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Poetry Book Review: The Thorn Key, by Jeana Jorgensen

Cover of The Thorn Key: Fairy Tales in Verse, by Jeana Jorgensen, featuring a large keyhole in a dark, foggy void, with brambles at the bottom of the hole, atop an icy-looking surface.

It’s not a long collection, containing about 40 poems (some just a few lines, many several e-pages long), a foreword, a list of content warnings/triggers, a fascinating multi-page afterword, and an appendix that lists which fairy tales inspired which poems. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to read all the poems in one go, since that may blunt their edges and impacts, but rather reading a few per day, taking time to savor them.

Book Review: CASUAL, by Koji A. Dae

Cover of Casual, by Koji A. Dae, in tones of brown and yellow, featuring a circuitboard with a stylized canine (a fox) embedded in the circuitry.

Dae does a great job of writing in Valya’s voice (first person, past tense) so that it’s easy to sympathize with the protagonist, without necessarily agreeing with her choices. She clearly cares deeply for “baby-girl” and is trying hard to make good plans and be a good mother-to-be; however, she’s had a hard life…