakers) recently announced his next film project, ears perked up. Korine is adapting Alissa Nutting’s salacious 2013 work, Tampa: A Novel. Nutting’s 2011 short story collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, featured authentic, complex heroines navigating existence everywhere from deep space to cannibal’s cauldrons. The collection’s sparkling language and deftly-crafted themes garnered the Sixth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. At the center of Nutting’s Tampa is the criminally insane middle school teacher, Celeste Price. Celeste is a buxom, mid-20s blonde, married to a handsome and naïve policeman. Celeste’s exploits her husband’s simplicity to pursue sex with her male students. She begins to sneak sleeping pills into her husband’s regimen so she can chase teen boys in her Corvette. Read the entire review.
by Dennis Mont'Ros
When avant-garde filmmaker Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Spring Breakers) recently announced his next film project, ears perked up. Korine is adapting Alissa Nutting’s salacious 2013 work, Tampa: A Novel. Nutting’s 2011 short story collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, featured authentic, complex heroines navigating existence everywhere from deep space to cannibal’s cauldrons. The collection’s sparkling language and deftly-crafted themes garnered the Sixth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. At the center of Nutting’s Tampa is the criminally insane middle school teacher, Celeste Price. Celeste is a buxom, mid-20s blonde, married to a handsome and naïve policeman. Celeste’s exploits her husband’s simplicity to pursue sex with her male students. She begins to sneak sleeping pills into her husband’s regimen so she can chase teen boys in her Corvette. Read the entire review.
Paul David Adkins' La Dona la Llorona Joins the Worldly and Otherworldly
by Jubalee Penuliar
Could you love a ghost that drowns little children? After reading La Doña la Llorona, you may just surprise yourself. Perhaps love is too strong of a word, but the ghost woman, la Llorona, detailed in this series of persona poems, will enchant readers into an eerie empathy for her vulnerabilities and desires, and even her vicious faults. In a sequence of portrait poems both by observers and by la Llorona herself, the reader sees the ghost as multi-faceted, at once violent and unrefined—“not a girl/ to bring home to your mother”—but also surprisingly self-conscious and reflective. La Llorona, like many, is a “misunderstood [woman],” subject to the scrutinizing gaze of others. About this, she says, “Even a ghost gets tired/ of stares.” Read the entire review.
by Jubalee Penuliar
Could you love a ghost that drowns little children? After reading La Doña la Llorona, you may just surprise yourself. Perhaps love is too strong of a word, but the ghost woman, la Llorona, detailed in this series of persona poems, will enchant readers into an eerie empathy for her vulnerabilities and desires, and even her vicious faults. In a sequence of portrait poems both by observers and by la Llorona herself, the reader sees the ghost as multi-faceted, at once violent and unrefined—“not a girl/ to bring home to your mother”—but also surprisingly self-conscious and reflective. La Llorona, like many, is a “misunderstood [woman],” subject to the scrutinizing gaze of others. About this, she says, “Even a ghost gets tired/ of stares.” Read the entire review.
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Douglas Alderson’s A New Guide to Old Florida Attractions: From Mermaids to Singing Towers Delivers Equal Parts Weird Florida History and Tourist Trap Nostalgia
by Alexander Cendrowski
A man named “Alligator Joe” holds an alligator’s jaw shut with his chin. Snorkelers are encouraged to partake in underwater archery. A reflective, glaring, aluminum-plated castle is erected in the swamplands. Strange how Floridian reality so often sounds like non-Floridian fantasy. Douglas Alderson’s A New Guide is a love letter in the form of a tourism pamphlet, amplified to book length and filled with 20th century attraction history. Alderson addresses the letter to Florida itself; to a pre-Disney, naturalist approach to “edutainment”; to a trip he took in 1966, packing into an old Rambler station wagon and heading down to the Sunshine State from Illinois. In this framework Alderson situates himself perfectly to examine and detail the peculiar tourist machinations of the country’s oddest state, tracing the lineage of early European tourists (plus or minus a fair shake of Native American abuse) to Ross Allen’s 153 mile “Survival Safari” to Weeki Wachee Springs’ live mermaid shows. His path is often winding, and at times the history is interrupted by patches of self-reflection—or was it the other way around? Read the entire review.
by Alexander Cendrowski
A man named “Alligator Joe” holds an alligator’s jaw shut with his chin. Snorkelers are encouraged to partake in underwater archery. A reflective, glaring, aluminum-plated castle is erected in the swamplands. Strange how Floridian reality so often sounds like non-Floridian fantasy. Douglas Alderson’s A New Guide is a love letter in the form of a tourism pamphlet, amplified to book length and filled with 20th century attraction history. Alderson addresses the letter to Florida itself; to a pre-Disney, naturalist approach to “edutainment”; to a trip he took in 1966, packing into an old Rambler station wagon and heading down to the Sunshine State from Illinois. In this framework Alderson situates himself perfectly to examine and detail the peculiar tourist machinations of the country’s oddest state, tracing the lineage of early European tourists (plus or minus a fair shake of Native American abuse) to Ross Allen’s 153 mile “Survival Safari” to Weeki Wachee Springs’ live mermaid shows. His path is often winding, and at times the history is interrupted by patches of self-reflection—or was it the other way around? Read the entire review.
