We Live in Bodies Poems by Ellen Doré Watson. Alice James Books, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Marcus Cafagña. Ellen Doré Watson writes a poetry of elegy. The poems in her first book, We Live in Bodies, seek consolation for all the losses that diminish the human body, the loss of life, the trauma of violence,…
The Art of Loss Poems by Myrna Stone. Michigan State, $17.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. In her first book, with considerable grace and fine, lovely detail, Stone evokes her family’s world and the larger world around it, while telling stories of our perpetual waste and repair. Any book about loss, of course, must also…
Here's a bright new voice in American poetry, woven out of the rich stories and intangible photos of a past lost in other countries — Jamaica, Canada, England — but still alive in the body of a young girl growing up in the Bronx. These flawless poems evoke a world where a mother can simultaneously…
A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga Stories by Julia Whitty. Mariner Books, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. By all accounts, Julia Whitty is a human being, one who makes documentary films about animals under the sea. But reading her debut collection, A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, you might begin to wonder…
Those who have read the poems that Philip Levine has produced in his thirty years of writing know that perhaps no other living poet has earned so fully the right to tell us "what work is." The various "grease-jobs," as he calls them, held in his native Detroit in his earlier days have provided him…
Galway Kinnell surely possesses the most lyrical voice of his generation; perhaps only the last books of James Wright approached the intensity of music Kinnell builds from "the noise inside things," whether a factory whistle "in concert with the tenor of stomachs" of workmen, or the "slub clump slub clump" of a bricklayer's trowel ("The…
Like the ideally instructed poet, some novelists try to make the ordinary appear extraordinary; others try to make the extraordinary appear ordinary. It seems to me that Stratis Haviaras has, in this short novel, done both at once, an achievement so dazzling it defies the reader to analyze just what is going on. The main…
Where She Went Stories by Kate Walbert. Sarabande Books, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Kate Walbert’s first collection, Where She Went, gives us haunting portraits of two women — a mother and her daughter — both trapped by itinerancy. While Marion Clark, a bride of the fifties, finds nothing but ennui in her many…
Whirling Round the Sun Poems by Suzanne Noguere. Midmarch Arts Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The title poem of Suzanne Noguere’s Whirling Round the Sun transforms a bus ride through a city in autumn into an epiphany, in which “leaf / by leaf turning” serves as “a clue / to earth’s revolution.”…
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