Review

rev. of Elijah Visible by Thane Rosenbaum

Elijah Visible Stories by Thane Rosenbaum. St. Martin’s Press, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Marcie Hershman. This is as vibrant and provocative a collection of short fiction as I’ve read in years. That it is also a debut collection makes it all the more gratifying. Thane Rosenbaum, who, in his early thirties left a prestigious New…

Girl Hurt by E.J. Miller-Laino

Joyce Peseroff recommends Girl Hurt, a first book of poems by E. J. Miller-Laino: ” Girl Hurt records a woman’s journey from the underworld of shame and hurt, where Mother cries ‘like Frankenstein in the movie, / those deep, guttural half-words . . . / of monsters created with human hearts,’ to the light of…

The Mind Afoot: rev. of Descending Figure by Louise Glück

Much contemporary poetry attempts to charge a landscape with the imaginative self through an allegorical and mythological vision. While poetry of the past tends to place the self in a landscape where it perceives and reacts, our contemporaries frankly reverse the process and locate the landscape in the psyche. This extends what Roy Harvey Pearce…

rev. of Emerald City by Jennifer Egan

Emerald City Stories by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jodee Stanley. In the title story of Jennifer Egan’s collection, Emerald City, a young photographer’s assistant walks down the streets of Manhattan with his girlfriend, an unsuccessful model. He takes in the street noise, the dark storefronts, looking for something that…

rev. of Glass, Irony, and God by Anne Carson

Glass, Irony, and God Poems by Anne Carson. New Directions, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Liam Rector. Poet and editor James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, is still acquiring poetry that is importantly new, poetry that still sets and extends new directions. Again taking up the battle cry of his essential mentor, Ezra Pound, Laughlin has…

rev. of Desiring Flight by Christine Balk

Desiring Flight Poems by Christianne Balk. Purdue Univ. Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. Among the many pleasures of Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight, two stand out. First, Balk has — as she showed in her Walt Whitman Award-winning Bindweed — a biologist’s precise knowledge of the natural world, and consequently her poems convey, at…

rev. of Equal Love by Peter Ho Davies

Equal Love Stories by Peter Ho Davies. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Michael Byers. In Peter Ho Davies’s second collection, Equal Love, common domestic situations give rise, in unexpected ways, to moments of luminous reflection. Davies’s stories are allusive, mysterious, often funny, and tender. As in his debut collection, The Ugliest House in…

rev. of Good Hope Road by Stuart Dischell

Good Hope Road Poems by Stuart Dischell. Viking, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. While fretting over “environmental destruction,” an old man faces his own mortality. A woman waiting for a tow truck wishes she were older or younger, “that what she had been / Waiting for all her life would finally begin to happen.”…

rev. of Devolution of the Nude by Lynne McMahon

Devolution of the Nude Poems by Lynne McMahon. David R. Godine, Publisher, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. The best works in Lynne McMahon’s Devolution of the Nude seem like found poems, unlikely jewels turned up in some nearby but rarely visited garden of the mind. The freshness of her language provides both delight and…