NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

After more than fifty years of James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams’s Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams’s biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams’s identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that “Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background.” The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain. Continue reading “By Word of Mouth”

The seven stories that make up Stuart Nadler’s spirited debut collection, The Book of Life, are about men: husbands and boyfriends, fathers and brothers, sons and grandsons. They’re about relationships, the mistakes and the misunderstandings. As a whole, the collection strikes a balance between characters who reclaim a portion of what is lost and those who are humbled by their circumstances and left to persevere. Infidelity is the crux of six out of the seven stories, but Nadler’s characters find surprises inside surprises inside surprises, spiraling the life out of any potential clichés. Continue reading “The Book of Life”

For those familiar with the French folktale “Bluebeard,” especially in its various versions such as the British “Mr. Fox” and “Fitcher’s Bird,” Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Mr. Fox will delight. Even if you are not familiar with these other versions, you get them in this novel. You only need to love fairy tale convolutions, especially when blended with real-life situations. Continue reading “Mr. Fox”

Hard to Say, recently published by PANK, contains a collection of short personal stories that will pluck at your heartstrings. Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone and Dark Sky Books, executes the tone of youthful awkwardness with the perfect amount of bittersweet. The pangs of childhood tales and oddities resonate throughout the book, keeping the reader drawn until the finish. Continue reading “Hard to Say”

Spoken word is powerful not only in language, but also performance. It can be difficult to capture the essence and emotion on the page; however, the writers in –gape–seed– have done just that. The diverse selection of poetry made it difficult to choose the best writers as each distinct piece had punch and power. At first I was wary; making a successful anthology of spoken word seemed like a tall order, but –gape–seed– inspired me to really feel the language as opposed to just reading it. Continue reading “–gape–seed–”

It wasn’t that long ago when Broadway producers put originality before the box office and tourists. In 1979, the New York Shakespeare Festival moved Runaways, another in a series of sold-out shows (the most successful 1975’s A Chorus Line; the most recent 2010’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), uptown from Astor Place. The musical, featuring real runaway teenagers, was composed, written, and directed by Elizabeth Swados. Runaways received multiple Tony nominations and established Liz Swados’s reputation. As she makes clear in Waiting: Selected Nonfiction, she has been “trashed, resurrected, trashed, and mentored dozens of young artists. I’ve survived well.” Despite its brief length, Waiting is a thoroughly friendly introduction to Swados’s life and work, a wistful remembrance of a vibrant era in New York theatre, and a perceptive look at how theatre is created. Continue reading “Waiting: Selected Nonfiction”

I picked up Habibi and thumbed through it with the intent of gathering its basic information for NewPages. Only a small number of the books we receive here are graphic novels, and my familiarity with the genre extends to buying Batman comics for a family member and having watched the movie version of Sin City. So I was curious to see what a two-inch-thick graphic novel consisted of. Continue reading “Habibi”

Carolyn Weber’s relationship with Oxford University began with a surprise when she received a letter in the mail announcing that she had won a full scholarship to pursue her post-graduate studies there. Without her knowledge, a professor had submitted her name for consideration for the scholarship. The book chronicles many more surprises that accompany Weber’s Oxford experience, most significantly her spiritual journey from cynical agnostic to evangelical Christian. Without a note of self-pity, Weber describes growing up in poverty with her mother and siblings after her father abandoned the family. A high-achieving student, she realized that through hard work she could improve her future prospects and become self-sufficient. Weber’s admission that she lied about her age on the application in order to qualify for her first job is particularly poignant following recollections of her family’s lavish lifestyle during her early childhood, before her father’s questionable business deals and resulting arrest doomed the family to financial devastation. Continue reading “Surprised by Oxford”

I have to admire a writer who attempts to take on the adult male sexual psyche. As a 52-year-old male myself, it’s still a mystery to me. John Franc, however, has attempted such a feat in his new novel, Hooked. Franc’s tale involves the bonding of a group of middle-aged men who meet socially two or three times a month for poker or drinks. They are white, successful, and of course, bored as hell. Their wives are the proverbial soccer moms though still “hot” according to the husbands. They have children, are married and have the potential to be pillars of their community. Continue reading “Hooked”

A Mortal Affect, Vincent Standley’s debut novel and the latest release from Calamari Press, is all about creating a world, inventing a vocabulary, and then approaching a proposed conundrum of what it would be like to have a portion of the world immortal, and a portion not. Full of Dante-esque circles of assigned living, painted blue welfare blocs of housing, Rooters (the mortal creatures that populate the novel), and Malkings (the immortals who vie for appropriate living throughout A Mortal Affect), this is a book that attempts to grow a universe, roots and all, in a mere two hundred pages: Continue reading “A Mortal Affect”

