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…
leadbelly, poems by Tyehimba Jess (Verse): Tyehimba Jess, like the subject of his National Poetry Series–winning debut, coaxes an astonishingly rich world from the wood and steel scraps of the life he finds before him. He chronicles the story of Leadbelly—the killer, the lover, the victim, the son, the greatest bluesman of his time—and…
Abide with Me, a novel by Elizabeth Strout (Random House): This second novel by the author of the extraordinary Amy and Isabelle further mines the conflicts, contradictions, and complications of small town life. Tyler Caskey, an observant and vulnerable minister in West Annett, Maine, must concomitantly confront the death of his relatively young wife, the…
Natural History, poems by Dan Chiasson (Knopf): Dan Chiasson’s second book offers up a complex weave of personae—guises as various as Horace, Pliny the Elder, and Randall Jarrell. From behind these many veils, the poems meditate upon the intersections of lived and literary experience, the mythical and the day-to-day. Chiasson playfully subverts the dramatic…
Water: Nine Stories, stories by Alyce Miller (Sarabande): By its title, Miller’s collection offers a fitting symbol for the multiple forms of desire that take shape within her characters. Filled with beautiful phrasings and descriptions of longing, the book sometimes shows desire’s fluidity as a result of age; other times, as in the story "Ice,"…
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