Almost all of Talvikki Ansel’s poems are in some way connected to the natural world—she has spent a significant amount of time working in gardens and cataloging birds for conservation efforts. This influence comes across in her work, which is laced with botanical terms and filled with experiences from the field.

Although her poetry stands strongly on it’s own, Ansel has often been compared to Elizabeth Bishop. They inhabit similar natural landscapes; have an affinity for odd and quirky images, and employ precision description. In one of Ansel’s more recent poems, “Valentine’s,” published in Poetry Magazine 2003, she writes, “I identified that weird / seed pod”… “Magenta capsule and four orange seeds”… “ ‘heart’s a-bustin’ with love’ it’s called” (12-13, 15, 16). This image seems an apt introduction to an astonishing poet.

Please follow these links to read further about Ansel and her work:

Review of Jetty in Blackbird.

Where Poetry Outgrows Hobby Status Artcle in the New York Times, written after Ansel won the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

First Sunday on Poetry A close look at one of Ansel’s poems from Jetty.

Orion Magazine, Poem: “Seed Savers”

Three Of Ansel’s Poems: “Tree List,” “Or Stay Again,” “Blue Collection”

Three of the four best stories you could have found in The New Yorker, including the best one, “Hell-Heaven,” which, after reading twice and hearing read once, I’m starting to think may be my favorite story of hers, right up there with “A Temporary Matter.” The fourth is the title story.

The book, or at least the advance copy, is broken into two parts. The second part is three linked stories starting with one from TNY. Unfortunately, that one was by the far the strongest, and the rest of the section didn’t feel finished to me. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was still working on revisions.

I’d put this book between The Namesake (which I think is more an extremely long short story than a novel, and a story that could have just been a regularly long short story) and Interpreter of Maladies (which I loved and which has one of the all time great titles). It’s good but not a classic.

Speaking of classics, and as an addendum to this post, check this out: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/lone_star_statements.php
Congrats to Fringe on their (our) list, though I can’t get behind any best book list that has The Kite Runner on it. The above link is someone’s compilation of one-star amazon reviews of best books.

Stay classy, San Diego.

Small Beer is the publisher of Elizabeth Hand’s novel Generation Loss. The title refers to what happens to a picture when you copy a copy, not a generation of adrift people. Except of course it does: Hand’s narrator, photographer Cass “Scary” Neary, is a burnt-up relic of punk’s quick arc. She goes to Maine and meets people who are worse psychological wrecks than herself. She solves horrific crimes that have been perpetuated and tolerated for decades.

I’ve never read a book quite like this before. Hand absolutely nails down characters, each of whose world has dissolved without them, and mythbusting the romance surrounding each world: East Village punk; the rural hippie commune; coastal Maine minus New Jersey’s summer cash; even sings a little death knell for film photography. Then weaves a fantastic, horrifying mystery out of these lost souls. And never veers into camp, because these characters are so finely drawn. Realistic? Yes, in hell. It’s totally entertaining. You’ll read it in 2 hours, I swear.

The 25 Books polls have closed, otherwise I’d advise you to stuff the write-in box. Thanks to everyone who voted.

This week is your last chance to submit writing on ethnicity and race for our second anniversary issue. We are particularly in need of art submissions!

Also, the 25 Books polls close December 31. So speed-read those last few books on your yearly reading list and get voting.

In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the public could qualify to vote by reading two or more books from our pool.

We still want to hear from you about the books you read from the pool, and which novels of the last 25 years changed your outlook, inspired you, or moved you to tears.

The polls close on January 1, so you only have 2 more weeks to sound off and let us know what you think.

Click here to read about the project.

Clear here to VOTE.

Not sure what book to read next? Click here for a list of Fringe Reviews.

So we launched the 25 Books Project…and now we need to hear from YOU.

To vote, you must have read 2 or more books from the Pool, which we’ve been reviewing on this blog. For each additional book you’ve read, you get an additional vote, up to five.

All votes are write-in — the only parameters are the ones set by the NYT list — only novels by American writers written since 1981 are eligible.

Vote here soon — the polls will close at the end of this year!

The novel falls into the Bildungsroman category, following Ruth Ann Boatwright, nicknamed “Bone,” who, like the author, was born to a 15-year-old unmarried waitress in South Carolina. The first person voice is compelling and takes the reader inside poor white rural culture.

Although the novel is about abuse, Alison writes against stereotype, keeping Bone’s pedophiliac stepfather, Daddy Glen, looming ominously in the background for most of the book, which keeps the story from lapsing into the sentimental. This authorial choice makes the subject of the book Bone’s early life, rather than the abuse, which shapes, but does not define her.

