What We’re Reading

Heather Hamilton: I’m currently rereading Paula Bohince’s Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, a poetry collection that doubles as a murder mystery, though to file it under any one term would be reductive. In fact, Incident is a complex and breathtaking book, pulling double duty on multiple fronts: at once rooted in a specific terror and speaking eloquently to the larger human condition, gleaning the best qualities from both narrative and lyric and melding them into a graceful whole, and forever tossing that strange coin whose faces are violence on the one side and beauty on the other. This is a book that not only withstands but deserves multiple readings.

Katherine Zlabek: Salvatore Scibona’s The End, nominated for the National Book Award in 2008, is a novel of ideas. It urges the reader onward, always deeper, saying, “There is a thing, wrapped in its name. Go on, catch it.” I love it for its density, and for its audacity in taking on supernatural elements—occasionally with surprising nonchalance on the part of the characters. It is a book with the structure of a lightbulb: narrow in plot, achieving fullness in the characters’ backstories—their failures and strengths, their faith and the denunciation of that faith. And the language is gorgeous, innovative and lyrical.

Lisa Ampleman: Right now, I’m reading Gallowglass, by Susan Tichy, which I picked up at the Ahsahta Press table at AWP after hearing Tichy read the title poem.  “Gallowglass” is an Anglicization of a Gaelic word meaning “foreign soldier or mercenary,” and while the collection addresses the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the book also explores the personal grief of a wife whose husband has died, among many other concerns.  The poems are mostly in long-lined, ghazal-like couplets, which allows for the juxtaposition of the horrific and the mundane.  “One, Two” is particularly wrenching.

Michael Griffith: During the term, most of my non-school reading consists of starting many books late at night, wistfully; investing fifteen minutes in them; then setting them down and stockpiling them for spring break. The ones I can’t wait to get to right now are Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Barbara Hamby’s Lester Higata’s Twentieth Century, John Brandon’s Citrus County, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists.