Al Young recommends White Lipstick, poems by Geri Digiorno: "With these pages—sparsely worded, richly lived—Geri Digiorno reminds us how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and ‘individual’ identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include kin and neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism, masquerade, transformation, sexual discovery and conquest, marriage and…
Robert Boswell recommends In the Shadows of the Sun, a novel by Alex Parsons: “This is a startlingly good novel. Set during World War II in rural New Mexico and the jungles of the Philippines, In the Shadows of the Sun is not a war story but a story of familial tragedy. One could argue…
Donald Hall recommends A Word Like Fire, selected poems by Dick Barnes: “Barnes, who died five years ago, was little known in the East, but he was a man of vast energy. His knowledge was superb, and his talents went everywhere. He taught literature at Pomona College, performed with his own jazz band, wrote and…
Donald Hall recommends Playland: Poems 1994–2004, by Eve Packer: "Eve was my student at Michigan, and much later my friend when I lived for a while in New York. It’s one of those books about which people say, ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ There is a liveliness and specificity about it, pure Manhattan, duly and…
Justin Kaplan recommends The Peabody Sisters, a biography by Megan Marshall: “A heroically researched and beautifully written biography about three women who were, in many ways, the American Brontës.” (Houghton Mifflin)
Maxine Kumin recommends Healed by Horses, a memoir by Carole Fletcher with Lawrence Scanlon: “A remarkable story of a young woman burned over sixty-five percent of her body, who made it back through agonizing debridements and skin grafts to training and actually performing with her much-loved horses.” (Atria)
Philip Levine recommends Sky, poems by Christopher Buckley: "Buckley is a California poet who—though he has published at least ten books—seems little known in the East. His poems are both Western and universal. It is the landscape of California that serves as the backdrop to the striving for significance that enriched his boyhood in Santa…
Robert Pinsky recommends Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, a biography by Stephen Greenblatt: "To recommend a best-seller? Strange in a way, but Ploughshares readers should know that Greenblatt is a real writer. Unlike many a ‘noted scholar’ he writes wonderful sentences and paragraphs. Here is a book about a literary writer that…
Maxine Kumin recommends This Smoke that Carried Us, poems by René Char, translated by Susanne Dubroff: “This volume of selected poems, with a sensitive and informative introduction by Christopher Merrill, is an essential document of World War II. Many of these poems were written while parachutists were dropping behind enemy lines, but the subject matter,…
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