Editor's Shelf

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)

Mark Strand recommends Flame Tree, poems by Kevin Hart: “For me, Kevin Hart is the best Australian poet of the past twenty-five years. Elegant, deeply philosophical, and utterly without pomposity.” (Paper Bark)

Dan Wakefield recommends My Misspent Youth, essays by Meghan Daum: “A first book of Didion-like essays on contemporary life, with wit and insight and graceful prose.” (Open City)

George Garrett recommends The Land Between, a novel by Cathryn Hankla: “Hankla’s second novel (and her ninth title) is coming out almost simultaneously with her latest book of poems, Poems for the Pardoned, from LSU. She writes as well as anybody alive about the earth and the environment. It’s a well-plotted, strong story, alive with…

Frank Bidart recommends Notes from the Divided Country, poems by Suji Kwock Kim: "This is a brilliant, unerasable book, one of the most remarkable debuts I’ve ever read. It begins with the descent of the soul into flesh, which is also the descent into the catastrophic, tormenting history of family and nation. The poems as…

George Garrett recommends Do I Owe You Something, a memoir by Michael Mewshaw: “Novelist and nonfiction writer Mewshaw here offers a focused memoir concerning writers he has known well over many years. At the still point where memory and gossip become history, he gives us candid and surprising portraits of giants and pygmies of the…