In 2012, Martha Rhodes will come out with her fourth collection of poetry, titled The Beds. Continue reading “The Beds”

In the opening scene of Almost Never, by Mexican writer Daniel Sada, the perturbed protagonist, Demetrio, an “agronomist” in Oaxaca, ponders his humdrum life. What will relieve his tedium? The answer: “Sex, as an apt pretext for breaking the monotony; motor-sex; anxiety-sex; the habit of sex, as any glut that can well become a burden; colossal, headlong, frenzied ambiguous sex … pretense-sex, see-through sex. Pleasure, in the end, as praise that goes against the grain of life.” Continue reading “Almost Never”

Chinese writer Can Xue’s short story collection Vertical Motion captures dream/nightscapes like Steven Milhauser and the surreal like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The short stories do reflect real life in activities and mostly relationships, but as she says in one of her stories, “Fantasy is still the way we do things best,” which seems to mean through fantastical experiences people improve. Thus each story explores a “new realm of imagination.” Continue reading “Vertical Motion”

Calyx of Teversall will entice you from the first sentence to the very last. Maia Appleby’s prose ensnares the reader in a fictional world that is both interesting and realistic at the same time. She plays off of what the young reader is already familiar with in order to structure this fantasy world full of gnomes and elves. In the beginning, we learn that Sigrid is recently widowed and struggling to make ends meet. Her husband maintained a wheat field that she now undertakes, and her three-year-old son Charlie braids the wheat. When Fenbeck, secretly a Borgh Elf, arrives and strikes a deal, Sigrid has no choice but to accept. Fenbeck magically turns many times the normal crop yield and accepts no payment but asserts that Charlie must work for him when he turns nine for one year. Continue reading “Calyx of Teversall”

Dear Prudence: New & Selected Poems, the latest work by poet and Columbia College Chicago professor David Trinidad, collects new poems and selections from over a thirty-year publishing history, including most recently By Myself (with D.A. Powell, 2009), Tiny Moon Notebook (2007), and The Late Show (2007). In 2000, he was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his collection Plasticville. The scope of Dear Prudence allows readers unfamiliar with Trinidad’s work a thorough introduction; those familiar with his work will find an indispensable exploration of the poet’s task of collecting, arranging and remembering. Continue reading “Dear Prudence”

Boston area poet Doug Holder noted the recent death of Hugh Fox with a blog post in which he remarks, “Whatever you say about Fox, he wasn’t a cliché of a man—he was a total original. He was a PhD with a big disdain for the academy; his breadth of knowledge left me breathless; he could be incredibly kind and incredibly rude, but I loved him warts and all.” He continues a little further on, “I asked Fox a few years ago what he would like to be remembered for. He told me: ‘That I reminded people to take a close look and engage the world around them.’ Fox took it all in: from sex, the Aztecs, religion, the meaning of being, the meaning of meaning…you name it.” On all these counts, The Year Book doesn’t disappoint. Continue reading “The Year Book”

In the fall of 2004, I attended a faculty reading at Sarah Lawrence College featuring Kevin Pilkington. I can still hear Kevin’s voice tenderly describing how his niece helped him look for “poet trees,” after they drank a glass of “apple spider.” This poem, aptly titled “Apple Spider,” is from Pilkington’s 2004 collection Ready to Eat the Sky. Far from being trite and sentimental, this poem captures the magical essence of childhood innocence in a sincere narrative that exemplifies Pilkington’s ability to convey the extraordinary beauty and revelation inherent in ordinary life. His new volume, The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, continues to express Pilkington’s trademark emotional clarity, as is evident from the heartfelt simplicity of the last lines of “A View From Here,” in which Pilkington sits alone with his wife on a pier: Continue reading “The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree”

Lindy is married to Hugh. They live in the Midwest. Adam is married to Jan. They live in Brooklyn. Lindy and Adam have resumed their affair that began in Manhattan and ended when Hugh took over his family’s bicycle business. Jan and Hugh know what’s going on but there are careers, children, and, most importantly, routines to consider. Routines that hurt rather than ease. Continue reading “Loving Longing Leaving”

