The World Book Poems by Steven Cramer. Copper Beech Press, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. “Sentimentality,” Wallace Stevens said, “is a failure of feeling.” The poems in Steven Cramer’s courageous and powerful second collection, The World Book, risk that failure: they address themes susceptible to sentiment, such as the narrator’s adolescence, the deaths…
Christopher Tilghman recommends The Mirror, a novel by Lynn Freed: “Lynn Freed pulls off a stunning tour de force in this flawless life story of a woman in South Africa after World War I. Please, read this book.” (Crown)
The Sixteen Pleasures A novel by Robert Hellenga. Soho Press, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. A character in The Sixteen Pleasures tells of a shop in Rome where petitioners in marital annulment cases can buy old postcards, old inks, and old uncanceled stamps, for the purpose of fabricating evidence from the past. This desire…
What a disconcerting book of poems Lloyd Schwartz has written! If Hell, as Hegel said, is Other People, then Schwartz does not even allow us the comfort of such infernal alienation — These People are among us, the poet himself right on the line, and the sad, the mad, and the had constitute an astonishing…
Maxine Kumin and Joyce Peseroff recommend The Moon Reflected Fire, poems by Doug Anderson (Alice James). Kumin: “These are war poems-war poems and beyond. Vivid, compelling, controlled, and often wildly lyrical.” Peseroff: “Not just about Vietnam but resonant with the history of warriors from the backyard to The Iliad to the Bible, Doug Anderson’s first…
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Snow Watcher, poems by Chase Twichell: “Chase Twichell’s new poems are both austere and luminous, both quiet and deeply startling. Her encounter with contemplative mind yields a poetry unlike any other-a new integration of Zen practice and American experience, American sentences. An utterly compelling and extraordinary book.” (Ontario)
Philip Levine recommends Things that Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones: “Rodney Jones is a new and long overdue discovery of mine. With wit, charm, and great resourcefulness, he writes wonderfully uncluttered poems that pay tribute to a rich cast of characters, from Aunt Madge to Melody, ‘the teenage welfare mother down the hall.’ His…
In the last century, Tolstoy put forth some thoughts on addiction in his essay, "Why Do Men Stupify Themselves?" His thesis is that we drink, take dope of one kind or another, even use tobacco, primarily for the ignoble ends of releasing us from the sanctions and general hamstringing of our consciences. People resort to…
Mary Caponegro opens The Star Café with the image of a "circular garland" that can only be appreciated if you "develop the telescope within yourself, your own inner eye, to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur; slimy or smooth." From the start, hers is no ordinary…
No products in the cart.