Readers of literary magazines and anthologies frequently speak of Stuart Dybek's stories with reverence, and they will certainly covet The Coast of Chicago, his second collection, which brings together several works already deemed classics: "Hot Ice," "Blight," and "Pet Milk." Seven long stories are interleaved with seven shorter ones, and they are bound so tightly…
The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 Poems by Jack Gilbert. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Daniel. One of the joys of reading Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires is how stubbornly it celebrates the courage and beauty found in the most habitual, commonly shared moments of our lives. This will come as news to no one…
Maura Stanton recommends Swamp Candles, poems by Ralph Burns: “In his new book, Ralph Burns fuses the two major strands in American poetry. His spare images dazzle us with their precision, while his colloquial voice moves us with its vital rhythms and deep emotions.” (Univ. of Iowa)
The Coast of Good Intentions Stories by Michael Byers. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin. $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In nearly every story in The Coast of Good Intentions, a debut collection by Michael Byers, there is the beguiling and disconcerting sense that all the real action is happening offstage, that offstage people are cheating on…
If a work of art is the realization of one's deepest imaginative processes, including the dream process, then everything that an artist produces becomes part of his own privately-ordered collection, which as a matter of course moves into the public domain. In this literal sense, Brian Moore's Great Victorian Collection can be viewed as a…
"Perpetual Motion," the title of Sweet Ruin's keynote poem, provides an apt analogue for Tony Hoagland's work. His muscular, conversational lines sprint from narrative passages to metaphorical clusters to speculative meditations, and then loop back, fast-talking and digressing their way into the book's richly American interior. Hoagland's poems grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they…
Dan Wakefield recommends The Collected Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman, stories by Bruce Jay Friedman: “One of the funniest writers of our time, the first American master of black humor fiction, he’s collected his best stories in one volume. ‘Brazzaville Teenager’ is the best thing since Ring Lardner.” (Donald I. Fine)
George Garrett recommends The Hatbox Baby, a novel by Carrie Brown: “Carrie Brown’s third novel is set in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and concerns the ‘Infantorium’-an exhibit of live premature babies.” (Algonquin)
Maxine Kumin recommends Sympathetic Systems, poems by Carole Simmons Oles: “These are vivid narrative poems, many of them family-centered, written in a sparkling, spare diction. When Oles is elliptical, the reader leaps with her, the unsaid so deftly placed that the whole poem takes you by the nape of the neck.” (Lynx House)
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