Glassworks’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2023

1,430

pages read

books read

Glassworks Magazine

Shortest Book

pages

Longest Book

350

pages

Average book length in 2023

130

pages

Enjoy me among my ruins by Juniper Fitzgerald

Most Shelved

2,126

people also shelved

Least Shelved

people also shelved

Glassworks’s average rating for 2023

5.0

it was amazing

5.0

Highest Rated on Goodreads

it was amazing

5.00 average

Glassworks’s first review of the year

it was amazing

Reviewed by Rebecca Green on www.rowanglassworks.org.

Nature is boundless: it covers just about everything we know. And yet, as modern technology progresses, nature has somewhat morphed into a monstrosity in our everyday lives. Many people today fear the unknown depths of the natural world and shy away from exploring it too closely. What might we be missing out on by avoiding nature in all of its pure and chaotic glory?

Adam Tavel’s Green Regalia a Reviewed by Rebecca Green on www.rowanglassworks.org.

Nature is boundless: it covers just about everything we know. And yet, as modern technology progresses, nature has somewhat morphed into a monstrosity in our everyday lives. Many people today fear the unknown depths of the natural world and shy away from exploring it too closely. What might we be missing out on by avoiding nature in all of its pure and chaotic glory?

Adam Tavel’s Green Regalia answers this question, among others. Tavel explores the more comforting aspects of nature through fresh metaphors and experimental phrasing. In all of nature’s chaos and climates, there exists an atmosphere of comfort that Tavel draws attention to. Tavel’s environmentally-themed collection begins with a poem titled “How to Write a Nature Poem.” This poem serves almost as an epigraph, foreshadowing the rest of the collection, which artfully guides the reader through understanding the environment’s present and prevalent hold on our lives. Through use of nature images, Tavel creates deeper themes surrounding family, identity and finding solace in uncontrollable external factors.

Tavel’s poetry contains a carefully crafted dichotomy between nature and family- more specifically the relationship between the speaker and the father. Through each narrated experience, nature serves as the overarching sense of comfort for the speaker. In “Vigil,” the speaker details an experience the summer their father left, claiming, “I drowned / my snuggle lamb inside our kiddie pool” (line 1-2). Through this act, we observe grief in the form of rebelling against a physical, unnatural object meant to represent something natural. Both the kiddie pool and the snuggle lamb are both fabrications of real living beings (lambs and deep lakes, rivers, oceans). During this spectacle, the “audience of bees” are buzzing nearby, later almost saying “you’re getting close” as the snuggle lamb nears total destruction. These bees exist in the absence of the speaker’s father and family, supplementing the companionship a family would provide in this circumstance. In this sense, nature is there for the speaker throughout the hardships that come with an absent father.

Tavel ties nature as comfort into many other family scenarios throughout the collection. In “Motel Light,” Tavel writes about refilling an ice bucket (full of moonlight) each time an unnamed family member’s “gin ran low” (line 7). The speaker refills the glass with “moonlight” because they have already established nature as a form of relief. So, as the gin provides the family member some sort of solace, the speaker views it as something natural, as light shining down from the moon. Alcoholism returns throughout the collection as something the “adults” experience, as well as the speaker at an older age. We see a shift in time in “Painting Toes,” where the speaker claims, “Most nights I drank the moon away” (lines 14-17). Alcoholism, infused with the moon, appears to represent a way of coping, as well as nature. As the speaker grows older, they continue to entwine nature with their evolving coping mechanisms. Since nature is such a familiar method for solace and comfort, the speaker incorporates natural symbols into their drinking habits (the moon especially).

The speaker continues to draw connections between himself and his father, while using nature as a way to safely cushion the two. In “Patter,” the speaker writes, “The only sound my father loved was rain / at night” (lines 1-2). The poet then draws a connection as well: “A boy, I drowned inside it too” (lines 3-4). The boy then sneaks outside and engulfs himself in the outer conditions, only to return to his bed later to sleep. Coming to terms with the unsteady relationship with his father, the boy uses nature as a mediator, as a sense of understanding between the two. He goes outside as his dad would to better understand his dad, to bridge the distance between them both physically and emotionally. In this sense, nature continues to comfort and support the speaker.

Tavel successfully relays the individual impact nature can have on those who dare to explore further than what meets the eye. Throughout the collection, nature is both powerful, forceful, and soothing. Comfort exists in the external chaos. And Tavel skillfully portrays this distinction. Green Regalia was a pleasant read. There were some dated references throughout: Abe Lincoln, Caesar, Oedipus, and Napoleon, among other historical and biblical figures. These poems all fit with the theme of nature, but might be a bit inaccessible to every reader. There are many other interesting themes throughout, though. Most prevalent are the poems about family, identity, and the space we encounter in each corner of the outside world.

