Oubliette Poems by Peter Richards. Verse Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. If you are a poet of any seriousness, you make a style for yourself out of one essential contradiction: the “thinginess” of experience, of thinking and feeling, and especially of silence, can’t be captured by words. The most distinctive stylists of the…
Come Up and See Me Sometime Short stories by Erika Krouse. Scribner, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Debra Spark. Mae West provides the title for Erika Krouse’s debut book, Come Up and See Me Sometime, and also the epigraphs for the collection’s thirteen stories. But the bawdy self-confidence of Mae West (“I’m single because I was…
Wavemaker II A novel by Mary-Beth Hughes. Grove/Atlantic Monthly, $24.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her admirable debut novel, Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes stitches together a complex story of an unraveling family against the backdrop of the early 1960’s misdoings of Roy Cohn, the controversial McCarthy-era lawyer. While the storyline is full of daring…
Robert Boswell recommends Leaving Disneyland, a novel by Alexander Parsons: ” Leaving Disneyland is a powerful and wide-ranging story of betrayal, violence, and regret. The book is brutally honest, unsparing, and written with amazing authority. The piercing sadness of Doc Kane is so beautifully rendered that the reader comes to see it as something more-a…
Waterborne Poems by Linda Gregerson. Houghton Mifflin, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. “Eyes Like Leeks,” the first poem in Linda Gregerson’s new collection, Waterborne, distills in a parenthesis the problematic that pervades the poems: “(how / odd / to be this and no other and, like all / / the others, marked for…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Facing the Facts, poems by Laurie Blauner: “Laurie Blauner’s fourth collection includes fifty-seven poems, ranging from largely tranquil domestic scenes to the stark contrast of the final section, in which she explores the characters and situations of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s horror tale seems eerily relevant to the marvels and terrors of twenty-first-century…
The Caprices Short stories by Sabina Murray. Mariner Books, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by Debra Spark. The Caprices, Sabina Murray’s ambitious debut collection of stories, largely concerns the lives of men and women in the Far East in the early forties, which is to say, those who were affected by World War II, either by being…
George Garrett recommends Sallies, poems by R.H.W. Dillard: “Dillard’s latest and sixth collection of poems-rich and wise.” (LSU)
Russell Banks recommends Senseless, a novel by Stona Fitch: “A scary, smart moral fable for the post-9/11 U.S. reality, it’s short and not at all sweet.” (Soho)
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