Maura Stanton recommends Improvising Rivers, poems by David Jauss (Cleveland State): ” Improvising Rivers is an impressive book of technically accomplished poems. The surface details, as on a river, float gracefully over hidden but powerful currents.”
Kick in the Head Stories by Steven Rinehart. Doubleday, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Steven Rinehart’s debut collection of stories, Kick in the Head, presents an ensemble of characters pushed through the edge to an abominable and shocking other side, while at the same time giving us tales that are always magnetic, entertaining, and…
It's no lie that the American novel is in deep trouble. Especially the "serious" novel, which is to say the story that by all the available ways and means of craft aims to offer a sensuous affective experience, the first condition of a work of art. It's true that, compared to non-fiction, to all kinds…
Those who follow the work of Robert B. Shaw are a patient lot, who wait with smoldering enthusiasm for something doled out like Maundy money, or water in the desert. Their patience is rewarded by poems of curiously persistent substance, so dense and well worked that they glow like the better sort of antique furniture;…
"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which…
Although best known for its pastoral sympathies, Maxine Kumin's work has always possessed a moral edge, and in her latest book, Looking for Luck, she confronts the precarious nature of privilege, awarded to some, withheld from others, human and beast alike. In "Looking for Luck in Bangkok," the poet stoops under an elephant smelling of…
Gary Soto recommends In a Few Words/En pocas palabras, poems and translations by José Antonio Burciaga: “Burciaga has gathered dichos-pithy sayings and proverbs-that reveal the folk wisdom of rural peasants. These are deft translations, as wise as the originals, as in ‘Si cada pendejo trajera palo, faltaría leña’: ‘If every fool carried a stick, firewood…
Large Animals in Everyday Life Stories by Wendy Brenner. Univ. of Georgia Press, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Wendy Brenner’s stunning first collection of stories, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, is marked by her dark humor, deft stylistic range, and joyous use of language. Whether an ice cream salesgirl in…
Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere, his first book, cannot be easily categorized. To call it, simply, a collection of essays would be an injustice. For though it charts a number of disparate courses — philosophical, whimsical meditations on such subjects as baked potatoes, art, utopia, architecture, religion, and paleontology — a narrative arc develops, edges…
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