NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

An albino woman, a dwarf named Toad, and two Italian prisoners of war on a rabbit-ridden farm in the nether reaches of Australia: what could be a better premise for a novel? Setting such a bizarre and unique concept at the center of a piece of fiction is a bold strategy, but Goldie Goldbloom’s debut novel, Toad’s Museum of Freaks and Wonders, never falls short of the mark. The winner of the 2008 AWP Award for the novel, it is apparent from the first few pages that you are in the hands of a master; Goldbloom writes with clarity and complexity, balancing abstract questions of identity, love, and value with a tensely developed plot and rich characters. Continue reading “Toad’s Museum of Freaks and Wonders”

The poems in Bobcat Country sling readers into a humorous yet serious exposition of American culture that mocks relationships between American capitalism and pop culture, the American family, and the “business” of contemporary poetry. Continue reading “Bobcat Country”

In one of the many aching, tender scenes in Mattaponi Queen, a woman goes to Wal-Mart with her husband, who is dressed in drag. He’s about to have a sex change operation and the public shopping expedition is her way to support and process his decision. Later, she wonders: “How old do you have to be to understand how love works?” Continue reading “Mattaponi Queen”

Dawn Raffel's newest collection of short stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, is an intriguing look at relationships. The spare, unfussy prose explores familial boundaries, the complicated connections between mothers and their children, sisters, aunts and great aunts, husbands and wives. The mundane matters of every day existence – taking a child to a museum or carving a pumpkin, a phone call to catch up, a day spent at the beach, learning to drive – fill up Raffel's prose; each story occupies only a few pages (in some cases only one), but each moment captured by her prose completely fills up the whole space. Continue reading “Further Adventures in the Restless Universe”

I was reading The White Visitation in the Detroit International Airport, waiting for my flight to Charleston, when the Iraqi gentleman on my left nudged my arm. “Is that the bible?” he asked. Continue reading “The White Visitation”

The gift that Patrick Madden gives us in Quotidiana is the gift great essayists have given us for centuries and that is the elegance of a mind at work. The essays Madden offers in this new collection are essays in the most traditional, classical sense. They do not traffic in the far-fetched or the bizarre, competing with reality television to hold our attention with a cacophony of sound, nor do they rely on the story to bear the weight of their subject, rather they investigate the way ordinary experience confounds and delights us, once we stop and pay attention. Continue reading “Quotidiana”

kari edwards’s last book, Bharat jiva, was published posthumously. The book represents a leap in style, control and application of language, and scope of address and content over hir earlier works, disobedience, iduna, and a day in the life of p. For example, whereas obedience continually lists and refines those lists, working from inclusion and exhaustion, Bharat jiva has a huge scope, a generous posing of questions against lists. Continue reading “Bharat jiva”

Scientific metaphors are invisible pitfalls for most poets, mainly because the average writer is unable to grasp how wildly ridiculous his or her musings and conjectures are. Reciprocally, poetry put forth by physicists, if sincere, can leave one rather cold. Fortunately, Amit Majmudar easily sidesteps both problems in this wonderful collection by having both a real scientific background and genuine empathy, creating a coherent work with sustained intellectual and emotional focus. Continue reading “0º,0º”

Lisa Olstein's Lost Alphabet is a serious meditation. All 90 pages of poetry have the same short paragraph form with a bracketed title that informs and sometimes subverts the poems. The setting seems post-apocalyptic in a quiet sort of way. There are no Mad Max renegades, but there is an unnamed narrator who moves to the edge of some pre-industrial village of horse traders where people dance to music made with a “dull spoon on the side of a pig.” The narrator is obsessed with the study of moths. The goal of this study is at first unclear, but as the narrator focuses more on the project, more questions arise. Continue reading “Lost Alphabet”

Sing, Mongrel, Claire Hero’s first full-length collection, proposes a central conceit where the born and the made merge to make a disturbing and lovely hybrid music. Continue reading “Sing, Mongrel”

Of all of the Iowa Poetry Prize winners I have read, Molly Brodak’s A Little Middle of the Night may be the most stunning, the most complete and beautiful package; every poem in the book is a gem and they all fit together to form a simple and elegant volume that I am pleased to have in my collection. Continue reading “A Little Middle of the Night”

