James Alan McPherson recommends Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome, a first novel by Stanley Crouch: “This is an extraordinary effort by Stanley Crouch to employ the improvisational resources to the blues idiom to explore, in the novel form, the nuances of contemporary reality. In attempting to use ‘riffs’ to examine the emotional and psychological…
Dan Wakefield recommends Dreamtime Alice, a memoir by Mandy Sayer: “A compelling memoir of a young woman tap-dancer who works with her musician father on streets corners of New York and New Orleans. A fine work of the memoir genre.” (Ballantine)
Robert Pinsky recommends Each in a Place Apart, poems by James McMichael (Univ. of Chicago): “An extraordinary book-length poem or sequence about love and failed love; absolutely original formally, yet clear and plain.”
Mark Dotyrecommends Ejo, poems by Derick Burleson: “This remarkable book chronicles two years in Rwanda, just before that nation’s social and moral collapse. Formally adept, attentive to the dangerous edges of language, Burelson’s first book is astonishingly coherent, fierce, and smart.” (Wisconsin)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Elegies, poems by Lars Gustafsson: “One of the world’s major poets, Lars Gustafsson has lived quietly in this country since 1983. His poems have the kind of sureness of line we admire in the drawings of the old masters, and his engagement is with essential matters. Yet within his imaginative authority there…
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…
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