Wedding Day, poems by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon): Intimate and hypnotic, the poems of Levin’s wonderful second book operate as a lens through which we are simultaneously granted two views: one into the darker, private interior of the self, the other of an outer-world turned otherworldly by the poet’s eye. Whether turning her gaze inward…
The Return Message, poems by Tessa Rumsey (Norton): The foremost organizing principal of this fascinating second volume is the manner in which Rumsey pairs poems beneath shared titles and erects a dialogue between the shorter, pastoral poems that occupy the left pages and the longer, cityscape poems on the right. The dense scent of wisteria…
Nice Big American Baby, stories by Judy Budnitz (Knopf): The breadth of these stories, from Kafkaesque surrealism to tightly wrought naturalism, is breathtaking in itself, but what unites this extraordinary collection is its unnerving verve and vision. There isn’t anything Judy Budnitz can’t or won’t do, and right when you think she couldn’t possibly be…
The Train to Lo Wu, stories by Jess Row (Dial): In Jess Row’s post-colonial Hong Kong, everything seems to be on the verge of disappearing. The city is a "mirage" that can be "swallowed in fog for days," the language slippery, "no tenses or articles, with seven different ways of saying the same syllable." No…
The Man Who Sleeps in My Office, poems by Jason Sommer (Chicago): Jason Sommer’s latest book is tough and nuanced, at turns both public and private, and ambitious in the subjects it takes on: while touring a concentration camp in Prague, a young American couple think of "[t]hose who were naked here / and had…
The Wasp Eater, a novel by William Lychack (Houghton Mifflin): The scope of Lychack’s short novel—his debut book—is deceptively small. In 1979, a ten-year-old boy named Daniel in Connecticut is caught between his estranged parents. His father, a former marine with a "sweepstakes smile and sly charm" who works as a window washer, is booted…
Citizen, poems by Andrew Feld (Perennial): Elegant, frank, and wise, the poems in Andrew Feld’s first book initially appear composed; yet, within each is a narrative that, in its unfolding, becomes dangerous in its revelation. This is a book of journeys, literal and figurative, as Feld transverses an earlier American landscape menaced by encroaching civilization,…
Animal Crackers, stories by Hannah Tinti (Dial): "You hear animal stories every day," one of Hannah Tinti’s charming characters declares, "how a bee stung little Johnny and he went into cardiac arrest. How a snake bit Cousin Tom and it shriveled up his toe . . . These stories are supposed to give warning." Her…
Mother of Sorrows, stories by Richard McCann (Pantheon): The pieces in this debut book are so tightly interwoven that the whole is novelistic, and they have a ring of truth to them so profound that the effect is practically memoiristic (indeed, one story was reprinted in an anthology of memoirs). The overall effect of the…
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