Why Is It So Hard To Kill You? by Barrett Warner Somondoco Press, 2015 $14.95 Warner’s collection opens with, “I Thought Pigeons were Vegetarians,” a meditation on (and critique of) the concept of monogamy as expressed through the image of doves and love birds. Warner challenges preconceptions of married life and normalcy, the sickly-sweet ideas we’re often …
Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad Trans. by Jennifer Grotz Open Letter Books, 2015 $16.95 In Rochester Knockings Tunisian author Hubert Haddad brings to life with exquisite historical detail the theater and sensation of the Fox sisters, spiritual mediums who captivated the world in the mid-nineteenth century. Haddad travels through time and …
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli Trans. by Christina MacSweeney Coffee House Press, 2015 $16.95 In 2013 Galería Jumex, a contemporary art gallery outside of Mexico City, commissioned Valeria Luiselli to write a fictional story about their exhibition, The Hunter and the Factory. Her resulting work, The Story of My Teeth, explores the connection between …
Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria by Eleanor Levine Unsolicited Press, 2016 $16.00 I’ve known Eleanor Levine primarily as a fiction writer. Her stories are usually funny, high energy jaunts that read like bursts of insane joie de vivre, though they can be quite dark as well. I’ve also seen her read fiction, and it was …
Drone Strings by Sherry Cook Stanforth Bottom Dog Press, 2015 $16.00 Anyone who has seen Diane Sawyer’s documentary A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains will understand that Appalachian culture presents some excruciating paradoxes. Sherry Cook Stanforth’s new poetry collection Drone String actually rejoices in the themes of this region’s people, their fatalism and determination, …
Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy Milkweed Editions, 2015 $16.00 What if Eve told the story? That’s a question raised by Nancy Reddy’s poem, “Inventing the Body.” Exploring the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, the earliest known hominid, Reddy asks, “Did she feel / the tender humming jumplily, catfish, / the rapid flare as she lit / …
Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2012 Poems by Andrea Hollander Autumn House Press, 2013 $17.95 Andrea Hollander’s book Landscape with Female Figure is comprised of 27 new poems and selections from three previous books (Women in the Painting, 2006; The Other Life, 2001; and House Without a Dreamer, 1993). Given the breadth …
Beautiful Zero by Jennifer Willoughby Milkweed Editions, 2015 $16.00 Today, late January, the sky opened up and let the sun break onto the snow. On top of a mountain in Claysburg, Pennsylvania, I watched as skiers peeled their clothes off; their bare skin blushed against the slopes. This moment matters, and maybe only because I …