In poem after poem in Giacometti's Dog, Robin Becker's third book, there is a courage in the piercing details that keeps the work from flinching from feeling and avoids even a trace of self-indulgence. These poems, generous in their emotional and geographical range, speak in Becker's voice about loss, guilt, erotic yearning, and the journey…
Maxine Kuminrecommends Dead Men’s Praise, poems by Jacqueline Osherow: “A stunning collection. Many of these poems come out of Hebrew Psalms, improbable as that sounds, and are often wonderfully humorous and down to earth.” (Grove/Atlantic)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Elegies, poems by Lars Gustafsson: “One of the world’s major poets, Lars Gustafsson has lived quietly in this country since 1983. His poems have the kind of sureness of line we admire in the drawings of the old masters, and his engagement is with essential matters. Yet within his imaginative authority there…
The poem of Gilgamesh, recreated by David Ferry from the thirtieth-century B.C. epic which is itself a retelling of an older Sumerian text, is best known by most readers for a tale of the Flood, complete with Sumerian Noah, that parallels Genesis. But the full narrative is a more troubling, darker story of a stormy-hearted…
Mary Gordon recommends Defiance, a novel by Carole Maso: “A wholly original, darkly brilliant, and poetic novel about a mathematician who murders her students.” (Dutton)
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…
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…
Definition of the Soul Poems by John Skoyles. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, $24.95 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The best poems in John Skoyles’s Definition of the Soul find solace in small scale. Their particular skill — announcing the Looming whose umbrage prompts them, but answering with barely lumen enough to light…
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…
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