April 7, 2017
This Is Who You Are: On Pete Fromm’s Memoir The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 272 pages. $25.99. At the age of twenty, Pete Fromm embarked on his own personal coming-of-age adventure, ditching the comfort of his dorm […]
March 31, 2017
Aphorism’s Enduring Instant: James Richardson’s During
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016. 102 pages. $16.00. For some time now, James Richardson has been reinventing the art of the aphorism in what he terms “vectors” or […]
March 31, 2017
“Our own long American sentence”: On Janine Joseph’s Driving Without a License
Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2016. 100 pages. $15.95. Janine Joseph’s debut poetry collection Driving Without a License explores liminal spaces inhabited by an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines coming […]
March 24, 2017
Mortal Panic: On Don DeLillo’s Zero K
New York, NY: Scribner, 2016. 288 pages. $27.00. Over the fifty years Don DeLillo has been publishing novels, thoughtful readers have come to consider each new book of his in […]
March 24, 2017
On Brightfellow by Rikki Ducornet
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2016. 176 pages. $15.95. There’s an old saw about universities being places where everything matters so much because the stakes are so low. The sense […]
March 17, 2017
Play Plus Time: Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special
New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2016. 224 pages. $25.95. Every November for the past sixteen years, a group of twenty-two men have gathered at a two-and-a-half-star hotel chain off Interstate […]
March 17, 2017
“These things should be kept in history before the people”: On Daneen Wardrop’s Cyclorama
New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015. 82 pages. $45.00. A precursor to 3D film technology, a cyclorama is a large-scale image that encircles the spectator and often includes actual […]
March 10, 2017
The Pier Leaps Out: On Monica Fambrough’s Softcover
Boston, MA: Natural History Press, 2016. 91 pages. $14.00. In “The Short Answer,” John Ashbery’s speaker says, “Why make things more difficult / than they already are? Because if it […]
March 10, 2017
On Melville in Love by Michael Shelden
New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2016. 288 pages. $25.99. It would be difficult to find someone who doesn’t know that Herman Melville was a great writer and that his greatest masterpiece […]
March 3, 2017
On Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt by Yasmine El Rashidi
New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group/Tim Duggan Books, 2016. 192 pages. $22.00. The subtitle of Yasmine El Rashidi’s subtle, powerful Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt sets […]
March 3, 2017
“I wish more poets would write about money”: On The Market Wonders by Susan Briante
Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2016. 116 pages. $18.00. In the opening prose poem of Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders, “Towards a Poetic of the Dow,” the poet offers an organizing […]
February 27, 2017
February Micro-Reviews
Joshua Bennett. The Sobbing School. Penguin Random House, 2016. 96 pages. $18.00. As you wander The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett beware of ghosts; the layers of history sidle up […]