Life of a Star presents itself as a series of short ramblings of the narrator, who is also the main character. The ramblings could even be called diary entries as they are the thoughts and desires of the narrator. The main character is a woman who imagines herself to be an actress, something that is evident throughout the book. Continue reading “Life of a Star”

“All along, along, there were incidents and accidents, there were hints and allegations.” – Paul Simon, “Call Me Al” Graceland Continue reading “Hints and Allegations”

In Six Lips, the poet Penelope Scambly Schott explores opposites and interconnectedness, in all its many forms. Her opening poem, “Compass” points us in that direction. Continue reading “Six Lips”

It is very easy to lose yourself in the brave, lonely world of Allison Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship. Her spare and questioning aesthetic is pleasing, and her subjects bristle just enough to provide a wonderful chemistry. Throughout her poems, she maintains a careful beauty and distance, and she creates a unique world of displacement, longing, and ultimately, survival. Continue reading “Sum of Every Lost Ship”

Ange Mlinko’s previous books have earned her much praise and fanfare and it does seem like she deserves it. Her third book, Shoulder Season, is sharp, entertaining and engaging. Her poems are timely and important. There are very few poets who can accomplish this feat. She is grappling with the world as it is. The landscapes are chaotic but the messages are not didactic. Continue reading “Shoulder Season”

In this debut collection, characters deal with pain in bizarre ways. A suicidal woman seduces a man in a coma. A lawyer drops pennies on passersby from the window of his office building. And in the title story, the teenage male narrator declares: Continue reading “If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home”

The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is under a porch, is between the fridge and the cupboard, is hiding among the coats and sweaters in the tilted closet above the basement stairs. Its shapeshifting and heartbreak is nightmarishly microscopic and horrifically asymptotical. Continue reading “The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits”

Pulleys & Locomotion, Rachel Galvin’s first full-length collection, finds delicate grace balancing on that titular ampersand. As pulleys are a tool of motion and locomotion is movement itself, so this collection asks us to stop and consider not just the trajectory, but first what enables it to occur. Continue reading “Pulleys & Locomotion”

Tara Masih’s short fiction has appeared in a number of well known journals for over a decade now, but Where the Dog Star Never Glows is her first collection of fiction. It does not disappoint. With seventeen stories, variety is the best word to describe this slim volume. The settings range from colonial India, to present-day Dominica, to the ‘60s USA, with lots of side roads taken. Though the prose style is consistently traditional – form is played with only slightly, and reality is always, more or less, real – the characters, themes, and content vary pleasantly, creating a dynamic and interesting collection. Continue reading “Where the Dog Star Never Glows”

Anton Waker’s parents are dealers in stolen goods, and his devious cousin Aria recruits Anton’s help in setting up a business forging passports and social security cards. But all Anton wants is to be an ordinary corporate drone, living a simple, lawful life. He quits Aria’s business, gets himself a fake Harvard diploma and snags a job at Water Incorporated, determined to go straight. He gets engaged to a beautiful cellist with the New York Philharmonic and looks forward to a mundane, middle class existence. Continue reading “The Singer’s Gun”

“I almost fainted with desire and fear” writes Julie Carr in her 2009 Sawtooth Prize-winning 100 Notes on Violence, and in doing so sums up the experience of reading the 116-page collection. In fragments, lists, quotations, facts and chunks of prose, Carr offers up a reflection on not just violence, but on protecting ourselves and our innocence from it. Continue reading “100 Notes on Violence”

It’s an understatement to say that Edip Cansever isn’t very well known in poetry circles (whatever those are), nor any more so in the specialized area of Turkish literature. Reading the introduction to Dirty August will give you some helpful background on the latter, but to appreciate Cansever’s poetry one has only to peruse Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin and Richard Tillinghast’s translations. While I can’t vouch for their fealty to the native language – that would be an issue for a different kind of review, couched in quibbling over semantics – I can say that what Tillinghast fille et père have kindly bequeathed English language readers, through these eminently readable translations, is a beguiling peek into the work of a “Second New” wave poet (who died in 1986), one espousing a secular vision more philosophically aligned with European existentialism than with Ottoman empiricism. The Tillinghasts are long-time aficionados as well as scholars of Turkish idiom and culture, and their love for Cansever’s writing is readily apparent in this slim, yet potent volume. Continue reading “Dirty August”

