Unravelling A novel by Elizabeth Graver. Hyperion, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Caroline Langston. In Elizabeth Graver’s quietly enchanting first novel, Unravelling, the longings of the young narrator, Aimee Slater, are strikingly vivid and contemporary, yet the story is set in nineteenth-century New England, at the juncture between the region’s rural, puritanical past and all the…
Several nights after the day his book reached the counters of three of Missoula's bookstores (the fourth sells prose pornography), Richard Hugo was offering the following terse explanation of the significance of the title, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, to a group of local admirers: "Sir Walter Scott wrote a poem called "The Lady…
The River at Work Poems by Jean Valentine. Alice James Books, $8.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. There are some poets whose work incites a reader to metaphor. This is especially true of those whose ultimate subject is the unsayable, the numinous — where the risks taken by the poet must provoke her reader into…
For the thirteen years since Frank Stanford's suicide at twenty-nine, most of his nine books, which were all from small presses, have been difficult if not impossible to find. Leon Stokesbury has done an impressive job winnowing the more than one thousand pages of Stanford's published poetry to one hundred and ten, including six previously…
The Sixteen Pleasures A novel by Robert Hellenga. Soho Press, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. A character in The Sixteen Pleasures tells of a shop in Rome where petitioners in marital annulment cases can buy old postcards, old inks, and old uncanceled stamps, for the purpose of fabricating evidence from the past. This desire…
The Long Home Poems by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Poets’ voices seldom emerge fully formed: first books more often air promise than plenitude, recklessness than resonance. But Christian Wiman’s The Long Home, winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, speaks with mature authority. The Long Home…
Mary Caponegro opens The Star Café with the image of a "circular garland" that can only be appreciated if you "develop the telescope within yourself, your own inner eye, to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur; slimy or smooth." From the start, hers is no ordinary…
Jonathan Dee's prescient novel. The Lover of History, was published in 1990, just before the Gulf War, and save for a few brief, favorable reviews, the book was, more or less, ignored. One supposes this had something to do with the timing of publication. For though the novel is elegantly written, precisely observed, and thoughtful,…
The Stories of John Edgar Wideman includes two previously published collections, Fever and Damballah, and ten new pieces gathered under the title All Stories Are True — an African proverb that has become Wideman's guiding meditation. For in all his works, in his stories and his memoir and his seven novels, Wideman shatters the barrier…
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