Reconsidering Place and Identity: Mia Leonin's Chance Born
by Chelsea Dingman
“I am the one-eyed wolf staring from your bluffs, the quarry in your limestone, I am the chance born,” the speaker of Mia Leonin’s forthcoming collection Chance Born (Anhinga Press April 2016) boldly states as a refusal to be defined by place or birth, by lineage or ancestry. This defiance is explored throughout Leonin’s collection as she explores what it is exist between cultures, as well as how the places we inhabit inform who we become, how we speak, and how we become extensions of experience. Her poems are a comment on motherhood and childhood, on being a daughter to a mother and an absent father, what it is to be a citizen of this country, and on death and what must be endured in times of war and strife. In “Refugee,” Leonin’s speaker states, “Daughter, your mother’s prayer would sharpen/and shred your opaque sack of sleep./She would chew you into her cow-belly vault, break you/into one of the earth’s invisible compounds with her rumen/if she could live to see what you will survive.” Using strong narratives, Leonin constructs a world that is torn, akin to the way a mother is torn by watching her children grow into themselves in this same world. Read the entire review.
by Chelsea Dingman
“I am the one-eyed wolf staring from your bluffs, the quarry in your limestone, I am the chance born,” the speaker of Mia Leonin’s forthcoming collection Chance Born (Anhinga Press April 2016) boldly states as a refusal to be defined by place or birth, by lineage or ancestry. This defiance is explored throughout Leonin’s collection as she explores what it is exist between cultures, as well as how the places we inhabit inform who we become, how we speak, and how we become extensions of experience. Her poems are a comment on motherhood and childhood, on being a daughter to a mother and an absent father, what it is to be a citizen of this country, and on death and what must be endured in times of war and strife. In “Refugee,” Leonin’s speaker states, “Daughter, your mother’s prayer would sharpen/and shred your opaque sack of sleep./She would chew you into her cow-belly vault, break you/into one of the earth’s invisible compounds with her rumen/if she could live to see what you will survive.” Using strong narratives, Leonin constructs a world that is torn, akin to the way a mother is torn by watching her children grow into themselves in this same world. Read the entire review.
Katie Cortese's Girl Power Masters the Flash Fiction Form
by Colleen Kolba
An embarrassed girl disappears into a black hole at a high school dance; an orange attacks humans; a drug promises treatment for “involuntary celibacy.” This is just a tiny sampling of the captivating short short’s that make up Katie Cortese’s new collection, Girl Power ((ELJ Editions, 154 pp, $20.99, September 2015). Divided into three parts “Maidenhood,” “Motherhood,” and “Matronhood”, Cortese’s collection chronicles the diverse experiences of women. The headings of the three parts eschew expectations for what these stages in a woman’s life can mean. In “Maindenhood,” there’s a strong thematic thread of death, disappearance, and absence, defining “coming-of-age” as something that can happen at any time, as well as happen more than once in a person’s life. Similarly, “Matronhood” shows the way new life can be found as a woman ages. She dips in and out of realist and surrealist writing, and each story captures one brief moment of lasting impact. All of the short-shorts in Cortese’s collection are told from the point of view of women, inviting voices that are often ignored or discounted to tell their stories. Read the entire review.
by Colleen Kolba
An embarrassed girl disappears into a black hole at a high school dance; an orange attacks humans; a drug promises treatment for “involuntary celibacy.” This is just a tiny sampling of the captivating short short’s that make up Katie Cortese’s new collection, Girl Power ((ELJ Editions, 154 pp, $20.99, September 2015). Divided into three parts “Maidenhood,” “Motherhood,” and “Matronhood”, Cortese’s collection chronicles the diverse experiences of women. The headings of the three parts eschew expectations for what these stages in a woman’s life can mean. In “Maindenhood,” there’s a strong thematic thread of death, disappearance, and absence, defining “coming-of-age” as something that can happen at any time, as well as happen more than once in a person’s life. Similarly, “Matronhood” shows the way new life can be found as a woman ages. She dips in and out of realist and surrealist writing, and each story captures one brief moment of lasting impact. All of the short-shorts in Cortese’s collection are told from the point of view of women, inviting voices that are often ignored or discounted to tell their stories. Read the entire review.
