NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Strange Theater brings us a reality where words can deposit you, drop you off, let you move struck by what you know, yet cannot quite believe (this is where we are at?). John Amen is in conversation with us. There is a we, and we have come to a turning point, we of this culture, we of this species, not knowing what we thought we were: Continue reading “Strange Theater”

Reading the surrealist essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s Some Versions of the Ice, one is quick to make comparisons. The most obvious is to magical realist writers such as Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, but there are many other resonances. His essay “The False Pigeon: A History”—a fictional account of a natural history museum—reads like it dropped straight from the pages of George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and the deceptively straightforward expositional tone that he employs throughout—which Michael Martone mentions in his wonderful blurb as a “hyper-rational empiricism [running] stoically and joyfully amok”—often echoes Lydia Davis. Continue reading “Some Versions of the Ice”

Selah Saterstrom’s Slab opens with a gripe, or a warning, perhaps, that the play won’t start. But then it does, and from page one, the story takes off at a breakneck pace and proceeds with all the force of a hurricane. Continue reading “Slab”

Italian novelist Paolo Giordano’s novella Like Family, in spite of its short length, encapsulates as much of life as his well-known novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers. His previous career as a physicist shows up in both works, while in this one, he is married with a small child employing a housekeeper. As the husband, father, and employer, he is the unnamed narrator in the story. The housekeeper, a central character, is also the child’s caretaker and confidante to the couple. The housekeeper is a middle-aged widow whom the narrator refers to Mrs. A while at the same time being named Babette by the couple (after the Karen Blixen story and film about a woman who prepares a fabulous feast to strict, frugal northerners). We do not know the housekeeper’s real name until the very end, which is important: she is family to the couple but they barely know her. Continue reading “Like Family”

“Katherine’s son was about to wrestle a blind boy. . . .” So begins “The Blind Wrestler,” the first short story in Mark Brazaitis’s collection Truth Poker.­ Surprising, intriguing, declarative sentences like this sink teeth into you and don’t let go, until you’ve reached each story’s satisfying ending. In “The Blind Wrestler,” Katherine has an affair with her son’s high-school-wrestling opponent. She regularly meets the handsome young man in a vacant house, “a den of mild iniquity,” where she confronts not only the loneliness in her marriage to a man eighteen years her senior, but also the way she blindly trudges through motherhood toward old age, without enjoying the journey or considering her destination. Continue reading “Truth Poker”

As I sat down with The Revolution Will Have Its Sky by Maria Garcia Teutsch, I was, in the longer term, in the midst of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I could never have guessed Maria Garcia Teutsch’s Revolution would be a perfect pairing with that venerable epic, and yet, much to my delight, it is. The Revolution Will Have Its Sky is, of course, much shorter in length, but it explores and illuminates many of the same themes and dichotomies of Tolstoy’s epic novel, and to similar thought-provoking effect. While that may seem hefty praise, I challenge any reader of Teutsch’s work to disagree that its ideas, comparisons, and discoveries succinctly coincide with those long found in War and Peace. The Revolution Will Have Its Sky is in its own right an enticing, nuanced, and many-layered collection of poems that will keep you satisfied while you read, and deep in thought long after you have put it down. Continue reading “The Revolution Will Have Its Sky”

“Stories, like real life, can strip you of the prettier features of illusion.” This is exactly the kind of line that ensures us we are in capable hands with Githa Hariharan, who narrates her travelogue Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York more as a travel guide, less as the star of her own world. To read this book is to venture on a rigorous journey around the globe and through pockets of time. As a fellow travel writer and having also lived a peripatetic life that crosses continents and hemispheres, this is the best travel book I have ever read. Continue reading “Almost Home”

Part travelogue, part Buddhist meditation, Natalie Goldberg’s latest book, The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life, was published this past February along with the 30^th anniversary edition of her classic title Writing Down the Bones. Through graceful prose and occasional humor, these essayistic memoirs weave between the covers as she tackles a reel of subjects such as death, the promises and faults of Buddhism, stalking, and, of course, writing. Continue reading “The Great Spring”

There is saying that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” derisively suggesting that teachers only resort to teaching because they are professional failures in their chosen fields. But Rick Barot’s Chord is the kind of book that will make readers see the reality that sometimes those who can—like Barot—are also willing to teach. Luckily for us. Continue reading “Chord”

