Shark Dialogues A novel by Kiana Davenport. Atheneum, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min. Hawaiian-born writer Kiana Davenport’s new novel, Shark Dialogues, resembles a myriad of dreams, each of them urgent and vivid, some dark with destruction and heartbreak, others bright with triumph, all shimmering with sensual beauty. Davenport manages to create a world that…
Among the many pleasures of Old and New Poems is the process of soul-making revealed within its pages. Donald Hall's gifts for seemingly effortless, exact language and formal grace were present from the start, as were his intimations of mortality, both for individuals and for New England's rural life, practiced by generations, supplanted by suburbia….
In her latest book of poems, Lucille Clifton writes about the lives of women as poets, historical witnesses, opinionated friends, mothers, wives. With all of them, there is a painful honesty that makes Clifton's work worthwhile, even if not for every taste. Often, the poems are personal, barren utterances of feminist rage, represented in a…
Robert Boswell recommends Silk, stories by Grace Dane Mazur: “Mazur is a former microbiologist, and the stories in her first collection offer a means of apprehending the world that is both intellectually fascinating and sensually wired. It is either a book of the mind about pleasures of the flesh, or a book of the flesh…
George Garrett recommends Omniphobia, fiction by R. H. W. Dillard (Louisiana State): “Four stories and three novellas by a master of American metafiction. A virtuoso demonstration of the virtues of the avant-garde.”
DeWitt Henry recommends Rabbit Fever, stories by Geoffrey Clark: “Geoffrey Clark’s new collection, Rabbit Fever, is rich with terrible beauties. His mature prose is fresh with sensory texture, sonority, wit, hard-learned truths, and precisely dramatized voice. The progress through the collection as well as the upper Michigan setting is reminiscent of Hemingway’s Men Without Women,…
Sister to Sister: Women Write About the Unbreakable Bond. An anthology edited by Patricia Foster. Anchor Books/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. For the anthology Sister to Sister, Patricia Foster has gathered twenty compelling pieces on an essential subject: the relationships of sisters. Foster writes in her introduction that she opened her eyes one…
Gail Mazur recommends Open Water, a novel by Maria Flook (Pantheon): “Maria Flook’s people in Open Water are the product of her full-hearted embrace of an American kind of nuttiness and a zest for their strange self-induced troubles. The margin, which is their habitat, is wildly, deliciously drawn by a writer of enormous intelligence and…
Rain A novel by Kirsty Gunn. Grove/Atlantic, $15.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. In New Zealander Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain, twelve-year-old Janey and her five-year-old brother, Jim, fight the loss of their innocence as their parents’ world encroaches upon them. They live by an enormous lake, where they play alone, seduced by the solace…
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