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….
Hurdy Gurdy Poems by Tim Seibles. Cleveland State University Press, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Tony Hoagland. Appetite, revenge, and celebration are the animating energies in Tim Seibles’s generous-hearted and rambunctious first collection, Hurdy Gurdy. As the title implies, this is street music of a kind, alternately plaintive and rapturous as it explores issues of adulthood…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Intricate Moves, poems and an essay by Joan Swift: “One of the Northwest’s best poets collects her poems dealing with rape-both those originally included in The Dark Path of Our Names (Dragon Gate) and later poems. Swift is the winner of three NEA grants, the most recent being the only one awarded…
Rosellen Brown recommends Lies of the Saints, stories by Erin McGraw: “These stories are wonderfully understated glimpses of believable lives, of men, women, and-in the title novella-children in uneasy embrace, trying for honesty and grace, and sometimes succeeding.” Reviewed in “Bookshelf” on page 239. (Chronicle)
In her poem "The Homeless in America," which appeared in the Twentieth Anniversary issue of this magazine, Diann Blakely Shoaf describes a photograph — on exhibit at Parthenon Centennial Park, Nashville — of a mother grooming her son's hair: "How do I even know the child's / alive? — his mother's half-smile / so naked…
Douglas Worth is another encouraging young poet. The epigraph at the front of his book recalls Sarah Appleton's poetry — "What is essential is invisible to the eye." That this epigraph is a quote not from Teilhard or any similar source but from The Little Prince points at once to the weakness and the strength…
Lies of the Saints Stories by Erin McGraw. Chronicle Books, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Ann Harleman. “Life puts us in each other’s way,” one of Erin McGraw’s characters tells another. That is the beauty of this first collection: the characters — so real that I hesitate, wanting to use the word “people” instead — engage…
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