Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Tess Gallagher recommends Poems of Repossession: Leabhar na hAthghabhála edited by Louis De Paor, Irish-English Bilingual Edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). “This book of Irish poems in translation carries some very strong poems, [including] one by Seán Ó Ríordáin called ‘Switch,’ which is the central mandate for empathy—a poet’s main tool. Also, one may read what Irish speakers thought of the bombing of Hiroshima from Dublin. They felt it much differently than in America, you may be certain.”
DeWitt Henry recommends GLASS: Poems by Joseph Featherstone (Fenway Press, 2019). In these seventy-two poems, Featherstone—a former protégé of Lucy Brock-Broido’s, New Republic editor, and headmaster of Commonwealth School—charts a lifetime’s epic [that is] poignant on loss, on disparate places and times, on childhood, parents, siblings, parenthood, friends, and late life illness. Reflecting on the suicide of a friend: “help me forget the knot she tied”; and on successful chemo results: “whatever can take it away…has instead waved me on.”
DeWitt Henry recommends A Certain Arc: Essays of Finding My Way by David Hamilton (Ice Cube Press, 2019). Poet, memoirist, and editor for three decades of the Iowa Review, Hamilton weaves digressive threads into unified tapestries. He writes about race, gender, and social justice as preoccupations; and about our cultural and personal histories during his lived life. He is above all a genial, earth-bound intellectual, lover of reading and writing well and of the natural world.
DeWitt Henry recommends William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked by Steve Almond (Ig Publishing, 2019). Mixing a critical reading of John Williams’ neglected masterpiece, Stoner, with his own memoir, Almond discovers insights into his calling as a writer and his struggles as a husband and parent, while also illuminating the novel’s multifaceted and lasting appeal.
DeWitt Henry recommends Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home by Elizabeth Mosier (New Rivers Press, 2019). Given a midlife remove in the Philadelphia suburbs from her childhood in Arizona, as well as caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s, leads the author to connect her passion for archaeology with her quest for wholeness. “Writing,” she writes, “is something like building a bottle from the base up using broken glass scattered on a table, glittering and inscrutable. And then taking it apart again to slowly fashion a story from the findings.”
Jill McCorkle recommends The Gulf by Belle Boggs (Graywolf Press, 2019). “Boggs gives us brilliant commentary on both writing workshops and religion without ever losing sight of human compassion and hope for a better world. The Gulf is as wise and moving as it is hilarious.”
Campbell McGrath recommends Severance by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), “an apocalypse novel that hits all the right notes.”
Campbell McGrath recommends Crawlspace by Nikki Wallschlaeger (Bloof Books, 2017), “a collection of poems that wrestles the linguistic zeitgeist into submission.”
Richard Tillinghast recommends How He Loved Them by Kevin Prufer (Four Way Books, 2018). “The poems are startling. Our world seems newly overtaken by violence and disorder—or maybe it’s our awareness of these things that seems newly intensified. Prufer has a way of incorporating all this in his poetry, and I’m impressed by his way with the poetic line, which is both simple and elegant.”
Dan Wakefield recommends Only Witness by Jim Powell (Writers’ Center of Indiana, 2017). “These stories bear insightful witness to the everyday dramas of our times, ranging in setting from Lafayette, Indiana, to Puerta Vallarta, Krakow, to Vienna, illuminating personal struggles with humor and compassion.”