Dan DeWeese, You Don’t Love This Man
“At the start of DeWeese’s engaging debut, Paul, a bank manager in the Pacific Northwest, loses his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, for a short time while trick-or-treating. After Miranda disappears 22 years later, on the day of her wedding, Paul begins a series of increasingly frustrating attempts to locate and talk with her. Unable to read relationship cues, Paul is often surprised or angered by the actions of those he thinks he knows well . . . Essentially decent, caring, and loyal, Paul is more valued than he suspects. Paul learns some valuable lessons as he retraces and re-evaluates his life in this insightful novel.” —Publishers Weekly
Rachel Hadas, Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry
In 2004 Rachel Hadas’s husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of ‘losing’ George.
“[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness.” —Lydia Davis
Lizzie Hutton, She’d Waited Millennia
“Rarely—very rarely indeed—a poet arrives in the world full-blown, possessed of musical mastery, cognitive penetration, yea, wisdom of the sort that eludes almost all of us almost all of the time. And utterly fresh, with a voice not-heard-before. Lizzie Hutton is just such a poet.” —Linda Gregerson
Carl Phillips, Double Shadow: Poems
Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: ‘now risk, and now / faintheartedness.’ In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there’s only the questing forward with no regrets and no looking back.
“A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt work of homage. . . . Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, this book is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsize personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.”
In The Beds, award-winning poet Martha Rhodes skillfully navigates a tonally complex terrain. Rhodes fourth collection mixes form and free-verse, specifically using the rondelet’s tight, obsessive repetition as a means to harness and modulate frenetic content.