A bodacious—compassionate—memoir

“Sugar Daddy culture is the patriarchy at its ugliest…. ‘Please Daddy, can I have some pocket money?’ is not autonomy, it’s not equality, and it’s far from easy money.” If you’re a regular reader of The Muses’ Refugia, you know I have a fondness for anything and everything that comes out of Guts Publishing, perhaps

“Don’t take any wooden ideals.”

William Heyen. Richard Blanco. Miriam Sagan. Sharon Olds. Campbell McGrath. Marge Piercy. Dan Giancola. There are only a mere handful of contemporary poets whom I hold in such high esteem that I immediately rush out and buy their new releases the instant they hit the bookstore (or the poet kindly gives me a copy). As

A Non-Fiction Triad: Alaska Here We Come

I first came across Adrienne Ross Scanlan’s poetry ten years or so ago when I was assistant editor at The Centrifugal Eye, a now defunct literary journal . Exactly which of Adrienne’s poems we published, I can’t recall—or even if we ended up with one of her works. I’m confident we did because, her writing

A Blitz of Books

What’s your next great read? Here are two I highly recommend, and one, well, you be the judge! The reek of damp and emptiness “Love affairs, one-night stands, beartbreak, joy, betrayal”—that is the essence in Deborah Price’s one words of her breathtaking memoir The Peanut Factory from Guts Publishing. The book recounts her unabashed, untarnished

From the Never-Ending Stack of Books—Three Sizzlers

As I am by no means a trendsetter, I was about ten years late getting to the Shades of Gray series. Maybe it’s just that books come into our lives (like teachers) when the student is ready. Since I’ve been writing more erotica lately, it seemed time to tackle these. And I’m so glad I

“Last chances to experience joy”

This is a book about dying and death. This is a remarkably uplifting book. That consummate novelist Laury A. Egan is able to achieve such a balance of emotional response among readers shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I’ve followed her career since her first major publication, Jenny Kidd (2012), but this book

“The anatomy of genius”

I killed three lanai intruders with this book, two wasps and a wolf spider. (Had to. Allergies.) But it is Enid Shomer who slays our hearts with her 2020 collection Shoreless. I can’t remember when I have been so completely bowled over by a collection of poetry. “Exquisite ” leaps to mind. And “masterful, ”

At Least I Won’t Forget the Silver Dress

Despite my reservations, I read the Bloomsbury-era novel To the North by Elizabeth Bowen.