The Truly Needy and Other Stories Stories by Lucy Honig. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Pedro Ponce. The title of Lucy Honig’s debut collection, winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, echoes the familiar plea of fundraisers and activists to forget selfish personal concerns and remember the less fortunate. But for…
Rosellen Brown recommends Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy, a memoir by Frances Mayes: “Frances Mayes’s beautifully written account of her love affair with a house she and her husband renovated in Tuscany, and with a place that retains ancient standards for all things sensual, contains an essay that appeared in my personal…
Talking to High Monks in the Snow An Asian American Odyssey by Lydia Minatoya. Harper Perennial, $20.00 cloth, $11.00 paper. Reviewed by Leila Philip. “I am a woman who apologizes to her furniture,” states Lydia Minatoya halfway through her engaging memoir about growing up as a Japanese American. ” ‘Excuse me,’ I say when I…
Philip Levine recommends The Dear Past & Other Poems, a collection by Janet Lewis (Robert L. Barth): “These poems were written over a period of seventy-five years, from 1919 to 1994, and though they demonstrate a variety of strategies and structures, they are brought together by the extraordinary precision and clarity of Lewis’s artistry, as…
A more conventionally integrated dramatic element informs Richard Tillinghast's new book. The Knife and Other Poems (Wesleyan, $3.95) is his first collection in eleven years. The title poem evokes the knife as a passive symbol, like Whitman's broad-axe or Dickey's helmet: a hard, masculine image of potential violence, and yet, in this poem as in…
Ruth Whitman's Tamsen Donner has already been widely praised, and for good reason. The book is a poetic journal, imaginatively recreated, of a pioneer woman who undertook the cross-country trek to California in 1846-1847. The Donner party came to grief in the high Sierras, only a hundred miles from the Sacramento Valley. Tamsen Donner had…
The Dual Tradition An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland, by Thomas Kinsella. Carcanet Press, $17.95 paper. Reviewed by M. L. Rosenthal. Irish poetry has had a long, trauma-beset journey. In his book The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland, Thomas Kinsella leads us through its successive periods of…
Some Ether Poems by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Tony Hoagland. Someday the term confessional will seem as quaint and obsolete as a fainting couch, and we will have a new terminology, one that feels more discriminating. In the meantime, we have Nick Flynn’s compelling poems, which turn some rather extreme autobiographical…
The Barbarians Are Coming A novel by David Wong Louie. Putnam, $23.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Sterling Lung has problems. The narrator of David Wong Louie’s first novel, The Barbarians Are Coming, is a recent graduate of the CIA — the Culinary Institute of America — and he has landed what he regards as…
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