Stygo A novel by Laura Hendrie. MacMurray & Beck, $16.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. Although Laura Hendrie’s first novel, Stygo, focuses on the tiny beet growers’ town of Stygo, Colorado, it is in no way limited by its narrow geographic boundaries. To the contrary, Hendrie’s brilliantly precise writing offers an organic view of…
In Delmore Schwartz's short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the protagonist imagines a film of his parents' courtship. He watches in impotent anguish for a while as they move inexorably toward their future and his, and then he stands suddenly and shouts to them not to do it, that nothing good can ever come of…
Sunday. As a title, it is somehow exactly right, and it has the curiously precise, poker-faced character of a good Lux poem. But Sunday is also, of course, what happens after Saturday night; it is both the day of grace and everyone's day off, both the worst and the best of days, depending, of course,…
The End of the Alphabet Poems by Claudia Rankine. Grove, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Michael J. Carter. In Claudia Rankine’s new collection, The End of the Alphabet, the always tenuous relationship between language and felt experience is stretched nearly to its limit: “The moment / of elucidation snipped its tongue.” Anguishing and fragmented, the voice…
"Perpetual Motion," the title of Sweet Ruin's keynote poem, provides an apt analogue for Tony Hoagland's work. His muscular, conversational lines sprint from narrative passages to metaphorical clusters to speculative meditations, and then loop back, fast-talking and digressing their way into the book's richly American interior. Hoagland's poems grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they…
The vatic voice requires that a poet believe in both the gods and in posterity, which explains its virtual absence from American letters after the annihilations of World War II. With their lyricism, passion, and irony, Allen Grossman's poems for the millennium, together with work collected from three previous volumes, fashion such a voice for…
Talking to High Monks in the Snow An Asian American Odyssey by Lydia Minatoya. Harper Perennial, $20.00 cloth, $11.00 paper. Reviewed by Leila Philip. “I am a woman who apologizes to her furniture,” states Lydia Minatoya halfway through her engaging memoir about growing up as a Japanese American. ” ‘Excuse me,’ I say when I…
The Foreign Student A novel by Susan Choi. HarperFlamingo, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. At first, finding any similarities between South Korea and Tennessee in the 1950’s might seem impossible, but Susan Choi manages to do just that in her lyrical first novel, The Foreign Student. In 1955, Chang Ahn flees war-battered Seoul and…
Ruth Whitman's Tamsen Donner has already been widely praised, and for good reason. The book is a poetic journal, imaginatively recreated, of a pioneer woman who undertook the cross-country trek to California in 1846-1847. The Donner party came to grief in the high Sierras, only a hundred miles from the Sacramento Valley. Tamsen Donner had…
No products in the cart.