NewPages Blog :: Books

Andrew Brininstool’s stories in Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession are not crude. They’re skillfully told, though some of the happenings within are crude, as in rough or harsh. For example, lots of males get into fistfights, lots of people get drunk, and liaisons don’t go smoothly. Brininstool, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, populates his stories with lively characters, some more likable than others. Continue reading “Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession”

This reviewer knows she might be addressing two possible readers of Elena Ferrante’s four-part series of novels: the ones who are already committed and want to read through the last book, The Story of the Lost Child, and the other, curious newcomer to the series. For the first reader, I will say that this last book does have a very good, real ending and of course is well-worth the effort. The Story of the Lost Child has a new emphasis on politics with characters we’ve grown to know, a glimpse of the effects of feminism on children, the motivations in maintaining success in writing, and as the epilogue called “Restitution” suggests, a final view of the female friendship and disturbing revelations of Elena Greco, our narrator. Continue reading “The Story of the Lost Child”

If bodies are temples, Susan McCarty is an expert demolitionist. In Anatomies, McCarty breaks these temples down, rips through drywall and flesh, tears sexuality and humanity from their hinges, and leaves behind the barebones, the nervous system, the warm, buzzing electrical impulses buried beneath the exteriors of the temples housing her characters. Continue reading “Anatomies”

Reginald Dwayne Betts rose from criminal obscurity to a current man of letters with an award-winning memoir and debut poetry collection, a Pushcart Prize, and now his second book of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era. The title conjures the time period of much of the work—Betts’s childhood in the 1980s—when he participated in a carjacking that put him in prison for the better part of a decade. Charged as an adult, sixteen year-old Betts spent ten days in solitary confinement while waiting for trial, where he discovered poetry after coming across an anthology of black poets being passed around. Soon after, he began writing heavily, and this dedication appears in his vivid imagery that often bites at the core of longstanding societal issues for urban youth. Continue reading “Bastards of the Reagan Era”

Prayers for the Living is a sprawling novel, a family epic. Written by the late Alan Cheuse, who was a commentator for NPR, his vast conversational experience is apparent throughout the book, which is told through conversation, narrated by a woman named Minnie Bloch, who chronicles the life of her grandson, Manny, and his joys, his struggles, and his demons. Continue reading “Prayers for the Living”

Joseph Massey mentions in the refreshingly spare notes of his fourth collection Illocality that he first encountered his title word in the Emily Dickinson poem “A nearness to Tremendousness.” Dickinson is an apt predecessor for a poet of such deliberate cerebralness. Yet, for his fine command of image, so is William Carlos Williams, or any number of Asian short-form poets. Indeed it is the relationship between logic and image, mind and world, that drives these poems so evenly through their inquiries, that most characterizes their productive tensions. “We think / ourselves here,” Massey writes to close the opening poem “Parse.” Continue reading “Illocality”

The Guilty by Juan Villoro is the only book of fiction translated into English by this Mexican writer of short stories, novels, plays, essays, and screen scripts. He has been given the Herralde Award in Spain, the Anton Artaud award in France and short-listed for the Reezzori Prize in Italy. In this book of short stories, the individual is in the new global world order, navigating the culture of signs, copies, media, and signifiers of commercial production. Each story is told from a first person point of view, but the “I” does not belong to a specific character with a name, the “I” a transient “I” living in the world through image-manufactured phenomena. Continue reading “The Guilty”

I hate sewing. My mother loves it. To save money during my elementary and middle school years, I wore several of her handmade outfits enduring the shaming glances of classmates who, by the mid-80s, were sporting Guess jeans and Ralph Lauren t-shirts. Unlike Oomen’s adolescent experience, 4-H was less cool during mine, nevertheless, my mother enrolled me in a local club at age eleven so I could learn to make my own skirts and, to this day, I can sew a wicked tunnel stitch (though I seldom find good reason to exercise this skill). Continue reading “Love, Sex, and 4-H”

