NewPages Blog :: Books

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”

In Gephyromania, which means the love of building bridges, we are given a “subtextual consciousness of queer” per the author, TC Tolbert, who is a genderqueer feminist poet and teacher. S/he is co-editor for The Feminist Wire and a curator for Trickhouse, an online cross-genre arts journal. Tolbert also founded Made for Flight, a youth empowerment program using writing and kite building, commemorating murdered transgender people, to bring awareness about homophobia and transphobia. Continue reading “Gephyromania”

This is a found poetry book . . . of sorts. William Shatner did Palin on the “Tonight Show.” He took Sarah Palin’s farewell speech and delivered verbatim in a beatnik style with an accompaniment of bongos and stand-up bass. Hart Seely, Syracuse Post-Standard columnist, seemed to hit gold with Pieces of Intelligence, his collections of poems that he ripped from Donald Rumsfeld. Nicole Mauro takes the idea to the next logical level in Tax-Dollar Super Sonnet, working with the fervor of a mash-up DJ. The borrowed speeches span the history of America and bristle with the newness of the modern age. These poems have a real political edge added back to them, the words reorganizing themselves to fortify new points. Continue reading “Tax-Dollar Super Sonnet, Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet”

Intimate family relationships can startle us when we recognize that, despite our familiarity, we’re actually strangers who keep many secrets from one another. Such is the case for Barbara Pupnick Blumfield, who discovers as a teenage girl her mother’s infidelity. Author Michelle Brafman explores three generations of mother-daughter relationships in Orthodox and Chasidic Jewish families through the eyes of Barbara, contrasting her life in the 1970s when she first discovered her mother’s unfaithfulness, with her life as a grown woman in 2009, where she has a teen daughter of her own. Continue reading “Washing the Dead”

I listed My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta as one of the books that I was currently reading online and saw that a friend of mine listed it as one of her “to-read” books. That has happened a few times but I’ve never been as happy to see it as I was for this book. It’s very possible that I feel so attached to it because I’m a 20-something girl (who still finds it weird to call herself a “woman” since that seems to imply some level of adulthood) just out of a grad school trying to figure out what to do from here. The experiences that Washuta describes aren’t all ones that I can relate to. She discusses mental illness, being raped, and being a minority in such a way that, while a reader may not be able to relate, it’s easy to empathize with her. Continue reading “My Body is a Book of Rules”

If you are looking for a fast-paced, succinct, plot-driven book then The Descartes Highlands by Eric Gamalinda may not be for you. If, however, you are looking for a thoughtful, slow-burning character-driven story then settle right in. It is a story that follows two adopted brothers who grow up in different homes after being sold in the Philippines by their American father. Gamalinda’s novel delves into a world inhabited by an American draft-dodger living in the Philippines who ends up needing to sell his two sons to other foreigners, each burdened with their own grief and turmoil. We spend about a third of our time with the father in flashbacks and each of his sons in the present as they try to find out about their origins and deal with how their unique beginnings impact their lives. Continue reading “The Descartes Highlands”

Ira Sukrungruang takes readers through the gamut in this collection of essays, Southside Buddhist. Gamut of what? You name it: emotions, literary styles of nonfiction, life experiences, ages, cultures—all in this one remarkable collection of essays. Continue reading “Southside Buddhist”

I just finished reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel in which the narrator desires that she and her sister resist the socio-economic structure of 1950s New England and reside, instead, on the moon. They finally do achieve this goal by converting their large house into a smaller living space, boarded-up and isolated from the outside world. In novels like Castle, women often reinterpret the boundaries of living spaces in their writing partly because traditional domestic contracts and spaces constrain emotion, creativity, and grief. In her book of poems titled The Sun & the Moon, Kristina Marie Darling contributes to this collective literary voice that unfetters domestic space as her speaker grieves and examines a past marital relationship. The Sun and the Moon, representing respectively a husband and wife, are always at opposite poles in this space that reels with cinematic flashes of memory and the ghosts that inhabit memory over time. Continue reading “The Sun & The Moon”

Throughout John Sakkis’s The Islands, a polyvocal weave of declarative refrains sound out in dizzying display. Across the book’s five sections appear poems, often in set series, presenting a hybrid mix of memoir, lyric, historical investigation, and daily documents full of dispatch concerning discursive news the poet’s ear has picked up on. We see in section three “Tangrams The New Collective,” the speaker’s concern throughout remains with “The salt of human projects,” in the face of which, Sakkis declares: “I go in. I am in bits.” What’s left for the poems are scattered fragments of events, both imagined and other, from out of which both structure and content prove to be derived. Continue reading “The Islands”

