Confronting the Demons (on The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1970—1997, edited by Gordon Van Ness; and A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie)
In Another Country (on The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub; Hotel Kid: A Times Square Childhood by Stephen Lewis; All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s by Daniel Kane; Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918 by Gerald W. McFarland; Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York by Paul Goldberger; & Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Philip Lopate)
State of the Arts (on Barnstorm: Contemporary Wisconsin Fiction by Raphael Kadushin; Forged in Fire: Essays by Idaho Writers by Mary Clearman Blew and Phil Druker; The Poets of New Jersey: From Colonial to Contemporary by Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale, and Sander Zulauf)
Stories True and Not: Six Anthologies of Our “Best” Writing (on The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore; The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, edited by Laura Furman; New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 2005, edited by Shannon Ravenel; Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, 2005 edition, edited by Bill Henderson; The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, edited by Nelson DeMille; and The Best American Sports Writing 2004, edited by Richard Ben Kramer)
The Alignments (on Considerations of Earth and Sky by Temple Cone; Radiant Field by Naomi K. Long; His Longing: (The Small Penis Oratorio) by Paul Allen; Solstice by Emmy Pérez; The Wrong End of the Rainbow by Charles Wright; The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook by Karl Elder; Myths of Electricity by Kevin Meaux; The Lowell Poems by Tom Sexton; and Days When Nothing Happens by David Tucker)
The Letter of the Life (on The Always Present Present: Letters-Poems by Renée Weiss and Theodore Weiss; The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton; A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley; and Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, edited by Willard Spiegelman)
Then, Who Is the Editor of the English Language? (on Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings; Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary by Lynda Mugglestone; and Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion by Ilan Stavans)
