NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

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”

We Come Elemental is Tamiko Beyer’s first full-length book; her chapbook bough breaks was published by Meritage Press in 2011. While bough breaks focused primarily on “domestic” concepts (gender, sexuality, motherhood, adoption), We Come Elemental draws from the entire planet for its topics. Water comprises the framework by which these disparate subjects are connected, just as water serves to connect all life on Earth. Continue reading “We Come Elemental”

While the title of Gail Martin’s second collection of poetry, Begin Empty-Handed, calls to mind a state of lack, it also implies a readiness to be filled, an openness to whatever might come to hand. This tension between remaining unburdened and delightfully accepting whatever turns up runs throughout Martin’s poems, as they both critique and catalog the world through the eyes of a therapist, daughter, wife, and mother. Winner of the 2013 Perugia Press Prize, Begin Empty-Handed crackles with wit and humor even as it considers loss and questions of responsibility in poems that clip along with intensity. Continue reading “Begin Empty-Handed”

In her previous memoir, Miss New York Has Everything, Lori Jakiela—an adopted only child—wrote about leaving her childhood home in Pennsylvania to work as an international flight attendant based in New York City, hoping to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a writer. Jakiela, who directs the writing program at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chatham University, writes here about the next phase of her life, after her father’s death and leaving New York City, her job, and her boyfriend to return to Pittsburgh and care for her ailing mother. Continue reading “The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious”

Language let loose: in Cloud vs. Cloud, Ethan Paquin gives us the poet as a fleeting point. His universe is one of words—not a social universe, not the natural world. We are in the quickness of thought, of seeing at the level of language. The author is talking to himself, bending language to a penetrating look at the surface, a surface that bounces him back. All is surface, including his own experience: “What is known, nothing . . . nothing can be articulated.” Continue reading “Cloud vs. Cloud”

The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson continue to inspire, by way of example, many off-shoot projects by poets who came after. Olson’s intimately grand gesture was scooping the local, immediate concerns of Gloucester, Massachusetts onto the historical and mythic world stage, while devoutly insisting the context remain personal. This gave both the permission and encouragement for numerous similar endeavors by poets seeking to weave broad, historical scope into autobiographical material. The most successful of these projects are ones similar to Donald Wellman’s Cranberry Island Series, where the poet steers clear of overly emulating Olson’s work (in terms of the “projective” form it takes across the page) and person. Wellman creates a work shaped according to its own needs assuming a form wholly its own. Continue reading “The Cranberry Island Series”

Soul in Space by Noelle Kocot challenges its readers. Within the first few poems, I recognized Kocot wasn’t going to provide footholds to guide me through her words of whimsy, which hint and glimpse at an uncharted world. I fought for meaning and felt lost in space; I surrendered to the experience, and suddenly Kocot’s vividity sang from the pages. Continue reading “Soul in Space”

As an undergraduate, I majored in history and archaeology. I suppose part of the attraction to these degrees was an enthusiasm for the undiscovered and all things old. In Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master, part of Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series, I was introduced to a new poet and was reminded of that thrill of finding something undiscovered and underappreciated—an artifact or an idea that time had passed by. In this amazing assemblage of poetry and essays, Editors Kevin Prufer and Michael Dumanis work to acquaint readers with an American poet whose life and work are largely unrecognized. Continue reading “Russell Atkins”

Michael Teig’s second poetry collection, There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick, is a romping book, full of syntactic (and synaptic) leaps. Organized in three parts, two of which begin with meditations on the possibilities of boxes, these poems hint at a diverse poetic lineage, possibly including James Tate, the New York School poets, and Sombrero Fallout-era Richard Brautigan. Teig finds occasion for poetry in chickens and waltzes and monkeys and hats, and the speaker addresses readers in a casual, friendly mode. The diction of the poems ranges from officious to fanciful, sometimes in the same intake of breath, which is at times both confusing and exhilarating. Continue reading “There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick”

The first piece of writing I ever read by Dodie Bellamy was an essay in an issue of City Lights Review concerning her on-again, off-again fucked-up hotel room romance with the poet John Wieners. Sex, drugs, and his rather poetically peripatetic mental state were the main highlights. After some reflection, after hearing Bellamy read and speak in public and becoming more familiar with her work, I came to the realization that this essay was in fact more or less a fictional story, a literary homage. Continue reading “Cunt Norton”

