Green Squall, poems by Jay Hopler (Yale): Hopler’s Floridian terrain is as seductive as it is venomous. Amid this wizardry of growth, we find the speaker stunned into stasis and paralyzed by ennui. Much of this book centers on Desire as a figure; in the wonderful longer poem "Of Hunger and Human Freedom," Hopler further…
Journey to the Beach of the Dead, poems by Richard Blanco (Arizona): The speaker of Richard Blanco’s second book serves as both tourist and guide to the reader throughout the relentless and far-flung journeying the poems undertake. Moving from otherness to origin, Blanco pulls away from such locales as Italy and Guatemala to reenter his…
Sanctuary, poems by Adrienne Su (Manic D): Do not allow the clarity of address in this striking second book to distract you from its many demands: Su’s approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity. The topics she addresses are as challenging as the formal rigors she undertakes and sustains…
The Cottagers, a novel by Marshall N. Klimasewiski (Norton): This arresting first book explores the mysterious and envious nature of the friendship between two couples on vacation at the Vancouver Island resort town of East Sooke. Thrown into this catastrophic mix is nineteen-year-old Cyrus Collingswood, a potential genius who just might have a tendency toward…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Dark Alphabet, poems by Jennifer Maier: "Jennifer Maier’s colloquial language settles you comfortably into the passenger seat for a journey full of surprising turns. The poems are triggered by ordinary events: a friend’s asking why she doesn’t write novels; the sight of ducks in mating season. This first collection is a sophisticated…
Permanent Visitors, stories by Kevin Moffett (Iowa): In this funny and acutely perceptive debut collection, Moffett has an eye for the tragic that is also comic: a mother’s unexpected death from a bad oyster is followed by the widower’s hosting of a party of "challenged" youth; an émigré’s desire for sex with "gazebo angels" runs…
Controvertibles, poems by Quan Barry (Pittsburgh): The poems in Barry’s second book springboard from a wealth of subjects as the speaker seeks to close the gulf between the concrete and the abstract; whether interrogating the Shroud of Turin, meditating on seahorses with "fused jaws & stalked eyes argentine," or revisiting the murder of Emmett Till,…
Maxine Kumin recommends Waking Stone, poems by Carole Simmons Oles: “This creative biography-in-verse, about the life of a nineteenth-century sculptor who proved that a woman could handle a chisel as well as a palette, is often in the voice of Hosmer herself, and is lively, informative, and vividly told.” (Arkansas)
Margot Livesey recommends Openwork, a novel by Adria Bernardi: “An exquisitely written, vividly inhabited novel that follows the lives of three generations of Italian families.” (SMU)
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