Editor's Corner

Alberto Alvaro Ríos: Pig Cookies and Other Stories, thirteen interrelated tales of a small village in northern Mexico over the course of several decades earlier in this century. (Chronicle)

Chase Twichell: The Ghost of Eden, Twichell’s fourth book of poems, a visionary sequence of interlocking meditations on the death of nature as we know it. The “ghost” is both the shadow of the paradise we have so carelessly ruined, and the poet herself. (Ontario Review Press)

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)

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

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.

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.”