Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

An Exodus of Sparks 

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

Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics 

by Selah Saterstrom   

(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

Pelican

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

Trickle Down Theory 

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

Sociopath: A Memoir 

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

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel 

by Dan Ephron  

(W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

 

&

 

Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East 

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

  

The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life

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 

 

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Winter 2024

Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney 

(Macmillan to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

Irish author and literary anti-hero Sally Rooney is out with her newest, Intermezzo. Rooney, ever an astute observer of the

human predicament, doesn’t disappoint in this novel about family, chess, and the gritty messiness of grief and forgiveness.

Her distinctive prose style rises to the level of poetry,

repeatedly, distinguishing her as a writer who constantly pushes the boundaries of her craft.

—Shari Zollinger

& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love

by aby kaupang 

(Parlor Press, 2023)

Lightning strikes a house amidst its residents’ profound grief, serving as both fire and aperture, this jolt giving way across

the book's expansive poem to “lightening” and “miracle & practice.” It is emblematic of the larger lyric project kaupang has built across multiple books over 15 years. Her poems are a navigation of grief’s potential to be both precise and all encompassing, but also a study of adaptation and love’s ability to suture home and body amidst loss.

—Michael McLane

What Small Sound

by Francesca Bell

(Red Hen Press, 2023)

Spending time with Francesca Bell’s collection, I understand what it must feel like to be ocean, reaching in for mouthfuls of shore, gorging on a surplus of sand like glass teeth, porcelain shells like splintered slivers of nail. Everything gritty. Everything sharp. Everything too much and yet, feeling like I couldn’t get enough. Bell’s poems hold nothing back, dealing honestly and poignantly with the intimacies of womanhood, motherhood, love, desire, and life’s many griefs. Hers is a book you will return to again and again.

—Samantha Samakande

Litany for the Long Moment

by Mary-Kim Arnold

(Essay Press, 2018)

This book-length lyric essay from a press known for excellent hybrid nonfiction investigates the nature of identity through

Arnold's history as a Korean-born American adoptee. Shaping the text are government questionnaires and other documents from the search for her Korean parents. Here the friction between the bureaucracy of selfhood and the individual spirit of selfhood reckons with a past dismantled by politics. 

—Katherine Indermaur

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing

by Adam Moss

(Penguin Press, 2024))

An insightful guide for multimodal writers, The Work of Art explores how ideas materialize into diverse aesthetic forms, offering practical strategies and reflections that resonate with those who blend text, visuals, audio, and more. Drawing on artist interviews and process artifacts, the book’s cross-disciplinary approach demystifies creativity, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in how varied modalities contribute to a cohesive, expressive work.

—Ben Gunsberg

Full Moon Coffee Shop

by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

(Ballantine Books, 2024)

If the idea of Brigadoon as a kind of pop-up (full moons only) cake shop in Japan, run by a tortoiseshell cat who reads the horoscope of people (a script writer and a TV exec) in need of the kind of guidance only a tortoiseshell might offer in the middle of the night sounds good, then this book is for you. Dreams within dreams. 

I’m on a Japanese-novelsin- translation binge lately, so I thought, “Why not?” I’m pleased I did.

—Neil Flatman

 Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens

by Corey Van Landingham 

(Tupelo Press, 2022)

This book meets the moment with prodigious intelligence but, more importantly, with the biggest heart. Drone warfare, long-distance romance, divinity, and art all meet Van Landingham’s eye.

—Katherine Indermaur

Bedtime Stories

by Steve Langan 

(Littoral Books, 2024)

Langan's poems are an embattled form of mindfulness in the age of too much. These poems address the ceaseless noise with self-awareness—that we are all an active part of one problem or another. The book is built from lines that are a form of moving forward, and the knowledge that sentiments such as “life will never be as good / as it is right now” are both a distress call and a prayer.

—Nano Taggart

Come on All You Ghosts

by Matthew Zapruder

(Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

Zapruder is a man who (famously) believes that when you want to say a thing, say it how it is; don’t slather it in unnecessary metaphor. Digression, unvarnished memory, and an ability to step into the lives of strangers are all to be had in a collection that occasionally left me floored—as in the poem “Journey to the Past.”