Doug Nufer makes me wish I knew more about horse racing because if I was more knowledgeable about horse races and the art of betting on this sport, I’d get so much more from By Kelman Out of Pessoa. As book 4 of 5 in the TrenchArt Recon Series, Nufer’s novel swings a wide arc of gambled characters and the throw of the die, using a backdrop of gaming as the setting of the novel as well as a means to writing it, a sleight of hand best described by the editors of Les Figues Press: Continue reading “By Kelman Out of Pessoa”

When we think about North American geography and ghost stories, the Midwest United States feels somewhat lacking. Maybe that’s because we think of the region historically as merely a way toward somewhere else, and thus any good haunting it might have acquired also feels ephemeral. Ghosts also require a decent amount of tragedy. The East has its colonies and its Puritanical roots based in part on superstitions. The South, of course, has its own tragic pillar of slavery and its gothic aftermath. Even the West has plenty of dead and displaced Native Americans. So the Midwest would seem to need its own man-made disaster to birth some spirits. Continue reading “Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them”

Lisa Fay Coutley’s most recent chapbook highlights numerous poems published in an array of literary magazines. Within each poem, the ideas are very fragmented; however, Coutley weaves them together so that each idea feeds from the one that precedes it. While there may be an overall theme, no poem constricts to one image; instead, she creates a collage of images to support a theme. For example, in her poem “After the Fire”: Continue reading “In the Carnival of Breathing”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where I live, the evidence is abundant that our country has not yet achieved racial equality. African Americans make up 61% of the metropolis’ population, and a recent report revealed that 24% of the population lives below the poverty level. Stephanie Deutsch’s You Need a Schoolhouse reminds us that, although we have a long way to go to achieve equality, our country has made notable strides in the 146 years since the end of the Civil War. Continue reading “You Need a Schoolhouse”

AnimalInside is a haunting parable of the apocalypse. Not since Yeats’s darkly poetic prophecy of the second coming has literature imagined such a sinister messiah. However, Krasznahorkai’s baleful parable not only predicts the beast’s malefic resurrection, it graphically details its emergence. Continue reading “AnimalInside”

This is the first full collection of poetry by Alberto Blanco to appear in a bilingual edition in the United States. While his reputation in his native Mexico and abroad is well established, here in the States, aside from receiving significant university appointments, he’s relatively less known. Bitter Oleander Press and translator Jennifer Rathbun are out to change that. Continue reading “Afterglow / Tras el Rayo”

The Battleship Potemkin, either the film or the ship itself—the allusion, in any case—makes its appearance early on in Kate Greenstreet’s single-poem chapbook, Called: “First we hear it. Trucks, helicopters. The / Battleship Potemkin. He’s building the shape.” Throughout the poem, Greenstreet works in concise stanzas such as this, each image and line constructed with a controlled hand. As such, the Potemkin is no toss-away detail. Its facts and mythology, of restless soldiers and fledging revolutions, and of propaganda, get bundled and pulled into the poem, while calling to mind the montage theories made standard by director Sergei Eisenstein, the great-grandfather of all modern film editing techniques. Continue reading “Called”

Bernard Noël is a cerebral, urban-realist mystic caught up by the extraordinary in everyday language as it passes by, carried in things themselves. He captures the instant of wonder, filled with longing, lust, and above all necessity, grounding it in earthy satisfaction. What the eyes see wanes but lives on as a concern of thought. The book is a record of a life of such sight: Continue reading “The Rest of the Voyage”

Winner of the 2009 Hudson Prize, Patrick Michael Finn’s short story collection From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet includes plenty of dark circumstances, all set in the industrial sinkhole of Joliet, Illinois in the mid- to late 20th century. The stories are of the type popular in the early 20th century literature, when American Naturalism dominated the landscape. Every character’s fate feels pre-determined, based upon heredity and social conditioning. Continue reading “From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet”

Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal, released in July from Octopus Books, is not unexpected or aggressive or raw or surprising. It is not a collection of poetry that blew me away. But this isn’t to say that I disliked Correct Animal—in fact, I liked it quite a bit, and I liked it for not being unexpected or aggressive or raw or surprising. I liked Farivar’s methods of quiet, of understatement, the lithe quality of her poems: Continue reading “Correct Animal”

We’re walking. We’re walking. Like “those colored paddles and banners (the new tourist universal)” that tour guides wield to direct their charges’ attention, Sven Birkerts holds up a metaphorical banner to keep us following along. When he wanders, it is not without direction. Invoking Robert Frost’s diverging road: “This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left and took my circuit…in reverse.” The author, one of the country’s foremost literary critics and editor of the literary journal AGNI, links walking with thought: “There is the rhythm, the physics, of walking, the drumbeat of repetition, stride, stride, stride, and then there is the fugue of the walking mind, laid over it, always different, always tied in some way to the panning of the gaze and the eye’s quirky meandering.” Continue reading “The Other Walk”

