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…
The Chain Poems by Tom Sleigh. Univ. of Chicago Press, $35.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Tom Sleigh’s third collection, The Chain, reads as if the history of poetry culminated in his voice. From the beginning, Sleigh’s book encompasses, and is encompassed by, the mythical. “Lamentation on Ur,” an “adaptation, from a…
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Stories by Aimee Bender. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. All elements are on fire in Aimee Bender’s startling and funny debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Set predominantly in San Francisco and parts unknown, these sixteen stories boldly and confidently explore the nature of failed…
Sunday. As a title, it is somehow exactly right, and it has the curiously precise, poker-faced character of a good Lux poem. But Sunday is also, of course, what happens after Saturday night; it is both the day of grace and everyone's day off, both the worst and the best of days, depending, of course,…
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)
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