The Island Kingdom: A Homage to Homeland
by Sarah Escue
Cuban-American writer Pablo Medina is the author eight poetry collections, four novels, three books in translations, and a memoir. In his eighth collection of poetry The Island Kingdom (Hanging Loose Press, 80 pp,, $18 May 2015), Medina masterfully creates evocative imagery through lyric and narrative language, locating his poems in his native land of Cuba, America, and a Biblically inspired landscape. I admire how Medina surrenders to his poems’ wild urges, concedes to his restless imagination, and embraces his phantoms: his memories of childhood in Cuba, Walt Whitman, Matsuo Basho, Habana, Vallejo, his father, and more. Medina’s poetry invites the reader to enter, regardless of education, age, or ethnicity. The Island Kingdom pays homage to Medina’s homeland and his experience as a Cuban-American poet. Read the entire review.
by Sarah Escue
Cuban-American writer Pablo Medina is the author eight poetry collections, four novels, three books in translations, and a memoir. In his eighth collection of poetry The Island Kingdom (Hanging Loose Press, 80 pp,, $18 May 2015), Medina masterfully creates evocative imagery through lyric and narrative language, locating his poems in his native land of Cuba, America, and a Biblically inspired landscape. I admire how Medina surrenders to his poems’ wild urges, concedes to his restless imagination, and embraces his phantoms: his memories of childhood in Cuba, Walt Whitman, Matsuo Basho, Habana, Vallejo, his father, and more. Medina’s poetry invites the reader to enter, regardless of education, age, or ethnicity. The Island Kingdom pays homage to Medina’s homeland and his experience as a Cuban-American poet. Read the entire review.
M.J. Fievre’s A Sky the Color of Chaos Transports Readers on a Stirring Coming of Age Journey in Haiti
by Carmella De Los Angeles Guiol
As a child, M.J. Fievre witnessed terror on the streets of Port-au-Prince during a time when Haiti was enduring multiple military coups, an embargo, and a United Nations occupation. M.J.’s home life was not any easier, living with a domineering father who ran his household of women with a firm and fiery hand. With each passing year, M.J. grew more and more determined to leave this turbulent life behind. Knowing her studies would be the ticket out, she applied herself to her schoolwork, delving into the worlds of writing and medicine. Readers will cry with laughter and shudder in fear as they walk beside this young woman maneuvering the intricacies of being a friend, lover, sister, and daughter, all the while learning how to love her country, her family, and herself. Read the entire review.
by Carmella De Los Angeles Guiol
As a child, M.J. Fievre witnessed terror on the streets of Port-au-Prince during a time when Haiti was enduring multiple military coups, an embargo, and a United Nations occupation. M.J.’s home life was not any easier, living with a domineering father who ran his household of women with a firm and fiery hand. With each passing year, M.J. grew more and more determined to leave this turbulent life behind. Knowing her studies would be the ticket out, she applied herself to her schoolwork, delving into the worlds of writing and medicine. Readers will cry with laughter and shudder in fear as they walk beside this young woman maneuvering the intricacies of being a friend, lover, sister, and daughter, all the while learning how to love her country, her family, and herself. Read the entire review.
15 Views of Orlando Delivers Un-Disneyfied Orlando in Mouse-Sized Bites
by Darrell Nicholson
The aim of the short story collection 15 Views of Orlando (Burrow Press, 176 pp., $15, January 2012) appears deceptively simple: fifteen talented fiction writers set out to paint a literary portrait of the “other” Orlando, the raw un-Disneyfied reality that exists beyond the wall that Walt built. But exploring any swath of urban sprawl through fiction, particularly one as schizophrenic as Orlando-outside-the-turnstiles, requires some sleight of hand. In a realm where the special taxing district called the Reedy Creek Improvement District can (poof!) become the Magic Kingdom, nothing is quite what it seems. Read the entire review.
by Darrell Nicholson
The aim of the short story collection 15 Views of Orlando (Burrow Press, 176 pp., $15, January 2012) appears deceptively simple: fifteen talented fiction writers set out to paint a literary portrait of the “other” Orlando, the raw un-Disneyfied reality that exists beyond the wall that Walt built. But exploring any swath of urban sprawl through fiction, particularly one as schizophrenic as Orlando-outside-the-turnstiles, requires some sleight of hand. In a realm where the special taxing district called the Reedy Creek Improvement District can (poof!) become the Magic Kingdom, nothing is quite what it seems. Read the entire review.
Lip Service: True Stories Out Loud, a Miami-based Literary Event
by Adriana Páramo
In a swanky spot on Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, sits Books & Books, an independent bookstore that every quarter, for the last four years, has hosted a one of a kind literary event: Lip Service, True Stories Out Loud. It is exactly what its organizers say it is: a group of writers, “throwing themselves into the wind.” Read the entire review.
by Adriana Páramo
In a swanky spot on Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, sits Books & Books, an independent bookstore that every quarter, for the last four years, has hosted a one of a kind literary event: Lip Service, True Stories Out Loud. It is exactly what its organizers say it is: a group of writers, “throwing themselves into the wind.” Read the entire review.
Want to Write a Review?
We are interested in reviews of any Florida-related subject: author, book, film, tourist attraction, CD, website, beach, park, toll roads, snack stands, local landmarks—anything! And unlike submissions of creative work, current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit reviews. Size limit: 6,000 words. See our submissions page for additional details.
We are interested in reviews of any Florida-related subject: author, book, film, tourist attraction, CD, website, beach, park, toll roads, snack stands, local landmarks—anything! And unlike submissions of creative work, current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit reviews. Size limit: 6,000 words. See our submissions page for additional details.