With “The Secret of Soil,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil opens her new book of poems, her fourth, within a secret: “The secret of smoke is that it will fill / any space with walls.” This secret truly belongs to the poetic imagination, of course, and speaks to how we daily embody the world, “no matter how delicate” the space, by giving it breaths of us, taking back lungfuls, placing ourselves here, and pressing our weight onto it: Continue reading “Lucky Fish”

The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, translated in many languages since its publication in 1989, has finally been translated into English this year by Krystyna Anna Steiger. As Steiger notes, this is a gentle parody of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but even if the reader is unfamiliar with that book, The New Moscow Philosophy is easy reading and full of insights into literature—particularly the Russian reverence for it. The book offers a mystery story and a debate, often humorous, over good and evil. And the reader may have heard of the competition for apartments in Moscow, which is at the heart of this book. Continue reading “The New Moscow Philosophy”

For better and usually much worse, fictional runaway teenage girls end up on ships bound for the colonies, the big city of offices and/or brothels, behind enemy lines, or never far from an estate with a wealthy young landowner. Ruth is the Florida native taking refuge in an upstate New York commune in John Oliver Hodges’ neo-Gothic coming-of-age novella, War of the Crazies. Though set in 1989, the situations this 19-year-old beauty finds herself in recall those of her literary ancestresses: growing up too fast, local men and boys falling hard for her, the hysterical obsessive of love (Silva, who prefers “meditation over medication”), and a serious household accident. Continue reading “War of the Crazies”

Musical and deeply rooted in a sense of place, Ida Stewart’s debut poetry collection highlights the essential element of sound within contemporary poetry. In a series of free verse poems that engage with the lyric quality of traditional nature poetry, Stewart delves beyond a simple examination of nature; instead, nature ties into a sense of past and place, ever-present in the depths of memory. Set within the concrete of ground, the minuteness of soil, Gloss condenses language to its potential as rich medium for the human voice and soul. Continue reading “Gloss”

Now wake up it’s time to eat! Show me
your tongue, my sweet…
boil her down to bone. Continue reading “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?”

Drifting into Darien, part memoir and part natural history, logs the memory of not only the people of the Altamaha River region in Georgia, but the landscape itself. In a multi-part larger essay and a series of smaller essays, Janisse Ray reminds us of this essential but little-known river. Readers who already possess knowledge of ecology and biology, as well as novice environmentalists, will appreciate the detail displayed by Ray’s knowledge of her native landscape. A strong environmental focus propels this collection of essays forward, urging the reader to take action to preserve not only the Altamaha, but their own rivers as well. Continue reading “Drifting into Darien”

In a world where habit drives and consumes lives, Shannon Cain’s short story collection takes steadfast aim at those who cannot resist the pull of what society deems illicit. Nine stories delve into seemingly average people, who, upon closer inspection, engage in the illegal, the deadly, and the bizarre, risking their lives and jobs to continue pursuing their obsessions. Continue reading “The Necessity of Certain Behaviors”

The Trees The Trees, the second poetry collection from Heather Christle, is a loosely-knit collection of poems that sometimes has to do with trees, that often has to do with the dichotomy of relationships, and that always has an overwhelmingly and wonderfully infectious use of rhythm: Continue reading “The Trees The Trees”

Meg Pokrass’s collection Damn Sure Right packs in a whopping eighty-eight stories. Short-shorts. Flash fiction. Whatever you call them, Meg Pokrass is their queen. She’s made a career out of flash fiction. She teaches flash fiction workshops nationally and has published over a hundred pieces in journals. In a market that goads short story writers to crank out novels, she’s firm in her commitment to keep it tight. But while most of us literature lovers have enjoyed a brilliant short-short in our time, few of us have read a whole book of them or even know how. Continue reading “Damn Sure Right”

In his introduction to this selection, editor and scholar Rigoberto González, after interrogating two previous “popular readings” of alurista’s work (note: throughout this review I am respectfully and enthusiastically attending to the poet’s own refusal to capitalize proper nouns) which define it both as “experimental” and “radiat[ing] from an Amerindian consciousness,” declares alurista to be a “political poet.” González is really doing nothing more than extrapolating upon merging the two readings together as one and expanding the argument for the notable worth of alurista’s work, but his point nonetheless is well taken. Continue reading “xicano duende”

