Book Review

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…

In the last century, Tolstoy put forth some thoughts on addiction in his essay, "Why Do Men Stupify Themselves?" His thesis is that we drink, take dope of one kind or another, even use tobacco, primarily for the ignoble ends of releasing us from the sanctions and general hamstringing of our consciences. People resort to…

The Truly Needy and Other Stories  Stories by Lucy Honig. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Pedro Ponce. The title of Lucy Honig’s debut collection, winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, echoes the familiar plea of fundraisers and activists to forget selfish personal concerns and remember the less fortunate. But for…

Marcia Southwick, in her first major collection ( The Night Won't Save Anyone, University of Georgia Press, $4.50), at times seems to totter toward this reliance on the easily conjured. But she saves her poems simply by dramatizing her personae to adapt them individually to the sometimes dangerously Merwin-like worlds they inhabit. In her long…

The Very Air  A novel by Douglas Bauer. William Morrow, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Alexandra Marshall. In The Very Air, Douglas Bauer’s second novel, “Doctor” Luther Mathias builds an empire with his pirate radio station, which broadcasts illegally over the border into the U.S. in the early part of this century. As events conspire to…

John Hildebidle's voice consists of an amalgam of various unstilled voices from the past or present. For the most part, he has gracefully turned away from the poetry of "the Goddamned Self," and finds his inspiration in others. He either speaks through others, in dramatic monologues, or writes about others, in sustained exercises in negative…