No Planets Strike, poems by Josh Bell (Zoo): The network of motifs in Josh Bell’s debut volume, No Planets Strike, create as intricate a system as the roads, tunnels, and bridges that comprise the transportation systems of major metropolitan cities, allowing the reader to traverse the speaker’s psyche at dizzying, gratifying speeds. This is not…
What You’ve Been Missing, stories by Janet Desaulniers (Iowa): Janet Desaulniers’s debut collection, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, is surprisingly lovely and thrilling, in that it offers incredible intimacy and honesty in the face of life’s worst calamities. In one story, a mother notes after the death of her young son: "Life,…
The Winter Without Milk, stories by Jane Avrich (Mariner):What can be said about a writer who reimagines everyone from Oedipus to Hester Prynne, and throws in common contemporary folk for good measure? Here are stories that are literary in the best sense of the word-smart, witty, erudite, even at times bookish. This first collection hums…
The Owl Question, poems by Faith Shearin (Utah State):The speaker of these poems, always quick-witted and warm, considers her place among the commonplace. While all of the poems in this debut collection deal with subjects close to home—family, childhood, motherhood—they shiver with a nervous tension as the speaker returns again to the fact that she…
Lucky Girls, stories by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco): It seems impossible that a writer of Freudenberger’s youth could know so much about the world, but she does. The five long stories in this first book—mostly about young American women who are living as expatriates in Bangkok, Delhi, Bombay—crackle with acuity and authenticity. The narration doesn’t miss…
The Room Where I Was Born, poems by Brian Teare (Wisconsin): In his first book, Teare exceeds his ambition to build a wholly new system of myths, and creates an utterly complex and harrowing volume as structurally and figuratively brilliant as it is genius in its lyrical flexibility. The many subjects of this book devour…
Serious Girls, a novel by Maxine Swann (Doubleday): Maxine Swann—after claiming a Best American, an O. Henry, and a Pushcart for a single story that appeared in Ploughshares—follows two girls struggling to transcend the limitations of their childhood in her riveting debut novel. This is a wise and wonderful piece of storytelling that teaches us…
The Saint of Burning Down, poems by Nicole Cuddeback (Zoo): With a penchant for the things of this world that reminds one of Bishop, Cuddeback’s first book catalogues landscapes diverse as the fecund silt of her childhood Florida to sunlit, crowd-filled piazzas of Florence, Italy. The book opens with the speaker as a muted and…
North True South Bright, poems by Dan Beachy-Quick (Alice James):The poems in this first book could belong to no other, so assured and singular is Beachy-Quick’s voice. These poems appear before us with the urgency of prayer, the fever pitch of a spell being cast, and the desire to comprehend the mysteries of language. Words…
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