Library Journal

Bell, Elana. Eyes, Stones. Louisiana State Univ. Apr. 2012. 72p. ISBN 9780807144640. pap. $17.95.
In tight-knit language, matter of fact yet deeply lyrical, Bell examines Israeli-Palestinian tensions by telling stories of the Jews who “named the land in blood and ink” and of Palestinians who’ve long tilled the same land to bursting. Bell, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of America Poets for this book.

Brimhall, Traci. Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems. Norton. Apr. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780393086430. pap. $15.95.
Chosen by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, this book gathers the voices of women traveling together as pilgrims in a world enduring apocalypse. Incantatory and dispassionate, the voices are sometimes first person singular (“I began to understand I was promised/ a second life but not a better one”) and sometimes, unusually and effectively, first person plural.

Choffel, Julie. The Hello Delay. Fordham Univ. Apr. 2012. 85p. ISBN 9780823242290. $45; pap. ISBN 9780823242306. $18.
Staccato and interior, the poems in Choffel’s first collection—which Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge liked well enough to pick for the 2011 Poets Out Loud Prize—examine the very act of language (“She is like her voice is and like the statements/ she is making in a bowl/ not ‘howling’/ or ‘timing herself’ ”).

Clay, Adam. A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World. Milkweed. Apr. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781571314413. pap. $16.
Whether the narrator of these sprawly poems is fishing up north, sitting in a Chinese restaurant, or “riding backward through Michigan toward Chicago,” one senses immediately his solitude, not desperate but contemplative, the way any of us might feel in “a hotel lobby at the edge of the world.”

Christle, Heather. What Is Amazing. Wesleyan Univ. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9780819572776. $22.95.
Christle’s third collection (after The Trees The Trees) can be offhandedly dark and spikily funny (“Was that a gunshot or/ was it a look of temerity”). Swans are murderers, some husbands so small one must lie down to chat. Then come the epiphanies.

Donnelly, Patrick. Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin. Four Way. Apr. 2012. 108p. ISBN 9781935536215. pap. $15.95.
If “every gesture triggers/ a cascade of ghost-futures,” then every gesture here also triggers ghost-pasts, told in language both tough and lovely and with an unsentimental regard for mortality and “this cup/ of tears and fire and gall.” Donnelly’s second book (after The Charge) is also cut through with some elegant translations of Japanese poems (done with Stephen D. Miller).

Fisher-Wirth. Dream Cabinet. Wings. Apr. 2012. 85p. ISBN 9780916727932. pap. $16.
“Oh to dive into an unmade bed and sleep,/ and sleep and sleep.” The lushness and comfort of those lines, which open this new book from the author of Blue Windows, suggests the personal, quietly reasoned poems to follow.

Frank, Patrick Ryan. How the Losers Love What’s Lost. Four Way. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781935536208. pap. $15.95.
A character actor (“I play an unlovely face/ for laughs”). A hunter (“dawn, like sickness, starts/ slowly”). A vet (“I was happy in the war./ Just one great thing”). A one-handed peeping tom (“All he wanted was that little thrill/ of seeing people happy”). In his first book, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, Frank draws portraits of startling forthrightness.

Motika, Stephen. Western Practice. Alice James. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781882295913. pap. $15.95.
Publisher of Nightboat Books, Motika offers gorgeously fractured poems that spread like starfish over the pages of his first book. He’s concerned with culture, and, yes, the West: from “Pacific Slope”: “in long stocking/pearlescent, feasting/ salty heat of abalone.” Energized.

Nadelberg, Amanda. Bright Brave Phenomena. Coffee House, dist. by Consortium. Apr. 2012. 133p. ISBN 9781566893039. pap. $16.
So sometimes the speaker in Nadelberg’s second collection (after Slope Editions Book Prize winner Isa the Truck Named Isadore) has tense personal moments: “I looked out/ the big windows and you/ were there too and all/ there was to see was elephants/ and angry elephants at/ that.” With inimitable everyday sparkle she also says “I/ make horses whenever/ I want.”

