Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Revised Edition; Millhouse Press, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-615-43925 As ubiquitous as computers have become, and with the promise of Virtual Reality for everyone always just upon the horizon, books like this one are bound to become ubiquitous as well. Aimed at teens, this first book in the Quests of Shadowind series follows a brother and sister team and their friends and enemies through a journey in a computer-generated world in which they one day wake up. Reminiscent of films like Tron , Lawnmower Man , and The Matrix trilogy in its exploration of alternate realms of existence generated by computer and inhabited by brave and daring humans who have nothing left to explore but the wireless world of cyberspace, Sky Shifter never really takes off and pays back the IOUs of its clever premise. Despite its Revised Edition status the novel feels like a tight plot begging for better-drawn characters and less stiff dialogue, like a brand-new house filled with old ...

 (New Milford, CT: Visionary Living, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-9857243-3-7 Exactly two years ago I reviewed The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies , a book co-authored by Guiley. This new companion book, subtitled “The Hidden Links between Djinn, Shadow People, ETs, Nephilim, Archons, Reptilians, and other Entities,” picks up where The Vengeful Djinn left off—with the possibility that the Djinn (often known by their Westernized name, genies ) are more active than many researchers have believed, and, indeed, may often be mistaken for the types of entities listed in the subtitle.             Djinn, which appear throughout the Quran, are composed of “smokeless fire” and reside in a parallel dimension to ours. It is said that they are highly intelligent, ancient (they helped to build Solomon’s temple), and eager to take the Earth back from the human race, which has usurped it. I refer readers inte...

 by Tash Jones (available for Amazon Kindle March 25, 2013; www.tashjones.co.uk ) This debut novel from Masters student Tash Jones is a compelling mirror-glance journey into the effects of the Gothic novel on Victorian sensibilities. While both referencing outright and adapting subtle elements of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , Stoker’s Dracula , Shelley’s Frankenstein , Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde , and Austen’s Northanger Abbey , The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile concerns itself with pulling back the layers of appearance and looking at the arts and their relationship to the dark side of Victorian-era values (the novel’s events take place in 1892–93). Uses the standard Gothic conventions of diaries, letters, and narration, Vile is a mystery that is slowly pieced together, reading at times like the surrealism of Poe, with generous doses of the flowery, image-laden and complexly sytaxed prose of the time in which it takes place. It is a story of people...

(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...