NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

I’ve found more often than not among poetry fans the myth of Villon the “criminal poet” usually exists far in advance of any experience reading the actual work. Much of this is a result of the general lackadaisical attention given in our day and age to searching out older texts on our own to enlarge our reading. We tend to hear from others more than discover for ourselves, taking what we hear as valid evidence rather than looking for ourselves. Books such as this one are needed opportunities to rectify this behavior. Continue reading “Poems”

In her debut short story collection, Safe as Houses, Marie-Helene Bertino fills the pages with wit and warmth in her nine stories. Bertino, who served as the associate editor of One Story for six years, shows good mastery of the short story in her unique storylines—such as dating the idea of your significant other, or a lonely alien coming to Earth to learn more about humans. Continue reading “Safe as Houses”

In her debut collection, Out Across the Nowhere, Amy Willoughby-Burle tells vast and vibrant stories (fourteen of them) in a scant (ninety-three) number of pages. Think bright and miniature, resembling the fireflies in her title story: “. . . like all the stars have left the sky to come roost in the tree limbs.” Think of their impact and largeness, and they make us feel that “We could swallow them and make little galaxies in our empty stomachs.” Continue reading “Out Across the Nowhere”

The twenty-two essays in this collection were chosen from four hundred submissions in response to Lee Gutkind’s (editor of Creative Nonfiction literary magazine) call for essays on the subject of death. The book is a collaboration of Creative Nonfiction and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. While it isn’t a book one would choose for entertainment or casual reading, it is an important one that offers an expansive view, from various perspectives, on how we deal with death and dying. Continue reading “At the End of Life”

A Displaced Person: The Later Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is the much anticipated finish of the Chonkin trilogy, told through a curious and unexpected Absurdist literary frame for our Russian protagonist. The story of A Displaced Person is fantastical dark satire of a Stalin-era Soviet soldier who manages to blunder his way from one adventure to another. This story, however, is also a wonderfully powerful philosophic commentary on the struggle for meaning in the confusing, conflicted experiences of a Russian Everyman. This detached existentialism that surrounds Private Chonkin throughout the narrative allows the author the opportunity for caustic commentary on Russian and Soviet moralism. Continue reading “A Displaced Person”

Southern discomfort informs Ray Morrison’s short story collection In a World of Small Truths, yet the unease that permeates each story comes distinctly from the New South, nowhere near the traditional gothic trappings of Faulkner or O’Conner. Still, Morrison’s voice is that of an insider, often reflecting on a youth long gone, not unlike a more collective longing for those lost antebellum days. Continue reading “In a World of Small Truths”

In Laura Kasischke’s first collection of short stories, she grabs you from the beginning, making you catch hold of your breath in anticipation. And I mean from the very beginning. The first line of the first story (“Mona”) reads: “They’d all warned her not to snoop.” Already, we are just as curious as the mother in her teenage daughter’s bedroom. What will she find? And in addition, what will we, as readers, find between the pages? This collection speaks of the unknown. What is your daughter hiding from you? What are the lives like for the people in the houses you pass by each day? What will happen when you grow up and are no longer a child? What lies ahead of you after death? And yet, what we find isn’t necessarily answers to those questions. I found arresting images, ones that allow both the darkness and the light to live within the same text. Continue reading “If a Stranger Approaches You”

Dutch novelist Herman Koch’s The Dinner, a bestseller in Europe, is funny, intense and discussable for its morality. Two brothers and their wives meet at a topnotch Amsterdam restaurant to talk about their fifteen-year-old sons. One brother, Serge, is a politician, a shoo-in for prime minister, and the other, the narrator Paul, was a high school history teacher. At first the novel is funny due to Paul’s acerbic comments on the restaurant’s pretensions and his brother’s obvious love of being in the spotlight. But then when we learn of the crime perpetrated by Paul’s son Michel and Serge’s son Rick, and we learn more of Paul’s background, the book grips us with its surprises. Continue reading “The Dinner”

