Howard Norman, In Fond Remembrance of Me, a memoir: A moving memoir of Norman’s time in Manitoba, where he and an Anglo-Japanese woman—fatally ill, but an ardent spirit—were translating Inuit tales. (North Point)
“Why can’t you just shut up about being Cuban, your mother says after asking if you’re still causing trouble for yourself,” Jennine Capó Crucet writes in the title story of her sparkling debut collection, How to Leave Hialeah. “No one would even notice if you flat-ironed your hair and stopped talking." Cuba and South Florida—…
Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage, poems: With his usual wry acuity, Simic explores love, futility, and the sense of an individual life in his fourteenth volume. (Harcourt)
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It: Stories, by Maile Meloy (Riverhead): The characters of Maile Meloy’s excellent new collection vary widely, from a ranch hand in Meloy’s native Montana to a construction worker at a nuclear power plant to a wealthy aristocrat in Argentina. But almost all of them cohere to the…
Charles Simic, Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt, poems, with drawings by Howie Michaels: A playful salute to all things sexy in erotic poems and illustrations. (Tin House/Bloomsbury)
Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited with an introduction by Thom Gunn, with a new afterword by Bradin Cormack (University of Chicago Press): Before I left the Midwest in 1986 for the graduate program at Berkeley, I dropped-in on a class taught there by one of the two poets I hoped to work with, Thom…
Gary Soto, Help Wanted, stories: A witty collection of ten young-adult stories about Latino youth in trouble, or looking for trouble, in the weirdness of everyday Fresno. (Harcourt)
Nick Flynn’s sequel to the PEN prize–winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a seriously absorbing instance of the Poet’s Memoir. (You know that a literary genre has reached maturity when it develops subgenres.) With this book, Flynn arrives where Dante stood as The Divine Comedy began—lost in midlife “alone in a dark wood.”…
Gerald Stern, Everything Is Burning, poems: Ruthless and occasionally outrageous, Stern’s literary songs are sharp, surprising, and unerring in their delivery. (Norton)
Spring 2003 - Digital