Editor's Shelf

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…

Maura Stanton recommends Crazy Woman, a novel by Kate Horsley (Ballantine): “This first novel is an imaginative tour de force. By using the form of a ‘captivity narrative,’ Horsley incorporates surreal events successfully into a realistic narrative. The result is dazzling language and vivid characters.”

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…

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)

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)