Percival Everett’s narrative model is vacillating like our thoughts, changeable as our awareness that inhabits the present as we are ever forced to find meaning by telling ourselves what is in front of us. Upfront in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett constructs the perch from which the book is written: “language was a great failure or deceiver . . . that it could not be trusted” because the Ontological Argument for God’s existence was logically, but not factually, sound. “A=A,” a logical proposition, is not the same as “A is A,” pointing at existence. Once we are in the territory of “is,” the otherness of life as its own force enters, and with the acknowledged unreliability of language comes a different kind of narrative than the narrative forms we have acclimated to in the modern era. All the techniques of postmodern narrative, a merged narrator of at least seven voices, intertextuality using literature elements from more than two thousand years, the narrative looking at the narrative as it is being written, nonlinear time, mix of high and low subjects, and varied writing styles are used to give us a story pointing beyond language . . . and Everett does accomplish this. The postmodern techniques, as deranging as they are, take a backseat to the “heart of the matter.” Yet the techniques let us experience our struggle for the incomprehensible knot it is. Continue reading “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell”

Michele Poulos’ debut poetry chapbook and winner of the 2012 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, A Disturbance in the Air, embodies a meditative, emotive lyric in finely crafted poems that deal with the complexities of interpersonal relationships. In examining lives through a historical veil, various speakers narrate and reflect on historical events surrounding Greece and other places, prompting the dead to speak and even return. Continue reading “A Disturbance in the Air”

Mary Szybist’s second poetry collection, Incarnadine, traces the ordinary and the divine in well-lit poems engaged in lyrical narrative. Although initially read as quiet, introspective meditations, these poems claim larger historical ground through interactions with and dissolutions of male-centric texts, including those of Nabokov, George W. Bush, and Byrd, and well-known female figures. With strong representations of Biblical female figures that further complicate the lineage and significance of women, specifically the Virgin Mary, Incarnadine leads the reader through a nuanced interpretation of gender roles and expectations. Continue reading “Incarnadine”

Julie Choffel offers a warning at the start of The Hello Delay, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2012 Poets Out Loud prize: “my poetry has no camera.” Photographs tell stories; their tableaus create the “‘everyone crying’ scene” or the “‘everyone looks elsewhere’ scene” (“The Sorrows”). Still, in a photograph’s version of reality: “mud is paper mud / the sky has creases in it” (“The Rain Falls as a Cylinder”) or “the sand is never real sand, but some uncatapultable feeling of / sand” (“The Sorrows”). Besides a natural disconnect between the image and the physical object, photographs have their own contexts, back stories, and intrigues that make meaning depending on the beholder. When the speaker of “The Sorrows,” for instance, gazes at a photo of herself, she “can only see [her] own eyes / seeking their place” and not the whole of the composition. Choffel’s collection resists “easy combinations” and singular definitions. In fact, her photography metaphor informs how the collection thinks about language: exploratory, changeable, and exhilarating. Continue reading “The Hello Delay”

“This is a book about ambition,” Lee Upton writes in the first section (aptly titled “Ambition”) of Swallowing the Sea. It would seem that Upton’s own ambition with this book is to discuss writing as a writer, and yet the book does so much more. For anyone in love with writing, Swallowing the Sea is an homage to the delicate, painful, and (for some) necessary impulse to write. Upton explores the process of writing, the hurdles and frustrations along the way, and the fervor of being an avid reader, while employing personal anecdotes, literary criticisms, and poetical metaphors to make sense of writing’s place in our culture. Continue reading “Swallowing the Sea”

Dobby Gibson’s newest collection, It Becomes You, is his third book of poetry. His poems remind me of Billy Collins or Mark Strand: conversational and witty with themes of nostalgia and doubt. At their best, they reflect the sharp humor of Auden, who makes tight lines appear effortlessly conversational. From W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.” Gibson’s best poems aspire to this same kind of detached philosophical clarity. He generally succeeds, but without the formal aesthetic pleasure. Continue reading “It Becomes You”

Matthew Specktor’s new novel, American Dream Machine, is set in LA and spans the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. My mind has pop-ups when I hear about a book that takes place in LA—I think Chandler, Fante and Mosley, not to mention all those black-and-white noir films. Never having visited, I prefer to keep my perhaps faux-romantic ideas of this location rather than be disturbed by the actual reality of Los Angeles. So, I wondered, what will Specktor’s book add to my at-a-distance relationship to this fabled city? Continue reading “American Dream Machine”

