Erinn Batykefer’s Allegheny, Monongahela may be her first collection of poetry, but it displays a mastery of form and content that underscores the awards and publications listed in the book’s acknowledgements. “Dog Poem” begins the collection with an image of what it means to be a poet: “I’ve been known to drag old bones with me for miles./If I bury them, the only question is how long/ till I’m clawing the ground to feel them under my teeth again.” From there Batykefer launches into explorations of death, love, and identity. While the collection features some more open poetry, Batykefer’s talents shine brightest when working in the formal modes. The sonnets “Red Hills with White Cloud,” “Pittsburgh as Self-Portrait I & II,” and “Haute Couture” demonstrate that the poet is comfortable working within the strictures of the form but also feeling the freedom to stretch the edges of the form to meet the poetic needs of the material. “Allegheny Love Letter” teems with earthy anthropomorphic imagery that sketches not only the many moods of the mighty river but also provides a chilling profile of the kind of love that cannot help but destroy the beloved. The most successful of the free verse works dwells on an extended anatomical metaphor to describe the speaker’s experience with opera—“The palate lifts like a curtain; the skull a dome for resonance.” This is not the only poem to dwell on what is going on under the skin of the body. “X-Ray” describes the portrait produced by the medical device, while “Horizontal Horse’s or Mule’s Skull with Feather” evisions a future “When my face is scoured clean, sun-whitened, / when my vulgar skin has been stripped / from my body.” “Egyptology” outlines the mummification process “because grief requires compartmentalization.” Lest you think that Batyfefer’s collection is nothing but dark tropes, “Heirloom Recipe” provides a touching—not sentimental—tribute to the power of a peach cake to remind us of our history. While Allegheny, Monongahela does have its weak spots, the delights far outweigh them.

There’s much to like in Stephen March’s Strangers in the Land of Egypt. The protagonist is that likable high-schooler who somehow is much more self-aware and wise than his peers but who still has lots to learn. The crises in the story don’t stretch our credulity. And the epiphanies in the end are profound, but they don’t promise to solve everything in a neat little package.

What keeps me from loving this book is that it doesn’t seem to know who its audience is, whether it’s aiming for a traditional Young Adult crowd or a literary adult audience. It’s the difference between Cecil Castellucci’s Beige or Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl and Robert Clark’s Love Among the Ruins, between a coming of age story in which the narrator is developing along with story and one in which an adult narrator—with adult understanding—looks back on youth. Where this comes out most strongly to me is in the exposition. After passages of deep understanding probing the emotions and psyche of our main character, we’ll get expositions of the basics of Judaism or the Holocaust that might be fitting in an After School Special. Castellucci’s Katy learns things she doesn’t know in natural interactions with her environment; Jesse listens to the kind of lectures I’d like to give the teens in my life but know they’ll never hear.

Blurbs pasted on the back of my reviewer’s copy praising March’s previous work claim that “March has successfully captured the feel of Southern angst as only…Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor can.” I generally ignore blurbs, and its probably unfair to compare anyone living to the crown royalty of Southern fiction. I can certainly see how an overzealous blurber could make the connection. Does Strangers feature an agnostic protagonist being confronted with a moment of supernatural grace? Yes. Does the story take place in a small town where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a colorful backstory? Yes. But for my money, this town could have been placed in any of a number of struggling Northern towns. Maybe the hegemony of consumerism has erased some of the unique qualities that made the South of Faulkner and O’Connor distinct from the Hawthorne’s New England or Sandberg’s Chicago.

I began this review saying there’s much to like in Strangers in the Land of Egypt. What made me keep turning the pages was the developing relationship between a self-aware, clueless boy and an odd Jewish Holocaust survivor. That Jesse (as in “the tree of”) is redeemed by the ministrations of a man named Ebban, the helpful stone carved with holy text, perhaps puts too fine a point on the transformation of the teen, but it is perhaps the only heavy-handed aspect to a subtle conversion in which we don’t see a fully renewed soul but rather a man set on the path of grace.

