Reviews
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Twin Cities by Carol Muske Dukes
Muske-Dukes’s book seems the perfect read for this time of year when the year is winding down, yet life is still rumbling forward.
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On Pointe, and in Limbo
Martha Schabas’ Various Positions is an excellent novel about performance anxiety and sexual development disguised as a young adult novel.
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The Glory of the Sunken
Set in a profane and beautiful world of uncertain values—a world that resembles ours but is in fact post-World War I Bucovina—Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol is a delight.
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They Sing Wild Songs In New Keys
Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue.
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Perceptive and Prophetic
Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight.
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A Halfway House Where No One Leaves
In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means…
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The Art of Shame
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation considers the humiliations of our lives and culture – from Liza Minelli to Eliot Spitzer to his own father.
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Profoundly Compassionate
If you harbor desires for truly deserved happy endings and sharply drawn prose, then you will relish every page of Liz Moore’s new novel Heft.
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Decades of Nothing Between
These poems are often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives.
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My Fruit Bat, My Gewgaw
These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea.
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Adventures in the Narrative
Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane.
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My Affairs Are Just My Questions
And it is a voice—perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience—that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.