New Pages

A new poetry collection by the professor emeritus who has recently been celebrated by both Wild writer Cheryl Strayed and Minnesota Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher. Plus other springy works in our annotated list of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by English faculty, students, and alums.

Aaron Apps (MFA 2013)
Dear Herculine [poetry]
Ahsahta Press, 2015
From Publishers Weekly: "In this second collection of verse and lyric essays, after Compos[t] Mentis, Apps speaks to, empathizes with, and commemorates Herculine Barbin--the 19th-century memoirist given posthumous fame by Michel Foucault--as one intersex, or ambiguously gendered, person to another. The book is clear, forceful, and moving in its concerns: 'I'm interested in the formation of gender. The way bodies with weird formations slip and exist below expectations. The way we form and un-form in the fluid when thrown out of the womb gush.' . . . Apps uses Barbin's story along with images from the animal world--slugs, octopi--to push back against the 'labels tattooed into every pore of my flesh.' The results--part memoir, part analysis, part outburst--become not just memorable but pellucid and teachable: the volume might be important far outside the precincts of poetry, a classic for young people trying to figure out, and then to say, who they have been, who they could be, and who they already are."

Debby Bacharach (MA 1994)
After I Stop Lying [poetry]
Cherry Grove Collections, 2015
From the publisher: "In Deborah Bacharach's After I Stop Lying women confront the mundane and strive for the sacred. One lonely student reaches out to touch a statue of Jesus. A new mother sees, for the first time, the beauty in the overhead lights of a grocery store. A sexual adventurer claims her dance with Apollo. Bacharach takes on pivotal moments in a woman's life--trying to conceive, leaving a child at day care, considering breast cancer--and does so with honesty, clarity, and lyric intensity."

James J. Berg (PhD 1996) with Chris Freeman, editors
The American Isherwood
University of Minnesota Press, 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."

Ruth Berman (PhD 1979), translator
The Prince of the Aquamarines by Louise Cavelier Levesque [fiction]
Aqueduct, 2015
From the publisher: "Louise Cavelier Levesque was born in Rouen, November 23, 1703, and died in Paris, May 18, 1745. She was one of the eighteenth-century writers who continued the tradition that had begun in the decade before her birth of creating new versions of fairy tales. . . . In 'The Prince of the Aquamarines,' the Prince is cursed by a Bad Fairy with the gift of the death-dealing glance. The heroine, the Princess of the Island of Night, is likewise condemned by a Fairy to live alone in the Dark Tower, until freed by a monster whose sight brings death. In 'The Invisible Prince,' the curse is a prophecy delivered by the priest of Plutus, the god of wealth, who announces that the young prince will undergo assorted dangers that will, however, lead in the end to good fortune."

Professor Emeritus Michael Dennis Browne
The Voices [fiction]
Carnegie Mellon, 2015
From the publisher: "One of the main themes is the essential presence of music and music-making in the world; 'I would never go into the dark without the voices,' as the title poem says. The book also includes a number of elegies for departed family members and friends in balance with poems that celebrate existence--'love your life,' as the final (wedding) poem insists. The epigraph at the beginning of the book suggests the way we all must live in contradiction." Professor Browne has received public tributes recently from Wild author Cheryl Strayed and Minnesota Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher.

Wes Burdine (PhD candidate) with Bill Stenross, editors
The Complete Darkness: An Annual Review of Minnesota United FC
Byline Press, 2015
From the publisher: "The first annual The Complete Darkness looks back at each match, each player, and the news of the year. We get insight into how the Loons built a Brazilian contingent, game reports, player profiles, and a statistical analysis of the tactics. Howler published an excerpt of the book, 'All the Roads We Have to Walk are Winding,' a profile of Assistant Coach Carl Craig by Alex Schieferdecker."

Matt Burgess (MFA 2009)
Uncle Janice [fiction]
Doubleday, 2015
From The New York Daily News: "Uncle Janice is a novel of cops and Queens, hilariously told. Author Matt Burgess knows cops, knows Queens and most of all knows how to riotously spin a story. Janice Itwaru is an 'uncle' (undercover narcotics cop) in the 115th Precinct covering East Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights. . . . It's possible that her cover has been blown--and that's part of the drama of Uncle Janice. The hurly-burly of the streets and the grit of the buys are both vibrantly portrayed, while the suspense embedded in those covert ops is integral to the story."

Mary Feng Chen (MFA 2013)
The 8th House [poetry]
Black Ocean, 2015
From the publisher: "Feng Sun Chen peels away the exterior of life's pink underbelly page by page in her second poetry collection, The 8th House, smelling the meaning in a mother's stew, carving light from holy grit, dissecting the surging waves of longing and love. These voices occupy the astrological 8th house, a house known for its healers and perversions, ruled by Pluto, where sex, death, and rebirth intersect and consume one another. Continuing to slice away at the distinctions between self and other, animal and human, male and female, the speaker of these poems 'exposes by being exposed.'"

Professor Emerita Maria Damon
XXX [chapbook of x-stitch visual poems]
Nous-zot Press, 2015
From Daniel Tiffany, author of My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Kitsch and Poetry: "In Maria Damon's affectionate album of contemporary needlework, one discovers on one of its pages a sampler decorated, quite conventionally, with images of plants and butterflies, but also alluding to the Millay sisters' girlhood project of learning the 'bohemian vernacular' of their friends: a tableau of flowers and cuss words. Needlepoint samplers, unlike the historically segregated media of the fine arts, have always mixed words and pictures, and despite the usual association of girlhood and domesticity, frequently found use as a rough medium of subversion and alarm. Damon's stitchery reminds us that the base and decorative materialism of traditional craftwork lends itself with deceptive affinity to infidel causes, conceptual polarities, and embodied critique."

