NewPages Book Reviews
Posted 1 February 2012
Against the Workshop
Provocations, Polemics, Controversies
Nonfiction by Anis Shivani
Texas Review Press, October 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1-933896-72-4
Paperback: 300pp; $24.95
Review by Patrick James Dunagan
Admitting his aim is to provoke, and filled with acidic
rectitude, Anis Shivani rants on in Against the Workshop
about what demonstrably awful affects MFA programs have upon
American writing. Under his analysis, the entire academic system
of American letters appears corrupt: a viral sham in which all
involved would feel ashamed if only they weren’t so mired within
its murky workings. Shivani’s not exactly wrong—his points are,
for the most part, well made, and there’s no doubting his
sincerity. Yet despite the at-times attractive bluster Shivani
coats his commentary in…
[Read
full review here]
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Half in Shade
Nonfiction by Judith Kitchen
Coffee House Press, April 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1566892964
Paperback: 214pp; $16.00
Review by Ann Beman
A fan of Judith Kitchen’s Short Takes, In Short,
and In Brief anthologies of flash nonfiction, I could not
wait to get a hold of Half in Shade, which—it turns
out—is not your standard memwah. Rather, it is a
collection of prose poems disguised as essays, the only
difference between the two being how they’re typeset on the
page. Kitchen characterizes it as “a series of lyric pieces
written variously to, from, or around old photographs found in
family albums and scrapbooks.” Whatever you call them, each of
the lyric tidbits develops before the reader as if with toners
and fixers and gelatin-silver…
[Read full review here]
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St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped
Poetry by Ann Cefola
Kattywompus Press, August 2011
ISBN-10: 1936715074
Chapbook: 31pp; $12.00
Review by Alyse Bensel
Within this brief but multitudinous chapbook, Ann Cefola
contemplates ordinary existence alongside the sacred. In 28
poems of varying form—some splaying across the page, others in
neat, organized stanzas—St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped
investigates the constant buzz and movement of modern existence
through these lyrical narratives. The world of schoolboys,
make-up counters, hotels that may appear familiar is elevated
into something of greater importance…
[Read full review here]
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The Tin Ticket
The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women
Nonfiction by Deborah J. Swiss
Berkley Trade, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0425243077
Paperback: 384pp; $16.00
Review by Lydia Pyne
In the late eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth centuries, the
British Empire exiled close to 162,000 men, women, and children
under the Transportation Act to serve their prison sentences in
Australia—simultaneously ridding Britain of an overcrowded
prison population and providing the Empire with expendable
colonists. In The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s
Convict Women, Deborah Swiss picks up a particularly
poignant, and oft overlooked, aspect of this period. The Tin
Ticket tells the stories of four early nineteenth-century
women…
[Read full review here]
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In the Absence of Predators
Fiction by Vinnie Wilhelm
Rescue Press, October 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0-9844889-64
Paperback: 156pp; $14.00
Review by Wendy Breuer
Vinnie Wilhelm's “Fautleroy’s Ghost,” included in his short
story collection In the Absence of Predators, first
appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review. I remember
reading it and feeling great affection for a writer who could
encompass an empathetic account of the doomed revolutionary
faith of both Leon Trotsky and Patrice Lumumba within a
Hollywood spoof. Ben Stuckey leaves his leaky living room in
Seattle to pitch his script for a bio-pic of Trotsky…
[Read full review here]
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Starring Madame Modjeska
On Tour in Poland and America
Nonfiction by Beth Holmgren
Indiana University Press, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0253356642
