NewPages Book Reviews

I love anthologies. Where else can you read so many diverse, creative ideas linked to a theme and compiled in one electrifying place? In the introduction to the anthology, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience, Murray Silverstein asks, “With our common culture so fractured, what did poetry have to say?” The answers here are emotional and right on target.

How does one write rejection? Specifically, the violence or indifference of a spouse? One makes a decision to be with a particular person, like be with them in everything—they say, yes—but the contents of that pact disintegrate, sometimes going up in flames quickly, and other times burning slowly and carried off, piece-by-piece, with the wind.

Howard Mansfield’s new book, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down, is a series of essays describing public and private projects that have deprived people of ownership. Entities behind the projects often claim they’re “acting in the public interest,” writes Mansfield. He goes on to say, “I was especially interested in the emotional toll these projects took. [ . . . ] I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.”

Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing is an inspirational and practical guidebook for anyone interested in starting and sustaining a publishing company. Biel, founder of Microcosm Publishing, a small, Portland, Oregon-based press, understands how to build a publishing company from scratch, and with his conversational style he leads readers through every stage of this process and beyond.

Born over thirty years after its final air date, my knowledge of the TV show I Love Lucy begins and ends in the handful of sporadic reruns I watched at my grandmother’s house on rainy days when I was growing up. Seeing her face twisting up as she acknowledged her latest goof-up on grainy black and white footage, hearing her wail “Ricky,” or seeing her shove chocolates into her mouth all readily come to mind when I hear the TV show’s title, and I can now add Slapstick: The Lucy Poems by Taylor Liljegren to my list of what I think about when I think of I Love Lucy.

Danielle Dutton is the author of three books and wrote the texts for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her first novel, SPRAWL was published by Siglio in 2010, but Wave Books re-released this little masterpiece in 2018, and thank goodness, because, subconsciously, I have been searching everywhere for the present-day Georges Perec. I’m not entirely sure how that sounds, but I promise that I mean nothing but praise for Dutton and her characterization of the modern housewife.

There’s no doubt that Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout is a superb poet, but to fully appreciate her latest book Wobble, a quick read-through might not do.