The Collected Critical Writings, by Geoffrey Hill
review by Nigel Beale

Hill tussles with, contradicts, and explores all species of idea: poetic versus real-world justice; complicity, revelation, and the poet’s involvement with language; creative response to "triumphs that trap, and defeats that liberate." They’re typically opposed, worried, torn apart, and left, at the end of their chapters, to hang out on clever, often puzzling concluding lines.

issue 4 :: november 2009

Gabriel García Márquez: a Life, by Gerald Martin
review by Leslie Harkema

The pervasive autobiographical strains of the novel are acknowledged, deciphered, and returned to in allusions that lend resonance and coherence to the life story. García Márquez’s genealogical charts at the back of the biography echo those that appeared in editions of the novel in order to help readers keep those Aurelianos and José Arcadios straight. Martin even manages to emulate aspects of García Márquez’s style, and to wonderful effect.

issue 4 :: november 2009

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction,
edited by Tara Masih
review by Matt Bell

These are exactly the kind of essays one hopes to find in a book like this: works that do not close down the form, that do not offer prescriptions and rules, but rather offer ways in which writers' minds might be widened, in the hopes that their enlarged sensibilities might then create new and innovative kinds of work.

issue 4 :: november 2009

The Late Age of Print, by Ted Striphas
review by Richard Nash

It is impossible to talk about books, nowadays, to talk about books without nostalgia creeping into the discourse, though perhaps, to speak the lingo, perhaps ‘twas always so. Whether the specific tone is wistful, elegiac, defensive, hostile, or whether the talk is of an imminent and lamented end, or of a bitter and defiant survival, or of some type of triumphalist victory in another world, it is difficult to find a discussion of books that does not view the past as some better place.

issue 3 :: september 2009

Close Calls with Nonsense, by Stephen Burt
review by Andrew Seal

The type of trust Burt hopes to elicit on behalf of his Ellipticals, on behalf of new poetry, is different: even knowing you’ve got all the parts for a bookcase in your hands, you must trust the instructions rather than what you’ve seen before. Frequently, the intermediate steps may even look wrong or unlikely to coalesce. The larger structure isn’t so quick to emerge, and the work of the small screws and nails is rarely evident until the end.

issue 3 :: september 2009

The Essays of Leonard Michaels
review by April Pierce

From one hermeneutical standpoint, this collection could be described as a chronicle of Michaels’ obsessions. Select phrases and images unapologetically reappear with urgent frequency. Kafka’s sentence “A cage went in search of a bird,” for instance, occurs in multiple chapters, each time expressing a slightly different flavor of thought. Michaels’ Jewish upbringing and heritage, movies, the nostalgia induced by the 1950s, sexual or emotional frustration, and guilt are all thematic fixations.

issue 3 :: september 2009

The Program Era, by Mark McGurl
review by Nora Delaney

How did we move from the café to the classroom, and from the strong pull of individual genius and personality — Pound and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulker — to the doughy group workshops from which M.F.A graduates rise like cookie-cutter cookies? McGurl argues persuasively that creative writing programs piggybacked on the postwar growth and development of mass higher education in America . . .

issue 2 :: july 2009