Andre Dubus recommends If the Tiger, a novel by Terry Farish (Steerforth): “Ms. Farish has written a taut, fast-paced novel about the young daughter of a pilot in the Gulf War and a young woman who is a Cambodian refugee. In New Hampshire and Lowell, Massachusetts, the young women are in flight from the Cambodian…
Gerald Stern recommends Ivory Cradle, poems by Anne Marie Macari: “Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, judged by Robert Creeley. Beautiful lyric poems, explosive, visionary. From an original viewpoint of a woman in her forties, with three young sons. Subjects are events in her life-divorce, mothering, ‘memory,’ often of Italy, and religion. Best first…
Gary Soto recommends Limbo, a novel by Dixie Salazar (White Pine): “Dixie Salazar is the Kaye Gibbons of Fresno, California. Wealth of detail, attitude, and a sorrowful story.”
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…
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