Reviews
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The Mother Who Stayed
Laura Furman’s new concerto of stories, The Mother Who Stayed, ties its parts together in an illuminating and subtle fashion.
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The Icy Hand of Love
In Double Shadow, suffering puts its hypothermic hand on the backs of all living creatures. In that sense, it might help to think of it as a spiritual book, a lyric struggle of an individual in the face of mortal…
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I Knocked On the Walls, In a Circle
The Chameleon Couch proves itself an expertly crafted book from a poet peaking in his awareness and execution of all the tangled dialectics that manifest in his art.
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The Tiger’s Wife
John Wilwol reviews Tea Obreht’s new novel, The Tiger’s Wife, which vibrates with the low rumble of unanswered and unanswerable questions that keeps us up at night.
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Your Worst May Be My Best, or Vice Worse-A
Like the poems it contains, The Takeaway Bin as a whole is a response to something commonplace; one might even say it’s a book of copings with or responses to life.
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Color Plates
Built on a walk through a privately-owned museum, a four-chambered version of art, Color Plates is not an easily defnable book.
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Freak Flag Fly
[T]his is no Rand McNally; what makes the collection exciting is Iredell’s delicious sense of humor, his play with language and the dexterity with which he varies his voice.
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Behold My Clearance Discounts
Nick Demske operates with a kind of magnetic-yet-repulsive force, powerfully driven by various tensions of opposites.
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While the Women Are Sleeping
Doppelgängers, ghosts, and philosophical riddles about the nature of identity make up Javier Marías’ new collection of short fictions.
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The Heart of Nothing Much That Mattered
Alan Heathcock’s stories are linked by the town of Krafton—where missing teenagers hang from trees and all anyone wants to do is get out.
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When Tar Roads Came In Barefoot Age
Les Murray seems to want to make his experiences into some kind of shared history. In fact, this blurred line between personal memory and shared history is the spine to this body of poems.
