Maxine Kumin recommends Late Summer Break, fiction by Ann B. Knox (Papier-Mache): “A delightful series of interwoven short stories, mostly with female protagonists, set on the fringes of rural life, in which the author explores interaction between the generations in ways that touch all of us.”
It is easy in one way to review Thomas Lux's Memory's Handgrenade because the book is such a pleasure to read and re-read. It is also easy to be misled: one keeps hearing other voices in his work. There is W.S. Merwin, with whom Lux shares a concern for subjects like gloves (Merwin: "gloves of…
Frank Bidart has business with substancelessness, whether in the wasting figure of Ellen West or in dreams which suffuse the old and new poems of In the Western Night. The book's unusual structure — Bidart begins with poems dated "1990," works retrospectively through books published 1983-1976, and ends with his most recent poems — suggests…
Jane Kenyon's third book of poems is deceptively quiet, gorgeously written, fierce and lyrical, stuffed with the luminous details of the ordinary world. It's a book struggling for vision and written out of deep necessity, and so it's hard to quote from — the poems make up a whole cloth. But passionate spiritual inquiry is…
Mercy Seat Poems by Bruce Smith. Univ. of Chicago, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. In the epigraph to a poem called “Self-Portrait as Ornette Coleman,” Bruce Smith quotes the legendary saxophonist as saying of Spike Jones’s treatment of an old standard, “He’d take ‘Stardust’ and run a saw through it then come back…
How Aliens Think Stories by Judith Grossman. The Johns Hopkins University Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first story collection, Judith Grossman, author of the acclaimed 1988 novel Her Own Terms, is boldly and decisively all over the map. How Aliens Think consists of lively and intelligent stories that are sometimes metafictional,…
In "My Neighbor and Myself," Pamela Stewart recalls, after almost thirty years, a playmate dressed for first communion: ". . . polished shoes, string / of funny beads, infected me with doubt" about her own transcendental conversations with God under a maple tree. For Stewart, doubt suffuses the roil of human affairs, and the poems…
In Personal Effects and Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the…
The coming-of-age story has become a somewhat tedious genre in recent years, owing simply, perhaps, to the sheer proliferation of them — and attenuated further, no doubt, by Hollywood — but Melanie Rae Thon transcends the easy traps of the form in Meteors in August, producing a fine first novel distinguished by its lyrical resonance….
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