Category: Reviews

Stephen Strom’s “Bears Ears” Featured in New York Times

Posted on November 30, 2018 by Rose Brandt

November 30, 2018

Today we were thrilled to see Stephen Strom’s Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land featured in the New York Times. The article, authored by the one and only Rick Bass, highlights three volumes of nature photography that “take us back to Earth’s innocent roots.”

Stephen E. Strom’s eloquent “Bears Ears: Views From a Sacred Land” is perhaps a more palatable picture book — if not also in its own way a perverse bummer, another chronicling of territory taken by force. In 2016, President Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (signed by Theodore Roosevelt) to set aside 1.35 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, intending to protect for all time more than 100,000 sacred Native American sites, not to mention a contained landscape upon which the narrative of time has been written more eloquently and indelibly than anywhere else on earth. What Yellowstone is to wildlife, Bears Ears is to geology. However, just half a year later President Trump, in one of his first acts in office (and with characteristic racism), reduced the scope of the protected monument by 85 percent — one of the many illegal executive orders that will remain caught up in courts for years.

Read the full feature by Rick Bass in print or online.

Publishers Weekly spotlights Farid Matuk’s The Real Horse

Posted on June 5, 2018June 5, 2018 by Rose Brandt

June 5, 2018

This week brings with it a thoughtful review of Farid Matuk’s sophomore full-length poetry collection, The Real Horse from Publishers Weekly:

Matuk (This Isa Nice Neighborhood) addresses his daughter in his second collection, a lyrical interrogation of Western notions of gender, race, and manifest destiny, as well as the dubious authority of parenthood in a turbulent political landscape where “the sky behaves itself/ with just enough war over us.”… Matuk conveys how Western ideology informs the father’s concern for how a daughter will “bear power’s projections,” and tender paternal observations provide humorous respite from moments of violence: “like if parenting is a thing are you childing us who gave you a face.” Matuk presents parental awareness as a sensory informational superhighway, “a picking at the earth’s curved surface and all laid on it.” Read the full review.

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country Spotlighted by Publishers Weekly

Posted on May 17, 2018May 14, 2018 by Rose Brandt

May 17, 2018

Addressing legal issues, human rights issues, and tribal sovereignty as they relate to Indigenous criminal and social justice, Northern Arizona University’s Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider argue that the American criminal and social justice system neglects American Indians, who have a unique political and legal status given that their justice issues “are rooted in colonialism.” Their edited volume, Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country analyzes issues such as Indigenous identity, the Indian Child Welfare Act, stalking, American Indian collegiate athletes, sterilization, violence, gambling and crime, and juvenile justice. Recently, Publishers Weekly spotlighted the volume’s “passion and purpose”:

The essays from the eight Native American contributors to this anthology of works about the challenges facing those living in “Indian Country” consider a broad range of topics, including the criminal justice system’s treatment of Native Americans, misperceptions among non-Natives that a connection exists between Native gaming and crime, and the systemic sterilization of Native American women as late as the 1960s and ’70s. Several examine the consequences of the legal stipulation that Native Americans who are not enrolled in tribes or whose tribes are not recognized by the federal government do not have the same rights and protections as those enrolled in federally recognized tribes, which include the denial of sovereignty over tribal matters. Still others examine ways forward for Native American communities faced with difficult cultural issues; for example, successful strategies for countering violence against women and ensuring placement of orphaned Native children with other members of the same tribe. Read the full review.

Discovering Pluto Featured in Wall Street Journal

Posted on May 14, 2018May 14, 2018 by Rose Brandt

May 14, 2018

As part of the weekend’s Wall Street Journal Bookshelf News, renowned science journalist and book reviewer Marcia Bartusiak highlighted two of the season’s important new books on the New Horizons project, the first mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt, including William Sheehan and Dale Cruikshank’s UA Press title Discovering Pluto:

While “Chasing New Horizons” is largely focused on the origin and development of the mission itself, “Discovering Pluto,” by Dale P. Cruikshank and William Sheehan, offers the backstory of the explorations of our solar system’s most remote regions. I came to think of the books as a flight of wins: “Chasing New Horizon’s” is the starter, nimble and refreshing, with “Discovering Pluto” offering deeper tones, scientific details that can be savored more slowly. Read the full review.

Kirkus: Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch

Posted on November 28, 2017November 28, 2017 by Rose Brandt

November 28, 2017

We’re nearly three months out from the much-anticipated release of Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s fourth book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series, Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch. This morning, Kirkus released their review, which is set to hit newsstands December 15, 2017:

Arrogance and greed add up to a powerful motive for murder.

