Book Review

Review: Red Clay Weather

There are quadrants and orbitals of poetry which fit neatly into no category. The first poem I encountered by Reginald Shepherd (from his first collection, Some Are Drowning) startled me completely with its strange intense interiority. It started with a narrative scrap, and then, like a pearl diver taking a breath and stepping over the…

Review: Missing Lucile

Suzanne Berne’s father was six years old when his mother died, less than two weeks before Christmas day in 1932. “We were told she was gone,” Berne remembers him repeating to her and her siblings. “No one ever said where.” In Missing Lucile, Berne, an award-winning novelist, sets out to find her grandmother and to…

Rev: Restoration: Poems

If restoration is, according to Nietzsche, an act of revenge, then Christina Pugh in her second book enacts vengeance that seems devoid of fear, primarily because the object of this vengeance remains a mystery, beyond narrative construction. Pugh’s Restoration: Poems defies and resists, as well as exposes, our Pavlovian desires for the explicatory and the…

Review: Unseen Hand

Adam Zagajewski’s newest collection of poems touches on many of the motifs and themes that his poetry is known for. The book is divided into three parts, very carefully arranged, almost like a musical composition. Certain subjects introduced in the first section reappear later in several variations, like Joseph Street in the Krakow Jewish quarter,…

Review: Train Dreams

Denis Johnson’s new novella, Train Dreams—a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle and the “hard people of the northwest mountains” who occupied it—focuses on the life story of one such hard person, Robert Grainier. The novella opens in 1917 as Grainier, part of a railroad bridge-building crew, is…

Review: Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life

Three distinct periods divide the historiography—some might argue hagiography—of short story impresario Raymond Carver. During the early phase of Carver’s career, when he enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with editor Gordon Lish, Lish downplayed the idiosyncratic aspects of Carver’s biography in favor of a “Carver-as-Everyman” representation that mirrored Lish’s efforts to edit the “defining personal history”…