Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Michael Martin Shea
Water Puppets, Quan Barry’s third full-length collection and winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, is anything but puppetry, striking a forceful blow against the idea of poetry as naïve navel-gazing. It takes as its motivating question, “What does poetry have to do with the real world?” and throws an emphatic response, as Barry builds a narrative at once personal and political... more
Reviewed by:
Chris Martin
You may come to this book looking for a stance on Beauty. You may come to it looking for more Snoop Dogg references. You may come looking for a catalog of Mark Leidner’s Twitter feed. In each of these cases you will arrive misguided, but by the time you realize it you will be halfway through this immanently readable book and a couple of express stops past your intended subway exit. In adopting... more
Reviewed by:
Nick Ripatrazone
In 1902, W.B. Yeats—according to his unused preface for Ideas of Good and Evil—told James Joyce that he had based his recent plays “on emotions or stories that I had got out of folklore.”[i] Yeats also imbued the folk tradition in his Red Hanrahan stories in The Secret Rose, and collected Sligo County oral tales in Celtic Twilight. Joyce called Yeats’s practice “... more
Reviewed by:
Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
In her thirteenth collection of poems, The White Cypress, Judith Skillman takes up again the tools of naturalistic observation and mythical allusion to examine difficult truths about the interior life of the self and its drives toward intimacy and seclusion, eroticism and entropy, as well as the paradox and complexity inherent in familial relationships. Skillman's tone is occasionally... more
Reviewed by:
Jennifer Bowen Hicks
God Bless America could almost be read as thirteen irreverent prayers: Dear [Whomever]: save us from our smallness. But no prayer will make you laugh the way Steve Almond does with his newest collection of stories, one of which was included in America’s Best, another in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In Almond’s America, parents and children, TSA agents and smart-mouthed... more
