New Pages

It's the time of the year for lists: best of lists, gift lists, wish lists. As you're writing up yours, get inspired by this annotated list of adventurous poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by English faculty, students, and alums!


Professor Charles Baxter
There's Something I Want You to Do [stories]
Pantheon, February 3, 2015
From Publishers Weekly: "Five stories named for virtues and five for vices make up this collection from a master craftsman. . . . Baxter's characters muddle through small but pivotal moments, not so much confrontations as crossroads between love and destruction, desire and death. . . . The prose resonates with distinctive turns of phrase that capture human ambiguity and uncertainty: trouble waits patiently at home, irony is the new chastity, and a dying man lives in the house that pain designed for him."

James J. Berg (PhD 1996) with Chris Freeman, editors
The American Isherwood
University of Minnesota Press, January 8, 2015
From the publisher: "[British-born] novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his Berlin Stories, which served as source material for the hit stage musical and Academy Award-winning film Cabaret. More recently, his experiences and career in the United States have received increased attention. His novel A Single Man was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film; his long relationship with the artist Don Bachardy, with whom he shared an openly gay lifestyle, was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story; and his memoir, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted for the BBC. . . . This collection of essays considers Isherwood's diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works and offers a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California."

Matt Burgess (MFA 2009)
Uncle Janice [novel]
Doubleday, January 6, 2015
From Kirkus: "[T]his pungently uproarious novel . . . chronicles several tumultuous weeks in the life of Janice Itwaru, an NYPD covert op desperate to climb from the dreary if sometimes-hazardous swamp of petty street buys to a detective's gold shield. . . . Less a conventionally plotted procedural than an anecdotal stream of harrowing encounters, scatological slapstick and polychromatic repartee, this is a multitextured chronicle of coming-of-age, or, perhaps more precisely, coming to terms with what it means to be a responsible grown-up struggling for truth, justice, love and value in a post-millennial urban universe where once-familiar boundary lines get blurrier every day. Is it possible that Burgess is doing for Queens what Junot Díaz is doing for New Jersey?"

Eric Dregni (MFA 2007)
By the Shores of Minnetonka
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
From Mpls-St Paul Magazine: "By the Waters of Minnetonka is as juicy as a walleye sandwich made with Orono summer tomatoes. . . . There's a good story about James J. Hill parking boxcars full of garbage in downtown Wayzata in the summertime as a way of bullying the city council; there are stories of ice yachts travelling 110 miles an hour from Excelsior; there are some intriguing tales of muskrat stew and dried beaver tail on the menus of the big hotels. But most of all there's a whole new way of appreciating Lake Minnetonka as a rich, storied, all-too-human place."

Katherine L. Holmes (MA 1985)
Josiah's Apple Orchard [middle grade novel]
Couchgrass Books, 2014
From the publisher: "Besides music, Vivvy loves green apples. She and her brother Matt go on morning apple raids until, one fall, their father drives them to a pick-your-own orchard. The cross old Josiah inhabits another time where pixies might appear like uprooted saplings. In the early, eventful 1960s, Vivvy takes the flute from Mr. Fortray, a band teacher who plays jazz. Detours confuse another apple picking trip, and Josiah is angry about progress. Yet if Vivvy wants to do what she loves, she must think beyond a fear that her father and Josiah share."

Merie Kirby (MFA 1996)
The Dog Runs On [poetry]
Finishing Line Press, 2014
From poet Margaret Hasse: "The Dog Runs On, Merie Kirby's first collection of poems, speaks directly to my heart and my imagination. . . . Her poems offer fresh images, ideas, and revelations about the fears we confront and pleasures we enjoy when raising our children in a world of small and large losses, as well as of safety and wonder. Although aware of life's miseries, such as illness and violence, the poems offer the possibility of 'a road that leads back home.' Kirby is a gifted writer. How lucky we are to have a book of her brave and tender poems in our hands."

Brian Laidlaw (MFA 2011)
Amoratorium [poetry chapbook/album]
Paper Darts Press, 2014
From Hymies Vintage Records: "The album approaches the true story and the mythology of Depression-era outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, and it is accompanied by a beautiful twenty-five page book of poetry published by Paper Darts Press. There is a love story at the heart of Amoratorium, as represented by the first song, "Will Our Love," but one set against the Cinemascope background of Depression and death. . . . Amoratorium belongs to the current 'economic downturn'. . . . Brian has often used historical vernacular and settings to explore contemporary concerns but not on such a large scale or with such an intimate focus."

Sherry Quan Lee (MFA 1996)
Love Imagined: A Mixed Race Memoir [memoir]
Modern History Press, 2014
From poet and memoirist Sharon Doubiago: "[F]ascinating, delightful. . . . This is an important document of a mixed-race contemporary woman, a memoir about her family lineages back to slavery, back to China, back to early Minneapolis, and about the struggle of finding herself in all of these."

Carrie Lorig (MFA 2014) with Sara Woods
Stonepoems [poetry chapbook]
Solar Luxuriance, 2014
From Probably Crying Review: "These poems, these stones, are tossed so gently you'd think they were weightless. & then you catch them. & then you are underground & not happy but content & not wrecked but cold & still the stone possesses a warmth. . . . These poems are difficult, but they make you, the reader, feel so easy in your movements, in your catching, in your burning."


Rachel Moritz (MFA 2006)
Many Forms in Water [poetry chapbook]
above/ground press, 2014
From New Books in Poetry: "Born of a connection to Theodor Schwenk's 1965 text Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, this collection seeks to inhabit that infinitesimal space left between water and that which holds it. Not everything that conforms to its container is formless--sometimes, like Moritz's verse, a liquid will become a gas and a gas will become all things, inhabit every scant surface of the earth we've been given. Moritz can make words pour, flow, and puddle."

Scott F. Parker (MFA 2014), editor
Eminem and Rap, Poetry, Race: Essays
McFarland, 2014
From the publisher: "However one finally assesses [Eminem's] contribution to popular culture, there's no denying his central place in it. This collection of essays gives his work the critical attention it has long deserved. Drawing from history, philosophy, sociology, musicology, and other fields, the writers gathered here consider Eminem's place in Hip Hop, the intellectual underpinnings of his work, and the roles of race, gender and privilege in his career, among various other topics."

Lynette Reini-Grandell (MA 1990; PhD 1992)
Approaching the Gate [poetry]
Holy Cow! Press, 2014
From poet Matt Rasmussen: "The poems in Lynette Reini-Grandell's first collection take root in personal experience and branch outward into the universal. The speaker in these poems seeks an identity through the exploration of history (personal, familial, and ancestral), the surrounding natural world, and the emotional complexities of a relationship that blurs our gendered lenses. 'If you are ravishing, then who will come / to ravish me?' By turning an ever-questioning eye and searching mind toward the exterior, we delve deeper into the mysteries of the interior. 'Everything follows / a current, a trace. / Every tree / whorls toward its stem.' Revelatory and authentic, the poems in Approaching the Gate reveal a psyche and a world always in the process of redefinition."

Hunter Sharpless (MFA candidate)
Song of the Fool: On the Road with Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers [memoir]
Resource Publications/Wipf, 2014
From writer Brooks Landon: "When considering this kid's out-of-the-blue request to tour with his band, [roots rock musician] Stephen Kellogg asked Hunter Sharpless to explain 'why it would be a good idea to bring an underage person out on the road who wants to write a book and is unhappy.' Turns out it wasn't a good idea. It was a great idea--as readers will discover only a few pages into the achingly sweet, disarmingly honest, and beautifully written Song of the Fool."