Arman Schwerner, Michelle Tea, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and more...

FEATURES

Armand Schwerner Part II
Essay by Eric Lorberer
The acclaimed author of The Tablets also published Selected Shorter Poems and Cantos from Dante's Inferno in the last year of his life.

REVIEWS: FICTION

House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
Things aren't what they seem to be in this "second printing" of a novel that originally appeared in a different form on the Net. Reviewed by Doug Nufer

Valencia
Michelle Tea
Not quite a novel but more than a memoir, Michelle Tea's Valencia is a lesbian manifesto, a portrait of a life lived outside the mainstream. Reviewed by Christine Kennick

Stardog
Jack Driscoll
Jack Driscoll's latest novel, Stardog, may navigate by the entrenched conventions of the American road novel, yet, like any good potboiler, this charmingly droll trip down America's byways satisfies our expectations in surprising ways. Reviewed by Peter Ritter

The New York Years
Felice Picano
In The New York Years, a collection of short stories written between 1972 and 1981 and published for the first time as one volume, readers are granted the rare treat of witnessing the birth of a supernova, a literary talent willing to take them on a tour of a long-gone New York City, once a metropolis of desire, now almost thoroughly co-opted and neutered by Walt Disney. Reviewed by Brad Jacobson

The Authenticator
William M Valtos
What happens to philosophy majors after graduation? Do they descend into the Stygian netherworld of the service economy, or like novelist William Valtos, do they put their crania-load of arcana to some practical purpose? Valtos's second novel, The Authenticator, assays both questions with morbid rigor. Reviewed by Peter Ritter

REVIEWS: NONFICTION

The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
Henri Cartier-Bresson
A collection of Cartier-Bresson's writings on the people he has known, the places he has visited, and his relationship with the world he found through the lens of his Leica. Reviewed by Elizabeth Culbert

Leap
Terry Tempest Williams
With poetic intensity, Williams carries us into the world of Hieronymous Bosch, uncovering connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life. Reviewed by Juliet Patterson

REVIEWS: POETRY

Republics of Reality, 1975-1995
Charles Bernstein
Republics of Reality brings together in their entirety many of the poet's early, out-of-print books, along with newer poems. Reviewed by Patrick Pritchett

Tottering State
Tom Raworth
New edition of Raworth's Tottering State, where meaning squirms, squirts, slips and slides from phrase to phrase. Reviewed by John Olson

Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems
Carol Frost
Frost's conflicts with the divine, with the body, and with poetic convention interrupt any delusions of attaining untainted joy or complete peace. Rather, Frost's brilliance is in her ability to capture moments that strain toward soaring song or deep despair, but that nevertheless linger at the thresholds of the breaking point. Reviewed by Jeffrey Shotts

Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond, Skin Divers
Anne Michaels
Whether slipping under the sheets as a late lover to the great Italian modernist painter Amadeo Modigliani or donning the seventeenth-century scientific cloak of the revolutionary mathematician Johannes Kepler, Canadian poet Anne Michaels offers a series of persona poems that ruminate and seduce with an erudite yet sexy seriousness. Reviewed by Fionn Mead

Arcani
Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman's Arcani catalogs, like a Book of Shadows, the various significant mysteries and losses collected in a life. Reviewed by Sarah Fox

The Cradle of the Real Life
Jean Valentine
The Cradle of the Real Life is Jean Valentine's eighth collection of poems, the latest offering in a thirty-five year spread, and a fine overture to Valentine's chemical wedding of old-school feminism and new-school poetics. Reviewed by Craig Arnold

Blues for Unemployed Secret Police
Doug Anderson
Blues for Unemployed Secret Police demonstrates a fearless poet, one who is unafraid of surveying the world around him or his own heart. Reviewed by John Bradley