For me, it’s rare for an author of fiction to accomplish “soul-touch,” but Olga Tokarczuk does just that with her captivating spiritual imagery and layers of characters that touch the heart-depths of readers’ imaginations. Primeval and Other Times is an award winning novel (first published in the 1990s) that takes place in a mystical Polish village guarded by four archangels through the 20^th century. One particular passage woven within her mythical tale that stands out is almost a summarized subtext of Tokarczuk’s mastered, descriptive sensory writing style: Continue reading “Primeval and Other Times”

Few books can be called “page-turners,” and even fewer books of poetry can claim that sobriquet, yet that is exactly what Mihaela Moscaliuc has managed to do with her debut collection, Father Dirt. Continue reading “Father Dirt”

In the Presence of the Sun brings N. Scott Momaday’s work to a new generation of readers. Momaday, a novelist and poet from the Kiowa tribe, combines the mainstream modernism of American poetry with an oral-language inspired reference to Kiowa and other Southwest Native American traditions, particularly the Navaho. Continue reading “In the Presence of the Sun”

I must start here by proclaiming my love for the publishers of this book: Burning Deck Press. I have nothing but respect for the press and the great poets who run it. There are many presses operating today, but Burning Deck is refreshing for its consistent integrity and taste, and Jennifer Martenson's first full-length collection of poetry, Unsound, is another strong release. The politics of Martenson are well-thought out and exciting, and her poetic forms are fresh and unexpected. Most of the poems in the final section of the book have vivid imagery and a strong voice, though I do wonder if the poet occasionally relies too heavily on visual tricks rather than engaging language. Continue reading “Unsound”

"But we have sensible reasons for not breaking out into the huge freedom of irregular shapes – once done we would no longer have the aid of our machines, tools and simple formulae." Steve Baer, a fellow-traveler of "the droppers," wrote these words in 1968 to describe the unorthodox architecture at Drop City, but the same quote can be applied in hindsight to the social experiments occurring there. Droppers provides a comparative look at Drop City and other communal ventures in America's past. Mark Matthews asserts that Drop City failed because it did not attempt to learn any lessons from past communes. The droppers intentionally charted out a new society without utilizing the "tools of history"; the commune took on an "irregular shape" that ultimately led to its destruction. Continue reading “Droppers”

Kate Greenstreet’s deeply elegiac second full-length poetry book The Last 4 Things is an expansive meditation on a life’s moments and memories flashing before one’s eyes, but very slowly, each one lingering. The tone, wounded without being outraged, urgent but not desperate, gives the sense that what is being described is from the deep past. Some of it may be, but much of it is reflection also of how life should be lived, present tense. Descriptions are by turns elemental (“We worshipped these names as the names of our gods”) and domestic (“because we had the rakes, / we had to stop every little while and / do some raking.”). While the speaker and the characters drifting through the poems are artistic, they are portrayed also as earnest and industrious. Passages feel like they are pulled from black and white snapshots, yellowed pieces of paper, American rural life. Continue reading “The Last 4 Things”

The Abyss of Human Illusion is a novel only in the postmodern sense, consisting as it does of fifty short narratives. Though the prose in terms of style and diction is traditional, the form challenges literary standards; the fifty pieces progress in size from approximately 130 to 1300 words over the course of the novel, as if the author had planted some verbal seed early on that germinates and sprouts with each successive page. The composition and editorial process is also non-traditional, as Gilbert Sorrentino passed away before fully finishing the novel and his son, Christopher Sorrentino, finished the work for him. Christopher’s preface illuminates not only this particular novel, but his father’s writing process in general, serving as a fitting tribute to a notable career. Continue reading “The Abyss of Human Illusion”

One lingering aesthetic argument posits that popular culture has no place in poetry – that by adding references to current movies, TV shows, or common-day jargon – to things as disposable as Styrofoam or SpongeBob – the poetry itself runs a risk of becoming outdated, or perhaps worse, inevitably obscure. But what ultimately matters is how skillfully the poet chooses to use his or her referents. Tony Hoagland is particularly adept at incorporating pop culture into his poems. Like one of those jugglers who keeps their audience on edge by tossing knives into the air, Hoagland regularly risks injury as well as insult, often with dazzling results. Even the less successful of Hoagland’s poems are better than average; what they might lack in verbal oomph they make up for in readability, and what they all evince is a sincerity of emotion and purpose that is as rare in modern literature as it is thoughtful. Continue reading “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty”

