The Broken World Poems by Marcus Cafagña. Univ. of Illinois Press, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. The inhabitants of Marcus Cafagña’s broken world beat against the bars of circumstance and fate as the poet fixes them with the empathy of attention. Whether in the kid shooting baskets who’s “had it / with the…
The vatic voice requires that a poet believe in both the gods and in posterity, which explains its virtual absence from American letters after the annihilations of World War II. With their lyricism, passion, and irony, Allen Grossman's poems for the millennium, together with work collected from three previous volumes, fashion such a voice for…
Stained Glass Poems by Rosanna Warren. W.W. Norton, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jonathan Aaron. In “Tide Pickers,” one of the tough-minded, beautifully crafted meditations in Rosanna Warren’s third collection of poems, the speaker sees the figures of people digging for shellfish on the Brittany coast as “Question marks at the tide line.” She wonders of…
George Garrett recommends The Buddha in Malibu, stories by William Harrison: “A collection of seventeen short stories set in Hollywood, Africa, and the future.” (Missouri)
The Foreign Student A novel by Susan Choi. HarperFlamingo, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. At first, finding any similarities between South Korea and Tennessee in the 1950’s might seem impossible, but Susan Choi manages to do just that in her lyrical first novel, The Foreign Student. In 1955, Chang Ahn flees war-battered Seoul and…
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)
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