What People Are Saying

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This is a new-century work, a voicing of Barbara Cully's tidal sense of the temporal, her premonitory stillness, written by desert and sea-light, inscribing the endurance of loss, the necessity of vigilance. Her images are beautiful and precise, her sensibility profound. 

…the speaker (Melissa Studdard in Dear Selection Committee) revels in her largesse…All of this immensity, this grand unburying, is squeezed into the prosaic corseting structure of a job application, intensifying the split between tame and wild…Indeed, these poems are so desirous and animated that they spilled over the edges of the page and into my thirsty soul.

Elegant, clear-eyed, and restless, Suzanne Frischkorn’s poems seek and illuminate the frayed hyphens fastening us to family, to the world. Her searching is psychologically rich, transformative: an iridescent interiority spirals outward to touch what sustains it, what divides it. Structurally brilliant, alive with lyrical thinking and observations, Fixed Star is ample proof of Frischkorn’s poetic gifts. In her hands, language is light.

InThe Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z, Neil de la Flor gives us a braided history of the speaker and his beloved Meta....de la Flor conjures a lovingly hybrid picture of Meta and the Danish Underground Resistance during the Holocaust. As the poet learns more about his heritage, we as readers learn more about American families and the pasts they carry, what our elders have taught us and what has (and perhaps always will) remain a mystery.

The book is spellbinding. I'm in awe of the research and subsequent detailing that goes into it. It's a moving tribute to that richness William Maxwell talks about in human experience. The American Experience is another strong subject-the losses incurred by our peripatetic lives. I sense the necessity behind the story being told-not just the author wanting to know better her own mother and understand her, but cutting the tethers of the self and soaring into the reader's interest in universal questions. I really couldn't stop reading it, and I'll keep it with me for a long time to come. 

What an insightful and spellbinding novel Megan Weiler has written. The Tuscan countryside, beautifully rendered in vivid detail, is infused with mysteries that are pursued with patient, inexorable attention. The Spring is richly, deliciously rewarding.