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…
David St. John also recommends For a Limited Time Only, by Ronald Wallace: “With his signature humor and elegant wit, Ron Wallace makes clear that the ‘limited time’ of the title is our own mortal passage. This is a death-inflected collection, filled with meditations upon illness that refuse to buckle in the face of the…
Maura Stanton recommends Visit Me in California, by Cooley Windsor: “Cooley Windsor’s brief stories (or are these poems?) are wildly imaginative and wildly funny. This is an unforgetable, orginal book that will make you laugh and think and gasp and hand the book to someone else shouting ‘Read This!!’” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern)
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…
Robert Boswell recommends House of Bone, poems by Sheila Black: "This is a complex and surprising collection, a very mature first book of poetry. House of Bone is beautifully written, and the poems are genuinely moving. Sheila Black deserves a wide and enthusiastic audience." (Custom Words)
Maxine Kumin recommends Ultra-Talk, essays by David Kirby: “Kirby’s essays leapfrog from remembering Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ while touring Sicily to a piece called ‘Give Me Life Coarse and Rank,’ a disquisition on dithyrambs and more in Whitman. My favorite essay, ‘Shrouded in a Fiery Mist,’ examines the eroticism of Saint Teresa of Avila…
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