Poet Ted Kooser’s refreshingly compact meditation on his youth in Eastern Iowa is an essential addition to the growing number of prose autobiographical works by established Midwestern poets (see Mary Swander’s The Desert Pilgrim and... Read More

"The Reluctant Daughter" opens as a bittersweet modern comedy of manners about generational conflict. There’s an unemotional, chain-smoking mother, a father who keeps trying to keep order, and a lesbian daughter. But this daughter... Read More

In Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 978-0-8195-6916-5), Kazim Ali moves in and out of silence, aware always of the veil “between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did... Read More

Sharon Potts does such a solid job in the first half of "In Their Blood" (Oceanview, 978-1-933515-62-5) that the second half, especially the superheated climax, suffers by comparison. Young, spoiled Jeremy Stroeb returns from Europe and... Read More

Unassuming title, common-enough topic, and yet this remarkable project delivers so thoroughly we might momentarily forget Batali, Bastianich, Curti, and other legendary Italian authors. In Thirty Minute Pasta, Guiliano Hazan opens with... Read More