New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
Rosellen Brown recommends Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking, 2025). “In this heartbreaking tribute to her husband Tony Horwitz who died suddenly, far too young, the formidable journalist-turned-novelist Brooks teaches a lesson on grieving, which does not occur in those famous seven steps. She brings him alive only to share with us what it was like to lose him.”
Tess Gallagher recommends Raven on the Moaners’ Bench, by Gary Copeland Lilley (Four Way Books, Fall 2025). “When I read this book in manuscript I felt it was an unforgettable American historical document with a great emotional undertow about Black migration within America, small-town violence inherent across the country for persons of color and ethnic difference, misogynistic violence against women, and the lost-on-the-streets-lives of our mentally ill. It needs to be required reading as it is a life changing book.”
DeWitt Henry recommends The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller by Lawrence Kessenich (Pierian Springs Press, 2025). “A well-researched, inventive, and witty sequel to Henry James’s Daisy Miller, where Daisy not only survives, but prevails.”
Joyce Peseroff recommends As If: Variations on Enrique Anderson-Imbert by Steven Cramer (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2025). “Steven Cramer’s done it again. This time, instead of rendering Rilke in a series of departures from New Poems (1907) and New Poems: The Other Part (1908), Cramer transforms twenty-one micro-stories by Enrique Anderson-Imbert into a series of poems that perfectly reflect the originals’ weird, dreamlike qualities. Cramer has an impeccable ear for the tone and voice of each brief lyric—winsome, deadpan, and utterly surprising. The series of variations Cramer crafts from the Argentine’s prose are by turns funny, provocative, and piquant, and always deeply imagined.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends The Venus of Odesa: New and Selected Poems by Askold Melnyczuk (MadHat Press, 2025). “Some of us admirers of Askold Melnyczuk’s fiction and political essays have also anticipated and then admired the occasional appearance of his poems. So we are deeply grateful for this long-awaited first collection. These poems are wrenching, often wryly witty, and always humane and generous.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends Utopians in Love by Bob Sykora (Game Over Books, 2025). “It’s such a treat to read poems that are fresh, unpretentious, witty, and seductive, but also serious and thoughtful. What a pleasure to find a young poet whose work is so consistently satisfying.”
Laura van den Berg recommends Habitat by Case Q. Kerns (Black Lawrence Press, August 2025). “A collection of interconnected stories set in a near-future New England: surprising, haunting, and beautifully strange.”
Rosanna Warren recommends The Selected Shepherd: Poems, edited by Jericho Brown (Universty of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). “Reginald Shepherd, who died in 2008 at age forty-five, left seven books of full-throated, gloriously and sometimes savagely lyrical poems, as well as a lot of sophisticated literary criticism. He made centuries of English poetry his own. A true original. Now Jericho Brown has given us the gift of this judicious selection.”
