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…
Don’t Erase Me Stories by Carolyn Ferrell. Houghton Mifflin, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Elizabeth Searle. “You ain’t no Body,” a young girl is told in Carolyn Ferrell’s powerfully compassionate first collection, Don’t Erase Me. With a rich variety of voices, Ferrell lets her characters — most of them African-American girls and women — answer back…
Jane Kenyon is apparently transplated to New England from Michigan; New England suits her well. Its depressive terrain and weather fit her gusty, solitary moods. Its Puritan heritage, still lived by in those towns, sparks her to spare meditations on the nature of the body, and on living this life. Her first book, From Room…
George Garrett recommends Hockey Sur Glace, stories by Peter LaSalle: “It may sound crazy, but seven stories and four poems, all involving ice hockey, really work. Why? Because LaSalle is a wonderful writer and knows more about hockey than anyone.” (Breakaway)
Through over twenty years of publication, William Corbett's books have steadily and thoroughly documented a life examined through art, offering a series of poems which, as the poet explains in Don't Think: Look, "enable the feeling eye to enact in words what it has seen." What's seen is rarely spectacle; rather, Corbett pursues the illuminating…
Susan Snively's poems share their predicament with Anne Sexton's. Considering Sexton's life and career, such a comparison can only be made with trepidation. But genuine similarities bring it to mind. Both are attracted to legends, myths, fairy tales (what Snively calls "Mysteries"). Both are interested in dreams, visions, the problems of illusion and reality (Snively…
Maxine Kumin recommends Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, essays by Christopher Cokinos: “The vividly researched story of six extinct birds of the U.S.A. written by a Kansas State professor and ardent birder/environmentalist. This book deserves a wide readership and distribution. Is it possible for an author to exalt and depress his audience at…
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