Reviews Archives - Page 147 of 219

Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion

Anne Champion’s dazzling first book of poetry, Reluctant Mistress, offers readers a thought-provoking revision of the love lyric, rendering this rich literary tradition relevant to a postmodern cultural landscape. While…

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Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop

Pirates plunder. Pirates navigate by wit and savvy and force. They intercept us somewhere between where we were and where we think we are going to end up. They are…

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Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva

Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine),…

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“We Live in Water,” by Jess Walter

In 2005, his Citizen Vince won the coveted Edgar prize for mystery fiction. The next year, Walter’s post-9/11 novel The Zero was a finalist for the National Book Award. Last year, his silver-screen saga Beautiful Ruins bowled over both critics and book clubs. Walter seems able to reinvent himself with each book he writes, effortlessly.

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“Ways of Going Home,” by Alejandro Zambra

Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra’s beautiful third novel, is not as simple as it seems at first. With 139 pages, short chapter sections, and wide line breaks, the book…

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Messages by Piotr Gwiazda

When I was young and soft and I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I’d just lie there in bed, swallowing lumps of dread whose shape and taste I had no…

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Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck

Every prison sentence represents compound tragedies involving family members and friends, the affect on the community where the crime was committed, and, of course, the prisoner whose sentence may or…

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“Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall,” by Ken Sparling

When Knopf originally published Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall in 1996, it became a casualty of lousy timing.

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Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two…

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Butch Geography by Stacey Waite

Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese…

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“Both Flesh and Not,” by David Foster Wallace

The ferocity with which scholars, writers, fans, and cultural critics explicate the legacy of David Foster Wallace, or even that a legacy is thought to already exist at all, strikes…

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Murder Ballad by Jane Springer

Because a book of poetry can do anything, I am going to propose that Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad open a hole in the Mississippi River. An impossible hole. Because the…

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