New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
DeWitt Henry recommends The Drama Room by Elizabeth Searle (Pierian Springs Press, 2025). “In twelve stories that probe contemporary maladies and focus primarily on vulnerable teenagers, Searle is more compassionate than censorious, more Salingeresque than scathing. She explores points of view, voices, and streams of consciousness; is sparing with symbolism, deft in managing perspectives in time; and her endings are visionary breakthroughs. Two standouts are ‘Bloody Show’ and ‘The Ones Who Are Gone.’”
DeWitt Henry recommends The Weight of Snow and Regret by Elizabeth Gauffreau (Paul Stream Press, 2025). “Gauffreau’s second novel concerns the history of an ‘actual’ Vermont poor farm, and its state-forced closure in 1968. The novel’s settings in place and time are vivid, as are the voices of the residents: young, elderly, and disabled. In keeping with the revolutions of the time, their bond is captured by blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins, who plays a role: ‘Folks listen to Po’ Lightnin’ play, and it’s like he speaking what’s in their heart, and after a while, it pacify their mind.’ As will this generous novel, in conviction, honesty, and craft.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends At the Same Time by Wang Jiaxin, translated by John Balcom (Arrowsmith Press, 2025). “With this new selection of translated poems, a world poet of indisputable power and clear-seeing imagination comes into English. A major figure in contemporary China now living in the US, Wang Jiaxin writes with an ink both interior and objective, immediate and long-view, intimate and global. The voice and history of these poems is distinctively Wang’s own, even as poem after poem ponders shared fates and shared inheritance, speaking of, and with, Du Fu and Akhmatova, Edward Hopper, Miłosz, and Walcott. Even the briefest—sometimes, especially the briefest—carries news that stays news.”
Antonya Nelson recommends The Plan of Chicago by Barry Pearce (Cornerstone Press, November 2025). “This Nelson Algren Literary Award-winning author is a consummate storyteller. Longtime Chicago resident, Pearce captures many idiosyncratic corners of the city and its inhabitants. An amazing book.”
Joyce Peseroff recommends Sky of Sudden Changes by Cornelia Veenendaal (BlazeVOX [books], 2025). “At one hundred, poet Connie Veenendaal has published her fifth book, a bounteous collection that considers everything from Emily Dickinson listening to both ‘the tread of hymns’ and ‘Irish tunes’ to a North Sea where ‘people come to lose things.’ Veenendaal’s clear-eyed, plainspoken work is always subtle in its movement. Considering the ‘seeds of wild greens carried in feathers’ far from their origins, she asks, ‘What will I take with me from our world?’ Sly titles like ‘The Rain in Spain,’ ‘Goodwill Hunting,’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ augur the wit of a poet who can wing through cities and mountains, oceans and continents—present and past—with confidence and wonder.”
Peggy Shumaker recommends Take My Name but Say It Slow, essays by Thomas Dai (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025). “Brilliant, funny, often lyrical, Dai’s essays explore growing up in a Chinese immigrant family, travel, longing, and belonging. Tender, wise, joyous, heartbreaking.”
Elizabeth Spires recommends World of Dew by Lindsay Stuart Hill (University of Wisconsin Press, November 2025). “In World of Dew, traveling can be an outward journey, or an inner one, and sometimes both at the same time. The best poems here, traversing continents, countries, and cultures, touch on hidden wellsprings of thought and feeling that nourish and sustain the reader in deeply original ways. In a brash world of insistently loud voices, Hill’s Zen-centered quietude is rare and refreshing. Reading her poems is like drinking the purest water from a hidden spring.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Edward Hirsch, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025). “My Childhood in Pieces is a masterpiece of comic elegy. I read it laughing out loud and aghast. It works in flashes, lighting up a complicated family: the wannabe not-quite-gangster father, the fierce, wisecracking mother, the occasionally violent but well-meaning stepfather. And the author’s tumultuous growing up—the girlfriends, the sports, the jostling with parents, his almost being mugged or kidnapped by poetry … A tremendous story. Which is also a story of the place itself—Skokie, Chicago. The life of a powerful young mind finding its own coordinates.”