Novey, Idra. Exit, Civilian. Univ. of Georgia. Apr. 2012. 88p. ISBN 9780820343488. pap. $16.95.
The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey’s National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don’t encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change: “Whisper at the door/ of the little prison/ and your voice will become a coin.” Startling.

Robbins, Michael. Alien vs. Predator. Penguin Poets. Apr. 2012. 70p. ISBN 9780143120353. pap. $18.
Willfully defiant and in your face (“You homicidal bitch. I killed the boar/ ’cause boar’s the game I came here for”), Robbins will appeal to those who like their poetry angry, darkly funny, and stirred up. And he can be wistful: “I feel like a discarded Christmas tree./ Thanks for sharing.”

Rybicki, John. When All the World Is Old. Lookout. Apr. 2012. 120p. ISBN 9780984592265. pap. $16.95.
This tender collection captures both the 16-year battle Rybicki’s wife waged against cancer (“I’m trying to smuggle her/ out of a burning city”) and her death (“There’s a river of light inside my lass/ and I’m hauling it out of her/ veins like rope. Even if she’s in the dirt”). Since the publisher’s first book was Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, a 2011 National Book Critics Circle winner and National Book Award finalist, you can trust its taste.

Webster, Kerri. Grand & Arsenal. Univ. of Iowa. Apr. 2012. 94p. ISBN 9781609380915. pap. $18.
If the poet seems so anxious to locate herself, perhaps it’s because the world is so dizzyingly rich—as are her poems, displaying both detailed physicality (“Objects/ pile on my work-bench: a flame. A seed. A heart”) and unfettered repetition (“Having gone looking for the smoothest stones/ having seen the herons pterodactyl-ancient in the cottonwoods…”). An exciting spill of words that won the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize.

As I look back over 2011—and my office, piled high with books—I realize that there are so many titles I just can’t let go of, even if I couldn’t get them reviewed. And I also can’t let go of the idea of doing a Best Short Stories list, inspired by LJ book review queen Heather McCormack. Herewith, then, ten top story collections from 2011 (plus an honorable mention), five core poetry collections I didn’t want to miss, eight collections from younger poets you’ll be hearing from again, and 14 fiction-in-translation titles that should intrigue a wide range of readers. In addition, don’t miss Angelina Benedetti’s second Best YA crossover list, touting some great books in unusual categories.

Best Short Stories 2011
Barnes, Julian. Pulse. Knopf. ISBN 9780307595263. $25.
Before you grab Barnes’s Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending, read his delicious collection of stories, which are ineffably witty yet never condescending to the characters, which come across as brave, aching, and real.

Beach, Lou. 420 Characters: Stories. Houghton Harcourt. ISBN 9780547617930. $22.
Originally posted on illustrator Beach’s Facebook page (which initially limited each entry to no more than 420 characters), these stories aren’t gimmicks but quirky and deeply felt views of the world.

Doctorow. E.L. All the Time in the World: New and Selected Short Stories. Random. ISBN 9781400069637. $26.
The Pulitzer Prize winner collects stories new and familiar and groups them not by character or setting but by their “similar mental light”—an approach that is an enjoyable as it is illuminating.

Hrbek, Greg. Destroy All Monsters: And Other Stories. Bison: Univ. of Nebraska. ISBN 9780803236448. pap. $14.95.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Hrbek’s brutally forthright and forthrightly beautiful first collection (after the award-winning novel The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly) studies the monster in us all. 

Latiolais, Michelle. Widow: Stories. Bellevue Literary. ISBN 9781934137307. pap. $14.95.
Quietly, unflinchingly, Latiolais—an award-winning novelist and codirector of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine—explores the raw, aching terrain of the newly widowed.

Millhauser, Steven. We Others: New and Selected Stories. Knopf. ISBN 9780307595904. $27.95.
Encompassing three decades of work and ranging from ghosts to teenage boys to Thomas Edison in his laboratory, this collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner is, not unexpectedly, dark, magical, and wickedly beautiful. 

