Chase Twichell recommends Blood Thirsty Savages, poems by Adrian C. Louis(Time Being): “Louis writes rough, smart, honest poems that cut through all the polite twinges of political correctness. Tenderness is one side of the blade, and rage the other. His Native America is not the one we normally hear about, stripped as it is of…
Child in Amber Poems by Stephen McNally. University of Massachusetts Press, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Peter Jay Shippy. Tomaz Salamun wrote that every true poet is a monster. If so, perhaps it is because monsters slap us into a sweet apoplexy from which we can’t escape ourselves. The poems in Stephen McNally’s Juniper Prize-winning…
Beneath the body and blood of the Eucharist, invoked and present throughout Thylias Moss's third collection, lie the bones — the skeletons in closets, the fingers worked, the heart's durable cage. "It's hard to bandage your life with bones," the poet writes in "Vicious Circles in the Trenches," but she will not be comforted by…
Sandra Tyler's deadpan-lyrical, remarkably accurate first novel, Blue Glass, concerns the coming of age of Leslie, an only child of divorcing parents. Her father, a college English teacher, withdraws and finds another woman, leaving teenaged Leslie in a world as claustrophobically feminine as that of William Inge's Picnic. While it is a world presumably of…
Junkies, says the runaway girl who narrates the title story in City of Boys, "exit right out of every situation before it's even become a situation." The same might be said for many of the chillingly detached characters in Beth Nugent's perceptive and unsettling first collection. Through ten spare, haunting stories, Nugent captures the overwhelming…
Atlantis and Heaven’s Coast Poems and a memoir by Mark Doty. HarperCollins, $12.00 paper and $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Mark Doty’s third collection, My Alexandria, won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award, and his new volume of poems, Atlantis, crowns its predecessor’s substantial achievements. Its mythical title notwithstanding, the realm…
Blue Spruce Stories by David Long. Scribner, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. The twelve stories in David Long’s third collection, Blue Spruce, are distinctive for many reasons, but mostly they are marked by place — namely, Montana and other points Northwest. Restless, lonely, the people in Long’s stories are inheritors of the American West,…
Dan Wakefield recommends City of a Hundred Fires, poems by Richard Blanco: “An exciting first book by a young Cuban American of great talent.” (Pittsburgh)
Autobiography of a Face A memoir by Lucy Grealy. Houghton Mifflin, $19.95 cloth. Release date: Sept. 27, 1994. Reviewed by Don Lee. At the age of nine, following a playground collision with another child, Lucy Grealy was plagued by a persistent pain in her jaw. After several misdiagnoses, it was determined that she had Ewing’s…
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