Reviews
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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), learning English at the age of 16 when his family…
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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…
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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 looks and reads like a breeze.
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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 way of understanding. To stop my mind from its looping…
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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 may not be appropriate. If the prisoner who is confined…
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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 months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in…
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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 proverb which marks the second of the book’s four sections:…
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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 me as a bit absurd, if inevitable.
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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 poems are going to vacate and fill in the space…
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Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumly
Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with…
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Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation by George Kalogeris
I Scene: The hilltop retreat of the ascetic Skepticus, high above the City. Small, uneven open space amid rocks, center. A rocky path leads upstage left, and, eventually, down the hill. Entrance to a small cave downstage center right. Enter…