Jim Krusoe Dalkey Archive Press ($14.95) by Carrie Mercer Consider the poetry of internal organs: "the bloated, spongy butterflies of lungs, the shy parenthesis of kidneys, the lurid exclamation marks of livers, the cheerful blimps of stomachs, the loopy daydreams of intestines, the schools of tiny pancreas, and dark, brooding spleens." Aren't they really quite […]

Josef Skvorecky Various translators Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25) by Tricia Cornell A memoir would seem almost superfluous for a writer like Josef Skvorecky. Approaching 70, with nearly 20 books behind him, the Czech dissident and émigré publisher has been telling the story of his life through his characters for more than four decades. Intriguingly, however, […]

Iztok Osojnik translated by Sonja Kravanja Modry Peter Publishers ($11.95) by Susan Smith Nash IIztok Osojnik, who lives and writes in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has published more than 16 collections of poetry, many of which have been translated from Slovenian into English. Perhaps the most widely read of those is Postcards for Darjia, which received the […]

Hank Lazer Lavender Ink Press ($14.95) by Cynthia Hogue Known for his acute criticism as well as exploratory poetry, Hank Lazer is a poet who might be described as a stylistic risk-taker as well as forager in the treasure house of words. But how does an avant-garde poet, by definition one who pushes the genre […]

Floyd Skloot Bucknell University Press ($19.95) by Lynnell Edwards Floyd Skloot's third full-length collection of poetry reveals him again as a poet of strong narrative and formal command, best when imaging the myth and history of the almost modern artists and aristocracy of the 19th and early 20th century. The Fiddler's Trance opens with a […]

Bin Ramke Iowa University Press ($16) by Dan Beachy-Quick Anaxagoras—a philosopher to whom poet Bin Ramke repeatedly returns—differed from his predecessors in one extremely important way. Rather than searching for the origin of the world in an earthly element (water, air, fire, dirt), Anaxagoras claimed that the universe was kept in order by the power […]

Li-Young Lee Boa Editions ($12.95) by M. L. Schuldt “Our bodies look solid, but they aren't. We're like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but there's no thingness to them.” Such is the metaphysical preoccupation of Li-Young Lee's long-awaited […]

Geoffrey G. O'Brien University of California Press ($16.95) by Steve Healey A cloud of anonymity shrouds The Guns and Flags Project, the first book of poems by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Granted, there's a pretty slick author photo on the inside flap, but even here he tucks sheepishly into his own shadows, letting the cloud looming […]

by Ryder W. Miller [Note: a version of this paper was presented at the John Steinbeck's Americas Centennial Conference at Hofstra University in March 2002.] Mexico City February 19, 1944 To Annie Laurie Williams, by Telegram PLEASE CONVEY THE FOLLOWING TO 20TH CENTURY FOX IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT MY SCRIPT FOR THE PICTURE […]

by Jon Carlson Jane Bowles was an American author of surpassing qualities, although her modest oeuvre remains well outside the consciousness of the general reading public, particularly in the United States. Best known for her novel Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943, she also wrote a number of notable short stories, including "Guatemalan Idyll," "A […]