In a period in which propaganda has largely reduced the artistic and entertainment validity of the screen in many other countries, it is pleasant to report that American motion pictures continue to be free from any but the highest possible entertainment purpose . . . Propaganda disguised as entertainment has no place on the American screen. Continue reading “Hollywood and Hitler”

In Nola Garrett’s second collection, The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball, the speaker considers many things in addition to the classic game she imagines in the ten-part title poem. That long poem, organized into ten “games,” covers a lot of ground on its own: from the clear evocation of place early on in “Game 1” when Garrett writes “Here in the Rust Belt // our schools are all rules, our sons play air / guitar, // wait for the army recruiter”; to personal stories of grandfathers, friends, and neighbors; to contemplations of tragedy (“When an airplane crashes, / no one blames the sky” in “Game 2”) and God (described in “Game 5” as a “deist clockmaker”). Pinball, throughout the long poem, serves as both subject of the poem and metaphor for life: Continue reading “The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball”

A poet of the working-class and city streets, Jim Daniels’s fourteenth poetry collection travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence. Continue reading “Birth Marks”

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante is the second volume of a trilogy. It is a novel of a complex friendship between two women, Lenú and Lila, that goes forward with intellectual intimacy, competition, loyalty, anger, and excruciating love. In the first book of this series, My Brilliant Friend, Lenú, in her sixties, learns that Lila has disappeared. She recreates their girlhood sharing fairytale dreams to escape a post-war Neapolitan neighborhood bleeding from fatalism and old betrayals. Lila, risk-taker and quick study, and Lenú the striver carry on friendly competition in school. Lenú is allowed to continue her education while Lila is compelled to work with her shoemaker father. Lenú begins rigorous secondary studies. Lila pulls herself into middle-class comfort at sixteen by marrying an ambitious grocer. The second book picks up at this point. Continue reading “The Story of a New Name”

“[S]he could see her story going on, her people there in the past—a way of imagining that grounds her,” writes Tess Taylor in her debut full-length poetry collection The Forage House (“Meeting Karen White, Descendent of Jefferson’s Gardener Wormley”). While these words describe someone other than the collection’s primary speaker, they prove an apt summary of Taylor’s first book: in The Forage House, we witness a personal discovery of family history and how it colors the speaker’s present. Throughout the collection, Taylor’s first-person speaker finds herself immersed in the vivid reality of her family’s past, a past that spans a period from Thomas Jefferson to a Confederate soldier who survived Gettysburg to her parents’ early years of marriage living in a Brooklyn commune. The Forage House presents the simultaneous distance and unshakeable presence of history through poems that bridge research and imagination, the distant past and the lived present. Continue reading “The Forage House”

In an opening piece (originally written in 2008) in Paper Dreams, Jill Allyn Rosser gives us “Reasons for Creating a New Literary Magazine,” beginning with, “There probably hasn’t been a new one created in the past six-and-a-half days.” Through this sarcastic piece, Rosser actually lists many reasons why you shouldn’t begin a new magazine. Among my favorites is, “There are serious, good, seriously good writers whose work is being completely ignored, and you are so nattily optimistic as to believe that literate people are going to read them in your new Yet Another Literary Magazine when they already have piles and unread piles of them . . .” Clearly, literary magazines are cropping up everywhere. And while there is an abundance of them, they are important in the literary culture. Continue reading “Paper Dreams”

The editors selected twenty stories from more than three hundred submitted by literary journals, magazines, and small presses and arranged them to make up New Stories from the Midwest 2012. Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham explain that the goals of the series are to “celebrate an American region that is often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature and to demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) rivals that of any other region.” In the introduction, Guest Editor John McNally, born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Burbank, writes: “If all politics is local, as Tip O’Neill once famously declared, then so is all fiction. The best fiction, it seems to me, is always strongly rooted in place.” These stories are linked by place, specifically the Midwest, where fierce winds blow in off the plains, corn stalks tower in ubiquitous rolling fields, snow begins before Thanksgiving and lasts long into spring, and ice freezes summer lakes. While the landscape and weather provide the settings and common themes for these stories, their universal appeal lies in the characters whose lives inhabit them. Continue reading “New Stories from the Midwest 2012”

“If it could speak it would offer / you excess; it would / offer you more.” Continue reading “Swoop”

