Book Review

rev. of Sunday by Thomas Lux

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,…

rev. of Sweet Ruin by Tony Hoagland

"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…