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,"…
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…
Sister, poems by Nickole Brown (Red Hen): Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of this unflinching and brilliant first book undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood, returning to a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader down the…
Epistles, poems by Mark Jarman, (Sarabande): Prized for his achievements in metrical verse and his deft deployment of English prosody, Mark Jarman turns, in Epistles, to the prose poem for this series of thirty dramatic monologues. Jarman’s explicit titular reference to the Apostolic letters of Paul lays the groundwork for an exhilarating experiment in this…
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