Ginny MacKenzie Sunstone Press ($18.95) by Benjamin Woodard In fiction, queries that plague memoirists—What makes a life significant enough to share with the public? Are certain achievements worthy of permanent recording?—rarely arise, for the imagination of the author typically eschews any chance of narrative dryness. But sometimes, an author packs too much of a good […]
A Guide To Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 To The Present Robert Atkins Abbeville Press ($24.95) by Mason Riddle Many of us prefer trains to planes. And, maybe for the same reasons, many of us prefer flesh and blood reference books to cyber Wikipedia and Google. Arriving at one’s destination may take a bit […]
Edited by Leigh Anne Hornfeldt and Teneice Durrant Two of Cups Press ($12) by Lauren Gordon The poems in the anthology Small Batch approach an interesting motif: bourbon. The concept sounds simple, but the variety of poetry contained within gleans quality through craftsmanship. In the introduction, Carla Carlton explains how making bourbon in small batches […]
Greg Pape Lynx House Press ($15.95) by Warren Woessner Four Swans, Pape’s tenth collection of poetry, should come with a map. Apart from an excursion east to bury his mother’s ashes, his poems are firmly rooted in the landscape of western Montana. While the poems in Four Swans are arranged in four sections, and the […]
by Andrew Farkas The traditional interview begins with a description of the surroundings where the interview took place, though in the present tense as if it were taking place right now and somehow being beamed onto the page. For instance, “I meet Cris Mazza at Insomnia, a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, that is situated […]
Patrick James Dunagan Ugly Duckling Presse ($10) by James Yeary Nothing appears further from fashionable at this moment in poetry, and perhaps in the larger art world as well, than alignment with the Modernist project. Somewhere between Pisa and 1968, signal and summit of the Fall, the idea of a singular vision is switched out […]
New Poems James Reidel Black Lawrence Press ($8.95) by James Naiden This chapbook, briefer than a will o’ the wisp at only twenty pages, contains poems not at all what one might expect from a more conventional practitioner. James Reidel obtained his MFA at Columbia University over three decades ago, wrote a highly respected biography […]
Alyn Shipton Oxford University Press ($27.95) by Britt Aamodt There are a million books about Bob Dylan. There are a million and five about The Beatles. Everything from the supergods' musical influences to their women and their philosophical underpinnings has been covered in loving and sometimes excruciating detail. Greil Marcus has made a cottage industry […]
Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($25) by Stephen Hartwell Since his debut novel A Hall of Mirrors in 1967, Robert Stone has exhibited a penchant for presenting characters living under various state of duress. Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975, dealt with Californians whose lives had been turned upside down by […]
Curzio Malaparte translated by David Moore New York Review Books ($16.95) by Andrew Marzoni July, 1941. Yampol, a village in Ukraine. An Italian journalist bears witness to a corpse, flattened by a tank, “a dead man—something more, or something less, than a dead dog or cat.” As he recalls, “It was a carpet of human […]