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)
Gary Soto, Nickel and Dime, a novel: In these powerful, immensely affecting linked stories, Soto follows three Mexican-American men-two down-and-out security guards and an aging poet-as they wander through Oakland, trying to salvage their broken lives. (New Mexico)
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’…
Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love, a novel: An instant classic, Baxter’s third novel is a sensual and luminous reimagination of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Ann Arbor, Michigan-a gradually darkening comedy, powered by a dozen voices speaking to a somewhat shadowy figure named Charlie Baxter. (Pantheon)
Marilyn Hacker, Squares and Courtyards, poems: Precise, haunting, elegant, and elegiac, Hacker’s ninth volume celebrates her community of friends in Paris and New York and their courage as they live with HIV and cancer. (Norton)
DeWitt Henry, Breaking Into Print, an anthology: Collecting first and early stories from Ploughshares by writers who are now literary lights , Henry serves up an invaluable reference for new writers. Headnotes for each story and interleafed shoptalk make this a sparkling commentary on craft. (Beacon)
Mary Gordon, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity, a memoir: Eight beautiful essays map out the places that have shaped Gordon’s life and writing, from her grandmother’s house to a Cape Cod writer’s retreat to her Manhattan apartment. (Scribner)
Bill Knott, Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969- 1999: Knott’s tenth volume gathers three decades of virtuoso poems, showcasing his iconoclastic wit, his unique view of the world, and his fiercely original language, proving Marvin Bell was right when he said that Knott can “twist the neck of syntax until…
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