NewPages Blog :: Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Space / Gap / Interval / Distance, Judy Halebsky draws the many strands of her life’s arts together, braiding the leaps and bounds of expression into a fantastic set of ekphrastic poems. Continue reading “Space / Gap / Interval / Distance”

From Sibling Rivalry Press, publishers of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, comes a new contribution to the GLBT canon. This one is a collection of lesbian poetry from both established and new authors. Before the poems, a paragraph or so provides details about each author. While usually this information is found at the end of a collection, here it sets up the reader for what he/she is about to read. This book includes a nice assortment of poems, and it was refreshing to read such a wide variety of works from each author. In this collection, there is no “one and done.” Through their poetry, the reader is truly able to get to know each writer before it is time to move on to the next. Continue reading “Lady Business”

Jac Jemc has written a novel so wonderful that if it were a dish served at a social event, I would ask the hostess for the recipe. If I were to place the various ingredients which make up this book I might say a dash of Kafka, maybe a pinch of those new wave French writers like Robbe-Grillet, and a tablespoon of Andre Breton’s classic “A Mad Love.” Mix it all up and place between two covers. Become horizontal, relax, and serve. Continue reading “My Only Wife”

Gregory Spatz’s well-written novel Inukshuk involves two alternating and to some extent paralleling stories: a father-son story and an historical recreation of the last days of 19th century explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew members on the ice-bound ships Terror and Erebus, trying in vain to discover the Northwest Passage. The parallels come first from the same names: the father is named John Franklin and his son, who is convinced he is related to the explorer, is Thomas, a name he shares with a crewmember. The father has moved the two of them to Alberta, Canada to be closer to his wife, who is on her own Arctic observation exploration. And both the explorer’s wife and the father’s wife are named Jane. What really links the two stories, however, is the thirteen-year-old’s escape into the world of the explorer’s expedition in its last days. Meanwhile, the modern John Franklin escapes into his poetry and fascination with the selkie myth (a shape-shifting myth of seal to man and back again, like the father’s own alternating myth with real life). This is a story of the danger of obsessions, the father’s and son’s coming after mother/wife Jane’s abandonment of them for her own obsession. Father and son each suffer alone, especially Thomas, the outsider in his school. Continue reading “Inukshuk”

This is a book for the era of Facebook, memes and all. Matias Viegener heard about a spate of peeps posting Facebook lists of 25 Random Things about themselves and decided to assign himself the task of creating such a list for 100 days, posting each daily to Facebook. Thus he ended up with a total of 2500 ‘things’ which not surprisingly proves more than enough to fill a book. Continue reading “2500 Random Things About Me Too”

I have not yet seen it, myself, but I hear in the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, Agent 007 may or may not cry. According to eonline.com, a tearful James Bond is a sin against the Ten Commandments of the James Bond franchise. When asked, Daniel Craig (the sixth official Bond, for those still counting) defended his character’s face-water: “He doesn’t cry, he’s sweating.” What’s funny is that in author Ian Fleming’s original dozen novels, the character Bond is found crying or sobbing about five times. His “heart lifts” a further six times; he’s rescued by a girl four times. I know this not because I’ve painstakingly read through all the books, but because Michelle Disler has—and has compiled her findings in the form of poems in [Bond, James]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography. Continue reading “[Bond, James]”

Alice Walsh’s A Long Way from Home is a compassionately told novel that straddles the line between children’s and young adult fiction, and the story it tells will appeal to younger and older audiences alike. Continue reading “A Long Way from Home”

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the opening of an interview with director Elizabeth LeCompte, Anne Bogart asks where LeCompte and her company get the permission to create work so “unlike what you see in most theatre.” She responds: “it comes from having a space that’s mine, that’s ours, our very own. So when I start work, there’s not anything that’s saying to me that you have to do this for somebody else. If it doesn’t work, then I don’t owe anybody anything.” Conversations with Anne, a series of twenty-four interviews conducted by Bogart, the artistic director of the SITI Company and professor of the graduate directing program at Columbia University, could be approached with the same mindset—this is a book about having your own space to voice thoughts: thoughts on art, the theatre, human emotion, fragility, strength of character. These interviews, held within a ten-year period after the 9/11 attacks, are all connected in some way to the theatre and the world of performing arts, though this piece is not restricted to the theatre-loving reader. Continue reading “Conversations with Anne”

Thoughts of death, specifically suicide, dominate Mark Brazaitis’s The Incurables, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. The collection masterfully adds a spoonful of eccentricity however, as the dour characters seem to shrug off their plight, almost as if their strange adventures were as pedestrian as their hometown of Sherman, Ohio. Continue reading “The Incurables”

I always judge a book by its cover, and then I check the blurbs. I know, there’s a behind-the-scenes history of blurbing books, friends helping friends, paying back owed favors, etc. But still, the marketing world seems to have zeroed in on what and whom I like. When I saw a turntable on the cover of Dylan Hick’s debut novel, Boarded Windows—well, being of the turntable generation, I was intrigued. Then I checked out the blurbs (Sam Lipsyte, Dana Spiotta, Greil Marcus), and I was hooked. I went home and digested the book. Continue reading “Boarded Windows”