Sarah Fox (MFA 2012)
Old Wives' Tales [poetry chapbook]
Five Hundred Places Press, 2015
On the author, from Altar Magazine: "Sarah Fox has found a way to make poetry both experimental and accessible. Her poems are strange but strike a deep chord. They are playful and dark, thought-provoking and silly."

A. T. Grant (MFA 2012)
WAKE [poetry]
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015
From Edward Mullany, author of Figures for an Apocalypse: "Toward the corner of a stage in a theater of the impossible is where A.T. Grant directs our gaze in WAKE, a book whose characters are at once dead and alive, absent and present, ghost and substance, damned and reprieved. There is something of rust belt America in the book's setting, but, in spirit, it is close to the works of Samuel Beckett and Salvador Dalí. A story almost without nationhood, or culture. A symbology of blood that observes itself with solemnity and humor."

Johannes Göransson (BA 1996)
The Sugar Book [poetry]
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2015
From Cleaver Magazine: "Johannes Göransson, in the ironically named The Sugar Book, gives us a poetry of cruelty. It is the necessary car wreck that brings the Jaws of Life. . . . The Sugar Book is a full-on assault on the senses, the sharp point of a blunt instrument. I don't think anyone would accuse this book of subtlety. Its virtue is precisely its overkill. Excess, at its best, becomes a form of complexity. The outrage, while often smirking, runs deep, forcing a core of sincerity into what might easily have become a flippant, cynical take on urban ennui."

Liana Liu (MFA 2011)
The Memory Key [young adult fiction]
HarperTeen, 2015
From School Library Journal: "Lora Mint's mother died in a car accident five years ago, and the pain of losing her hasn't diminished. Worse, Lora's memories of her are fading, even though she has a Memory Key, because the Keys aren't meant to preserve memories perfectly, just mimic the brain's ability to remember. Her mom was a top scientist at Keep Corp, the morally questionable company that developed Memory Keys to combat the widespread Alzheimer's-like Vergets Disease. After Lora's Key begins malfunctioning, she suddenly has crystal-clear memories of her mother--memories that make the teen wonder whether the accident actually ended her mom's life. Now she must sort through her past to discover her mother's true fate, before Keep Corp fixes her Memory Key and takes away her perfect recall forever. . . . [A] story with elements of mystery, corporate and government conspiracy, romance, and friendship. The narrative moves along at a quick enough pace that even reluctant readers will stay engaged."

Rachel Moritz (MFA 2006)
How Absence [poetry chapbook]
MIEL Books, 2015
From Sarah Vap, author of Arco Iris: "Rachel Moritz's How Absence is a stunning collection that lurches with open arms, seemingly in slow motion, seemingly quietly, and seemingly with a surfeit of pause, pause, pause--toward her infant son's creation, and toward her own mind's creations. The language here, like the infant's making, like everything that's invisible, (like absence), becomes the immensely weighty presence: 'Something transparent, we know/ still contains.'"


Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether
Great River Road: Memoir and Memory [memoir]
New Rivers Press, 2015
From Rosellen Brown, author of Civil Wars: "Great River Road is a candid personal story and a far larger one: an intriguing take on the challenge of revisiting our lives, taking pleasure in old joys, and overcoming our natural resistance to the painful parts. Sprengnether's conclusion that memory is a 'process rather than a product, a verb rather than a noun' is the perfect way to open tight-shut doors to the forgiveness of others and of the self."

Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether
Near Solstice: Prose Poems [poetry]
Holy Cow! Press, 2015
From Debra Marquart, author of The Horizontal World: "'I can't stop seeing,' one narrator proclaims in Madelon Sprengnether's delicious new collection. And doesn't that make us all lucky? In Near Solstice, Sprengnether maps the liminal--the ineffable gray spaces between dawn and full sunlight, between dusk and utter darkness, between health and illness, the body 'becoming ever more itself over time.' . . . Sprengnether invites us into fuller habitation of the body, to notice the gold sky, to hear the urgent call of birds, to feel the proximity of death in order to be more fully alive. Do you feel the 'tongues of ravening dogs at your feet'? This book is a balm, a guide, a hedge, and a companion against the vagaries of mortality."

Francine Tolf (MFA 2006)
Joliet in My Blood [memoir]
Port Yonder Press, 2015
From Under the Sun: "With quiet detail and a healing grace, the adult Tolf evokes, among others, some of her playmates' mothers, irate pensioners, a piano teacher, the cat lady, best friends, a bullied boy and members of her cheerleading team that are less than accepting of the tall new girl. Tolf's writing resonates in the reader, evoking memories of similar or dissimilar events. . . . At one point, Tolf speaks of the 'flawed beauty' of her home town where a movie theater enchants with velvet and chandeliers, never mind that it is surrounded by inner city blight. Where a brook in a park endures despite the trash and litter which is trying to stop it. Herein lies Tolf's power as a writer: She can convince us that Joliet is, indeed, a marvelous place."