Book Review Archives - Page 17 of 37

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…

rev. of The Ether Dome and Other Poems by Allen Grossman

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…

rev. of Talking to High Monks in the Snow by Lydia Minatoya

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…

rev. of The Foreign Student by Susan Choi

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…

rev. of Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey by Ruth Whitman

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…

rev. of The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady

Beginning with "Gratitude" and ending with "The Sheets of Sound," two long poems which together describe the influences on Cornelius Eady's art of "pushing / Any damn wall" and "sailing / Right over //The top," The Gathering of My Name reveals a writer of sly confidence and generous authority. Good-humored enough in "Atomic Prayer" to…

rev. of The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie

The Barbarians Are Coming A novel by David Wong Louie. Putnam, $23.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Sterling Lung has problems. The narrator of David Wong Louie’s first novel, The Barbarians Are Coming, is a recent graduate of the CIA — the Culinary Institute of America — and he has landed what he regards as…

rev. of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Stories by Aimee Bender. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. All elements are on fire in Aimee Bender’s startling and funny debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Set predominantly in San Francisco and parts unknown, these sixteen stories boldly and confidently explore the nature of failed…

rev. of The Best of the West #4 an anthology edited by James and Denise Thomas

The West is a place of myth, legend, and genre. "Call it a geography of the heart — a geological survey of western literary imagination," write the editors. The stories in this collection were chosen not necessarily because they are from and about the region, but because they follow a tradition in theme and setting,…

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