BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief

I must make a disclosure right up front: I’m a huge fan of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s. I’ve been hooked ever since reading her fantastic short story, “The Smallest Man in the World,” which later appeared in her first book, Women and Other Animals. So, I read her newest book, American Salvage, with high expectations. I wasn’t let down.

American Salvage is a collection of 14 stories set in small town and rural Michigan. Though not formally linked, they share a strong sense of place and a cast of down-and-out characters, all wrapped up in Campbell’s energetic, lively prose.

Campbell presents Michigan as a place of beautiful lakes and glistening snow, but also of propane tanks, rusted El Caminos, old foundries, and salvage yards. This is done with a deft touch; it’s never heavy-handed and rarely draws attention …MORE

BY CHRISTOPHER FELICIANO ARNOLD

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel is a nameless immigrant from a nameless war-torn country, struggling to survive in Montreal, “this city with its case of chronic snow.” The story opens shortly after his botched attempt to hang himself in a city park. This failed suicide results in court mandated therapy sessions with a naïve young counselor named Genevieve. What follows is a bleak, existentialist survival tale—the 21st century spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex.

Born in Beirut, Hage lived through nine years of Lebanese civil war before immigrating to Canada in 1992. His debut novel De Niro’s Game, winner of the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, told the story of two young men on the ravaged streets of Beirut. In Cockroach, Hage fixes his gaze on the exile experience, delivering …MORE

BY M. LYNX QUALEY

At the end of Rafik Schami’s sprawling The Dark Side of Love, recently released in English, the author worries about how Western colonialist narratives may have shaped and colored his work.

“Again and again,” Schami writes in the book’s final, memoir-like pages, “I had been led astray by colonialist ideas of us, which whether well-intentioned or not ultimately offered misinformation.”

The novel, which cost Schami 40 years and a library of more than 200 books, numerous magazines, and boxes of archival materials, was the work of a heart, he says, fixed in his native Damascus. However, the novel—which was written in his adopted German—resembles Western literature far more than contemporary Arab work. The Dark Side of Love spans a blood-feud-thwarted love affair and a murder-mystery, and is told in largely realist style. …MORE

BY STEELE CAMPBELL

Peter Campion’s new book of poems, The Lions, articulates both the private intimacies of life and a robust involvement with the natural and political world. He intensifies the individuality of his first book, Other People, also published by The University of Chicago (2005), to show how the personal is inescapably public. To traverse from the personal to the public, Campion establishes both intimacy and grandeur. The collection begins by intoning the dual involvement:

It happens in our ignorance.
Fringing the steep calderas and
sinkholes
                  the blacktail deer descend.
Trembling. All systems on alert.

Then, in short declarative statements he describes the natural world descending into the technological to gaze “however long / Then tense. Then pulse out through the air / smelling of buckwheat and water.” Reminiscent of Lowell, The Lions contrasts two usually separate spheres utilizing the terminology of the technological to …MORE

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

There are at least three voices at work in Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me.  There is the voice of the lens: poems rich in sight-detail that move as a cycle of photographs before the reader, often with the same subject shot from several angles. “The Sunarban Swampland Tiger swims up to 2 miles a day. A diver captures how outstretched paws shape efficient paddles. The narrator explains how big cats swim the same way they walk, walk the way they swim, chins skimming water.”

There is Goodman’s sonnet voice: rambunctious, funny, full of old jazz: “Cans cranked, I love to listen past the studio tricks/ and catch a hint of any discarded ghost line/ mistakenly laid down when a mic bleeds through./ First thought, best thought? Cue take two.” Though …MORE

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

As a lover of Rilke, I remember reading Duino Elegies for the first time, nineteen years old, how one thick poem could sustain me for days.  It was proof that exhaustion is not always the reader’s enemy: when done right, it even satisfies.  It seemed impossible to read a book of Rilke’s in a very short amount of time (have I read all of his work yet?) and really understand it.  Still the work sustained me, and kept me coming back.  Jessica Garratt’s poems in her first book, Fire Pond, are crafted differently but stem from the same root of a good-willed doubting look at the world.  They also satisfy.

For a cerebral, philosophically-minded poet, Garratt is honest.  This is what invites the reader back—the no bullshit policy of her poems.  The opening piece “Abstract” starts straight: …MORE

BY DAVID BLOMENBERG, Poetry Editor

Don’t let the unpronouncability of the poet’s name throw you off–this collection is worth looking into. This wonderful book came to us in the mail from those nice folks at Zephyr Press, who no doubt were pleased by the fact that this collection–in parallel translation–was shortlisted for best poetry translation of 2009. It appears to be the third in Zephyr’s New Polish Writing series.  I’m certainly looking forward to their future publications.

The poems in this collection are spare, sinewy, and often disturbing in their sense of detachedness, both in a sense of remove as with a sense of having been, with a shocking blow, been severed from important connections, from loved ones, lovers.  they are a selevtion from Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s previously-unEnglished nine books of poetry, published beteen 1990 and 2005.  This sense of loss is underscored …MORE

BY DAVID BLOMENBERG, Poetry Editor

An advance copy recently came my way of Ernst Weiss’ 1931 novel (in a new translation by Joel Rotenberg). Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, due out at the end of the year from Archipelago Books. It is a massive (560 pages) novel that ranges from ships lodged in polar ice to equatorial villages. The novel has some unforgettable scenes, many of them involve rats, which are a main motif of the novel. Told in first person from the point of view of the title character, we get a sense of his upbringing, the hard lessons his embittered father taught him, and Georg Letham Jr.’s learned disavowal of love. Mankind, according to his father, shouldn’t be classified as good or evil, or successful or unsuccessful, but rather he “asked me quite casually whether people might perhaps …MORE

BY DAVID BLOMENBERG, Poetry Editor

Hot off the presses is Canadian poet Carolyn Smart’s sixth book, Hooked, from the wonderful people at Brick Books.  The collection is a series of seven long poems, each about or from the point of view of a woman of some notoriety, from notorious Hitler supporter Unity Mitford (sister of famous writer Nancy) to serial killer Myra Hindley to acclaimed author Carson McCullers.

Each of the poems unfolds the compulsive, obsessive nature of each of these women, often quite chillingly, with quotations from their correspondence.  After Unity Mitford’s failed suicide attempt, Hitler visits her, consoles her, but her hopes of Britain coming over to the side of the Nazis had been dashed:  “I put my Party badge in my mouth/ and swallowed that golden possibility/ I tried again and again/ but nothing worked…”

“Good writing is like …MORE

BY KATIE CONNOR, Managing Editor

On the whole, I tend to shy away from books on women writers. I feel targeted, for one. Because I am a writer and a woman, it is assumed that I want to read women writers. Secondly, these type of groupings often do more harm than good as far as marginalizing writing into a separate corner of the bookstore, a certain niche, much like writers of color. The separation of writers by gender can close them off from male readers, making them easy to miss or dismiss, as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “damned mob of scribbling women.” Finally, because writing is art, I feel that books should be classified according to art form. I don’t want to think of Virginia Woolf as a woman writer, but as a fundamentally modernist writer. I’m not interested in Aimee Bender because …MORE