Maura Stanton recommends Crossing, a first novel by Manuel Luis Martinez: “A powerful first-person narrative, based on a true incident, about a sixteen-year-old boy trying to cross the Mexican/Texas border in a sweltering railroad boxcar with twelve older desperate men.” (Bilingual)
Madeline DeFrees recommends Beethoven and the Birds, poems by Judith Skillman: “Forty-five poems from the author whose first collection, Worship of the Visible Spectrum, won the King County Arts Commission’s Book Award in 1988. The poems celebrate the author’s return to playing the violin after a lapse of nine years. Images drawn from music and…
Philip Levine recommends Believers, stories and a novella by Charles Baxter: “This is a superb collection; the stories are unusually daring and imaginative-‘Time Exposure’ and ‘The Lures for Love’ are two not to be forgotten. The novella ‘Believers’ demonstrates an extraordinary ability to deal with and invoke a past era and to show how sex,…
Jane Hirshfield recommends Below Cold Mountain, poems by Joseph Stroud: “One of the finest collections of poems I’ve read in years-intelligent, sensuous, moving, full of human insight.” (Copper Canyon)
James Alan McPherson recommends Billy Verité, a novel by Rick Harsch: “A portrait of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and the human condition, in late twentieth-century America, from an absolutely original point of view.” (Steerforth)
David Gullette recommends Bite Every Sorrow, poems by Barbara Ras: “Barbara Ras has written a dazzling first book of poems-C. K. Williams’s choice for this year’s Walt Whitman Award. She favors long, opulent, clever lines, as when she falls for a man in Central America: ‘I loved the gesture for wait, two hands pumping the…
Maxine Kumin recommends Black Drum, poems by Enid Shomer: “Dazzling work by a Florida poet now living in Manhattan; Shomer weaves her net so skillfully that the reader is caught up in the story long before realizing the formal element that holds the squares in place. This book deserves serious attention.” (Arkansas)
Chase Twichell recommends Blood Thirsty Savages, poems by Adrian C. Louis(Time Being): “Louis writes rough, smart, honest poems that cut through all the polite twinges of political correctness. Tenderness is one side of the blade, and rage the other. His Native America is not the one we normally hear about, stripped as it is of…
James Alan McPherson recommends Blues and Trouble, short stories by Tom Piazzi: “In these stories, Tom Piazzi is touching the grain of actual, as opposed to imaginary, human life. He sees both the pain and the humor, the tragic as well as the comic.” (St. Martin’s)
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