Editor's Shelf

Autumn Road by Brian Swann

Maura Stanton recommends Autumn Road, poems by Brian Swann: "Imagine D. H. Lawrence writing with a sense of humor, and you’ll have a faint idea of what Brian Swann’s rich, detail-packed, mid-twentieth-century English memoir poems are like. Swann arrives on earth about the same time as the Nazi blitz—an air raid siren announces his birth—and…

Ladder of Hours by Keith Althaus

Chase Twichell recommends Ladder of Hours, poems by Keith Althaus: “This book contains forty years of poems from a poet whose work has been seriously overlooked. Althaus’s lyrics are spare, without ornamentation, passionate, and intimate. He’s interested in the numinous underlying the ordinary, and gives us frequent surprising and memorable glimpses of it.”(Ausable)

White Guys by Anthony Giardina

Rosellen Brown recommends White Guys, a novel by Anthony Giardina: "White Guys is an extraordinarily potent novel. It engages us, passionately, in questions that matter-what it means to be a man, to be a son, a husband and father; to watch, with hope and despair, the changing of small towns into copycat suburbs. It works…

Sweet Smoke by Thomas Aslin

Madeline DeFrees recommends Sweet Smoke, poems by Thomas Aslin: “Like the sweet smoke of leaf-burning, an elegiac undercurrent drifts through the poems in this first book with their blend of fine perception, tender feeling, and rhythmically persuasive language. Aslin captures the essence of family life and close relationships, preserves them for the record, and enriches…