When I began to write this I suddenly realized that in order to review Jonathan Callahan’s debut collection of short stories, The Consummation of Dirk, I’d have to invent a whole new set of adjectives. The writing contained within these covers is imaginative, wrought, out-of-the-box, and perhaps bordering on the avant-garde, all of which have been said about many works of literature and which, in the long run, tell you little. Yet, while reading his stories, I had a sense of the traditional narrative undergoing a transformation—I pictured Bruce Banner changing into the Hulk. These are stories trying to punch their way out of the bag. They are written with some edge and share varying degrees of foreboding. Continue reading “The Consummation of Dirk”

Rebecca Gayle Howell’s debut collection was selected by Nick Flynn for the 2012 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. In his foreword, Flynn writes: “To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day.” Continue reading “Render”

The poems in The Year of What Now by Brian Russell can catch an unsuspecting poetry reader off-guard, much like a sudden illness or the meeting of your future significant other. Within the opening two lines of the book’s first poem, we discover we will not be eased into this experience: “your hands were stained the urgent shade / of blood when I found you.” As readers continue, they will uncover sections of humor, as well as soft assuring language and soothing music within the poems. Every poem is written without any punctuation marks, except apostrophes. This tactic, although noticeable, doesn’t interrupt the flow or create uncertainty and confusion; instead, it makes the message clearer, helps readers directly connect with the narrator’s thoughts and share the narrator’s sensation of uncertainty. Readers are opened to accept the music of the moment with comforting sounds like “clack of keys,” repetition and rhythms like, “born from smoldering / Rome came crawling,” and unexpected rhymes like: Continue reading “The Year of What Now”

It’s hard to imagine a trope of Americana more ingrained in the public conscientiousness than purposeful living in New England. In Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, Howard Mansfield takes Thoreau’s call to “live deliberately” as a demand to examine the nature of shelter and the circumstances that create a home. These themes, he argues, are how people can engage with their culture and how they live in their spaces. Dwelling in Possibility, one could say, is Mansfield’s answer to “putting to rout all that is not life” (Walden-Pond-style) by calling direct and specific attention to what he sees as humanity’s un-purposeful living in their dwellings. Continue reading “Dwelling in Possibility”

This novel’s title and cover image, of reddish curls of smoke, inspires assumptions that another vampire story is lurking in our midst, quietly digging its fangs on an ever-crowded genre dominated by pale, gorgeous characters, 500-year-old blood-suckers whose sense of smell defies any human standard of keenness. In the novel’s first paragraph, the narrator’s revelation of a loss—of “something very special . . . running through [her] veins like a blessing, or a plague”—appears to support that impression, that perhaps she is referring to properties in her blood, of being trapped in the vacuum of eternity itself. Even the narrator’s name—Eva—has strong kinship to blood, old blood, the origin of blood, fallen, cast away from innocence, purity. It’s hard to say where our impression of vampires eventually fades in the story; Margot Berwin’s canvas is filled with shadows, quiet rooms with creaky doors, cloudy skies, and lonely roads, whether Eva is in the mountaintop town of Cyril, New York where her grandmother Louise lives, or in the tropical weather of New Orleans, where Eva shacks up with her boyfriend Gabriel after Louise—an aromata, a master creator of scent—passes away. Continue reading “Scent of Darkness”

The beauty of a “new and selected” book is that it can provide a wide-ranging introduction to readers unfamiliar with a poet while serving to remind familiar readers of all the reasons they loved the poet’s work in the first place. The risk sometimes is that drawing from a poet’s entire career can yield too diverse a book, one which lacks cohesion. That is not the case in A Wild Surmise. Although it includes poems from throughout Healy’s long career, the tone of the book is consistent—from the opening acknowledgments to the closing poem, the tone is celebratory, grateful, and entirely current. Whether a reader is already familiar with Healy’s work or not, the poems are engaging, the presentation is savvy, and the subjects (love, death, nature, urban life) are both timely and timeless. Continue reading “A Wild Surmise”

Despite a several-decades-long history of publication in the poet’s homeland of Uruguay, prior to the publication of Diadem: Selected Poems the only published translations into English of Marosa Di Giorgio’s work were her 1965 collection The History of Violets (Historial de las violetas) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and a selection of her work in the anthology Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay (Shearsman, 2011). This is slim representation for a poet who, as translator Adam Giannelli relates in his introduction, “like Whitman . . . expanded the same work throughout her career,” ultimately gathering fourteen books as her collected poetry in Los papeles salvajes (“The Wild Papers”) which in “the most recent version appeared in 2008, and gathered in a single volume nearly seven hundred pages of poetry.” Continue reading “Diadem”

