NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems.” However, Crystal Williams’s third book of poetry, Detroit as Barn, is lacking neither in news nor in difficult truths between the lines (between the minds) of those she writes about. Her poetry engages with the question of how to live with what changes and also with what stays uncomfortably the same, stuck in a rut. The collection is centered on real moments where history seems to sit on a struggling city and its people, yet there is also a central wonder throughout the book about the “life beneath this life,” a reminder that history is shimmering, that it is not one thing.

Continue reading “Detroit as Barn”

Becoming Judas, Nicelle Davis’s second full-length poetry collection, is a strange, beautiful, complicated book which includes equally strange and beautiful illustrations by artist Cheryl Gross. The book is comprised of a vast cast of voices and stories, with the speaker weaving religious history, popular culture, and personal experience into a complex personal mythology. Judas and Jesus may be expected characters, based on the title, but the book also includes Joseph Smith, John Lennon, and Charles Manson, as well as the speaker’s mother, grandmother, son, and many others. Continue reading “Becoming Judas”

On the copyright page of Diddy Wah Diddy, Corey Mesler writes: “Everything in this book, including its truths, is a falsehood,” establishing a humorous tone that continues throughout the book. The disclaimer is also a reminder that this is a work of fiction, even though historical characters—one-time Memphis mayor “Boss” Crump, W. C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Arty Shaw, Elvis, John Dee, Butterfly McQueen, Bessie Smith—appear in the scenes. While most of the chapters or vignettes could stand alone, together they present a complex, multi-layered imaginative account of post-World War II Beale Street, gateway to the Delta and birthplace of the blues. Continue reading “Diddy Wah Diddy”

Every so often one comes across a book so engrossing that, as the truism goes, one can’t put it down. Typically, such books tend to be works of fiction—popular crime thrillers, espionage novels, or summertime beach reads. It’s nice, then, to find a work of nonfiction that takes on a subject matter as grim as the Nazi concentration camps and turns it into an utterly relatable story—like that of a Catholic Polish woman who survived World War II and lived to 100 years of age. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps: My Mother’s Memories of Imprisonment, Immigration, and a Life Remade is anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer’s rendering of Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko’s memories of life, both before and after World War II. Continue reading “A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps”

Any time I pick up a book from McSweeney’s Poetry Series, I have high expectations—and Victoria Chang’s The Boss does not disappoint. This collection of poetry is full of clever, cheeky language that propels you through to the last page. The author presents us with a diverse collection written on the same core topic, yet contemplates it from so many points of view that although she considers it fully, I still wanted more. A particularly good example from “The Boss Has Grey Hair”: Continue reading “The Boss”

Tessa Mellas’s debut collection is full of noise—and absurdity, charm, otherworldliness, and beauty. The twelve stories in Lungs Full of Noise brandish the bizarre and stroke the pages with strange and unsettling stories that hover on the border of reality. Mellas ushers us into the uniqueness of her world, reminding me of the inventive and alluring worlds created by such writers as Kevin Brockmeier and Joyelle McSweeney. It is no wonder that she was the deserving winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Continue reading “Lungs Full of Noise”

Kristina Marie Darling’s Vow is simultaneously familiar and strange. The title itself evokes Anne Waldman’s Vow to Poetry, but one look at the small, spare book tells you that this is a different thing. It is, like Waldman’s book, a text about text, but not just in content: Continue reading “Vow”

Saul Lemerond writes in a bizarre universe, fraught with psychosexual dysfunction and filled with strange and desperate characters. The worlds of Kayfabe, whether rainbow cities littered with drunk children or WWE-style wrestling rings, are surreal, disturbing, and often hilarious. He goes to places where few writers have dared, or thought to dare, and finds something universal out there on the same edge that Vonnegut likes to view us from. Continue reading “Kayfabe”

