The King of Limbo Stories by Adrianne Harun. Mariner, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Don Lee. The ten stories in Harun’s first collection, The King of Limbo, tend toward the elliptical — tinged with mystery and occasionally fable, populated by loners who are estranged from loved ones. Haunted, grieving, the characters fitfully reach for solace, sometimes…
Waiting for the Paraclete Poems by Lise Goett. Beacon, $15.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. Lise Goett’s first book is a lush investigation of a life that is never pedestrian and often wildly dramatic — each poetic image as if bejeweled in gorgeous language. Goett’s lyrical narratives ride violent, ever-changing currents of emotion. The entire…
Discography, poems by Sean Singer (Yale): Selected by W. S. Merwin as winner of the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Sean Singer’s Discography is a singular, quirky, and, at times, astonishingly beautiful first book. While jazz provides the central subject matter and metaphor for the collection, Singer’s poems don’t spend much time in rooms…
On This Day, a novel by Nathaniel Bellows (HarperCollins): A compelling, heartfelt first novel about an eighteen-year-old brother and his twenty-year-old sister who are orphaned by their parents. Warren and Joan’s father dies of cancer, and, within months, their mother commits suicide. In their small Maine hometown, the siblings try to ward off a pushy…
Sails the Wind Left Behind, poems by Alessandra Lynch (Alice James): These poems do the remarkable job of making contemporary American poetry feel new again. Lynch takes risks at every turn, trying out new shapes in the mouth, flirting with narrative. A story of longing and desire gets told, but entirely on Lynch’s terms —…
The Guru of Love, a novel by Samrat Upadhyay (Houghton Mifflin): The debut novel of short-story writer Samrat Upadhyay is set in Kathmandu, but for most of the first half of The Guru of Love, the plot and the language aren’t so terribly exotic. This remarkable restraint is one of this wonderful novel’s many strengths,…
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…
How to Breathe Underwater, stories by Julie Orringer: The three stories that open this debut collection are pure gems, rollicking along with scintillating prose and surety. Just when you think they will stop—and lesser writers would stop—they keep going with inexorable momentum. Almost all of the stories involve youths imperiled—by accidents, illness, fate, and, most…
Thieves’ Latin, poems by Peter Jay Shippy: This prize-winning first collection provides proof that, as Peter Jay Shippy writes, "writ happens"—and that sometimes it is wonderful "writ." With a gift for breathtakingly original language, he leads us through the vast orchard of his imagination, where we can pluck and taste its astonishing fruit. Thieves’ Latin,…
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