Bruce Covey’s Change Machine is a lively book that takes a humorous approach to formal experimentation. Among other ideas, Covey examines how the man-made world intersects with the natural one. Here, “man-made” includes human inventions both critical—mathematics, industry, philosophy—as well as trivial—puns, pop singers, imitations. The speaker’s voice is conversational but emotionally cool, and its consistency holds together a varied array of poetic forms including sonnets, near-sonnets, and imitations of iconic poems by Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan. Continue reading “Change Machine”

Mary Jo Bang is a slippery poet, with a mind that often seems a few seconds ahead of itself. A quick glance at the cover of her new book, The Last Two Seconds, perfectly encapsulates this kind of speed: the monorail that has just slipped from our frame of vision, the typography of the title trailing like a futurist contrail. It is this trailing, however, that is a crucial point—this collection is not about the next two seconds, but the last—as in the last two seconds you’ve just spent reading this sentence. Continue reading “The Last Two Seconds”

Theatergoers will be reminded of Yasmina Reza’s well-known plays Art and God of Carnage in this short story collection Happy Are the Happy. In spite of no paragraphing in each of the short stories, they flow with perfect dialogue, brief but definitive settings, and situations involving both humorous and sad bad behavior and embarrassment. Fiction allows Reza to exhibit her lovely style, vivid succinct descriptions, and ironic truisms and insights. Continue reading “Happy Are the Happy”

William Black’s stunning and stirring debut collection consists of twelve short stories set in Appalachia’s Northeastern Pennsylvania, where rugged hills and peaceful valleys landscape both the terrain and the soul. The evocative language in which Inheritances is written mirrors the highs and lows of his characters’ emotions as Black leads us into and immerses us in their lives. Each story’s intriguing beginning and thought-provoking ending make this collection a keeper—one you’ll find yourself reaching for every time you need a dose of the valor and courage his characters demonstrate. Continue reading “Inheritances”

Starlight In Two Million bills itself as a neo-scientific novella. Amy Catanzano works in quantum poetics, a lofty goal. She states that she tries to amplify the hallucinatory experience of the novel by changing perspectives and seeks to find a fourth person perspective in the mode of time. Detached and somewhat nonlinear, the novel moves from an outré perspective and gives itself to the form much of the time, posing a challenge for the reader looking for one. The work attempts to produce a feeling, a controlled navigation through a hypercube. Continue reading “Starlight in Two Million”

Diana Hamilton’s Universe is one of the tightest projects I’ve ever read: a chapbook length poem on ethics, broken into two sections (one roughly on property/possession, the other on race) and comprised largely of analytical propositions angularly cut into strikingly short lines. “You and I exist in a civil condition” the speaker asserts. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Continue reading “Universe”

It’s funny to think of No Girls, No Telephones in the context of the fan genre, like everyone’s favorite 50 Shades of Gray, but let’s do that for just one wincingly good second. Okay. Of course, this isn’t 50 Shades of Gray. This is poetry, for one. It’s a collaboration between Brittany Cavallaro and Rebecca Hazelton, two talented and accomplished poets. And perhaps most importantly, it riffs not off of a tweeny bestseller but one of the most sophisticated, startling, and idiomatic literary works of the American tradition, John Berryman’s Dream Songs. Continue reading “No Girls No Telephones”

Every line, phrase, and syllable of Kimberly Burwick’s Good Night Brother is thick with a language that perhaps only angels know. As I read these dense, imagistic lines, I recall the charismatic churches of my youth when, at Sunday morning worship, any number of individuals might erupt into an otherworldly song in “tongues,” coming from the spirit within. Perhaps Burwick has such a spirit—a poetic spirit that transforms “milkweed,” “geese,” “pheasants,” “berries,” “roads,” and “flies” into abstractions, the reader reveling in the feel of this strange language passing over the pores of the page. Continue reading “Good Night Brother”

Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.) is published by gnOme press, which specializes in anonymous, pseudepigraphical and apocryphal works; a press that also eliminates the name of the author because “The self in no way matters . . . (the reader) is any one and I (the author) am also anyone. . . .” The author, represented by the initial M, has written a text in three parts, each part its own distinct structure of fragments, each of the structures with its own specific effect. Across all three parts, the fragments of syntax elements yield each part’s content. This is not a theoretical exercise, but a language born of the body, the senses, the gut. . . born of the anguish and power of flesh in the world. Continue reading “Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.)”

