Igloo Among Palms Stories by Rod Val Moore. Univ. of Iowa, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Selected by Joy Williams for the 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Rod Val Moore’s Igloo Among Palms proves to be a highly original and engaging collection. Set in dusty towns on both sides of the California-Mexico border, the…
Jimmy & Rita Poems by Kim Addonizio. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Whitman’s famous proclamation “Through me the many long dumb voices,” depending on how it strikes the ear, echoes either with self-aggrandizement, a song that appropriates everything within shouting distance to swell its own puny notes, or with self-erasure,…
Maura Stanton recommends Liver, poems by Charles Harper Webb: ” Liver, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, is a book you can read cover to cover with astonishing delight. The poems are witty, imaginative, stylistically sophisticated, and completely accurate about life on a planet crowded with billions of others like you. Buy this…
From Oedipus to Tom Jones to Luke Skywalker, our culture is full of children who need to discover their true parents. The quest for lineage has been the subject of sagas and fairy tales, and in her fifth full-length collection of poems, Madeline DeFrees adds a woman's sensibility to the heroic search for family, identity,…
Mark Strand recommends Journey to the Land of the Flies, essays by Aldo Buzzi: “It is impossible to describe the homey exoticism of this book, its associative richness, its great intelligence manifested so casually, its wit, its imaginative scope, its revelations, its dilemmas, e.g., ‘I was reflecting on the menu, undecided between serpent soup, roast…
"I hear him weep," a narrator says of his father in Steven Schwartz's fine second collection, "but rather than sadness I feel a great relief; finally, something I've done has touched him." If Flannery O'Connor's stories are "mother-ridden," Schwartz's are, in a gentler sense, father-ridden. Seven of the ten short stories in Lives of the…
Ho-hum Jesus Christ people are still putting out 200-page prose pieces and calling them novels. Even the publisher gets the joke; the wrapper looks like the kind of mimeographed permission-sheet an editor might put on a manuscript before it went to Production. A description of the jacket front panel labelled "jacket front panel" . ….
"Novel" seems somehow the wrong term to apply to Francine Prose's first book; and "first novel" seems even more unfortunate, connoting as it so often does, grandness of purpose and lack of artistic control. Rather, Judah The Pious is a tale, a story within a story, almost a legend. The writer's art lies in the…
Don Lee recommends Living to Be 100, stories by Robert Boswell (HarperPerennial): “A richly imaginative, truly wonderful collection of short stories. Where other writers would stop, Boswell always goes one unexpected, delightful step further.”
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