Editors Select

	Michael Anania, In Natural Light. Asphodel Press, 1999. Anania's most recent volume of poetry contains two major poems first published in NDR, "A Place That's Known" and "Fifty-two Definite Articles." It also contains an excellently recorded CD of the author reading poems from the book. This is the first volume of new work by Anania since his Selected Poems of 1994.
	William Logan, Vain Empires. Penguin, 1998. NDR contributor William Logan has collected a range of recent poems that shuttle back and forth between Florida, where he teaches in the University of Florida's creative writing program, and Cambridge, England, where he spends a good deal of his actual writing time. The poems engaging a British or European subject matter, sometimes in a manner reminiscent of Geoffrey Hill (on whose work he writes with great insight) are particularly impressive.
	Suzanne Paola, Bardo. University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Winner of the Brittingham Prize in poetry, Paola's book includes both "Tenure at Forty" and "Christ in the World of Matter" which first appeared in NDR. Paola's Prologue explains the title: "The bardo in Tibetan means an intermediate state, most specifically the one after death when your soul wanders through the heavens and hells, trying to avoid rebirth into samsara-the realm of the material-and achieve nirvana or Buddhahood..." The Bardo Thostrol, or Book of Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State, was written as a guide. It's read to the corpse for a few days after death (when the soul's in a state of confusion, unaware that it has died), and read by the living. Like everything the bardo journey takes place both inside you and outside. Like everything it's both a metaphor and not."
	Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain, editors, Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970. Wesleyan University Press, 1999. This anthology represents strictly experimental, "alternative," or marginalized British and Irish poets. No Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Eavan Boland, or Craig Raine. Covering some of the same territory as Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos, which was an earlier NDR Editors Select recommendation, it has the great advantage of having an American publisher. American readers may know the names of Brian Coffey, Ken Edwards, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Gael Turnbull and others among the Others here collected, but this anthology probably represents the first opportunity many have had to read their work in a book easily found at the local Barnes and Noble.
	Keith Tuma, Fishing By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Northwestern University, 1999. Tuma's book is the best available introduction to both the texts and contexts of poets working in the tradition represented by the Caddel/Quartermain anthology. The book is both a history and a critical study. The historical sections make clear why American readers are almost totally ignorant of some of the best British writing of the last fifty years. The critical sections examine such diverse works as Gordon Macleod's The Ecliptic, Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, Basil Bunting's Briggfaltts, Roy Fisher's A Furnace, Peter Riley's Distant Points, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's X / Self.
	Irini Spanidou, Fear. Knopf, 1999. Fear continues the tale Spanidou began with her remarkable first book, God's Snake, charting young Anna Karystinou's life and development in post-war Greece. Anna is now thirteen and her fear of the world she encounters and is propelled through is both external and internal, recreated with a delicate fierceness and luminous clarity. Fear is a triumphant coming of age novel, stript of sentimentality, singular in its steely, unyielding, brilliant sensibility.
	Susan Choi, The Foreign Student. HarperCollins, 1998. Susan Choi eschews the typical first novel's concerns in her admirable fiction debut and creates a clash of cultures in sleepy Sewanee, Tennessee, during the mid-fifties, with the appearance of a Korean War veteran as a new student on campus. Choi's accomplished story of interracial romance exposes secrets of the heart and of the nation.
	Hazard Adams, Many Pretty Toys. SUNY Press, 1999. Adams' new novel is, in many appealing ways, an update of Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey. Adams does for the tumultuous time of Vietnam-era protest on college campuses what Trilling's novel did for the same milieu during the radical thirties. The competing voices in Many Pretty Toys both critique and create an academic novel of generous heart and admirable substance.
	Emer Martin, More Bread or I'll Appear. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Award-winning first novelist (for Breakfast in Babylon), Irish writer Emer Martin's second novel, a portion of which appeared in NDR #7, is another fascinating dissection (and vivisection) of contemporary culture both here and abroad. A mordant portrait of our times inspired by, "a trinity evident from birth: television, history, and the church."