NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

From California publisher Heyday Books comes New California Writing 2011, the first of an annual publication that aims to be the America’s Best of writing from the Land of Fruits and Nuts. The book compiles poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; some are taken from larger works, others from newspapers and weblogs, and at least one is a commencement speech. Continue reading “New California Writing 2011”

When an artist produces only one piece of work and when the work is anywhere close to stunning, it’s hard not to see it as representational of “promise” and lament what could have been. Daniel Jones authored only one collection of poetry during his lifetime and published it under his last name. Jones was twenty-six when it was published; after The Brave Never Write Poetry was originally published in 1985, he never again published a poem (though he did publish fiction). His sole collection was beautifully republished by Toronto’s Coach House Books in 2011. Continue reading “The Brave Never Write Poetry”

They Could No Longer Contain Themselves brings together the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest and four of the finalists from the fourth annual contest, resulting in an off-beat, varied, and vital flash fiction collection. The work presented here by Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller shows a range of style and concerns; however, each author presents work that is lively and engaging, making this an essential collection to anyone interested in not just flash fiction but fiction in general. As Rose Metal Press editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney write in the preface, “For all of the differences in writing style, technique, and theme, the characters throughout these five chapbooks are barely contained and bursting out.” Continue reading “They Could No Longer Contain Themselves”

Selected as the winner of the open competition award for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Smith Blue is a compelling collection about love and loss. The poems are prefaced by two quotes on loss, one from Gwendolyn Brooks and another from C.D. Wright, then moves into the short poem “After Opening the New York Times I Wonder How to Write a Poem about Love.” The poem details how the speaker hopes to love—“like God can love, sometimes”—and invites the reader to “Turn the page. / Turn another page,” concluding that “this was meant to be / about love. Now there is nothing left but this.” The introductory quotes and poem prepare the reader for the themes of love and loss that follow. Continue reading “Smith Blue”

Manuel de Lope’s novel The Wrong Blood is about family secrets, set just before and after Spain’s Civil War, in the Basque region. As the author says in the introduction, “The circumstances include the death of a loved one, a rape, and a birth with disastrous results.” This is a story of women dealing with the effects of war, one rich, one poor, who nevertheless come together to help each other reach their dreams. A doctor living nearby is witness and also complicit to the strange agreement the two women make. Long after the death of one of the women, a young man’s arrival at the women’s house is enough to unravel the secrets of the past. Continue reading “The Wrong Blood”

When reading the poetry of Nate Pritts, one gets the sense that his drive to write poetry originated from the ecstatic strain of the Beat Generation, namely through the poetry of Philip Whalen and the Ginsberg of “Supermarket in California,” as opposed to the more apocalyptic strain personified by Burroughs and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” This is the strain that has it that all of nature and even some man-made objects are imbued with a holy light and the possibility of transcendence. This is a source of yearning and salvation for Pritts, as he writes in the first poem of his fourth book, Big Bright Sun, “There are literally / hundreds of roses I could pick today // or leave for tomorrow & the evening / of a different year, the purple evening.” In the book, this is especially true of the sun: Continue reading “Big Bright Sun”

From the beginning, Hadbawnik’s book offers itself as a tale of self-discovery: the precocious journey of a young poet brimming with literary-mindedness working towards further developing into a mature, aware-minded, somewhat older poet dutifully reporting back as his development continues. Unfortunately, rather than further sharpening and developing insights on writing or living, the work loses focus as it progresses and is worse off for it. Continue reading “Field Work”

The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage is a work of fresh travel writing, a sort of intellectual pilgrimage. In the book, Robert Isenberg—a teacher and playwright in Pittsburgh—journeys to meet up with his high school friend Amila in Sarajevo. Rather than flying directly to the Bosnian capital, he begins his trip in Athens in order to criss-cross the Balkan states, educating himself and his readers on the people, places, and history of the region. Continue reading “The Archipelago”

Undone aptly describes the poems in this collection; they are poems of depth and density, stories told by a master storyteller, connecting the incidentals in life to the more profound. As a storyteller, Scates includes dialogue in many of her poems—“Friday Night Fights” recounts a conversation with friends during a game of Scrabble, which becomes more significant to the speaker, as he finds himself “doing my father imitation” with “everyone laughing / because I’m good at it though maybe feeling guilty / because no one knows it’s the anniversary of his death.” The imitation, something done as a joke during a Scrabble game, reveals deeper memories and pain in the speaker’s life, as he remembers his father as a “clown of a drunk.” Continue reading “Undone”