Odom Shiloh is not the most successful or ambitious guy. He’s pushing 40, his second marriage is on the rocks, and he works as an Assistant to the Assistant Coach for a miserable high school football team. And life only gets worse when Odom runs over a French bicyclist and, inexplicably, flees the scene of the crime. Continue reading “Drag the Darkness Down”

An Unfinished Score is not a novel to get lost in. It is a tough novel, well-written, with major and minor rhythms coursing through it to carry the plot. It is broad and narrow at the same time. It is an exploration of grief, the history of music, being an artist, the concept of hearing, and the emotional life of a woman torn between her every day and a fantasy world. Continue reading “An Unfinished Score”

“All my life I have acted wrongly, very wrongly,” Nester opens this collection, threatening us with a voice that suggests a morose combination of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. The tone is confessional, and not a little self-hating, and perfect. For Daniel Nester is the rarest of humorous essayists: he’s actually funny. He also happens to be a fine poet, and a keen authority on popular music, and his writing in How to Be Inappropriate radiates the kind of intelligence and insight that inspires a reader to conduct his own self-examination vis-a-vis inappropriateness. Continue reading “How to Be Inappropriate”

Mark Statman’s first collection of poetry, Tourist at a Miracle, is an enjoyable read filled with Frank O’Hara-ish observations of the everyday, or perhaps more like Bukowski sans booze and racetracks with a little James Schuyler thrown in. Statman’s book is filled with poems that are not to be feared, but instead quench a thirst for big ideas stated simply, that anyone can understand and ultimately use. Continue reading “Tourist at a Miracle”

This debut novel from Deborah Noyes is a must for any fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne closes his story with Hester Prynne returning to New England’s shores while her daughter, Pearl, remains overseas, with wealth and a child of her own. It is from this moment of possibility that Noyes undertakes her own mission, to remove the ambiguity about Pearl’s character and explore the actuality of that closing scene. Continue reading “Angel and Apostle”

I don’t usually fall in love with a book before I’ve even opened its cover. But it just happened with Lynn Wagner’s chapbook, No Blues This Raucous Song. This is a jewel of a collection – albeit a tiny one. From the deep red cover, to the gold and ivory pages, to the crisp letters and evocative poetry inside, every element of this collection is beguiling. Continue reading “No Blues This Raucous Song”

This was a book where the narrator expressly stated that he wanted to tell the story of the last moments of Adela Rugama’s life. For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be a murder mystery and was a bit surprised when I found out it wasn’t. So within the first couple of chapters the reader knows Adela Rugama is dead, knows who did it, and also has a vague idea of the reason behind her murder. Even though there was no mystery to figure out, the book kept my attention. I was impressed with the way a seemingly simple story about a woman who was murdered kept me reading longer than I intended. Continue reading “Meet Me under the Ceiba”

When I began reading this, I was expecting a biography, although a closer inspection of the subtitle, “A memoir,” should have clued me in that Silverstein and Me was not a typical biography. And how could it be? Marv Gold tells us “he was an outsider and a loner.” Silverstein only did two interviews in his lifetime, both to the same university magazine, one of which is included in its entirety in the memoir. Writing an “accurate” biography of someone completely open is complex as it is, but given the “recluse” status that Silverstein earned while he was alive would make writing his life story utterly impossible. But Gold does a fantastic job of evoking Silverstein through his anecdotes, and we are able to get to know the famous author through Gold’s words as well as anyone probably could have. Continue reading “Silverstein and Me”

Reading Genine Lentine’s collection is like drinking deeply after a hike through the desert: refreshing and shocking in the way you didn’t realize how much you needed it until you had it. From concrete poetry to lines shaped likes the ripples of swords cutting through the air, Lentine manages to create an immediate and personal world within the pages. Continue reading “Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments of Splashes”

The epigram for Slaves to Do These Things brings up the quiet matter of love. In the poem that King quotes – Charles Baudelaire’s “Beauty” – the poet likens himself to “a dream of stone.” His hard breast is made to evoke love from other poets. This love, being “mute and noble as matter itself,” is one with the body it has inspired. In “Beauty,” the matter or subject of poetic love has merged with the matter or atoms of the body. The meeting place of atoms and ideas is familiar territory for King whose poems explore the line between the concrete and abstract. In King’s poetry, however, matters of all kinds – intellectual, material and political – are not always noble, and rarely are they mute. Continue reading “Slaves to Do These Things”