Pearlman, Edith. Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories. Lookout Books. ISBN 9780982338292 $18.95.
Winner of Pen/Malamud Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and finalist for the National Book Award, Pearlman’s collection is this year’s stunner, bringing a writer we should all have known better to the fore. Every story is a surprise.

Shepard, Jim. You Think That’s Bad: Stories. Knopf. ISBN 9780307594822. $24.95.
Shepard takes chances, as do his characters, and here he ranges widely in fiercely beautiful prose, proving that his National Book Award nomination for Like You’d Understand, Anyway was no fluke.

Thon, Melanie Rae. In This Light: New and Selected Stories. Graywolf. ISBN 9781555975852. pap. $15.
Thon, named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists (check out this year’s amazing The Voice of the River), offers troubled characters in hard environments yet never abandons them to their fate.

Woodrell, Daniel. The Outlaw Album. Little, Brown. ISBN 9780316057561. $24.99.
Purveyor of such terrific novels as Winter’s Bone, Woodrell here offers a first collection that similarly explores folks on the edge in dark, bracing language.

Honorable mention: Don’t forget Bruce Machart’s astonishing Men in the Making (Houghton Harcourt. ISBN 978015603449. $24), tough-minded stories of working men and down-and-outers that are not for the faint of heart. It’s as absorbing as the author’s fiction debut, The Wake of Forgiveness, a little relentless but satisfying for everyone.

Five Core Poetry Collections I Nearly Missed
Cruz, Victor Hernández. In the Shadow of Al-Andalus. Coffee House, dist. by Consortium. ISBN 978156689277. pap. $16.
Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and winner of the Louis Reyes Rivera Lifetime Achievement Award, Cruz writes bright, vigorous poetry that dances lightly across the surface. Here, he brings his talents to bear on how the cultures of Spain, North Africa, and Puerto Rico have been influenced by Islamic culture. Sprinkled with the right words (“Coast to coast sailors wrapped in djellebas,” “Sahara is the thought of my word”), the poems create a vivid sense of visitation. Is that enough? Maybe; lots of readers will engage.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Nod House. New Directions, dist. by Norton. ISBN 9780811219464. pap. $15.95.
Mackey picks up right where Splay Anthem, his 2006 National Book Award winner left off, sending us on one long and exciting journey (“There we stood leaning forward, one/ hand gripping the balcony rail, the/ other an Asafo flag”). This is rich, jangly, and atmospheric, maybe too densely packed for modest readers (“Risen waft, anabatic/ whiff./ Buried our heads in/ Erzulie’s loin-musk”). But serious poetry readers and all those interested in African American verse will want.

Morgan, Robert. Terroir. Penguin Poets. ISBN 9780143120193. pap. $18.
A best-selling novelist (Gap Creek) as well as a noteworthy poet (with honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). Morgan is a little too fiercely no-nonsense to be seen as a nature poet, notwithstanding the title. Here he gets right down there in the dirt (“Soft Mountains,” “Poison Oak”),  then goes back to brightness (“November light is like a dream”), and spars with death and great poets (“Was only when I watched my dad/ approach his end I understood/ how little Dylan Thomas knew/ of death and dying” ). Plain-spoken, well-crafted work with, dare one say, old-fashioned charm.

Stobb, William. Absentia. Penguin Poets. ISBN 9780143120186. $18.
Winner of the National Poetry Series for Nervous Systems, Stobb writes deft, sure poetry straddling the territory where the physical and imagination, nature and history meet (“What sound there is—whisper of wind/ across the land’s sand skin….//Stake the imaginary tent/ on imaginary lake bottom”). Accomplished. 

Wright, Franz. Kindertotenwald. Knopf. ISBN 9780307272805. $26.
Prose poems can be a poor excuse for fine writing (read: convoluted, flowery stuff that is supposed to create a mood…or something). But this Pulitzer Prize winner writes clear, muscular verse one can really bite into—and come away hungry for more. From the weather forecast to the forecaster, from a mauled trip home to Nietzsche, Messiaen, and two saints, these are wide-ranging and erudite yet utterly approachable poems. Don’t miss.

