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…
George Garrett recommends Dogfight and Other Stories, a first collection by Michael Knight: “A strikingly original and various young writer.” (Dutton)
Folks Like Me Poems by Sam Cornish. Zoland Books, $12.95 cloth. Reviewed by Sven Birkerts. Sam Cornish has written a book that subtly defies the norms. This is not a gathering of “poems,” or a showcase for isolated tours de force, but rather an ambitious vocal collage in which each poem is a voice and…
Marilyn Hacker recommends Harping On, poems by Carolyn Kizer: “Carolyn Kizer’s magisterial new book is a world citizen’s witty and lyrical meditations on many of the major events of this century, from the intimate perspective of someone who was there. As she re/members herself in sentences and stanzas-the seventeen-year-old observing Einstein; the twenty-year-old hearing of…
Domestic Work Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Kevin Young. In a voice confident, diverse, and directed, Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work does what a first book should, and more, all while avoiding what first books often do — either borrowing themes from other poets or recycling a narrow vision of family…
Maxine Kumin recommends Forged Correspondences, poems by Philip Brady: “Wildly inventive, these ‘forgeries’ roam from Heraclitus to the Queen of Sheba, from Newark to Africa. Highly serious and richly comic, a great trip.” (New Myths)
This first novel is neither polished and gemlike nor gusty and pungent, nor funny, nor exceptionally brilliant, nor prophetic in its earnestly Mailerian effort to place third world pain, protest, and pioneering into philosophical, historical and literary perspective, but the book has other solid virtues, worth the reader's patience to absorb. The time is the…
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