The twenty-two prose pieces collected together in Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me were originally published on the “Missed Connections” section of Tuscaloosa’s Craigslist, and as such they follow the form established there—titled by the location where the missed connection occurred and the tag M4W (man-for-woman). Because Craigslist deletes posts after 45 days, the pieces, which were published every other day, began to disappear just after the final piece went up. The ephemeral nature of the project parallels the ephemeral nature of the moments where connections were missed, where they continue to be missed. Continue reading “So You Know It’s Me”

In Thin Kimono, Michael Earl Craig’s third book, Craig is a kind of Whitman for post-Google America, where everything is exchangeable and incongruous elements continually collide, creating an equalizing strangeness where no one thing is more important than another. This strangeness, however, doesn’t remove Craig from the world, but rather is his method of being in the world. Continue reading “Thin Kimono”

In Christina Hutchins’ first full-length book, the speaker contemplates the development of the self within the body’s dissolution over a lifetime. Less abstractly, the poet-speaker interweaves meditations of aging within familiar surroundings which are themselves growing older, of slowly losing her father to Alzheimer’s while simultaneously finding renewal in her ripening love for her girlfriend. In the face of her life’s constant material change, she often sees a moment’s “beauty…in the distortion,” and she hears in the “small silences between waves” “the black hole in me.” And faced with the certainty of her loss, the speaker desires the clarifying sort of beauty found only within the quiet: Continue reading “The Stranger Dissolves”

To Make It Right examines the significance of words said and unsaid, as the speaker navigates the relationship between her family and heritage in a modern world. In coming to terms with past grievances and uncovering the harsh reality of religious persecution, Hales creates strong images that resonate throughout the collection. First-time and experienced readers of Hales will find her command of language succinct yet lyric, an enjoyable experience. Continue reading “To Make It Right”

While Short Bus may not be a typical beach read, that’s exactly where I took this strong fiction collection by Dark Sky Magazine fiction editor Brian Allen Carr. I read this book on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the sand, in the sun, despite its lack of sunny-ness. It was that good. Continue reading “Short Bus”

Ann Scowcroft’s debut collection overlays simple language with the depth and complexity of family relationships. Centered in interactions with family and close friends, Scowcroft captures a sense of regret in presenting broken and austere images of the home. The Truth of Houses demonstrates how a poet can explore how relationships continuously change throughout the course of a life, providing rich and multifaceted people that populate its pages. Continue reading “The Truth of Houses”

Daniela Olszewska’s chapbook The Twelve Wives of Citizen Jane is a collection of poems written in couplets with each poem, as the title implies, dedicated to a wife of Citizen Jane. The number twelve holds mystical, cultural, and religious significance: 12 tribes of Israel, 12 Olympians, 12 Apostles, 12-step programs, 12 imams, the number of studio albums released by the Beatles. There is this same mythical quality to Citizen Jane’s story—we feel Citizen Jane is a vessel for a story, that she is representative of something bigger than just herself. Continue reading “The Twelve Wives of Citizen Jane”

Dreams of Molly is a slim, somewhat befuddling novel. Narrated by a man (an “impatient” writer) who “dreams” constantly of his ex-wife (the Molly of the title), each night/chapter finds him in strange and complex situations, all circling around her mirage. Each chapter ends abruptly, as if being pulled out of a dream, and so the novel is elliptical, chasing and never finding either Molly or any sense of stability. Baumbach is a word magician; he expertly builds suspense very quickly, though like most dreams, he rarely concludes or fulfills in any expected manner. Continue reading “Dreams of Molly”

Home/Birth is a wonderfully intimate term that invites an exploration of the body and the space it inhabits. When I first noticed this book, I was struck by this term, not yet knowing that this book is literally about the physical act of home-birthing. When I began to read the book, I was comforted to find that its content matched the intimacy of its title. From the start, the reader is placed in the midst of a conversation between Arielle Greenberg, Rachel Zucker, and various other voices which are frequently quoted by the two authors. The conversation is very personal, often detailing individual accounts of birth both at home and at the hospital. Continue reading “Home/Birth: a Poemic”

The creation of an entirely new form of performance art—drawing from modern dance, spoken word, and architecture—provides a provocative debut novel by Kirsten Kaschock. Sleight attempts to address the ever-pervasive issue of how art should function in and respond to the tragedies of the modern world. With an array of characters depicted in lyrical, short language, the novel unfolds in traditional from, small plays, word sequences, and boxes filled with words that experiment with the novel form in a self-reflective manner, allowing further introspection. Continue reading “Sleight”

