The Lost Family Jenna Blum Harper Collins, 2018: 432 pp. This review appeared in the 31st edition of The Briar Cliff Review. Jenna Blum’s third novel is full of ghosts. On the cover, we are greeted by a woman, elegant and colorless but for her rich red dress, whose face disappears beyond the page. It is a face we will spend the next four hundred plus pages searching for. The novel, told in three parts, begins in 1965 with Peter Rashkin, a moderately successful restauranteur i

The Sea Is My Ugly Twin Marcella Remund Finishing Line Press. 2018: 28 pp. This review appeared in the 31st edition of The Briar Cliff Review. In this remarkable collection, Marcella Remund floats the reader in and out of myth, through various cultures and land/ seascapes, engaging us all the while with dream-like imagery and compelling ideas. Beginning with the first and title poem, we find ourselves moving from the sea to dry land like an ancient creature in evolutionary tr