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,…
"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which…
Equal Love Stories by Peter Ho Davies. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Michael Byers. In Peter Ho Davies’s second collection, Equal Love, common domestic situations give rise, in unexpected ways, to moments of luminous reflection. Davies’s stories are allusive, mysterious, often funny, and tender. As in his debut collection, The Ugliest House in…
Farewell, My Lovelies Poems by Diann Blakely. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. In her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, Diann Blakely evokes Raymond Chandler’s yin and writes a decidedly female poetry — tough, stylized, and heart-smart. In the opening poem of the collection, “Last Dance,” the speaker observes a gaggle of…
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