by Daniela Gioseffi We sit at Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s dining table, with China teacups before us, in her tastefully arrayed New York City apartment. There are paintings, perhaps some of her own, on the walls. In addition to being an acclaimed poet and scholar, she’s also a visual artist who has written about painters from […]

Michelle Boisseau University of Tampa Press ($14) by Denise Low “Flick the house from your eye and hurry away” begins Michelle Boisseau’s most recent book, Among the Gorgons. This distortion of reality in “The Crisp Inscription” is a way to describe skips of memory. The image of a huge house becomes a miniature irritant, reduced […]

Alan Moore Liveright ($35) by Greg Baldino Pity the independent bookseller who has to decide where to shelve Alan Moore’s second prose work. Twenty years ago saw the publication of Moore’s first prose book, a novel-in-stories set throughout the history of the English county of Northamptonshire. Although esoterically written in chronologically accurate first-person dialects, including […]

Jon Savage Faber & Faber ($29.95) by Brooke Horvath To be clear: the explosion Jon Savage wishes to celebrate in his new book occurred in England and America. What blew up was youth culture, and the explosive used was primarily pop music, which served as catalyst, mirror, and running commentary on the events of 1966—the […]

Chiyuma Elliott Unicorn Press ($18) by Ralph Pennel Every poet’s task is to name the ineffable, to give shape and voice to what haunts them—what haunts us all, if we are honest—while simultaneously giving the ineffable room to speak on its own and for itself. When this balancing act is achieved, we feel it; we […]

Edited by Matthew Burgess Secretary Press ($28.99) by John Bradley “I hid in closets, behind doors, and under tables,” writes Matthew Burgess, editor of the fascinating anthology Dream Closet, “meditations on childhood space.” “I crawled into the cabinet under the sink,” he continues, “and climbed trees to find hidden perches.” He loved books “filled with […]

Linda Russo Subito Press ($18) by Catherine Rockwood In four innovative essays, Linda Russo celebrates five female authors whose lives span the interval from the Romantic period to the present day. In the first essay, on Dorothy Wordsworth, Russo traces a causal connection between the author’s daily walks and her ability to think in ways that […]

Florence Noiville Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan Seagull Books ($21) by Jeff Alford A fragile mind can be afflicted with an obsession like a stroke. In a snap, a person can be consumed with “the delusional illusion of being loved”: some lingering eye contact or an innocent inquiry from a stranger can swell from meaningless […]

by Michael Swingen There was a predawn chill in the morning wind as I waited in the downtown port of Fort-de-France to board the ferry for St. Lucia. It was Christmas time last year, and in the boarding station St. Lucians chatted with holiday cheer as they waited for the return passage home. They had […]

How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama Ethan Michaeli Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($32) by Spencer Dew Journalistic style exists along a spectrum, from the terse, skim-conducive relay of stats and facts to the immersive long-form, unraveling complexities. Ethan Michaeli’s book The Defender is […]