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)
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…
Spring 2023 - Digital