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)
Christopher Tilghman recommends The Mirror, a novel by Lynn Freed: “Lynn Freed pulls off a stunning tour de force in this flawless life story of a woman in South Africa after World War I. Please, read this book.” (Crown)
Maxine Kumin and Joyce Peseroff recommend The Moon Reflected Fire, poems by Doug Anderson (Alice James). Kumin: “These are war poems-war poems and beyond. Vivid, compelling, controlled, and often wildly lyrical.” Peseroff: “Not just about Vietnam but resonant with the history of warriors from the backyard to The Iliad to the Bible, Doug Anderson’s first…
Philip Levine recommends The Mortal City, translations by William Matthews of one hundred epigrams by the Latin poet Martial: “The best book of translations I’ve read in ages. Matthews manages to make a first-century a.d. poet who wrote in Latin sound both like a Roman and a contemporary. All the wit you find in Matthews’s…
Robert Pinsky recommends The Odes of Horace, poems translated by David Ferry: “David Ferry’s versions of Horace have an immense formal appeal: they sound ravishing when you read them aloud, and that appeal to the senses is one of the ways that this book rescues us entirely from the stereotype of Horace as a kind…
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Snow Watcher, poems by Chase Twichell: “Chase Twichell’s new poems are both austere and luminous, both quiet and deeply startling. Her encounter with contemplative mind yields a poetry unlike any other-a new integration of Zen practice and American experience, American sentences. An utterly compelling and extraordinary book.” (Ontario)
Rosellen Brown recommends The Stone Diaries, a novel by Carol Shields (Viking): “A marvelously written, poignant, and funny chronicle of a Canadian woman’s life. This has the wit and authority of a nineteenth-century novel with a knowing contemporary slyness to it.”
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