Ron Carlson, The Signal, a novel: Carlson’s love for the mountains and mastery of fiction radiate in the pages of this thrilling story about a couple who ventures into the Wyoming wilderness only to discover the true nature of their wounds. (Penguin)
Collections of Nothing, a memoir by William Davies King (Chicago): There is, perhaps, only a continuum linking habit, hobby, obsession, and pathology. William Davies King, in his new memoir, stunning and smart, insists, "I collect nothing—with a passion." Throughout this quirky little book, the author riffs on the nothing that is not there, and the…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Adam Chooses, poems by Michael Spence: “These spare, understated poems have the elegant design and the formal ease we’ve come to expect of Michael Spence’s work. The stance is reminiscent of James Wright’s Green Wall poems in their escape from ‘that vacant Paradise’ to the celebration of the here and now.” (Rose…
James Carroll, Practicing Catholic, nonfiction: Carroll sets this searching examination of his faith against the history of the Catholic Church in America, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes discouraging actions of its leaders. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor (Yale University Press): Jack Tworkov, one of the original members of the school of Abstract Expressionism, was also a teacher, administrator, husband, father, friend and devoted reader of poetry. All the facets of this complex and humane man are reflected in this…
What a pleasure to find a poet whose sense of risk and honesty drives her to complicate the emotions and attitudes of her poems — so that sorrow might be suddenly hijacked by bravado, or delight by anger and humor — rather than to wrap us up a neat little parcel of agreeable "sensitivities." In…
Elizabeth Spires, The Wave-Maker, poems: In these poems, Spires explores the seamless continuum of birth, death and transformation, meditating on creatures as unlikely as a lowly snail, a prehistoric coelacanth, or a tiny Japanese netsuke of a badger disguised as a monk. (Norton)
Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica, poems: In this book-length lyric narrative inspired by history, Dove recreates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist, the son of a white woman and an "African prince," whose conflict with Ludwig van Beethoven over a woman evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. (Norton)
The New Valley, novellas by Josh Weil (Grove Press): Josh Weil drew me into The New Valley from the get-go. His language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. In fact, Weil writes the kind of sentences you want to sniff and then slosh around in your mouth for a while before heading into the next paragraph….
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