A fire sparked Peter Kaufman’s Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America. On the evening of February 3, 1897, the Walford, Iowa General Store burned to the ground. Among the few recognizable items found in the rubble was a skull detached from a partial male skeleton. The assumption was that it was storeowner Frank Novak, who had been guarding his property following a rash of neighborhood burglaries. Continue reading “Skull in the Ashes”

If the fifteen stories in Karate Chop, by Danish writer Dorthe Nors, were drawings, the spare lines would be punctuated by dark space filled with implication. Each tale is a visit to a foreign place from the viewpoint of an other, someone you might pass without noticing—a walker in the park, a woman getting a haircut, a teenage girl with her father in a car. Continue reading “Karate Chop”

The beautifully written novel An Unnecessary Woman, by Beiruti writer Rabih Alameddine, may be best appreciated by a mature reader, although any lover of serious books should enjoy this one. Continue reading “An Unnecessary Woman”

The voices of four women poets are gathered in one place in the beautifully designed collection Mend & Hone. The title’s pungent phrase, suggesting the acts of both repairing and sharpening, intrigued me, as did a question asked on the back cover by the poet D. Nurkse: “How do we make ourselves at home on a stone falling through space?” All four writers in this book seem engaged in the work of finding and making a place for their lives, both within experiences of the physical/natural world and the world of human interactions. Continue reading “Mend & Hone”

The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Harriet Scott Chessman’s fifth title, charts the day-to-day battles faced by Benny Finn, having returned from serving in Vietnam, and Sister Clare, a young woman learning the trials and joys of committing her life to a convent. Isabel Howell, Benny’s brother’s gal and Sister Clare’s childhood friend, link the two of them, creating a friendship between Benny and Sister Clare that brings about a sort of healing and acceptance for them both. The beauty in this novel, as the title somewhat alludes to, is in the little things—in this case, elegantly crafted lines from Chessman. Continue reading “The Beauty of Ordinary Things”

Jonathan Grimwood’s debut novel, The Last Banquet, takes us to France during the mid-1700s, when the gap between the haves and have-nots widened and set the stage for revolution. The landscape is surreal, with bands of roaming citizens scouring the countryside for food—it’s almost an 18th century version of Road Warrior, minus the gas-powered vehicles and villains in strange get-ups. Continue reading “The Last Banquet”

This essay collection is by noted memoirist Sue William Silverman, who was one of my mentors at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program. While normally such ties between reviewer and author are discouraged in NewPages’s reviews, the exception was made for two reasons, one being the import of the subject matter of the essays: Silverman explores her extended spiritual identity crisis from growing up Jewish in a Christian world and includes a continuation of focus from her two previous memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, in which Silverman recounts being sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood and her resultant sexual addiction and recovery. While tremendously important social issues to be brought into the public dialogue, it’s much harder for such books to be given much, if any, review consideration. The second reason for the exception is precisely that my relationship to Silverman affords me the ability to comment on her craft, as she taught it, and assess her own ability to “walk her talk.” Continue reading “The Pat Boone Fan Club”

Ninety-two-year-old Elizabeth Spencer, with fifteen works published over the course of seven decades, is known as the “Grand Dame” of Southern literature—yet she addresses contemporary family problems as sharply as any younger author. Her best-known work is the 1960 novella Light in the Piazza, as it was made into a Broadway show. It’s been more than a decade since her last book, and her new short story collection, Starting Over, is worth the wait. Continue reading “Starting Over”

It comes as no surprise to the reader that Rachel McKibbens is one of American’s most accomplished spoken-word poets, having served nine times on the National Poetry Slam team and winning two spoken word championships. The strength of her poems lies in their strong, consistent voice—one that speaks with authority and uses the cadences and expressions of natural speech to create a natural tension that moves through each poem and the collection as a whole. Continue reading “Mammoth”

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.” Mark Twain’s observation about biography reminds us that life-writing is nothing if not a tricky genre—where the clothes and buttons of a person’s life are cut, tailored, and assembled into a specific narrative. How a biographer weaves together the threads of the clothes heavily influences how an audience internalizes a person and his/her life. Continue reading “A Brighter Word Than Bright”