You might want to bone up on the Arabian Nights stories, particularly Scheherazade and her sister Dinarzade’s tale, before delving into Jo Ann Clark’s poetic take on the siblings. In 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life, Clark’s first book, she mixes the fable with some prehistoric fellows and a dash of mythology to present a really interesting set of works. Confession: I had to look up some words, such as viviparity, monotreme, Hypohippus, Merychippus, and mokoro. But once that was in order, a second reading of Clark’s book brought it to life. Continue reading “1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life”

Wolff’s One Morning— sat in my possession in a very raw state. The captivating parts of the poems were laid out and exposed. It was easy to see the mechanics and the utility of every phoneme and word. This is a highly refined piece of work from a woman very much in control of her craft. The level of Rebecca Wolff’s control shines through in the entire piece. There is juxtaposition in each sentence and stanza. “Traveller, / Your journey has been long // and sectional.” Those introductory lines in “Arcadia (et in . . . est)” bear the weight of repetition. They are full of heart and compassion, yet still quite cerebral. There are always dualities to be explored and explained. Wolff demonstrates the relation between the two as often as she can locate it: “By night everything seems impossible // By day, by extension, everything: possible.” Continue reading “One Morning—”

Elaine Equi’s latest book, Sentences and Rain, feels like a confident drift. There is so much control and purpose in the playful word ideas. She must be listed among many of the greats. The insights into humanity that are contained in each and every poem remind the reader of the wonder tucked in every corner of life. The words and format are gentle and full of utility. This is the way of those who hold the passage. Equi has pushed her pen for many years. The development is original and organic. One need not read Equi’s previous writing to get the impression that this is a writer and an observer of life in the peak of their critique. Continue reading “Sentences and Rain”

The world seems bigger than what it is. The twenty pieces of short fiction in Everywhere Stories reminds us of this as it closes the gap between countries and cultures, successfully condensing 24,901 miles into a 234 page book. Forget language barriers, plane tickets for the price of a new car, or time constraints—it’s possible to travel the world without ever leaving the comfort of your favorite reading nook. Continue reading “Everywhere Stories”

Running beneath each story in Liz Prato’s collection, Baby’s on Fire, is a murmuring chaos, the kind that seems to bubble beneath the surface either as the aftermath of or building up to a full-blown eruption. But those eruptions never come to readers in the span of the narratives. They’ve already happened, or this story is the building up to it, or it may never happen at all, and what we witness in these lives is precisely what we witness in the lives of people who surround us on a daily basis. Whole lives lived, the full details of which we have absolutely no awareness, but that simmer there, just below the surface. Just like our own lives in relation to others. Continue reading “Baby’s on Fire”

“The body as sculpture,” Testament—G. C. Waldrep’s book-length poem—begins, and with it we feel the steadying gesture that prefaces any great feat—fingers at one’s temples, eyes closed, the breath held. Continue reading “Testament”

FitzPatrick’s debut collection, published by the Vandalia Press imprint of West Virginia University Press, consists of nine powerful stories about the fragility of hope, the devastation of grief, and the precarious balance of family harmony that lies between the two. Four of the nine stories feature the same characters, allowing us to see growth, and sometimes the lack thereof, in the lives of these individuals. Continue reading “My Pulse Is an Earthquake”

Even before turning the first page of Khaty Xiong’s beautifully composed chapbook Deer Hour, we are given a visual clue as to what we’ll find inside. The cover image shows a large and noble buck suspended between an expanse of grey sky above and yellow field below. The animal, balanced between the two seemingly endless landscapes, defies and resists enclosure. Much the same way, Xiong’s poems refuse to be confined to definitive beginnings and endings, and instead hover, suspended on each page. Continue reading “Deer Hour”

“Been working on my abstractions now / for over a lifetime” is the very opening line of the book. This line holds true through the duration of Jon Curley’s Hybrid Moments,​which is of the school that plain language ought to be reserved for journalism. Though it is a modern work, influenced by much in the contemporary realm, it rings in the manner of the classic romantics. The language is ornate and the thoughts are powerful. There are many threads that must be teased from one another. Continue reading “Hybrid Moments”

