Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

David Gullette recommends Joseph “Jay” Featherstone’s third collection of poems, Rising Out of Nowhere (Fenway Press, 2023). “This collection shows an experienced poet at the top of his game. Particularly sharp is the sense of place—in his case, Gloucester’s Eastern Point—where he watches as ‘A great Atlantic roller swings / toward land, flowing, green. / Nothing empties into everything.’ He has conversations with his late wife, recalling ‘the marsh hawk sailing by your memorial service, and the Luna moth, crazy for my shirt breast / in wild gusts of wind at my mother’s gravesite— / all my familiars, rising out of nowhere.’”

David Gullette recommends DeWitt Henry’s newest book of poems, Trim Reckoning (Pierian Springs Press, 2023). “After a career of storytelling, Henry has come to poetry later in life. These are honest, unfussy, straightforward slices of life and memory, many based on early family life: an uncle brings a German Luger back from the war, and the poet keeps not the gun but ‘the canister, with its shoulder-strap / thumb-lever catch and rubber mask / folded inside’; he catalogs his boyhood scars, from surgery, cleats, barbed wire, but he says the most important scars are invisible, and when he wanted to call his first memoir ‘Tribal Scars,’ a friend told him no one would buy a book with ‘scars’ in the title, so he changed it to ‘Sweet Dreams.’ Warning: these poems are quickly addictive, and deliver regular hits of pleasure.”

Joyce Peseroff recommends Ghost Variations, by Elton Glaser (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). “Glaser’s ninth book of poems immerses a reader in the enduring grief caused by the death of his wife after a long marriage. Yet even through elegy, Glaser won’t ignore the lusciousness of life that rudely muscles through. Moving through the seasons, his poems celebrate the pomp of unfurled dahlias, the miracle of geese landing as they ‘walk on air and … water,’ the pull of his Southern roots and of travels beyond. Rich in language, wit, memory, and passion, every page of Ghost Variations proves evocative and true.”

Robert Pinsky recommends Fog and Smoke, by Katie Peterson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), “with its vivid experience, personal and large, symbolic and everyday, of those distinct yet blurry presences, fog and smoke.”

Richard Tillinghast recommends English As a Second Language and Other Poems, by Jaswinder Bolina (Copper Canyon, 2023). “The title poem, about a group of recent Punjabi immigrants to the UK eating hot dogs for the first time, which begins, ‘We came upon a line of English / eating dog, we thought,’ is an instant classic. The book is filled with the smartest, funniest, most tuned-in poems on the American scene you will find.”

Rosanna Warren recommends All Souls: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2023) and Corridor: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2014), the last two books of poetry by Saskia Hamilton, who died in June, 2023. “Hamilton’s was an utterly singular voice, an art of reticence, asceticism, obliquity, delicacy, wit, detachment, and understated erudition. In All Souls: Poems, which was published shortly after her death, she contemplated her own impending extinction with a rare dignity, and also generosity, as the poems attend to many souls and eras besides her own. She made quietness into a form of power.”