The Dumbbell Nebula by Steve Kowit
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Dumbbell Nebula, poems by Steve Kowit: “A book of rangy, big-hearted, capacious poems, full of surprising wisdoms and affection for the world as it is.” (Heyday)
Review
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Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa by Charles Nicholl
Charles Baxter recommends Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, a biography by Charles Nicholl: “An eerie, brilliant, and weirdly comic story about a poet who gradually became a real-life Joseph Conrad character.” (Chicago)
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rev. of The Best of the West #4 an anthology edited by James and Denise Thomas
The West is a place of myth, legend, and genre. "Call it a geography of the heart — a geological survey of western literary imagination," write the editors. The stories in this collection were chosen not necessarily because they are from and about the region, but because they follow a tradition in theme and setting,…
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rev. of The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
In Delmore Schwartz's short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the protagonist imagines a film of his parents' courtship. He watches in impotent anguish for a while as they move inexorably toward their future and his, and then he stands suddenly and shouts to them not to do it, that nothing good can ever come of…
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rev. of My Sister Life by Maria Flook
My Sister Life A memoir by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. The author of the novels Open Water and Family Night, Maria Flook turns to memoir in My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister’s Disappearance, and delivers an original, gripping, intensely moving story. In 1964, Flook’s fourteen-year-old sister Karen…
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Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine by Peter Canning
James Alan McPherson recommends Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine, a memoir by Peter Canning: “Peter Canning is a former student from both Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His book is an excellently written account of the lifesaving roles played by paramedics in an increasingly dangerous world. I might add that Peter is…
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rev. of Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow by August Kleinzahler
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow Poems by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $19.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Rivard. August Kleinzahler is a poet whose freshness provokes other poets and critics into describing him as the offspring of unlikely matings. In one book blurb, Thom Gunn brings together Frank O’Hara and Basil Bunting. Helen Vendler,…
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Naming the Light: A Week of Years by Rosemary Deen
Marilyn Hacker recommends Naming the Light: A Week of Years, essays by Rosemary Deen: “These essays mostly begin with the natural world near at hand: the author’s rambling garden in Ulster County, New York. But they range and reach out the way a brilliantly polymath mind does: to Florentine painting, American rural architecture, medieval polyphony,…
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Pears, Lake, Sun by Sandy Solomon
Maura Stanton recommends Pears, Lake, Sun, a first book of poems by Sandy Solomon: “Sandy Solomon is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The poems in Pears, Lake, Sun are tough-minded and impeccably crafted, full of passionate stillness and disciplined commotion.” (Pittsburgh)