Editor's Corner

Jane Hirshfield, After, poems: A luminous investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence. (HarperCollins)

Ron Carlson, Five Skies, a novel: A tour de force of grief, atonement, and the cost of loyalty, Carlson’s first novel in twenty-five years brings together two stoics and a teenage misanthrope in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains to build a ramp to nowhere. (Viking)

Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions, a novel: An elegant new novel charting the history of one family whose lives are forever changed by the loss of their mother. (Little, Brown)

Mary Gordon, Circling My Mother, a memoir: a rich, bittersweet memoir about Gordon’s mother—a single parent who weathered war, the Great Depression, and physical affliction—their relationship, and her role as a daughter. (Pantheon)

Howard Norman, Devotion, a novel: A haunting examination of romantic and filial love in the vast open spaces of Nova Scotia. (Houghton Mifflin)

Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music: Poems , poems: Pinsky’s first book of poems since 2000 discovers connections between things seemingly disparate in this ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by a major American poet. (FSG)

Gary Soto, A Simple Plan, poems: A new collection that returns to the themes of place, childhood, and kinship with the down-and-out in Fresno. (Chronicle)

Mark Strand, New Selected Poems, poems: more than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Selected Poems, Strand offers a magnificent new gathering of work, one that spans and celebrates his remarkable career to date. (Knopf)

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger, poems: A glorious arrangement of selections from six previous volumes, culminating in a series of new poems. (Norton)