Hardcover: 432pp; $39.95
Review by Patricia Contino
Prior to audio and video, theatre history is a frustratingly
silent one. Reviews, illustrations, journal entries,
photographs, designs, and prompt books are helpful—and rare. But what about the performers and performance? For Maria Modjeska (1840-1909), her “binational” acting
career was fairly well-documented in her native Poland and
adopted America. A talented, ambitious, and generous spirit, her
pretty face sold picture postcards and candy. Modjeska’s
immortalization was furthered by a guest appearance in Willa
Cather’s…
[Read full review here]
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Exhibit of Forking Paths
Poetry by James Grinwis
Coffee House Press, October 2011
ISBN-13: 978-156689-280-3
Paperback: 79pp; $16.00
Review by Gina Myers
It is impossible to think of forking paths without recalling
Borges’s garden of innumerable possibilities. And so in James
Grinwis’s second book of poems, Exhibit of Forking Paths,
selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the National Poetry Series, it
makes sense that we find a poetry of possibilities and
alternatives, a bit of play, an interest in “what the sounds
mean before the definitions of sounds,” and a space where things
can simultaneously be and not be. The title poem, which opens
the book, presents different lives captured on numbered tablets,
with the speaker coyly stating…
[Read
full review here]
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Lucky Bruce
A Literary Memoir
Nonfiction by Bruce Jay Friedman
Biblioasis, October 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1926845-31-9
Hardcover: 290pp; $26.95
Review by David Breithaupt
The title of Bruce Jay Friedman’s new “literary” memoir,
Lucky Bruce, is an understatement. All the old adages about
luck come to mind, you make your own luck, some are luckier
than others, etc., but when you read Friedman’s life story
you can’t help but agree: Bruce is one lucky guy. One of the
foundations of Friedman’s “luck” is an incredible talent for
writing. As the author of numerous novels, short stories, plays,
essays and screenplays, Friedman now adds a memoir to his cache
and provides a sweeping view of his creativity and life,
beginning with his 1930s childhood in the Bronx…
[Read full review here]
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The City, Our City
Poetry by Wayne Miller
Milkweed Editions, September 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1-57131-445-1
Paperback: 104pp; $16.00
Review by James Crews
The principal aim of The City, Our City, the latest
poetry collection by Wayne Miller, is to construct a difficult,
philosophical poetics that most audiences will have trouble
wrestling into meaning. I have no problem with being pleasantly
mystified or even confused (Lynn Emanuel’s latest work baffles
me even as I gasp with wonder), but this book straddles a fine
line between unsettling readers and completely turning them off.
Since Miller’s previous volumes, especially The Book of Props,
have won praise from many circles (including The New Yorker),
perhaps he need not worry about losing readers…
[Read full review here]
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Disclosure
Nonfiction by Dana Teen Lomax
Black Radish Books, December 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0982573174
Paperback: 81pp; $15.00
Review by Aimee Nicole
Disclosure is by far one of the most interesting
books I have ever read. It should perhaps be called “Full
Disclosure,” as Lomax presents us with so many fragments from
various areas of her life. Some pieces disclosed to us are FAFSA
forms, an acceptance letter into the Peace Corps, pay stubs from
several different jobs (including Taco Bell), student reviews of
her teaching skills, bank statements, and medical forms. Lomax
has no qualms about baring all of the personal, private
information in these documents…
[Read full review here]
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Drunken Angel
Nonfiction by Alan Kaufman
Viva Editions, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1936740024
Hardcover: 360pp; $25.00
Review by Audrey Quinn
It’s clear within the first few paragraphs that Alan Kaufman
has no intention of holding anything back in Drunken Angel.
