Reviews
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Maggot
Watching Paul Muldoon’s sentences course across the forms he has set for himself is like watching an elite athlete being put through his paces.
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What We Hack Up We Can Choke Down
It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these poems.
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How They Were Found
“As soon as the wolf forced himself inside her, she sprung her trap, showing him that she too knew what it meant to consume someone whole.”
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Where I Live
Maxine Kumin’s poems about the specifics of life on the farm with family, and relationships to fish, fowl, horse and vegetable matter, not to mention lovely liquids and unappealing solids, are consistently satisfying and sometimes deliciously entertaining.
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Listen to This
Whether writing about Mozart or Björk, punk rock or opera, Alex Ross urges readers to search for the moments when the familiar becomes strange.
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Holding Company
In Holding Company, his third collection of poems, Major Jackson achieves the difficult feat of writing a book that feels simultaneously both intensely personal and yet also archetypally American.
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The Cleverest Man in the World
Donald Sturrock’s biography of Roald Dahl bridges the gap between the literary impresario and the troubled man.
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This Fantasy Is Most Disturbing
In Brock Clarke’s Exley, a boy tries to reunite with his father, and to sort out the difference between fact and fiction.
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C
The hero of Tom McCarthy’s new novel moves through a broken world in which technology is both a wonder and a threat.
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The Man Who Guarded the Bomb
Gregory Orfalea’s collection of linked stories demonstrates that conventions are there for a reason—and it’s often harder to follow the rules than to break them.
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When I Go Outdoors, Light Splits
The poems in This Noisy Egg are always engaging and hold the reader’s attention, but they do not feel un-tethered or dangerous. Reading them, I had the sensation that there was little room for what Stanley Kunitz called “wilderness,” the…
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Paper-thin People
The winner of this year’s Drue Heinz prize writes flash fiction that bursts with poetic imagery and focuses on lust and the death of beauty.