Above the Houses, short stories by Susan Engberg (Delphinium): In her fourth collection of stories, Susan Engberg explores the tentative, testing movements of people recently unmoored by change. Spouses die; marriages end or begin; there are new towns, new houses, new bodies to navigate. The landscape can feel hostile. A baby wanders alone down a…
In the Mouth, stories and novellas by Eileen Pollack (Four Way): How’s this for brave? One narrator, a son, is obsessed with fulfilling his dying father’s request for a belated circumcision, even at the son’s own hands. How’s this for unflinching? Another narrator, a mother, is troubled by something as normal but taboo as a…
Fire Ants, stories by Gerald Duff (New South Books): Most of the fifteen stories in Gerald Duff’s strong collection are filled with characters who are down on their luck. A mother’s mentally handicapped son is in jail because he didn’t understand that showing a gun to the cashier at the Sac’n Pac might be interpreted…
Meaning a Cloud, poems by J. W. Marshall (Oberlin): J. W. Marshall’s starkly beautiful first book, Meaning a Cloud, is a bang-up narrative of fracture and its aftermath—a sort of out-of-body reportage born of dumb luck injury and the careful exploration of what repair (or endurance) entails. The landscape is one of dissonance: scattering clouds,…
The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity, by Richard Todd (Riverhead): Along with his witty and astute social commentary on objects, places, politics, words, and ideas, all of which serve to foreground his sensibility, Richard Todd offers us fragmentary revelations of his personal life. Gradually these revelations deepen into a fully realized, brave, and…
The Art of the Poetic Line, criticism by James Longenbach (Graywolf): James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line is a very legible book that manages to pack much wisdom and complexity into a relatively small space—which is, of course, what we expect from the best poetry itself. A poet achieves such condensation by making…
Bang Crunch, stories by Neil Smith (Vintage): Most literary trends produce both brilliant and unfortunate incarnations, and the "quirky fiction" school is no exception. The less successful manifestations of this trend toward off-kilter fictional realities seem to embrace weirdness for the sake of weirdness, to privilege style over substance, while the more memorable works…
National Anthem, poems by Kevin Prufer (Four Way): Kevin Prufer’s terrific fourth collection exposes a nightmare straight from the head of Walt Whitman. In it, America sings a democratic song of distress, with no one, or thing, denied suffering or a voice: not the moon, nor minor politicians, shopping centers or the book’s most prevalent…
Home Remedies, stories by Angela Pneuman (Harcourt): In this dark and spirited debut collection, Pneuman mines the quirks of characters who hail from Kentucky to explore issues of religion, family, death, and sexual attraction. The eight fully realized stories featured here are sharp, well told, and—most important—fearless in their capacity to explore the contradictions both…
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