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…
The Stonecutter’s Hand Poems by Richard Tillinghast. David R. Godine, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Eleven years after the publication of Our Flag Was Still There, Richard Tillinghast has assembled a fourth full-length collection, The Stonecutter’s Hand, that solidifies and deepens the considerable achievements of his earlier work. Tillinghast’s new volume of poems…
In "A Microtome," Paul Hannigan suggests "naming each orgasm after a famous magician." Sleight-of-hand seems to me the key to the poems in The Carnation: sometimes the drone of conversation or the montony of the mind just rambling is inexplicably transformed into vision — clear, hard, wrought vision; sometimes a sort of camp nonchalance or…
Thomas Lux recommends The Forgiveness Parade, poems by Jeffrey McDaniel: “A terrifying, hilarious, and utterly alive second book by a young poet still in his early thirties. Read this book. If you get a chance to hear him read/perform, don’t miss it: he can do it on the stage and on the page.” (Manic D)
Madison Smartt Bell recommends Stop Breaking Down, debut stories by John McManus: “Would I be happy to have written these stories myself? I wish I could have written them.” (Picador)
The Cartographer’s Vacation Poems by Andrea Cohen. Owl Creek Press, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. With its aesthetic roots planted in the tradition of American Surrealism, Andrea Cohen’s first collection, The Cartographer’s Vacation, is delightfully unfashionable. Cohen might well have hung these lines from her poem “Instructions for Writing” on the cover of the…
Beginning with "Gratitude" and ending with "The Sheets of Sound," two long poems which together describe the influences on Cornelius Eady's art of "pushing / Any damn wall" and "sailing / Right over //The top," The Gathering of My Name reveals a writer of sly confidence and generous authority. Good-humored enough in "Atomic Prayer" to…
Stygo A novel by Laura Hendrie. MacMurray & Beck, $16.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. Although Laura Hendrie’s first novel, Stygo, focuses on the tiny beet growers’ town of Stygo, Colorado, it is in no way limited by its narrow geographic boundaries. To the contrary, Hendrie’s brilliantly precise writing offers an organic view of…
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