The Pushcart prize Best of the small presses

Literature--intimate, lucid, and mysterious--is at once forever-new and enduring, holding its own amid the cacophony of changes and catastrophes. In its forty-seventh year, this annual, global assembly of the most outstanding poetry, fiction, and essays published in myriad small presses showcases writers known (Rita Dove, Gail Godwin, Alice McDermott, Karen Russell) and emerging in a luminous mosaic. The elegy, the most ancient of genres, is enacted here with grace, vibrancy, and imagination in poems by Jamaica Baldwin and Ada Limón, the current U. S. poet laureate, and in a heart-seizing essay by Debra Gwartney about the last days of her husband, the revered writer Barry Lopez. The struggle to care generously for children shapes Idra Novey's unnerving essay about a camping trip in the Andes, where a glacier has been precipitously destroyed; Nicole Graev Lipson's tender account of her young son's shocking response to a Hebrew school event; and Aleyna Rentz's short story about a teacher coping with a chronic illness. Intrepid, diverse in voices and subjects, and wholly compelling, this is an invaluable guide to the current literary galaxy.

Forty-seven years on, the venerable literary annual shows no signs of creakiness. There was a time when the Pushcart Prize, its winners culled from dozens of journals, seemed the province of big names. (We're looking at you, Joyce Carol Oates.) This newest number has a few heavyweights--Alice McDermott, Rita Dove, Gail Godwin--but is populated more equitably by early- to midcareer writers. Not surprisingly, after years of pandemic, many are preoccupied by death. One memorable evocation comes from Ada Limón, whose dying subject swims out to sea to behold and be examined by the "eye of an unknown fish," a melancholic moment that is still oddly comforting in commemorating a woman who, in those cold waters, was "no one's mother, and no one's wife, / but you in your original skin." Essayist Debra Gwartney recounts the defiant, shattering death of her husband--a famed writer whom she does not name until the end of her piece and upon whom "death swooped down...like a hawk, talons first." Courage, innocence, and helplessness all converge in those final moments, ending with a lovely vision of that moment when one partner begins to travel where the other cannot yet go. "My mother, who is dying, / tells me to lock the doors and windows. / Winter is coming," writes Jennifer Chang, while Idra Novey delivers an enigmatic, near-perfect story of a family that, with friends, drives an Andean highway where disaster is ready to descend at any moment: "If one of our vehicles hit a rock and fell off the cliff, there was a good chance no adults in the car would be able to name every child plummeting with them down the mountainside." The death is not of people, though, but of the Earth itself. It would all make for grim reading in the aggregate save that each piece is so finely crafted, bracketed by work that is just as good, another memorable gathering. A state-of-the-art, essential report on current literary trends. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.