Editor's Corner

Richard Tillinghast, Six Mile Mountain, poems: Clearly influenced by the Irish tradition, the enchanting poems in Tillinghast’s seventh full-length collection are rooted in landscape, and explore love, travel, chaos, and betrayal. (Story Line)

James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a novel: Welch delivers a stirring, bravura tale-based on a true incident-of a Lakota Indian trapped in late-nineteenth-century France after being left behind by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. (Doubleday)

   Russell Banks, The Angel on the Roof, stories: A magnificent, generous collection of thirty-one stories, many of them set in hardscrabble New Hampshire, eloquently probing the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives. (HarperCollins)

   Rosellen Brown, Half a Heart, a novel: Miriam Starobin is living in upper-middle-class Houston when she is reunited with her eighteen-year-old daughter-the fruit of an affair with a black professor in Mississippi when Miriam was a civil rights activist. A searing, provocative novel about race, identity, and ideals. (FSG)

            Stratis Haviaras, Millennial Afterlives: A Retrospective, prose poems: A gorgeous limited-edition collection of poetic missives, each dedicated to a friend, that lyrically reflects on the passage of time. (Wells College)

   Fanny Howe, Selected Poems: Sixteen evocative poems that are driven by metaphysical, religious, and ontological quests. Moving from Boston to Ireland, these poems show Howe at her musical and intellectual peak. (California)

   Maxine Kumin, Always Beginning: On a Life in Poetry, essays: The Pulitzer Prize winner engagingly describes the marriage of her lives as writer, farmer, mother, wife, and comrade, including a moving remembrance of her friendship with Anne Sexton. (Copper Canyon) Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of Recovery, nonfiction: Kumin, a lifelong equestrian,…

Jayne Anne Phillips, Motherkind, a novel: With radiant prose, Phillips’s long-awaited new novel portrays thirty-year-old Kate Tateman as she cares for her dying Appalachian mother in Boston while Kate bumps through the birth of her first child and her new marriage. In a single year, she must reconcile profound beginnings and endings. (Knopf)

   Lloyd Schwartz, Cairo Traffic, poems: Schwartz extends his exploration of the intersections of character and language, of the places where common speech mysteriously transforms itself into poetry, into a series of extraordinary and compelling narratives-funny and frightening, seductive and moving. Includes several translations of contemporary Brazilian poems. (Chicago)