Editor's Shelf

Joyce Peseroff recommends Letters to Jane, correspondence by Hayden Carruth: "While researching Jane Kenyon’s papers archived at the UNH library, I came across a file of letters written to her by Hayden Carruth during the long months of her illness. Carruth didn’t expect a reply; he didn’t write to be cheery or tell her to…

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…

Philip Levine recommends Poets of the Non-Existent City, an anthology edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak: "First and foremost this is an homage to an era and a place, Los Angeles, and to the dedicated few who worked to create a free society during the shameful decade of McCarthy. At the center was a group of…

Madeline DeFrees recommends The Volunteer, poems by Candace Black: "The poems in this first book by Candace Black are, like the volunteer of the title, pure gift. They spring, as if spontaneously, from the common clay of everyday experience—love, marriage, family, birth and death. In fresh, precise, evocative language, these poems prove the examined life…

Al Young recommends The Devil’s Garden, poems by Adrian Matejka: "Adrian Matejka’s first collection simply sizzles." (Alice James)

Philip Levine recommends What I Can’t Bear Losing, a memoir by Gerald Stern: “This book would have been more accurately titled What I Can’t Lose, since it is made up of a series of essays that deal with the images and events that have haunted Stern all his life. As in his poems, Stern is…

Maxine Kumin recommends The House on Eccles Road, a first novel by Judith Kitchen: “A day in the lives of Molly and Leo Bluhm in Dublin, Ohio, June 16, 1999, mirroring Joyce’s Bloomsday, artfully layered with outer calm and inner disarray.” (Penguin)

Thomas Lux recommends Old Bright Wheel, poems by Robert Fanning: “A first volume by a young poet of great emotional depth, skill, and imaginative energy.” (Ledge)

Rosellen Brown recommends There Is Room for You, a novel by Charlotte Bacon: “A two-generation novel in which a British mother’s childhood in India is not only fascinating for the reader but illuminating for her very American daughter.” (FSG)