The Best Day the Worst Day by Donald Hall
Donald Hall, The Best Day the Worst Day, a memoir: This beautiful book’s account of Hall’s life with his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, is joyful, intimate, heartbreaking, and generous. (Houghton Mifflin)
Review
News from the New American Diaspora by Jay Neugeboren
Jay Neugeboren, News from the New American Diaspora, stories: The twelve stories in Neugeboren’s illuminating new collection focus on Jews in various states of exile—strangers in strange lands, far from home. (Texas)
Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon by Joyce Peseroff
Joyce Peseroff, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, essays: Peseroff gathers personal and critical essays, letters, poems, and memoirs that piercingly celebrate Kenyon’s spirit and charm. (Graywolf)
In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman
Howard Norman, In Fond Remembrance of Me, a memoir: A moving memoir of Norman’s time in Manitoba, where he and an Anglo-Japanese woman—fatally ill, but an ardent spirit—were translating Inuit tales. (North Point)
Review: How to Leave Hialeah
“Why can’t you just shut up about being Cuban, your mother says after asking if you’re still causing trouble for yourself,” Jennine Capó Crucet writes in the title story of her sparkling debut collection, How to Leave Hialeah. “No one would even notice if you flat-ironed your hair and stopped talking." Cuba and South Florida—…
My Noiseless Entourage by Charles Simic
Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage, poems: With his usual wry acuity, Simic explores love, futility, and the sense of an individual life in his fourteenth volume. (Harcourt)
Rev: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It: Stories
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It: Stories, by Maile Meloy (Riverhead): The characters of Maile Meloy’s excellent new collection vary widely, from a ranch hand in Meloy’s native Montana to a construction worker at a nuclear power plant to a wealthy aristocrat in Argentina. But almost all of them cohere to the…
Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt by Charles Simic
Charles Simic, Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt, poems, with drawings by Howie Michaels: A playful salute to all things sexy in erotic poems and illustrations. (Tin House/Bloomsbury)
Rev: Selected Poems of Fulke Greville
Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited with an introduction by Thom Gunn, with a new afterword by Bradin Cormack (University of Chicago Press): Before I left the Midwest in 1986 for the graduate program at Berkeley, I dropped-in on a class taught there by one of the two poets I hoped to work with, Thom…