Editor's Shelf: Book Recommendations from Our Advisory Editors

Marilyn Hacker recommends The New Black by Evie Shockley: “A second collection of poems that delights with its virtuosity while confronting the conundrums of race, class, gender, and history. Shockley can entrance with or rupture narrative, is fluent in nonlinear forms and a splendid sonneteer. The poet’s verbal bravado is of a piece with her acute intelligence.” (Wesleyan, March 2011)

DeWitt Henry recommends A Girl Like You by Bruce Bennett: “The story of the end of an academic poet’s not-quite-affair with a young admirer, told in twenty-four sonnets, at once wise, witty, mocking and rueful, with overtones of E. A. Robinson’s ‘Eros Turannos.’” (Finishing Line Press, 2011)

Jane Hirshfield recommends Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems by Tess Gallagher: “The new poems section of this indispensable compendium is called ‘Signature,’ and that single word’s intelligence, multidirectionality, and resonant richness conveys no small part of Gallagher’s signature gifts. These are life-lifting and almost infinitely explorable poems.” (Graywolf, September 2011)

Maxine Kumin recommends Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries edited by Gigi Bradford & Louisa Newlin: “Shakespeare’s Sisters contains prose and poetry by thirteen contemporary women writers (in the interest of full disclosure I am one of them) reflecting on women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This handsome chapbook is anything but dull. To pick one example: Jane Smiley has created lively imaginary letters exchanged between Desdemona and Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, ending with the tragic deaths of Othello and his beloved.” (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2012)

Philip Levine recommends Piano Lessons by Anna Goldsworthy: “A memoir which is actually a tribute to a teacher, Elenora Sivan, a Russian pianist and émigré living in Adelaide, Australia. As a very ambitious, self-confident child prodigy, Goldsworthy took piano lessons from Sivan and discovered that she either was totally without talent or knew next to nothing about the piano and its music. Her teacher does nothing to lessen the shock. An elderly woman, Sivan long ago gave up any notion that tact is an aid to teaching—or so we are led to believe for much of the book. She is eccentric, dictatorial, yet incredibly insightful, and in her broken English she manages to say everything that needs to be said. Goldsworthy comes to realize what is required to become a true artist. With the help of Sivan, she discovers within herself resources she had no idea she possessed. I have never read a better depiction of a great mentor and of how true learning takes place. Every teacher of anything should read this book. Twice.” (Macmillan, October 2010)

Margot Livesey recommends The Might Have Been by Joe Schuster: “A wonderful novel ostensibly about baseball but really about all the things that good novels have always been about: ambition, time, love and loss.” (Ballantine, March 2012)

Thomas Lux recommends Pretty Little Rooms by Katie Chaple: “I greatly admire its daring, its intelligence, and its passionate detail.” (Press 53, August 2011)

Robert Pinsky recommends Coral Road by Garrett Hongo: “Hongo’s book is a meditation on culture, and its terms—its languages, you might say—are the history of Hawaii and in particularly the history of Japanese families who came to Hawaii as farm laborers. He finds ways to write about art itself, and history itself.” (Knopf, September 2011)

Robert Pinsky also recommends Night of the Republic by Alan Shapiro: “Shapiro in this book writes unique, haunting evocations of public spaces, their manifold human life, even late at night, or when they are otherwise, technically speaking, empty.” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2012)

Maura Stanton recommends The Local World by Mira Rosenthal: “This is a stunning debut collection full of elegant and tender poems that dramatize a personal yet universal struggle to understand and transform the past.” (Kent State University Press, September 2011)

Gerald Stern recommends The Undertaker’s Daughter by Toi Derricotte: “I love this new book. It is strikingly original and moving.” (University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2011)

Gerald Stern also recommends The Water Books: Poems by Judith Vollmer: “Judy Vollmer’s very best book. Her spirit shines.” (Autumn House...