Check out book reviews of titles from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Blog.
Ancient wound. Politicians, monarchs, and religious fanatics still use this phrase to justify vengeance. Its literary applications are no less tragic. To give a Pulitzer and Nobel winning example, Eugene O’Neill knew how to channel that fury and apply it to his highly ordered dysfunctional universe. Continue reading “The Antigone Poems”
The poetry in Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone by Annelyse Gelman is witty, comfortable, and contemporary. Nothing too heavy waits inside the bright blue cover, and even the heavier moments are lightened by Gelman’s sly humor, a welcome presence throughout the poems. Continue reading “Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone”
Alex Green’s collection of short prose is aptly titled Emergency Anthems. Brooklyn Arts Press wisely bills the book as a collection of “Short Fiction/Prose Poems,” leaving elbow-patched professor types to duke it out over finer genre distinctions. Alas, I regularly cling to genre like it’s a life-raft in wild waters. The stories/poems are presented as block paragraphs with justified left and right margins. The majority of these shorts don’t feature any traditional narrative arc, no building and releasing of tension. Without the floatation device of genre, the word “Anthem” feels like an appropriate designation for Green’s short bursts of prose. Continue reading “Emergency Anthems”
The poems in Sylph, Abigail Cloud’s debut collection, are comprised of multiple balancing acts. They are graceful, self-assured poems, beautifully executed with a tightly focused imagistic sensibility. But they are also searching, inquisitive poems—their arrivals are real-time events, self-discoveries. They have an airy quality, as the title of the collection would suggest (there are “wings” everywhere), yet are also deeply rooted in the material world. They are as at-home in myth and the spirit world, or the haunting voices in archives, as they are in the garden and in the home. Continue reading “Sylph”
Once, Then by Andrea Scarpino is a collection of elegies that are caught in the tension of two worlds, the scientific and the spiritual. In attempting to understand the aftermath of loss, Scarpino turns to form, and her lyrical, shortly-woven lines sing. The collection often features the profiles of people, those closest to Scarpino, and also mythic figures such as Persephone and Achilles. What results is a poet deeply engaged with the world. Continue reading “Once, Then”
Lyrical, honest, descriptive, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes by Kerrin McCadden is a thoughtful meditation on wandering through a human landscape, one full of loss and desire. Often elegiac, this collection of poetry accepts the world before it, acknowledging the quotidian value of our lives while also seeing the beauty in it. Continue reading “Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes”
Literary Nobel Laureates are not known for readability and popularity, yet the novels of 2014 winner Patrick Modiano (also winner of Prix Concourt and Prix MondialCino Del Duca for lifetime achievement) are easy to read and popular. His novels are short with short prose pages. Plus he recreates atmospheric noir settings, such as eerie dark abandoned castles or noble estates, and the characters he introduces are ever mysterious. His narrator, mostly unnamed and a persona for him, is constantly reminded of the past and wants to go back to understand it. Continue reading “Suspended Sentences”
Deceased Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño is known for experimental fiction like By Night in Chile, which is told without paragraphing, but this work, A Little Lumpen Novelita, is written chronologically, with standard punctuation and paragraphing. It is a story told from the perspective of an older sister (19 years old) named Bianca, about herself and her unnamed younger brother after their parents’ fatal auto accident. As she tells us in the opening sentence, Bianca is now married with children, Continue reading “A Little Lumpen Novelita”
The best movie monsters come back to life in sequels or remakes that can be masterpieces (Aliens) or miscalculations (the two American Godzillas). The late Friday night TV marathons or Saturday afternoon matinees that influenced at least three generations of movie makers and goers are a regular part of Turner Classic Movie Channel’s schedule. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (his monster played by Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and Benedict Cumberbatch to name a few), classic movie monsters endear because they are more human than their creators or tormentors. Continue reading “Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems”
The Tribute Horse, Brandon Som’s debut full collection, is a surprising title once you wade into the first few pages of this beautiful mediation on migration, cultural memory, and the great mitigating force of both, language. The title image is almost like a piece of statuary, a trophy or memorial object, and to be sure, this collection does feel like a tribute, but it spends far more time at sea and among the heights of birdsong and other utterances than would seem to warrant that powerfully terrestrial and corporeal image of the horse. Continue reading “The Tribute Horse”
