Review

rev. of Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang

Apology for Want Poems by Mary Jo Bang. Middlebury College, $25.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. There is quiet anarchy in the spare poems of Mary Jo Bang’s haunting first collection, Apology for Want. The terrain is decidedly American and familiar — one of shopping malls and consumption in the “flinty age of…

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Blood Thirsty Savages by Adrian C. Louis

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…

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rev. of Child in Amber by Stephen McNally

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…

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rev. of At Redbones by Thylias Moss

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…

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rev. of Blue Glass by Sandra Tyler

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…

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rev. of City of Boys by Beth Nugent

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…

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rev. of Atlantis and Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty

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…

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rev. of Blue Spruce by David Long

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,…

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City of a Hundred Fires by Richard Blanco

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)

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