About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Deborah Landau
Positive Booklist Landau’s fifth collection takes a wry and realistic look at the scale of a life ... Most striking is the mouthfeel of the poems, whether arid or salivating, as in a poem about cherries ... Skeletons is clever, pragmatic, and, finally, ecstatic about \'this bag of bones\' we’re bound to.
Ann McCutchan
Positive Booklist Florida native McCutchan captures Pulitzer Prize–winning Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ unconventional life, from her peripatetic girlhood to her great love, the beautiful, temperamental terrain of north-central Florida, in a well-paced and absorbing biography ... the singularity of her life shapes her work ... One hopes that this appraisal of Rawlings leads to a revival of interest in her as both a chronicler of a time and place and an exacting practitioner of the writer’s craft.
Heather Clark
Rave Booklist In her exhaustive new biography, Clark starts from scratch in defining Plath, carefully separating the popular myth of an unstable and overdramatic prodigy from the real Sylvia: troubled, yes, but also joyful in her reading, ruthlessly self-critical, and blazingly ambitious. Clark had access to material never before incorporated into a Plath biography, including letters and psychiatric records. This material not only fleshes out Plath herself, it also refocuses characters from the Plath-Hughes mythos ... This additional material also prompts fresh readings of the poems, which makes the late work especially moving. In her introduction, Maggie Nelson writes, \'To be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.\' Red Comet has the authority and insight to permanently correct that sentiment.
Heather McHugh
Rave Booklist If you had only about a hundred pages from which to teach all of contemporary poetry, McHugh’s new collection would not be a bad place to begin. The multi-award-winner’s first book in a decade reflects her habit of reaching for whatever tool or material she needs—rhyme, meter, pared-to-the-bone imagism, or luxuriant abstraction—to get the work of each poem done. This breadth of style and skill allows her to range freely from difficult intellections to spit take worthy jokes without losing consistency of voice or perspective. But McHugh doesn’t demonstrate virtuosity for its own sake. These poems are consistently politically and socially aware ... McHugh’s wordplay is peerless. Poems rest in anagrams, palindromes, and neologisms like cremaindered, and the sonic pleasure of her riffs on assonance and slant rhyme delights the ear. This is a high-impact book that is impossible to exhaust.
Alice Notley
Positive Booklist Notley smashes through expectations both formally and intellectually. This is a poem that teaches readers how to read it from the beginning so that as the language and linearity distorts, the sense is not lost, and the effort pays off brilliantly. It’s easy to feel the poet reaching ecstatically for whatever tool will express the radical moment: concrete poetic images, foreign languages, colloquialisms, and unexpected humor ... not an easy book, but its method and its message are well worth the effort.
Martha Ackmann
Rave Booklist Ackmann’s literary biography of Emily Dickinson takes a unique approach ... a deep dive into the milieu and mind of the elusive poet ... Ackmann combines rigorous scholarship, thorough explication of the poems, and a sharp familiarity with the geography of Dickinson’s world in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a fiction writer’s sensibility. Indeed, the book feels like a novel, and casual readers will be greedy for what happens next, while those steeped in Dickinson’s poems will delight in learning about the moments that gestated them ... an affectionate and knowledgeable look at the person and the poet.
Sharon Olds
Positive Booklist If a book of poetry can unsimplify—can add tangles, grit, and tangents to the way we think and feel—Arias is that book ... children, including Trayvon Martin, Etan Patz, Olds’ own firstborn, are introduced in the book to bring the immensity of the world’s hurt to an intimate human level, not only to personalize it but also to concentrate it and to find its odd joys. Arias offers hard-earned comfort well worth the effort.