by Helen Ivory | May 11, 2013 | Reviews
‘Medical section’s upstairs,’ she told me. ‘I think it should be in fiction.’ ‘Then we don’t got it.’ Instruction Manual for Swallowing was Adam Marek’s first collection for Comma Press, a publisher remarkable for its consistent brilliance and commitment...
by Helen Ivory | May 6, 2013 | Reviews
Myra Schneider’s pamphlet What Women Want is full of riches. The poems are textured with images that keep surprising – a chair has ‘a love affair / with mustard yellow’ (‘Le Vieil Homme Assis’); the speaker ‘sift[s] feathers of kindness’ (‘Need’). There is both...
by Helen Ivory | May 2, 2013 | Reviews
I wanted to like all the stories here more than I actually did – in other words, while Nick Healy...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 22, 2013 | Reviews
Let me take the more recent of these books by Tim Nolan first. While he initially trained as a poet, taking his MFA degree at Columbia University, he had also married and knew...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 13, 2013 | Reviews
This delicately rendered collection has many durable insights conveyed simply, almost epigrammatically. These poems have clarity as well as many saddening, irrefutable truths, a mixture of both prose as poetry and poetry as prose, although the dominant genre is...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 4, 2013 | Reviews
An Elegant Illusion: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, tr. Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead and Anne McLean Deception, or at least, elusiveness and allusive obliquity, is much of the business of this enchanted labyrinth of a...
