Editor's Shelf

DeWitt Henry recommends Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2021). “Jack Smith—literary editor, novelist, critic, and philosophy teacher—recommends a league of his own, one in which I am proud to be included. Much as there was no ‘great tradition’ before the critic F. R. Leavis invented one, so here Smith…

Jane Hirshfield recommends Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon, 2021). “Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures….

Laura van den Berg recommends The Mysteries by Marisa Silver (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). “Silver’s latest is brilliant on the life-warping power of grief, and on the tactile etherealness of childhood. A suspenseful and deeply felt novel.” Rosellen Brown recommends Imagine the Dog by Cecilia Pinto (Texas Review Press, 2021). “There aren’t enough presses that dare…

Peter Ho Davies recommends Likes by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (Macmillan, 2020). “Several pieces in this collection of sly, wise stories—two of which originally appeared in Ploughshares—spring from myth and fairytale, but the abiding magic here lies in the luminous reality of the characters.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W….

DeWitt Henry recommends a hundred little pieces on the end of the world by John Rember (U. of New Mexico Press, 2020). “Rember’s meditations ‘on teaching, writing, and friendship in an increasingly fragile world’ are, above all, alert, voracious, thoughtful, and life-read. From his prospect in Sawtooth Valley, Idaho, he offers clear-minded witness of our…

Rosellen Brown recommends Everywhere You Don’t Belong, a novel by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin, February 2020). “The immensely talented Bump’s first book is an odd and original portrait of, and by, a Black kid from the South Side of Chicago who’s a fierce reporter of the affection and the disaffection that roil his community. There’s violence…

Tess Gallagher recommends My Name Is Not Viola by Lawrence Matsuda (Endicott and Hugh Books, 2019). “My Name Is Not Viola belongs to all of us who wish to experience the WWII Japanese American forced incarceration heartbeat through the eyes of Hanae Tamura. As one of the 120,000 victims jailed without due process, she was…

Tess Gallagher recommends Poems of Repossession: Leabhar na hAthghabhála edited by Louis De Paor, Irish-English Bilingual Edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). “This book of Irish poems in translation carries some very strong poems, [including] one by Seán Ó Ríordáin called ‘Switch,’ which is the central mandate for empathy—a poet’s main tool. Also, one may read what…