The Babies

Author	Kristen Arnett
ISBN	1947793306

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into...

Author	T Kira Madden
ISBN	1635571855

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant...

Author	Jia Tolentino
ISBN	0525510540

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes...

Author	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	1556594100

Honored as a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013"

Honored by Cosmopolitan as the one poetry title on their list of “Best Books of the Year For Women, by Women”

"A heady, infectious celebration."—The New Yorker

"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy,...

Author	Justin Torres
ISBN	0547576722

An exquisite, blistering debut novel.

Three brothers tear their way through childhood — smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are...

Author	Alex Lemon
ISBN	0977312747

Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores Alex Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him...

Author	Karyna McGlynn
ISBN	1932511768

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration...

Author	Sylvia Plath
ISBN	0060907894

Crossing the Water and Winter Trees contain the poems written during the exceptionally creative period of the last years of Sylvia Plath’s life. Published posthumously in 1971, they add a startling counterpoint to Ariel, the volume that made her reputation. Readers will recognise some of her most...

Author	Bob Hicok
ISBN	1556594364

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

“[Elegy Owed is a] fluid, absorbing new collection... Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this...

Author

Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor...

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1932511512

update: I'm thinking this could have been edited into a slimmer and more powerful collection, because I feel like some of the poems were powerful and unique whereas others were just mediocre and not so unique.

Overall, 3 3/4 stars.

***

Macabre in a creepily sing songy manner....

Author	Lucie Brock-Broido
ISBN	0375710221

With Trouble in Mind, her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,”...

Author	Matthew Henriksen
ISBN	0984475222

Poetry. Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous...

Author	Joe Wenderoth
ISBN	0970367201

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JULY 1, 1996

I had such a wonderful meal, in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. It asserts an altogether proper dominance. And how do you manage to hire such attractive people! Often I visit Wendy's just to take a...

Author	Mark Strand
ISBN	0307957314

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear...

Author

Nick Flynn

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times)

Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive,...

Author	Alexander Chee
ISBN	0312305036

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but...

Author	Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
ISBN	1938912349

Intimate, observant, and unflinchingly honest, The Year of No Mistakes is Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's tribute to the broken heart. Aptowicz's sixth poetry collection chronicles the author's story as she leaves New York City, her home of fourteen years, and bears witness to the unravelling of Aptowicz's...