Book Review

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…

Adam Zagajewski’s newest collection of poems touches on many of the motifs and themes that his poetry is known for. The book is divided into three parts, very carefully arranged, almost like a musical composition. Certain subjects introduced in the first section reappear later in several variations, like Joseph Street in the Krakow Jewish quarter,…

Three distinct periods divide the historiography—some might argue hagiography—of short story impresario Raymond Carver. During the early phase of Carver’s career, when he enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with editor Gordon Lish, Lish downplayed the idiosyncratic aspects of Carver’s biography in favor of a “Carver-as-Everyman” representation that mirrored Lish’s efforts to edit the “defining personal history”…

Denis Johnson’s new novella, Train Dreams—a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle and the “hard people of the northwest mountains” who occupied it—focuses on the life story of one such hard person, Robert Grainier. The novella opens in 1917 as Grainier, part of a railroad bridge-building crew, is…

“She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved them. That is why it had not felt like stealing.” From taking cakes of Lux rose-scented soap from the bathroom cabinet to committing far more serious crimes, the two women in Ru Freeman’s stunning debut novel have disobeyed. The first is Latha, the…

When Susan Conley moves to China with her husband Tony and two little boys, she hopes for adventure, and for her family to grow “in that way you hear Americans do when they head east,” but she doesn’t know that cancer will play a role in that growth. Tony is fluent in Mandarin and thriving…

Essay anthologies are one of the perennials of American publishing, old and new titles shoaling into bookstores by the tens of thousands every year … the catch being that most are put forward not as essay anthologies, but as “composition readers,” created to encourage undergraduates to take an interest in the shapeliness of their own…

At 113 pages, How Like Foreign Objects is an ambitious and meaty first book, filled with poetry that is succinct and captivating. It is easy to be hooked by Orgera’s quick wit and deceptively straightforward syntax. Especially, as in “Sleeping with the Dictionary,” when she presents lines that offer immediate pleasure while pointing to a…

Khaled Mattawa’s fourth book marks his second breakthrough (his first was his debut, Ismalia Eclipse). The title poem, and centerpiece, is a 26 page visionary reorientation in verse of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Mattawa’s Tocqueville is not a mere revision of that historical document, but a poetry based on motion, where narrative doesn’t…