Travel agent Sadie Walela, who lives on a small country property with Sonny, her wolfdog, returns from a funeral to find her boyfriend, Deputy Lance Smith, at the scene of a nearby murder. The dead man, who was killed by a handmade arrow, is said to have been acquainted with ranch owner Angus Clyborn, but Clyborn, a newcomer, denies knowing him. An animal rights group is picketing Clyborn’s Buffalo Ranch, which is stocked with tame buffalo, elk, and other animals he intends to charge big bucks for rich trophy hunters to shoot. After Sadie witnesses the birth of a white buffalo calf on Clyborn’s property, she knows trouble is on the way should word get out a sacred animal was born there.

Read the full review online on Kirkus.

Shelf Awareness: The King of Lighting Fixtures

Posted on October 24, 2017November 16, 2017 by Rose Brandt

October 24, 2017

This morning, we were thrilled to see Daniel Olivas’s latest fiction collection The King of Lighting Fixtures reviewed by Shelf Awareness, who declared it, “a potpourri of formats and styles.” Shelf Awareness for Readers appears Tuesdays and Fridays and helps readers discover the 25 best books of the week, as chosen by booksellers, librarians and other industry experts:

In a helter-skelter cornucopia of voices and formats, the stories of Daniel Olivas’s King of Lighting Fixtures are set on the streets of Los Angeles, focusing on characters as diverse as the city. The collection cements his place in the magical realism tradition of García Márquez and Urrea, and showcases his skills as a master stylist and self-aware observer of life’s little vignettes. Grandson of Mexican immigrants, converted Jew in the Reformed tradition, Olivas (The Book of Want; Things We Do Not Talk About) works as a lawyer in the California Department of Justice and works miracles on the page. “He will have to call it ‘fiction’ otherwise he will be rejected by the publishing industry as a lunatic,” as Olivas writes of a character in “The Three Mornings of José Antonio Rincón” who wakes in different bodies on three consecutive days.

Read the full review on Shelf Awareness.

18 Best Poetry Books to Read Right Now

Posted on September 29, 2017November 16, 2017 by Rose Brandt

September 29, 2017

Signature, a place for “making well-read sense of the world,” highlighted Emmy Pérez’s With the River On Our Face in their fall poetry roundup, which is curated by critic Lorraine Berry.

Emmy Perez sings the borderlands between America and Mexico, a contested land where identity and nationality are under constant surveillance. Her poetry forces the reader to feel the persons who live in those lands. In poems that follow the currents of the Rio Grande, she re-immerses readers in the waters where we all developed, fills our senses with the scent of blooming roses, of burning mesquite, and crashes us into the barriers erected to prevent the development of cross-border relationships. Reading Perez ignites the desire to experience the heat and the sere landscape, and generates anger at the destruction of all that flourishes there.

Read the full list of fall poetry titles on Signature.

August 30, 2017

As part of their forthcoming September/October issue, Foreword Reviews celebrates Daniel Olivas’s latest collection of short stories The King of Lighting Fixtures saying:

Olivas’s bold insistence on leaving a few seams visible, a few threads frayed—even on pulling the rug away entirely—makes the book resound as a fascinating exploration of both the art of storytelling and the ways in which fiction echoes the messiness of life.

Read the full review on Foreword Reviews.

Poetry Beyond the Basics: Twelve New Collections Offer Fresh Perspective on the Human Experience

Posted on August 4, 2017October 24, 2017 by Rose Brandt

August 4, 2017

Right out of the gate, Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut is getting big attention, just this week landing a spot in Library Journal‘s fall poetry feature Poetry Beyond the Basics: Twelve New Collections Offer Fresh Perspective on the Human Experience.

“Come closer, chula / There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” These beckoning lines, ending a poem set on a city bus, capture the intimacy and disturbing undercurrent that typify Vértiz’s fine second collection (after Swallows). Vértiz portrays her Los Angeles neighborhood with verve and what might be described as fond anger. We see poverty (“the death stench in our water in our jobs”) and fractured families. In one poem, “Dad’s paychecks couldn’t feed two houses,” which explains why the pet rabbits end up as soup, and elsewhere a postcard from pops says, “I wish you were here, mija / Come on, don’t get all feelings on me / I may be drunk / But at least I’m home.” The uncle delivering an unexpected kiss, teenagers in tight black jeans, the “pleyboy” boyfriend who proved “a hard climb / A home to mispronounce” (“Fuck that, said my brother, There’s other fools to love”), a mother and brother signifying “ten thousand truck miles (“Why won’t / their coughs go away?”)—these make up a chamber opera that Vértiz vivifies with jangle and sparkle.

Read the full feature on Library Journal.

The University of Arizona Press