Post-Modern Turgenev
Diptych Before Dying by Thomas McGonigle. Tough Poets Press, 114 pages. Review by Kevin T. McEneaney. Diptych offers a family travelogue novella, one about an adventure in Newfoundland with the author’s father and another about an earlier, happier period with ...
Nuclear Disaster
The Last Wave from Port Chicago by Peter Vogel 2025, edition compiled by Walter Wilkinson. This electronic book on the 10,000-pound nuclear Gadget exploded offers a summary version of Peter Vogel’s massive work on the first nuclear ball of fire ...
Conviction
Review by Kevin T McEneaney How do innocent people who are wrongfully sentenced to prison adjust to their confinement? Intelligent intellectuals, from Socrates to Boethius and Solzhenitsyn, have a long history of unjust incarceration. Here, we have the local memoir ...
The Mellow Glow of Memory
LAPTOP by Desmond Egan. Goldsmith Press, 2024. Book Review. by Kevin T McEneaney Desmond Egan was the first post-modern poet in Ireland when he published his book, Midlands in 1972. He eschewed traditional punctuation and rhyme from the outset, preferring ...
Poetry & Sex
The Poetry of Sex: From Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy by Brian Arkins. Peter Lang, 133 pages, 2023. Reviewed by Kevin T McEneaney The bibliography of this book has more books cited than there are pages in this densely written ...
Local History: What a Read!
Historic Tales of the Harlem Valley: Life at the End of the Line. Tonia Shoumatoff. History Press, 2023, 202 pages. by Kevin T. McEneaney I admit I am not a local history buff, yet Tonia Shoumatoff’s book is written with ...
When the vacuum is full
by Kevin T McEneaney Empty American Letters: the Bulgarian novel by Thomas McGonigle. Spuyten Duyvil Press. 316 pages, 2022. Pub. Oct 6, 2022. There is nothing empty here in McGonigle’s sixth novel, unless it’s the empty vacuum American pop culture ...
Will the real Quichotte Please Stand UP?
After Salman Rushdie's lecture on composing his his novel Quichotte (the proper period pronunciation is in the title, before the royal lisp was adopted) at Bard College Sosnoff Theater, I went backstage, chatted with him; he was open, amusing, his ...
Believing in Art
Towards a Credo. Brian Arkins. Little Gull Publishers. 36 pages. 2022. Reviewed by Kevin T McEneaney Brian Arkins is not only Ireland’s leading Greek and Latin scholar, he is also well-known for shedding light on Irish poetry, plays, and Anglo-Irish ...
When the last are first
New and Selected Poems, 1996-2020. Donald Gardner. Grey Suit. 225 pages. Reviewed by Kevin T McEneaney One of the reasons most people don’t read poetry is that poets take themselves too seriously: serious about their craft, subjects chosen, their advanced ...