Charles Simic recommends The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson (Field Poetry Series): “If you wish to know what the prose poem can do, read Edson. He is one of the most original poets we have, widely translated and almost unknown at home.”
Maxine Kumin recommends Vietnamerica, a memoir by Thomas A. Bass: “A disturbing and totally compelling account of the lives of Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam; transported to the U.S., dumped in detention centers; used in factory jobs; fated to wander rootless from place to place. Bass, like John Balaban before him, forces us to…
Fanny Howe recommends The Letters of Mina Harker, a novel by Dodie Bellamy: “A contemporary epistolary novel that carries the ecstatic and personal extravagance of New York School poetry into a new realm. San Francisco but also novelistic observation. Sexually explicit but far from pornographic. See the difference.” (Hard Press)
The Pleasing Hour A novel by Lily King. Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. This may be the first time you hear of Lily King, but her debut novel, The Pleasing Hour, assures that it won’t be the last. With an acute sensibility tuned to the finest details of character, place, and…
The Very Air A novel by Douglas Bauer. William Morrow, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Alexandra Marshall. In The Very Air, Douglas Bauer’s second novel, “Doctor” Luther Mathias builds an empire with his pirate radio station, which broadcasts illegally over the border into the U.S. in the early part of this century. As events conspire to…
For the thirteen years since Frank Stanford's suicide at twenty-nine, most of his nine books, which were all from small presses, have been difficult if not impossible to find. Leon Stokesbury has done an impressive job winnowing the more than one thousand pages of Stanford's published poetry to one hundred and ten, including six previously…
The Pugilist at Rest Stories by Thom Jones. Little, Brown and Company, $18.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kevin Miller. Already commercially successful, with half the entries previously in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire, Thom Jones’s debut collection is best described as utterly uncompromising. From his gallery of hard-assed, hard-headed, hard-luck, or simply hard cases, to…
Even the gods crave the pungence of language we have "monstered up" for them in The Want Bone. In poems like "Lament for the Makers," "Hut," and "At Pleasure Bay," Robert Pinsky names the ways we are made — and unmade — by wanting, and how what we want is essentially shaped by naming. But…
The Long Home Poems by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Poets’ voices seldom emerge fully formed: first books more often air promise than plenitude, recklessness than resonance. But Christian Wiman’s The Long Home, winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, speaks with mature authority. The Long Home…
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