Editor's Corner

Frank Bidart, Star Dust, poems: Finishing the sequence that began with his chapbook Music Like Dirt, Bidart illustrates with unforgettable passion that the dream beyond desire is rooted in the drive to create. (FSG)

Donald Hall, The Best Day the Worst Day, a memoir: This beautiful book’s account of Hall’s life with his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, is joyful, intimate, heartbreaking, and generous. (Houghton Mifflin)

Joyce Peseroff, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, essays: Peseroff gathers personal and critical essays, letters, poems, and memoirs that piercingly celebrate Kenyon’s spirit and charm. (Graywolf)

Mark Doty, School of the Arts, poems: Incisive and transcendent, Doty’s seventh collection contemplates the creative process and eternal questions of love and loss, desire and despair. (HarperCollins)

Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, poems: Williamson’s verse from the last three decades are collected with new poems that beautifully draw his oeuvre together. (Chicago)

Margot Livesey, Banishing Verona, a novel: A shy housepainter and a pregnant radio show host begin an affair in Livesey’s radiant, delicious new novel, and then they’re immediately separated, setting them off in transatlantic pursuit. (Holt)

Rita Dove, American Smooth, poems: In her eighth superb collection, Dove pays homage to the grit and mother wit that inform our mongrel cultural heritage. (Norton)

Madison Smartt Bell, The Stone That the Builder Refused, a novel: Bell gives us the final, climactic novel in his glorious trilogy about Toussaint Louverture. (Pantheon)

Russell Banks, The Darling, a novel: Set in Liberia, Banks’s riveting new book explores the interrelated history of race problems in the U.S. and Africa. (HarperCollins)