NewPages Book Reviews
Posted October 4, 2011
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- Book Type Fiction
- by John Oliver Hodges
- Publisher Main Street Rag
- Date Published May 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1-59948-288-0
- Format Paperback
- Pages 160pp
- Price $8.00
- Review by Patricia Contino
For better and usually much worse, fictional runaway teenage
girls end up on ships bound for the colonies, the big city of
offices and/or brothels, behind enemy lines, or never far from
an estate with a wealthy young landowner. Ruth is the Florida
native taking refuge in an upstate New York commune in John
Oliver Hodges’ neo-Gothic coming-of-age novella, War of the
Crazies. Though set in 1989, the situations this 19-year-old
beauty finds herself in recall those of her literary
ancestresses: growing up too fast, local men and boys falling
hard for her, the hysterical obsessive of love (Silva, who
prefers “meditation over medication”), and a serious household
accident.
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- Book Type Fiction
- by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh
- Translated From Russian
- by Krystyna A. Steiger
- Publisher Twisted Spoon Press
- Date Published June 2011
- ISBN-13 978-80-86264-36-3
- Format Paperback
- Pages 186pp
- Price $16.00
- Review by Olive Mullet
The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh,
translated in many languages since its publication in 1989, has
finally been translated into English this year by Krystyna Anna
Steiger. As Steiger notes, this is a gentle parody of
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but even if the reader
is unfamiliar with that book, The New Moscow
Philosophy is easy reading and full of insights into
literature—particularly the Russian reverence for it. The book
offers a mystery story and a debate, often humorous, over good
and evil. And the reader may have heard of the competition for
apartments in Moscow, which is at the heart of this book.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Publisher Tupelo Press
- Date Published January 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1-93295-58-3
- Format Paperback
- Pages 79pp
- Price $16.95
- Review by Marcus Myers
With “The Secret of Soil,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil opens her
new book of poems, her fourth, within a secret: “The secret of
smoke is that it will fill / any space with walls.” This secret
truly belongs to the poetic imagination, of course, and speaks
to how we daily embody the world, “no matter how delicate” the
space, by giving it breaths of us, taking back lungfuls, placing
ourselves here, and pressing our weight onto it:
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- Book Type Nonfiction
- by Sven Birkerts
- Publisher Graywolf Press
- Date Published September 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1555975937
- Format Paperback
- Pages 192pp
- Price $15.00
- Review by Ann Beman
We’re walking. We’re walking. Like “those colored
paddles and banners (the new tourist universal)” that tour
guides wield to direct their charges’ attention, Sven Birkerts
holds up a metaphorical banner to keep us following along. When
he wanders, it is not without direction. Invoking Robert Frost’s
diverging road: “This morning, going against all convention, I
turned right instead of left and took my circuit…in reverse.”
The author, one of the country’s foremost literary critics and
editor of the literary journal AGNI, links walking with
thought: “There is the rhythm, the physics, of walking, the
drumbeat of repetition, stride, stride, stride, and then there
is the fugue of the walking mind, laid over it, always
different, always tied in some way to the panning of the gaze
and the eye’s quirky meandering.”
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Rebecca Farivar
- Publisher Octopus Books
- Date Published July 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0980193862
- Format Paperback
- Pages 84pp
- Price $12.00
- Review by J. A. Tyler
Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal, released in July
from Octopus Books, is not unexpected or aggressive or raw or
surprising. It is not a collection of poetry that blew me away.