American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) has long been a favorite among poets and writers. His work first appeared in art shows and galleries advertised as surrealist, frequently accompanied by and/or incorporating text. In his own lifetime, he directly courted the friendship and patronage of poets such as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. In addition, poets ranging in diversity from John Ashbery to Charles Simic have also written about the attraction his work holds for them and/or composed poems in his honor. Cornell also completed a number of various homages to poet Emily Dickinson. In short, there’s poems-a-plenty in existence that interact one way or another with Cornell and his work. By joining in such company, Kristina Marie Darling is taking the risk that her work be held to a similarly high standard. Or rather, in composing a book so directly addressing Cornell’s work, the assumption is that Darling herself is aware she’s aiming high and must be willing to hold her own work to these standards. Continue reading “The Moon & Other Inventions”

If you are reading this review, chances are good that books, those things with lots of words crammed between two covers, are probably an integral part of your life. You live with them, thumb through their pages, pass them on to friends, and—if you have enough—make furniture with them (as do I). If this describes you in any way, you will doubtless do yourself a favor by reading Andrei Codrescu’s take on the printed word both past and present, how it lives, where it goes, and the very nature of archives. Bibliodeath is also a portrait of a life lived with books and words. At the end of his tome, Codrescu states: “It is still possible, for as long it took you to read this book, to distinguish the quickly vanishing border between the real and the virtual. This essay is a history of how I got to that border, and how I moved to one or another side of it.” Indeed, Codrescu surveys with depth and humor this very transition we are living through, the digitization of our words. Continue reading “Bibliodeath”

Sam Savage’s narrator Harold Nivenson is, in Harold’s own words, a minor artist. Yet The Way of the Dog, though a slim novel, is anything but a minor work. Continue reading “The Way of the Dog”

I’ve been thinking a lot about masculinity lately, more specifically the particularly violent attitudes that have been swirled into recent discussions about mental illness, gun laws, sexual violence, and football. In this miasma, masculinity is presented as problem, as a relation of actions based on constructed ideals. But of course, a person is not a problem, or not only a problem, and especially not to his mother. Continue reading “Y”

With its depiction of wintry weather along the shores of Lake Superior and even a view of Isle Royale, Michiganders (and Wisconsinites) will relate to Peter Geye’s novel The Lighthouse Road even though its setting is Northern Minnesota. Geye is a native of Duluth, and some of the novel’s action takes place there, but mostly it alternates between 1895-96 and 1910-37 in the lakeside town of Gunflint, near a logging camp called Burnt Wood Camp. Continue reading “The Lighthouse Road”

This book of thirteen short essay-stories, The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker by Michael du Plessis, is dense with conflated cultural images that construct an alternate unreal-real reality of consumer America. The story’s location is Boulder, Colorado, in a a snowglobe, the kind bought at a “cheap airport gift store and stuck at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.” Boulder is also the place where JonBenet, a six-year-old beauty pageant queen and possibly one of the narrators, was murdered on Christmas Eve in 1996. The other possible narrator of this “fiction inside a fiction” is the dead writer Kathy Acker. Then, there is another narrator, as JonBenet and Kathy Acker discuss: “Somewhere a narrator still worries, almost like a grown-up.” These narrators “out” each other and often call attention to the narrative as a narrative. Continue reading “The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker”

Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, pick up a copy of Sherry Shahan’s book Purple Daze and smell the incense and peppermints. Equally appealing to readers who lived through the 1960s and to those who didn’t but want to know what it was really like, Shahan has created a compelling chronicle of a single tumultuous year: 1965. This particular window to the past is unusual for a couple of reasons. First, Purple Daze features not one main character, but six. Ziggy, Mickey, Cheryl, Nancy, Don and Phil are a group of friends growing up in Los Angeles. The second thing that sets this book apart is the fact that Shahan has chosen to write much of the novel in verse. Our protagonists share their stories through poems, notes, letters, journal entries, and song lyrics. While this format might seem an odd choice from the outside, Shahan’s skill and range engenders a level of intimacy with each character that is surprising given the brief snatches of information shared in a given moment. The reader feels the drama as the paths of these six friends diverge and darken with the weight of the year’s events. Ziggy writes: Continue reading “Purple Daze”

