Fire Ants, stories by Gerald Duff (New South Books): Most of the fifteen stories in Gerald Duff’s strong collection are filled with characters who are down on their luck. A mother’s mentally handicapped son is in jail because he didn’t understand that showing a gun to the cashier at the Sac’n Pac might be interpreted…
Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, poems: The speaker in this anticipated new volume of poems wonders: What is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? And how does one live in Ordinary Time-during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? (Norton)
DeWitt Henry recommends Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be, a memoir by Jen Trynin: "This memoir should be required reading for wannabe Janis Joplins; for others it offers a view of the corporate music world worthy of Nathaniel West. The monologues of soulless hucksters are pitch-perfect, and Trynin’s dream of becoming a rock star carries…
Meaning a Cloud, poems by J. W. Marshall (Oberlin): J. W. Marshall’s starkly beautiful first book, Meaning a Cloud, is a bang-up narrative of fracture and its aftermath—a sort of out-of-body reportage born of dumb luck injury and the careful exploration of what repair (or endurance) entails. The landscape is one of dissonance: scattering clouds,…
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, a novel: Lee’s second novel is an incisive satire about art and commerce, fame and ethnicity, nature and development, and two estranged brothers, Lyndon and Woody Song. (Norton)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Dancing in Odessa, poems by Ilya Kaminsky: ” Dancing in Odessa is not newly published, but it is new to me, and deserves to be recommended. This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its…
The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity, by Richard Todd (Riverhead): Along with his witty and astute social commentary on objects, places, politics, words, and ideas, all of which serve to foreground his sensibility, Richard Todd offers us fragmentary revelations of his personal life. Gradually these revelations deepen into a fully realized, brave, and…
Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street, a novel: This absorbing novel opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. (Harper)
Maxine Kumin recommends Morning in Serra Mattu, an ode by Arif Gamal: ” Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode is actually an oral recitation of life in the Sudan from the 1940’s to the building of the Aswan Dam, as told to E. G. Dubovsky, who recorded it in meter. It is rich with…
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