Book Review

The Broken World   Poems by Marcus Cafagña. Univ. of Illinois Press, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. The inhabitants of Marcus Cafagña’s broken world beat against the bars of circumstance and fate as the poet fixes them with the empathy of attention. Whether in the kid shooting baskets who’s “had it / with the…

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf  Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. It is obvious from the first poem in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s debut book of poetry in English that her concerns will be large: “while my grandfather, a prisoner of war / in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned / booties…

In "A Microtome," Paul Hannigan suggests "naming each orgasm after a famous magician." Sleight-of-hand seems to me the key to the poems in The Carnation: sometimes the drone of conversation or the montony of the mind just rambling is inexplicably transformed into vision — clear, hard, wrought vision; sometimes a sort of camp nonchalance or…

The Invisible Circus A novel by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jesse Lee Kercheval. My copy of the Harper’s Book of Quotations insists that Henry Ford really said, “History is more or less bunk,” instead of the shorter, blunter version usually attributed to him. Either way, most Americans would probably agree….

The Cartographer’s Vacation  Poems by Andrea Cohen. Owl Creek Press, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. With its aesthetic roots planted in the tradition of American Surrealism, Andrea Cohen’s first collection, The Cartographer’s Vacation, is delightfully unfashionable. Cohen might well have hung these lines from her poem “Instructions for Writing” on the cover of the…

A more conventionally integrated dramatic element informs Richard Tillinghast's new book. The Knife and Other Poems (Wesleyan, $3.95) is his first collection in eleven years. The title poem evokes the knife as a passive symbol, like Whitman's broad-axe or Dickey's helmet: a hard, masculine image of potential violence, and yet, in this poem as in…

The Chain  Poems by Tom Sleigh. Univ. of Chicago Press, $35.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Tom Sleigh’s third collection, The Chain, reads as if the history of poetry culminated in his voice. From the beginning, Sleigh’s book encompasses, and is encompassed by, the mythical. “Lamentation on Ur,” an “adaptation, from a…

Readers of literary magazines and anthologies frequently speak of Stuart Dybek's stories with reverence, and they will certainly covet The Coast of Chicago, his second collection, which brings together several works already deemed classics: "Hot Ice," "Blight," and "Pet Milk." Seven long stories are interleaved with seven shorter ones, and they are bound so tightly…

Some Ether Poems by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Tony Hoagland. Someday the term confessional will seem as quaint and obsolete as a fainting couch, and we will have a new terminology, one that feels more discriminating. In the meantime, we have Nick Flynn’s compelling poems, which turn some rather extreme autobiographical…