Editor's Corner

Madeline DeFrees, Double Dutch, poems: A limited-edition chapbook of DeFrees’s poems that has been published in honor of this esteemed writer’s eightieth birthday. (Red Wing)

Jay Neugeboren, Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness, nonfiction: In 1997, novelist Neugeboren delivered a moving and important memoir, Imagining Robert, about his mentally ill brother. Now Neugeboren examines the mental health care system as a whole, giving us a comprehensive, dramatic, and richly textured survey of failures and successes. (Morrow)

Joyce Peseroff, Mortal Education, poems: Peseroff’s third book of poems recalls the raw experience of mortality, met through the illness and death of a friend, the context of history, and the tensions and pleasures of family life. Carnegie Mellon has also reissued Peseroff’s The Hardness Scale as part of its Classic Contemporary Series. In Ploughshares,…

Joyce Peseroff, Mortal Education, poems: Peseroff’s third book of poems recalls the raw experience of mortality, met through the illness and death of a friend, the context of history, and the tensions and pleasures of family life. Carnegie Mellon has also reissued Peseroff’s The Hardness Scale as part of its Classic Contemporary Series. In Ploughshares,…

Robert Pinsky, Americans’ Favorite Poems: An anthology of poems that were nominated for the Favorite Poem Project, the centerpiece of Pinsky’s Poet Laureateship. Americans from all walks of life were invited to recommend their favorite poems, and thousands have responded with impassioned personal letters, some of which are excerpted here alongside the poems. This anthology…

Jane Shore, Happy Family, poems: Shore’s latest volume follows the arc of her life from childhood in a closely knit Jewish family in 1950’s New Jersey to her marriage and parenthood. In humorous, earthy verse, she bridges together experiences in the lives of women in ways both magical and profound. (Picador)

Gary Soto, A Natural Man, poems: In his new collection, Soto-who this fall was presented with the Hispanic Heritage Award-gives stirring, authentic voice to Chicano life in the San Joaquin Valley, where he was born and raised. (Chronicle)

Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, poems: In her seventh collection, Dove mines American mythologies and histories to brilliant effect, arriving at relevant and artful poems that stir and sing. (Norton)

George Garrett, Oedipus at Colonus, play: Garrett’s scintillating translation is included in Sophocles, 2, edited by David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, which rounds out the Penn Greek Drama Series, the first complete translations of Sophocles in fifty years. (Pennsylvania)