In this, his ninth book of poetry, lyric master X. J. Kennedy regales his readers with engaging rhythm fittingly signaled by the book’s title, which echoes Duke Ellington’s jazz classic "It Don’t Mean
There is a clearing by a certain stonewhere images flow and are worth stopping for. I have stayed there almost all day in silenceuntil night remembered what belonged to it and its shadows started to t
Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s stories have been praised by theNew York Times Book Review as "eerily funny, dexterous, and too haunting to be easily forgotten," with "
"I was born in a land of bayous, raised between rivers," Glenn Blake writes. "There is a place in Southeast Texas where two rivers meet and become one. There is a long bridge over these waters, and as
Robert Phillips is a prominent figure in what has been called America's neglected "transition generation"—poets born in the late 1930s and early 1940s.Spinach Days is his sixth full-length c
In the pivotal poem "Marking Time," which appears almost exactly halfway through Peter Filkins’s fourth collection of poetry, the speaker reflects on the death of a sibling and how time is marked by o
A federal agent quits his job after his warning about a terrorist attack goes unheeded. A woman fleeing her abusive lover realizes her safety will forever be cruelly out of reach. An American visitor
In Couldn’t Prove, Had to Promise, Wyatt Prunty ushers readers into a seesaw world, one that teeters between small fables of childish misgivings and adult assurances. Alternately shadowed and illumina
To be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin’s darkly c
Though at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline. In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessit
Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB); Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb. The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world i
The New York Times Book Review has praised Richard Burgin’s stories as "eerily funny... dexterous... too haunting to be easily forgotten," while the Philadelphia Inquirer calls him "one of America’s
This is the first collection to appear in twenty years from one of America's best short story writers. His thirteen stories are marvelous—funny, heartbreaking, and wise by turns, and on occasion all t
Lee Conell’s linguistically deft stories examine the permeability between the real and the imagined, the stories buried beneath the surface and the stories by which we live our lives. In the title sto
It’s all about loss. Don’t kid yourself. Even a simple game of catch is hinged on the moment the ball leaves the glove, the moment it returns. Don’t even try to think this story or any other story is
