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#9 – Out of Darkness, Shining Light: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
As we continue the countdown of best reads of 2019, we come to Out of Darkness, Shining Light by the Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah. It’s a vivid imagining of the company that escorted the body of Dr. David Livingstone, the famed explorer and missionary, back to the coast following his death in central Africa. Gappah’s novel… →
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It’s Time for the Heartlands Best Reads of 2019! #10 – Uncommon Prayer
This is the 3rd year for the highly-anticipated Heartlands Best Reads list. If you want to check out previous years you can look here (2018) and here (2017). How does a book make the Heartlands list? Well, the main limiting factor is that Alex Joyner has to read it during the year. It’s been another… →
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The Rough Beauty & Devotional Poetry of Kimberly Johnson
About halfway through Kimberly Johnson’s 2002 poetry collection, Leviathan With a Hook, you find yourself face-to-face with the themes that have since come to characterize much of her work: a moment that opens the world, a rich encounter with nature and transcendence, and a little hint of disturbing fire. It’s all right there in “Up… →
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Love And Fire Children: Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here
I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine… →
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An Antidote to Gutless Prayer: Dreaming Like Jesus with Rebekah Simon-Peter
The wonderfully-named Rebekah Simon-Peter looks around at mainline Protestantism, including The United Methodist Church of which she is a part, and sees some problems. It’s not just that the church is competing for attention in a post-Christian world with Sunday morning soccer practices. It’s not even the eight maladies she lists that include shrinking numbers,… →
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Into the Woods in Elmet
You might expect that there’d be a little bit of Beowulf in a book by a medieval studies scholar in York, England. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel adds some Heathcliff, too, for a touch of Yorkshire Moors gothic. But even if you can spot the forbears in Elmet, you probably won’t suspect what you’re getting in… →
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Aging Well with Scott Cairns
Scott Cairns is still carrying on his affair with Erato, the Greek muse he addresses throughout his poetry. “I wanted very much/ to find a word to grant us both assurance” he says in the poem “Erato at 64.” At such an age, lovers and poets know that the beloved is as much within them… →
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Dancing When the World is Killing You
It’s not that dancing on the stage of the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas the evening I arrived in the city wasn’t in the range of possibilities. Over the years, my friend Juan has introduced me to a lot of things I hadn’t previously considered. Like the time we put together a talent show in… →
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Long Loves in a Small Coastal Town: A Review of In West Mills
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When… →
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