A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Pieces
A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz (Akron, 2012) by Nick Ripatrazone Dislocated Identities, Found Personas Edward...
View ArticleTo Clare, a Rehearsal
Die lieder sind verweht . . . (“The songs trail away in the wind”) — O Kuhler Wald Johannes Brahms, Opus 72, no. 3 I am sorry to disturb you so...
View ArticleConfederado by Casey Clabough
Recommended by William Wright Casey Clabough’s first novel, Confederado, is the story of Alvis Benjamin Stevens, a confederate soldier of central Virginia who returns home four months after the...
View ArticleBring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Recommended by Sarah Kennedy If you love the Tudors, you will probably like Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies. The sequel to her Wolf Hall, the book continues the story of Henry VIII’s secretary...
View ArticleFor the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Faber and Faber) by Nathan Englander
Recommendation by Sophie Xiong 2012 must be a banner year for Nathan Englander. He has (at long last) come out with his second collection of short stories titled What We Talk About When We Talk About...
View ArticleThe Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead (Algonquin)
Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star convinced me that Robert Olmstead can write as well as anyone around about the solitude, the boredom, the hellish waiting and the sheer horror that beset men at...
View ArticleNightwoods by Charles Frazier
Recommended by Andrea Siso Nightwoods Review The lean, taut narrative of Nightwoods creates a story in which the setting holds as much spark as the characters, and is the central factor that brings...
View ArticleThe Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)
Caveat lector: I seem to be in a meddlesome mood. And from the starting gun, I don’t want you to think that I’m recommending this book for the reader primed for precise and evocative, character-driven...
View ArticleThe Chameleon Couch (FSG, 2011) by Yusef Komunyakaa
Reviewed by Philip Belcher Komunyakaa Review Erudition as Disguise On occasion, an eager and adept reader happens upon a poetry collection that satisfies immediately. The lyric intensity of individual...
View ArticleTrophy
This prized fish on the wall in our suburban split-level is a rainbow trout, an identification I know because my husband made a point of telling me this, more than once, when he brought the fish home...
View ArticleSecure the Shadow by Claudia Emerson LSU Press (2012)
Reviewed by Lisa Russ Spaar Claudia Emerson’s poems have always stalked liminal territories—abandoned houses, vestigial buildings reclaimed by wildness, bodies caught in birth and death throes, the...
View Article“A House upon the Height–”
A House upon the Height recording —Emily Dickinson The fence that runs the road hems the house in, thigh-high grass and clover tight, pushing back through the wire slats. The farmer’s wife next door...
View ArticleThe Pointer
“The Pointer” received the 2nd annual Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Short Story. Swallows fly in and out the broken windows of a V-12 silvered by weather, our great-grandfather’s ancient Sunday...
View Article“I am holding onto the gut.”
wetatuhneesáhUt. I am holding onto the gut. Wah. Once they were accepted they were allowed inside—White men. D. D. Mitchell, Indian Agent, among them. They sent a boy. The Arikara men. Bear...
View ArticleNightingale Capability
Italy, May, 2011 We’ve been in Bogliasco a week before we understand the bird that’s wakened us each miserably early morning is a nightingale. I am pleased by this just as I was years ago, when I had...
View ArticleFirst Person
One lies on one’s back in the woods, savoring the sun, and for some reason one has opted for what Fowler calls the “false first person pronoun”—one, that is, over the other. One brushes an ant from...
View ArticleMine
I am a woman; I am a mountain, I hover over you, a thumb laid hard across the thickest vein that pulses fuel down your neck. I’ve locked my knees beneath oceans, and for nine hours at a time, I’ve...
View ArticleFirst Lessons on a Whore’s Mouth Harp
The best still play all tongue, and most with old love letters and lungs. But sinners choose to kiss all tooth and grind that steel as pelvic bone, or bit, or even burden. Coo arrives less like a doe’s...
View ArticlePeregrine
Peregrine (audio introduction 2012) I saw Melvin Wood, The Tree Man, in Mall Mart while I was buying travel size toiletries for my upcoming Cruise to Nowhere. To keep him from seeing me, I turned to...
View ArticlePassage
John Casteen– Passage Bollard & bulkhead, cormorant & clew, spindrift, scene: the pitchkettle Tropic of Capricorn. The city. The sea in its unsurprising windrows; the glyph of the break-...
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