Though hardly a household name in the U.S., Ludvìk Vaculìk is probably best known first among historians for his provocative publications during the Prague Spring in 1968, and then among the more eccentric students of literature and journalism. Even then, he’s not recognized for writing, but for championing modes of literature: samizdat, the precursor of underground DIY zines, which enabled Prague writers to thrive under harsh censorship, and the editorial street-beat columns known as Feuilleton. A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator, published in 1987, collects Vaculìk’s feuilletonic samizdat essays for an English audience. Continue reading “The Guinea Pigs”

Tom Limbeck, a social worker in New York City, lives a mundane life. His office life constrained ever more by budget cuts, his social life limited by his own depressive and obsessive tendencies, his world is restricted and hemmed in. But one thing fascinates Tom: a homeless young man named Michael who becomes part of his caseload. Such is the premise of A.G. Mojtabai’s novel Parts of a World. Continue reading “Parts of a World”

I don’t claim to understand all of Sommer Browning’s poetry, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading her first full-length collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating. Her work is smart and requires some effort to interpret; the eccentric, stream of consciousness writing subtly shifts from thought to thought and challenges readers to follow. And it’s certainly worth the undertaking. Browning’s poetry is flat out funny. For example, in the poem “Sideshow” she writes: Continue reading “Either Way I’m Celebrating”

A painfully articulate and driven first collection, The Language of Shedding Skin employs the powerful force of words to speak about struggles with race and gender. Niki Herd, a Cave Canem fellow, follows in a tradition that engages with lyric and rhythmic language, using song as a guiding principle. In poems that freely range in form yet always possess an emotional depth, this compact debut collection will captivate with its spirited language. Continue reading “The Language of Shedding Skin”

Mid Drift is Kate Hanson Foster’s first book of poems. Written in free verse, the poems are lyrical, dark as they plunge into snapshot memories of her past, and powerful. The poems take place in the city, at night, circling images of water, particularly of rivers, and the narrative, though only seen in glimpses, reveals a betrayal, an affair. Lowell is a recognized influence, in the last poem “Dear Lowell,” where the speaker claims, unconvincingly, to plan to leave the place she has written about so meticulously in poem after poem. The line in “Mill City,” “My mind is filthy with old, dear secrets” encapsulates the book—the speaker simultaneously holds the past “dear” yet recognizes it as “filthy.” Continue reading “Mid Drift”

British author Joan Aiken died in 2004, leaving behind a huge volume of work, including over a hundred books. She began with short stories, and this collection of nineteen tales is a fun introduction to Aiken’s quirky, imaginative style. The word “tale” is particularly apt for these stories; many of them read like old folk tales handed down through generations. Continue reading “The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories”

It takes a while to settle into Chad Faries’ Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years. A memoir that chronicles the author’s itinerant childhood, the book devotes a chapter (including a foreword and afterword, as well as three unnumbered “lost chapters”) to each childhood home. The book’s format is important, as it provides structure for the narrative events, flights of fantasy, poetic imagery, and dreams contained therein. Continue reading “Drive Me Out of My Mind”

It could have gone the other way for Peter Brown Hoffmeister. He could be strung out, in prison, or dead. In his first book, Hoffmeister chronicles his adolescent downward spiral and the events which signaled that he needed to pull up, one way or another, into wild, blue manhood. “When I think about my childhood, I am confused,” he says. “There is a lot about everything I don’t understand.” We readers are game to grapple alongside for understanding, as the author doles out suspenseful moments, employing super-tuned senses, providing rich imagery, grounded reflection, and the tension inherent in a coming-of-age tale in which drugs, violence, and a genetic tendency toward OCD conspire—“I bite my fingernails until they bleed, then I bite them over again to make sure they’re all even. They never bleed evenly enough. There is so much I can’t control.” Continue reading “The End of Boys”

Robert Fisher’s The God Machine takes after Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, with bits of Margaret Atwood’s more modern approach, Oryx and Crake. In The God Machine, a planet is harvested and controlled by “God.” God is, in fact, a computer maintained by a “superior” race of humans. The inhabitants of the planet, bred and brainwashed into submission, lead lives tightly controlled by the computer and its manipulators. That is, until Walter Dodge. Dodge questions, finds the truth, and reveals all, in turn becoming a god-like figure and bringing down the machine. This all happens in “Part 1.” Continue reading “The God Machine”

If a writer addresses conditions of extremity, does that exempt the work from critique, putting it somehow beyond the pale? Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff wrote Holocaust, a volume based on testimony from the Nuremberg Trials. There were times when it seemed to me that collection lacked what Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered a first condition for literature: “poetic transfiguration of reality.” Continue reading “Caput Nili”

