on The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

on Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry by Robert Hass

Marianne Boruch’s ten poetry collections include the recent title The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia last year at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute, observing the astonishing wildlife to write a book-length sequence, a neo-ancient/medieval bestiary, which is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. The poems in this issue are a part of that collection.

on How Far She Went by Mary Hood

Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was a prolific short-story writer and an award-winning novelist. Professor of literature at Colgate University from 1966 to 2003, he authored twenty-seven books and more than one hundred short stories and essays. His many honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for fiction in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 1991.

on Dust Bowl Descent by Bill Ganzel

on When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community by James Boyd White

“My Fingers Clawing the Air”: Versions of Paradise in Contemporary American Poetry (on Deep Within the Ravine by Philip Schultz; Paradise Poems by Gerald Stern; Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things that Have Been in the Fire by Marvin Bell; Traffic, With Ghosts by Rosanne Coggeshall; & Selected Poems by Philip Levine)

Interpreted Lives (on The Life of Jane Austen by John Halperin & James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795 by Frank Brady)

Custom, Birth, Food, Nature: A Perspective on Some Women Poets (on The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 by Cheryl Walker; An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich by Wendy Martin; To Hold in My Hand: Selected Poems, 1955-1983 by Hilda Morley; Coagulations: New and Selected Poems by Jayne Cortez; The White Wave by Kate Daniels; In the Mother Tongue by Catherine Anderson; Deer in the Haystacks by Dixie Partridge; Deception Pass by Sue Standing; Natural Affinities by Erica Funkhouser; All That Autumn by Eileen Silver-Lillywhite; Hours by Frances Mayes; & Talking Soft Dutch by Linda McCarriston)

Maxine Kumin’s seventeenth poetry collection, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (W. W. Norton, 2010), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2011. Kumin’s other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals. A former United States poet laureate, Kumin lives with her husband on a farm in the Mink Hills of New Hampshire, where they have raised horses for forty years and enjoyed the companionship of several rescued dogs.

He/She

Stephen Dunn is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and the Latitudes of the Personal,  is due out from Tiger Bark Press in October 2018, and a new collection of poems, Pagan Virtues, is scheduled to be published by W. W. Norton in 2019. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours, and he has had fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Dunn lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.