review: results 1–11 of 11

Any reader who believes the suburbs to be a cultural and spiritual wasteland will have their prejudices confirmed. And yet, Cusk's great talent as a writer is to complicate these tired notions and make them fresh and engaging. Her Desperate Housewives are not stereotypes, but unique and sympathetic characters. Cusk is masterful at capturing the ordinary moments of family life.

Fulfilling the promise of his early work, Angel's new book is characterized by deep consciousness, the rigors of his syntax anchoring his voice. His new poems exemplify what is true of the rest of his work collected here as he summons Self, human presence, from the collision of worldly details. If we exist in the noise of body, and commerce, and community, Angel's work captures sublimated landscapes of deep feeling and spiritual incident.

I can say honestly that Kate Moss and I have never been friends. Even when young, vulnerable, and with loads of cultural literacy while perusing slinky images splayed in Vogue and Cosmo, I simply couldn't have picked Kate Moss from a line-up. I'm not even sure I'd want to, even today. And yet Unbound & Branded has given me a different Kate Moss. A Kate Moss who can "tear down the wall," "peel back the universe," "spend your whole paycheck on yourself," and even, "tell the boss / to fuck off."

A poet must try and make sense of the enormity of loss that steeps our life with difficult meaning. The great achievement of Fritz Goldberg's text is that grief remains unanswerable and alluring… Where we might expect heavy-handedness and painful confessionalism, Fritz Goldberg's poems are buoyant, and like the title of her collection, filled with linguistic, frolicsome concentration.

We are revealed in its language and Ríos's "theater of experience," which is unavoidably common to us all. And how fortunate we are for having Ríos as not only our usher but our poet.

The third volume to emerge from the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the first collection of its author's work, Famous is an assured and refreshingly self-possessed volume of poems, a rich offering of plain but musical language and understated irony

Reading this novel renders one a fly on a digital wall, listening in as half-baked undergraduates urgently chat about everything from the role of repressed postwar frustration as a motivating factor for tentacle-rape manga porn to whether the word "beige" can signify the same thing to two people in two places. All of which, in less skilled treatment, could be unbearable, but Pelevin's secret is pacing.

This is the gift of the book, in the end, a balance between philosophy and poetry, helter-skelter wit and calm sensual pauses.

Like so many good books, Mother of Sorrows is about what one man has and does not have, and therefore, it is about the tragedy of desire that bridges the space between.

Ben Lerner's first collection of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, is a sequence of untitled fourteen-line poems (with one fifteen-line exception) that run on the collision, the violence, and the unresolved resolution of juxtaposition.

History's typecast of "the mother" breeds thoughts of the bored housewife, entertaining herself with embroidery, pastel aprons, and flip hairdos. Herstory relates a more honest and complex definition of the mother, much like the work of Beth Ann Fennelly's poems in Tender Hooks.