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…
The Flawless Skin of Ugly People, a novel by Doug Crandell (Virgin): In this debut novel, Doug Crandell reverses the age-old question of inner versus outer beauty to deal with its counterpart: inner versus outer ugliness. The novel compellingly reveals that physical ugliness (however this is defined)—because of the reactions of others—may isolate and alienate…
Eternal Enemies, poems by Adam Zagajewski (FSG): It sounds somewhat disingenuous now to call even a single poem beautiful, let alone an entire book, so it’s not without caution that I say Adam Zagajewski’s latest collection, Eternal Enemies, is exactly that: lovely, luminous, and wholly lacking the easy cynicism lesser poets might ascribe to such…
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