While it is generally a mistake to assume the speaker of a poem is the poet himself, Belmont is an introspective book featuring many overtly autobiographical gestures. Taking its title from the Massachusetts town where poet Stephen Burt lives, the collection explore the pleasures of adulthood and the security of home through poems that are fixed in definite times and recognizable places and often refer to specific people. Objects, even, have specificity; in “Over Wingaersheek Beach,” readers are told that “Nathan’s kite shows a pattern of angelfish, coral, and sea stars,” taking the vivid description so far as to denote possession—the kite in question is Nathan’s—and in fact Nathan and other family members are mentioned by name frequently in the book, lending the collection the narrative specificity of a memoir. Continue reading “Belmont”

Against the background of bad press about Chechnya—from violent rebel attacks like that on a Moscow theater and, more recently, the Chechen connection with the Boston Marathon bombers—Anthony Marra’s novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena manages to right the balance on Chechen/Russian violence. For those of us who know little about the Chechens’ struggle for independence, from the first page on, we see the brutality of the “Feds” (the Russians) and their continuing efforts to obliterate any chance of the country’s unification. The two main female characters, sisters Natasha and Sonja, are Russians; their family was encouraged to move to Chechnya to help keep the country Russian. Continue reading “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”

Dissident Gardens begins in Queens during the post-war years, when the romance with Communism was still fresh. There was a brief window of time before McCarthyism when, as Allen Ginsberg wrote in his famous poem America, “everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was . . .” In some circles, revolution was in the air. There were cell meetings, communiques from Moscow, Bolsheviks in the bathroom. However, the narrative informs us: Continue reading “Dissident Gardens”

The Swedenborg Foundation’s annual Chrysalis anthologies were first published in 1984, for the purpose of examining themes related to the universal quest for wisdom according to the teachings of scientist-turned-spiritual-visionary and writer Emanuel Swedenborg. This, the final volume of the series, contains essays, stories, poetry, and illustrations focused on the theme of patterns. It contains more than seventy pieces and numerous illustrations by poet laureates and prominent and award-winning authors, as well as some new voices, and is divided into five sections: “Breaking Patterns,” “Perpetuating a Pattern,” “Stuck in a Pattern,” “Patterns in Progress,” and Making New Patterns,” in addition to the preface and epilogue. Continue reading “Patterns”

All Standing is history with a pulse. Kathryn Miles, in a heroic feat, attempts to unravel the threads that lead to the success of the Jeanie Johnston, a famous Irish famine ship that never lost a passenger. Continue reading “All Standing”

Life choices were nonexistent for Bertrande Guerre (née Rols) in sixteenth century France. Her marriage to Martin was arranged between their wealthy peasant families when they both reached puberty. A distant husband, Martin grudgingly comes to respect Bertrande when she sides with him against his cruel father. To prove her love, she covers for Martin when he runs away. “Eight days” turns into eight years, and Martin returns a changed man . . . that is, if it really is him . . . Continue reading “The Wife of Martin Guerre”

Dark Times Filled with Light is a brilliant collection of poems, spanning four decades, by Argentinean poet Juan Gelman. Virtually unknown to English-speaking literary audiences, Gelman is the recipient of relatively recent international acclaim, including a Cervantes Prize and Argentine National Poetry Prize, and his work continues to be translated into English. More impressive, however, than Gelman’s vitae is the sheer poetical power and pull of his work. Gelman’s poetry negotiates the boundaries between politics and history, between voice and borders, and gives an enigmatic narrative thread to the life and times of a poet in exile. It is impossible to not appreciate the sophistication and pathos that is etched in the work. Continue reading “Dark Times Filled with Light”

Kathryn Davis begins her novel Duplex with a tableau of children at play at summer’s end on a safe suburban street at dusk. Perhaps this is the early 1960s: no internet, television watched on a “console.” To immediately insert into this landscape robot neighbors and a Mephistophelean sorcerer complicates suspension of disbelief. Questions arise: if this place is not what it seems, what is it? What are the rules here? Who’s making the rules? Continue reading “Duplex”