Have you listened to those early songs by Cat Power where the speaker lists the names of friends from her youth who grew up abused, turning to sex and drugs way too early in life? These poems by Cynthia Cruz are just like those songs. I’ve discovered that Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) never quite had friends with those exact experiences or went through all that miserable hell herself. It doesn’t bother me too much either. The songs are still damn good. Powerful, moving, and quite evocative, the poems of Cynthia Cruz equally match all the grime and dark foreboding of Cat Power’s best licks. The Glimmering Room hits the same raw nerve, again and again: Continue reading “The Glimmering Room”

In Steve Stern’s story collection The Book of Mischief, rabbis and lonely adolescents will themselves into flight. From such heights the stories track the Jewish trajectory from nineteenth century shtetl to post-assimilation present; from Galicia, the Lower East Side, the North Memphis Pinch to the Borscht Belt. We might expect to find familiar characters out of Singer, Shalom Aleichem, Woody Allen, and Phillip Roth. But Stern’s perspective is wholly his own. Taking off into surrealism and fairy tale, he observes the mortals below in the places they’ve come to ground and misses not a crumb of realist detail. Continue reading “The Book of Mischief”

The Arcadia Project’s massive size reflects the depth and quality of its content—poems that reexamine the relationship between our perception of the natural world and how natural environments are represented in contemporary poetry. Using the term “postmodern pastoral” to define the works included in the anthology, Editors Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep have carefully arranged a wide array of poems from both established and emerging North American poets in order to try and define a different facet of this term. In the anthology’s introduction, Corey explains how the “postmodern pastoral retains certain allegiances to the lyric and individual subjectivity while insisting on the reality of a world whose objects are all equally natural and therefore equally unnatural.” The poems in The Arcadia Project, then, remain inclusive rather than exclusive in subject matter, incorporating and adding, not subtracting. Continue reading “The Arcadia Project”

In “the stigma(ta) of autopsy. [an introduction]” Trisha Low writes: “[Kim] Rosenfield’s book is a bricolage of dense and tenuous single-line poems, swelling at mid-section, only to bleed away.” She goes on to refer to this text as “a dynamic dream-state of everyday language, grammatical imperatives and overheard clausal-tidbits” and rather conclusively states: “our only readerly option is to follow these poems.” I would beg to differ. Considering two successive lines on just as many pages which read “How long did you wait? / I waited for you for nearly an hour” as “single-line poems” is a bit of a stretch. We may choose to follow the stilted and fragmentary conversation(s) scattered throughout the book or we might just as well choose not to. Continue reading “Lividity”

Bernardo Atxaga has written the perfect book for deep winter reading. His latest novel, Seven Houses in France, takes you to the steamy Congo in the year 1903. Here you will join a cast of characters belonging to the Force Publique (a sort of military gendarmes) and ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium. The King apparently thought this spot in the Congo was his for the taking and dispatched his men to develop the area as well as take advantage of its rubber, mahogany, and ivory. Atxaga’s novel chronicles a collection of 17 white officers, 20 black non-commissioned, and a crew of 150 “askaris” (volunteer black soldiers). This conglomeration of characters is as diverse and as exotic as in any Shakespeare play. Their interactions are the meat of this novel. Continue reading “Seven Houses in France”

Future Hall of Fame pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddox once lamented in a classic Nike TV spot that “chicks dig the long ball.” According to Mark Spencer, the charms of an overweight, balding pro wrestler with “big bags under his eyes . . . like miniature pot bellies” are considerable—not to mention complicated. The Masked Demon chronicles in entertaining mock-epic fashion the tribulations of Daryl Lee, aka Samson, Bible Bob, and Masked Demon. He is literally at the crossroads of his career and triple-secret life. Continue reading “The Masked Demon”

Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever are Not Afraid is different from anything I’ve read and informative about a way of life that people outside of Israel are probably unfamiliar with. It is a story of three female friends—Yael, Avishag and Lea—during and after their obligatory military service, and the effects that service has on their lives. It is unlike the usual coming-of-age story, though the girls are young, in their twenties at their oldest. They come from a nondescript town, consisting of nothing but buildings, near the Lebanese border. Not only is the scenery bleak, but the service at remote checkpoints is full of boredom and brutality as well. Consequently, they come out of service brutalized and almost devoid of feelings. This is the effect of nonstop war becoming normal. Continue reading “The People of Forever are Not Afraid”

