The Best Place to Be, a novel in stories by Lesley Dormen (Simon & Schuster): In this debut fiction, Dormen successfully captures all the pivotal moments in a woman’s life—dealing with college, facing the death of her mother, arriving at middle age with grace and humor—although not necessarily in chronological order. "I didn’t have any…
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…
The Pajamaist, poems by Mathew Zapruder (Copper Canyon): There is a famous story about John Lennon’s visit to a London art gallery in the sixties, in which the Beatle was faced with a precariously tall step ladder leading up to a dangling telescope. When he climbed to the top of the ladder and looked through…
The Memoir and the Memoirist, literary criticism by Thomas Larson (Swallow): Unlike its parent, autobiography, memoir doesn’t seek to tell the story of the writer’s entire life but rather focuses on a well-defined period, event, or crisis. Nor does the memoirist need to be a VIP. What the resulting literary work loses in historical importance…
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…
Every Past Thing, a novel by Pamela Thompson (Unbridled Books): I mean no slight to Pamela Thompson’s dazzling first novel, Every Past Thing, when I say that here is a book that can be judged by its cover: A reproduction of Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s exquisite "Mourning Picture." (The original hangs in the Smith College Museum…
The Monsters of Templeton, a novel by Lauren Groff (Voice): What’s fresh and fun about The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is how it doesn’t fit neatly into one contemporary genre. It’s literary, it’s historical, and it’s peppered with mysteries, ghosts, and "monsters." Even the packaging of the book is a delight—full of illustrations,…
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