what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Pear as One Example by Eric PankeyAusable Press, 2008
Smart, allusive: the first poem is called “To Olga Knipper,” and includes a reference to May 25, 1901—the day of her wedding to Chekhov. The poem is like a letter from Chekhov’s point of view: it’s quiet and beautiful (images of flowers, birds, rain) and makes me want to read Chekhov’s actual letters to Knipper.…
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Prairie Style by C.S. GiscombeDalkey Archive Press, 2008
These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (“What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but…
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The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. MerwinCopper Canyon Press, 2008
This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of…
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Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David LevithanAlfred A. Knopf, 2008 (originally 2006)
I am such a sucker for city-romances like this, and also for David Levithan’s particular post-gay brand of optimism and charm, and also for the occasional slightly-breathless young adult novel. “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?” is how Nick and Norah’s…
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Selected Poems by Frank O’HaraEdited by Mark FordAlfred A. Knopf, 2008
When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music”…
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Up All Night: A Short Story Collection by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, et al.Harper Teen, 2008
While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short…
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A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher BenfeyThe Penguin Press, 2008
The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are…
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The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha HuntHoughton Mifflin, 2008
It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York…
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Paris to the Moon by Adam GopnikRandom House, 2001 (originally 2000)
It’s easy to be enchanted by a city you’ve never been, and Gopnik was enamoured of Paris before he’d so much as visited it. His first trip only served to solidify his ideas of the city’s charms: “The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had…
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The Guermantes Way by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the…