Review by New York Times Review
SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER: Essays, by Mary Gaitskill. (Vintage, $16.) In her first collection of nonfiction, Gaitskill, ever prescient, tackles everything from date rape to politics to her own creative process. Gaitskill borrows from Anton Chekhov for the collection's title; in a way, the essays serve to remind "that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws." THE LEAVERS, by Lisa ??. (Algonquin, $15.95.) Ko's novel opens with the disappearance of Deming Guo's mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant in the Bronx. Deming is adopted by a wellintentioned white family, but he is soon called back to China to investigate the mysteries of his life. This novel of migration is a story of belonging, home, loss and identity. THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION: A Literary History of the Beats, by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Bill Morgan, with a foreword by Anne Waldman. (Grove, $20.) Between 1977 and 1994, Ginsberg gave 100 or so lectures about the cultural movement he helped lead. Morgan has condensed these addresses, organizing them around the figures Ginsberg discusses: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Ginsberg himself. THE BARROWFIELDS, by Phillip Lewis. (Hogarth, $16.) An Appalachian family's saga is at the center of this debut novel. Henry Aster grows up in North Carolina as the son of a brilliant, troubled man, but once he leaves for college his ties to home become ever weaker, and he breaks his promise to remain close to and protect his younger sister. Years later, Henry grapples with the specter of his father's alcoholism and other demons. The tale is ultimately one of a troubled's family redemption, and of the miracle of forgiveness. THE FIRST LOVE STORY: Adam, Eve, and Us, by Bruce Feiler. (Penguin, $17.) A reconsideration of the Genesis story attempts to scrub away its sexist taint, instead casting Eve as a curious and modern woman, and her relationship with Adam as a healthy, dynamic marriage. Our reviewer, Rich Cohen, called the book "the literary equivalent of breathing life into a figure made of clay." FAST: Poems, by Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Graham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, explores the erosion of the body, the environment and even the nation, in writing from a time of trauma: Her parents were dying, she was receiving cancer treatment and the country was in tumult. Our reviewer, Adam Fitzgerald, called the collection "an autopsy of self and nation in the face of overwhelming loss."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Graham's tidal, iridescent body of work was celebrated in her second selected collection, From the New World: Poems,1976-2014. Here she extends her ardent and intricate exploration of human consciousness and planetary impact, navigating the tumult of now in poems of exceptional vitality, inquisitiveness, emotion, wit, and artistry. Graham's lush, pulsing lyrics sweep across unusually wide pages in her signature style of reach and embrace, her language surging with passion yet shaped with precision. Graham adeptly sets traditional tropes birds, trees, rivers, sunrises within the technoscape and considers with metaphysical sensitivity the ambience and implications of our hurried digital lives. She writes of being tracked and marketed to, of bots and comment boxes, algorithms and drones, 3D printing and simulated reality. Our cyber-identities complicate the eternal questions of the self, which Graham considers both personally and as a member of the species that is driving so many others to extinction. She writes of the deaths of her parents and her bout with cancer, turning an MRI session a lifesaving bombardment into a compassionate vision of the horrors of bombings and the suffering of refugees. Each of Graham's poems is a daring voyage from the harbors of facts through the rapids of feelings and thoughts, leaving readers exhilarated and transformed.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Graham more fully explores the new direction she hinted at in her 2015 selected volume, From the New World: poems that are frantic, syntactically and formally restless, shifting from long-lined stanzas to prose blocks to short, single lines. Those four new poems, including the title poem here, engaged a consciousness at the outer limits of bodily experience. Graham's 12th collection joins these poems to 19 others in a dizzying, difficult exploration of that border and the world beyond-the one in which the human is becoming or has become unrecognizable: "Each epoch dreams the one to follow.// To dwell is to leave a trace.// I am not what I asked for." This latest book contains some of Graham's most accomplished work to date-the poems "Reading to My Father" and "The Medium" among them-but Graham has always been a poet of great books, followed by books that explore new forms and new ways of seeing. This is at its heart a book of exploration, with varied levels of success. Still, there's a great pleasure in reading one of America's most intelligent poets work her way through subjects that are by their nature beyond understanding: "the floating faces which carried/ themselves through all the eras-they say nothing," Graham writes; "there is no real to which you can refer." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her first all-new volume in five years, the multi-prize-winning poet Graham examines life, death, and illness, considering how to live and die in an era of technology, of bots that clamor and whisper from voices on the ocean's floor to those beyond the grave: "How can I find myself again. In this world. I want to live in this world." From the clang and claustrophobia of an MRI machine to dementia's labyrinth and the final silence of death's room, Graham repeatedly asks readers to "Define human. Where do you find yourself. Is it/ worth waiting around for." In poems both complicated and inventive, she constructs and deconstructs her core ideas through multilayered words and phrasings, compelling readers to feel what it's like to be human in a posthuman world. "Think-in, squint-in, shoo-in, heroine, citizen, pleistoscene." says Graham, weighing the possibilities, with characteristic punctuation that gives readers pause and thrust and transformation. -VERDICT While these poems are not easy, many are simply stunning as they build, take apart, rebuild, and move inexorably to the question: "how is it/ possible the world still exists, as it/ begins to take form there, in the not/ being...." Highly recommended.-Karla Huston, Appleton, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
