Tag Archives: Summer 2014

The Pedestrians

Rachel Zucker Wave Books ($18) by Geula Geurts Rachel Zucker's ninth book of poetry, The Pedestrians, is really a double collection, as it’s divided into two sections: “Fables” and “The Pedestrians.” Both sections form a cohesive whole that resonates like a mother's cry against the hustle and bustle of the New York City skyline. “Fables” […]

Everything Begins Elsewhere

Tishani Doshi Copper Canyon Press ($16) by James Naiden Born in 1975 in Madras, India, Tishana Doshi reveals a delicate but febrile sensibility in her second collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University writing program, she worked in advertising for a London firm before returning to live in India in 2001, […]

The Crocodile

Maurizio de Giovanni translated by Antony Shugaar Europa Editions ($17) by Kelsey Irving Beson Across class, age, and experience, the characters that people Maurizio de Giovanni’s The Crocodile are defined by their injuries. The driving force behind the plot is grief, and a looming depression pervades the narrative. Like many noir heroes, the protagonist of […]

Nine Rabbits

Virginia Zaharieva translated by Angela Rodel Black Balloon Publishing ($16) by Chris Beal Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits, translated from Bulgarian, gives English-speaking readers a chance to sample literature from a part of the world about which most of us know little. Straddling the lines between literary genres, the book is classified as fiction, reads like […]

New Directions Goes Old School

A Review of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-12 by Benjamin Paloff 1945 came late this year. It was four years earlier, in January 1941, that New Directions introduced The Poet of the Month editions, billed as “A Series of Poetry Pamphlets,” with William Carlos Williams’s The Broken Span. The idea was to publish twelve slender […]

Where the River Goes

The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku edited by Allan Burns Snapshot Press ($45) by Peter McDonald Casual readers and practitioners in English-language haiku often assume this brief poetic form, imported to the West from Japan at the turn of the 19th century, is indelibly associated with elegiac snapshots of nature in three-line poems of 5-7-5 […]

The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa Editions ($18) by John Toren The Story of a New Name is a whirlwind account of friendship, rivalry, and waning interdependency between two women—Lila and Lenú—who have grown up together in a lower-class neighborhood of post-war Naples. We see events largely through the eyes of […]

In the House Un-American

Benjamin Hollander Clockroot Books ($15) by Michael Wendt Early in Benjamin Hollander’s In the House Un-American, the question is posed: “if everyone is truly welcome [in the United States], why does there exist, in phrase and condition, the un-American?” Throughout the course of the rest of the book we follow Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, a […]

What Happened Here

Bonnie ZoBell Press 53 ($17.95) by Matt Pincus A follow up to her fine chapbook The Whack-Job Girls (Monkey Puzzle, 2013), Bonnie ZoBell’s What Happened Here centers around a thirtieth anniversary party for a 1978 plane crash in a San Diego neighborhood, a real-world event that killed 137 people on board the aircraft and seven […]

All Movies Love the Moon

Prose Poems on Silent Film Gregory Robinson Rose Metal Press ($14.95) by Jay Besemer In September 2013, the Library of Congress published a report by film scholar David Pierce entitled The Survival of American Silent Feature Films 1912-1929. This report (available as a PDF online) details the startling and dismaying loss of over 7,600 original […]