Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff
by Allisa Cherry
(Michigan State University Press, 2025)
In the title poem, Allisa Cherry addresses the America her father grew up in—Southwest, downwind, irradiated: “My father / was so small when you began to powder / his milk teeth and bones with your radiation.” Equal parts family elegy, lyrical spar with childhood faith, and tender croon from a wellspring that feels like a gift, Cherry’s work is both haunting and generative.
—Shari Zollinger
(Essay Press, 2017)
Saterstrom transgresses boundaries of genre and the practice of writing in this illuminating book. Having read it, I still hear whispers of the supernatural and its colorful possibilities.
—Katherine Indermaur
by Emily O’Neill
(YesYes Books, 2015)
I finally pulled Pelican off our bookshelf and was engaged from poem one, “Kismet”: “But. // There is an onion / browning where my heart should be.” Come on—what a way to start a poem and a book. The rest doesn’t disappoint, working through rough emotion and grief with fresh and innovative poetic structure.
—Natalie Padilla Young
by Kenan Ince
(Moon in the Rye Press, 2025)
Kenan Ince’s sole and posthumous book of poems brims with possibility and dynamic intelligence. Educated as a mathematician, he voiced a queerness and loneliness I can’t shake. Lines like, “the worst thing I ever did was live seventeen years / inside my father’s house,” “for once my yellow dress is moon enough / to take the light’s communion,” and “I trace your outline with my words / and never find you inside them” will thankfully continue to rattle in the field of my awareness.
—Nano Taggart
by Patric Gagne
(Simon & Schuster, 2024)
This memoir covers a sociopathy diagnosis given in Gagne’s twenties and her quest through the American mental health landscape for viable treatment options. Her sincerity is startling, chilling, and hilarious as she reckons with her personality type and the world’s response to it. This book broadens the dominant narrative of what makes a sociopath and puts a human face on a misunderstood condition that is just one variation of the human experience.
—Laura Walker
by Dan Ephron
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)
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by Nicholas Blanford
(I.B. Tauris, 2006)
Killing a King is a carefully crafted narrative that proves, once again, the truth is (far) more appalling than fiction. Killing Mr. Lebanon displays politics as an exercise in blunting the potential of the many in service of the few. Both books are dense with detail but somehow manage to remain, if not page-turners, hard to put down.
—Neil Flatman
by Margaret A. Brucia
(Princeton University Press, 2025)
The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life is a meticulously researched, emotionally resonant literary biography, centered on the diary entries, letters, and oral histories of a major 20th Century American poet. Diving deep into the Swenson archives, Brucia plucks gems of May’s language that refract the light of her mind, granting readers a glimpse of a brilliant, private, funny, flawed, and fiercely devoted poet. The result is a biography that feels as vivid and layered as the poet herself.
—Ben Gunsberg
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