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…
Jane Hirshfield recommends Restarting the World, poems by Leonard Nathan: "In this new book, along with his two previous Orchises Press volumes ( The Potato Eaters and Tears of the Old Magician), Leonard Nathan has created a late body of work of alchemical power. His brief poems observe with equal force and tact the momentary…
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…
Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: “These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In ‘The Ridge’ she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Overtime, poems by Joseph Millar: “Take a sensibility of remarkable delicacy and precision, immerse it in the abrasive, often violent atmosphere of twentieth-century blue-collar America, and what you get is a chronicle of drink, debt, and divorce: a story not unlike that of Raymond Carver. Joseph Millar’s Overtime includes some of the…
Marilyn Hacker recommends Little Ice Age, poems by Maureen Seaton: “There are very few poets of whom I might say, ‘It is inexplicable why this work is not better known, celebrated for all it’s worth.’ Maureen Seaton is a poet like that. Her register is enormous, her verbal daring and wayfaring breathtaking; while the solidity…
Philip Levine recommends Skirts and Slacks, poems by W. S. Di Piero: “In his new book, the poet W. S. Di Piero manages to place the reader in specific places at particular times with such ease and authority that after a single reading I felt close to lives I’d known nothing about and cared nothing…
Gary Soto recommends Star Apocrypha, poems by Christopher Buckley: “Buckley has been the master of nostalgia in his previous eight collections, and once again he has distinguished himself with a sorrow for the Santa Barbara of his childhood, for music, for his late friend and inspiration Larry Levis, and-this is scary-for the middle age moving…
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