Recommended Reading

ALSCW President Lee Oser is feeling like a jackass on stilts trying to catch up with Christopher Ricks’s Along Heroic Lines and Carmen Bugan’s Poetry and the Language of Oppression. Oser’s first impression of these marvelous books (both from Oxford UP) is that he should chuck his current work/deadlines etc. overboard to devote serious time to studying work that matters. These are books to purchase, mark up, and return to, one essay at a time. Ricks, our greatest living critic, restores a world to coherence that seemed to be dissolving into the Twittersphere. Bugan has so many smart things to say about poetry and politics that one exits the encounter not just illuminated but shocked.

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Little Armageddon: Poems by Gregory Fraser, Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy by Mark Edmundson, and Stranger by Night and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch.

ALSCW President Lee Oser is once again gobsmacked by the genius of a new Greg Delanty book, No More Time (LSU Press). The book’s great formal dexterity — its luminously woven terza rima, for instance — matching the supreme dexterity of animals in their environmental niches, Delanty memorializes the pathos of their extinction with plangent and truth-obsessed wit. His vision might be described as Dante meets the biosphere; the unifying architecture of the book is brilliantly conceived.

“Honor Moore’s Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, is a moving, subtle blend of memoir and biography. Moore compassionately narrates her mother’s life and intimate family tensions, and at the same time records the turbulent reform movements of the 1960s: the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the emergence of women’s liberation.” – Rosanna Warren

ALSCW President Lee Oser highly recommends Joshua Hren’s In the Wine Press: Short Stories, describing the book as “a unique visionary baroque that defies the positive and negative clichés about religion and the contemporary short story.”

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Joan Romano Shifflett’s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry.

ALSCW President Lee Oser highly recommends Daniel Tobin’s On Serious Earth: Poetry & Transcendence.

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Mark Edmundson’s Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals.

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Kate Daniel’s Three Syllables Describing Addiction.

David Mura’s “A Stranger’s Journey” is a new kind of literary criticism—personal, postcolonial, analytic and dramatic—his insights into the situation of the writer of color amidst centrist assumptions and prohibitions open a new field of critical and creative thinking woven together in a book that could have been called “Castiglione’s The Courtier Meets Sun-tzu’s Art of War.” — Garrett Hongo, ALSCW Council member

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Frederick Seidel’s new book Peaches Goes It Alone: Poems and Mark Edmundson’s new book, The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching.

At Women’s Voices for Change, Rebecca Foust introduces and explicates A.E. Stallings’ poem, “Empathy,” first published in Literary Matters 9.1.

“The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison” by Barbara Nickel and Elise Partridge.

“Bracing for Impact: Trauma, Triggers & the Saving Power of Literature” by Cassandra Nelson in Commonweal Magazine.