Editor's Shelf

Jane Hirshfield recommends The Dumbbell Nebula, poems by Steve Kowit: “A book of rangy, big-hearted, capacious poems, full of surprising wisdoms and affection for the world as it is.” (Heyday)

Philip Levine recommends New Addresses, poems by Kenneth Koch: “Koch at his best. He addresses what has given his life meaning: sex, love, war service, languages, business, the central and the trivial. Funny poems? Yes. And wonderfully serious.” (Knopf)

Madeline DeFrees recommends Saying the Necessary, poems by Edward Harkness: “The balance between reality and imagination is so precarious and the language so persuasive that the reader identifies with the speaker.” (Pleasure Boat Studio)

Chase Twichell recommends Ocean Avenue, poems by Malena Mörling: “This is a remarkable first book-taut, often egoless poems that subtly nudge the reader into territory that’s wholly original yet also familiar. Each poem creates a minor shock of recognition.” (New Issues)

Robert Boswell recommends Silk, stories by Grace Dane Mazur: “Mazur is a former microbiologist, and the stories in her first collection offer a means of apprehending the world that is both intellectually fascinating and sensually wired. It is either a book of the mind about pleasures of the flesh, or a book of the flesh…

Lloyd Schwartz recommends Offspring, a novel by Jonathan Strong (Zoland): “Reading a novel by Jonathan Strong is like finding a secret treasure in a dark attic. ‘Every unhappy family,’ Tolstoy wrote, ‘is unhappy in its own way.’ Offspring is the tale of a peculiarly happy family that lives in an unhappy world which can’t understand-or…

Maxine Kumin recommends Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer’s Reflections on Her Kitten, Her Aged Mother, and . . . Life, a memoir by Merrill Joan Gerber: “This is a deeply affecting book, told absolutely without artifice; unflinching but compassionate, and very charming. Gerber is best known as a novelist and short story writer. She…

George Garrett recommends Omniphobia, fiction by R. H. W. Dillard (Louisiana State): “Four stories and three novellas by a master of American metafiction. A virtuoso demonstration of the virtues of the avant-garde.”

Gail Mazur recommends Open Water, a novel by Maria Flook (Pantheon): “Maria Flook’s people in Open Water are the product of her full-hearted embrace of an American kind of nuttiness and a zest for their strange self-induced troubles. The margin, which is their habitat, is wildly, deliciously drawn by a writer of enormous intelligence and…