Justin Kaplan recommends The Edge of Marriage, debut stories by Hester Kaplan: “Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and praised by The New York Times Book Review for the work’s ‘graceful, accomplished prose’ and by The Boston Globe for the portrayal of ‘articulate adults, fully aware at every moment of the agony they are…
Thomas Lux recommends Spare Change, poems by Kevin Pilkington: “Tough, quirky, lucid poems by a poet unafraid of being understood.” (La Jolla Poets)
The Blue Hour A novel by Elizabeth Evans. Algonquin Books, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Janet Desaulniers. In Elizabeth Evans’s first novel, The Blue Hour, the narrator, Penny, recounts her teenaged years with both a child’s twitchy, anticipatory dread of the future and an adult’s sorrowful knowledge of the past. The book peels away the decorous…
The End of the Alphabet Poems by Claudia Rankine. Grove, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Michael J. Carter. In Claudia Rankine’s new collection, The End of the Alphabet, the always tenuous relationship between language and felt experience is stretched nearly to its limit: “The moment / of elucidation snipped its tongue.” Anguishing and fragmented, the voice…
Thomas Lux recommends Squandering, poems by George Mills: “Gorgeous, utterly original poems by a poet now in his mid-seventies. Exceptionally beautiful production-a limited letterpress edition. His first book was The House Sails Out of Sight of Home, winner of the 1991 Morse Poetry Prize, from Northeastern University Press.” (Indian Hill)
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)
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