Joan Cusack Handler CavanKerry Press ($18) by James Naiden This collection of poems is an extended elegy to Joan Cusack Handler’s parents, who were immigrants from Ireland. The lives of the Cusacks were centered around work and belief in the Catholic god—and that meant the rosary, Mass attendance, and being dutiful about it. The poet’s […]
Swan Huntley Doubleday ($25.95) by Rebecca Clark Debut author Swan Huntley spins a spellbinding novel in We Could Be Beautiful, over three hundred pages that explore wealth, trust, and the tumultuous nature of familial relationships. Drawing parallels to J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Huntley paints a haunting […]
Tomaž Šalamun Translated by Michael Thomas Taren Black Ocean ($18.95) by John Bradley When Tomaž Šalamun died on December 27, 2014, the poetry world lost one of its most playful and fearless practitioners. This can be seen on every page of Justice, his sixteenth volume translated into English. As this is the first work of […]
Gabriel Gudding Ahsahta Press ($18) by Garin Cycholl In The Middle Ground, Richard White explores the history of Great Lakes tribes in the seventeenth century and attempts to recollect colonization’s “story of fragmentation.” In Literature for Nonhumans, Gabriel Gudding offers a poetic work that explores another empire, one defined by agri-industry and the slaughterhouse. Gudding […]
Sara Majka Graywolf Press ($16) by Montana Mosby Sara Majka’s debut novel, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, blurs the line between memory and fact in a dream-like prose that follows the narrator, a women re-evaluating her life after a divorce, through a series of fourteen sad stories. These works include the protagonist’s process of falling […]
Michael N. McGregor Fordham University Press ($34.95) by Linda Lappin Visitors to the Greek island of Patmos in the 1990s might have noticed a lean, lanky older fellow with baggy jeans and a goatee, sipping lemonade at cafés while chatting with fishermen or waiting in line at the post office with a bundle of letters […]
by Stephen Burt Rachel Gold is the author of two terrific young adult novels with trans girl protagonists: Being Emily (2012), a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Just Girls (2014). Both books won the Golden Crown Literary Award in YA for their years. Her latest novel, My Year Zero (Bella Books, $16.95), is about mental […]
Sue Klebold Crown Publishing ($28) by Jason Zencka The tension that animates Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, could be conveyed with the simplicity of an elevator pitch: What if the mother of one of the most infamous school shooters in American history were a great mom? What if she […]
Geoffrey Hill Edited by Kenneth Haynes Oxford University Press ($39.95) by Adam Tavel Having spent much of 2014 savoring Geoffrey Hill’s colossal Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, I’ve come to accept that any review of it will falter as piecemeal commentary in the shadow of its achievement. At nearly a thousand pages, this stoic hardcover is […]
Edited by Gavin Parkinson Liverpool University Press by Laura Winton Gavin Parkinson is a man on a mission, and not just a mission to Mars. His mission is to establish academic scholarship on Surrealism’s link to science fiction and to comics, a line that many fans of science fiction and/or surrealism have known about for […]