Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire Carole Maso Counterpoint ($25) by Brian Evenson For Carole Maso, prose writing is elastic and multiform, and we find in all her books a willingness to slide ecstatically between different generic modes, not only of prose but of other forms as well. "My form is always an […]
C. K. Williams Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($21) by Elaine Margolin Whether we admit it or not, we all rehearse our parent's death. We think about what we will do, whom we will call, how we will tell our own children. We believe ourselves to be ready, all grown-up, having had decades to repackage our […]
Selected Texts edited by Richard Kostelanetz Cooper Square Press ($17.95) by Ramez Qureshi One evening I heard some modern music: Scriabin, Stravinsky. I also had seen modern painting in Paris. My reaction to modern painting and modern music was immediate and enthusiastic, but not humble: I decided that if other people could make such things, […]
Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc Gustaf Sobin University of California Press ($31.95) by Robert Baker In Luminous Debris, expatriate American poet and novelist Gustaf Sobin sifts the remnants of the past for the "mirroring images they might provide" to the present. For Sobin the artifacts of lives lived in the midst of the ongoing […]
Mary Rising Higgins Potes & Poets Press ($13) by Patrick F. Durgin "If the world no longer consists of places, has it become larger because it is no longer a place?" (Andrew Levy, Paper Head Last Lyrics) In our data age, such a question becomes acutely pertinent, particularly in terms of our national ambition to "globalize." […]
Molly Tenenbaum Van West & Company ($14) by Tim Scannell In this first collection of thirty-two poems, Molly Tenenbaum illustrates the mastery of poetic eye and delicate fingertip of imagination. One recalls, a generation ago, the felt awe in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, or the more aware sensitivity in The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis […]
Robert Pinsky Farrar Straus & Giroux ($21) by Piotr Gwiazda Robert Pinsky's sixth poetry collection is not a disappointment to his readers. The book contains a number of apt, solid, and vivid poems, precisely what should be expected from a writer who up to this point has successfully welded tacit autobiography and restrained discursiveness, and […]
Paul Vangelisti Littoral Books ($11.95) by Kim Fortier An alphabet's letters describe a phonetic system, symbolizing the very process of constructing speech through sound. Vowels denote the voiced components of language, whereas consonants represent the edges of sound—the actions that start and stop the voice in the pronunciation of a given syllable. The 26 symbols […]
Ursula K. LeGuin Harcourt Brace ($24) by Alan DeNiro Early in her new novel The Telling, Ursula LeGuin writes about a fundamentalist monoculture trying to squash the "old ways" of learning. Upon encountering this I was hesitant. What literary territory regarding the dangers of fundamentalism hadn't been tread and retread by countless authors before her? What […]
Armistead Maupin HarperCollins ($26) by Brad Jacobson People exist in your life who once were considered the very best of friends. For one reason or another, perhaps due to a change in geography, career, or love, they drop off your radar, disappearing without so much as a "good-bye" or an explanation. If you're a good […]