Author Geoffrey Peerson Leed is a voice from the future. Other than a webpage issued by The Market Optimization Bureau labeling him “subversive,” there is his “lost work” Partisans. Leed too is a “ghostly neighbor” whose fate is unknown. M. Allen Cunningham is responsible for the book’s publication, presented in accordance with the author’s wishes “as indicated in manuscripts discovered after his disappearance.” Readers who favor either the political dystopias of Orwell or the zombie-apocalypse works of Max Brooks will be interested in what Leed has to say. Continue reading “Partisans”

When I finished Julia Cohen’s I Was Not Born I had the following reactions, more or less simultaneously: That really ends with a punch. I am not so sure what just happened there. I want to try something like this. Even from the first paragraph of the first essay, I knew that this was not going to be a traditional project. Continue reading “I Was Not Born”

The back cover of this book will give readers the most bare-bone details of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor; that Job and Ifi are a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, that Job, “Mr. Doctor,” isn’t actually a doctor, and that this lie puts a strain on their marriage and their life at large. But Julie Iromuanya’s novel is about more than a struggle to keep up appearances. It delves into the nitty gritty details of a culture, a marriage, two people unto themselves, displaced in a strange land that is famed to provide opportunity and riches. From the very first pages, it is painfully clear that this life is not what either Job or Ifi had pictured for themselves. Continue reading “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor”

Kurt Beals’s award winning translation of Swiss short story writer Regina Ullmann’s 1921 The Country Road will appeal mostly to mature readers who find themselves uncomfortable in contemporary fiction, seeking instead something old-fashioned. This is a different collection, unlike any short stories written today, more like vignettes, reveries, or sketches of rural peasant life in small villages, not grim but also not sentimental. It is not a page-turner; the reader will want to savor the beautiful prose and insights into human nature. Plot and character development are minimal, motivation and “backstory” in all but one case not given, lending a sense of mystery to the account. A repeated stylistic series of dots or ellipses suggests the steady continuum of life. Continue reading “The Country Road”

A girl with blue skin is found drowning in a lake. A fifteen-year-old girl named Audrey saves her. Audrey’s mother, Irene, stands by. So do Irene’s friends, Magda and Libby. So do Audrey’s friends, Rebecca and Caroline. Audrey is the only one who acts; the rest of them watch. Audrey isn’t only the one who saved The Blue Girl, which is a remarkable thing for a fifteen year-old to do in itself, but she is the only one who attempted to save her. This singular moment—this moment of action and inaction—is the foundation for The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos. This event propels the story forward—how these six characters interpret this event, and thus in the process, how they come to understand themselves. Continue reading “The Blue Girl”

“The Girl on the Swing,” the first novella of this two-story collection by Peter Grandbois, fittingly opens with a Kafka quote, because this is very much a story of metamorphosis. Not only does “the girl,” timid but precocious twelve-year-old Isabel, undergo a dramatic physical transformation, but so do the other three members of her family: her mother, father, and her brother, each in their own unsettling way. Isabel’s dramatic and quite gruesome transformation triggers a domino effect throughout the family; the panic caused by her transformation highlights her family’s dysfunction, which soon snowballs into a full-blown collapse. Continue reading “The Girl on the Swing and At Night in Crumbling Voices”

The King of the Sea Monkeys is a novel of two parts. The first part is about Paul, a young high school teacher, a loving father to Jessie and husband to Lilian. The second part is about Saul, whom Paul “becomes” after surviving a gunshot to the head upon being thrust into the middle of a gas station robbery. Wrong place, wrong time, and just like that, Paul becomes Saul. Continue reading “The King of the Sea Monkeys”

I read half of the poetry in John Philip Drury’s newest book of poems Sea Level Rising while situated on a large towel on St. Augustine Beach along the Atlantic in Northern Florida. It was the ideal setting for contemplating as Drury expressed his love for the sights and sounds of the ocean. “I miss the rising tides,” he reminisces in the book’s title poem, “that bash the docks / and spatter brackish water in my face.” Continue reading “Sea Level Rising”

