Editor's Corner

   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)

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…

James Alan McPherson, A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, essays: With topics ranging from racism in the South to Disneyland, McPherson provocatively probes the geography of a morally bankrupt society, as he yearns for “spiritual civility.” Often magical and transcendent, all of these essays are heartfelt and resonant. (Simon & Schuster)

Leonard Michaels, A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories: This collection of Michaels’s fiction from the early sixties to nineties glows with his inimitable style and trenchant perspectives on love and sex. (Mercury)

Robert Pinsky, Jersey Rain, poems: Marking a fresh, lyrical direction in Pinsky’s work, this volume is a luminous, fugue-like meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven. (FSG)