Reviews
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“Baltics” by Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer’s Baltics, a long poem, first appeared in 1974, but this time around Samuel Charters has added a new afterword to his original translation, and his wife Ann Charters has included photographs from 1973 of Tranströmer and his wife at…
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“The Map of the System of Human Knowledge,” by James Tadd Adcox
It is the most human tendency to impose order and organization where there is none, conjure sense out of nothingness, and James Tadd Adcox submits to this urge in The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. As a former…
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“The Apothecary’s Heir” by Julianne Buchsbaum
A winning selection in the 2011 National Poetry Series, Julianne Buchsbaum’s The Apothecary’s Heir interrogates the wildness of nature, the decadence of urban sprawl, and the necessity of myth and history in our daily lives. While her third collection maintains…
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“The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson,” by Bryan Furuness
I went to Catholic school, damn it. They guilted me good and thick. In junior high, the young priest who led the boys’ sex ed talk referred to masturbation as “wasting God’s seed.” Even thoughts could be dangerous, as what’s…
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“Sweet Tooth,” by Ian McEwan
Page-turner thrillers of all stripes trade on nimbly accelerating plot mechanics and narrative sleights-of-hand that highlight the gap between what eventually transpires and what readers (and, often, the intrepid hero) initially believe or anticipate. At the onset, Sweet Tooth’s essence appears…
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“As Long As Trees Last” by Hoa Nguyen
Seattle’s renowned independent press, Wave Books, recently published Hoa Nguyen’s third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last. In it, Nguyen once again dares to experiment with form, structure, and language to bring us a collection of genuinely…
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“Unbuilt Projects,” by Paul Lisicky
“It is hard work to be dead,” writes Paul Lisicky, referring to his mom. “She should have been in training for this, instead of putting her feet up in front of the TV, eating crackers.” It is hard work to be…
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“50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
I’ve visited exactly half of the states that make up our federal constitutional republic. I’m counting states that I’ve lived in, vacationed in, or merely driven through. Some of the states on my list are among the most beautiful places…
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The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman
The recent glut of apocalyptic novels has encouraged readers’ desires to become armchair spectators to doom. Our front-row seats at the end-of-days enable us to cheer for the scrappy protagonist survivors as we nurture fantasies of being singled out for…
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“Mortality,” by Christopher Hitchens
An amorphous aura resonates around authors we discover on our own. Before we hear of their fame and talent, before everyone recommends their book as a “must read” we find their book, lost, broken, beat up in a pile of…
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“What Is Amazing” by Heather Christle
What Is Amazing by Heather Christle is another illustration of my frustration with the word “critic,” why I think “appreciator” is a closer approximation and why I’m still open to one-word suggestions. Christle was born in 1980 and has two…
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“The 6.5 Habits of Moderately Successful Poets,” by Jeffrey Skinner
You might be forgiven if, like a kid looking through the newspaper for comic strips, you return to this book only to enjoy the humorous lists, tables, and other extras that punctuate the text. Like “The Periodic Table of Poetic…