Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (available in paper format from the publishers or at Calameo.com as e-books) By Joey Madia As Founding Editor of www.newmystics.com , a literary and art site that hosts pages for nearly seventy authors and artists from around the world, I have the opportunity to give the creators of innovative and thought-provoking poetry a forum for their work. As often happens, in cultivating the e-publisher/author relationship, I am asked to review additional work by the author not hosted at New Mystics. In the case of Jack Galmitz, when links to his e-books were provided, I visited Calameo.com and chose three titles— Objects , Yellow Light , and A Semblance —for review. There are several other titles from this author available there as well and you can find more of his writing at Scribd. In our correspondence preparing for the launch of his New Mystics author page in February 2014, Galmitz said that his poetry is based on “the indeterminacy created by ambiguity—sometimes two words that ar

In September of 2012 I wrote a very positive review of the independently published debut novel in this series, Unheard Of . The sequel does not disappoint.             Picking up where the first book left off, The Silent Sound finds the three main characters—Arco, Chastin, and Rachel—setting out to sea with two brothers named Zeke and Zender, a mysterious and doom-prone old fisherman, and a tough as nails female captain in the Imperial Navy after the islands are attacked by a sea-dwelling race of beings known as the demar.             There is plenty of action and conflict among the ship’s disparate group of passengers, complicated by a pair of thought-talking music sticks named Maletalio—the unifying force among the three main characters and the holder of many of the secrets of the Keys.             In the tried and true tradition of a fantasy series, Hammons extends his themes and his world in The Silent Sound , although the central conflict is still between the Imperial Iori

(Mythos [Imprint of GMTA Publishing, 2013, fifth anniversary edition), ISBN: 978-0-615754-28-4 We live in an age of flash. An age of CGI and ultra-action in our storytelling that breeds endless comic-book films with flimsy stories and one-dimensional heroes causing brain-jarring explosions.             In many ways, publishing has followed suit, filling the stacks with dark visions of horror and title after title full of violence and sex attempting to keep afloat paper-thin story structure and one-dimensional heroes and heroines.             So it is very refreshing to read a novel like P. S. Bartlett’s Fireflies . A novel that tells, simply and elegantly, the story of a family’s love. Now, don’t get me wrong—there is violence, and sex, and there is even a supernatural series of events involving a 6-year-old boy, Ennis, and his abilities to heal through the help of what is believed to be angels.             But at the heart of this adventure, which takes pl