Editor's Corner

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)

Mary Gordon, Pearl, a novel: In Gordon’s haunting new book, a woman reexamines her assumptions about politics and the church when she goes to Dublin to save her daughter, who is on a hunger strike. (Pantheon)

Marilyn Hacker, translation of Birds and Bison, poems by Claire Malroux: These are both urban and pastoral poems, marvelously observing the natural world, language, and the human spirit. (Sheep Meadow)

Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen, a novel: In this enthralling tale, a small-town librarian is hit by lightning, and finds her heretofore frozen heart suddenly burning. (Little, Brown)

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)

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)

James Carroll, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, essays: Carroll collects his searing, passionate Boston Globe columns about the Bush administration’s "coercive unilateralism." (Holt)

Stuart Dybek, Streets in Their Own Ink, poems: In his second poetry collection, Dybek finds extraordinary vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated fiction. (FSG)