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…
Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, a memoir by Seth Kantner (Milkweed): Because of its engagement with the American imagination, authentic Alaska is all too often lost in overly romanticized tales of survival, or politically motivated descriptions of "barren, lifeless tundra." The best antidote for this, perhaps, is a rooted literary voice that…
What a pleasure to find a poet whose sense of risk and honesty drives her to complicate the emotions and attitudes of her poems — so that sorrow might be suddenly hijacked by bravado, or delight by anger and humor — rather than to wrap us up a neat little parcel of agreeable "sensitivities." In…
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir by Haruki Murakami (Knopf): This plain-speaking, suggestive memoir by the prolific and internationally acclaimed novelist Murakami is part runner’s diary, part writer’s handbook, part spiritual meditation. "Writing honestly about running and writing honestly about myself are nearly the same thing," he states. His example…
Irish Elegies, personal essays by Chris Arthur (Palgrave-Macmillan): Irish Elegies is Chris Arthur’s fourth book of new essays in a series that includes Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002), and Irish Haiku (2005), all published by the Davies Group, all fondly recommended by this reviewer. Irish Elegies departs from the trilogy by joining the ranks…
Collections of Nothing, a memoir by William Davies King (Chicago): There is, perhaps, only a continuum linking habit, hobby, obsession, and pathology. William Davies King, in his new memoir, stunning and smart, insists, "I collect nothing—with a passion." Throughout this quirky little book, the author riffs on the nothing that is not there, and the…
The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor (Yale University Press): Jack Tworkov, one of the original members of the school of Abstract Expressionism, was also a teacher, administrator, husband, father, friend and devoted reader of poetry. All the facets of this complex and humane man are reflected in this…
The New Valley, novellas by Josh Weil (Grove Press): Josh Weil drew me into The New Valley from the get-go. His language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. In fact, Weil writes the kind of sentences you want to sniff and then slosh around in your mouth for a while before heading into the next paragraph….
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