This is both an interesting and useful book, particularly as a text of poetic collaboration that is at once an investigation and interrogation of, as well as elaboration on, ecological poetics. Forrest Gander and John Kinsella have gathered together poems along with various bits of investigative prose which they’ve been trading back and forth in personal correspondence to produce a hybrid text with simple intentions addressing a global issue of escalating crisis. Continue reading “Redstart”

Rahimeh Andalibian calls The Rose Hotel a “true-life novel,” and aside from made-up scenes where she was not present, the book is a factual account of her family’s tragedies and secrets that reads like a novel. In spite of the chapters’ brevity and the book’s fast pace, the fully depicted scenes put us in the story while also proving informative regarding various cultural details. Continue reading “The Rose Hotel”

Science fiction is nothing if not an enigmatic and eclectic genre. It’s a category of literature that would seem to take a number of subgenres—from imagined alternate histories, fantasy, magical realism, cyber punk, and everything in between—and deliver it as a multiplicity of reading experiences for its fans. As Ray Bradbury argued, “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. . . . Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done.” Continue reading “Walking the Clouds”

Amber Sparks has sloughed off all constraints on imagination to blend story with science, fabulism with deep truths, narrative prose with language play—lists, boxing-match transcripts, poetics—but who can think about form when reading these shorts? Instead, think: Andrea Barrett meets Karen Russell meets Kurt Vonnegut to sustain bullying in the chemistry lab, preach scantily-dressed on the streets, trip up to heaven, or sink inside the rotting tissue of a body. In Sparks’s fictional world, Death is just a regular guy who “looked kind of like a J. Crew model,” a disenchanted dictator longs for the life of an American cowboy and practices on his people, a bathtub splurges up a new configuration of family, and wives turn into animals leaving “the husbands to worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.” This is the kind of thing you’re in for with Sparks in charge of the page. Continue reading “May We Shed These Human Bodies”

In 1994, Vermont College of Fine Arts hired Mary Ruefle to teach poetry to graduate students in their low-residency writing program. A reluctant public speaker, she was terrified to learn that the job would require her to give biannual standing lectures, and she responded by writing out her lectures, which she then read aloud to students. It turns out that Ruefle’s discomfort with public speaking is a gift to readers, for this book is the collection of those written lectures. However, to relegate the book to that narrow definition would be a mistake. Ruefle’s lectures are thoughtful, thought-provoking essays about art, literature, the moon, life, love, language, and philosophy viewed from the perspective of a wise poet who prefers asking questions to making proclamations. Continue reading “Madness, Rack, and Honey”

Kevin Goodan’s new collection of poetry, Upper Level Disturbances, takes us deep into the forests and fields of an unpopulated landscape. The solitary wanderer who narrates this collection depicts an outdoor world of animals and weather, rivers and fires, ghosts and slaughter. Rarely are we sheltered from the elements or in the presence of other humans, which creates a lonely shadow of observation. Throughout, the ghost of the speaker’s father haunts the perceptions of his weather-ruled world. Continue reading “Upper Level Disturbances”

Ali Hosseini’s The Lemon Grove, the author’s first novel written in English, is a moving story set in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The characters are well-defined, the landscape vivid and the culture personal—we care about what happens to the characters, and we learn more than most Americans know about the country. Continue reading “The Lemon Grove”

In psychiatric terms, “clangings” is a thought disorder experienced by those with schizophrenia and manic states in which words are connected by sound rather than concepts, and speech and thoughts can quickly veer in a new direction in a disconnected way. In Clangings by Steven Cramer, each page has a poem of five quatrains that stands alone as a self-contained piece but also furthers the book’s connected story of a narrator reflecting on his life “in his way.” There are two pages that break this pattern and provide clarity of the narrator knowing his misaligned place in the scheme of things. Close to the end of the book: Continue reading “Clangings”

