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…
Richard Tillinghast recommends A Different Person, a memoir by James Merrill (Knopf): “The late James Merrill turns out to have been a perfect memoirist. The life, the sensibility, the writing style, are perfectly of a piece. A past master in his use of metaphor, Merrill brings that gift to his prose.”
M. L. Rosenthal recommends Complete Poems, a collection by Kenneth Fearing (National Poetry Foundation): “It’s a special joy to have the work of this wry, sardonic, thoroughly alive Catullus of the American Depression once more in print. (Edward Dahlberg compared him with Corbière-and that was true, too.)”
Gary Soto recommends Babylon in a Jar, poems by Andrew Hudgins: “Hudgins can’t get over his Southern childhood, which he drags as lovely narrative poems into his adulthood in Cincinnati. Perhaps the South does have manners, as Flannery O’Connor once said, but Hudgins’s characters, mostly men, have such inconsistent manners: one moment they are brutes…
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