Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(New York: theenk Books, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-9647342-8-9) Going to the mailbox and finding the latest book by Eileen Tabios is always a treat for me. Of all the poets and writers of poetry I have been blessed enough to know over the past two decades, none provokes thought and inspiration more than she. Eileen is a pioneer, inventing new forms such as the hay(na)ku, and always adding in some essays or other notes into her collections. In the end, I always feel like I have gotten just that little bit more from her and her work than “just” poems. In The Awakening , we get a little bit of lots of things, so if you’ve yet to read Eileen’s work, this is an excellent place to start. In less than 60 pages, she gives us a long poem on the sexual (mis)adventures of some of history’s best-known painters, as framed through the medical work of the poet and MD William Carlos Williams. We then move on to an offering of emails sent and received on September 11, 2001, that ...

 (Rutland Square Press, Boston, MA, 2013; ISBN: 9780985894603) by Joey Madia Mari Passananti’s The K Street Affair is a well-paced and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink action-adventure featuring a first-person perspective from lawyer-turned-amateur-agent Lena Mancuso. Use of the first person is unusual in the spy/terrorism genre, and it took a little while for me to adjust to it, but it does not deter from the overall success of the novel and in the end, provides some benefits to the way the tale unfolds. The story begins with a terrorist bombing in Washington, DC and quickly escalates and broadens to involve a high-powered law firm, a multi-national corporation, several front organizations, and high-level politicians in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, all vying for economic and global power. Add in the FBI and a sudden murder of someone very close to Lena and we are taken along on a fast-paced ride through the geo-political world of offshore accou...

 (Skirt!, Guilford, CT, 2012; ISBN: 978-0-7627-8045-7) Crash , subtitled, “A Mother, a Son, and a Journey from Grief to Gratitude,” is many books in one. First and foremost, it tells the story of the author’s son, Neil, being hit by a drunk driver as he was walking his girlfriend home one night, and his ongoing physical and mental recovery over the last 10 years. If that was the beginning and end of it, Crash would still be a book worth reading. But it isn’t. Instead, Crash is also a book about how families come together in times of crisis; it’s an examination of the medical system by an insider turned outsider; it’s an indictment of the justice system when it comes to the sentencing of drunk drivers who injure and kill. And it is also a testament to the true wonder and worth of Words, for it is clear that Roy-Bornstein owes much of her family’s victory over tragedy—of their movement from Grief to Gratitude—to her ability to write things out, whether academical...

(Otoliths, 2012, ISBN 978-0-9872010-5-8) by Joey Madia In March of 2010 I opened my review of Bobbi Lurie’s collection of poems titled Grief Suite by saying: “Bobbi Lurie writes poetry that hurts.” Some two and a half years later, Lurie has presented the reader with a substantially different group of poems in both form and substance. Different, yes—but equally compelling. the morphine poems are 55 pieces that vary in length from a page and a quarter to a single sentence. All are run-on and stream of consciousness in form, with the varied content tethered to Lurie’s experiences during treatment for cancer. The first poem, “horrors of morphine,” is also the longest at more than a page, and sets the stage for all that is to come. It is here that we first experience Lurie’s thoughts on the state of poets and poetry, a theme that pervades: “they want to be among you if you offer them a contract for a book they believe will make them famous but if y...

 (self-published, 2012; available on Amazon.com in for several devices) Take a moment to imagine American society’s reliance on social networking, Genetically Modified food, and pharmaceutical over-prescription continuing on its current upward arc. What will a virtual-reality world of synthetic foods, drinks, mood-enhancers, genetic manipulation, and digital economic opportunity-building run by the biomedical, religious, media, political, military, and educational establishments look like? If you are thinking bleak and slave-like, then there is much to appeal to you in The STARLING Connection , author Theodore Webb’s four-part vision of life in 30 years. Part Phillip K. Dick and part John Hughes’ prototypical high school meets Tim Burton’ Edward Scissorhands , The STARLING Connection is a sobering and often times violent and frightening look at what our world might become if things continue on their current trajectory. Taking the premise that the more thi...

A Review of Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s Ouija Gone Wild , with Rick Fisher (2012, Visionary Living, Inc., www.visionaryliving.com ). ISBN: 9780985724306 From one of the most prolific and respected author–investigators working in the field of the paranormal today, Ouija Gone Wild is a thoroughly researched and excellently organized collection of facts and true stories having to do with the often mis-understood (and mis-used) “talking board.”             Rosemary Ellen Guiley is joined in this endeavor by Rick Fisher, founder of the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania, the National Museum of Mysteries and Research Center in Columbia, PA and the founder of that city’s Historic Haunted Ghost Walks. He maintains an extensive file of news clipping and stories related to the board and owns a sizable and varied collection of them.             The book is filled with s...

Surfing the Middle East is a book of endless dicotomy. Subtitled “Deviant Journalism for the Lost Generation,” Aizenstat’s diary and depiction of his two trips to the Middle East is equal parts eye-opening participant journalism in the tradition of Sebastian Junger and V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers (the best book I have ever read about the tangled weave of cultures and belief systems in the Middle East) and an at times over-the-top homage to the Gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson (as evidenced most obviously by the opening quote from the good doctor and more subtly by the rampant use of his signature words: “savage,” “swine,” “fiend,” and his metaphorical device of linking drug-tripping adjectives with his on-site experiences).             To be fair to Aizenstat—whose idea to surf in Israel and Lebanon while immersing himself in the Gordian knot of what is happening “over there” as an American Jew was ...