Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. By Alan Williamson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. The very first page of the prefatory material in this new book speaks of Robert Lowell as a moralist, and refers with admiration to something called “moral wisdom,” which we are to ask from poetry. And in…
Playing Out of the Deep Woods Stories by G. W. Hawkes. Univ. of Missouri Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. A conventional wisdom about short story collections these days is that they must feature stories that are linked in some way — collections that focus on a particular series of characters, or a particular…
Readers familiar with the verbal dazzle of Alice Fulton's previous collections might assume that the title of her third is a sly allusion to sexual politics. But Fulton is engaged by all sorts of meetings and collisions, from the nuclear family to the electron, as well as by the individual's confrontation with God. Fulton's equanimity…
Jimmy & Rita Poems by Kim Addonizio. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Whitman’s famous proclamation “Through me the many long dumb voices,” depending on how it strikes the ear, echoes either with self-aggrandizement, a song that appropriates everything within shouting distance to swell its own puny notes, or with self-erasure,…
Mercy Seat Poems by Bruce Smith. Univ. of Chicago, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. In the epigraph to a poem called “Self-Portrait as Ornette Coleman,” Bruce Smith quotes the legendary saxophonist as saying of Spike Jones’s treatment of an old standard, “He’d take ‘Stardust’ and run a saw through it then come back…
"Novel" seems somehow the wrong term to apply to Francine Prose's first book; and "first novel" seems even more unfortunate, connoting as it so often does, grandness of purpose and lack of artistic control. Rather, Judah The Pious is a tale, a story within a story, almost a legend. The writer's art lies in the…
The coming-of-age story has become a somewhat tedious genre in recent years, owing simply, perhaps, to the sheer proliferation of them — and attenuated further, no doubt, by Hollywood — but Melanie Rae Thon transcends the easy traps of the form in Meteors in August, producing a fine first novel distinguished by its lyrical resonance….
Kick in the Head Stories by Steven Rinehart. Doubleday, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Steven Rinehart’s debut collection of stories, Kick in the Head, presents an ensemble of characters pushed through the edge to an abominable and shocking other side, while at the same time giving us tales that are always magnetic, entertaining, and…
How Aliens Think Stories by Judith Grossman. The Johns Hopkins University Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first story collection, Judith Grossman, author of the acclaimed 1988 novel Her Own Terms, is boldly and decisively all over the map. How Aliens Think consists of lively and intelligent stories that are sometimes metafictional,…
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