American Smooth by Rita Dove
Rita Dove, American Smooth, poems: The poems in Dove’s gorgeous eighth collection move through history, music, war, and motherhood in an ever graceful choreography. (Norton)
Rita Dove, American Smooth, poems: The poems in Dove’s gorgeous eighth collection move through history, music, war, and motherhood in an ever graceful choreography. (Norton)
Maxine Kumin recommends As When, in Season, by Jim Schley: “This is the executive director of The Frost Place’s first collection of poems and represents years of composing and revising. The centerpiece, an inventive series of odes to the muses, displays Schley’s literary insights and his musical gift with language.” (Marick)
Sue Miller, The Senator’s Wife, a novel: In this rich, emotionally urgent novel, two women at opposite stages of life face parallel dilemmas. (Knopf)
George Garrett, Empty Bed Blues, stories: The fifteen stories in Garrett’s thrilling collection are deeply concerned with the old verities of love and death. (Missouri)
David St. John recommends The Usable Field, by Jane Mead: “There is a far greater spareness to these new poems of Jane Mead’s, yet they are as philosophically complex and stylistically compelling as those in her two previous collections. Yet this more honed style has only amplified the ferocity of her attention to the natural…
Jay Neugeboren, 1940, a novel: Neugeboren’s first novel in twenty years presents a fictional account of an obscure historical figure, Dr. Eduard Bloch, an Austrian doctor who achieved notoriety for being Adolf Hitler’s childhood physician. (Two Dollar Radio)
Lorrie Goldensohn, American War Poetry, anthology: Covering five centuries, these fascinating poems edited by Goldensohn put into sharp relief America’s complex, conflicted, and evolving attitudes toward war. (Columbia)
David St. John also recommends For a Limited Time Only, by Ronald Wallace: “With his signature humor and elegant wit, Ron Wallace makes clear that the ‘limited time’ of the title is our own mortal passage. This is a death-inflected collection, filled with meditations upon illness that refuse to buckle in the face of the…
Charles Simic, That Little Something, poems: In his superb eighteenth collection, Simic moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior. (Harcourt)
Subtotal: $27.98