Editor's Corner

Gary Soto, One Kind of Faith, poems: Soto once again displays dazzling range in his twenty-sixth book, exploring the wonders of the everyday in poems about Berkeley and Fresno, along with a nervy section of “film treatments for David Lynch.” (Chronicle)

Maura Stanton, Cities in the Sea, stories: Blurring the boundaries between fairy tale and vérité, Stanton incisively taps into the mysteries of contemporary life in these magical new stories, examining the nature of narrative and dreams. (Michigan)

Gerald Stern, What I Can’t Bear Losing, essays: Tenderly touching upon a number of events, from Sundays spent in Calvinist Pittsburgh to being shot in Newark, Stern provides magnificent lessons on the awakening of an artistic consciousness. (Norton)

Tobias Wolff, Old School, a novel: A scholarship student at a New England prep school vies for a literary prize in Wolff’s marvelous first novel, and the boy ends up being seduced by the irresistible power of self-creation. (Knopf)

Donald Hall, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, essays: Hall collects forty years of writings on poetry into a luminous and essential volume about the sensuality of language, its pleasures and sounds. (Michigan)

Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress, essays: In these richly evocative and provocative pieces, Howe meditates on imagination, motherhood, art-making, and bewilderment, challenging conventional systems of belief. (California)

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place, poems: Lux asks questions about language and intention and about connections to nature in fifty-two new poems, bringing to delightful life the “refreshing iconoclasms” that Rita Dove has admired in his work. (Houghton Mifflin)

Fanny Howe, Gone, poems: With verve and clarity, Howe illuminates the interstices between the known and unknown worlds with motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction, in her extraordinary new book. (California)

Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love, poems: With his signature terse line and syntax, Phillips examines the myths that we make and return to in the name of desire, delving into the constant tension between abandon and control. (FSG)