Clampdown, by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions): A few decades ago Jennifer Moxley might have been called a “coterie poet”—her low celebrity wattage within the larger galaxy of American letters contrasts starkly with the deep respect and loyalty she inspires among a relatively small number of serious readers and fellow poets. Her work appears in hard-to-find…
In his essay “Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness,” Tony Hoagland makes sense of current divisions among poets writing in the U.S. today by dividing them into camps that go to poetry either for some sort of perspective on experience—to feel a cathartic “gong of recognition”—or to untangle their sleepy mammal selves from the probable, humdrum,…
Pilgrims Stories by Elizabeth Gilbert. Houghton Mifflin, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Two things are certain in Elizabeth Gilbert’s first collection, Pilgrims: her characters possess minds of their own, and they can talk. Oh, can they talk. Gilbert is adept enough with one-line zingers (“He’s too dumb to bat both his eyes at the…
1-800-HOT-RIBS Poems by Catherine Bowman. Gibbs Smith, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,” Lowell wrote, as if foreseeing 1-800-hot-ribs, the debut collection by Catherine Bowman, a skilled young poet who seems to manipulate the language with a branding iron in one hand and a bullwhip…
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Stories by Dianne Nelson. Univ. of Georgia Press, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. In A Brief History of Male Nudes in America, Dianne Nelson’s first story collection, the element of place — a ranch in Nevada, a tent in Kansas, or a hotel in Santa Fe…
A Four-Sided Bed A novel by Elizabeth Searle. Graywolf Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, A Four-Sided Bed, Elizabeth Searle, the 1992 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, ambitiously tackles the shifting boundaries of love and sexuality. Over the course of a telling year, two men and two women…
J.-M. G. Le Clézio and the Nobel Prize: This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature selection has proven controversial, and to some, disappointing. One French critic fumed that the winner’s fiction lacked "universality," and even worse, often made it to the bestseller lists. The dean of German literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, expressed astonishment that the award…
You might think that Michael Chabon is simply trying to twist your tongue when he writes sentences like this: "She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite and adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman's body as seal her off from…
Exiles, a novel by Ron Hansen (FSG): While Ron Hansen’s forays into fiction have been so diverse as to seem disjointed—from the outlaws in Desperados and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, to Hitler and his twisted obsessions in Hitler’s Niece, to the young and unstable nun in Mariette in Ecstasy—all…
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