Along with Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Twain, and Anonymous, the authors of this anthology are among the most recognized in literature. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were also preservationists, transcribing fairy tales verbally passed down from generation to the next. With book in hand—something increasingly common during the course of the nineteenth century—the “Story Teller” no longer had to rely on memory. Since their publication in 1812, these stories found their way into other narrative forms including visual and/or animated art, music, opera, ballet, and film. Artists from Walter Crane to children sitting at the kitchen table have drawn Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, and Rapunzel. Continue reading “The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”

In The Year of Perfect Happiness, nobody is perfect. Under a veneer of normalcy and seeming perfection lie malice, cunning, chicanery, and evil. In people like you and me that populate the landscape of Middle America—the ones with dreams and aspirations to have good jobs, a family, career and friends—have a little malice in us. Characters in Becky Adnot-Haynes’s The Year of Perfect Happiness, a collection of ten short stories, are etched with the slightest of kinks, of imperfections, that allow the evil to seep through, making the ordinary seem that much less so. Female protagonists are drawn with an eye towards the slightly weird, the eccentric, with tinges of idiotic. The characters stay with you long after you’ve flipped the page. Continue reading “The Year of Perfect Happiness”

The characters in Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez’s stories navigate many worlds, literally and figuratively traversing continents, global metropolises, national borders, and epistemic boundaries, all in a quest for that universal human need for belonging and connectedness. In a collection of fourteen stories, Vaquera-Vasquez, an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico, draws the blinds into a sub-culture of Eses, hombres, border crossers, and all things Chicano. Continue reading “One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen”

In the dedication Chris Green states that there is “no straightforward compensation.” The rest of the poems follow Joseph Brodsky’s quote during his employment trial, “Everything was interesting to me. I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people.” There is a Midwestern, blue collar motif to the language that runs through the poems. There is plenty of indirect and direct evidence of the observations of a poet from Chicago. Many times I thought of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé on living a low-wage lifestyle. Continue reading “Résumé”

This is not a pipe. The word is not the thing. The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom shares this sentiment. Noah Eli Gordon presents a modern treason of symbol. His words take flight in the very airplanes he describes. The trajectory is set by meta ontology. As the poems move forward and take shape, there is the sense that a message was thought of before the descriptions, that the writing has an agenda. However, there is a playful sense of tumbling through, that the words are allowing each other to create the next one. The message of origins of language and the etymology of our very ideas are shrouded in mystery. Continue reading “The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom”

Every evening in the city
is a deep pool of wine

Everyone who lives in the city
is drunk with it

And cannot leave

            They are surrounded by friends

Continue reading “Surrounded by Friends”

Ann Pancake’s collection of novellas and short stories, is steeped in the culture and dialect of generations of rural West Virginians; moreover, it’s awash with heartache, brutal honesty, mistrust of strangers, and the necessary and stubborn resolve that illuminates the mountain-state people’s passion for family and the place they call home. Continue reading “Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley”

Mary Biddinger’s fourth poetry collection, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, grapples with social mores, loneliness, and isolation through serial non-sequitors and questions that seem sincerely non-rhetorical, yet go unanswered. Tonally, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water is reminiscent of the poetry of Mary Ruefle, or of Steven Millhauser’s prose poem novella, Enchanted Night. Continue reading “A Sunny Place with Adequate Water”

Alex Green’s collection of short prose is aptly titled Emergency Anthems. Brooklyn Arts Press wisely bills the book as a collection of “Short Fiction/Prose Poems,” leaving elbow-patched professor types to duke it out over finer genre distinctions. Alas, I regularly cling to genre like it’s a life-raft in wild waters. The stories/poems are presented as block paragraphs with justified left and right margins. The majority of these shorts don’t feature any traditional narrative arc, no building and releasing of tension. Without the floatation device of genre, the word “Anthem” feels like an appropriate designation for Green’s short bursts of prose. Continue reading “Emergency Anthems”

The poems in Sylph, Abigail Cloud’s debut collection, are comprised of multiple balancing acts. They are graceful, self-assured poems, beautifully executed with a tightly focused imagistic sensibility. But they are also searching, inquisitive poems—their arrivals are real-time events, self-discoveries. They have an airy quality, as the title of the collection would suggest (there are “wings” everywhere), yet are also deeply rooted in the material world. They are as at-home in myth and the spirit world, or the haunting voices in archives, as they are in the garden and in the home. Continue reading “Sylph”