Overwinter, Jeremy Pataky’s debut poetry collection, examines the speaker’s isolation and solace in the vast, untamed nature of the Alaskan wilderness. Throughout the collection, the speaker spends his time between a developed city, with its electricity and human companionship, and the natural Alaskan landscape filled with its braided streams, unpredictable wildlife, and endless illusions of light and depth. Continue reading “Overwinter”

A little bit travelogue, a little bit art history, and a little bit heartbreaking memoir, Michael White’s Travels in Vermeer explores the author’s fascination with the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, a fascination that takes him around Europe and America. Traveling to Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Washington D.C., New York, and London in the course of a year—while at the same time dealing with a painful divorce and custody battle, remembering the difficulties of his childhood and the alcoholism of his early adulthood, trying to get back into the dating scene, and remembering the brief, passionate romance with his first wife, who died of cancer—White gives long meditations on Vermeer’s paintings in lyric detail, becoming an intense eye through which we the readers also get to see them. Continue reading “Travels in Vermeer”

Risk Management Studies is a very reasonable riot. Noel Sloboda is playful through and through, and it is refreshing to read an entire chapbook that stays consistently hilarious. While the collection has a modernist slant, it never strays into critical territory. Continue reading “Risk Management Studies”

Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles is a dense work wrapped in a short body. Originally from Michigan, the Midwest comes through Upton’s poetry in a similar way to a classic James Wright poem. It is there when she wants it to be, but she has the control to stray from it when necessary. Many of these poems are closer in scope to Charles Wright, the current Poet Laureate, and readers of her 2005 publication Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Gluck, and Carson will see how they’ve influenced her writing throughout this collection. Continue reading “Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles”

“This letter is about our lives simultaneously, and the mess of memories and body parts that emerges from our selves.” Thus writes the contemporary narrator to Herculine Barbin, an intersexed person born 1838, given a surgical sex reassignment which led to his/her suicide at twenty-nine in 1868. There are about fifteen ways to have an intersexed body, from not XX (female) and not XY (male) to complete gonadal dysgenesis. An intersexed body automatically makes one an intersexed person. The intersexed person does not fall within the guidelines of the social organization based on the clear-cut sexes, male and female, which, in turn, is amenable to the prescribed roles of gender. Continue reading “Dear Herculine”

“This is not the story of Katrina, of flood waters rising and then receding,” the prologue of The Parish: An AmeriCorps Story lets readers know. One could argue that it’s not even “An AmeriCorps Story” either. The Parish is a story of finding purpose and direction in a place that feels devoid of nearly everything—a story of finding purpose and direction in one’s self. Continue reading “The Parish”

Hemmed in by questions, suspended over days that mete out incremental evidence, with an investigative protagonist alternating between the archive and the street, this little chapbook—a/0—is an exemplar of the detective genre. But it is so much stranger than most. One wants to say Pynchon or Murakami. No usual suspects here, and the universe is not what you think. Continue reading “a/0”

“Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.” So reads the one sentence biographical author note as retained in this new edition of Short Talks, the poet Anne Carson’s first book of poetry originally published by Brick Books in 1992. In the years since its publication Carson has made a considerable name for herself as a poet, essayist, and astutely adept translator of Greek, with her translation of Sappho in particular garnering much well-deserved acclaim. While Carson has always kept her personal details on the relative down low even as she has, at times, courted a fair bit of notoriety, and while concision is a definitive hallmark of her oeuvre, the brevity of this bio note is thus at once both disarming and appealingly elusive, especially for a poet of her stature. Continue reading “Short Talks”

A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write opens with “A Room in London,” a rumination on the physical space Melissa Pritchard occupied while temporarily living and writing in a borrowed London flat. This particularly brief piece (four pages) introduces the collection by touching on topics more thoroughly explored later in the book: Pritchard describes herself at work, presents her belief in writing as a spiritual—often religious—act, and embraces the essay’s ability to successfully grow around an ill-defined plot. Continue reading “A Solemn Pleasure”

