Jane Hirshfield recommends fine, poems by Stefanie Marlis: ” fine consists for the most part of brief ‘definitions’-poems that slip from actual definition into etymology into image, association, story, pondering. These elliptical prose poems liberate the relationship between the poet’s life and imagination in surprising, precise ways, like tiny explosive charges set down in…
Chase Twichell recommends Where I Stopped: Remembering Rape at Thirteen, a memoir by Martha Ramsey (Putnam): “This is a remarkably lucid, emotionally gutsy book. Its language is quiet, never sensational, yet Ramsey manages to peel back the layers of memory with real power.”
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Henry Holt, $28.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan. In the years since his death, Richard Yates has been that saddest of literary celebrities, the beloved but forgotten author. What’s most shocking about this is that he wrote not one but three great books. His early masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, has…
Where She Went Stories by Kate Walbert. Sarabande Books, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Kate Walbert’s first collection, Where She Went, gives us haunting portraits of two women — a mother and her daughter — both trapped by itinerancy. While Marion Clark, a bride of the fifties, finds nothing but ennui in her many…
Day Moon Poems by Jon Anderson. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. Day Moon, Jon Anderson’s canny and refreshing new book, is his first since publishing The Milky Way in 1983. In the intervening years, he seems to have undergone a poetic makeover on the order of a head…
Whirling Round the Sun Poems by Suzanne Noguere. Midmarch Arts Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The title poem of Suzanne Noguere’s Whirling Round the Sun transforms a bus ride through a city in autumn into an epiphany, in which “leaf / by leaf turning” serves as “a clue / to earth’s revolution.”…
Sherman Alexie recommends One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, nonfiction by Scott L. Malcomson: “This book inspired me and pissed me off. I threw it across the room in anger a few times because I disagreed so strongly with Malcomson; I also shook my head with wonder when he was so right….
The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America An anthology edited by Garrett Hongo. Anchor Books, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Stewart David Ikeda. In this time of multicultural vogue, Garrett Hongo’s extraordinary poetry anthology, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, makes an intelligent statement about the limitations of limits, the perils of essentialism, and…
Philip Levine recommends The Trust, nonfiction by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones: “A complex and fascinating story of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, owners of The New York Times, beginning with the amazing Adolph Ochs, an American success story to rival Gatsby’s, and ending yesterday with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., in command of the dynasty….
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