The twenty-two selections in this nonfiction collection are culled from twenty years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. I was worried it would inevitably suffer from aesthetic myopia. But the selections are eclectic enough to avoid this. I learned about the history of sign language, the particulars of Finnish baseball, and about the difficulties and rewards of teaching a university course on the philosophy of death. This whirlwind collection features an exceptionally talented stable of writers, all of whom are present as characters in their essays. Continue reading “True Stories, Well Told”
Pete Fromm’s If Not For This was the most moving novel I read in 2014. The main characters are raft guides in the interior west. Fromm worked for many years as a river ranger in Grand Teton National Park. I chose the book based on those two kernels of information. I left the west three years ago. Before beginning my drive east in earnest, I spent a few days camping in the Tetons. Continue reading “If Not For This”
Titulada is, without question, one of the best books of poetry I’ve read this year. Formally exploratory, sonically interesting, and rich with meaning, this book offers exactly what I’m hoping to find every time I pick up a new poetry collection: a challenge that rewards the effort put into reading it. Continue reading “Titulada”
Elegy on Kinderklavier is a debut collection of seven short stories. The driving force across the stories is violence. The characters are forced to the edge of the world, intruded upon by one form of violence or another: war, terminal illness, loss of loved ones before their time, death and mutilation by explosives. Violence, in all its forms, is the hovering, unpredictable specter and Hemenway handles it with innovative, effective techniques. Continue reading “Elegy on Kinderklavier”
Greek dramatists called them “Chorus.” Virginia Woolf christened them “Judith Shakespeare.” In big-budget films with a religious, historic, or fantasy theme, they are “Extras.” On television, they form the zombie army on The Walking Dead or seek fame on reality TV, which is like turning zombie. With the exception of letters and journals written before the Industrial Revolution that survived by luck, there isn’t much to go on. Continue reading “Sisters and Courtesans”
Benjamin Parzybok’s new novel Sherwood Nation is the latest addition to what is now being called “climate lit.” Books with apocalyptic plots which once seemed so far off in some crazy future are now disturbingly within reach. Recent titles such as Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior” and Eden Lepucki’s “California” seem plausible. Continue reading “Sherwood Nation”
I was drawn to reading Alex Lemon’s The Wish Book partly from the surreal quality of its cover which features fish floating over a well-dressed bird-headed character while a mustached man reads a newspaper of poems, and a dapper potato-headed figure of many eyes lifts the arm of his suit where a large insect pokes free. Yet there are many contemporary poets who seem to draw surreal dream-like worlds on the page; that alone isn’t enough to make a book stand out for me. Continue reading “The Wish Book”
The reader will either become addicted to or lack the commitment needed for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels starting with My Brilliant Friend (331 pages), followed by The Story of a New Name (471 pages) and this latest third volume Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. The final fourth volume will come out September 2015. The length of the novels and the character-driven, rather than plot-driven, story might discourage some readers. Continue reading “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”
The Imagination of Lewis Carroll by William Todd Seabrook is the winner of the Rose Metal Press eighth annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. The book is appealing to the hand and eye, a font and layout with a flavor of Carroll’s nineteenth century. The twenty-four short chapters imaginatively take us through the life of Lewis Carroll and perhaps is a more accurate biography of him than a factual one. Seabrook uses the techniques of Carroll’s own imagination to imagine Carroll’s life of imagination. Continue reading “The Imagination of Lewis Carroll”
The cover image of Richard Newman’s All the Wasted Beauty of the World is “Great Blue Heron of Southern Indiana” by Nick Nihira and the thirty-nine poems are divided into four sections: 1. Summer Spells; 2. Autumn Contrails; 3. Winter’s Bloom; 4. Spring Necromancies. I assumed the poems would be about nature by the cover and title, and the poems would be in a metrical style since the publisher is Able Muse. That is the delightful surprise about poetry and reviewing—as neither was entirely the case. Continue reading “All the Wasted Beauty of the World”
