Editor's Shelf

Gary Soto recommends Limbo, a novel by Dixie Salazar (White Pine): “Dixie Salazar is the Kaye Gibbons of Fresno, California. Wealth of detail, attitude, and a sorrowful story.”

Maura Stanton recommends Liver, poems by Charles Harper Webb: ” Liver, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, is a book you can read cover to cover with astonishing delight. The poems are witty, imaginative, stylistically sophisticated, and completely accurate about life on a planet crowded with billions of others like you. Buy this…

Fanny Howe recommends I Love Dick, a first novel by Chris Kraus: “A highly charged description of an obsession with an indifferent man named Dick, this unfolds as a brilliant intertextual document-feminist and contemporary in all its anxieties and passions. Important!” (Semiotexte)

Don Lee recommends Living to Be 100, stories by Robert Boswell (HarperPerennial): “A richly imaginative, truly wonderful collection of short stories. Where other writers would stop, Boswell always goes one unexpected, delightful step further.”

Andre Dubus recommends If the Tiger, a novel by Terry Farish (Steerforth): “Ms. Farish has written a taut, fast-paced novel about the young daughter of a pilot in the Gulf War and a young woman who is a Cambodian refugee. In New Hampshire and Lowell, Massachusetts, the young women are in flight from the Cambodian…

Jane Shore recommends Meadowlands, poems by Louise Glück: “A brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking book, both personal and universal, by the master craftsperson and muse of her generation.” (Ecco)

Maura Stanton recommends Improvising Rivers, poems by David Jauss (Cleveland State): ” Improvising Rivers is an impressive book of technically accomplished poems. The surface details, as on a river, float gracefully over hidden but powerful currents.”

Gary Soto recommends In a Few Words/En pocas palabras, poems and translations by José Antonio Burciaga: “Burciaga has gathered dichos-pithy sayings and proverbs-that reveal the folk wisdom of rural peasants. These are deft translations, as wise as the originals, as in ‘Si cada pendejo trajera palo, faltaría leña’: ‘If every fool carried a stick, firewood…

Marilyn Hacker recommends In the Crevice of Time, poems by Josephine Jacobsen (Johns Hopkins): “The collected and new work of a poet who is truly one of our ‘unacknowledged legislators.’ Josephine Jacobsen’s keen intelligence and moral acuity are perfectly matched to the precision, elegance, and wit of her words: and that fit never ceases to…