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Maxine Kumin recommends This Smoke that Carried Us, poems by René Char, translated by Susanne Dubroff: “This volume of selected poems, with a sensitive and informative introduction by Christopher Merrill, is an essential document of World War II. Many of these poems were written while parachutists were dropping behind enemy lines, but the subject matter,…
No Planets Strike, poems by Josh Bell (Zoo): The network of motifs in Josh Bell’s debut volume, No Planets Strike, create as intricate a system as the roads, tunnels, and bridges that comprise the transportation systems of major metropolitan cities, allowing the reader to traverse the speaker’s psyche at dizzying, gratifying speeds. This is not…
Bill Knott, The Unsubscriber, poems: The poems in Knott’s collection, his first in a decade, are surreal yet vernacular, outrageous yet tender—absolutely unique, iconoclastic, and astonishing. (FSG)
C. D. Wright recommends Altazor, poetry by Vincente Huidrobro, translated by Eliot Weinberger: “A book-length poem from the twenties that continues to set the mind on fire. An exhilarating tribute to the future, which is perhaps the only place it is reasonable to aspire since the present is nonetheless interesting but a deadly spot in…
What You’ve Been Missing, stories by Janet Desaulniers (Iowa): Janet Desaulniers’s debut collection, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, is surprisingly lovely and thrilling, in that it offers incredible intimacy and honesty in the face of life’s worst calamities. In one story, a mother notes after the death of her young son: "Life,…
Philip Levine, Breath, poems: Levine, in these heady, extraordinary new poems, looks back at his life to unearth rites of passage in an America of victories and betrayals. (Knopf)
Stratis Haviaras, translation of The Canon, poems by C. P. Cavafy: Haviaras’s marvelous new translations of the one hundred fifty-four poems Cavafy published during his lifetime resonate, as Seamus Heaney says in his introduction, with “the abundance and excitement of . . . restoration.” (Hermes)
The Man Who Sleeps in My Office, poems by Jason Sommer (Chicago): Jason Sommer’s latest book is tough and nuanced, at turns both public and private, and ambitious in the subjects it takes on: while touring a concentration camp in Prague, a young American couple think of "[t]hose who were naked here / and had…
Campbell McGrath, Pax Atomica, poems: With singular verve, McGrath continues ever deeper into the jungle of American culture with poems that are musical, comedic, and impassioned. (Ecco)
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