by Alan DeNiro and Kelly Everding Jonathan Carroll is a fabulist of the first order. In twelve novels, as well as in his short fiction, he has created a body of work filled with psychological complexity, lyrical sentences, and outright surrealism, yet one which still provides the reader with the most basic pleasures of page-turning […]
John Olson Calamari Press ($13) by Ellen Twadell John Olson's The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat is hard to classify, hard to read, and hard to stop thinking about. There are numerous short chapters. There are sparse illustrations by artist Derek White. There are words. Mostly, there are words. Words without context or story, or […]
Tom Sykes Rodale Books ($22.95) by Matthew Schneeman In What Did I Do Last Night?, Tom Sykes recounts a classic tale of a rise and fall and rise again. Though a basic plot synopsis would lead you to think the story somewhat simple—man beats alcoholism—it is far from the truth. The originality that brings this memoir […]
Dick North Harbour Publishing ($19.95) by Ryder W. Miller In Sailor on Snowshoes, Canadian journalist and northern historian Dick North takes the reader on an expedition to The North to follow the travails of Jack London during the year he spent searching for gold in the Klondike. London, then a scrappy 21-year-old sailor and adventurer from […]
Gregory L. Blackstock Princeton Architectural Press ($19.95) by Eliza Murphy A painstakingly rendered murder of crows line up on the cover of Blackstock's Collections—the extremely endangered Hawaiian crow, Iraqi pied crow, and the carrion crow stand in profile alongside others in the tidy rows that characterize Gregory Blackstock's artistic oeuvre. The back cover features similarly […]
Anna Moschovakis Turtle Point Press ($16.95) by Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein The title of Anna Moschovakis's debut collection is cause enough to stop and consider. I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone may stand as one of poetry's best book titles of 2006. It immediately ushers in a poet of sharp irony, humble yet […]
Malena Mörling University of Pittsburgh Press ($14) by Miguel Murphy "No ideas but in things" William Carlos Williams famously wrote in 1944; Malena Mörling's work is a contemporary echo of Williams' philosophy of the localized image, one set in relation to theoretical physics and quantum theory. In Mörling's hands, the poetry of the local becomes […]
Landis Everson Graywolf Press ($15) by Adam Fieled Landis Everson is a visionary poet. But that doesn't mean he leaves earthly desires, pleasures, fears and pains untouched—they are, in fact the basis for his visions. For Everson, the daily world allows the poet to receive insights that, mixing innocence and experience, might be called "divine." […]
Barbara Jane Reyes Tinfish ($13) by Craig Perez do you know what it is to witness an unraveling? Barbara Jane Reyes's second book, Poeta en San Francisco, explores the translatable and untranslatable collisions of writing self and culture. We immediately become bound to the "lack of apology for what [the poems are] bound to do," which […]
Alicia Yànez Cossìo Translated by Amalia Gladhart University of Texas Press ($19.95) by Kristin Thiel Alicia Yànez Cossìo's 1985 novel, recently translated into English, is recounted breathlessly, as though time or circumstance might soon prevent it from being told. Some sentences are short or list-like, moving the reader quickly through details, as in the description […]