Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder’s third novel, is as different from his second, U.S.! (a fantasia-parable about the American left, in which socialist and novelist Upton Sinclair is serially resurrected and serially assassinated), as his second was from his first, Bear vs. Shark (the nation is collectively distracted from all other matters, public or private, by…
When Eleanor Ross Taylor received the Poetry Foundation’s prestigious Ruth Lilly prize in 2010, Christian Wiman predicted most readers would be unfamiliar with her work. Indeed, although Taylor has been writing startlingly original, commanding poems for decades, the announcement of the prize was met in my household with “Eleanor Ross who?” Luckily, this new and…
Mark Twain once remarked that God invented war to teach Americans geography. If my knowledge of the Middle East is indicative, it may be time for us to try a different strategy. Even with revolutions spreading from country to country, and heavy American involvement in about half of them, I was stunned to discover—when I…
At the end of the second section of the extended lecture from which this short volume takes its title, Durs Grünbein says that he “might even go so far as to say that poetry is in large part born from the desire to start over as often as possible.” Whether or not this is true…
There are quadrants and orbitals of poetry which fit neatly into no category. The first poem I encountered by Reginald Shepherd (from his first collection, Some Are Drowning) startled me completely with its strange intense interiority. It started with a narrative scrap, and then, like a pearl diver taking a breath and stepping over the…
Suzanne Berne’s father was six years old when his mother died, less than two weeks before Christmas day in 1932. “We were told she was gone,” Berne remembers him repeating to her and her siblings. “No one ever said where.” In Missing Lucile, Berne, an award-winning novelist, sets out to find her grandmother and to…
If restoration is, according to Nietzsche, an act of revenge, then Christina Pugh in her second book enacts vengeance that seems devoid of fear, primarily because the object of this vengeance remains a mystery, beyond narrative construction. Pugh’s Restoration: Poems defies and resists, as well as exposes, our Pavlovian desires for the explicatory and the…
For newcomers to Howard Norman’s fiction, this, his sixth novel, will seem deliberately and beguilingly odd. There is, for example, a murder acknowledged from the outset. The first person narrator, Wyatt Hillyer, is writing an account of his life to his estranged daughter, Marlais, who was taken from him as a child by her mother,…
Robert Frost advises that the surest way to reach a reader’s heart is via the ear; Ellen Bryant Voigt, in her illuminating contribution to Graywolf’s "The Art Of" series, maps out the cerebral pathways along the ear-to-heart journey. A gifted poet and teacher, Voigt has long been masterful at breaking down–and thus building up–the music…
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