Summer 2023 Reviews – Big City Lit

Ilka Scobie’s Any Island

Oct 24, 2023Daphne AstorSummer 2023 Reviewsdaphne astor, Review

Review by Daphne Astor Ilka Scobie’s new book, Any Island, published by Spuyten Press, is a powerful collection of lyric poems and free verse contemporary elegies that are delivered with wit and courage. Scobie is a lifelong New Yorker, born in Brooklyn in the 1950s. She writes in deceptively plain language about daily life at

In Love with Death and Poetry

Oct 24, 2023Victoria ReynoldsSummer 2023, Summer 2023 ReviewsReview, Victoria Reynolds

Review by Victoria Reynolds In Orange Tulips, Joan Barasovska explores the perilous territory where, as a young woman, she was “neither dead nor safe” (57). We follow her out onto the ledges and lethal precipices of her own mind, then into a locked psychiatric ward, where, as a young woman, she battles a “death sentence