Philip Levine recommends Reign of Snakes, poems by Robert Wrigley: “Robert Wrigley has been a fine poet through four previous books; his last, In the Bank of the Beautiful Sins, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. In this new book he has become someone else, someone who has wandered into a ferocious cave…
Marilyn Hacker recommends Naming the Light: A Week of Years, essays by Rosemary Deen: “These essays mostly begin with the natural world near at hand: the author’s rambling garden in Ulster County, New York. But they range and reach out the way a brilliantly polymath mind does: to Florentine painting, American rural architecture, medieval polyphony,…
DeWitt Henry recommends Richard Yates, criticism by David Castronovo and Steven Goldleaf: “As part of Twayne’s United States Authors Series, this book is a provocative, helpful, and well-informed reading of Yates’s work as a canon, related to his biography, the work of his contemporaries, and to the intellectual character of our times and culture. Provides…
George Garrett recommends Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure, a textbook by Madison Smartt Bell: “A remarkable textbook with an unusual point of view, in which the structural design is primary in the writing of fiction. With excellent examples and analyses.” (Norton)
Christopher Tilghman recommends Safe in America, a novel by Marcie Hershman (HarperCollins): “Marcie Hershman has interwoven a family saga with the triple threats of the Holocaust, war, and AIDS. She presents these calamities as family tragedies, revealed in the heartbreaking ordinariness of daily life. Her story, with its ironic title, should make everyone consider his…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Intricate Moves, poems and an essay by Joan Swift: “One of the Northwest’s best poets collects her poems dealing with rape-both those originally included in The Dark Path of Our Names (Dragon Gate) and later poems. Swift is the winner of three NEA grants, the most recent being the only one awarded…
Maxine Kumin recommends Invisible Horses, poems by Patricia Goedicke: “These poems are about subjective and objective realities of the hidden impulses we live by-very powerful and innovative: ‘. . . wondering / what strings us together, self / and self-image, and the words for it . . .’ ” (Milkweed)
Gerald Stern recommends Ivory Cradle, poems by Anne Marie Macari: “Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, judged by Robert Creeley. Beautiful lyric poems, explosive, visionary. From an original viewpoint of a woman in her forties, with three young sons. Subjects are events in her life-divorce, mothering, ‘memory,’ often of Italy, and religion. Best first…
Mark Strand recommends Journey to the Land of the Flies, essays by Aldo Buzzi: “It is impossible to describe the homey exoticism of this book, its associative richness, its great intelligence manifested so casually, its wit, its imaginative scope, its revelations, its dilemmas, e.g., ‘I was reflecting on the menu, undecided between serpent soup, roast…
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