I’m a writer — Why write reviews?
Literary journals are often looking for book reviewers, especially for folks willing to review small press and university press publications. Writing book reviews means investing hours of your time in the serious work of analyzing and evaluating another writer’s book. If you write reviews for nonprofit journals, you may be donating those hours, or earning a very modest stipend.
If you’re a reader, though, the good news is that by writing reviews, you get free books. These can be hard copy books, or e-books. Either way, they are yours to keep. Add the hard copies to your own shelfie or re-gift them.
But if you’re a writer, you may wonder why you should spend time you could devote to your own stuff on reviewing other writers’ books. The answer is simple: it will make you a better writer.
Reviewing a book requires reading a book, and we all know that reading will improve our writing. Beyond the everyday reading, though, is the re-reading and analysis of review-writing that forces us to focus on either theme, craft or genre strategies. I always learn something important about craft while writing a book review, and it’s usally something I can put to use in my own writing.
For example, for this review of Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s poetry collection, Ornament, I read the book straight through once, then once again to select the poems to focus on in the review.
I’m a fan of sonic resonance, so one element I considered in the review is how this poet works with form and repetition:
In addition to rhyme and meter, palilogy shapes some of these poems. As subtle as slant rhymes, repetition of individual words resonates like the often-invisible patterns in nature and in housekeeping. The poem “Trillium,” which is set outside of the home, is particularly rich in meter, palilogy, and internal rhymes.
. . . our eyes, kept closed against branches,
opened slowly to a shimmering white,
flower sleeves that lit themselves and flaredover dark leaves. Like stars, whose light is both
a wailed call and calm response, they leapt
out from shadows as we leaned down to breathethe barest scent of pepper from their centers
and walked among green leaf and flame-white petal,
careful that our feet did not catch fire.
The review is one of several that appear in the December, 2018 selections of Tupelo Quarterly, a journal that publishes original poetry as well as reviews of poetry collections. If your chosen genre is fiction, try Necessary Fiction for reviews.
And yes — reading reviews of books in your chosen genre will make you a better writer, too!
