Without Donald Hall It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or what time of day or night it is, when I pick up this collection, it’s the only one I read from first page to last. Published in 1998, Without traces the illness and death from leukemia of Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, in an [….]
LitStack Recs: my name on his tongue & Never Let Me Go
Published on :my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby In her first book of poetry, published in 2012, Halaby mines issues of identity, geography and the dislocation that comes from inhabiting two worlds. Halaby, the author of two novels, and recipient of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award, calls this volume a memoir in poems: a story of [….]
LitStack Recs: Without & Three Parts Dead
Published on :Without Donald Hall This book is the one of the few that, when I pick it up, I read from first page to last—no matter what I was doing before, or what time of day or night. In twenty poems, Donald Hall traces the illness and death of Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who [….]
LitStack Review: Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Published on :Life on Mars Tracy K. Smith Graywolf Press Release Date: January 1, 2011 ISBN 978-1-55597-584-5 I’ll admit it – I often have problems reading poetry. Don’t get me wrong. I love poetry, or at least the idea of poetry. It’s an idiom that is unique, that uses the look and the cadence of language to [….]
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff
Published on :Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish David Rakoff Doubleday Release Date: July 16, 2013 ISBN 978-0-385-53521-2 If anyone had told me that I would be reading a novel that was completely written in verse, I would have rolled my eyes in a “heaven help us” gesture. Epic poems are certainly not unknown in literature, but [….]
LitStack Review: Hysteria: a Collection of Madness by Stephanie M. Wytovich
Published on :Hysteria: a Collection of Madness Stephanie M. Wytovich Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2013, Poetry I put Stephanie M. Wytovich in the company of Charles Simic, Alison Eir Jenks, Stephen Dobyns, and Rain Graves: they are all poets who won’t let me leave poetry to die a slow death in unread journals and chapbooks and collections. It seems [….]
The New Death and Others by James Hutchings
Published on :The New Death and Others James Hutchings ASIN: B005Q8Q8DY — ♦ — 44 stories, 19 poems, all wrapped into a 100-page book. Usually this is the paragraph where I’d summarize the plot or, when reviewing a short story collection, the theme connecting the stories. That’s not something I can easily do for ‘The New Death [….]
my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby
Published on :my name on his tongue Laila Halaby Syracuse Univ Pr ISBN-10: 0815632940 — ♦ — Laila Halaby first read poet Mahmoud Darwish’s A Lover from Palestine as a child. The book belonged to her mother, and the English translations ran on the pages facing the original Arabic. At the time, Halaby read only the [….]
True Colors by Michelle Davidson Argyle
Published on :True Colors Michelle Davidson Argyle CreateSpace ISBN-10: 1467925500 — ♦ — Colors have a way of fascinating, whether wrapped in paper and stuffed in a box, or pushing fistfuls through topsoil, screaming, “I am here at last!” The above qoute, from ‘Clover’ on page 89, summarizes this collection of literary short stories (with the occasional [….]