Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Peter Ho Davies recommends The Book of Disbelieving, by David Lawrence Morse (Sarabande Books, 2023). “Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these are wondrous, beguiling, and deeply affecting stories.”
Peter Ho Davies recommends The Best Possible Experience: Stories, by Nishanth Injam (Pantheon Books, 2023). “Hauntingly beautiful tales of arrival and departure, love and loss.”
Tess Gallagher recommends Curve, by Kate Reavey (Empty Bowl Press, 2022). “I am so beguiled by Reavey’s sense of play in language, a lightness of mind and heart that pushes the poem further into consciousness. She has a natural, stunning way of being present to loss, so it never stands apart but abides within the speaker. Truly a book to carry in one’s days and open to be lifted authentically.”
DeWitt Henry recommends People Once Real, by Richard Hoffman (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023), “where the poet is a soul-troubled seer, and resourceful and wide-ranging in form. Family, memory, and imagination are pervasive topics, as in this brief beauty, ‘Album’: ‘They turn to me, my parents, as if they see me, / as if they might respond, but go on dancing..../....Young,/ filled with necessities and niceties and faith, / they wonder at me: what are you staring at?’ Unlike Delmore Schwartz, the poet wonders back, but feels no urge to warn against their union and his birth.”
DeWitt Henry recommends The Fight Journal, by John W. Evans (Rattle Books, 2023). “It has the intensity and heft of a book-length memoir. The long centerpiece and title poem charts the progress of divorce after ten years of marriage and raising three sons. The speaker’s wife is adamant, having kept a private journal of grievances, and the speaker tries his best to reconcile with her, yet loses and endures. We fully participate thanks to the art’s hard-won honesty and balance.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, by Erin Noteboom (Brick Books, 2023). “Canadian poet Erin Noteboom—also a science communicator with The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics—is an observer of extraordinary acumen, muscularity, precision, and breadth. Drawing from physics, archeology, etymology, Chernobyl, the life and legacy of Marie Curie, and interior life, Noteboom’s poems have volume and edge, resonance and bite, an equal abundance of feeling and mind. These sui generis, often small poems throw a large and expanding light.”
Antonya Nelson recommends How to Care for a Human Girl, by Ashley Wurzbacher (Atria Books, 2023). “The novel is so tremendously pleasurable for its stylistic elegance and its utterly charming characters that you might fail to notice its clever interrogation of our current cultural divide. This book is sane, humane, full of heart, and very, very smart.”
Joyce Peseroff recommends Joy Ride, by Ron Slate (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023). “Ron Slate interleaves a family odyssey of emigration and loss with his own interior and outward journeys. Sometimes surreal, always precise, and always startling a reader out of ordinary manners of perception, Slate’s third book of poems is never a description of experience but experience itself.”
David St. John recommends The Stranger You Are, poetry by Gail Wronsky and art by Gronk (Tia Chucha Press, 2022). “I’m a fan of collaborative books, but here is a true conversation between delicate, visually provocative images by seminal Los Angeles artist Gronk and the wry, brilliantly subversive poems of Gail Wronsky. The works are paired on facing pages, in dialogue with each other. A pleasure so pure even Ernst and Éluard are applauding.”