Alberto Ríos, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, poems: Ríos wryly carves poems from fable, parable, and family legend to examine the Nogales, Arizona, of his childhood-a literal and metaphorical border between the U.S. and Mexico. (Copper Canyon)
Tim O’Brien, July, July, a novel: O’Brien’s new book deftly centers on a July 2000 weekend when the Darton Hall College class of 1969 gathers for a reunion. The sharply drawn ensemble includes a Vietnam vet, a Republican trophy wife recovering from a mastectomy, and a mop manufacturer. (Houghton Mifflin)
George Garrett recommends Do I Owe You Something, a memoir by Michael Mewshaw: “Novelist and nonfiction writer Mewshaw here offers a focused memoir concerning writers he has known well over many years. At the still point where memory and gossip become history, he gives us candid and surprising portraits of giants and pygmies of the…
Elizabeth Spires, Now the Green Blade Rises, poems: Spires movingly meditates on the life-and-death matters of midlife-the separation of parent from child, the loss of family and friends, the evolving nature of our closest relationships. (Norton)
Discography, poems by Sean Singer (Yale): Selected by W. S. Merwin as winner of the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Sean Singer’s Discography is a singular, quirky, and, at times, astonishingly beautiful first book. While jazz provides the central subject matter and metaphor for the collection, Singer’s poems don’t spend much time in rooms…
Jane Hirshfield recommends Ripe, poems by Roy Jacobstein: "Roy Jacobstein’s Ripe, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize, is a book of balance, precision, vision, courage, and wit. Each poem feels solidly present in what it knows, each poem is fragrant with lived life—just as its title implies, here is a poet come into his ripeness."…
Maxine Kumin recommends Now the Green Blade Rises, poems by Elizabeth Spires: “A book remarkable for its grace, its willingness to grapple with large metaphysical issues in modest and physical terms, and an eloquence that is an unusual commodity in most contemporary collections.” (Norton)
On This Day, a novel by Nathaniel Bellows (HarperCollins): A compelling, heartfelt first novel about an eighteen-year-old brother and his twenty-year-old sister who are orphaned by their parents. Warren and Joan’s father dies of cancer, and, within months, their mother commits suicide. In their small Maine hometown, the siblings try to ward off a pushy…
DeWitt Henry recommends A Tragic Honesty, a biography by Blake Bailey: “Richard Yates comes fully alive as an artist and as a man in this meticulously researched, judicious, and critically perceptive biography. Blake Bailey has done for Yates what Carlos Baker did for Hemingway, allowing Yates himself to speak from letters, archives, reported conversations, and…
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