Review

rev. of Rapture by Susan Mitchell

A given of Elizabethan thought — expressed in works as different as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra — was God's goodness as made manifest through the "infinite variety," to use Enobarbus's phrase, of his creation. Susan Mitchell's Rapture, her second collection, is an extended hymn in praise of our world's…

rev. of Sky Open Again by Gian Lombardo

Sky Open Again Poems by Gian Lombardo. Dolphin-Moon, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Priscilla Sneff. The prose poem, constructed of sentences rather than lines, is a more liquid sort of solid than other poems. More like glass — that is, molten, mobile, globby — than crystal, the prose poem makes do without enjambment, relying instead on…

rev. of My Body to You by Elizabeth Searle

My Body to You Stories by Elizabeth Searle. Univ. of Iowa Press, $22.95. 1992 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winner, selected by James Salter. Reviewed by James Carroll. Elizabeth Searle has written these stories in fire. They are thirteen searing portraits of women or girls whose lives have taken them to the extreme of feeling —…

rev. of Out West by Fred Leebron

Out West A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is nothing timid about Fred G. Leebron’s first novel, Out West. He takes two basically decent, highly educated, young social do-gooders and quickly steeps them into the squalid heart of two murders, and then asks us, his readers, to…

Reader’s Block by David Markson

Ann Beattie recommends Reader’s Block, a novel by David Markson: “Finally: a fictional sequel to Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ Markson’s novel advances by allusion and cumulative effect, like a big snowball going downhill (and it’s impossible to read without realizing that the twentieth century has gone the same way). This is really a work of genius:…

My Shining Archipelago by Taluikki Ansel

Maura Stanton recommends My Shining Archipelago, poems by Taluikki Ansel: “Ansel’s poems are surprising and imaginative, filled with fresh insight into the natural world. Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.” (Yale)

rev. of Paradise, New York by Eileen Pollack

Paradise, New York A novel by Eileen Pollack. Temple Univ. Press, $27.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Paradise, New York, Eileen Pollack, author of the acclaimed 1991 story collection The Rabbi in the Attic, deftly evokes the entertaining and complex life of a Catskills hotel, as seen through the eyes of…

rev. of Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands by Martin Espada

In this slender collection of ethnic and political poetry, Martín Espada does what many black poets of the Sixties did with the Broadside Poetry Series during the black arts movement. He writes for an audience not limited to poets and writers, but for the community at large, and Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's…

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…