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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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)
Philip Levine recommends Reign of Snakes, poems by Robert Wrigley: “Robert Wrigley has been a fine poet through four previous books; his last, In the Bank of the Beautiful Sins, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. In this new book he has become someone else, someone who has wandered into a ferocious cave…
George Garrett recommends Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure, a textbook by Madison Smartt Bell: “A remarkable textbook with an unusual point of view, in which the structural design is primary in the writing of fiction. With excellent examples and analyses.” (Norton)
No products in the cart.