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…
Controvertibles, poems by Quan Barry (Pittsburgh): The poems in Barry’s second book springboard from a wealth of subjects as the speaker seeks to close the gulf between the concrete and the abstract; whether interrogating the Shroud of Turin, meditating on seahorses with "fused jaws & stalked eyes argentine," or revisiting the murder of Emmett Till,…
The Birthdays, a novel by Heidi Pitlor (Norton): This debut traces a family reunion precipitated by Joe Miller’s seventy-fifth birthday and complicated by his wife Vera’s contemplation of an affair and the three different pregnancies involving their three different children. The kaleidoscopic effect of the roving third-person intimate point of view creates a crystalline portrait…
The City Is a Riding Tide, a novel by Rebecca Lee (Simon & Schuster): Fixed on a pair of Manhattan nonprofit workers who want to build an ill-fated healing center on a perilous bank of the Yangtze River, this is an urgent story infused with lyricism and populated by flawed people who both use one…
Mosquito, poems by Alex Lemon (Tin House): The poems in Alex Lemon’s striking first book document the experience of undergoing brain surgery, an agonizing recovery, and the sudden discovery of Eros, who finally emerges as the ultimate emblem of survival. Careful yet raw, the fresh sutures that comprise the lines in many of these poems…
Journey to the Beach of the Dead, poems by Richard Blanco (Arizona): The speaker of Richard Blanco’s second book serves as both tourist and guide to the reader throughout the relentless and far-flung journeying the poems undertake. Moving from otherness to origin, Blanco pulls away from such locales as Italy and Guatemala to reenter his…
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, poems by Lisa Olstein (Copper Canyon): Olstein’s first book weaves its reader into a sensual and fibrous dreamscape inhabited by totem animals, somnambulist lovers hypnotic with longing, and symbols boldly acknowledged for their inherent duplicity: "Insert bird for sorrow," her speaker insists. While the poems in this book often operate as…
Secondhand World, a novel by Katherine Min (Knopf): In this lucid and lyrical debut, Min offers the magnetic story of Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, an estranged Korean-American teenager struggling to understand just how it is that she, the lowly daughter, has managed to survive her ill-fated younger brother and the murder-suicide of her two parents….
Sanctuary, poems by Adrienne Su (Manic D): Do not allow the clarity of address in this striking second book to distract you from its many demands: Su’s approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity. The topics she addresses are as challenging as the formal rigors she undertakes and sustains…
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