It’s taken me a long time to write this review, at least six months according to the file creation date, and longer than that based on the date on my notes and the date on the book. But Natural History Rape Museum has been in my thoughts all this time, plaiting its Plath-sharp shrieks into my mind. Continue reading “Natural History Rape Museum (TRIGGER WARNING)”

In a family saga that spans two countries, a half-century, and three generations, Shelley Ettinger’s Vera’s Will is both historical document and social commentary, deftly couched in beautifully written fiction. The story opens with Randy, a young lesbian, reflecting on her past while attending her Grandmother Vera’s funeral. It is at this emotionally tumultuous service where Randy meets and reacquaints with her grandmother’s friends that she has a startling realization: both her deceased grandmother and her favorite aunt are also gay. Continue reading “Vera’s Will”

Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel opens with Adam, a 26-year-old drug-addicted burnout, fleeing from New York City to Israel. Adam’s caretaker and closest companion, his grandfather, has recently died. During the airplane ride, Adam broods on whether American authorities are following him. Experiencing withdrawals and toting an odd assortment of belongings, including an elaborate gold brooch, he volunteers to work on a kibbutz. He’s searching for someone. The circumstances of his grandfather’s death, the significance of the brooch, and the identity of whom Adam is searching for drive the thoughtfully plotted Safekeeping. Continue reading “Safekeeping”

Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize in 2013, is a slim volume of seven short stories about young adults facing teenage pregnancy, homelessness, prostitution, the death of a child on his babysitter’s watch, and so on. “Shelter,” the first story in the book, is an odd choice for an opening, in that the story largely relies on the limited shock value of having homeless teenagers for its protagonists. Reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s project to represent the lives of young poor women from the South, Jones’s story is less angry, but similarly features young characters who hide their vulnerability behind tough facades and speech that is likewise patina’d with derogatory slang. Continue reading “Unaccompanied Minors”

My Feelings, the aptly primal title of poet and memoirist Nick Flynn’s fourth poetry collection, appropriately marks the book as the end product of long winnowing—an unequivocally subjective appraisal of life’s equivocations. In My Feelings, Flynn brings a memoirist’s robust conception of personal history to the page, crafting finely textured poems about what it means to live in the ever-growing aftermath called the present. To underscore the subjective nature of his collection, Flynn even includes a disclaimer telling readers that “[t]he word ‘my’ in the title is meant to signify the author.” Continue reading “My Feelings”

According to the author, poetry anthologies are “like a museum exhibition.” They certainly suit every imaginable reading need: fulfilling the core curriculum; completing the home, school, or public library; satisfying the rare book collector; providing access to a favorite writer in one place. Now there is an exceptional anthology about poetry that is both quotable and useful. Readers of The Oregonian are already familiar with poet David Biespiel’s monthly column that ran between 2003 and 2013. Now selections from the series (ended by the author, not the newspaper) are available in A Long High Whistle; Selected Columns on Poetry. Continue reading “A Long High Whistle”

In these eleven essays that make up Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel, Kevin Oderman journeys widely: from Latvia to Italy to Turkey; from Indonesia to Cambodia to Vietnam. Oderman does not feign to completely absorb the cultures in which he travels. Who could in a week or a month? No, he does something better; he delves into an aspect or a couple aspects of a culture or its history. These aspects—whether a painting, a dance, a temple, a house, or a puppets show—he describes so intricately that, while I read, his obsessions became my obsessions, and, when I finished, I remembered my own obsessions, and was inspired to explore them with the same kind of passion and precision. Continue reading “Cannot Stay”

The particulars of a Catholic girlhood have endured through centuries. Friends, enemies, and colleagues never tire of offering unsolicited psychoanalyses of that guilt-laden live, learn, and worship by rote existence. What outsiders will never understand is that abiding by those rules leads—if one is willing—to a freedom they can never appreciate. Continue reading “A Portal to Vibrancy”

A good poem places pressure on language in an interesting way. This mantra can be peeled from the pages of Seth Abramson’s Metamericana. However, his secret seems to be that a good poem places pressure on ideas in an interesting way—that a good idea places pressure on old ideas in an interesting way. Philosophy places pressure on technology and technology places pressure on philosophy. All of this interacts in a swirling and kaleidoscopic manner. Continue reading “Metamericana”

