Editor's Corner

Yusef Komunyakaa, Taboo, poems: In the first book of a trilogy, Komunyakaa shows that he is our great poet of connectivity—the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. (FSG)

  Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica, poems: In this book-length lyric narrative inspired by history, Dove recreates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist, the son of a white woman and an "African prince," whose conflict with Ludwig van Beethoven over a woman evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. (Norton)

  B. H. Fairchild, Usher, poems: This new collection of poems employs dramatic monologues and embraces a range of subject matters and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. (Norton)

  Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters, a novel: Hoffman’s latest book tells of sisters who create their own magical world to escape a tragic encounter that has forever changed their lives. (Areheart)

  Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, essays: A richly contemplative collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America’s most original contemporary poets. (Graywolf)

  Paul Muldoon, Plan B, poems and photographs: In this extraordinary collaboration with Scottish photographer Norman McBeath, Muldoon’s poems reveal an uncanny relationship between word and image. (Enitharmon)

  Carl Phillips, Speak Low, poems: Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason—these are the lenses through which Phillips examines, in this tenth collection, what it means to be a human being in the world. (FSG)

  Robert Pinsky, Thousands of Broadways, nonfiction. Pinsky builds his portrait of the American small town through an accretion of recurring works, artists and themes, covered in passing and usually in unexpected ways. (Chicago)

Elizabeth Spires, The Wave-Maker, poems: In these poems, Spires explores the seamless continuum of birth, death and transformation, meditating on creatures as unlikely as a lowly snail, a prehistoric coelacanth, or a tiny Japanese netsuke of a badger disguised as a monk. (Norton)