Book Review

Bad Judgment  Poems by Cathleen Calbert. Sarabande Books, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Victoria Clausi. Calbert’s second book, Bad Judgment, is a searching, sometimes seething look at the traditions of love and marriage, revealing a strong voice adept in the use of irony. These poems frequently open onto a world poised between the surreal and the…

Junkies, says the runaway girl who narrates the title story in City of Boys, "exit right out of every situation before it's even become a situation." The same might be said for many of the chillingly detached characters in Beth Nugent's perceptive and unsettling first collection. Through ten spare, haunting stories, Nugent captures the overwhelming…

Bardo   Poems by Suzanne Paola. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. In Tibetan, the bardo is defined as a transitory state after death, a murky time where, Suzanne Paola writes in her latest book of poems, “the soul wanders through the heavens and hells . . . trying to achieve…

There is language and there are languages. Our obsession with translations from languages few of us can read with any cultural comprehension may be leading us away from the traditional connotative values of English into a Peter Pan world of raw and too often merely clever imagery. But for Charles Simic the encounter with a…

Beloved Infidel  Poems by Dean Young. Wesleyan University Press, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. In “The Hive,” as in many other of the very fine poems in Dean Young’s second collection, Beloved Infidel, the slightly cracked and wavy but nonetheless serviceable mirror of contemporary language is held up to our lives, to the…

I first read this tremendous book in 1961, when it was published, and recently read it again after an interval of twenty-six years. Both times it has struck me as the best novel I know on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer: and that alone seems marvelous because so…

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,…