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Reviews

R's Boat
Lisa Robertson

reviewed by Melissa Mack

Abject women, a man shouting please, help me, "People are fragile and finite," (p. 54), our poverty, the effects of war, that our bodies are the state's, a dying economy, only temporary stays against empire, not to mention discontinuous references to the presence of death in Poussin's Arcadia. read more

Roads of Bread
Eugene Ruggles

reviewed by Richard Silberg

Eugene Ruggles shines in singularity. The feel of his genius is rough-hewn, homemade. You could call him a cross between Dylan Thomas and Philip Levine, and that would be useful, clever, but nowhere near the full truth of his writing. read more

Works & Days
Dean Rader

reviewed by Zara Raab

Dean Rader takes his title from an 800-line didactic poem by the eighth century B.C. poet Hesiod, whose Works and Days is a kind of farmer's almanac. read more

The Present Tense of the World
Amina Saïd

reviewed by Zack Rogow

Amina Saïd's The Present Tense of the World is the first full collection of her poetry to appear in English, artfully translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. Born in Tunis in 1953, Saïd grew up speaking both Arabic and French. read more

The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides

reviewed by Jessy Goodman

"Every letter is a love letter." (p. 221) So thinks Mitchell Grammaticus, the ostensible hero of Jeffrey Eugenides's latest novel, as he reads a 'break-up' note from Madeleine Hanna, his close friend and one-sided love interest. read more

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Photographs by Christopher Felver.

Features

Old Italian Living:
On Ferlinghetti
by Jack Foley

In Kerouac's Big Sur he is "sweet old Monsanto," "Monsanto with his husky shoulders,"

big blue eyes, twinkling rosy skin, that perpetual smile of his that earned him the name Smiler in college and a smile you often wondered "Is it real?" until you realized if Monsanto should ever stop using that smile how could the world go on anyway—

Some history, in brief:

In December, 1950, Lawrence Ferling, hearing good reports of the city, moved from Paris to San Francisco. Earlier that year, Senator Joseph McCarthy had announced that he possessed the names of "205 Communists working and shaping the policy of the State Department," and the term "McCarthyism" had been coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block ("Herblock"). The Korean War had begun five months before Ferling arrived on the West Coast. read more

On Reading Anne Carson's Nox
by Lauren Crux

The book cascades to the floor. It's fold-out accordion pages pour from my lap like a kid's Slinky. I am upset, distressed that the pages will have been torn, bent, or ruined in some way by this tumble. I lean to pick it up, begin to fold it back in to itself, but some of the pages fold awkwardly and they begin to escape my grip and again unfold stretching to the floor. read more

Poetry Talk

A Rage for Wildness
by Wilda Morris

Tony Barnstone, the Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College in southern California, often writes with humor and attitude. He experiments with forms and looks for ways to break—or expand—them, so as to meet the needs of modern readers. read more

2012 Northern California Book Awards

The 31st Annual Northern California Book Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, April 22, 2012, at Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, 1:00 p.m. more info

2011 Northern California Book Award-winners

Fiction
Ivan and Misha: Stories, Michael Alenyikov read review

Poetry
Suck on the Marrow, Camille T. Dungy read review

Creative Nonfiction
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit read review

General Nonfiction
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson read review

Children's Literature
The Haunting of Charles Dickens, Lewis Buzbee read review

Translation: Fiction
A Thousand Peaceful Cities, Jerzy Pilch, translated by David Frick read review

Translation: Poetry
Maribor, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis read review

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