Paula Bohince

The Children

“Another writer with Paula Bohince’s gift for the ravishing image—and such writers are very few—would have us on our guard. We are wary of beauty; we have seen too often what beauty leaves out. But Bohince, in her magical capture of the material world, scorns all euphemizing edits; ‘the condom listing against milk-/weed’ is registered as scrupulously in these pages as are the combs of the abandoned hive. Which makes these poems transformative in the true and difficult sense: they bestow on the world the blessing of having-been-seen. And beauty too: ‘Something to recall / as beautiful, in the future. As the sewer was / in summer. Little childhood river.'” (Linda Gregerson)

 

Gordon Bowker

James Joyce: A New Biography

“It is a great boon that British biographer Gordon Bowker, who has written lives of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell, should have taken on this task, and better yet that he has produced such a fine portrait of the artist and the man who was James Joyce . . . Instead of being daunted by Joyce having in a sense got there before him, Bowker makes this a strength, as he skillfully presents incidents and experiences both as they happened in life and, suitably transformed to varying degrees, on the page . . . the reader has the best of both worlds, being informed—or in the case of those already familiar with the books, reminded—both of the glories of Joycean fiction and of their roots in his life. Never reductive, genuinely attuned to both Joyce’s fictive methodology and his human qualities, Bowker manages to be immensely sympathetic to his subject while managing to preserve necessary critical distance and acuity.” (Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle)

 

Michael Collier

An Individual History

“Collier’s sixth collection engages with childhood, fatherhood, and family life, in the living present and memorial past, a history explored with brilliantly precise detail and originality of perspective.” (Publishers Weekly)

 

Eduardo C. Corral

Slow Lightning

“[W]e can make of what would blind us a conduit for changed vision, suggests Corral. In these poems, a cage implies all the rest that lies outside it; any frame frames a window through which to see other possibilities unfolding… Like Hayden, Corral resists reductivism.  Gay, Chicano, ‘Illegal-American,’ that’s all just language, and part of Corral’s point is that language, like sex, is fluid and dangerous and thrilling, now a cage, now a window out.  In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority.  His refusal to entirely trust authority wins my trust as a reader.” (Carl Phillips, from the Foreword)

 

Norman Lock

Escher’s Journal

“Lock’s work seems to emanate…from an essential strangeness, an estrangement from easily agreed-upon psychologies, from popular culture, from anything resembling a zeitgeist. It is marked by an eerie tonality and an intense, unsettled intellectual curiosity—a Lock novel might take place during any time period, anywhere in the world.” (Dawn Raffel)

 

Padgett Powell

You & Me

“Wonderful…You & Me is by turns hilarious, depressing, gnomic, smutty, and just a far better Saturday night than anything to be had in Jacksonville and Baskersfield combined.” (BookForum)

“…swaggering genius and ribald wit.” (Vanity Fair)

 

Gregory Spatz

Inukshuk

“Inukshuk is a feat of empathy and honesty, a taut tale of fear and resentment and other threats from within, meticulously observed and fearlessly rendered in vivid, authoritative, gripping prose. It’s a virtuoso performance.” (Doug Dorst)

 

 

Craig Morgan Teicher

To Keep Love Blurry 

“A liberating push-back against the idea of economy. More play, more improvisation, and more defiantly deadpan humor – this is the vital shot-in-the-arm American poetry needs.” (D. A. Powell)

 

 

Matthew Thorburn

Every Possible Blue

“If Fred Astaire could write, it might sound like this: practiced, complex, graceful…These are a sequence of anecdotes daring to love again, dreaming in daylight.” (Grace Cavalieri)