In his preface, Anis Shivani claims that The Fifth Lash & Other Stories is a collection of fiction that is fundamentally the work of a young man. He quickly points the reader to the collection’s immaturities—the anger of the narrators, the stylistic experimentation from story to story, transient identities of characters, and even the youthful rawness of emotions crammed into the assemblage as a whole. Indeed, The Fifth Lash was Shivani’s first collection (later publications include Anatolia and Other Stories as well as his poetry in My Tranquil War and Other Poems), but the poignancy of these sketches deserves more than to simply stand in the shadow of his earlier published—yet later written—work. Continue reading “The Fifth Lash & Other Stories”

In capturing the people and place of a small town, Ira Joe Fisher’s fourth poetry collection forges a strong relationship to form, meter, and rhyme. A keen sense of reminiscing for past ghosts filters through poems that range from brief lyrics to grander narratives. The Creek at the End of the Lawns resurrects the need for the performative aspect of poetry in terms of storytelling and mythmaking, prompting the reader to speak these poems aloud rather than remain silent. Continue reading “The Creek at the End of the Lawns”

Adam Wheeler was by all accounts a very successful 21-year-old. He entered his senior year at Harvard University with everything going for him: top marks in his courses, a large circle of friends, and a steady girlfriend, not to mention scads of prestigious academic honors and awards. Indeed, it seemed that there was nothing this affable wonder boy couldn’t do. There was just one problem. All of his success—from the impressive academic grants he received to his very admission to Harvard University—was predicated on fraudulent transcripts, fake SAT scores, phony letters of recommendation, and enough plagiarized prose to fill a library. In short, everything people thought they knew about Adam Wheeler was a lie. Continue reading “Conning Harvard”

Noel Sloboda released two chapbooks from different presses in 2012. His screen-printed, stanza-form chapbook, So Below (sunnyoutside, March 2012) contains four short poems and a deftly made two-color fold-out. Unlike So Below, the other chapbook of prose poems, Circle Straight Back, is sparse and unadorned. The effect is matter-of-fact, archival, and unsentimental. This seems an appropriate device for poetry of subtle misery and overt tragedy. It is certainly a theme running through the text. From the first poem, “Birth of Tragedy,” to the end of a species in “Of Species,” the threads of death, destruction, tragedy, and disappointment prevail. Continue reading “Circle Straight Back”

As our age at an ever increasing rate gives birth to what is rightfully referred to as The Rise of the Digital, are printed books going to disappear? This is the largely opaque question at the heart of the lengthy conversation between two accomplished artistic European intellects that forms This Is Not the End of the Book. Umberto Eco is surely the more easily recognizable interlocutor here—his books In the Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum enjoy a broad readership, especially since the former was made into a film starring a young Christian Slater alongside Sean Connery. Yet Jean-Claude Carrière is a no less distinguished literary figure. A French writer with numerous books to his name, though perhaps not an author widely recognized by English readers, he has also authored several screenplays for films which are likely quite familiar, such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Continue reading “This Is Not the End of the Book”

The “other” world is a refrain throughout Dorothea Lasky’s startling new collection Thunderbird, which seeks the origins of creativity in the dark corners of anger, frustration, and even boredom. “I don’t live in this world,” Lasky writes (in “Death and Sylvia Plath”). “I already live in the other one.” These second worlds are easy to “breeze” into (“When you breeze upon the other world / O you are already there / O you are already there”); alternately, they seem impossibly insular (“Sweet animal, they locked us in this life / But I think we still have time before we have to get out of it”). In a book of flights—“Thunderbird” references a Native American spirit, but Lasky also conjures birds, planes, wind, and the mind’s movements—travel means to relinquish control. To disembody: Continue reading “Thunderbird”

Patrice Melnick’s memoir is a dance with language. Po-boy Contraband is a series of mini essays that outlines Melnick’s diagnosis with HIV and her journey to reclaim her life through music, writing, and relationships. The literary dance she creates is quick and jarring in the opening section “Finding Out,” sweeping us through the wilderness of Africa, where Melnick served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ’80s and where she contracted the virus. Characters pop up and out of the essays like soap bubbles, never reoccurring in later scenes—a nod to the flimsiness of relationships but also, at times, unsatisfying to the reader. Her relationship to music has the strongest hold in this book, so I more easily remember the album she listens to in DC when she discovers she’s HIV-positive than the friends she has in Africa. Continue reading “Po-boy Contraband”