Eight Young Poets To Watch: Collections I Couldn’t Pass Up
Burwick, Kimberly. Horses in the Cathedral. Anhinga. ISBN 9781934695241. pap. $17.
“Each animal is the abstraction that goes through me”: so Burwick says of those horses. Burwick, who won the Robert Dana Prize for Poetry with this book, writes spare, lyric verse that does plumb abstraction—but only by working through pitch pine and yellowwood, “hands/ clayey with milk and magnolia.” A fresh new sense of the pastoral.

Chang, Tina. Of Gods & Strangers. Four Way Bks. ISBN 9781935536178. pap. $17.
Brooklyn’s poet laureate does not write gentle odes. Whether she’s revisiting the last empress of China (“Once the guards sprayed me down unclothed/ I left my veil in a pool of my own waking”), contemporary violence (Fever in the white stone garden:/ By 7 p.m., stray dogs have the run of Jaffna’s streets”), or more intimate darkness (“I dream I am whipping a donkey”), Chang is as bold as she is affecting. Pretty much a definite purchase.

Crews, James. The Book of What Stays. Bison: Univ. of Nebraska. ISBN 9780803236356. pap. $17.95.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, this is a forthright, engrossing collection of portraits, places, and events (a damaged palomino, a couple stranded in a deadly blizzard, a bridge covered with some arresting graffiti) that should attract readers who enjoy poetry grounded in the everyday and informed by a sure sense of narrative.

Griffiths, Rachel Eliza. Mule & Pear. New Issues: Western Michigan Univ. ISBN 9781936970018. pap. $15.
Bearing a title from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, this gutsy, bitterly lyric collection (“I’m honeysuckle./ A girl child crying/ holy seven sins”) takes in the entire African American experience in lines that just spin out over the page, leaving you breathless to catch up and keep reading. Wow; do get this one.

Legault, Paul. The Other Poems. Fence. ISBN 9781934200506. pap. $15.95.
Every once in a while one must go for wacky, acerbic wit, and Legault’s second collection (after The Madeleine Poems) fits the bill (“EVERYBODY: Everybody shut up./ MONDAY: It’s happening again.”). The point: get used to life’s absurdities. Fun for risk-taking readers.

Oshiro, Janine. Pier. Alice James. ISBN 9781882295883. pap. $15.95.
This is a first collection by a poet who really is about to dive off that pier, exploring love, loss, and the way she manages as she locates herself gracefully (“I want outside./ In the wrist is a bone like a boat.// I have been a long time out of water.” Yet she doesn’t dwell tiringly on the self, the “I” that can overwhelm a poem. This is an open world mixing ghosts and violets. Try it.

Rosal, Patrick. Boneshepherds. Persea Bks, dist. by Norton. ISBN 9780892553860. pap. $15.
It’s not every poet who can move deftly from the Japanese occupation of his father’s homeland to cousins “shush[ing] the goats before they kill them” to “a sex shop and a Bible shop/ two doors down.” But Rosal, who has won honors from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop and the Association of Asian American Studies, can do it. “We have to sing/ just to figure out/ what we can’t say.” A keeper.

Shaheen, Glenn. Predatory. Univ. of Pittsburgh. ISBN 9780822961628. pap. $14.95.
This collection, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, is meditative but grounded in the tangible (“In the heat the glue has melted away and nothing will remain fastened.// Sometimes I wish it would all suddenly and gently end”). For the down-to-earth poetry reader.