Dodie Bellamy’s The TV Sutras is “inspired text born from a crisis of urban bombardment.” In the tradition of Joseph Smith, Moses, and the oracle at Delphi, Bellamy’s introduction describes a process wherein after a 30-minute yoga DVD and a 20-minute meditation facing the (turned-off) TV, she turns the TV on and begins to receive a transmission. After a break, she describes the scene, then gives her commentary without “irony, cleverness or perfection—or art.” Continue reading “The TV Sutras”
Chelsea Woodard’s poetry collection Vellum was a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, judged anonymously by the Able Muse Contest Committee. The forty-six poems are well-balanced with nine to ten poems in each of the five parts, though not grouped by specific theme or setting. Continue reading “Vellum”
Joan Gelfand searches her own motives with a touch of whimsy while probing for hard answers, which makes her wide knowledge of humanity evident in her book The Long Blue Room. She is a poet who has visited abroad and traveled across her own country to gain a sense of contemporary life grounded in realism but also presented with a delightful wit that’s penetrating and wise. She observes the rhythms, the good and bad about her, but maintains the appreciation of small things—takes time to thoroughly taste fruits like peaches and pears and wonder about them. Continue reading “The Long Blue Room”
Stephen Twilley’s new translation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s last work The Professor and the Siren would appeal most to those who loved di Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard, as both are beautifully written. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa witnessed the demise of his aristocratic family’s holdings in Sicily after the rise of Garibaldi and the subsequent unification of Italy. The Leopard’s story traces the aristocracy’s downfall in the person of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, known as “the Leopard.” Continue reading “The Professor and The Siren”
The Family Cannon is Halina Duraj’s debut short story collection on family, loyalty, and fidelity. The collection of ten stories revolve around Magda, a 20-something woman (perhaps modeled after the writer herself?) and her immigrant parents from Poland who survived the Nazis and WWII. The father immigrates to the United States after the war and, in a few years’ time, visits his birth country to find a wife. The stories do not follow a narrowly defined linear trajectory; Continue reading “The Family Cannon”
Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 is the first compilation of Hoa Nguyen’s work, gathering several of her previous small press chapbooks, including Red Juice from effing press, Your Ancient See Through from subpress, and Hecate Lochia from Hot Whiskey Press. Arranged chronologically, the book demonstrates the progressive development of some of Nguyen’s key interests—including the contradictions of popular culture; the visceral nature of childbirth, mothering, and womanhood; and a clashing sense of both culpability in and removal from impending environmental collapse.
The “moment” in Robert Sitton’s Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film does not involve Ms. Barry. Over a series of formal meetings and parties, several millionaires (Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney) and their talented, educated friends (architect Philip Johnson and the wealthy painter Gerald Murphy) decided to create The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That they accomplished this during the Great Depression is miraculous. They knew society—not the types in nightclubs or their equivalent to the red carpet—could not survive without culture.
The Unsung Masters Series published by Pleiades Press performs a remarkable service to writers whose work has been eclipsed for one reason or another during the ensuing decades after its original appearance. Each volume focuses upon a writer relatively unknown, providing a relatively quick, yet nonetheless detailed, summation of his or her biography along with some critical overview and examples of the work itself. Francis Jammes (1868-1938) was a major presence in the French literary scene of his day. He also received significant attention from English readers. Continue reading “Francis Jammes”
William Logan’s poetry reviews found in Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure don’t mince words. Never drab, his criticism will entertain and never bore. It doesn’t much matter whether readers agree or disagree with his judgments, as he generally delivers them with enough original panache to readily amuse all the same. He doesn’t quite reach far enough out from the borders of the poetry world to be of interest to those readers unfamiliar with poetry-at-large, but anyone with a decent background in the field, whether reading for a degree or for pleasure, will be quite well acquainted enough to follow along. Continue reading “Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure”
John Skoyles, poetry editor of Ploughshares and professor at Emerson College, unveils in this memoir his journey as the son of a working class family in Queens whose mother introduces him to poetry, to student at a Jesuit all-male college, to the Iowa Writers Workshop, Provincetown, Yaddo, and a long, successful career as professor and published writer. He takes the reader along through his interactions with intimidating professors, competitive classmates, indifferent women, and flawed mentors. He skillfully weaves the diverse elements Continue reading “A Moveable Famine”
It’s the rare book that will compel me to read it aloud rather than silently, and reading The Blue Box by Ron Carlson turned out to be one of those experiences. Flash fiction is a genre that can so easily become pretentious or overly complicated. To fit a distinct narrative voice in such a short span of time while also enticing the readers with an intriguing plot, humor, and depth is no easy feat, but Carlson seems to accomplish it all with little more than a snap of his fingers. Though the circumstances in the stories were often surreal, the voice felt cemented in a witty hyper-reality. Continue reading “The Blue Box”
Reckoning by Rusty Barnes is the story of a Richard Logan, a fourteen-year-old boy in a small Appalachian town. Richard and Katie, the pretty new girl in town, find an unconscious woman in a lake one day while swimming. This woman, Misty, along with Katie’s mother and Lyle, Richard’s adult nemesis, lead the way down a path into debauchery and violence in their wooded hamlet. In the description on the back of the book, it is called “brutal and beautiful” which is true in parts. The brutality is clearly used as a selling point, unsurprising when shows like Breaking Bad and True Detective are being celebrated Continue reading “Reckoning”
How does a poet who perceives the depth of trouble humans have sunk themselves and other living species in convey the confusion and range—the tumultuous feeling—of this trouble? The long poem by Betsy Andrews titled The Bottom swims right into these waters with a voice that jumps from clear-eyed anger to imaginative wonder as it catalogues and presses close to “the sea’s delicious mess.” This is a relentless swimming, tense with music, urgent in its journey toward a sense of safety and home. Continue reading “The Bottom”
Flipping a page in Julia Elliott’s short story collection The Wilds is opening a page upon whole new futuristic worlds that do not stray that far from our own. On one page you’ll enter a spa for “bodily restoration” with goat-milk-and-basil soaks, kelp baths, and lunches of raw vegetables and fermented organ meats. Turn the page and you’ll enter a scientist’s lab where a sexless robot falls in love. Further in still, you’ll discover a disease that feeds on teenagers, causing them to obsess over videogames or social-networking sites and to have a social withdrawal and “a voracious appetite for junk food.”
What is this life all about? That type of philosophical query may seem an unlikely undercurrent to a book of poems ostensibly focused on a writer’s experience of a specific place. Yet, when read as a whole, the direct, lyrical poems in Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains, weave a wide web of overlapping stories and impressions that casts a deep sense of wonder on the nature of particularity. Continue reading “Lake of Two Mountains”
The reader has a lot of work to do after entering Divya Victor’s piece of expression, Things To Do With Your Mouth. The writing is a hybrid of text, speech, and performance. The body, the vocal cords, the mouth. This is about who can speak and be heard and who cannot, about who has power in the system and who does not, and we experience this from the side of those who are not heard and who do not have power in the system. Continue reading “Things To Do With Your Mouth”
Shane McCrae in Nonfiction, a collection of poems, urgently requires readers to face both the visible and invisible truths of our American culture and society, present and past. Throughout these poems, the lyric voice of our culture and its various speakers emit a language that insistently stammers and stutters, resulting in poems that stun readers with pure lyrical beauty. The rhythm of the line, the stutter and repetition, so closely mimics the messy, rarely perfect, inner dialogues of the soul. Continue reading “Nonfiction”
For fans, baseball is poetry in motion. One team that continues to demonstrate grace is the Los Angeles Dodgers. Love or hate them, the team of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax who has Magic Johnson among its co-ownership are still captivating, starting with manager Don Mattingly. As a Yankee in the 1980’s, “Donnie Baseball” and Keith Hernandez, his equal, opposite number on the New York Mets, gave daily clinics on the art of playing first base. No line drive or off-balance throw was too impossible for either of them. Continue reading “Heart of the Order”
I usually start a book review with some information on the author, including past publications, academic affiliations and other markers of importance that might help the reader slot the work into whatever framework he or she has for deciding what books are worth reading. While CAConrad definitely has the required pedigree, detailing it seems counter to the ethos of the book’s rejection of received knowledge in favor of lived experience.
