Igloo Among Palms Stories by Rod Val Moore. Univ. of Iowa, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Selected by Joy Williams for the 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Rod Val Moore’s Igloo Among Palms proves to be a highly original and engaging collection. Set in dusty towns on both sides of the California-Mexico border, the…
Jane Kenyon's third book of poems is deceptively quiet, gorgeously written, fierce and lyrical, stuffed with the luminous details of the ordinary world. It's a book struggling for vision and written out of deep necessity, and so it's hard to quote from — the poems make up a whole cloth. But passionate spiritual inquiry is…
From Oedipus to Tom Jones to Luke Skywalker, our culture is full of children who need to discover their true parents. The quest for lineage has been the subject of sagas and fairy tales, and in her fifth full-length collection of poems, Madeline DeFrees adds a woman's sensibility to the heroic search for family, identity,…
In Personal Effects and Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the…
Ho-hum Jesus Christ people are still putting out 200-page prose pieces and calling them novels. Even the publisher gets the joke; the wrapper looks like the kind of mimeographed permission-sheet an editor might put on a manuscript before it went to Production. A description of the jacket front panel labelled "jacket front panel" . ….
Lies of the Saints Stories by Erin McGraw. Chronicle Books, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Ann Harleman. “Life puts us in each other’s way,” one of Erin McGraw’s characters tells another. That is the beauty of this first collection: the characters — so real that I hesitate, wanting to use the word “people” instead — engage…
Those who follow the work of Robert B. Shaw are a patient lot, who wait with smoldering enthusiasm for something doled out like Maundy money, or water in the desert. Their patience is rewarded by poems of curiously persistent substance, so dense and well worked that they glow like the better sort of antique furniture;…
"I hear him weep," a narrator says of his father in Steven Schwartz's fine second collection, "but rather than sadness I feel a great relief; finally, something I've done has touched him." If Flannery O'Connor's stories are "mother-ridden," Schwartz's are, in a gentler sense, father-ridden. Seven of the ten short stories in Lives of the…
In the Surgical Theatre Poems by Dana Levin. The American Poetry Review, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. Dana Levin’s first book of poetry, In the Surgical Theatre, resonates with the dual imagery of pain and healing, scalpel and angel. The poems move swiftly and seamlessly from the literal drama of the operating room —…
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