Editor's Shelf

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…

Maxine Kumin recommends The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Sue Ellen Thompson: “Ninety-four poets are represented in this collection, ranging from the usual suspects to some very bright up-and-comers. There are also photos and bio material, making this a rich, worthy addition to the general library and the poetry lover’s bookshelf.”…

Gerald Stern recommends Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, poems by Ashley Capps: “I love the scorching details of Capps’s poems, as well as their withering honesty, their modesty, their crazy imagination, and their cunning. And I love their moral stance and their gracefulness.” (Akron)

Joyce Peseroff recommends Here and Hereafter, poems by Elton Glaser: “Glaser’s sixth collection of poems remains rooted in this life as it considers the pull of the next. His gardener’s take on the natural world, spiced with wit and a gift for the extravagantly precise image, makes for satisfying poems time and again. Most poignant…

Rosanna Warren recommends Letters from Aldenderry, poems by Philip Nikolayev: “Fiendishly bright, world-savvy, word-savvy, large-hearted poems that tilt at lyric sentimentality (‘Autobiography no longer saves’) but keep an ancient faith: ‘miniature illuminations mostly faded but some / still quite bright amid the frozen parcels of speech / the old quill is dead now but the…

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…