Lee Martin’s introduction in New Stories from the Midwest promotes Midwest writers, sometimes overlooked by East Coast literati; however, this collection of nineteen writers illustrates less a sense of the Midwest than daring developments of plot and character, which illustrate contemporary realities. Continue reading “New Stories from the Midwest”

Everything has come before and will again,
But only the moment of recognition is sweet.
—Osip Mandelshtam, from “Tristia” Continue reading ““neither wit nor gold” (from then)”

In trying to locate an American identity, the politics of class infiltrate a collection seeking to amend the impossible with art. The Cold War, Kathleen Ossip’s second poetry collection, tackles the complex socio-economic class status conflicts that have been a staple of American culture for nearly the past century. Combining psychological and sociological documentation of the class phenomenon with past experience, in a relevant historical context, both challenges and informs the reader. Continue reading “The Cold War”

To testify, in the Christian sense, is to tell the story of how one became a true Christian. In the legislative sense, to testify is to provide an account or evidence under oath in a court of law. In his new poetry collection, Testify, Joseph Lease seizes the cultural moment in which one’s testimony is as important as one’s identity, when testimony supersedes identity to the extent that it becomes identity. In our recent moment, we have seen America’s financial cornerstone crumble and watched those responsible (well, some of them, anyway) plead their ignorance and innocence interchangeably, while others have used religious belief systems to shake the very foundational elements of our nation. Continue reading “Testify”

In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina fulfills the promise of the title by returning to explore the paths he traveled while coming of age in Kenya and South Africa. Along the way, he traces the birth of his own desire to write down what he was experiencing, developing a complex narrative in which the personal and the public, the psychological and the political, are intertwined, sometimes joined harmoniously and at other times pulling in opposite directions. Continue reading “One Day I Will Write About This Place”

The close-up begins on the stairway. Forgotten silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) has been lured into police custody for the murder of screenwriter/kept man Joe Gillis (William Holden, the dead narrator in the pool) with the promise of cameras. Trailing her like movie extras are several LAPD officers and an attractive older woman. She and her wide-brimmed hat are the only bright objects in the frame. Moments ago she was pleased landing the exclusive on this Hollywood cougar murder, but her demeanor crumbles watching the demented Norma walk towards the newsreel cameras until her face blurs, then fades. Continue reading “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”

One could describe Richard Froude’s FABRIC as a meditation on memory presented in prose poetry, but this description would elide too many deeply interesting facets of the work. While working from the basis of a consideration of memory’s inherent virtues and flaws, FABRIC creates a space within that consideration for the inspired moment. By “inspired,” I mean several things: the invented, the possibly mistaken, the obsessive, and the associative. Continue reading “FABRIC”

Fiction writers have long used the fairy tale genre as a potent vehicle for innovation and subversion, a trend that only intensified after the post-modern assault on canonical literature launched by Messrs. Barthes and Barth. By the 1960s, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges had already used the stuff of fable and fantasy to breathe new life into old forms, and authors such as Angela Carter and Robert Coover began manipulating both the form and content of classic fairy tales to interrogate and re-imagine some of the most basic assumptions of literary fiction. Continue reading “boysgirls”

Though Kelcey Parker’s collection of short stories, For Sale By Owner, falls comfortably into the genre of discontented housewife lit—tackling subjects such as the disillusionment of a “perfect” marriage, the depression that often accompanies excessive material wealth, or the fantasies people create to distract themselves from reality—it stands out in that it has distinctly well-developed characters who are crafted with beautiful depth. Parker’s writing is thoughtful and highly literary, and she pulls readers into the disappointment of her characters’ lives while maintaining a sense of wry humor and irony. For example, in the short story “Best Friend Forever Attends a Baby Shower,” Parker describes the ache of social rejection and the growling bitterness it inspires: Continue reading “For Sale By Owner”

Rusty Barnes’s Mostly Redneck, is, in fact, not “mostly redneck,” at least not in the way most would think of “redneck.” There are a few yokels, some pickups, a shotgun, but the pages are not inhabited by slack-jawed, one-overall-strap-loose, hill folk. The stories in this collection follow real people in all situations. For instance, in “This is What They Call Adventure,” Bob, who is simple, feeds the hens and meets a girl: Continue reading “Mostly Redneck”