Due to the subject matter, it’s not the easiest read, but the passion of this book makes its unpleasantness well worth it.

• Brett Allen Smith’s short story Needle! Now! Broken! takes what could be a horribly sentimental plot about AIDS and turns it into something subtly unsettling by fragmenting the short-story form. Is it any wonder that he likes David Lynch?

• Ponyboy, Brad Gayman’s short short, negotiates the bizarre world of the Internet chat room, and the lies we’ve all told there.

• Tammy Ho and Reid Mitchell’s collaborative dialogue, Perfect Teeth, explores a chance encounter in the dentist’s waiting room, the ambiguities that lie behind judgements at face-value.

• Self Portrait in Three Hairstyles, a nonfiction essay by Carrie Jerell, shows how hairstyles, often dismissed as superficial, can change both self-perception and others’ perception of oneself.

• Heather MacNeill’s piece on Oulipos will surely introduce you to a new and avant-way of composing literature.

• Carol Dorf’s poetry is playful, literally in Holiday Season: Playing Dictionary, and mythically in her other two poems, which play with the stories of Hansel and Gretel and Persephone.

• Craig McKenzie’s work plays with image through photo collage, and the concentric circles superimposed over his figures brings to mind the halos of ancient religious icons.

• You’ve read about the 25 Books Project…now it’s time to vote! Leave us your contact info in the poll, and we’ll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of Fringe’s top book.

Stay tuned Fringe fans, we’ll be back with another new issue, featuring sleek fresh web design, in two more months!

Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel runs each of its engines at full capacity. It is completely intelligent, completely feminist, completely hilarious, completely furious, completely compassionate, and it does the whole thing inside out. It is an exhausting book. It is worth the effort, and then you will force it on your friends.

This is a story of the rebirth of the straight white middle-class American feminist, written in the mid-1980s, and it takes place in Buffalo. It is dated, but to a feminist era and type I feel unlived nostalgia for: there’s a Midwest-runaway New Yorkiness about this sarcastic, corny, male-affectionate, DIY feminism; little bits Gilda Radner and Silver Palate Cookbook. Characters are tortured by middle-class feminist questions like, does it bring me pleasure to serve others? I say this without mockery. It’s a good, often hushed question.

Heartbreak Hotel is intentionally written to be diffuse, not like those, ahem, linear books you’re used to reading, and it has the guts to create two-dimensional characters and give each a voice, and through jokes, compassion, and a series of haunting witness-bearing litanies, resurrect the squashed third dimensions. Six women, each a type you’ll recognize, live in a house attached to the Museum of the Revolution, in which they all work. They’re resting, because they’re all burned out from their roles. The Museum’s humpbacked curator is in a coma, and they must decide whether or not to save her; also, Buffalo wants to close the Museum.

I quit; it’s impossible to explain the plot without sounding ridiculous. The book is a joyride. If you made it this far, you’re gonna love it.

Katie Spencer graduated from Skidmore College in 2004 and is tiptoeing toward a master’s degree at Emerson. She spends most of her time in the kitchen, and likes to walk around with a cat on her head.

There’s something about reading a book by someone you see on a regular basis—something that makes the book somehow more personal, more complex, more relevant to your own daily life than it would be had it been written by a complete stranger. This is how I felt, at least, when reading Jump at the Sun, the newest novel by Emerson Writer-in-Residence Kim McLarin. With each page, heroine Grace Jefferson’s story seemed entwined with my own.

Except that Grace Jefferson is an affluent, married, African-American mother of two—demographics I know nothing about. Also, though McLarin is a familiar face around Emerson, I have never had her as a professor or really even spoken to her. So why was reading this book such a personal experience? McLarin’s writing is so visceral and her characters so real that we, as readers, are drawn inside the book.

Jump at the Sun tells Grace’s story from her own point of view, with flashbacks woven in throughout telling the stories of her grandmother and mother. As this triumvirate of narratives unfolds, McLarin deftly explores questions of race, marriage, class, and motherhood—questions that span geography and generations.

Though Grace Jefferson is blessed with a beautiful home, healthy children, and a loving husband, she feels like an impostor in her own life. Confronted with her feelings of regret and doubt, she must try to find a happy medium between the two models of motherhood in her life—her mother’s nearly self-destructive degree of devotion to her children and her grandmother’s tendency to cut and run. Grace’s search for answers culminates in a breath-taking climax you won’t soon forget.

Jillian D’Urso is a second-year graduate student in the Publishing and Writing program at Emerson College. In her abundant spare time, she enjoys coffee, The Office, and 90s music.