Editor's Corner

Jane Hirshfield, After, poems: Profoundly moving, After is an extended investigation into mutability and incarnation, desire and loss, and our intimate connection with others. (HarperCollins)

Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, poems: The speaker in this anticipated new volume of poems wonders: What is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? And how does one live in Ordinary Time-during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? (Norton)

Antonya Nelson, Some Fun, stories: The seven stories and novella in this witty, taut, and provocative collection prove to be a timely inventory of the state of family in America. (Scribner)

Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, a novel: Lee’s second novel is an incisive satire about art and commerce, fame and ethnicity, nature and development, and two estranged brothers, Lyndon and Woody Song. (Norton)

Joyce Peseroff, Eastern Mountain Time, poems: In her piercing fifth collection, Peseroff propels the reader from the pastoral to the tragic with bravura inventions of language. (Carnegie Mellon)

Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street, a novel: This absorbing novel opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. (Harper)

Alberto Ríos, The Theater of Night, poems: Set along the U.S.–Mexican border, Ríos’s poems charmingly follow the courtship and marriage of a couple as their lives sweetly weave into one. (Copper Canyon)

Thomas Lux, God Particles, poems: A satiric edge cuts through many of the poems in this new collection, with unexpected moments of grace instilling even the darkest moments with surprising sweetness. (Houghton Mifflin)

Dan Wakefield, The Hijacking of Jesus, nonfiction: With courage, passion, and outrage, Wakefield asks how and why the Christian faith has been appropriated and manipulated by current politics. (Nation)