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)

Jane Hirshfield recommends Except by Nature, poems by Sandra Alcosser: “Sandra Alcosser’s second collection is filled with pleasures: descriptions that make the reader shiver with delight, vivid moments of the human heart refracted, and passionate inquiry.” (Graywolf)

Chase Twichell recommends Flesh and Blood, a novel by Michael Cunningham: “A contemporary family saga with vivid, memorable characters that tells a heartbreaking story without a trace of sentimentality. The writing is fluent and poetic, unselfconscious, with passages of great beauty.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Maxine Kumin recommends Forged Correspondences, poems by Philip Brady: “Wildly inventive, these ‘forgeries’ roam from Heraclitus to the Queen of Sheba, from Newark to Africa. Highly serious and richly comic, a great trip.” (New Myths)

Joyce Peseroff recommends Germany, poems by Caroline Finkelstein (Carnegie Mellon): “When a Jewish woman chooses Germany as the title for her book of poems, she is telling you something about language and history. Caroline Finkelstein writes with radiance about an implacable world where ‘. . . the yews move, / . . . the ragged…