In The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Jennifer Knox reveals a gift for making readers laugh. All 43 poems in this volume display great wit—a possible liability in hands less adroit than Knox’s. Fortunately, while rendering comical scenes, she never sacrifices pathos for a joke. Her poems feature complicated humor that emerges from funerals and interventions. Always keeping in view the high stakes for her speakers—and their friends, parents, and lovers—Knox dances on the edge of the ridiculous, obliging people to laugh at difficult situations for which there are not rational responses. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway”

There’s something to be said for the matter-of-fact voice that short-form fiction so effectively encourages. With it, images and situations that would be surprises if not entirely doubted are accepted without a bat of the lash from the narrator. Continue reading “Alien Autopsy”

A quotation attributed to William Butler Yeats can be found in cyberspace, “What can be explained is not poetry.” At least 63 people have “liked” this quotation, but not me. I appreciate explanation. Susan’s Scarlata’s new collection is bookended by both an introductory “Proem” and end “Notes.” The “Proem” explains that her 64 poems are: “A recoup of the Sapphic Stanza form… They are strung… linked without attempt to present any sum total.” The first poem, “What Is Your Business Here?” begins, “I dreamed I carried a snake / to a burnt cracked tree /…Our needs and wants” include “a plectrum” and we are advised to “throw these bits / in two directions at once.” “Plectrum” is explained in the notes: “A plectrum is a spear point used for striking the lyre.” Continue reading “It Might Turn Out We Are Real”

In a competitive field such as creative writing, where anybody who’s anybody needs to make their name a brand, this anthology makes the monstrous crowds a family, pairing mentor with student. Each person introduces somebody else, and gives some refreshingly personal insider information on how they met and who they are. Instead of a wimpy, some-odd-word-count biography stuck in the back, the reader is provided with a backstory, making the entire collection significantly more personal. Continue reading “Of a Monstrous Child”

Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s fourth full-length book, The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, is a genre-bending collection of what can best be described as lyric essays. In essence, the pieces in this book are enacting the exaptation that they advocate: the exaptation of language to connect with a collective identity, one that allows for new ways of communication that are not hindered by culture/hierarchy/power/history but are inclusive to all. Continue reading “The Concession Stand”

Part mystery, biography, memoir, history, narrative nonfiction escapade, Deborah Baker’s The Convert doesn’t fit in any one category. Like its subject, Margaret Marcus/Maryam Jameelah, the book is a misfit. And like creative nonfiction should, it poses questions, and in wrestling with those questions, it jigs loose more questions, bigger questions, questions that tie you in knots, give you an unscratchable itch, or maybe incite you to hurl something not unlike a hardback volume across the room. In any case, it is a book you want to discuss. Continue reading “The Convert”

Titling a collection of short stories In Which Brief Stories Are Told may seem rather obvious, but Phillip Sterling’s tales of loss, detachment, and mystery reveal the complications inherent in narrative and character, and call into question the relationship between narrator and audience. Throughout, he brings to life characters we ordinarily might not give a second glance: bystanders and passers-by who, like the reader, catch only glimpses of the greater plot in which they play a role. Continue reading “In Which Brief Stories Are Told”

Curses and Wishes, Carl Adamshick’s award-winning debut collection, is driven by brief retrospective and introspective poems, compacting an overwhelming sense of loss in America. Adamshick at once laments and celebrates different ways of American life, ranging from small-town farms of the Midwest to the international scale of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Following in the tradition of American poetry that engages with the American spirit, Adamshick transfers the fervor of Whitman’s long, sprawling lines into short-lined, energetic poems that make for a fast and invigorating read. Curses and Wishes will entrance any reader with concerns for the fate of the American landscape and its people. Continue reading “Curses and Wishes”

Helsinki, as a collection, almost reads as one long poem. The poems are nearly uniform in length and line-length, all one-stanza, lacking punctuation, title-less. The poems are characterized by their drive, their unceasing motion that sweeps the reader along with it. It is the work of an author with focus; the collection’s themes are primarily on love and war. The love object, a reoccurring character, is Julia. The book first begins with discussing war and death: Continue reading “Helsinki”

Fallout from a real revolution can be worse than its cause. Mass murder, reckless replacement of proven agrarian practices, and imprisoning the educated are just a few documented aftershocks. Fictional revolutions and their resulting chaos can be equally atrocious, as it is in Bogdan Suceav?‘s Coming from an Off-Key Time. Continue reading “Coming from an Off-Key Time”

Fanny Howe’s latest work, Come and See, explores themes of spirituality and war with a concern for children growing up in the midst of war-torn countries. Spirituality, a theme that can be seen in Howe’s work as a whole, rises more in the form of a seeker, one questioning religion, rather than an adherent. Continue reading “Come and See”