Review

Misery Prefigured by J. Allyn Rosser

David Gullette recommends Misery Prefigured, poems by J. Allyn Rosser: “The voice in Rosser’s second book is sassy and self-assured: ‘To say screw them, to be screw-them / bent on one thing all but lost, / one music or mystery, / beyond all the necessary / incidental snaggings of the heart.’ In ‘Prell’ a man…

Forever Remembered edited by Irv Broughton

George Garrett recommends Forever Remembered, interviews edited by Irv Broughton: “This is a wonderful gathering of interviews with World War II combat pilots. Broughton, a poet and filmmaker, is every bit as good as Studs Terkel in eliciting the stories and memories of these old guys.” (Eastern Washington)

Ladies of the Borobudur by Barbara Haines Howett

DeWitt Henry recommends Ladies of the Borobudur, stories by Barbara Haines Howett: “Although Howett’s stories portray a variety of characters, the primary focus is on corporate wives in Indonesia and their troubled awareness of social injustice and of the richness of cultural differences. Howett explores and evokes astonishingly different points of view, and her post-colonial…

Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm by David Hamilton

DeWitt Henry recommends Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, by David Hamilton: “In an experimental ‘memoir’ that extends from the personal to the regional to the historic and geographical with an epic sweep comparable to Thoreau’s in Walden and William Carlos Williams’s in Paterson, New Jersey, Hamilton considers the legacies of injustice in…

What We Carry by Dorianne Laux

Philip Levine recommends What We Carry, poems by Dorianne Laux (BOA Editions): “Gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today.”

rev. of You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook

You Have the Wrong Man Stories by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. First as a poet, and then as a novelist, Maria Flook has established herself as a writer with an astonishing vision — an artist who refuses to blink. Now, in her first book of stories, You Have the…

Feeding the Fire by Jeffrey Harrison

Philip Levine recommends Feeding the Fire, poems by Jeffrey Harrison: "It’s thrilling to read an entire book of poems written with such pleasure and gusto. Harrison writes with remarkable confidence about a range of ordinary things—salt, rowing a boat, discarded books, a stinking pond—and he gets more out of his subjects than seems possible. How…

rev. of What Work Is by Philip Levine

Those who have read the poems that Philip Levine has produced in his thirty years of writing know that perhaps no other living poet has earned so fully the right to tell us "what work is." The various "grease-jobs," as he calls them, held in his native Detroit in his earlier days have provided him…

rev. of Yours, and Mine by Judith Rascoe

The Renaissance had its studies where the master taught his arts to apprentices, and today we have, for writers at least, the graduate writing schools where more than one master passes on the traditions. Stanford is one of those schools and has graduated such people (to name a few women) as Hannah Green who wrote…