1.12.2007

Return of the 42 Review, and other responses

We've said it before, but we really mean it this time, baby. In the coming weeks we hope to revive the 42 review. We'll be migrating it to the blog, but archived 42-word reviews can still be found here: http://www.horselesspress.com/fortytwo.html

We're interested in reviews of any and all kinds of books, but we especially love reviews of poetry. If you want to get involved, email us your 42-word review: jen AT horselesspress DOT com. Included below are a few reviews that have been banging around my inbox for way too long:

***

Winter Prophecies by Ralph Gustafson
Written in spare verse, this work offers surprisingly evocative and fresh meditations on death, hiding the human's place in the world's splendor underneath a surface melancholy – a must read from a deceased Canadian poet who lacks the exposure he rightly deserves.
-Rick Morrow

Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins
"[C]areless fart in a bottle by the stove" punches Satan a new gut – a miscellany of nonsense for bored pragmatists. Wonderful. Exuberant. Forgettable apocrypha, for the phosphate Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata. Skip to Responses, love your delicate mind, and meditate half-crazy smooches.
-Michael Donnelly

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
An ocean planet, a once-dead romance, textbooks, and nihilism. Quietly intelligent, neurotically detailed, mercilessly mysterious. Science takes a century to tell us how something probably works--no certainty, no reason. Humanity, desperate to understand, to love, to see itself in the unknown.
-Callie Fournier

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Father and son stagger through charred America, pushing a shopping cart in black snow drifts, drinking ashy river water, scavenging the crumbs of crumbs, cough blood mist on the fruitless ground, fence with the truth of starvation, of cannibals, of futile charity.
-Callie Fournier

***

Also look to this space for longer reviews, responses, discussions soon.

No comments: