Editor's Shelf

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…

Dan Wakefield recommends In the Family Way, a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: ” In the Family Way is a witty, loving, totally credible novel of the way a typically atypical family lives now. Another fine novel by the author of that small masterpiece, Leaving Brooklyn.” (Morrow)

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…