Maxine Kumin recommends Healed by Horses, a memoir by Carole Fletcher with Lawrence Scanlon: “A remarkable story of a young woman burned over sixty-five percent of her body, who made it back through agonizing debridements and skin grafts to training and actually performing with her much-loved horses.” (Atria)
Philip Levine recommends Sky, poems by Christopher Buckley: "Buckley is a California poet who—though he has published at least ten books—seems little known in the East. His poems are both Western and universal. It is the landscape of California that serves as the backdrop to the striving for significance that enriched his boyhood in Santa…
Mark Doty, School of the Arts, poems: Incisive and transcendent, Doty’s seventh collection contemplates the creative process and eternal questions of love and loss, desire and despair. (HarperCollins)
Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, poems: Williamson’s verse from the last three decades are collected with new poems that beautifully draw his oeuvre together. (Chicago)
Book Description In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, greed, envy, and despair. Pêre Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization??I loved them too much…
Wedding Day, poems by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon): Intimate and hypnotic, the poems of Levin’s wonderful second book operate as a lens through which we are simultaneously granted two views: one into the darker, private interior of the self, the other of an outer-world turned otherworldly by the poet’s eye. Whether turning her gaze inward…
Fanny Howe, On the Ground, poems: In this bold, yearning new collection, Howe responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived “on the ground.” Infused with moving clarity, these poems have unassailable urgency. (Graywolf)
Robert Pinsky recommends Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, a biography by Stephen Greenblatt: "To recommend a best-seller? Strange in a way, but Ploughshares readers should know that Greenblatt is a real writer. Unlike many a ‘noted scholar’ he writes wonderful sentences and paragraphs. Here is a book about a literary writer that…
Carl Phillips, Coin of the Realm, essays: In this generous and sensual collection, with pieces ranging in subject from Plath to race, Phillips luminously argues that the currency that most holds weight, both in art and life, includes beauty, risk, and authority—values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. (Graywolf)
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