Not so long ago, anyone perusing the shelves of a bookstore would have noted a philosophical split in available information on pregnancy and childbirth. Few, if any, books offered by traditional medicine practitioners mentioned both the... Read More

Of those poetry collections in the ecstatic genre, Sandra Alcosser’s "Except by Nature" is one of the best, deserving of its recent selection for the National Poetry Series. Poets of the ecstatic often craft images and language around... Read More

With this book John Engman joins the long, sad, wild tradition of the poete maudit. From Villon to Frank O’Hara to Charles Bukowski, these poor souls seem condemned to extravagant suffering, equally extravagant verse, and early death.... Read More

Fighting bird proprietor Sonny Cantrell slouches forward through a miasma of rural fits and starts into the tentative landscape of young manhood as the central character in Manley’s debut novel The Cock Fighter. Covering just two days... Read More

Barbara Kingsolver begins her introduction to the second edition of her only collection of poems, Another America, by declaring that she has “never yet been able to say out loud … I am a poet.” She attributes this, in part, to the... Read More

Why do men persist in destroying their habitat? In Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard offers a trenchant and well-argued philosophical response that even he acknowledges doesn’t fully explain the problem. It’s not just greed that leads... Read More

Dark and wry ironies pile up like bodies on a battlefield in Jospi Novakovich’s fourth book, a collection of excellent short stories about Croations caught in the absurd twistings of their war-ravaged homeland or trying with equal... Read More