“What is the code for happiness?” Mary Ruefle asks in “Trances of the Blast,” a poem that comes midway through her book of the same title, but is as good a place as any to begin: Continue reading “Trances of the Blast”

To read a Jane Gardam novel is to be sorry when it ends. In this country she is best known for her non-chronological Old Filth trilogy: Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Final Friends. But this early (originally published in 1971), seemingly autobiographical novel, A Long Way from Verona, has the same Dickensian, odd, well-defined characters. Her wit comes through as usual, in spite of the sometimes obscure British references. Continue reading “A Long Way from Verona”

The best word to describe Laura McCullough’s newest book might be “fearless.” This may seem strange, as many of the poems deal with the horrors and threats of the world. These are not poems without fear, but poems that directly confront the speaker’s fears, and in so doing, they offer a way through. Continue reading “Rigger Death & Hoist Another”

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation enlisted Lee Gutkind, the editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine, to choose these twenty-one essays in this new collection from the two hundred submissions sent in response to a call for manuscripts. Gutkind, who in the past two decades has written five books about the medical world, reveals in the introduction that he has a clear memory of the doctors and patients in his stories but not of the nurses, who remain semi-invisible to most of us, even though there are over 2.7 million of them working in the United States. The purpose of this book is to bring nurses out of the shadows and shine a light on the difficult work they do, as well as to educate readers about the demands of this challenging occupation. Continue reading “I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out”

The Year of the Rooster, Noah Eli Gordon’s eighth book, examines a crisis of faith: a poet-narrator who questions his impulse to write and not write, the trappings or usefulness of theory and craft, and the very ability of poetry to signify. Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he directs Subito Press, also founded chapbook publisher Letter Machine Editions with Joshua Marie Wilkinson in 2007; they both co-edit The Volta as well. Gordon is a writer fully immersed in a poet’s life, but his narrator questions the impact of such an immersion. Continue reading “The Year of the Rooster”

There are few surprises in The Artist’s Library: A Field Guide. Author-librarians Laura Damon-Moore and Erinn Batykefer do not have to convince bibliophiles that the library is hallowed ground. What they set out to do, and accomplish nicely, is offer ideas for becoming a more resourceful user regardless of intent. Continue reading “The Artist’s Library”

Normally, I’m not one to gravitate to self-help or how-to books, but something about Adam Gnade’s 2013 chapbook drew me in. Maybe it was the cold winter months looming over my shoulder or, probably more likely, it was the blunt, unignorable title spread across the cover that led me to Gnade’s Do-it-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad. Continue reading “The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad”

One challenge with reading poetry that seems to be creating its own forms for what it is seeing and expressing is the tension between the urge to absorb the work as it is presented and an urge to search for clues—to go digging in, and perhaps between, the lines. On my first read through Mary Molinary’s Mary & the Giant Mechanism, I jotted little notes to myself and often thought, “hmmm . . .” On my second read-through, I mostly flipped through the pages at random, sometimes reading sections out of order, and thought “Ohh!” I think one of the successes of this poet’s first book of poetry is that it did compel me to go searching for larger “mechanisms” (to echo the title) that link the images and themes presented here. Continue reading “Mary & the Giant Mechanism”

The word “Appalachia” can call to mind a host of stereotypes: poverty, fundamentalism, environmental exploitation, backwardness. Each word conjures up a vague image of a broad region that many have never visited. By contrast, specificity and personal experience come to the forefront in Sarah Beth Childers’s debut essay collection, Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family. Here, in linked essays that consider family ties, faith, and history, Childers reveals her unique understanding of West Virginia as seen through her eyes and the eyes of her family. Through careful attention to the personal, these essays gently argue for the validity of each person’s understanding of their own world. Continue reading “Shake Terribly the Earth”

