Review

Madeline DeFrees, Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems: Displaying quiet clarity and humor, this collection covers fifty years of writing, with twenty-three new poems joining selections from six earlier books and two chapbooks. (Copper Canyon)

Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins, stories: Nine incisive stories and a bravura novella that explicate the sins of adultery and lust. These dramas unfold in Maine, Connecticut, New Orleans, Michigan, and elsewhere with flawless execution. (Knopf)

Henry Bromell, Little America, a novel: A rousing, clever, and thoughtful tale that’s part John Cheever and part John Le Carré, this novel follows historian Terry Hooper from Boston to Rome as he tries to clarify his CIA father’s involvement in the assassination of a Middle Eastern king. (Knopf)

George Garrett, Going to See the Elephant: A miscellany of works that exhibit Garrett’s sly and humane sensibilities, including essays, a memoir, a poem, a story, and an interview, edited by Jeb Livingood. (Texas Review Press)

Donald Hall, The Painted Bed, poems: Hall’s masterful thirteenth collection of poems expand on the themes of love, death, and mourning. The works here are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing-“mania is melancholy reversed,” he writes. (Houghton Mifflin)

Maxine Kumin, The Long Marriage, poems: Kumin’s luminous twelfth volume of poetry dips into themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery, along with tributes to Wordsworth, Gorki, and Rukeyser. (Norton)

Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, personal essays: With artful, witty, illuminating prose, Levine recounts his youth in Detroit and his adulthood in California and Spain, and celebrates his mentors John Berryman and Yvor Winters. (Michigan)