—Neil Flatman

Daughter Isotope

by Vidhu Aggarwal

(The Operating System, 2021)

Daughter Isotope is like teleporting into an alternate universe. These poems contain everything an alt world should: pop culture, action-packed language and lines, fast

food, innuendo, grief, mythical and religious story, science, space, tech—and let's not forget the rainbows and unicorns. “As stars blow apart so do our virtual mutualities, so do our mutual virtualities, so do our visceral / municipalities, so do our muchacho virilities.” 

—Natalie Padilla Young

Second Empire

by Richie Hofmann

(Alice James Books, 2015)

The lyricism here is astonishing. This collection’s jewel-like poems interweave incisive observation—of urban and natural landscapes—with confessions and epiphanies alike.

—Katherine Indermaur

Like Love: Essays and Conversations

by Maggie Nelson

(Graywolf Press, 2024)

Poet and critical essayist Maggie Nelson draws from twenty years of a writing life in Like Love: Essays and Conversations. Each chapter, set chronologically, includes

reviews; conversations; and—what Nelson does best—razor-sharp reflections on queer issues, art, and love. There exist only a few, Nelson being one, who can use the word love without issuing a single cliché.

—Shari Zollinger

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae 

by John Tipton 

(Flood Editions, 2022)

This book intersperses new translations of the Gospel of Mark with the ancient Greek tragedy Euripides’ Bacchae and Tipton’s own poetry. Believers will change the way you think about ancient texts and broaden your perspective on time.

—Katherine Indermaur

Be With 

by Forrest Gander

(New Directions, 2018)

Forrest Gander dares to expose shortcomings and grief, revelations, and regrets after the death of his wife (poet C.D. Wright). In Be With, he takes every imaginable color of pain and hurls it through the line until, sometimes screaming and other times in reflection, it says, This is what it’s like to look out at the world in this moment. 

If you want to read a poem once and know everything it has to offer, this isn’t for you. But if you want something that dares you to suggest it might fail, you won’t regret picking up this Pulitzer Prize-winner. 

 —Neil Flatman

Arboretum in a Jar 

by Frances Donovan

(Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023)

“ … I wanna do what I want," from the last line of “Pastoral, Poughkeepsie,” encapsulates Donovan's success at writing poems that, ironically, cannot be contained. She writes a new niche by building up, breaking down, and twisting around the modern fairy tale via her intelligent lens, sharing a unique blend of intimacy and hindsight in this melodious collection. The poet reveals “complicated laces”and "coded secrets" via themes of family, sexuality, and identity, and does so the way she wants—masterfully and beyond comparison. 

—Clarissa Adkins

Our Cancers

by Dan O’Brien  

(Acre Books, 2021)

Twenty years after the events of 9/11, the dust continues to settle—in the Battery Park apartment and surrounding neighborhoods where Dan O’Brien and his wife lived and worked, in their breath and bodies, and in the brief 24 hours in which the one cancer journey concludes only to find another lying in wait. Love and nothingness curl around the enjambments and white space of these 101 terse lyric poems, each of which finds O’Brien acknowledging in new ways that “I must find / my way / to live here.”

—Michael McLane

A Book of Days 

by Patti Smith 

(Penguin Random House, 2022)

A Book of Days includes a picture and a caption for every day of the year, revealing music icon and poet Patti Smith’s solid practice of finding beauty within the mundane and imbuing both the objects and people in her world with a special kind of magic, designating all aspects of her life worthy of inspiration. With spare language and dreamy Polaroids, Patti Smith lays her ardor upon the altar. 

 —Shari Zollinger

Tender 

by Sarah Bates

(New Michigan Press, 2020)

Do you ever tire of poems forcing tidy revelations onto things/states that are defined by disorder? (Hi entropy, have a nice bow!) If the answer is yes, check out this mini-collection. Bates’ availability to the all-too-much-ed-ness of both tragedy and minutiae, and her conveyance of “always starting over”—in topic, in form, and in the act of observation—is breathtaking.

 —Nano Taggart