Call me inspired. Most audiences come to know Herman Melville through Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor—deep, complex narratives that swell with metaphor and allegory. Both have entered the classical Americanist canon of literature thanks in large part to the early twentieth-century “Melville revival” within academia. Melville’s writing, however, extends well past the White Whale, and for the latter half of his literary career, his publication efforts and creative energy focused on his poetry. In recent decades, scholarly interest has turned to Melville’s canon of poetry as a window into American history and the understood role of a poet. (“[Melville’s] pained ironic view of his position as poetry weighed upon him.”) Melville as Poet: The Art of “Pulsed Life” (a bit of an odd title, but better than Melville: More than Moby) explores the breadth and depth of Melville’s poetry through its emphasis on the history, narrative, and imagery of a unique, careful, and lyrical American poet. Continue reading “Melville as Poet”

The front matter of Frank Montesonti’s Hope Tree asserts something interesting for an erasure formed from a how-to manual about pruning: “method / is unnecessary / to remove / the past season.” It is a fitting introduction to a book in which leniency and ruthlessness, and growth and death, are inexorably intertwined. Continue reading “Hope Tree”

Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947 begins with Anaïs Nin and her husband, Hugo Guiler, escaping the war in Europe to relocate to New York City. On the first page, she is also concerned about whether her two lovers, Henry Miller and Gonzalo Moré, would come to New York with her. They did. Also on the first page, she writes: “I am still baffled by the mystery of how man has an independent life from woman, whereas I die when separated from my love.” Four hundred and forty pages and a dozen or more lovers later, she is still in the realm of needing love, experiencing loss, and longing for the one love that will make her whole. Her lovers are the content the narrative is hung upon, but not the most interesting. There is very little written outside her desire for love, finding love, being in love, leaving the lover, very little written about the art of the day or even about the city of New York or the world that was at war. The drama here is within the psyche of Anaïs Nin. Continue reading “Mirages”

Many readers associate Ron Padgett with the so-called second generation of the New York School of Poets. He did, after all, edit, with David Shapiro, the multi-generational spread An Anthology of New York Poets (1970), was at one time director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Lower East Side, and has continued for decades to split his time living between homes in Vermont and Manhattan. He has also written intimate memoirs of, as well as edited works by, his friends, poet Ted Berrigan and artist Joe Brainard. And of course in the 1960s, the three collaborated on the infamously mischievous Bean Spasms, now a classic of collaboration from the era. Continue reading “Collected Poems”

In Norah Labiner’s Let the Dark Flower Blossom, the character Roman Stone, a writer, says, “A story is a map to the underworld and how you follow that map is, of course, entirely up to you.” This story is cut into different patterns of back-story and forward motion, and point of view shifts from first person to third, character to character. Stone, a celebrity novelist, has been murdered. The news is shocking but not really a surprise to the lovers, enemies, and friends who have revolved around him, seemingly helpless to get out of his orbit. What the reader learns about Stone comes from the retrospective memory of the others. He appears to be the monster in the center of the labyrinth. Continue reading “Let the Dark Flower Blossom”

How would it feel to suddenly find huge distortions in your memories of your own life, and then sense ripples of distortion when looking at the story of the world all around? The narrator of Diane Raptosh’s American Amnesiac speaks from within the swirl of such an ongoing confusion: “I’m a man without a past, like so many folks who’ve been expelled / from their own but dare not detect it. Shake your head no; nod your head yes. // There’s enough amnesia out there to kill a horse. . . .” Continue reading “American Amnesiac”

In this memoir covering more than thirty years, teacher and award-winning writer Janice Gary expertly braids together her life’s themes and experiences, focusing on her fifteen-year relationship with Barney, a stray Lab-Rottweiler that she finds in a supermarket parking lot. Barney fulfills the prediction made during his first visit to the veterinarian: he grows into a very big dog. This presents a complex problem for Gary after Barney becomes dog-aggressive as a puppy when he’s attacked by a larger dog and subsequently attacks and injures several neighborhood dogs. Gary, a trauma survivor who at fifteen years old found her father’s body after his suicide and then four years later was raped at gunpoint in a dark alley, explains how Barney’s size and power initially provide her with a sense of safety and security, although, since he outweighs and overpowers her, she’s challenged to control him when other dogs are present. The writer wins the reader’s sympathy for this life-loving dog, whose emotional wounds mirror the wounds of his owner: “We were twins, the two faces of fear walking side by side.” Continue reading “Short Leash”

