C. D. Wright recommends Midnights, by Jane Miller: “An absorbing performance of art taken to the brink. There is nothing prosaic about Midnights. No one is simply cooking carrots; rather all of its parts contribute to a gestalt of living, loving and losing in a reel of feeling that nonetheless attains a bracing lucidity. This…
Ann Beattie recommends Quick-Eyed Love, a memoir by Susan Garrett: “Garrett’s remarkable Quick-Eyed Love is the story of her mother, a photographer of children from Main Line Philadelphia who was not so lucky and not so famous as her acquaintance Mr. Steiglitz or the unstoppable Margaret Bourke-White. Implying questions about how a woman alone can…
DeWitt Henry recommends Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be, a memoir by Jen Trynin: "This memoir should be required reading for wannabe Janis Joplins; for others it offers a view of the corporate music world worthy of Nathaniel West. The monologues of soulless hucksters are pitch-perfect, and Trynin’s dream of becoming a rock star carries…
Jane Hirshfield recommends Dancing in Odessa, poems by Ilya Kaminsky: ” Dancing in Odessa is not newly published, but it is new to me, and deserves to be recommended. This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its…
Maxine Kumin recommends Morning in Serra Mattu, an ode by Arif Gamal: ” Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode is actually an oral recitation of life in the Sudan from the 1940’s to the building of the Aswan Dam, as told to E. G. Dubovsky, who recorded it in meter. It is rich with…
Philip Levine recommends Astoria, poems by Malena Mörling: “In a poem by Malena Mörling the reader is taken on trips never bargained for: time may be compressed, action go in reverse; in the blink of a line you can move from Grand Central Station to a design on wallpaper, and yet when you finish the…
Maxine Kumin recommends As When, in Season, by Jim Schley: “This is the executive director of The Frost Place’s first collection of poems and represents years of composing and revising. The centerpiece, an inventive series of odes to the muses, displays Schley’s literary insights and his musical gift with language.” (Marick)
David St. John recommends The Usable Field, by Jane Mead: “There is a far greater spareness to these new poems of Jane Mead’s, yet they are as philosophically complex and stylistically compelling as those in her two previous collections. Yet this more honed style has only amplified the ferocity of her attention to the natural…
James Alan McPherson recommends The Interloper, a novel by Antoine Wilson: "The Interloper is an admirable exploration of the complex emotional bond that develops between an imprisoned man and another male, bent on vengeance, who employs the affectations of a female. The exploration of this developing bond will enlighten the novel’s readers. Antoine Wilson, a…
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