Moth; or, how I came to be with you again, by Thomas Heise, is a poetic narrative of three- to six-page chapters, by a fictional narrator writing his memoir who “may” be under doctor’s care for an illness in which he is unable to distinguish between “what was real and what was not”—a condition the doctors were so concerned about that perhaps “they might be diagnosing themselves.” These prefatory remarks likewise state that the manuscript had been lost and found and perhaps altered by himself or another and, once translated from the German into English, the original was burned. The book begins with an unreliable narrator and text. Continue reading “Moth”

Critic and poet James Longenbach has a mission: to call writers back to the study of great poems. Although this mission has motivated Longenbach’s critical writing previously, it comes through most clearly in his newest book, The Virtues of Poetry, a series of twelve essays that each consider the qualities a successful poem might possess. Weaving together research, close reading, and unmitigated passion for the poems and poets he admires, Longenbach’s arguments prove convincing and insightful in this lively essay collection. Continue reading “The Virtues of Poetry”

Witty to no end, Brandon Shimoda writes smart-ass hipster poems. The title of his latest collection, Portuguese, stems from a first day of first grade childhood teasing incident on the school bus when he was mocked by a “a fourth grader, skinny, with grassy blond hair and the face of a horse” who drawled out “in a squealing voice, Portugueeese, Portugueeese!” Shimoda is not in the least Portuguese. However, the incident not only gives him the title of this collection but clearly shapes the irony and humor that run throughout, along with for better or worse contributing to his larger views regarding humanity. One way or another, the event led as well to his researching “words of Portuguese origin introduced into the Japanese language, mostly by Portuguese Jesuit priests.” The list is a curious wonder in itself, at once as much practical as fanciful:  Continue reading “Portuguese”

While reading Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost, I kept thinking of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED speech, back in 2009. It was titled “The Danger of the Single Story”; the subject echoed the project of challenging master narratives from the previous century. That challenge germinated revisions in university reading lists, back in the late seventies, as the war in Vietnam approached its final phase. Adichie underlines the role of power cultivated in a single story, and how it insinuates, then calcifies, subterranean borderlines through stereotypes. On a Virgin flight from Lagos before her talk, Adichie heard an announcement about charity work in “India, Africa, and other countries”; however unintentional this categorization of Africa as a country was, the remark was not isolated. Adichie was clear about that, that the comment signaled pernicious perceptions about Africa, the kind that framed the continent in a stereotype: that its economic situation is prime destination of numerous charities from the First World. On the other hand, Adichie’s problem with stereotypes “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete[;] they make one story the only story.” Continue reading “Birds of Paradise Lost”

In his author’s note at the beginning of his book, Donald Anderson writes: “I concern myself in this book with matters of war, race, religion, memory, illness, and family, sources of humor and horror. And: boxing, which has been reported in literature from Homer on.” This diverse list prepares the reader for the book’s numerous intersecting threads of themes and topics. Boxing stands alone here, because in addition to being a theme for rumination, its images of bobbing and weaving, punching and ducking describe the book’s structure. As the title suggests, this memoir is not a linear narrative but a chronological series of memories, quotes, and data, some related and some seemingly random, that trace the writer’s life from his birth in Butte, Montana in 1946 to his current life as director of the creative writing program at the U. S. Air Force Academy in Colorado. Continue reading “Gathering Noise from My Life”

Ernest Hilbert’s second collection of poetry, All of You on the Good Earth, is an enlightening example of the revival of the sonnet. The poems are intelligent, topically indulgent, and extremely well crafted. The sonnets are capsules, compressing large ideas or expanding small ones, lined up in equal measure. Continue reading “All of You on the Good Earth”

When I received my copy of Meaty at an event for the ALA conference, I knew I was in for a different kind of reading experience. She signed my copy with fair warning that she likes writing dirty messages: “your vagina smells amazing. love, Samantha.” This is just a small sampling of the type of writing that you’ll see in her essays. Creator of the blog “Bitches Gotta Eat,” Samantha Irby tells it like it is, whether through the gritty details of her Crohn’s disease or through her unfiltered rantings of men and sex. It is written very informally, following the aesthetic of her blog, and inviting readers in as if Irby is personally conveying her stories and thoughts to them. Continue reading “Meaty”