In addition to traditional rain showers, April 2016 will bring the launch of Lindsay Tigue’s book of poetry, System of Ghosts, winner of the 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize. In this, her first book, Tigue has mastered a technique of taking facts—some obscure—and using them as a springboard to wherever her imagination leads her. Judge Craig Moran Teicher says these bits of information are “gathered magpielike,” leading to insight. Continue reading “System of Ghosts”

Bystanders, by Tara Laskowski, due out May 2016, contains thirteen short stories with titles that make you want to see who the bystanders are and what they’re up to. The majority center on young couples, and several pieces would be right at home in the old TV series “The Twilight Zone,” like “The Monitor” in which neighbors see each other’s babies on their own baby monitors. Plus, there’s another strange figure who keeps appearing. Continue reading “Bystanders”

A collection of short stories that drips with artistry and revelatory truths, Where the Wind Can Find It is a masterful exploration of the struggle between who and where we were and are, and who we want to be. Continue reading “Where the Wind Can Find It”

If you half-snoozed through the classics at school, reading Matt Burriesci’s Dead White Guys is a shrewd way to refresh your knowledge. The book is subtitled A Father, His Daughter and the Great Books of the Western World. It includes visits to philosophers and storytellers such as Plato and Plutarch, Montaigne and Shakespeare, John Locke, Adam Smith and other notables. Author Matt Burriesci deftly combines their teachings with his own experiences and ideas to equip his daughter with lessons for a good life. Continue reading “Dead White Guys”

Magdalena Zurawski began writing her poetry collection Companion Animal in a state of doubt about her own abilities as a poet (to cite her final selection from the book, “Dear Reader,”). In 2009, when she was feeling particularly unsure about her abilities to write, a close friend encouraged her to read and write poetry daily and cultivate a loosely-supervised writing routine. The poems that stemmed from this exercise explore the realities of daily life—financial stress, relationships, lost loved ones, and of course, the companionship of a tiny dog—while questioning the relevancy of poetry and the act of writing itself. Continue reading “Companion Animal”

Michael Donhauser is an accomplished Austrian poet, essayist, and critic whose books date back nearly thirty years, but he is not widely known to English readers. It makes him a great candidate for Dichten—Burning Deck’s translation series, which brings this rich and varied collection, Of Things (first published in German nearly twenty years ago), to a needed new audience. It’s a dizzyingly varied work, finely translated by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron. It is philosophically poised but historically informed, personal, scientific, whimsical, and serious—showcasing a real rucksack of literary tools that Donhauser brings into the field with him to sketch, like the plein air painter, his subjects. Continue reading “Of Things”

I used to laugh at the notion of singularity because it objectified the pluralizing concept of always wanting more. Good poetry is like that; it is circulatory, a wheel constantly spinning between the yin and the yang of existence. I don’t mind that one poem is different than the next, only that somehow the wheel doesn’t get stuck and I become lost in the duality of it all. Continue reading “I’m No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance”

The blank page, always a canvas with vocabulary a pallet and creativity the brush, is a daunting image; it is there though, hanging in the balance like a friendship on a tightrope. It is what can be done with such a task that matters the most. And Ben Tanzer emphatically delivers with an unapologetic stroke in his latest collection Sex and Death. Continue reading “Sex and Death”

Phantom pain is one of those peculiar syndromes that has received widespread recognition for its oddness, mostly. Noelle Kocot’s Phantom Pains of Madness trickles and drips with oddity as well, the entire piece written one word at a time. Each word receives its own line, which makes the book very easy to read: a delight in the modern age. It also gives the book a dimension and heft that is incomparable. But Noelle’s humor disarms the reader often and keeps the book light, while its content is quite heavy. This is her seventh book of poetry, and there is no doubt that she has achieved a wringing out of all that isn’t her. Phantom Pains of Madness is a truly original work and a very rewarding read. Continue reading “Phantom Pains of Madness”

Sometimes our roots are someplace else and we craft our whole lives in places away from our original source like outsiders wishing earnestly to ‘belong.’ We absorb a lot of what is new and retain or let go of our past. Generations pass, the memory of the roots begin to get weaker, yet it filters through families, countries, history. History absorbs the effects of immigration and narrates his stories, her stories, their stories. We meet people, engage in relationships, progress through situations, and separate moments from our different lives converge at common points of emotional realizations. Continue reading “The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal”

The mythic and the humane combine in Startle Pattern to create an arrow of divination that pierces the heart of injury and healing. Larissa Szporluk delivers prophecy in the form of bone, loss in the form of tone, and violence in the form of stone. Continue reading “Startle Pattern”

