A given of Elizabethan thought — expressed in works as different as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra — was God's goodness as made manifest through the "infinite variety," to use Enobarbus's phrase, of his creation. Susan Mitchell's Rapture, her second collection, is an extended hymn in praise of our world's…
My Sister Life A memoir by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. The author of the novels Open Water and Family Night, Maria Flook turns to memoir in My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister’s Disappearance, and delivers an original, gripping, intensely moving story. In 1964, Flook’s fourteen-year-old sister Karen…
In this slender collection of ethnic and political poetry, Martín Espada does what many black poets of the Sixties did with the Broadside Poetry Series during the black arts movement. He writes for an audience not limited to poets and writers, but for the community at large, and Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's…
Hurdy Gurdy Poems by Tim Seibles. Cleveland State University Press, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Tony Hoagland. Appetite, revenge, and celebration are the animating energies in Tim Seibles’s generous-hearted and rambunctious first collection, Hurdy Gurdy. As the title implies, this is street music of a kind, alternately plaintive and rapturous as it explores issues of adulthood…
Large Animals in Everyday Life Stories by Wendy Brenner. Univ. of Georgia Press, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Wendy Brenner’s stunning first collection of stories, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, is marked by her dark humor, deft stylistic range, and joyous use of language. Whether an ice cream salesgirl in…
In her poem "The Homeless in America," which appeared in the Twentieth Anniversary issue of this magazine, Diann Blakely Shoaf describes a photograph — on exhibit at Parthenon Centennial Park, Nashville — of a mother grooming her son's hair: "How do I even know the child's / alive? — his mother's half-smile / so naked…
Last Things A novel by Jenny Offill. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Jenny Offill’s stunning debut novel, Last Things, captures the crucial years in the life of a young narrator trying to choose between a conventional but remote father and a mesmerizing but insane mother. In the mid-1980’s, Grace Davitt…
In Hush, by David St. John, we see a conscious movement away from the lyrical voice, to a simpler, more prose-like form. This tendency in poetry is at least sixty years old now, if we trace it to the Imagist school, and much older and more universal if we consider the efforts at plain speech…
Late Empire Poems by David Wojahn. Pittsburgh Poetry Series, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “History has to live with what was here,” wrote Lowell in one of his offhand but authoritative pronouncements. In an age emerging from the New Critical hegemonic concept of literary and historical tradition that Lowell was schooled on,…
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