Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Jane Hirshfield recommends Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon, 2021). “Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures. His direct, chiselled statements of thought, feeling, and invention make the world bigger in every dimension.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends Selected Translations 2000-2020 by Ilan Stavans (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). “This book makes an irresistible if accidental anthology, whose poems form a coherent conversation: works one translator-reader has loved enough to choose to bring into a supple, muscular English. Some poets will be familiar (Borges, Neruda, Halevi); others for me were new, their work striking enough to send me searching for more. Stavans is a national treasure, increasing the available English storehouse of world poetry’s languages, experiences, and multiplicity of vision.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends The Album by Peg Boyers (Dos Madres, 2021). “This ‘album’ of ekphrastic poems is one of the most beautiful poetry books I’ve ever seen. It includes not only the poems themselves, several of which have previously appeared in Boyers’ collections, but also reproductions of the artworks that inspired them—from Michelangelo and Giorgione to Picasso and Lucien Freud, from erotic sixteenth-century Indian miniatures to a pastoral picnic scene by an anonymous Hudson River School painter—each image creating a fresh and reverberant new context for these bewitching and moving poems.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends The Man Who Would Not Bow: and Other Stories by Askold Melnyczuk (Grand Iota, 2021). “I’m blown away by the variety and depth of these stories, the wicked and sometimes heart-wrenching surprises, the telling details, the extraordinary writing. And thinking. Could one author have written them all? Only one! This book is a treasure.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Szilárd Borbély’s novel The Dispossessed, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Harper Perennial, 2016). “It’s a grim, haunting story narrated by a little boy, who seems to be a version of the author. He plunges us into the filth, hunger, and cruelty of life in a rural village under Communist rule: the mother’s despair, the father’s alcoholism, the viciousness of the villagers. History presses on these people in ways they hardly articulate: World War II, the expulsion and massacre of the few local Jews, the cynicism of Communist rule. It’s the quality of voice that sets this book apart from so many other novels recounting similar events: the child’s hyper-realist attentiveness to sensory detail and small sadistic acts, his observation of the suffering and brutal adults around him. And threading through it all, vestiges of kindness and a life of the spirit.”