The stories in Eileen Pollack's first collection, The Rabbi in the Attic, occupy the delicate knife edges of human emotion with such utter solidity and weight that this writer keeps rereading in hope of discovering how she does it. In one story a woman allows an air conditioner to fall seventeen stories and flatten a…
The Way Out Poems by Lisa Sewell. Alice James Books, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. Lisa Sewell’s first collection of poems, The Way Out, explores territory that’s not fit for the timid; whether she’s writing about the body’s generation or its decay, or of love, or sex, or of abortions, she does so with…
Maxine Kumin recommends The Making of a Poem, an anthology edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland: “An eminently sensible book to work from, this anthology of poetic forms is delightfully varied, with succinct commentary.” (Norton)
Kazuo Ishiguro's justifiably acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, has been considered unique due to the fact that the writer, a Japanese who grew up in England, has demonstrated his brilliance in projecting his imagination into the mental habits of a British butler, Stevens, who serves in the household of Lord Darlington. Stevens' language…
Marilyn Hacker recommends The Woman Behind You, poems by Julie Fay: “Julie Fay’s The Woman Behind You is at once a superb manifestation of the contemporary possibilities of lyric poetry and a sustained and gripping narrative of a late-twentieth-century woman’s life, exemplary in its specificities, picaresque in the geographic and erotic vicissitudes of its quest….
The Master of Letters Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. Rarely does a book of poems appear that takes us back to poems and poets we know we should read again. Even more unusual is a book that sends us back to these poems with an entirely new way of…
The River at Work Poems by Jean Valentine. Alice James Books, $8.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. There are some poets whose work incites a reader to metaphor. This is especially true of those whose ultimate subject is the unsayable, the numinous — where the risks taken by the poet must provoke her reader into…
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)
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