NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

The final lines of the book’s opening poem (“Our questions are / our miracles.”) are uncharacteristically positive (even to use the word “positive” here seems an awkward choice, perhaps “affirming” is more apt) for Goldberg. Drawing a poem to an eloquently surprising and surprisingly eloquent and obsessively conclusive conclusion, however, is not. In fact, this is Goldberg’s special talent—perfected over twenty years and throughout her six books—demonstrated with astonishing consistency and brilliance in her new poems, of which a dozen and a half appear in this volume. “It’s not a season if it expects / a conclusion. That’s what I think, / because of you,” she concludes in “Everything is Nervous.” “If you can’t bear to forget don’t / be born,” concludes “Absence.” Continue reading “Reliquary Fever”

Striking, sad, suspenseful, Up From the Blue tells the coming-of-age story of Tillie Harris. Set in her third-grade year, the novel focuses on the home life of Tillie. The father, a colonel in the air force, develops navigation systems for missiles. The older brother, Phil, tries his hardest to be a small soldier: orderly, emotionless, and compliant. Tillie herself is an energetic eight-year-old, full of conflicting emotions and confusing expectations from the adult world. It is her mother, though, who is the star of the book. Red-headed, dreamy-eyed, the mother swings from being loving and tender, the only one who understands Tillie, to vacant and lost, sitting on the couch or lying in bed for days on end. As the mother’s depression deepens and the conflict extends from between the parents to create an ever-widening gulf into which the entire family slides, Tillie risks losing not just her mother but herself. Continue reading “Up From the Blue”

In her collection of short stories entitled Baby and Other Stories, Paula Bomer explores the dark underbelly of marriage and parenthood and fearlessly puts to paper horrific human desires. Anger plays out through violent (and sometimes sexual) acts and, even more dangerously, through toxic passive aggression. There is a stark contrast between what her characters say and what they think, and real communication takes a backseat to resentment and isolation. She raises questions that aren’t easy to answer, as in the title story “Baby”: Continue reading “Baby & Other Stories”

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington by Juan Jose Saer flows like the walk it entails, divided into three sections of seven blocks each, in the Argentinian town of Rosario, taking place around 10 a.m. on October or November 1960 or 1961. On that day Angel Leto decides not to go to work and encounters The Mathematician, just back from his grand tour of Europe. The two men, different in important respects (class, town’s years of residency), nevertheless walk together for most of the distance, the Mathematician regaling his companion with accounts of Noriega Washington’s sixty-fifth birthday, a party to which neither man was invited. Continue reading “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington”

Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, by Kelli Russell Agodon, is a collection of charming, intelligent poems that invoke the idea of a modern day Emily addressing the world from the safety of her room. Agodon incorporates anagrams in many of the poems; for example, in “Believing Anagrams,” “funeral” becomes “real fun,” “Emily Dickinson” becomes “inky misled icon” and “poetry” becomes “prey to.” While with some poets this kind of word play can become gimmicky, Agodon masterfully weaves the words into the poem in a natural, organic way. “In the 70s, I Confused Macramé for Macabre” is another poem where language is taken apart and put back together, using the words incorrectly in two different memories, as the speaker “wanted / my mother to remind me / that sometimes we survive.” Continue reading “Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room”

Nine Worthies by Caroline Knox is a book that blends the genres of prose and poetry to tell the story of Nathaniel Smibert (1734-1756) painting the portraits of nine men and women from Boston and Newport in the year of Nathaniel’s death. Continue reading “Nine Worthies”

Cynthia L. Haven has gathered an exquisite collection of thirty-two memoirs, which pay tribute personally through historical and personal accounts of one of the most celebrated poets, Czeslaw Milosz. The bevy of contributors who share encounters with Milosz spin intimate stories oft with intimate ease—spanning from the 1930s until just days before his death in 2004. Haven did an excellent job selecting memoirs from a well-credentialed, diverse group of contributors who represent political, literary, environmental, cultural and spiritual spectrums on many levels. She also weaves in lines form Milosz’s vast works in relation to the time period, stories, and references. Continue reading “An Invisible Rope”

The ninety-two-year old de Barros, recipient of the most prestigious poetry awards in his native Brazil, is author of more than 20 books, though this is the first to appear in English. (Birds for Demolition is a collection of poems from the poet’s oeuvre over the last few decades.) Novey, director of Columbia University’s Center for Literary Translation and author of the poetry collection, The Next Country (2008), explains in her introductory note that de Barros writes of the wetlands and rivers, the “poverty and solitude of rural life,” the part of Brazil where he was raised and which he knows best, not the city, where we often expect (however erroneously) to find most poets. She classifies his writing as “riverbed-poems” and describes the intensity of the experience of translating their unique sense of place. Continue reading “Birds for a Demolition”

