Born in Nebraska, Cathy Carr has lived in North Carolina all through the 1980's. She took her undergraduate degree at Duke University and lists the writer-in-residence there, Mr. Reynolds Price, as a major influence on her thought and writing. She is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of North…
From the beginning, Marshall Klimasewiski has instinctively known the point where a story or an anecdote becomes fiction. His earliest efforts, when he had just enrolled as a Creative Writing major here at Carnegie Mellon, already had that center to them, that crossing of emotions which distinguishes a genuine short story, even though these efforts…
Dana Gibson has the real gift, an ability to see and to think and to write in a way that is truly unique and original. Her prose makes even the most ordinary of events take on an almost edenic clarity and freshness. Sometimes her language seems Nabokovian to me in its lilt and life, and…
Susan Straight's prose is as innocent and hard as the lives of the people she loves. It is this love for her characters-unidealized, tangible, as deep as time-that makes her story so extraordinary. Little of moment happens: A woman lies next to her man at dawn and thinks about his back, yet in the evocation…
Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…
Craig Raine's new kind of poetry has yet to reach a substantial audience in the United States. But, if the reviews can be believed, Raine's reputation in Britain exceeds that of any contemporary poet on this side of the Atlantic. Raine's four books- The Onion, Memory, A Martian Sends a Post Card Home, Rich, and…
I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd rightness of its…
Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…
Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…
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