I’ve been surprised to learn that (at least until I discovered Grey’s Anatomy is on Netflix) finding time to read while caring for a newborn (especially while breastfeeding) has been super easy. But time for review writing? Well, not so much. Case in point: I finished this Atwood novel more than two weeks ago. Still, better late than never: When I attempted this 100 books project the first time back in January of 2011, I began...

Scott Hightower “Emblem” Richard Hoffman Barrow Street Press, 2011, $16.95 Emblem is Richard Hoffman’s third book. His second, Gold Star Road, won the 2006 Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Emblem departs from Alciati’s 1531 Emblemata, a Latin metrical collection of moral, proverb-like sayings, in which ethical teaching is couched in elegant and forceful diction. That text is accompanied by woodcuts. After Alciati, writing such a...

I am wary of sincerity.  Is it because I am incapable of appearing to possess it even if I feel possessed by it?  I joked with a friend recently that I am capable of competing with almost anything but the hint of sincerity.  Its place in art necessarily troubled given that by definition the creative act is an artificial one, a construct by which feeling is enacted and/or elicited—sincerity remains misunderstood.  And yet it is...

Book 4 of 100 Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight            It’s taken me awhile to write this review. I wanted some time to reflect on this memoir before commenting on it. In this book, Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo,” as she’s called throughout her childhood), recounts her experiences of growing up in South Africa with her parents and older sister, Vanessa. Her story is interesting, but I can’t say the...

(T)ravel Un(T)ravel, Neil Shepard’s fourth book of poetry delivers the dependable style and rational weight of Shepard’s previous books –– and it takes a step further out into both the geographic and literary world.

Book 3 of 100 Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore’s slim novel took me two tries. I sat down some number of months ago and read the first eight pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the book’s opening section. It felt too dense and disconnected—I couldn’t find anything to grasp onto to pull myself through. I felt a little bored. I put the book away. When I came back, the first eight pages were still slow, and it...

Book 2 of 100 Kathryn Stockett, The Help I’m happy to report that so far I’m about two-and-a-half times as fast at reading than I am at reviewing. : ) Stockett’s novel chronicles the lives of several southern women in the early 1960’s: Black maids caring for white children and families, as well as a few of the white women who have hired them. Just home from college and swept up by the momentum of the early stirrings of the...

Scott Hightower “Birds for a Demolition” Manoel de Barros; translated by Idra Novey Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010, 978-0-88748-523-7, $16.95 Birds for a Demolition is a compilation of poems by the celebrated poet Manoel de Barros. Life on the rural Pantanal (the beautiful, tropical wetlands of Brazil, in the northeastern corner of the country, near Paraguay) lies as the center of this poet’s expression. The Pantanal is a...

Scott Hightower “The Earth in the Attic” Fady Joudah Yale University Press, 2008, 978-0-300-13431-5, $16 Back in 2007, Fady Joudah’s first collection of poems, The Earth in the Attic was selected by Louis Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. It is a book that will long continue to warrant reading. Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston. He is familiar with issues of immigrants and...

The Dirt Riddles, Michael Walsh’s first book of poems, has taken several awards. But it is interesting, and to the credit of Walsh’s talent, that the awards were not in contests reserved solely for first books.