Once, Then by Andrea Scarpino is a collection of elegies that are caught in the tension of two worlds, the scientific and the spiritual. In attempting to understand the aftermath of loss, Scarpino turns to form, and her lyrical, shortly-woven lines sing. The collection often features the profiles of people, those closest to Scarpino, and also mythic figures such as Persephone and Achilles. What results is a poet deeply engaged with the world. Continue reading “Once, Then”

Lyrical, honest, descriptive, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes by Kerrin McCadden is a thoughtful meditation on wandering through a human landscape, one full of loss and desire. Often elegiac, this collection of poetry accepts the world before it, acknowledging the quotidian value of our lives while also seeing the beauty in it. Continue reading “Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes”

What do a grass skirt, refrigerator, buttons, bones of a dairy cow, magnets, an old cake mix, and a spider all have in common? All, somehow impressively, appear in the first poem of Control Bird Alt Delete, a collection of poetry by Alexandria Peary. In it, Peary deconstructs our worlds and examines our environment from the perspective of deletion. If we destroy our natural resources to make products that will never deteriorate, what will exist of our world? Peary offers a world with unicorn rainbow stickers and fake lilacs. Continue reading “Control Bird Alt Delete”

Corporate Relations opens with a series of broken analogies that illustrate the ridiculousness of the idea of corporate personhood. Even from the first section, “The Beautiful Life of Persona Ficta,” Jena Osman makes this ridiculousness plain: “it is a nightmare that Congress endorsed. mega-corporation as human group, the realm of hypothesis.” Continue reading “Corporate Relations”

Ancient wound. Politicians, monarchs, and religious fanatics still use this phrase to justify vengeance. Its literary applications are no less tragic. To give a Pulitzer and Nobel winning example, Eugene O’Neill knew how to channel that fury and apply it to his highly ordered dysfunctional universe. Continue reading “The Antigone Poems”

The poetry in Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone by Annelyse Gelman is witty, comfortable, and contemporary. Nothing too heavy waits inside the bright blue cover, and even the heavier moments are lightened by Gelman’s sly humor, a welcome presence throughout the poems. Continue reading “Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone”

The Tribute Horse, Brandon Som’s debut full collection, is a surprising title once you wade into the first few pages of this beautiful mediation on migration, cultural memory, and the great mitigating force of both, language. The title image is almost like a piece of statuary, a trophy or memorial object, and to be sure, this collection does feel like a tribute, but it spends far more time at sea and among the heights of birdsong and other utterances than would seem to warrant that powerfully terrestrial and corporeal image of the horse. Continue reading “The Tribute Horse”

The twenty-two selections in this nonfiction collection are culled from twenty years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. I was worried it would inevitably suffer from aesthetic myopia. But the selections are eclectic enough to avoid this. I learned about the history of sign language, the particulars of Finnish baseball, and about the difficulties and rewards of teaching a university course on the philosophy of death. This whirlwind collection features an exceptionally talented stable of writers, all of whom are present as characters in their essays. Continue reading “True Stories, Well Told”

Pete Fromm’s If Not For This was the most moving novel I read in 2014. The main characters are raft guides in the interior west. Fromm worked for many years as a river ranger in Grand Teton National Park. I chose the book based on those two kernels of information. I left the west three years ago. Before beginning my drive east in earnest, I spent a few days camping in the Tetons. Continue reading “If Not For This”

Titulada is, without question, one of the best books of poetry I’ve read this year. Formally exploratory, sonically interesting, and rich with meaning, this book offers exactly what I’m hoping to find every time I pick up a new poetry collection: a challenge that rewards the effort put into reading it. Continue reading “Titulada”

Elegy on Kinderklavier is a debut collection of seven short stories. The driving force across the stories is violence. The characters are forced to the edge of the world, intruded upon by one form of violence or another: war, terminal illness, loss of loved ones before their time, death and mutilation by explosives. Violence, in all its forms, is the hovering, unpredictable specter and Hemenway handles it with innovative, effective techniques. Continue reading “Elegy on Kinderklavier”

Literary Nobel Laureates are not known for readability and popularity, yet the novels of 2014 winner Patrick Modiano (also winner of Prix Concourt and Prix MondialCino Del Duca for lifetime achievement) are easy to read and popular. His novels are short with short prose pages. Plus he recreates atmospheric noir settings, such as eerie dark abandoned castles or noble estates, and the characters he introduces are ever mysterious. His narrator, mostly unnamed and a persona for him, is constantly reminded of the past and wants to go back to understand it. Continue reading “Suspended Sentences”