Patricia Waters’s Fallen Attitudes beautifully betrays her artistic and intellectual maturity. This is not novice poetry, but poetry in which scenes, locations, history, and memory are culled for what they cannot possess rather than for epistemological revelations. Waters is not attempting to prove anything, to justify a life lived a certain way; this is a memoir of letting go of proof and justification, of finding peace with whatever remains, and what remains seems to be a love. Continue reading “Fallen Attitudes”

Haiku is excessive. What luxury. In five mere words, Ken Mikolowski can do what the ancients needed seventeen syllables to accomplish in his book That That. Take the poem “No more / and / no less.” This says it all. It says everything that is needed to be said. It is a commentary on the state of the art and on the personal lives that we all carry in ourselves. Math uses simplification to produce elegant equations. In this same vein, Mikolowski uses reduction to get to the heart of the issue. These poems take on enormous universal equations by mimicking tiny proverbs. It is a great read for the age of Tweets. It reaches hearts and minds with the wisdom of Solomon using the tactics of a Facebook advertisement. Continue reading “That That”

During the Occupy Movement in New York City when The People literally took over Zuccotti Park, poet Filip Marinovich was right there in the mix, helping to set up and run the People’s Library and reading his poems over the People’s Mic, “the people’s mic is intoxicating / that’s why I am its pauper king” (“Zuccotti Park Fugue State”). The poems gathered in Wolfman Librarian stem directly from Marinovich’s experience with Occupy. Continue reading “Wolfman Librarian”

“Somebody pour me / a fresh Pepsi?” Fanny Says is an amalgam of the south. A woman striving for class in a society that worked hard against her. The author Nickole Brown peels away the caricature that could be Frances Lee. What is revealed is Fanny, an archetypal southern woman, yes, but a participant in a modern and changing world. There is a universalism at work in Fanny Says that Brown allows and directs rather than forms and shifts. It is a dense work of poems, functioning as a memoir and a history lesson by way of the comedian. Brown is always tender but does not shy from exposing faults and social problems. Her ability to record and recreate the things her grandmother said is a prowess far beyond her. The reader is so immersed in Fanny it is as if we know her. Getting to know Fanny is like examining America, first the shoes, then the belt, and finally the hair-do. Continue reading “Fanny Says”

The poems in Sean Bishop’s elegiac debut collection The Night We’re Not Sleeping In seethe with animosity—sometimes humorously, sometimes righteously—toward all manner of received wisdom about life, death, grief, and consolation. Selected by Susan Mitchell as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, the collection centers around the death of the speaker’s father, with several longer poetic sequences throughout the book’s four sections interrupting and elaborating on similarly turbulent themes. Continue reading “The Night We’re Not Sleeping In”

Magda Szabó wrote this well-known Hungarian classic in 1987, and fortunately The New York Review of Books reissued it with an excellent introduction by Ali Smith. The novel is about the relationship between a young writer (the narrator) and her husband with their housecleaner Emerence, who proves to be so much more than that. The book could be viewed as autobiographical because the narrator, now a famous writer, is looking back on herself as young when she first met the old woman Emerence who announces, “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty laundry.” She arrives at the apartment wearing, as she always does, a headscarf covering her hair and face like a veil. Hiding herself, the headscarf serves as the equivalent of Emerence’s locked door at her own villa. Continue reading “The Door”

Editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney have assembled, edited, and published this brilliant collection of specialized coming-of-age novellas—each one special because it is composed entirely of cohesive, yet stand-alone works of flash fiction—defined in the introduction as stories of 1,000 words or less. Helpful, informative essays by each of the five authors whose stories appear in this collection expound upon their creative process in birthing these works. Part craft-of-writing book and part novellas-in-flash collection, this unique text is both educational and entertaining: an excellent textbook or self-instructional manual on the form. Continue reading “My Very End of the Universe”