Tavel’s poetry shows us that there is something enchanting and meaningful just outside the window. Using expressive language to describe what some might find ordinary, Tavel emphasizes the significance of absorbing all nature has to offer. Most importantly, when it feels like humans and modern technology have abandoned us, there are the bees, the moon, and the rain to comfort us. ...more

GLASSWORKS’S 2023 BOOKS

it was amazing

Halfway from Home by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Manic-depressive Pixie Dream Girl by Katya Zinn

Suede Mantis / Soft Rage by Jennifer Soong

The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson

Almost Deadly, Almost Good by Alice Kaltman

it was amazing

Glassworks’s last review of the year

it was amazing

Reviews by Nyds L. Rivera on www.rowanglassworks.org.

“For all the mutts.”

Dela Torre, the most recent chapbook from poet and essayist Dani Putney, opens with this dedication. Simple and effective, they give no other preface before diving into 20-some pages of raw, emotional poetry where they break down their own mixed-race heritage, the history of their parents, and tear into colonialism with sharpened teeth. While Dela Torre runs rife with vario Reviews by Nyds L. Rivera on www.rowanglassworks.org.

“For all the mutts.”

Dela Torre, the most recent chapbook from poet and essayist Dani Putney, opens with this dedication. Simple and effective, they give no other preface before diving into 20-some pages of raw, emotional poetry where they break down their own mixed-race heritage, the history of their parents, and tear into colonialism with sharpened teeth. While Dela Torre runs rife with various themes about identity and family, there is one through-line that can be felt in each and every one of these poems— anger.

As you learn very quickly in Dela Torre, Putney identifies as mixed-race Filipinx. Not only this, they are also a queer and neurodivergent writer. While this is not addressed directly in the chapbook, the feeling of layered displacement comes through clearly in each poem. Coming from a background that is, in many ways, similar to Putney’s own, this was a breath of fresh air to me as a reader. Too often are we asked to be placated by the bare minimum of representation, by DEI offices, by scholarships for marginalized people. Putney attacks these ideals at their base, and begs the question…why? Why should we be satisfied with platitudes when our families have spilled blood for the so-called “American Dream”?

Putney expresses this anger, when not outright, through perhaps the only universal language: food. Eating is a constant image throughout Dela Torre—how can it not be? Eating is something that is so integral to human life, not only for survival, but for community. In “Halo-Halo,” Putney describes the feeling of being like this heterogenous dessert, “I see myself in the cup’s crushed / ice, scattered like the islands / throughout an archipelago, / the shards of my DNA floating / in evaporated milk” (lines 13-17). In “Kimchi”, they address the fact that Americans have dictated Asian culture, writing, “[but] my picture of Asia / was painted in America— / as an American, I can choose / from curated Eastern symbols” (lines 8-11). Kimchi is not a Filipino food, and yet, Putney feels it links them to their culture because it has been dictated to them that it should. At this point in the chapbook, this is still pretty consistent with the traditional image of food as representative of culture and family, but it soon evolves into something more.

Putney expresses the desire to consume as a vengeful act, referencing outright cannibalism in some pieces and a more metaphorical eating in others. To devour and to be devoured—is that not what we feel as cultural “others”? American culture has devoured what we have of identity, of heritage, has chosen which parts they want and spat us back out. To turn our teeth on colonialism, to devour that which has devoured, is the ultimate act of revenge. The problem here is not so much that Putney wants to eat colonialism, but that to do so, even figuratively, is a reclamation of the culture that was stolen from us. Communion, in a sense, which brings us closer to who we are.

Putney is expressing their rage, their bereavement, and through doing such, is encouraging the reader to do the same. So often, narratives of heritage take the tone of celebration or of sorrow. We are told to be grateful for the life our ancestors gave us, but as Putney writes in “Heritage,” “Luck is not being born at all” (line 36). We are forced to hide our anger, but Putney needs no permission to share it. Their frustration is loud and clear, and it is what makes the poems in this chapbook feel so raw.

Dela Torre is a book written “for all the mutts.” For everyone told that they exemplify the American dream, even when they wish they could be anywhere, anything but. It is a book that gives us permission to be wildly, unapologetically angry, to bite the hand that bit at us. Dela Torre is a collection that says what us self-proclaimed “mutts” have been holding back for much of our lives.

Putney says it best: “This work of art is / an indictment. Your white- / flight prayers book- / ended with exclamation marks & empty anecdotes won’t reach me” (lines 1-5). They are bitter, they are honest, and they are unapologetic. In doing so, they give us the permission to be the same. ...more

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