The Birthdays, a novel by Heidi Pitlor (Norton): This debut traces a family reunion precipitated by Joe Miller’s seventy-fifth birthday and complicated by his wife Vera’s contemplation of an affair and the three different pregnancies involving their three different children. The kaleidoscopic effect of the roving third-person intimate point of view creates a crystalline portrait…
Philip Levine recommends The Ghost of You and Me, poems by Wesley McNair: “I wonder if Maine is half as interesting as the poetry Wesley McNair has written about the place. He finds so many skewed and irresistible characters who manage to get into odd situations for which there is only one remedy: to persevere….
Elizabeth Spires recommends Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, poems by Janice N. Harrington: “Like a hammer to gold, Harrington’s richly lyric voice shapes her poetic material into unforgettable ‘sung stories.’ One of the marvels of this book is its convincing and tender reanimation of lives lived in a black community in the…
Rosellen Brown recommends White Guys, a novel by Anthony Giardina: "White Guys is an extraordinarily potent novel. It engages us, passionately, in questions that matter-what it means to be a man, to be a son, a husband and father; to watch, with hope and despair, the changing of small towns into copycat suburbs. It works…
Thomas Lux recommends The Seed Thieves, poems by Robert Fanning: “Robert Fanning is a powerful and urgent young poet whose work I have been following for some time. This, his first full-length collection, is a stunner.” (Marick)
Gerald Stern recommends Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, poems by Ashley Capps: “I love the scorching details of Capps’s poems, as well as their withering honesty, their modesty, their crazy imagination, and their cunning. And I love their moral stance and their gracefulness.” (Akron)
Sea of Faith, poems by John Brehm (Wisconsin): Very few poets seem able to land all grown-up on the pages of their first books—often they are tentative, anonymous—but John Brehm arrives with a great chorus trailing, and he does so without apology, which is a delight because he’s a very interesting man, it seems, one…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Sweet Smoke, poems by Thomas Aslin: “Like the sweet smoke of leaf-burning, an elegiac undercurrent drifts through the poems in this first book with their blend of fine perception, tender feeling, and rhythmically persuasive language. Aslin captures the essence of family life and close relationships, preserves them for the record, and enriches…
Gerald Stern recommends Against Which, poems by Ross Gay: “Ross Gay’s Against Which is stunningly original, confrontational, and lovely. He reminds me of Hart Crane.” (CavanKerry)
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