Fourteen Fiction-in-Translation Titles from 2011 You Should Definitely Consider
Best European Fiction 2012. Dalkey Archive. ed. by Aleksandar Hemon. ISBN 9781564786807. pap. $15.95.
The third edition of this excellent series is the strongest yet, with the 34 stories from 26 countries organized by theme (e.g., “Love,” War,” Family”). Some of the best: Augustín Fernández Paz’s “This Strange Lucidity,” a dog’s-eye view of his master’s serial relationships; Gabriel Rosenstock’s “…everything emptying into white,” about a hapless folklorist’s introduction to the real world at a conference in Slovenia; Rui Zink’s disaffected traveler in “Travel Destination”; and the rebellious teenagers in Bjarte Breiteig’s “Down There They Don’t Mourn.” Wonderful for anyone interested in world fiction.

Can Xue. Vertical Motion: Stories. Open Letter. tr. from Chinese by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping. ISBN 9781934824375. pap. $13.95.
The stories in this collection from a noted Chinese novelist (Five Spice Street) feel realist (“The thing I love watching most is the swirling cotton candy”) but go dreamy and slant, not exactly surreal but heightened (“I belong to the moonlight; the lion belongs to the darkness”). That the author has written on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante and has chosen a pseudonym that means “dirty snow” (her real name is Deng Xiaohua) attests to her wit and protean taste, as reflected in her writing. Important for world collections.

Glissant, Édouard. The Overseer’s Cabin. Univ. of Nebraska. tr. from French by Betsy Wing. ISBN 9780803234796. $19.95.
Leading Caribbean author Glissant captures the history of 20th-century Martinique with this story of Mycea, born in 1928 and released from an asylum in 1978 at novel’s end. More quietly focused than similar works by Toni Morrison, Marlon James, and Isabel Allende, this work is just as harrowing and will appeal to readers of these authors.

Gonçalo, M. Tavares. Learning To Pray in the Age of Technique. Dalkey Archive. tr. from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. ISBN 9781564786272. pap. $15.95.
A distant surgeon, who “considered himself an observer of the world,” is upended by a cancer diagnosis. The time and place aren’t specific, and the plot has universal appeal, though noted Portuguese author Gonçalo (winner of the Saramago Prize) won’t likely appeal to casual readers. For those interested in world fiction.

Le Clézio, J.M. G. Mondo & Other Stories. Univ. of Nebraska. tr. from French by Alison Anderson. ISBN 9780803230002. $19.95.
He’s a Nobel prize winner and French, so some readers probably suspect that Le Clézio is difficult. But in fact his quiet explorations of beauty and culture are freshly, conversationally written. A nice introduction if needed, as the stories range widely.

Le Tellier, Hervé. The Sextine Chapel. Dalkey Archive. tr. from French by Ian Monk. ISBN 9781564785756. pap. $14.95.
Associated with the cutting-edge writing group Oulipo, Le Tellier is a daring writer; in this first collection of linked short-short stories, he introduces telling and isolated moments in a series of relationships (“Anna and Ben.” “Ben and Chloe.” “Chloe and Dennis.”), each in a single page. Occasionally precious, often brilliant, more successful than you might think; for nervy readers.

Meddeb, Abdelwahab. Talismano. Dalkey Archive. tr. from French by Jane Kuntz. ISBN 9781564786296. pap. $14.95.
“Down stairs leading to the sloped street that ends in the school’s cul-de-sac, I find I’m fully medina-minded, medinating: shaded passages zigzag, footsteps oddly resonant. Vaulted portions of alleyways ringing with cymbal and echo.” This work by Tunis-born, Paris-based Meddeb is less story than meditation on memory, place, and the cross-currents of Arab and Western culture. Not for those who want traditional narrative but gorgeous and atmospheric; I kept returning with interest.

Rodoreda, Mercè. The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda. Open Letter. tr. from Catalan by Martha Tennent. ISBN 9781934824313. pap. $15.95.
A leading Catalan writer of the 20th century who lived in exile in France and Switzerland during the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda doesn’t have a lot of exposure in English translation. This collection of 30 stories, from the meditative “Happiness” to the moody, autumnal “Carnival,” reveal carefully observed moments in the characters’ lives and would serve as a good introduction for interested readers.

