Editor's Corner

Ellen Bryant Voigt: Kyrie, a mosaic of sonnets that conjures up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed half a million people in the U.S. Voigt first focuses on a family and then branches out to separate voices. (Norton)

Dan Wakefield: Expect a Miracle, a nonfiction book that examines the everyday miracles Wakefield himself has experienced, interleaved with accounts of extraordinary events in the lives of his friends and acquaintances. (HarperCollins San Francisco)

Gail Mazur: The Common (Univ. of Chicago), her third collection of poems, of which Lloyd Schwartz comments: ” ‘Dislocated’ in Houston, New Englander Gail Mazur writes that she’s determined to look at her new surroundings ‘with the wise tough eye of exile.’ She succeeds-partly because, like so many of our very best poets, she is…

Sue Miller: The Distinguished Guest (HarperCollins),a novel about a couple who must care for the husband’s mother, an acclaimed author-a situation that forces them all to reconcile with the past.

Gerald Stern: Odd Mercy (W.W. Norton, July 1995), a new book of poetry, including a 56-page poem called “Hot Dog” about a street woman in New York’s East Village.

Russell Banks: Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, May 1995) , a novel about a homeless, drug-addicted teenager living on the edge of society.

Donald Hall: Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (Univ. of Michigan), a collection of writings in defense of the vitality of contemporary American poetry.

Philip Levine: The Simple Truth (Knopf), a collection of new poems, of which Harold Bloom says, “I wonder if any American poet since Walt Whitman himself has written elegies this consistently magnificent.”

Tim O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence), a novel about a Minnesota politician who searches for his missing wife and confronts long-suppressed memories of My Lai.