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)
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,…
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)
Philip Levine, The Mercy, poems: Levine’s eighteenth volume is at turns touching and heartbreaking, enchanting and brutal, but always compelling. This is a book of essential journeys, from birth to death, from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from here to there. (Knopf)
Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, nonfiction: Going far beyond mere prosody, Pinsky delivers a fascinating, instructive treatise on poetry, which he convincingly asserts is, above all, a “vocal” and “bodily” art. (FSG)
Winter 1979 - Digital