Critical Notes

Marie Ponsot remembered and a stack of new book reviews

By Carolyn Kellogg

Poet Marie Ponsot, whose 1998 collection The Bird Catcher won the NBCC award in poetry, died Friday July 5 at age 98. NBCC Board member Tess Taylor penned her obituary in the NY Times.

Martha Anne Toll reviewed When We Were Arabs by Massoud Hayoun for NPR.

Christoph Irmsher reviewed A Spirit of Inquiry by Susannah Gibson for the Wall Street Journal

Julia M. Klein reviewed Catherine Chung's The Tenth Muse for the Chicago Tribune.

NBCC board member David Varno reviewed two books about exile, Springtime In A Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti and China Dream by Ma Jian for On the Seawall.

Kristen Evans interviewed Sarah Gailey about their debut novel, Magic for Liars, for Kirkus Reviews' Pride issue.

Jeremy Lybarger reviewed The Queen by Josh Levin for The Nation and the photo book April Dawn Allison for Art in America.

Philip Kopper reviewed Tony Horowitz' Spying on the South for the Washington Times.

Paul Gleason reviewed The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger for the Los Angeles Times.

Lanie Tankard reviewed the novel Children of the Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi, translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah, for World Literature Today.

Kathleen Rooney interviewed translators Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig about their translations of work by French Venezuean poet Miyó Vestrini for the Poetry Foundation.

Michelle Newby Lancaster reviewed the novel King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman for Lone Star Literary Life.

At the Maine Edge, Allen Adams reviewed Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes and The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff and came up with a list of baseball books.

Jeffrey Mannix reviewed Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, Denise Mina’s Conviction and Kelsey Rae Dimberg’s Girl in the Rearview Mirror in the Durango Telegraph.

Rachel Nevins revisited the novel One, None, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello at Necessary Fiction.

Elizabeth Lund reviewed new poetry collections by Gregory Orr, Tess Gallagher, Jim Harrison, and Drew Pisarra for the Washington Post

Marie Ponsot photographed by Tom Birmingham for Knopf.