NewPages Blog

Vanishing Point is not a memoir. It says so in the bottom right corner on the cover. On the back of the book, it says “Literature/Essays.” In this book, Ander Monson serves on a jury, spends time at Panera Bread, details his self-Googling results, and devotes a section to the flavors of Doritos. But Vanishing Point is about all of us. How the I of my life, of your life, of every life, blends together and vanishes, at least a little. Continue reading “Vanishing Point”

Winner of the 2008 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition, Dana Elkun’s Black Box Theater as Abandoned Zoo offers a guided tour of a rich, imagined landscape. The cover of the volume features a pair of monkeys, perched on a bed, releasing butterfly silhouettes into the air. Underneath the enigmatic cover art, 15 sophisticated yet accessible poems treat topics as varied as marriage, medicine, and history. Continue reading “Black Box Theater as Abandoned Zoo”

The greatest strength in How to Catch a Falling Knife, Daniel Johnson’s first collection of poems, is its chosen silences. While that may sound like strange praise, this book’s sparseness gives it a paradoxical power where the poet’s ability to know what not to say and when allows what he does say to starkly shine in the same way that it is more arresting to see one light left on in a house you gaze at from the dark street than it is when all the windows are festively blazing. Continue reading “How to Catch a Falling Knife”

The latest release from Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution is a history unto itself. Both a fable and a myth (“Myth is about the past, fable is about the future.”), this title revolves around stories of an ancient, watery Earth populated by “subspecies,” one of which is man, although she does not physically resemble modern homo sapiens. (I know I’ve used “man” and “she” together. It’s an oft-employed technique from the book, one of many contradictions of language that whirl about and simply shrug off their own existences, adding to the intricate mystery and progression of Hoang’s work.) Continue reading “The Evolutionary Revolution”

Entering my neighborhood from a different direction for the first time, I became disoriented, unable to find my building right away. Then, there it was! And I suddenly had a new "feel" for the place. Experiencing the familiar from a new perspective can bring disorientation that, fading, leaves an enhanced understanding. In much the same way, Robert Kelly's fiction shows us our familiar world from a new perspective, and expands our understanding of this life we live. Continue reading “The Logic of the World”

I recently became aware of the term personal watermelon. This is a smaller melon than your picnic-for-ten variety, weighing in at 5 lbs or less. Briefly, I entertained the false notion that the term meant the sweet, quenching fruit was mine mine mine and no one’s but. “Personal Watermelons. Get them here.” I’ve been reading about the seedless orbs a lot lately. They seem to be in season; it’s their time. Much like terrorism and terrorist were – and continue to be – ripe terms following September 11, 2001. On that date, artist, software designer, and global hitchhiker Mark Stephen Meadows found himself stranded in Paris, unable to fly home to California as planned on September 12. Continue reading “Tea Time with Terrorists”

John Cotter, author of the just published novella Under the Small Lights, is also a poet. The novella, a co-winner of 2009 Miami University Press Novella Contest, and a knowing yet earnest coming-of-age story about a group of college-age youths embracing a guileless hedonism and salvation through art, has many marks of a poet: a deft feel for spoken language and the ability to create vivid scenes through language. The very structure of the book – with short, often very short, chapters – has less of the expansiveness of prose, and more the concise cognitive breath of poetry. Continue reading “Under the Small Lights”

The latest collection from Michael Rattee, Falling off the Bicycle Forever, is a smooth, two-wheel ride through your nearest suburban neighborhood; if you don’t pay close enough attention, you’ll miss the subtleties of this book’s sedentary life, the thick underlay of muck beneath the gilded exterior of the American Dream. Continue reading “Falling off the Bicycle Forever”

Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth is a collection of great intellectual rigor, grounded by an awareness of the everyday. It presents a series of forty-four poems, all but one entitled “Creation Myth.” Reaching back into history – and sometimes prehistory – Svalina’s poems explore origins. Indeed, almost every work but the last (“Destruction Myth”) starts with some variation of “In the beginning.” Relying upon this formula lifted from “Genesis,” Svalina nonetheless demonstrates great range. He presents highly personal material, confessing “how I felt / when I was eight years old / & my home broke apart,” alongside thought-provoking anthropological generalizations (“Human life begins / at the moment / of contraception”; “Nothing without thumbs / is human”). And he displays skill with both free verse and prose – though the latter mode seems better suited for his forthright tone and frequent use of dialogue. Continue reading “Destruction Myth”

When titles are well written, they strike our interest and pull us into the main text, but they also are part of the main text – adding to the story, the voice, the emotional resonance – and should never be something without which a text can survive or make sense. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – chosen by Lynn Emanuel for the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry – does just those things and is exactly what the title of a book should be; even before readers get to what’s inside of the book, it is striking, creative, intriguing, and relevant. Continue reading “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl”

What’s in an author’s name? Just uttering, “Oliver de la Paz” is to be moved by poetry. Repeating the musicality of such a name over and over before even peeling back the cover to the opening poem makes one ponder, “Could this poet’s name be some sort of predestination statement at the root of his creative process? Or evidence of his introduction since birth to the rise and fall of words that have fine-tuned his ear?” Continue reading “Requiem for the Orchard”

In her memoir Creating a Life, Corbin Lewars chronicles her difficult journey to motherhood. Along the road there is a miscarriage, unearthed memories of being raped as a teenager, a struggle to find meaningful work, and tough decisions about the birth itself: hospital or home? Drugs or “natural” childbirth? Continue reading “Creating a Life”

The novel The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin, is one that defines how love can surpass not only generations but countries as well. The story comes through so naturally – the narrator not hesitating to let true statements of the heart come through when need be – that, by the end of the novel, I felt as if this was a story told to me personally by a good friend. Continue reading “The Disappeared”