Deceased Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño is known for experimental fiction like By Night in Chile, which is told without paragraphing, but this work, A Little Lumpen Novelita, is written chronologically, with standard punctuation and paragraphing. It is a story told from the perspective of an older sister (19 years old) named Bianca, about herself and her unnamed younger brother after their parents’ fatal auto accident. As she tells us in the opening sentence, Bianca is now married with children, Continue reading “A Little Lumpen Novelita”

The best movie monsters come back to life in sequels or remakes that can be masterpieces (Aliens) or miscalculations (the two American Godzillas). The late Friday night TV marathons or Saturday afternoon matinees that influenced at least three generations of movie makers and goers are a regular part of Turner Classic Movie Channel’s schedule. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (his monster played by Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and Benedict Cumberbatch to name a few), classic movie monsters endear because they are more human than their creators or tormentors. Continue reading “Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems”

The Imagination of Lewis Carroll by William Todd Seabrook is the winner of the Rose Metal Press eighth annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. The book is appealing to the hand and eye, a font and layout with a flavor of Carroll’s nineteenth century. The twenty-four short chapters imaginatively take us through the life of Lewis Carroll and perhaps is a more accurate biography of him than a factual one. Seabrook uses the techniques of Carroll’s own imagination to imagine Carroll’s life of imagination. Continue reading “The Imagination of Lewis Carroll”

The cover image of Richard Newman’s All the Wasted Beauty of the World is “Great Blue Heron of Southern Indiana” by Nick Nihira and the thirty-nine poems are divided into four sections: 1. Summer Spells; 2. Autumn Contrails; 3. Winter’s Bloom; 4. Spring Necromancies. I assumed the poems would be about nature by the cover and title, and the poems would be in a metrical style since the publisher is Able Muse. That is the delightful surprise about poetry and reviewing—as neither was entirely the case. Continue reading “All the Wasted Beauty of the World”

Dodie Bellamy’s The TV Sutras is “inspired text born from a crisis of urban bombardment.” In the tradition of Joseph Smith, Moses, and the oracle at Delphi, Bellamy’s introduction describes a process wherein after a 30-minute yoga DVD and a 20-minute meditation facing the (turned-off) TV, she turns the TV on and begins to receive a transmission. After a break, she describes the scene, then gives her commentary without “irony, cleverness or perfection—or art.” Continue reading “The TV Sutras”

Chelsea Woodard’s poetry collection Vellum was a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, judged anonymously by the Able Muse Contest Committee. The forty-six poems are well-balanced with nine to ten poems in each of the five parts, though not grouped by specific theme or setting. Continue reading “Vellum”

Joan Gelfand searches her own motives with a touch of whimsy while probing for hard answers, which makes her wide knowledge of humanity evident in her book The Long Blue Room. She is a poet who has visited abroad and traveled across her own country to gain a sense of contemporary life grounded in realism but also presented with a delightful wit that’s penetrating and wise. She observes the rhythms, the good and bad about her, but maintains the appreciation of small things—takes time to thoroughly taste fruits like peaches and pears and wonder about them. Continue reading “The Long Blue Room”

Greek dramatists called them “Chorus.” Virginia Woolf christened them “Judith Shakespeare.” In big-budget films with a religious, historic, or fantasy theme, they are “Extras.” On television, they form the zombie army on The Walking Dead or seek fame on reality TV, which is like turning zombie. With the exception of letters and journals written before the Industrial Revolution that survived by luck, there isn’t much to go on. Continue reading “Sisters and Courtesans”

Benjamin Parzybok’s new novel Sherwood Nation is the latest addition to what is now being called “climate lit.” Books with apocalyptic plots which once seemed so far off in some crazy future are now disturbingly within reach. Recent titles such as Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior” and Eden Lepucki’s “California” seem plausible. Continue reading “Sherwood Nation”

I was drawn to reading Alex Lemon’s The Wish Book partly from the surreal quality of its cover which features fish floating over a well-dressed bird-headed character while a mustached man reads a newspaper of poems, and a dapper potato-headed figure of many eyes lifts the arm of his suit where a large insect pokes free. Yet there are many contemporary poets who seem to draw surreal dream-like worlds on the page; that alone isn’t enough to make a book stand out for me. Continue reading “The Wish Book”