Editor's Shelf

Don Lee recommends Zip Six, a first novel by Jack Gantos: “Dark, energetic, and sometimes surprisingly comic, Gantos’s novel charts a young drug smuggler’s course through prison.” (Bridge Works)

   Jane Hirshfield recommends fine, poems by Stefanie Marlis: ” fine consists for the most part of brief ‘definitions’-poems that slip from actual definition into etymology into image, association, story, pondering. These elliptical prose poems liberate the relationship between the poet’s life and imagination in surprising, precise ways, like tiny explosive charges set down in…

Sherman Alexie recommends One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, nonfiction by Scott L. Malcomson: “This book inspired me and pissed me off. I threw it across the room in anger a few times because I disagreed so strongly with Malcomson; I also shook my head with wonder when he was so right….

Philip Levine recommends Things that Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones: “Rodney Jones is a new and long overdue discovery of mine. With wit, charm, and great resourcefulness, he writes wonderfully uncluttered poems that pay tribute to a rich cast of characters, from Aunt Madge to Melody, ‘the teenage welfare mother down the hall.’ His…

Gail Mazur recommends Two Cities, essays by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “Zagajewski’s a fine poet, one of the best, and this second collection of prose pieces-memoir/essays/prose poems-is the mature work of an ecstatic ironist: cosmopolitan, sweet, philosophical, and revealing. Born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945, Zagajewski is the voice of his generation, everywhere…

Rosellen Brown recommends Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy, a memoir by Frances Mayes: “Frances Mayes’s beautifully written account of her love affair with a house she and her husband renovated in Tuscany, and with a place that retains ancient standards for all things sensual, contains an essay that appeared in my personal…

Fanny Howe recommends The Letters of Mina Harker, a novel by Dodie Bellamy: “A contemporary epistolary novel that carries the ecstatic and personal extravagance of New York School poetry into a new realm. San Francisco but also novelistic observation. Sexually explicit but far from pornographic. See the difference.” (Hard Press)

Maxine Kumin recommends Vietnamerica, a memoir by Thomas A. Bass: “A disturbing and totally compelling account of the lives of Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam; transported to the U.S., dumped in detention centers; used in factory jobs; fated to wander rootless from place to place. Bass, like John Balaban before him, forces us to…

Maxine Kumin recommends The Making of a Poem, an anthology edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland: “An eminently sensible book to work from, this anthology of poetic forms is delightfully varied, with succinct commentary.” (Norton)