Annie Guthrie’s first book The Good Dark is a rhythmic journey where darkness occupies the spaces in between silence and belief, morphing into the things needed most: sand, sight, star. Guthrie’s haunting sonic landscape shakes the foundation of belief, and gives darkness a cadence to its face. Continue reading “The Good Dark”

In June of 1933, American boxer Max Baer and German heavyweight Max Schmeling, a former world champion, fought a highly publicized bout in front of sixty thousand fans in New York’s Yankee Stadium. Schmeling was Hitler’s favorite fighter and was favored to win. In the days leading up to the fight, Schmeling told American reporters that stories of Germany’s persecution of Jews were untrue. Max Baer, in a move that was part publicity stunt and part sincere act of defiance, sewed a large Star of David to his trunks. Baer’s subsequent victory over Schmeling became an international symbol of Jewish resistance to fascism. One year later, Baer, still with Star of David on the left leg of his trunks, became heavyweight champion of the world. Continue reading “Max Baer and the Star of David”

At first I was baffled by Mark Statman’s style—succinct, clipped verses, and scant punctuation. But as I progressed through the pages of his new poetry book That Train Again, his poems took on more meaning. Having published numerous books of poetry and now teaching literary studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, Statman’s skill and experience shows throughout this collection. Continue reading “That Train Again”

David Armand’s third novel The Gorge follows the publication of his 2013 novel Harlow, and his first novel The Pugilist’s Wife, which won the George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press. Continue reading “The Gorge”

Furo Wariboko is a Nigerian man living in his parents’ home in Lagos. Like many young Nigerians, he is looking for work. He wakes up one morning to find that overnight, he has transformed into a white man. Barrett’s premise—to explore how Furo’s aesthetic metamorphosis does or does not affect personal change—could produce serious explorations of race’s role in contemporary Nigerian society, as it does. But Barrett’s literary skills are many, and he has produced a first novel that is both contemplative and comic. Continue reading “Blackass”

In Four-Legged Girl, Diane Seuss’s latest book of poems, we move from the rural country of Wolf Lake and into the city, where the speaker shows us her younger self lounging on red velvet sofas, parading in pink leopard print pants, and generally swapping naivety—this is, after all, a book that opens with a jump rope song—for misdeeds, true love or, in a pinch, ecstatic moments. And in the interstices, there is wisdom to be found here as well, the kind of wisdom that one misfit passes along to another. Continue reading “Four-Legged Girl”

Check out your favorite bookstore in May. That’s when Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy: An Essay on Love by David Lazar will be available, and it’s one fun book. Though it’s subtitled an essay, his ninth book is written in a series of short prose poems that mesh bits of autobiography with strong portions of mythology and dreams, accented with songs and movies. Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy”

The January 16, 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live included the skit “America’s Funniest Cats.” The week’s guest host Adam Driver played the emcee of a TV program spoofing the long-running America’s Funniest Home Videos, only here the felines’ dignity prevailed whatever their selfie-obsessed humans did to them. Driver’s two guests (SNL regulars Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon) played hosts of an artsy French, existential spin-off. While the blond-wigged Driver and the two series regulars were silly, the audience audibly cooed and giggled over the cats’ antics. Continue reading “Cat is Art Spelled Wrong”

Margaret Malone’s debut short story collection visits places we all recognize but don’t always think about or allow a second thought. Most likely you will find kindred spirits in these pages and acknowledge situations you may have forgotten or tried to repress. A case in point, the title story, People Like You, finds a young couple (Cheryl and Bert) invited to a friend’s surprise party. “Friend” is a loose term as the narrator explains, “we have no friends,” she confesses, “we have acquaintances from work, or old friends who live in other cities, or people who used to be our friends who we either borrowed money from and never repaid or who we just never bother to call anymore because we decided we either don’t like them or we’re too good for their company. We are not perfect.” Continue reading “People Like You”

At the beginning of his life, Bunkong Tuon was caught in the takeover of Cambodia by the Communist Party of Kampuchea under Pol Pot. At three, his mother died from starvation, his father remarried and remained in Cambodia. His grandmother carried him out of Cambodia to a UN refugee camp in Thailand when he was six or seven (he cannot remember precisely). From there, a Christian sponsor brought him to Massachusetts. He has no specific memories of his parents. Continue reading “Gruel”

Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife amalgamates the slang of the centuries. Jennifer Nelson is an art historian with a Twitter feed and some resolve. The title is apt to produce a complex thought system about the nature of relationships. Philosophy majors may recall Heracles shooting the poison arrow at Nessus, the centaur trying to force himself upon his wife. Nessus lies to the woman and deceives her into killing her own husband. Whether the extrapolation is made unto interpersonal living, it can certainly be seen intrapersonally.  Continue reading “Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife”

Tony Hoagland has been high on the list of established poets for years. The great thing about his poetry is the way he takes simple vocabulary and channels it into something amazing or disquieting or droll. He frequently writes what the rest of us might be thinking. In his latest book, Application for Release from the Dream, he demonstrates this in the poem “His Majesty.” Continue reading “Application for Release from the Dream”

There are linked wounded wonderers wallowing in the unsympathetic world inside the pages of this illustrious collection of short stories. In King of the Gypsies, Lenore Myka writes each story with passion and an abundance of knowledge for the Romanian culture. Her haunting tales depict the realities of abandonment and the continuous search for something better. Continue reading “King of the Gypsies”

What initially drew me to Melissa Reddish’s recent book was the title: My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud. It resonated with me, and I was happy to learn that this title is also the title of one of the short stories in the book. I will admit that I initially rushed past the first couple pieces to get to it. I was not disappointed. “My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud” is poignant, and thankfully not in the “oh woe is me” way. This story was clearly delicately crafted to avoid hitting the reader over the head with “daddy issues.” In this snapshot of her life, I got a well-rounded sense that this character existed before the scene she appears in. It is clear that this character has scars from her past, that they re-open all the time, and that she struggles to stitch them up even as an adult. To get that grand a sense of a life already lived within six pages is pretty remarkable. Continue reading “My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud”

Innovative forms written by literary warriors like Kate Colby illustrate the breadth of structural opportunities in contemporary nonfiction. In the case of Colby’s I Mean, the writer approaches poetry with dynamics and patterns perhaps otherwise expected of prose, and even repeats those techniques in prose. Continue reading “I Mean”

Race and Identity are two separate functions of description, but in our times, hardly. There is a war between nations, inside of nations, and ultimately inside of each individual. In the forthcoming Hardly War, Don Mee Choi details the interior of the life of a young girl in the middle of war. This is no mere reduction or retelling. The metaphor stands that we are all hardly adults. Perhaps hardly human. The complex war machine has turned us into THE BIG PICTURE and reduced us: “It was hardly war, the hardliest of wars. Hardly, hardly.” Continue reading “Hardly War”

The only thing certain to drive somebody insane (or to at least let them think they are crazy) is to make them forget they are doing something different than what somebody else has done a hundred times before. Continue reading “sad boy / detective”

Set aside your preconceived ideas of a circus. Sure, clowns, animals, and oddballs populate In the Circus of You, an illustrated novel in poems, but the words and drawings are a revelation. Poet Nicelle Davis and artist Cheryl Gross, each seeming to have a circus within themselves, team up to create a fantastic mini-world combining reality with illusion, and not always in a fun way. Continue reading “In the Circus of You”

Don’t be confused by the title of Christopher Deweese’s The Father of the Arrow is the Thought—taken from a line by Paul Klee, it suggests poems that might be characterized by a singular trajectory, a martial swiftness that lands us with a wobbling after-strike in our target. And a cursory glance at the poems pretty much supports this—all of them take the form of relatively skinny columns that shoot with a severe straightness down the page. Indeed, we are going somewhere, and pretty fast. But a look at the rest of that Paul Klee quote gives us something which complicates this sense of motion: “How do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?” Continue reading “The Father of the Arrow is the Thought”

In Heather Christle’s fourth and newest collection of poems, Heliopause, speakers acknowledge boundaries, and then promptly confront them. The title itself pertains to “the boundary between our sun’s sphere of influence and interstellar space” (via book jacket). These poems acknowledge some of history’s haunting topics—the aftermath of 9/11, the events upon the slave ship Zong, the 2012 Aurora Shooting—and yet the collection as a whole manages to balance out the darkness with a voice that is full of wit and refreshing candor. This collection showcases the versatility of Christle’s creative talent, and maintains a sense of balance and composure amidst “the terrified world.” Continue reading “Heliopause”

The poems in Smote speak of loss and the wanting of more life, even if it is like this, a poignant neutrality that can leave us in shreds. The backdrop is Jackson, Mississippi. Deftly dealt with are the issues of class, interracial relationships, poverty, alcoholism, broken families, the lifeline of friendships, a black mother who loves and feeds a poor white boy not only dinner, but shows him how to live, “Ms. Anna, who loved me for no reason that I understood [ . . . ].” Under the chance and horror of daily life, we are shown a light that never goes out. Continue reading “Smote”