Rosero, Evelio. Good Offices. New Directions, dist. by Norton. tr. from Spanish by Anne McLean & Anna Milsom. ISBN 9780811219303. pap. $13.95.
Award-winning Colombian author Rosero gets his second chance in English (after The Armies) with this story of earnest hunchback Tancredo, who helps Father Almida serve the town’s charity lunches. When a new priest must substitute, he dangerously charms both Tancredo and his helpers. A direct hit on the Catholic Church and a good read for a wide range of readers.

Scliar, Moacyr. Kafka’s Leopards. Texas Tech Univ. (The Americas). tr. from Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebe. ISBN 9780896726963. $26.95.
Asked to deliver a message, Benjamin Kantarovitch fancies that he is under direct orders from Trotsky (the time is the Russian Revolution) and leaves the shtetl for Prague, where he loses the message but encounters Franz Kafka. What results is a witty, twisty, literate yet accessible tale of semi-intrigue that opens with a deadpan police report. Just deceased, prolific Brazilian author Scliar is noted for his fable-like work and triumphs here.

Sorokin, Vladimir. The Ice Trilogy. New York Review Books. tr. from Russian by Jamey Gambrell. ISBN 9781590173862. pap. $19.95.
Outstanding contemporary Russian author Sorokin is making a name for himself; his tart and daring Day of the Oprichnik was published here last year to good reviews. This trilogy, about a brotherhood intent on global destruction, should appeal to a wide range of readers; Ice, the second volume, originally appeared as a standalone in 2007 and described by LJ’s reviewer as “truly thrilling postmodern thriller.”

Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. The Truth About Marie. Dalkey Archive. tr. from French by Matthew B. Smith. ISBN 9781564783677. pap. $12.98.
Toussaint has been called a Camus for the 21st century, and that seems apt. He’s got a cool, acute way of describing human emotion. Here, having “realized that we made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other,” the narrator chronicles their uncertain relationship, starting with the death of Marie’s paramour of the moment and moving back to the narrator’s intuition of that death, then forward again. A racehorse that figures in the plot (“aware of nothing but the certainty of being then and there”) signifies an urgent presence in the novel, something the narrator is reaching for, always. Francophiles and other interested readers will want.

Urban, Miloş. The Seven Churches: A Gothic Novel of Prague. tr. from Czech by Robert Russell. Trafalgar Sq. ISBN 9780720613117. pap. $13.95.
A Prague policeman fascinated with the Middle Ages is fascinated by a group trying to reconstruct the city’s golden era even as he chases a murderer drawing inspiration from the past. Billed as a literary thriller, a best seller in the Czech Republic and Spain, and sold to many more countries, this absorbing and readable work will appeal to anyone who like the works of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Iain Pears, medieval mystery writers, and the more upscale Scandinavian scare-folks.

Several years ago, while wondering how to get more people to read poetry, I came up with an idea. Why not pair poetry collections with popular fiction titles in a read-all-around experience that would show folks how richly exciting and tapped in and accessible poetry really is? I’ve never gotten around to actually trying it until this year, when I took a look at LJ’s Best Books list and got some ideas. Here are my suggestions for books to read along with LJ’s Top Ten in poetry, focused on current or forthcoming titles, mostly but not exclusively fiction ,and drawing on other LJ Best Books when possible. Let me know if this works!

al-Jubouri, Amal. Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation. Alice James. ISBN 9781882295890. pap. $17.50.
This lyric and heartrending account of Iraq’s current turmoil might add perspective for readers of thrillers like Michael Robotham’s eviscerating The Wreckage. More literary titles include Benjamin Bucholz’s One Hundred and One Nights, a novel just out this month about an Iraqi who has returned home from America, and Stephen Dau’s forthcoming The Book of Jonas. My favorite fiction on the complexity of war in the Middle East remains Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil.

Flynn, Nick. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. Graywolf. ISBN 9781555975746. $22.
I’ve racked by brains to come up with a current fiction title that equals the intensity of Flynn’s forthright look at human violence, but nothing works for me like Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s 2008 The Painter of Battles. In a striking parallel, Flynn focuses partly on Abu Grahib and its awful photographs, while Pérez-Reverte’s hero is a disillusioned war photographer. In addition, Flynn’s collection might add an interesting counterbalance to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, an LJ Best Book.

