Editor's Corner

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)

Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, poems: This sumptuous volume collects 226 poems across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, including twenty new poems; a CD of recordings is included. (Houghton Mifflin)

Carl Phillips, Riding Westward, poems: In this startling and distinctive eighth collection, Phillips meditates on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct. (FSG)

Robert Pinsky, First Things to Hand, poems: This chapbook serves as a kind of literate anthropology, but is also vintage Pinsky: casually erudite, charged with steady passion, a pleasure to read. (Sarabande)