Joyce Peseroff recommends The Bad Secret, poems by Judith Harris: "Pain—the pain of illness and the pain of loss—is the background to Judith Harris’s second book of poems, but not its subject. Like Dickinson, Harris’s acute perceptions of the natural world convey feeling and insight beyond autobiography. Harris’s language is always precise, and her metaphors…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Dark Alphabet, poems by Jennifer Maier: "Jennifer Maier’s colloquial language settles you comfortably into the passenger seat for a journey full of surprising turns. The poems are triggered by ordinary events: a friend’s asking why she doesn’t write novels; the sight of ducks in mating season. This first collection is a sophisticated…
Maxine Kumin recommends Waking Stone, poems by Carole Simmons Oles: “This creative biography-in-verse, about the life of a nineteenth-century sculptor who proved that a woman could handle a chisel as well as a palette, is often in the voice of Hosmer herself, and is lively, informative, and vividly told.” (Arkansas)
Philip Levine recommends The Ghost of You and Me, poems by Wesley McNair: “I wonder if Maine is half as interesting as the poetry Wesley McNair has written about the place. He finds so many skewed and irresistible characters who manage to get into odd situations for which there is only one remedy: to persevere….
Thomas Lux recommends The Seed Thieves, poems by Robert Fanning: “Robert Fanning is a powerful and urgent young poet whose work I have been following for some time. This, his first full-length collection, is a stunner.” (Marick)
Gerald Stern recommends Against Which, poems by Ross Gay: “Ross Gay’s Against Which is stunningly original, confrontational, and lovely. He reminds me of Hart Crane.” (CavanKerry)
Margot Livesey recommends Openwork, a novel by Adria Bernardi: “An exquisitely written, vividly inhabited novel that follows the lives of three generations of Italian families.” (SMU)
Jane Hirshfield recommends In All Their Animal Brilliance, poems by Lance Larsen: “Lance Larsen’s second collection is a book that reaches a genuinely startling excellence. Its best poems are striking, masterful at the level of sentence and image, and also in the fierceness of both intelligence and compassion they bring to their disparate subjects. Imaginatively…
Elizabeth Spires recommends Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, poems by Janice N. Harrington: “Like a hammer to gold, Harrington’s richly lyric voice shapes her poetic material into unforgettable ‘sung stories.’ One of the marvels of this book is its convincing and tender reanimation of lives lived in a black community in the…
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