If you Google search Montana Ray, there is a good chance you will find a (guns and butter) shower curtain. This lends to the understanding of concrete poems and their relationship to the modern dialogue in poetry. Concrete poems, or shape poems/visual poems can be considered the bastard child of literature. An exercise in class that only the nerdy kids take seriously. A fun exercise that is just that: an exercise. However, in subverting this notion, Montana Ray finds the means to exalt the depraved and to tyrannize the tyrannical. Continue reading “(guns & butter)”

Pressgang’s Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson, is one of the most fun reading experiences I’ve had all year. Those who read Flashed after its February 2016 release will likely be saying the same thing as they look back at their year’s reading history next December. Continue reading “Flashed”

Kathleen Halme’s My Multiverse opens with a marvelous set-piece, a multi-part cycle (that comprises the entirety of the first section of the six-sectioned book) titled “City of Roses” that begins with that tender invitational, “Dear,” and from there pans its camera over the big and small, visiting with different characters and embracing the ambience of different scenes all within the same city, Halme’s own Portland, Oregon. It’s a gesture in line with the great urban works, like Ulysses, which endeavor to sketch the cultural, emotional, and physical anatomy of a city: “Blocks and blocks of ornate iron-front buildings. / Shanghai traps and tunnels. / Iron horse rings to which someone / has hitched tiny plastic palominos.” Continue reading “My Multiverse”

I have always found Hoa Nguyen’s poems surprisingly comfortable to inhabit, considering the challenges they can offer, and Tells of the Crackling, a lovely little hand-stitched chapbook from Ugly Duckling Presse, is no different. Spare, elliptical—not exactly breezy, but roomy—these poems are a bit like walking over a brick path gone uneven from the undergrowth, fresh and tentative vegetal shoots sending trajectories of thought this way and that. Indeed, there is a dual “crackling” of both spring and autumn that characterize the poems, a light and almost sickly feel, a mind not quite right, the sound of tea being made in the background. Continue reading “Tells of the Crackling”

I have always found Hoa Nguyen’s poems surprisingly comfortable to inhabit, considering the challenges they can offer, and Tells of the Crackling, a lovely little hand-stitched chapbook from Ugly Duckling Presse, is no different. Spare, elliptical—not exactly breezy, but roomy—these poems are a bit like walking over a brick path gone uneven from the undergrowth, fresh and tentative vegetal shoots sending trajectories of thought this way and that. Indeed, there is a dual “crackling” of both spring and autumn that characterize the poems, a light and almost sickly feel, a mind not quite right, the sound of tea being made in the background. Continue reading “Tells of the Crackling”

Ada Limón’s fourth collection of poems, Bright Dead Things, faces discontentment, nostalgia, and longing in the face of a changing environment. The speaker examines her place in a varied world littered with its fried pickles, wide expanse of blue skies, fields full of fireflies and the stars they mirror. Limón brings us a world we recognize. Where the death of a loved one comes flooding back over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, where animals suffer, where we leave small pleasures in old cities, and where life goes on despite all of it. Continue reading “Bright Dead Things”

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) wrote novels, plays, and the Israel Haggadah for Passover still in use and in print for over 40 years. Fig Tree Books, a publisher specializing in titles relating to the American Jewish experience, recently re-issued Levin’s Compulsion, his 1956 bestseller fictionalizing the names (including his own as a reporter for The Chicago Daily News) but not the facts of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1959) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) followed the same author-in-the-nonfiction/novelization crime formula, producing some of their best writing. After subsequent “Crimes of the Century” involving celebrities and troubled young men both rich and poor that the media treats like celebrities, Compulsion is a reflective experience. Continue reading “Compulsion”

A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation is the third chapbook in a series that pairs two female poets, one well-known and the other a rising talent. Molly Peacock is widely anthologized and published in leading literary magazines in addition to her six volumes of poetry. She also helped create New York’s Poetry in Motion program. A decade ago, Peacock mentored Amy M. Clark. Meanwhile Clark’s poetry book won the 2009 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.

Continue reading “A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds”

Here’s the solution for people who love to read fiction but haven’t the time or inclination to plow through a novel or even a standard length short story. The Best Small Fictions 2015 lets you peruse 55 short stories—some are as tiny as a paragraph or a sentence. The longest stories in this digest-size book are four pages. Continue reading “The Best Small Fictions 2015”