Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Robert Boswell recommends Big Time, by Rus Bradburd (Etruscan Press, 2024). “This novel is hilarious. A university has given up the pretense and is openly run by college sports, leaving professors to haggle over the rights to concessions at the big games—which is how they fund their departments. I laughed aloud maybe twenty times. Like DeLillo’s White Noise, this novel may not seem like a satire in the foreseeable future. But right now, it’s wonderfully funny.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends Every Minute is First: Selected Late Poems, by Marie-Claire Bancquart, translated by Jody Gladding (Milkweed Editions, 2024). “This collection by a major French poet brings original perception and a gift for surreal detail to one of life’s essential crossroads: its nearing close. Objects claim their own agency; strangeness and side-leap remind at times of Jean Valentine; small acts of witness, invention, questioning, and memory feel dropped into a well without bottom. Suffusing these poems also: an enormous tenderness toward the existence its writer knows she soon will be leaving—but not yet.”
David St. John recommends The Wound Is the Place the Light Enters, by Howard Norman (Texas Tech University Press, 2024). “This extraordinary book about friendship and art recounts the writer’s close friendship with the painter Jake Berthot leading up to their final day together.”
Richard Tillinghast recommends What Can the Matter Be?, by Keith Taylor (Wayne State University Press, 2024). “Taylor is a serious birder and naturalist, and the knowledge he brings to the global crisis of climate change gives gravity, authority, and persuasiveness to these poems.”
Maura Stanton recommends A Walk with Frank O’Hara, by Susan Aizenberg (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). “I loved every poem in this compelling book. Always clear, always insightful, these elegant poems conjure old grief and love and politics, but also describe and articulate our rich but anxious daily life.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Darkening Mirror, by Wang Jiaxin, translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell (Tebot Bach, 2016). “Not ‘new’ (it came out in 2016) but new to me: this collection of new and selected poems by Wang Jiaxin stirs me to want to write poems. A Chinese poet who has translated Celan, Yeats, and Mandelstam, and who taught for years at Renmin University in Beijing, Wang now splits time between Beijing and New York. His poems are lyrically compressed, suggestive, subtle. ‘Write as Pushkin wrote,’ he advises in ‘Varykino Ballad,’ ‘in gold, turning pain into music.’ From ‘Another Landscape’: ‘A ritual: sit down, cast your shadow on the wall, do nothing but listen.’”
