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)
This two-volume, bilingual set is the first complete edition of Anna Akhmatova's poems to appear in either Russian or English, and its publication is an event comparable to Thomas Johnson's definitive version of Emily Dickinson. Akhmatova has been numbered with Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam as one of Russia's four great modern poets. Yet the bulk…
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. It is obvious from the first poem in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s debut book of poetry in English that her concerns will be large: “while my grandfather, a prisoner of war / in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned / booties…
Don Lee recommends Take Three, poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joe Osterhaus, and Larissa Szporluk: “An innovative and worthy new annual series from Graywolf, edited by Agni’s Askold Melnyczuk. Designed to launch the work of new poets, this first volume presents about twenty-five poems by each of these young writers — three very different, vibrant…
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