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)
Cathedral of the North Poems by Connie Voisine. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. Connie Voisine’s Cathedral of the North is an intriguing account of the working poor of Maine, a place where the speaker’s “yard blooms with refrigerators and cars inside out and rusting.” Like Carolyn Chute’s earlier novels, Voisine’s…
Sue Miller, The World Below, a novel: In her sixth novel, Miller hauntingly exposes the nerves, hopes, and regrets that lie hidden in the marriages and families of two women-a San Francisco schoolteacher and her Vermont grandmother. (Knopf)
Howard Norman, The Haunting of L., a novel: The final book in Norman’s Canadian trilogy, this beautifully crafted novel-set in Manitoba and Halifax-becomes a chilling fable about moral blindness, spirit photography, adultery, artistic ambition, and greed. (FSG)
James Alan McPherson recommends Who’s Irish? by Gish Jen: “Very funny stories about domesticity.” (Knopf)
Rosellen Brown recommends Inspired Sleep, a novel by Robert Cohen: “This novel, more gently than DeLillo’s White Noise, and with a wicked wit, takes an appalled look at Americans’ current work-weary, sleep-deprived, multitasking-unsatisfactory-lives and shows why it’s no wonder so many reach for the anodyne of pills. Sympathetic to some and hell on others, this…
Wild Ride Essays by Bia Lowe. HarperCollins, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Bonnie Friedman. Bia Lowe’s lovely first book, Wild Ride, uniquely combines nature essays with personal narrative. Each piece — composed of succulent, sweet prose — is a thought pagoda, ideas storied one atop another, from sneezes to alfalfa to sexual betrayal to Halley’s comet…
Madeline DeFrees recommends I Want This World, poems by Margaret Szumowsky: “Margaret Szumowsky’s poems embody a global consciousness. In her first full-length collection, she reveals a lively energy, a sharp eye for the triumphs and the foibles of the human condition, and a wide-ranging empathy. These are poems the reader will return to again and…
Chase Twichell recommends Vortex of Indian Fevers, poems by Adrian C. Louis (TriQuarterly): “More passionate, funny, dead-serious poems from one of the most overlooked poets in America.”
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