In a collection that falls somewhere between linked short stories and poetic reflections, Joseph Riippi explores, through the words and story of a young man who shares his name, the strangeness of knowing so much about someone but also not knowing them at all—which is in a way true of so many relationships. Continue reading “the Orange Suitcase”

Judging by the expression of the startled damsel on the cover of This New & Poisonous Air, some things are best left alone. But what purpose does that really serve? There would be no experience. No meaning. It is the unknown’s transformation into a difficult reality that Adam McOmber explores in his strong collection of stories. Continue reading “This New & Poisonous Air”

Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas takes his title Never Any End to Paris from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. But whereas Hemingway was poor but happy in Paris, the narrator says of his two years as a young man in the 1970s, “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Although the narrator (a stand-in for the author) uses his early life in a Paris garret to give a three-day lecture, for the most part this novel feels more like a fictionalized memoir than a lecture. The narrative shows the intellectual life of the times with famous and not so famous writers and eccentrics. It also reviews approaches to writing, since the narrator asks advice while writing his first novel. And irony figures in this account with Vila-Matas’ erudite wit and keen eye for absurdity or the ridiculous. It even appears with the narrator’s not understanding irony: “irony is the highest form of sincerity.” Continue reading “Never Any End to Paris”

Anselm Berrigan’s new book Notes from Irrelevance opens with a simple declarative idea: “I came.” But what precedes that phrase gives a better sense of what a reader can expect from this long poem: Continue reading “Notes from Irrelevance”

The title of Alison Stine’s collection Wait—and the repetition of this word in its multitudinous forms throughout the work—suggests a passivity and loss or relinquishment of control, which seem to be the driving force behind much of the book’s thematic content. Wait presents itself from an almost stark, feminine—if not feminist—perspective, with subjects who are distant and passive, but not without some veiled level of control. This power is deployed, among other means, through the forcefulness and tight control of the poet’s language, in sharply crafted poems which alternate between small consistent selections of loose forms. In one line alone, the talented Stine has the power to simultaneously wax nostalgic about a carefree, country childhood and come down critically on misogyny and the notion of the patriarchy. Continue reading “Wait”

Julie Enszer’s first book of poetry, Handmade Love, embodies the political in a sensual context. This book, printed in a lovely 4×6 format by A Midsummer Night’s Press, centers on themes of relationships, including lesbian marriage and friendships. Continue reading “Handmade Love”

In Ferenc Máté’s new book A Real Life, he asserts that what truly matters are family, good friends, and a true community. This is a telling indicator of his audience; people attracted to this book will relish their old-fashioned values being confirmed. Hence, Máté will be preaching to the already converted—unfortunately, because others should read this book to implement changes in our society. But even the already converted will find this book (termed a memoir by the publisher) fresh, given Máté’s examples, humor, quotable insights, and appropriate research. Continue reading “A Real Life”

Winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, Shann Ray’s volume of short fiction features ten stories of the American West. Focused, as the title implies, on the question of what it means to be a man, the stories delve into relationships, substance abuse, and parenting. Hovering right underneath—and often entwined with—the question of masculinity is the question of racial identity: most of Ray’s stories feature Native Americans struggling with their identity (whether in the white world or within their own culture), or white Americans making their way in the Native world. Continue reading “American Masculine: Stories”

In “Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues,” Chris Toll writes, “The job of poets is not to explain the Mystery. / The job of poets is to make the Mystery greater”—which is precisely what Toll accomplishes in his new collection of poems. The Disinformation Phase brings together 50 poems—including some “translations”—that, though economic in language, are wide in scope, expansive in imagination, and linguistically playful. Divided into three sections whose titles exemplify the playfulness (“The Ritual in Spiritual,” “The We in Weep,” and “The Ion in Redemption”), the book consists of short, concise poems where inanimate objects are capable of action and emotion, as seen in the opening poem, “Insulator Drive Blues”: Continue reading “The Disinformation Phase”

From a long tradition of nature writing that intermingles reflection and poetic descriptive prose with an ability to recount minute detail, David Scott Gilligan’s newest chronicle illuminates the California landscape. Gilligan juxtaposes first-person narrative with clear science writing as he explains geologic activity, volcanoes, and evolution, all focused on the diverse landscape of California mountain ranges. Following in John Muir’s footsteps, Gilligan endeavors to capture his personal connection to the landscape by employing stunning language to bring the Sierra Nevada to the reader. Continue reading “Rise of the Ranges of Light”