Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Lauren Groff recommends Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Counterpoint, 2018). “I’ve been haunted by this talented writer’s first memoir since I read it a month ago. It is knife-sharp and beautifully strange and so full of both kinds of madness that the madness seems to leak through the text and into the reader.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf, 2019). “Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited second full-length collection arrives on the shelf of immediate masterworks. As powerfully filmic as it is verbal, Kaminsky’s originalities of language and story are hewn from bedrock necessities. His people and their fates carry the visionary authority, spareness, objectivity and tenderness of Kafka or Brecht or Anna Swir. Deaf Republic’s extended parable speaks directly into the ears, mind, and heart of our own harrowed and harrowing time, signing what is already and always happening.”
Margot Livesey recommends Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives by Jane Brox (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). “In this eloquent and absorbing book, Brox examines silence, its place and purpose, in two very different institutions: the monastery and the penitentiary. Her accounts of the silence of the monastery are fascinating, of the prison, heartrending. Over and over she made me reconsider the delicate balance between words and silence in my own life and the world around me.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends Conscience by Alice Mattison (Pegasus Books, 2018). “Alice Mattison’s ambitious new novel about characters involved in the student anti-war protests of the late '60s and '70s and the later consequences of their actions is absolutely compelling and extremely moving. Her characters are so engaging and ‘real’ because the subtlety of their thoughts and choices, and their interactions with each other, always feel genuinely lived. So does every sentence. I love this book.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends A Distant Center by Ha Jin (Copper Canyon, 2018). “Most people know Ha Jin as an eloquent prose writer. But before he started to write novels, he was writing poems. The poems in this new book were originally written in Chinese. But these are his own English versions—gnomic, wise, deep, and piercing. Almost every poem has the word you in it, and ‘you’ might be the reader, the lover, a bird, the wind, the soul, an artist ‘whose footprints will become milestones’—and maybe most of all the poet himself. This is the rare book of poems almost completely without ego. But with total confidence in its art.”
Eleanor Wilner recommends A Crown of Hornets by Marcia Pelletiere (Four Way Books, March, 2019). “As the title turns sonnets into hornets, so these stunning poems brilliantly capture (and I believe for the first time) the interior experience of life and language ‘going Babel’ after the catastrophe of brain trauma. Somehow, ‘she listens /to the damage that she’s so long occupied,’ giving us the precious gift of insight into a soul once stranded in a broken world, her poetry an act of reclamation.”