Review

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.”…

Meeting with a young man torn between progressive and fundamentalist ideals, Zahoor, an elderly paleontologist, shows him the cupolas of the Great Mosque in Cordoba. It was built in a period, he argues, when Islam showed a different face to the world, a time when "faith meant devotion to multiple pleasures–mathematics, poetry, music, anatomy, calligraphy……

The Maverick Room, poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis (Graywolf): In this marvelous and accomplished volume of poems, Ellis works the page the way his musical subjects (crooners, masters of funk, DC-based Go-Go bands) work a room: with rhythm, sass, and self-deprecating wit. The sonic effects of these poems duplicate the experience of listening to live…

I Got Somebody in Staunton, stories by William Henry Lewis (Amistad): In his second collection, Lewis sketches out a complicated and often mesmerizing view of black America with lyrical, sensual language. Traveling up and down the paths of the Great Migration, from South to North, from small towns in Tennessee to Bed-Stuy, these ten stories…

Any Holy City , poems by Mark Conway (Silverfish): Conway’s debut book, Any Holy City, maps a rich and mysterious landscape haunted by ghosts—ghosts of the dead and the living, of addiction, sacrifice, of loss and love. This place, however, is very much alive with a poet fully engaged in the natural and not-so-natural world…