The Night of the Rambler is true to its title. It tells a story of a revolution rambling with plans on how to execute a coup d’état on a young government, perhaps too young to transform and reconfigure policies inherited from previous colonial administrations. The transition is mired with problems, which is not unusual: young governments in newly decolonized territories are still learning the ropes of being free. Like youth itself, these fledgling states are high on new-found independence or semi-independence. In this novel, that mindset disables effective government. A territory that such a state governs feels neglected and excluded from basic benefits and services. Ironically, here, the lack of organized surveillance through bureaucratic standards—which gave colonial administrations immense control—becomes a form of oppression: political marginalization, a loss of sovereignty that opens channels for organized protests. However, there is a twist in the revolution Montague Kobbé has fictionalized, which is not necessarily in the protest itself, but what it wants in the end: it prefers direct administration from its original colonizer. Continue reading “The Night of the Rambler”

You are Everything You are Not represents the conclusion of John High’s lyric narrative trilogy of books he began with Here and A Book of Unknowing. The characters of a mute girl and one-eyed boy return, joining in with a circus man, blind monks, ghosts, and assorted unspecified masters in a journey more spiritual than psychological, across an un-named landscape of trees, wind, streams and rivers, which often brings to mind Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Or, as Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno describes it in his preface, “a realm as magically realistic as any found in a García Márquez novel.” Continue reading “You are Everything You are Not”

The Moral Life of Soldiers is a collection of five stories (one novella-length) and a novel that fans of author Jerome Gold might recognize from previously published collections, such as Of Great Spaces and Prisoners. This collection is told from the perspective of an older soldier, Paul Donaldson, taking stock of his life and his experiences in the Vietnam War. The organization of the stories speaks to Jerome Gold’s commitment to the practical means of arranging the pieces—favoring a series of myopic encounters of ambiguous moral distinction rather than a longue durée quasi-biographical story of his main character. Continue reading “The Moral Life of Soldiers”

Kate Greenstreet, painter, graphic artist, and poet, has published two previous books of poetry with Ahsahta Press: case sensitive (2006) and The Last 4 Things (2009). The back cover of Young Tambling, her third outing, is stamped “Based on a true story.” Fittingly, the first of its six sections, “Narrative,” begins with a retelling of Young Tambling, a Scottish ballad wherein the hero is not Tam or Tambling or Tom Line. Instead, the story belongs to the girl telling it, driving it: “for once, the hero is the girl and her point of view and actions are primary.” This story frames the mixed-genre artist’s memoir; also serving as a frame are epigraphs, each of which is printed at the beginning of a section but erased so only the section is visible, and later in the section, fully legible. Greenstreet’s black and white paintings, photographs, and lists round out the collection. Continue reading “Young Tambling”

When confronted with an awkward situation that falls outside the bounds of social etiquette, modern women and men may find themselves in a quandary over what should be done. Never fear, etiquette devotees, for a new volume has explored this uncharted territory and created a guide for those hapless sailors who find themselves adrift in such unfriendly waters. From adultery and infertility to illiteracy and obesity, Tara Laskowski has carefully documented the dos and don’ts for these sticky circumstances in Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons. How fortunate for the current generation to have such wisdom readily available! Emily Post never addressed the faux pas to avoid when choosing to elope. Miss Manners never opined on how to scout a location when engaging in recreational arson. And neither one discussed the missteps likely to occur when conversing with soon-to-be victims of homicide. In short, this is a necessary volume for the considerate psychotics and kindly sociopaths among us—and for those of us who are in search of an amusing read. Continue reading “Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons”

Once upon a time the young Basil Bunting came across a succinct expression of a central concept in his own poetic practice which Ezra Pound quickly promulgated as a crystalline slogan of the Modern era: “dichten = condensare”—‘to compose poetry is to condense.’ Perhaps no other poet’s work sets a clearer, finer example of this than Lorine Niedecker. As she states in her rather infamously well-known poem “Poet’s Work,” her grandfather advised her to “learn a trade” and she Continue reading “Lake Superior”

As soon as I saw the title of Stacey Waite’s first full-length book, Butch Geography, I was reminded of a line from the poem “Solar” by Robin Becker: “The desert is butch.” Unsurprisingly, Waite uses this line as an epigraph for the book’s title poem. However, while Becker’s poem focuses largely on the geography of landscape, Waite’s book concerns itself prominently with the intimate geography of the gendered body and its relationship to the world and to others. Continue reading “Butch Geography”