Even if you were only half-awake in the late ’80s and early ’90s and only occasionally watched prime-time shows on ABC, you may remember the nostalgic narrator of The Wonder Years and the young urban professionals in thirtysomething, which sparked the now-commonplace term and later earned a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. Both shows were framed in the imagination of baby boomers, the Clinton-Gore age group back in 1992 whose childhood memories of Sixties counterculture now feels muted, ironed out into designer suits and body language that secure career paths and retirement plans. You might get a whiff of those two shows in Joshua Isard’s Conquistador of the Useless, through the tone of nostalgia for one’s teenage years that, to some extent, acts as an element of restraint and caution about being pulled too fast into an upwardly mobile career in information technology. The narratives of urban alienation in Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain, MTV’s Daria, and Kurt Vonnegut are not mere artifacts in Nathan Wavelsky’s suburban world, but serve as imaginary sticky notes for a life filled with statistical reports, deadlines, and board meetings. Thus, Nathan accepts a big job promotion with trepidation and, knowing the ball is in his court, requests a few months off for something unrelated to his career: his condition for accepting the offer is that he starts working in his new job after climbing Mt. Everest. Continue reading “Conquistador of the Useless”

It’s impossible to do justice to the breadth of literature that surrounds cancer. We can view cancer in a historical context through works like Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies. We can read reflections from the medical community in Atul Gawande’s Complications. We can see literature through the decades—like Death Be Not Proud—take on the question of how to balance art and science in practicing medicine and what might determine what we would call “good medicine.” Countless examples shape how we, as a culture, think about and make sense of cancer. And at the forefront of all cancer genres is the personal anecdote: the story of experiencing cancer either firsthand or through a family member or friend. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us, by S. Lochlann Jain, takes the jumbled milieu of medicine, anthropology, culture, and history and tells us how we (broadly defined) think about cancer through the lens of her experience with it. Continue reading “Malignant”

The beautiful cover image for this book of poetry—a painting by an artist named Linda Okazaki—features an animal, probably a fox, alone on a bridge over a vast expanse of water, with trees and mountains in the distance under an orange-red sky. There is a mythical quality to this painting that matches the energy of the best poems in Stan Sanvel Rubin’s There. Here. In this fourth full-length book by Rubin, I find an author who sometimes muses about life in direct, observant narratives and, at other times, offers images with the compression of Zen koans. Continue reading “There. Here.”

Scratching the Ghost is Dexter L. Booth’s first full-length book, though he has been published in a variety of literary magazines; this manuscript was the winner of the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. From the first stanza to the very last, I found myself reading like I had an addiction to his prose, and I just couldn’t put the book down. The beginning to one of his Abstracts:

Mouths foaming
like a scar after
the sweet kiss
of peroxide.

Continue reading “Scratching the Ghost”

The backstory of Folsom’s 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison’s Executed Men would make a pretty good book of its own. Author April Moore’s great-great-aunt Betty, a “fiery redhead” who worked in Los Angles nightclubs, was married to Tom, a professional gambler and bookie with ties to LA and Las Vegas crime syndicates. If that wasn’t enough to keep family phone lines and dinner conversations buzzing, Tom had photos and dossiers of all 93 men executed at Folsom Prison between 1895 to 1937. Why he had them is a mystery; they came into his possession following a visit to the prison to collect a debt from a prisoner. After Betty’s death, the author acquired, as her grandfather labeled them, “the ugly mugs.” Moore follows this irresistible film noir of an introduction with straightforward accounts of how the condemned went to the gallows. Continue reading “Folsom’s 93”

