Editor's Corner

Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture, a biography: A masterful portrait of the man who led the first—and only—successful slave revolution in history. (Pantheon)

Chase Twichell, Dog Language, poems: Twichell’s dazzling poems capture the complex emotions and challenges of family and aging, without ever reducing them to cliché or sentiment. (Copper Canyon)

James Carroll, House of War, nonfiction: Carroll draws on rich personal experience as well as exhaustive research to produce an intimate, searing, and emotional history of “the Building” known as the Pentagon. (Houghton Mifflin)

Madeline DeFrees, Spectral Waves, poems: Feisty and haunting, the poems in DeFrees’s tenth collection range from sonnets about Elvis to lyrics about cataracts, birds, and the plants in her well-tended garden. (Copper Canyon)

Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts, poems: In Gallagher’s first new collection in fourteen years, the ghosts of the past are resplendently conjured as part of the poet’s present day with signature grace. (Graywolf)

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)

Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry, poems: The republic in Espada’s eighth collection is a glorious place of odes and elegies, memory and history, miracles and justice. (Norton)