The book brings the reader into his life as a young writer, a
soldier in Israel, a husband, an addict, and finally a father,
with many more twists and turns throughout. There were moments,
while reading, that I disliked things he did and had I met him
then, I probably wouldn’t have liked him very much. However,
Kaufman’s willingness to open up so completely to his reader, to
put himself in such a vulnerable position, won my respect…
[Read full review here]
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The Day Before Happiness
Fiction by Erri de Luca
Translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore
Other Press, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1-59051-481-8
Hardcover: 175pp; $16.95
Review by Olive Mullet
Erri de Luca’s The Day Before Happiness, a
bildungsroman set in Naples after WWII, shows both memories of
the war and the city at that time, focusing on characters in an
apartment complex. It also offers poetic insights along with
humor. The lyrical style ultimately doesn’t distinguish the two
main characters, even though one is a boy and one his
caretaker/mentor, but the humor does distinguish another
character in his nouveau riche ignorance. Our narrator is an unnamed orphan (only referred to as
guaglio, short and generic for boy/young man) whose
education in this book ends…
[Read full review here]
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Already It Is Dusk
Poetry by Joe Fletcher
Brooklyn Arts Press, September 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-00-7
Paperback: 52pp; $8.00
Review by H. V. Cramond
Brooklyn Arts Press has entered the business of publishing
chapbooks with a collection about endings. Joe Fletcher, whose
previous publications include the chapbook Sleigh Ride
(Factory Hollow Press), evokes in Already It Is Dusk a
world drunk on its own decay, whose fields are “abandoned by
sowers” and whose “soldiers stare blankly at the smoldering
embassy.” While not as bleak as, say, Blake Butler’s Scorch
Atlas, this world is peopled with monsters such as “Ben Nez
the Winged,” who threatens to suck the breath from that poem's
narrator…
[Read full review here]
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Hypotheticals
Poetry by Leigh Kotsilidis
Coach House Books, October 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1-55245-249-3
Paperback: 96pp; $15.95
Review by Alyse Bensel
In Hypotheticals, the scientific method breaks down
into a scattering of hypothetical circumstances. Leigh
Kotsilidis’s debut poetry collection delves into the reimagining
of knowledge and personhood, questioning, on an elemental scale,
the configuration of the world. A variety of formal and free
verse poems, Hypotheticals takes a hard yet lyrical
look at the creatures and objects that inhabit our planet,
inviting the reader in to experience these strange and
surprising sensations…
[Read full review here]
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The Cisco Kid in the Bronx
Episodes in the Life of a Young Man
Fiction by Miguel Antonio Ortiz
Hamilton Stone Editions, January 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0-9801786-9-2
Paperback: 206pp; $16.95
Review by Paul Pedroza
The Cisco Kid in the Bronx is a Caribbean emigrant
bildungsroman that at moments may remind the reader of the
classic collection Drown by Junot Diaz. Ortiz’s
collection certainly fulfills many of the conventions of what
could be considered a Caribbean Diaspora literature. The subtitle of this book is Episodes in the Life of a
Young Man, and although I didn’t find it to be useful, it
does lend the reader an idea of how a good deal of these stories
operates. Certainly too many read more like vignettes than
stories, but they all contribute to the understanding…
[Read full review here]
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Lunch Bucket Paradise
Fiction by Fred Setterberg
Heydey Books, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1597141666
Paperback: 256pp, $15.95
Review by Audrey Quinn
In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg gives a
vivid description of life in California from the 1950s-1960s.
Setterberg’s style of writing quickly pulls the reader into his
world. I’ve never been to California, my parents were born in
the years when his story begins and I seemingly have nothing in
common with Setterberg’s experiences, but that doesn’t matter at
all. The people in his “true-life novel” are so vivid that
almost instantly you understand how their minds work and their
relationships to each other…
[Read full review here]
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selected unpublished blog posts of a
mexican panda express
employee
Poetry by Megan Boyle
Muumuu House, November 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0982206720
Paperback: 96pp; $12.00
Review by Aimee Nicole
selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express
employee is a collection of unpublished blog entries that
teeters between poetry and prose writing. Rarely do I come
across writing that can pass as both styles, which is
interesting. There are no capital letters in the entire book,
which adds to the informal tone. Assuming the collection is
autobiographical (as it stems from blog posts), Boyle is a
23-year-old bi-curious stoner who records her life. It is one of
the most honest pieces I have ever read; she even lists every
single person she has had sex with, never leaving out minor
details…
[Read full review here]
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