The City Is a Riding Tide, a novel by Rebecca Lee (Simon & Schuster): Fixed on a pair of Manhattan nonprofit workers who want to build an ill-fated healing center on a perilous bank of the Yangtze River, this is an urgent story infused with lyricism and populated by flawed people who both use one…
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, poems by Lisa Olstein (Copper Canyon): Olstein’s first book weaves its reader into a sensual and fibrous dreamscape inhabited by totem animals, somnambulist lovers hypnotic with longing, and symbols boldly acknowledged for their inherent duplicity: "Insert bird for sorrow," her speaker insists. While the poems in this book often operate as…
Chase Twichell, Dog Language, poems: Twichell’s dazzling poems capture the complex emotions and challenges of family and aging, without ever reducing them to cliché or sentiment. (Copper Canyon)
Mosquito, poems by Alex Lemon (Tin House): The poems in Alex Lemon’s striking first book document the experience of undergoing brain surgery, an agonizing recovery, and the sudden discovery of Eros, who finally emerges as the ultimate emblem of survival. Careful yet raw, the fresh sutures that comprise the lines in many of these poems…
Secondhand World, a novel by Katherine Min (Knopf): In this lucid and lyrical debut, Min offers the magnetic story of Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, an estranged Korean-American teenager struggling to understand just how it is that she, the lowly daughter, has managed to survive her ill-fated younger brother and the murder-suicide of her two parents….
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…
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