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 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…
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,…
C. D. Wright recommends Altazor, poetry by Vincente Huidrobro, translated by Eliot Weinberger: “A book-length poem from the twenties that continues to set the mind on fire. An exhilarating tribute to the future, which is perhaps the only place it is reasonable to aspire since the present is nonetheless interesting but a deadly spot in…
DeWitt Henry recommends When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother, nonfiction by Thomas J. Cottle: “Cottle’s memoir of his mother, Gitta Gradova, a prominent concert pianist, is first a biography that evokes her career, performances, and friendships with such greats as Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, Heifetz, and Horowitz, giving us a cross section of classical music’s inner…
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