Editor's Corner

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.

Maura Stanton: Life Among the Trolls (David R. Godine), a poetry collection that explores themes of love and hate.

Richard Tillinghast: The Stonecutter’s Hand (Godine), a collection of poems that extols the virtues and pleasures of travel.

Tobias Wolff: In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (Knopf), a memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam years.

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.

Charles Simic: The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (Univ. of Michigan), a collection of memoirs, essays, and journal entries that illuminate the origins of Simic’s poetry.

The City Below, James Carroll’s ninth novel, which chronicles two brothers in Boston during the Kennedy years.