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…
James Alan McPherson recommends Blues and Trouble, short stories by Tom Piazzi: “In these stories, Tom Piazzi is touching the grain of actual, as opposed to imaginary, human life. He sees both the pain and the humor, the tragic as well as the comic.” (St. Martin’s)
Dan Wakefield recommends City of a Hundred Fires, poems by Richard Blanco: “A stunning first book of poems by a young Cuban-American writer of awesome lyrical talent. This book tells the story of the Cuban-American experience as powerfully as a novel, and speaks to all who appreciate personal insight, irony, and love of language, both…
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