The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels Free Press ($26) by Sarah Buttenwieser What do welfare mothers and celebrity moms have in common? According to Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, these iconic stereotypes contribute to motherhood's current state, the new "momism." Welfare mothers border upon […]

Michael Magee University of Alabama Press ($27.50) by Jefferson Hanson Emancipating Pragmatism focuses most specifically on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph W. Ellison, Frank O'Hara, and Amiri Baraka, none of whom explicitly define themselves as pragmatists. Nonetheless, Magee sees a definite link between their work and that of the avowed classic pragmatists John Dewey and William James. […]

Michael Gorra Princeton University Press ($24.95) by Leland de la Durantaye Early on in Michael Gorra's The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany, the author says of his wife that, "she is skeptical enough about my own slipping and sliding between the personal and semi-scholarly that she might prefer not to appear in this book […]

The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Thirty-Seven Conversations with the Pop Master Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith Carroll & Graf ($17) by Christopher Luna Could Andy Warhol have been as superficial as he appeared? Both admirers and detractors of the controversial Pop artist will find material to support their positions in this hefty collection of interviews, as I'll […]

Edited by Leslie Scalapino O Books ($14) by Michael Cross This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would […]

Kim Addonizio W. W. Norton & Company ($21.95) by Mike Chasar Despite all of the drugs, booze, and sex in Kim Addonizio's fourth book of poems, What Is This Thing Called Love?, the collection becomes a fascinating sort of love poem for the speaker's daughter. The book's narrator tries hard to convince us otherwise, however, drawing […]

Laurence Donovan Pineapple Press ($12.95) by Robert Zaller For most people, the connection between Florida and poetry begins and ends with Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." Yet several impressive Cuban-American poets have emerged from Florida in the past generation, and an older generation, dating back to the 1940s, laid the foundation […]

Christine Hume New Issues Poetry & Prose ($14) by Sun Yung Shin The thesis of Alaskaphrenia, Christine Hume's second volume of poetry, is cleverly captured in its title, phrenia being a suffix from the Greek meaning mind that also connotes phrenology, the skull's peculiar tectonics and hidden topographies. Hume never lets her readers forget their mortality, the retractable […]

Bill Knott Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($20) by Cindra Halm The surprise is that Bill Knott's poetry still surprises. After ten previous "official" volumes and a slew of self-published, proletariat-style chapbooks, The Unsubscriber elicits illumination by shaking up our complacency. Some would say by shtick or by trick, and certainly we recognize Knott's methods: the sonnet's […]

Mark Wallace Edge Books ($12) by Karl Kraus Haze, a collection of variations on poetics by Mark Wallace, takes its title from a semi-deconstructionist conceit of "how words go on where discourse breaks down, splits apart, no longer recognizes itself as discourse." To cover his bases, Wallace writes though various topics and forms to present […]