Put aside any expectations of swashbuckling that this title might inspire. Pirate Talk or Mermalade has its share of cutlasses, of peg legs, of sailors marooned on desert isles. But it is far from a typical pirate tale. Described as a “novel in voices,” the story is told entirely in dialogue. No quotation marks, no helpful tag lines (i.e. he said, she replied): each page is simply the conversation, with an indentation serving as the indication that the speaker has shifted. At first, I thought the “only dialogue” rule would limit the scope—where would the description be? The thought and reflection?—but within a few pages, it was apparent that Svoboda is a masterful writer and is no more constrained by this selection of form than a poet is constrained by composing a sonnet: the novel delights because of this rule, succeeds because of this confinement. Continue reading “Pirate Talk or Mermalade”

In his new book, The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist, John McNally gives an honest and highly informative account of his experiences in the writing/publishing industry. As he cautions his readers in the introduction entitled “The Writer’s Wonderland—Or: A Warning,” this book is not an instruction manual on how to write short stories, it’s not a place to seek writing prompts, and the author does not claim to have a formulaic answer to getting published. Rather, he explains: Continue reading “The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide”

The mind is a smelly heap of compost comprising our greatest hopes, delusions and sexual fantasies about robots. We explain its function with analogies to computers or other machines, trying to impose a structure on a ghost. So when our bodies and minds start to fail, we panic. We grope about in the dark for a user's manual, a crossword puzzle or anti-depressant that will put our brains in the order that we suppose it should have. Seth Berg explores this dark space in his first book of poems, Muted Lines from Someone Else's Memory. Continue reading “Muted Lines from Someone Elses Memory”

For fans of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, God on the Rocks, a 1978 Booker Prize finalist, will satisfy. As Gardam wrote in the November 20, 2010 Op-Ed article “Richard’s Glove, Kate’s Hand” (which gives an historical perspective to Kate and Prince William’s upcoming wedding), “In my novels I write about the ‘old world,’ my parents’ world, where people wore hats—and gloves.” But “the old world is not so far away from this one.” Therefore, this novel, set along the northern English coast in 1938, between the world wars, is not chronological but jumps back and forth between different characters’ perspectives and pasts. In a book both humorous and tragic, the reader has to read carefully to notice switches in perspective and Gardam’s parceling out of information during the unfolding of fully defined lives. Continue reading “God on the Rocks”

I adore Coach House Books. The book design is smart, inventive, spot on. Poetry is clever, original, risky, inspiring. You want to go back to these books again and see them as if new each time you pick them up. You’re happy to give them to others, to show them off. You return to them as, and I am not exaggerating, a reason to keep going on. And on. A reason to read. A reason to write. A reason to believe in poetry. Even, maybe especially, when they are difficult (emotionally or intellectually or in a reader-ly way). Continue reading “Indexical Elegies”

Emma Rathbone’s debut novel The Patterns of Paper Monsters is about Jacob Higgins, an angry kid incarcerated in a juvenile detention center. But like any great book, this one can’t be reduced to its plot. Its magic lies in the sarcasm that drools from its narrator’s voice and in the beauty of the way that voice strings together language. Listen, as Jacob describes the crime that landed him in the JDC: Continue reading “The Patterns of Paper Monsters”

Please Take Me Off the Guest List is a collaboration between three people: Nick Zinner, of the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, provides the photographs; Zachary Lipez, of the band Freshkills, provides the essays; and Stacy Wakefield, former design director of Artforum, pulls it all together into a wonderfully designed object. It has already been noted elsewhere how rare it is for the book’s designer to have her name on the cover, but here it is earned. Zinner’s photographs and Wakefield’s design are the true highlights of this collection, which should appeal to anyone interested in book arts. Unfortunately, Lipez’s essays do not measure up to the quality of the photographs and the quality of the design elements. Continue reading “Please Take Me Off the Guest List”

This is the sixth volume in Saturnalia’s Artist/Collaboration Series. I am impressed by and grateful for publisher Henry Israeli’s commitment to making available the collaborative efforts of visual and literary artists. The books are beautifully conceived, designed, and composed, and they occupy a uniquely wonderful place in the world of small press poetry publications. Continue reading “Velleity’s Shade”

Ellis’s collection of poems, Skin, Inc, is an aggressive book to say the least. It is a statement in itself. A statement that is different and powerful. The language coursing through the veins of this collection is raw, real, and full of earnest emotion. It is calm, yet aggressive. Strong, yet tamed. One poem that really sets the tone for the first portion of the book is “My Meter Is Percussive”: Continue reading “Skin, Inc.”

Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz, phases through genres, using poetry as a vehicle to explore politics, gender, culture and human nature. The book opens with a prologue, a single sentence that declares the purpose of the book and the long list of who the book is for: Continue reading “Present Tense”

Can you pour new wine into old bottles? Well, if you are Camille Martin and the bottles are sonnets, the answer is an emphatic, "Yes." By her flexible use of the idea of the sonnet, Camille Martin has written a book that holds a pleasing balance of unity and variation. In the second sonnet, Martin seems to be speaking to the form as the beloved: Continue reading “Sonnets”

Rob Schlegel’s debut collection of poems, The Lesser Fields, winner of the 2009 Colorado Poetry Prize, creates a kind of rarefaction through decay. As Schlegel states, “I breathe away the parts of myself I no longer require.” The titles of the three sequences which comprise the book, “The Lesser Fields,” “November Deaths,” and “Lives,” seem to underscore this theme. Indeed, the collection itself feels rarified, taking up a miserly fifty-four pages, including notes and acknowledgements. Continue reading “The Lesser Fields”

Bragi Ólafsson is a well-known author of poetry, short stories and novels in Iceland. His fifth novel The Ambassador was the finalist for the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize and received the Icelandic Bookseller’s Award as best novel of the year. Continue reading “The Ambassador”

The Circus Poems by Alex Grant defied my expectations, becoming more than “just” a book about circus performers through contextualizing the circus in history and myth and leading the reader toward the idea of the circus as metaphor. Continue reading “The Circus Poems”

I was drawn to this collection for two – make that three reasons: I enjoy versifying power-couple Barbara Hamby and David Kirby’s individual work, and I believe good, ‘funny’ poetry is, if not quite as uncommon as some might argue it to be, at least worthy of omnibus analysis and appraisal. I suspected that these two editors, no strangers to humorous writing, would take a broad enough approach to compiling what they deem “seriously funny” poems, and the book’s introduction – a fine read in its own right – bears that out. Continue reading “Seriously Funny”

Tony Gloeggler’s latest poetry book, The Last Lie, celebrates imperfection in all its ubiquitous manifestations – in people, relationships, memories, and dreams. It is about the lies we tell ourselves when we discover that the truth is insufficient, and the tools we use to renounce those fabrications that distract us from recognizing beauty in imperfection and experiencing fulfillment from that which seems lacking at first glance. Continue reading “The Last Lie”

The contemporary American literary scene is as vibrant and diverse as any other art community; thousands of writers and millions of readers participate and interact on a daily basis. But looking back to any past period of the community – say the 1940s and 50s, somewhere in the layover between modernism and postmodernism – the world of letters looks sparse. One can’t help but imagine that literary circles must surely have been as wide and broad as they currently are. But it feels as if so few writers have lasted even such a meager sum of time. We’re often led to believe that there’s a reason past artists fall into obscurity. D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer prove that notion wrong. Continue reading “Dunstan Thompson”

Neil de la Flor’s Almost Dorothy is a collection of poetry dealing with issues of sexuality, the past, and coming of age. AIDS is a recurring theme, as is death. The world he writes in isn’t inviting or pretty, yet he seems to find humor in it and approaches it in a playful way. Continue reading “Almost Dorothy”

I was website hopping the other day, and came to the Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt's list of Top 10 fiction bestsellers. On their hardcover list, at #3, was Room by Emma Donoghue, which they call "a perfect example of that book (maybe Wolf Hall is also in this category) that's been a total success without being read by a single person under the age of 30." I am here to attest that I am a person under 30 (though not for long) who has read the book. Not only read it, couldn't put it down. While I was on vacation in Miami. It is that good. Continue reading “Room”

Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. Such literature is valuable for both its simple sensory pleasure and its faith-restoring powers. Tina May Hall’s The Physics of Imaginary Objects is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you’ll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall’s poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall’s hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious. It is, however, seamless – so delicately woven you forget it ever required stitching in the first place. The words fit together so effortlessly it sometimes feels like they just naturally occurred that way. Continue reading “The Physics of Imaginary Objects”

Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes details the relationship of the author and his friend, teacher, and surrogate father, Frank Conroy. It opens with their initial meeting: Tom, a budding writer considering MFA options, is snubbed by Frank after a reading. "I spotted Stop-Time [Conroy's own critically-acclaimed memoir] on a high shelf and reached for it … I struggled to tear it in half. When I failed, I ripped out pages by the handful until I'd gutted the thing, splitting in two the author's name and the book's title … I turned and said, 'Fuck Frank Conroy.'" Continue reading “Mentor”

Striking Surface by Jason Schneiderman focuses on death, religion, and the violence and exile of war. Though writing on such serious topics, Schneiderman still manages to weave in pop culture references, referencing several leading ladies such as Grace Kelly in his poem “Billboard Reading,” Sandra Dee and Lana Turner in “Susan Kohner (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life),” and Audrey Hepburn in “Elegy VII (Last Moment).” Continue reading “Striking Surface”

A geographical whirlwind, Connell’s debut collection presents 36 cities in alphabetical order (some letters get more than one hit … why eschew Moscow for Madrid? Xi’an, on the other hand, has no X peer). Each destination offers a story, a scene, or a vignette – as I read I came to think of them as little windows – into the city. A moment, a place, a person. Each encounter is an intense mixture of location and love. Continue reading “Metrophilias”

Swiss writer Robert Walser opens Answer to an Inquiry, originally published in 1907, by stating his purpose for writing it: “You ask me if I have an idea for you, sir, you ask me to draft a sketch, a play, a dance, a pantomime, or some other thing you could use, that you could depend on.” From there, Walser lists the materials needed for costumes, set, and lighting, and gives step-by-step instructions with commentary on how to convey true suffering to an audience: Continue reading “Answer to an Inquiry”

Davis Schneiderman vividly creates a desolate and backward futuristic word in his novel Drain – a world that is made all the more terrifying for its uncanny resemblance to our own. Part sci-fi/fantasy (though certainly not the kind you want your kids to read), part psychological thriller, and part commentary on contemporary religion and politics, Drain follows numerous paths and occasionally fights the urge to draw extraneous ideas into its already-teeming domain. Continue reading “Drain”

In a brief, illuminating YouTube interview on the publisher’s website, Michelle Hoover discusses the genesis of The Quickening. She discovered a typewritten memoir, composed in 1950, by her great grandmother about her experiences as a farmer and farm wife. The memoir of twenty or more pages covers much of this strong woman’s life in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Hoover used this story and further research on family history and U.S. farm life as a springboard to create the imaginative world of this novel. Continue reading “The Quickening”

Katie Williams’s debut YA novel, The Space Between Trees, is a lyrical journey into the lonely world of 16-year-old Evie, a friendless teen whose life changes forever after a childhood friend, Elizabeth “Zabet” McCabe, is murdered. Evie was friends with Zabet in middle school, but they hadn’t been close for ages. Adept at small, usually innocuous stretches of the truth, Evie finds herself telling Mr. McCabe at Zabet’s funeral that she was his daughter’s best friend. Evie’s lie initially repels Hadley Smith, a troubled, unstable teen who was Zabet’s real best friend, but Hadley soon draws Evie into her dangerous obsession to find Zabet’s killer. Continue reading “The Space Between Trees”

Sawako Nakayasu’s translation of Ayane Kawata’s Time of Sky & Castles in the Air proves that translating Japanese to English can result in a beautiful rebirth. The first half of the book, Time of Sky, is full of number-titled poems usually no longer than three or four lines in length, but these poems pack so much imagery and beautiful sounds that the reader often has no choice but to reread immediately. I found myself pausing to soak in all of the wonderful, unique images and ideas. Even simple things resound with beauty, like the description of a pigeon in 12: Continue reading “Time of Sky & Castles in the Air”

My grandfather used to tell me and my siblings stories about World War II all the time. But he never talked about Alsace-Lorraine. He never talked about whether he heard the potato masher that filled him with shrapnel. He never talked about if he saw from where the bullet came that shredded the nerves in his right arm. He never talked about how he was presumed dead, like everyone else in his unit by the German army that day. He never talked about crawling through the woods while trying to keep his consciousness. He never talked about the year in a British hospital. He never talked about why he hated fireworks, or backfiring cars or popping birthday balloons. He never talked about why he woke up every night of his life in a sweat until he was 75. He never talked about the small pieces of metal that would work their way out of his skin and end up next to him in bed some mornings. He never talked about a lot, but he wrote a lot of it down, in the margins of his bankbook, in a photo album, scratched onto the back of his Purple Heart. Continue reading “Phantom Noise”