What’s this? A miniature gift book? That’s exactly how smug and loved I felt Valentine’s Day weekend when I opened up my NewPages reviewer envelope and discovered a novelty postcard-size stowaway jewel: Helen Barolini’s Hudson River Haiku. I was immediately transported to a mind getaway with Barolini’s simple turns of phrase, striking verbs, knack for colorful, condensed descriptions and the beckoning watercolor illustrations of Nevio Mengacci, an Italian artist. The reading experience is also textural since it’s printed on stippled watercolor paper stock. Continue reading “Hudson River Haiku”

With their directness and precision, their attention to what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” Joseph Young’s microfictions might be mistaken for Imagist poems, but with their shift away from showing “things” as “things” toward “things” as something else, or, rather, toward portraying both the “thingness” of the thing and of some different “thing,” his miniatures suggest something altogether different. But where they fit is less important than what they do, how they make you feel. In Easter Rabbit’s miniatures, its sharp sentences focused on often mundane details, Young offers epics. Seemingly channeling William Blake, he offers further “auguries of innocence,” further testaments to worlds in granules, heavens in flowers, and – well, suffice to say, these are sentences to linger over. Continue reading “Easter Rabbit”

Christine Hume’s language, “alive and lying,” takes us – shot or shunted – down into night, the imaginal-space of gestation. Mina Loy’s daughter-poet, Hume composes a Baedeker of the body pregnant, mapping a haunted landscape with a language she makes strange, dream wording a dream world: “I hear myself coming from your thoughts . . . Skull pockets that burn without warnings.” Continue reading “Shot”

The beauty of Graciela Limon’s writing lies in her unadorned, tell-it-like-it-is style. While you’re reading, you don’t get tripped up and mesmerized by crafty phrases and descriptions so original that you have to stop and think in order to actually see them. All you see in The River Flows North is character. People. Their painful pasts, difficult voyages, and hopeful futures. Continue reading “The River Flows North”

Tsim Tsum derives its title from an idea in Kabbalah that a being cannot truly exist unless the creator departs from his creation. This must refer to the fact that the two main characters, Walter B. and Beatrice, seem like abandoned children left to find their way through a fairy-tale landscape of allegorical friends and props. Rather, the spirit must have left them and their world midway through creation, as both characters have just enough intelligence to be confused. This is the central dilemma of Tsim Tsum. Continue reading “Tsim Tsum”

Selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series, Sarah O’Brien’s debut book of poetry appears at first glance to be an extended meditation on photography. The collection is divided into seven sections, with each one made up of lyric poems investigating what it means to see something – to capture a moment, even if it’s blurred. Continue reading “Catch Light”

It seems fitting that this debut short story collection by Lori Ostlund won the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction, because Ostlund’s writing has a classic, timeless feel to it that would not have been out of place in O’Connor’s time. The title story, the first story in the book, could have been written last week or fifty years ago. Ostlund creates an eccentric nanny, Ilsa Maria Lumpkin, charming enough to rival Mary Poppins, though life for her two charges, Veronica and Martin, is no fairy tale. Ostlund writes with great sensitivity about children, and the inability of adults to understand their point of view. In addition to the title story, “The Day You Were Born” and “All Boy” both deal with a child’s view of their parents’ crises; in the former, a young girl copes with her father’s mental illness and the resulting disintegration of her parents’ marriage, and in the latter, an effeminate eleven year old boy copes with the stigma of being different, at the same time that his father admits that he is gay and moves out of the house. Continue reading “The Bignessof the World”

This volume, which won the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize, features six pieces that bring the realities of human nature into focus. It is the realities, not the dramatics, that Glasser writes about. His stories have familiar surroundings, familiar people, and are written in prose that is a flowing, melodious tune – one you could hum. Continue reading “Dangerous Places”

I can honestly say Death at Solstice by Lucha Copri has taught me something. I like mystery novels. I’ve avoided reading them if I could for most of my life because I thought I didn’t like them. Now, this is not the first mystery I’ve read, but it did confirm that I enjoy the genre, something I’d been wondering about recently. It’s likely that having started reading this thinking that I didn’t like the mystery genre may have led me to being more critical of this story than I normally would have been towards a novel. Having said that, there were a great many things about this novel that I did enjoy. Continue reading “Death at Solstice”