Review

Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins

Gary Soto recommends Babylon in a Jar, poems by Andrew Hudgins: “Hudgins can’t get over his Southern childhood, which he drags as lovely narrative poems into his adulthood in Cincinnati. Perhaps the South does have manners, as Flannery O’Connor once said, but Hudgins’s characters, mostly men, have such inconsistent manners: one moment they are brutes…

rev. of Bone by Bone by Gary Krist

Bone by Bone Stories by Gary Krist. Harcourt Brace, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. The best stories are often the ones that surprise us, either because we aren’t expecting what happens, or because they take us farther than the destination we had in mind. In his second collection, Bone By Bone, Gary Krist…

The Mind Afoot: rev. of Classic Ballroom Dances by Charles Simic

There is language and there are languages. Our obsession with translations from languages few of us can read with any cultural comprehension may be leading us away from the traditional connotative values of English into a Peter Pan world of raw and too often merely clever imagery. But for Charles Simic the encounter with a…

rev. of Bad Judgment by Cathleen Calbert

Bad Judgment Poems by Cathleen Calbert. Sarabande Books, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Victoria Clausi. Calbert’s second book, Bad Judgment, is a searching, sometimes seething look at the traditions of love and marriage, revealing a strong voice adept in the use of irony. These poems frequently open onto a world poised between the surreal and the…

rev. of Bourgeois Blues by Jake Lamar

At twenty-seven, Jake Lamar was a paragon of society — an upstanding young black male. He had been reared in a middle-class family in the Bronx, attended parochial and private schools, gone to Harvard, and was now an associate editor at Time magazine. His memoir is an exegesis of his growing discomfort with his place…

R.V. Cassill’s Clem Anderson

I first read this tremendous book in 1961, when it was published, and recently read it again after an interval of twenty-six years. Both times it has struck me as the best novel I know on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer: and that alone seems marvelous because so…

rev. of Bardo by Suzanne Paola

Bardo Poems by Suzanne Paola. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. In Tibetan, the bardo is defined as a transitory state after death, a murky time where, Suzanne Paola writes in her latest book of poems, “the soul wanders through the heavens and hells . . . trying to achieve…

Break Every Rule by Carole Maso

Mary Gordon recommends Break Every Rule, essays by Carole Maso: “An original and compelling exploration of narrative strategies.” (Counterpoint)

rev. of Coconuts for the Saint by Debra Spark

Coconuts for the Saint A novel by Debra Spark. Faber and Faber, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Ann Harleman. Bright, wistful, and brash, Debra Spark’s first novel, Coconuts for the Saint, snares the reader instantly. On the surface it is a mystery story: Who is Sandrofo Cordero Lucero, and what is he hiding? Beneath lies another…