When my copy of Dip My Pacifier in Whiskey arrived in the mail, I could not wait to get reading. I don’t tend to judge a book by its cover, but rather by its title. To me, it seemed like a play on the adult child, and it had been awhile since a title instantly hooked me. The book cover is black with red brush strokes, simple but still interesting. Unfortunately, I really struggled to find a solid sample of writing to lure readers to this book of poetry. Continue reading “Dip My Pacifier in Whiskey”

The turbulent life of Czech writer Ladislav Klíma is echoed in one of his works of fiction, Glorious Nemesis. Born in 1878 in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic), Klíma was expelled from school in 1895 after ostensibly insulting the ruling Hapsburgs. From then on, he rejected most aspects of a traditional life, shunning regular employment to live off of inheritance money and publishing royalties. Before he died of tuberculosis in 1928, he destroyed a reputed 90% of his own manuscripts. A great deal of what he wrote was published posthumously. Continue reading “Glorious Nemesis”

Don’t let the title of Fred Arroyo’s latest collection of short stories, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, fool you. “Fiction” is hardly the right word for what Arroyo has done here. If these insightful, living, breathing stories are fiction, I’d be hard pressed to imagine what reality must look like. Continue reading “Western Avenue”

The Tree of Forgetfulness, by Pam Durban, is the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. The novel is based on the true event of the lynching of three blacks in Aiken, South Carolina—a town in which forty-one lynchings had been investigated in the eight years prior to the one in 1926. The characters, fictional, are few: Howard and Libba Aimar and their son, daughter and unborn grandchild; Minnie and Zeke Settles, the Aimars’ black help; Aubrey Timmerman, the sheriff, who does the law his way; and Curtis N. R. Barrett, the New York reporter sent to find who really committed the murders, the three bodies so shot up and burned, they were a horror to view. The Confederate flag, bootleg whisky, the Klan, as well as good Southern manners and antebellum descendants whose heritage of “how it used to be” are all here, but the book is a series of levels moving downward from community to the individual, propelled by the interior dialogue of the characters, until we come to the real story. Continue reading “The Tree of Forgetfulness”

“I was the first child ever allowed to visit a patient at the private mental hospital where my mother was being treated. Before our first trip there, Dad said, ‘The doctors think your mother will get better if she can keep seeing you.’” The opening lines of Chana Wilson’s book illuminate the intimate, complex and soul-sucking relationship that she and her mother have throughout their lives, meanwhile plunging the reader into a sparse, transparent glimpse into the lives of women treated in 1950s psych wards. Wilson grows up with her parents as an only child, but at the age of seven, her mother is put into a mental hospital for her severe depression. She attempts to commit suicide numerous times, and the memoir jarringly opens up with the scene of Gloria holding a rifle to her head in the bathroom. Continue reading “Riding Fury Home”

All throughout Half of What They Carried Flew Away, Andrea Rexilius proves her command of words and sentences. Mostly, the process of her creating is hidden by its resulting prose poems and declarative stanzas. One passage, however, lifts the curtain: “These borders live on, interrelated. Between the body’s procreation and use. I have been told, it is unfair to say the word ‘body’ again. That’s fine. It’s easy enough to ignore.” Continue reading “Half of What They Carried Flew Away”

Impossibly pure poetry is a losing game. At best, a transient mood may be set by way of tone as the general weight of measured restraint from over-expression provides an atmospheric gloss of consciousness. This is the haunting of Mallarme. The desire to have the poem stand for more than is possible. Yet Andrew Zawacki’s translation of Sébastien Smirou holds up admirably well in the face of such challenges. Continue reading “My Lorenzo”

Many of the meditations in Rusty Morrison’s After Urgency—selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Dorset Prize—arise from nature where the poet comforts herself after the loss of her mother and father (“‘My dead,’ I’ve begun to call them”), who died only a season apart. How, now, to “live past” their deaths? How to go on; “how to stand still?” In “Appearances,” Morrison’s melancholy goes unanswered by the landscape: “Tree-line, water’s edge, places that borders will gather against. / What a body might verge upon, it can neither tame nor test.” Continue reading “After Urgency”

In the John Ford’s 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there’s a line or two that ring particularly true to writing about the West. After learning the truth about the shootout and the story behind outlaw Liberty Valance’s death, the newspaperman tells James Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Continue reading “With Blood in Their Eyes”

Winner of the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction, Rise by L. Annette Binder is a book of fourteen stories in which, with each story, we experience living inside a trauma from the subject’s interior eye level. Binder gives a no-blink portrayal of what happens to an individual and the person close to that individual as the trauma is lived and shapes their responses. She constructs her stories around traumas many of us will deal with at one time or another with ourselves or a loved one or collaterally from the newspaper: a child kidnapped at the mall, life lived around a birth defect, a child losing a parent to death, war with a malicious neighbor, molestation of a young teen by a parental figure, being diagnosed with a terminal illness, a driver hitting a child in a crosswalk. Once thrown into trauma that is life-altering, how do we reclaim ourselves . . . or can we? Continue reading “Rise”

Charlotte Pence’s chapbook and winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, The Branches, the Axe, the Missing, leads the reader through a sequence of unnamed poems. A brief narrative of a woman leaving her husband after a divorce and thinking about her homeless father is told alongside poems that address the development of language and social interaction among the evolution of humans as a species. Varied in form and length, each poem adds another link to the narrative chain that brings together a complex and sophisticated extended poem that dwells on our evolutionary desire to communicate. Continue reading “The Branches, the Axe, the Missing”