Foulds, Adam. The Broken Word: An Epic Poem of British Empire in Kenya, and the Mau Mau Uprising Against It. Penguin. ISBN 9780143118091. pap. $16.
This Costa Award winner uses the personal—a young man’s return to the family farm in 1950s Kenya—to tell the significant story of rebellion against colonial rule. I cannot imagine a more illuminating poetry book to read along with Alexandra Fuller’s classic Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and her recent Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, both memoirs of her family in an Africa just slipping its chains.

Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, Claire. Bear, Diamonds and Crane. Four Way Bks. ISBN 9781935536130. pap. $15.95.
When I first started thinking about this book, writers from Chang-rae Lee to Jhumpa Lahiri came to mind as possible parallel reads. But the best match for this exploration of family, love, and loss, particularly among several generations of Japanese Americans, is Julie Otsuka’s National Book Award nominee and LJ Best Book, The Buddha in the Attic. Don’t forget her earlier title, When the Emperor Was Divine. Both authors write with delicacy and distinctiveness.

Kakischke, Laura. Space, in Chains. Copper Canyon. ISBN 9781556593338. pap. $16.
Kakischke here writes breathtakingly about the luminous everyday, with poems ranging from “Your Headache” to “Rain.” She’s so wide-ranging that a good match was evading me until I thought of Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family: Stories, an LJ Best Book that vivifies the breadth of human experience in the author’s own fluid tones.

Levin, Dana. Sky Burial. Copper Canyon. ISBN 9781556593321. pap. $15.
Levin references everything from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec sacrifice as she explores the meaning and impact of death in her singing, beautifully fractured lines. Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, an LJ Best Book and National Book Award nominee, also explores death—her subject is turmoil in the Balkans—with the same quiet radiance.

Shockley, Evie. The new black. Wesleyan Univ. ISBN 9780819571403. $22.95.
Stylistically, Shockley’s in-your-face poetry differs from the hard-won lyricism of Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winner (and personal favorite) Salvage the Bones. Yet they share an urgent need to communicate what the African American experience is today. For a real stylistic match, go for Ishmael Reed’s Juice!

Smith, Bruce. Devotions. Phoenix: Univ. of Chicago. ISBN 9780226764351. pap. $18.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Smith’s devotions are rigorous, discursive contemplations ranging from the offbeat everyday (“Thirst Reduction”) to the profound (the child Tchaikovsky screaming “This music./ It’s here in my head. Save me from it”). Try reading them with illustrator Lou Beach’s debut story collection, 420 Characters, just out this month to considerable praise. The vignettes are each delivered in 420 characters, the limit Facebook set on status updates when Beach started posting his pieces there, and they are weird and wonderful little gems.

Smith, Tracy K. Life on Mars. Graywolf. ISBN 9781555975845. pap. $15.
Smith’s exploration of art, science, and religion is couched partly as an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. A couple of books come to mind as compatible reads. The Lieutenant, Kate Grenville’s 2009 follow-up to her Commonwealth Writers’ Prize–winning The Secret River, explores a young British soldier’s construction of an observatory in late 18th-century New South Wales. More broadly, Gin Phillips’s Come In and Cover Me, coming in January, explores art (pottery made by Natives of the American Southwest), science (the efforts of archaeologists to find and study them), and religion (protagonist Ren is a successful archaeologist because she can commune with ghosts of the past, including her brother). That might work.

Trinidad, David. Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems. Turtle Point, dist. by Consortium. ISBN 9781933527475. pap. $19.
Whether he’s summing up Peyton Place in haiku or looking at Diane Arbus looking at blockbuster writer Jacqueline Susann, Trinidad can be so goofily caustic that his compendium would be a perfect read with nearly any novel about contemporary mores. I had an inspired thought, though, while attending a concert this afternoon: Lorrie Moore!