Prize-Winning Novels and the Contemporary Fictional Voice (on After Freud by Mary Elsie Robertson; & Kingdoms by Barry Targan)

At the Beginning and the End of the Earth (on Basin and Range by John McPhee; Sand Rivers by Peter Matthiessen, Hugo van Lawick)

Samuel Pickering, the author of more thirty books, which span several genres, was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught English for forty-five years, thirty-five of them at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is Parade’s End, published by Mercer University Press in 2018. “Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in the Smithsonian decades ago, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.”

Engagements with Reality (on Selected Poems by Mark Strand; Bazaar by Susan Wood; With Wanda: Town and Country Poems by Paul Zimmer; The Red Coal by Gerald Stern;& The Cheer by William Meredith)

The Inventions of Memory

You Thought So Far

Marvin Bell’s recent books include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013 )and Whiteout (Lodima Press, 2011), a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons. The selections from “If & When” in this issue continue Bell’s poetic correspondence with Christopher Merrill, earlier exchanges from which were collected in After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts (White Pine Press, 2016).

For Dulcimer & Doubled Voice

The Linear Fallacy

Sadness and Still Life

Losses