Poetry is often viewed as a respite from the noise and violence of the “real world.” A podcast that paused to lament the anti-intellectual culture of American politics talked of a book of poetry at a president’s bedside in the same breath as vacation and exercise. These things are necessary, or productive even, but not of the same world. Continue reading “Fannie + Freddie”

What is home? Darcy Lipp-Acord asks. Is it in the prairies of South Dakota where she grew up? Or amidst the mountains of Montana where she attended college? Where does one truly ever belong? What is place? Lipp-Acord explores these and other timeless themes in Circling Back Home: A Plainswoman’s Journey. In a total of thirteen essays, written over ten years, Lipp-Acord wraps the reader up in the intimacy of her marital home, her childhood home, her husband’s ranch, and the lives of her children. Lipp-Acord grew up in Timber Lake, South Dakota, on a farm where three generations of her family have lived. She now lives on a ranch near the border of Montana and Wyoming with her husband, Shawn, and their six children. Continue reading “Circling Back Home”

Coming Events promulgates a non-linear reading practice. The form and content of these “collected writings” challengingly swerve back and forth between critical essay, poetry, and personal essay. When considered as a whole, the book’s tendency toward a deliberative structure of concentricity enchants, as individual pieces loop back on each other in ellipsoidal, interchanging depths of reading. The slow reader, returning again and again to the book’s pages, is justly rewarded against the too-eager skimmer looking for quick buzz-words and easily identifiable markers. Continue reading “Coming Events (Collected Writings)”

Flesh-eating hagfish, blue bejeweled garages, animated art, and a moveable geography. Dark March: Stories for When the Rest of the World is Asleep is filled with stories where sandspits are sentient, seagulls are cutthroat, and character conscientiousness is invariably fleeting. These hyperbole-infused short stories infuse ordinary settings with magic and imagination—they give just enough detail to be anchored in a possible universe but contain enough impossibility to buoy the characters above the predictable. Colin Fleming’s collection is pithy and witty, and manages to walk an interesting line between absurd existentialism, surrealist fantasy, and magical realism. Continue reading “Dark March”

The characters in A. Igoni Barrett’s short story collection, Love Is Power or Something Like That, are linked to each other within the chaos and contrasts of Lagos, Nigeria in a nation cycling since the end of colonialism between democracy and dictatorship, reform and intractable corruption. They are dreamers and strivers who sometimes literally tumble into potholes of bad luck while living out the axiom that “no good deed goes unpunished.” The instinct to love is also part of the chain: a father struggling to save a sick infant daughter; a son trying to nourish a drunk, abusive mother; grandmothers who try to nurture neglected grandchildren; two feuding old women abandoned by long departed children who must rely on each other for mutual aid; cousins unable to resist an illicit attraction; a wife trying to placate a husband’s raging despair. Continue reading “Love Is Power or Something Like That”

Just when you thought it was safe to move about the cabin, Jerry Stahl has unleashed a new novel. To the uninitiated, Happy Mutant Baby Pills has no exact genre except for Stahl himself. Continue reading “Happy Mutant Baby Pills”

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s People on Sunday took me a long time to finish because his poems thrilled me so much. Many pieces in People on Sunday demand an immediate reread upon completing the final lines. Often O’Brien tucks clues, hints, and foreshadowing into his poems. These hints blossom with much more depth and meaning during the second (or third and sometimes fourth) read. My fingers could hardly turn the pages backward fast enough to satisfy my urge to devour some of these poems again. Continue reading “People on Sunday”

Microcosm Publishing’s Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America is an image-rich examination of the dominance of car culture in the United States. “I am an advocate for car-free cities, car-free city sections, and car-free living,” author/illustrator Andy Singer states within the first few introductory pages. The text proceeds from there, detailing the disadvantages of arranging urban and suburban life around cars rather than people. This is followed by a succinct history of highway politics in the United States, and Singer concludes with a call to action, offering suggestions for individuals who wish to live car-free and strategies for funneling more money into public transportation at the state level. Continue reading “Why We Drive”