Hoa Nguyen, similar to Louis Zukofsky—another poet whose work indelibly again and again proves the apt suitability of the term when intended as sincere compliment and appropriately applied—deserves the title of A Poet’s Poet. Nguyen’s poems approach pure poetry. That is to say, there’s no shtick, no commentary, no gloss, or outside concern beyond what the poem is busying itself being as a momentary occurrence of heightened language use. Any intrusion or obscuration is absent. While it’s obviously possible to situate Nguyen within a historical English language poetic lineage (which would run something like: Chaucer, Wyatt, Donne, Shakespeare, the Wordsworths, Keats, the Shelleys, Dickinson, Hopkins, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Stein, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan, Kerouac, Whalen, Notley, Mayer, Kyger) her work exists in a timeless flow of language and song; daily routines, observances, and distractions carrying the poems along: Continue reading “As Long As Trees Last”

David Burke may seem like an awkward, average teenager, and in most ways he is. However, unlike most teens, David spends a good deal of time looking after his severely disabled younger sister, Ivy. She gets all the attention, whereas David believes he’s practically invisible to his parents. It’s not surprising that sometimes David feels resentful of Ivy, and it is in one of these moments of frustration that Kathy Stinson begins this compelling family drama, What Happened to Ivy. Given that Stinson has penned more than thirty titles across many genres, it’s not surprising that her prose effortlessly captures the range of emotions encompassed in this story. Continue reading “What Happened to Ivy”

Her story reads like fiction. In 1864 Napoleon III and sentimental Mexican royalists re-established a Mexican monarchy, placing the Austrian Prince Maximilian and his Belgian wife Carlota as rulers. The move, in hindsight as grotesque as the gaudy art and fashion of Napoleon’s era, was extremely unpopular in the Americas. Following the Civil War, the American government supported an uprising spearheaded by lawyer/reformer Benito Juarez. The puppet monarchy was overthrown in 1867, and Maximilian was executed. Carlota escaped, never recovered from a subsequent nervous breakdown, and lived in a castle serving as an asylum until the age of 87. Continue reading “The Madness of Mamá Carlota”

Solian Lede is a New Zealand runner who possesses a wealth of talent but who lacks sufficient discipline to excel at her sport. As Paul Christman’s The Purple Runner begins, Solian strives to become a winning professional runner, but she expresses ambivalence about the possibility of fame, the need to give up partying in order to focus on her running, and her frustrated attempts to find a partner who takes the sport as seriously as she does. Meanwhile, Chris Carlson is a television news editor working in New York City, whose true lifelong passion is for running, and Warren Fowles is a thirty-six-year-old San Francisco lawyer who seems to possess fortune in spades. Warren has good looks, a comfortable trust fund, and natural running ability, but what he lacks is the impetus to focus: whether on his running or on his creative dream of finishing a substantial poetry manuscript. As The Purple Runner develops, the narration moves between these three characters, and all three find themselves moving to London in order to fulfill their individual dreams. Continue reading “The Purple Runner”

The “Little Man” and the “Fat Princess,” as children in the spring of 1880, trail a red balloon—a “swollen heart”—across Washington Square. And thus begins James Friel’s The Posthumous Affair, a beautifully written and unique, daring love story. Even the end is a risky stand on the part of the author. Continue reading “The Posthumous Affair”

The short stories by Anita Endrezze in Butterfly Moon are a hybrid of myths and folklore, mostly with a contemporary setting. Many traditions—Native American, Norse, Greek, Romanian, Transylvanian—are used with appearances by guardian angels, gypsies, witches, familiars, shadows, a vampire, the three fates—and a Jungian therapist. The breadth of her reach is not surprising as her father is a Yaqui Indian with roots in Sonora, Mexico and her mother’s roots are in Slovenia, Germany, Romania and Italy. For all the elements combined, the stories run smoothly as they take place in psychological space where we want answers about ourselves in the world. With the prominence of interior space, the drama is within the personal field of the characters . . . and in this personal field of hopes and desire for mercy, human beings haven’t changed much over the millennia. Continue reading “Butterfly Moon”