Book Review

All-American Girl  Poems by Robin Becker. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. Gathered at the edge of each poem in Robin Becker’s moving fourth collection, palpable and terrible, wait the forces of chaos. Love affairs end, families dissolve, the kingdoms of childhood are lost. All-American Girl, despite its insouciant title, is…

Bone by Bone    Stories by Gary Krist. Harcourt Brace, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. The best stories are often the ones that surprise us, either because we aren’t expecting what happens, or because they take us farther than the destination we had in mind. In his second collection, Bone By Bone, Gary Krist…

Connie Porter's first fiction is more a collection of related stories than a novel, and will seem like old material to readers who only glance at the jacket copy. The book is a tale of a black family living in the urban North and, because of its structure, is from a woman's perspective. But Porter's…

At twenty-seven, Jake Lamar was a paragon of society — an upstanding young black male. He had been reared in a middle-class family in the Bronx, attended parochial and private schools, gone to Harvard, and was now an associate editor at Time magazine. His memoir is an exegesis of his growing discomfort with his place…

M. F. Beal's long visionary story "Gold" was featured in the New American Review in 1971. That piece, along with others in earlier issues of NAR, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review, earned for her a considerable reputation, including mention in Gravity's Rainbow. Amazon One is Beal's first published novel, and will, it is to…

Breathe Something Nice  Stories by Emily Hammond. Univ. of Nevada, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. There are no quiet stories in Breathe Something Nice, Emily Hammond’s first collection of fiction. In a series of ambitious evocations, Hammond demonstrates fresh wit and a fine irony. Most remarkable, though, is her willingness to keep opening up…

For sheer corporeal presence in verse, it would be hard to match Alice Mattison. Her best subject is motherhood, including pregnancy (no need to say " enceinte" in this case). No subject holds more boredom or fascination for us. As Adrienne Rich has noted, we tend either to make too much or too little of…

By now, many people have heard of the 1986 accident that led to the amputation of writer Andre Dubus's left leg and cost him the use of his right one. Driving home, Dubus stopped to aid two motorists, a brother and sister. An oncoming car hit Dubus and the brother, killing the young man, but…

When Anne Sexton died in her garage, asphyxiated by exhaust, in October of 1974, a generation of writers and readers were jolted, if not quite surprised. Death had been a main subject of hers; yes, poetry was, in Peter Davison's phrase, a "dangerous trade." When Sexton was twenty-eight, living the hemmed-in life of an unfulfilled…