For those readers drawn to history and psychology, Solares’s Yankee Invasion is a novel certain to intrigue. Set in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war of 1846-48, the novel is narrated by Abelardo, who struggles to write an account of the recent war even while he is still dominated by the mental trauma of the conflict. Continue reading “Yankee Invasion”

“Perhaps it’s the more subtle experience of relief as a kind of lifting up that most interests me,” says Kim Dana Kupperman in her collection’s opening essay, “Relief.” But what makes the compilation of linked essays interesting to readers? Through deftly untwining stories from her life, she manages to lift us up even as her topics are decidedly downers. Continue reading “I Just Lately Started Buying Wings”

Celebrated poet Mark Doty's how-to guide of writing poetry, The Art of Description: World into Word, is a book on writing that stands out among many of its kind. From the very beginning we see a passion for the language and a romanticism in it, making the word-loving reminisce and the non-word-loving fall in love. The book serves as a microscopic view of poetry, detailed and scientific. Doty skillfully picks apart the language into its most simple and primal qualities and shows the reader how to utilize them. In sections, he uses established poems and poets to function as a sort of body for dissection and observation. For one in particular, Elizabeth Bishop's “The Fish,” Doty devotes an entire chapter in which he breaks down the poem piece by piece and describes to the reader why the poem works so well. This happens a few more times in the book, as well, and they all benefit the reader greatly. Continue reading “The Art of Description”

I read Monkey Bars initially while on vacation with my family. It was a warm, pine-and-campfire-scented weekend, full of moments like the one described in Matthew Lippman’s title poem, “dying from laughter, / the joke funny / the bust-the-gut hysteria, hysterical.” I read the poetry as such, too; when I reached the author’s biography – “He teaches English and Creative Writing to high school students” – I even thought to myself, holy cow his students must have a blast! Continue reading “Monkey Bars”

Brace yourself for The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane. Not only is it hilarious and disturbing, it is also disorienting, cunning, and bizarre. Continue reading “The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris”

With his first novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, I encountered the spine-tingling creature known as the “contemporary writer” – contemporary in both the sense of writing now and writing at an age close to my own. After coming to terms with Lin’s persona (an unfortunate combination of reading the back cover of books and the Internet), fiction diverged from my ideas of authorship and the dead white guys who’ve historically run the show. Continue reading “Richard Yates”

In his “36 Assumptions About Playwriting,” José Rivera instructs, “In all your plays be sure to write at least one impossible thing. And don't let your director talk you out of it.” Jonathan Ball takes this idea to a new level in his collection, Clockfire. Billed as poetry on its press release, this genre-defying collection consists of “blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce.” Continue reading “Clockfire”

In this, her third book of poems, Jen Currin is at her most elliptical. Yes, it’s a somewhat useless term, one replaced by something even more vague by the critic who coined it, but it is a term which has come to indicate a certain sort of poem to me, which Jen Currin’s poems are: not really fairy or folk-tale-like, but having commonalities with fantastic narratives with an object lesson; not really domestic surrealism, but certainly in love with the idea of slippage, the morphology of phrases when juxtaposed, etc.; not really symbolism in a heavy handed way, but light, contemporaneous, elliptical indications of meanings just beyond the text. Continue reading “The Inquisition Yours”

So it goes, and a mollusk can not draw
the machine as we can not draw the heart Continue reading “To Light Out”

Robert Coover is one of my favorite writers. With quirky, mythical tales of magic realism, it’s no wonder he endorsed The Mothering Coven, the fabulist debut novel by Joanna Ruocco. Throughout this slight, but fertile novel, Ruocco plays with language and creates an inventive world filled with richly crafted characters. Continue reading “The Mothering Coven”

“My argument is abandon and tells me to abandon every argument.” Continue reading “The Art of Recklessness”

Margarita and Alex Haralson are just average Jewish parents. Sixty-somethings, recently retired, they want nothing more than to get some grandchildren, and quick. But their two grown children refuse to cooperate (marijuana usage, potential lesbianism, and other obstacles get in the way of progeny production). So, Margarita and Alex do what, perhaps, any folks would do: they turn to robots. Or, to be more precise, the robots turn to them. Hey, whatever it takes to get some grandchildren! Continue reading “Our Jewish Robot Future”

Here is a collection of poems for hard times. The first section, “There Goes the Neighborhood,” re-examines life’s past warts and pimples. Weil’s poem, “In My Neighborhood, Everyone Almost Wins the Lottery” looks at where he grew up and says, Continue reading “The Plumbers Apprentice”