Reviews
-
Russian Winter
In this “magnificent” first novel, an aging ballerina looks back on life, betrayal, and loss in the former Soviet Union.
-
A Conversation So Imperfectly Understood
Rosanna Warren’s tautly elegant poetry in her collection Ghost in a Red Hat captivates me. Warren does not aim for obscure language and obstructed meaning; she carefully and clearly reveals her intent in writing her poems.
-
The Fates Will Find Their Way
“It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.”
-
Have Gun, Will Travel
Deb Olin Unferth’s ruefully funny memoir revisits the year she followed her boyfriend into the war zones of Latin America.
-
Glass Is Really a Liquid
The hard thing about these poems is that they make sense, fundamentally, but they’ve got a strange, skittering-away sense to them, a resistance to being pinned down.
-
Until There Is No Next Thing
Imagination is not simply a bulwark in Cradle Book; it is a means through which Teicher actively transcends the blight suffered throughout the work.
-
Fission Accomplished
A collection of linked stories set at Fort Hood convey the loneliness and strain experienced by military families.
-
I Felt a Need to Touch Someone
An aspiring writer’s memoir of September 11 focuses on the strangeness of life in New York City before and after the attack.
-
Your Frills Are Made of Bone
The Haunted House… tumbles through a teenage-girl world, giddy and feverish, at times drunk on foiled friendships and empty kisses, and at others sober with the knowledge that this tumultuous frolic is lamentably (thankfully?) temporary.
-
The Intimates
Ralph Sassone’s first novel explores the devastating emotional craters of first love, and the bumpy, baffling relations between the generations.
-
The Foreign Skin of the Familiar
What’s most delightful is how Rader balances the heaviness of that observation against the lightness of the characters of Frog and Toad. Absurdity and lyricism, humor and serious contemplation, bump up against one another in pleasing ways.
-
Only Human
“For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret. He felt the secret exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he knew a decision had to be made.”