“Let Me Clear My Throat: Essays,” by Elena Passarello
Confession: I spend a lot of time hanging out in a dive piano bar in Oakland, and I can just imagine Elena Passarello, author of a quality new collection of…
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Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
In Washington, D. C. many years ago, Denise Levertov took questions after a reading and was asked if poets were obligated to protest with poetry when their government was acting…
Homebodies by Sarah Jane Sloat
If you open your hands to hold Homebodies, a chapbook of poems by Sarah J. Sloat, you find much about the book itself that makes the act feel personal, private.…
“Open Heart,” by Elie Wiesel
When eighty-two-year-old Elie Wiesel was told he needed emergency heart surgery he was surprised rather than afraid.
Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler
Betsy Wheeler’s Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room has sort of undone me for the month and a half I’ve spent with it, reading it or letting it hang over…
“Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia,” by José Manuel Prieto
In 1988, Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a personal dictionary of his “key words, problem words, words I love.” Not your average lexicon, “Sixty-three words” fuses history, philosophy, social-critique and…
“Love Is a Canoe,” by Ben Schrank
“Love and marriage,” says the song, “go together like a horse and carriage.” Or do they? In his latest novel, Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank casts a critical eye…
My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
In age of poetry saturated with the irony and airy nonsense of the last phalanx of the grandchildren of the New York School, it is wonderfully refreshing to read Tanya…
Now Make an Altar by Amy Beeder
In Amy Beeder’s poetry, we are surrounded by the refuse and remains of the past: memories and photos of lost generations, the bones and fur of animals used to adorn…
“Beamish Boy (I Am Not My Story): A Memoir of Recovery & Awakening,” by Albert Flynn DeSilver
The story of an artist’s search for identity, Beamish Boy opens with that classic trinity of WASP dysfunction: old money, alcohol abuse, and remote parents. The author’s earliest memories conjure…
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it…
“Descanso for My Father,” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Like the dreamlike shadowboxes of Joseph Cornell, Fletcher assembles scraps of imagery and inherited keepsakes into an enchanting quest to understand his family’s stories. Yet the abundant images with which Fletcher crafts his essays serve best as they buttress the unknown.