There are many reasons to praise this extraordinary book by the Chinese poet Ha Jin. Among the poets of his generation, who came of age in the crucible of the Cultural Revolution, he is, I believe, the first to publish a collection not translated, but written in American English — spare, clear, unadorned. The poet,…
Coconuts for the Saint A novel by Debra Spark. Faber and Faber, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Ann Harleman. Bright, wistful, and brash, Debra Spark’s first novel, Coconuts for the Saint, snares the reader instantly. On the surface it is a mystery story: Who is Sandrofo Cordero Lucero, and what is he hiding? Beneath lies another…
Bitter Lake A novel by Ann Harleman. Southern Methodist Univ. Press, $22.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Bitter Lake, Ann Harleman, the 1993 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, deftly evokes the complex world of abandonment in a dysfunctional family. Here is a meditative work about family,…
Dark Sky Question Poems by Larissa Szporluk. Beacon Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. In Larissa Szporluk’s startling first collection of poems, Dark Sky Question, winner of the 1997 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, one finds a fiercely independent voice mapping the geography of longing. Here the backdrop of a darkening sky is just…
Sandra Tyler's deadpan-lyrical, remarkably accurate first novel, Blue Glass, concerns the coming of age of Leslie, an only child of divorcing parents. Her father, a college English teacher, withdraws and finds another woman, leaving teenaged Leslie in a world as claustrophobically feminine as that of William Inge's Picnic. While it is a world presumably of…
Blue Spruce Stories by David Long. Scribner, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. The twelve stories in David Long’s third collection, Blue Spruce, are distinctive for many reasons, but mostly they are marked by place — namely, Montana and other points Northwest. Restless, lonely, the people in Long’s stories are inheritors of the American West,…
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…
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