Editor's Corner

Don Lee, Yellow, stories: Eight short stories that offer a fresh, contemporary vision of what it means to be Asian in America, a post-immigrant examination of identity, race, and love. (Norton)

Thomas Lux, The Street of Clocks, poems: In his first all-new volume in seven years, Lux delivers a mesmerizing series of lyrical monologues, imbued with characteristic playfulness and lucidity, in language both distilled and musical. (Houghton Mifflin)

Gail Mazur, They Can’t Take That Away from Me, poems: Mazur’s sparkling, compassionate, and illuminating fourth collection measures the passage of time-the body’s desires and frailties, illness and death, children and parents, the intimacies of marriage. (Chicago)

Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, poems: A comprehensive selection from Muldoon’s eight books of poetry, this brilliant volume presents an astonishing range of moods and subjects, showing a poet reinventing himself at every turn. (FSG)

Madison Smartt Bell, Master of the Crossroads, a novel: The second installment of Bell’s trilogy about the slave revolt on Haiti, this mesmerizing and masterful volume focuses on the military leader and liberator Toussaint Louverture. (Pantheon)

Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods, poems: A stunning cycle of four-quatrain poems that explores, with virtuosity and splendor, the mythological underpinnings of sex, sin, and violence, and their relationships to the natural world. (FSG)

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)

   Gerald Stern, Last Blue, poems: Philip Levine writes, “This is a sparer Stern than we’re used to; for years he’s been our Whitman for the present hour. He still is, but he’s writing now with a tighter focus, as though he had to make every word count. The best news is he does. ‘Ravages’…