But this isn’t to say that I disliked Correct Animal—in
fact, I liked it quite a bit, and I liked it for not being
unexpected or aggressive or raw or surprising. I liked Farivar’s
methods of quiet, of understatement, the lithe quality of her
poems:
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- Book Type Fiction
- by Patrick Michael Finn
- Publisher Black Lawrence Press
- Date Published July 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0982622896
- Format Paperback
- Pages 220pp
- Price $18.00
- Review by Ryan Wilson
Winner of the 2009 Hudson Prize, Patrick Michael Finn’s short
story collection From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet
includes plenty of dark circumstances, all set in the industrial
sinkhole of Joliet, Illinois in the mid- to late 20th
century. The stories are of the type popular in the early 20th
century literature, when American Naturalism dominated the
landscape. Every character’s fate feels pre-determined, based
upon heredity and social conditioning.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Bernard Noël
- Translated From French
- by Eléna Rivera
- Publisher Graywolf Press
- Date Published October 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1-55597-600-2
- Format Paperback
- Pages 120pp
- Price $16.00
- Review by Patrick James Dunagan
Bernard Noël is a cerebral, urban-realist mystic caught up by the extraordinary in everyday language as it passes by, carried in things themselves. He captures the instant of wonder, filled with longing, lust, and above all necessity, grounding it in earthy satisfaction. What the eyes see wanes but lives on as a concern of thought. The book is a record of a life of such sight:
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Kate Greenstreet
- Publisher Delete Press
- Date Published 2011
- Format Paperback
- Pages 24pp
- Review by Jeremy Benson
The Battleship Potemkin, either the film or the ship
itself—the allusion, in any case—makes its appearance early on
in Kate Greenstreet’s single-poem chapbook, Called:
“First we hear it. Trucks, helicopters. The / Battleship
Potemkin. He’s building the shape.” Throughout the poem,
Greenstreet works in concise stanzas such as this, each image
and line constructed with a controlled hand. As such, the
Potemkin is no toss-away detail. Its facts and mythology, of
restless soldiers and fledging revolutions, and of propaganda,
get bundled and pulled into the poem, while calling to mind the
montage theories made standard by director Sergei Eisenstein,
the great-grandfather of all modern film editing techniques.
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- Book Type Fiction
- by Meg Pokrass
- Publisher Press 53
- Date Published January 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1-935708-17-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 171pp
- Price $14.95
- Review by Tessa Mellas
Meg Pokrass’s collection Damn Sure Right packs in a
whopping eighty-eight stories. Short-shorts. Flash fiction.
Whatever you call them, Meg Pokrass is their queen. She’s made a
career out of flash fiction. She teaches flash fiction workshops
nationally and has published over a hundred pieces in journals.
In a market that goads short story writers to crank out novels,
she’s firm in her commitment to keep it tight. But while most of
us literature lovers have enjoyed a brilliant short-short in our
time, few of us have read a whole book of them or even know how.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Heather Christle
- Publisher Octopus Books
- Date Published July 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0980193879
- Format Paperback
- Pages 72pp
- Price $12.00
- Review by J. A. Tyler
The Trees The Trees, the second poetry collection from
Heather Christle, is a loosely-knit collection of poems that
sometimes has to do with trees, that often has to do with the
dichotomy of relationships, and that always has an
overwhelmingly and wonderfully infectious use of rhythm:
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- Book Type Fiction
- by Shannon Cain
- Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press
- Date Published September 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0-8229-4410-2
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 160pp
- Price $24.95
- Review by Alyse Bensel
In a world where habit drives and consumes lives, Shannon
Cain’s short story collection takes steadfast aim at those who
cannot resist the pull of what society deems illicit. Nine
stories delve into seemingly average people, who, upon closer
inspection, engage in the illegal, the deadly, and the bizarre,
risking their lives and jobs to continue pursuing their
obsessions.
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- Book Type Nonfiction
- by Janisse Ray
- Publisher University of Georgia Press
- Date Published September 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0-8203-3815-6
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256pp
- Price $22.95
- Review by Alyse Bensel
Drifting into Darien, part memoir and part natural
history, logs the memory of not only the people of the Altamaha
River region in Georgia, but the landscape itself. In a
multi-part larger essay and a series of smaller essays, Janisse
Ray reminds us of this essential but little-known river. Readers
who already possess knowledge of ecology and biology, as well as
novice environmentalists, will appreciate the detail displayed
by Ray’s knowledge of her native landscape. A strong
environmental focus propels this collection of essays forward,
urging the reader to take action to preserve not only the
Altamaha, but their own rivers as well.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Arlene Kim
- Publisher Milkweed Editions
- Date Published July 2011
- ISBN-13 978-1-57131-440-6
- Format Paperback
- Pages 96pp
- Price $16.00
- Review by H. V. Cramond
Now wake up it's time to eat! Show me
your tongue, my sweet…
boil her down to bone.
your tongue, my sweet…
boil her down to bone.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Ida Stewart
- Publisher Perugia Press
- Date Published August 2011
- ISBN-13 978-0-979458248
- Format Paperback
- Pages 84pp
- Price $16.00
- Review by Alyse Bensel
Musical and deeply rooted in a sense of place, Ida Stewart’s
debut poetry collection highlights the essential element of
sound within contemporary poetry. In a series of free verse
poems that engage with the lyric quality of traditional nature
poetry, Stewart delves beyond a simple examination of nature;
instead, nature ties into a sense of past and place,
ever-present in the depths of memory. Set within the concrete of
ground, the minuteness of soil, Gloss condenses language
to its potential as rich medium for the human voice and soul.