Editor's Corner

Motherkind by Jayne Anne Phillips

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)

Cairo Traffic by Lloyd Schwartz

   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)

Last Blue by Gerald Stern

   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’…

Tiepolo’s Hound by Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, poems: Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Walcott’s own paintings, Tiepolo’s Hound is a stunning book-length poem that is at once the spiritual biography of Camille Pissarro, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of Walcott’s desire to catch the visual world in more than words. (FSG)