Elise Cowen is a name unlikely to ring a bell for any readers unfamiliar with the now rather legendary American literary phenomenon of the Beat Generation. Yet her writing will likely intrigue and warrant interest to a readership well beyond that demographic. Cowen’s brief life (1933-1962) proves rather remarkable for a young, unmarried woman of the era: she freely and openly explored her sexuality with multiple lovers of both sexes, including Allen Ginsberg, with whom she appears to have formed a deeper attachment, likely unreturned in kind; spent time living in both New York City and San Francisco, establishing relationships and friendships with artist communities in both cities; experimented habitually with drugs and alcohol; and dedicated herself to the pursuit of a poetic, intellectual life as much as possible all the while. Continue reading “Elise Cowen”
One gets the feeling that she is always stuck in a hallway, or a “corridor.” But a corridor is not only a way of connecting rooms or railway cars; it also serves as link between two lands, and as a migratory path for birds. Continue reading “Corridor”
Joseph P. Wood’s most recent poetry collection, Broken Cage, is a short book that takes ideas of symmetry and formal constraint to the extreme. Broken into three sections, the poems grow longer as the book progresses, and then shorter again in the third section. Wood focuses most of his energy on the triolet, an eight-line French form that includes rhyming as well as repeated lines.
Smart, funny, tender, and always sharp with language, Joanne Diaz’s new book of poems My Favorite Tyrants is both elegy and celebration of those tyrants—cultural, historical, mythical, and personal—that shape our understanding of our current selves and the world we’ve produced. Divided into three sections, “The Perimeter of Pleasure,” “Elegy,” and “Metastasis,” the occasion for these poems is centered around the sudden and tragic loss of the speaker’s mother, a mother while dearly loved and respected, was perhaps, in her own way, a bit of a (shall I say it?) tyrant. Continue reading “My Favorite Tyrants”
Confessions of a Book Burner is award-winning poet and children’s book writer Lucha Corpi’s latest collection of personal essays and stories of growing up in a large family in Mexico and pursuing her passion for the written word. These twelve essays delve into childhood memories, cultural heritage, family, love, and the craft of writing. The essays explore Corpi’s Chicana heritage and offer a nuanced look at the intimate histories of Mexican Americans and their struggles straddling two cultures. Continue reading “Confessions of a Book Burner”
“Let me explain. I hunt for twins,” says Jack Gorse, narrator of Pamela Erens’s The Understory. “Not your run-of-the-mill fraternals, your IVF side effects, but identicals only, life’s natural aberrations. Nothing so far but Nature can make those mirror images, her rare gift of likeness in the world of infinite variety.” Originally published in 2007 by Ironweed Press and reissued this past April by Tin House Books, The Understory is a book about doubles, a search for second selves and other halves. It is about what it feels like to be alone and the lengths we will go to in order to find completion. Continue reading “The Understory”
Hemingway’s literary world is nothing if not well-studied. Between 1917 -1929, Ernest Hemingway’s early adult years are marked with journalism, war, marriage, expatriation, and his own struggles as a writer attempting to make inroads into the growing scene of European literati. Where most scholarly work has focused on Hemingway’s personal journey in his literary career, the surrounding contexts of his work are less emphasized. In War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings, editors Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout focus on the social and cultural histories of Hemingway’s early work, highlighting detail from a swarm of Hemingway scholars. Continue reading “War + Ink”
In Ellen Kaufman’s House Music, the reader is invited to come in, have a seat, and get comfortable. There are no grandiose declarations or flighty vagaries to spin the reader off into the cosmos; Kaufman’s use of plain, honest verse and precise language establishes order and a warm sense of familiarity to her subjects and places. Kaufman treats us to her company and wit without imposition, as the readers become guests beneath the roof of her memories and imagination. Continue reading “House Music”
The Stories of Jane Gardam will delight Gardam’s fans, who may find something new here. Unlike Gardam’s most famous novel Old Filth, but not unlike the ending of the third book in her trilogy Last Friends, these stories explore what may not be real. They also hold the element of mystery, fantasy, and surprise endings. Spanning from 1977 to 2007, these stories give a broader overview of Gardam’s talents, her favorite themes very visible. Continue reading “The Stories of Jane Gardam”
“The Day,” the first poem Anthony McCann’s latest poetry collection, Thing Music, from Wave Books, begins:
In this coupling
of speech
where everything
begins where
shimmering
began
please Continue reading “Thing Music”
The title of this debut novel by Wendy Jones, The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, suggests a fun, light, old-fashioned read, which it partly is. But it also deals with serious, timeless subjects, though the resolution reflects the time wherein the novel takes place: 1924, in the small Welsh town of Narberth. Continue reading “The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals”
