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…
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.”…
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…
Jane Hirshfield recommends Except by Nature, poems by Sandra Alcosser: “Sandra Alcosser’s second collection is filled with pleasures: descriptions that make the reader shiver with delight, vivid moments of the human heart refracted, and passionate inquiry.” (Graywolf)
Lloyd Schwartz's writing displays a peculiar combination of gifts — observation of personality; loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called "forgiving" because it declines to condemn in the first place; a formal aptitude for triolets and off rhymes; a way of being funny that…
In a way, Disturbing the Peace bears a special relation to Yates's early t.b. ward stories — "Out With The Old," "No Pain Whatsoever," and "Thieves" (published here for the first time) — I guess to the extent the "affliction" of the protagonist can only be questioned in impersonally moral terms: the unafflicted are merely…
Farewell, My Lovelies Poems by Diann Blakely. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. In her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, Diann Blakely evokes Raymond Chandler’s yin and writes a decidedly female poetry — tough, stylized, and heart-smart. In the opening poem of the collection, “Last Dance,” the speaker observes a gaggle of…
George Garrett recommends Graveyard of the Atlantic, stories by Alyson Hagy: “Alyson Hagy’s third collection of stories and her best so far. Praised by Charles Baxter and Jill McCorkle, among others, these seven stories all concern life on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.” (Graywolf)
Robert Stone's highly-praised first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, told of a down-and-out alcoholic radio announcer named Rheinhardt, of his doomed affair with a touching slattern named Geraldine, and of his involvement with ultra right wing politics. Good as it was, there were major flaws with that first work. For one thing, the story, couched…
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