“All the publishers are interested in selling books and if you say something about sex and being a nigger then you got a bestseller” (206).

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today’s impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person’s shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown’s classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I didn’t want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60’s Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington’s encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering “What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?” When Washington realizes that “everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides” (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where “the battleground is a bit more familiar” (206).

In his introduction, Louis Gates, Jr. recalls that among his friends at Yale Brown’s book was “a required text on our veritable ‘Quest for Blackness’” (x). I don’t pretend to know or understand what lessons he derived about African-American identity from Life and Loves, but the return of Washington to America where the battleground is familiar might be one. The gigolos in Brown’s book are all expatriates escaping the racism and violence of the South, of America. Yet, what they find in Europe is not essentially different. The white women do not desire them for their persons but for their color. The existentialism of Europe seems to Washington to be just another way for whites to get in touch with their blackness. America may be a place that doesn’t allow him to write a “serious book,” but it’s a place where he understands the situation.

I also stayed with the book because while George Washington is careering through women left and right, he displays a self-awareness and understanding that is endearing. At first, his knowledge makes him appear the rapacious player, but as you watch the emptiness dawn on him, a core of inner humanity peeks out. Mr. Jiveass might be a slick negotiator, but he can’t jive himself for too long, and in the end, not at all.

Gates calls attention to the postmodern epilogue in which Brown tells his character “All is jive” (212) and encourages him that in the end, after “the intellectuals [pick] through your soul….You will have them understand what you mean by jive” (213). In a new preface written for this edition, Brown suggests that “Jive is a philosophy, for sure, but it is also a door. Open it and enter” (xxii). Brown certainly opens a door into a world of experience alien to me racially, but it’s also a world that is not entirely foreign. It is a world in which people’s self-serving behavior robs them of humanity, a world in which escaping from overt oppression leads to a more insidious, creeping imprisonment, a world in which freedom from does not lead to freedom in. And the kind of life that leads to that world and may be required in that world is certainly something I could understand as jive.

When one reads “modern-day fairy tales for grown-ups, reimagined from Jewish folklore” on the back of a book, one is prepared for ironic tales in which that which we see the good side of the bad. We’ve been prepared for these ironic fairy tales from the spate of post-modern spate of books that tell us that what we’ve been shown thus far isn’t the whole story. What I wasn’t prepared for in Jonathan Keats’s The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six was the storyteller pushing through the idea that irony is good for its own sake to show us the truths that irony reveals in its opposition.

Tet the Idler, who lives in a world without sleep, not only discovers the value of rest, but in doing so, he also rediscovers the joy of work. Dalet the Thief, whose thieving becomes toothless when the traditional items he steals lose their worth in a booming and developing economy, returns the town to their humanity by stealing those baubles by which the neuveau riche now measure their worth. And so it goes in each of the 12 tales.

The tales are framed with a mysterious tale of a student collecting these stories of secret Jewish saints. Sounding almost Buffy-like, we’re told that in every generation there are 36 saints roaming the earth. The catch is that the saints don’t know it. The narrator suggests that it is in the “quotidian” that we find holiness rather than in the special. The tales themselves suggest that not only is holiness found in the quotidian but also that it is found in those who do not seek it. None of the protaganists know that they are saints nor are they much interested in seeking out spiritual truth. Each blithely goes about their lives simply trying to live. It is as they try to make sense of thier lives that their search reveals to their communities the truths they didn’t know they sought.

Performing this sort of ironic morality instruction would be engaging in a single story, but Keats pulls off a thoroughly wondrous set of 12 tales, each one rendered in a natural voice that while echoing the patness of a fairytale never condescends to either the material nor the reader. While the inclusion of only 12 tales in a book whose subtitle is “Tales of the Thirty-Six” may smack of marketers setting up a sequel, it’s a sequel I would gladly welcome.

I have an image in my head of Malcolm MacPherson sitting at a table surrounded by piles of audio-cassettes and notebooks, head in hands as he tries to figure out what in the world to do with the hours of anecdotes, stories, histories, and process explanations that he has just collected in conversations with the Hillstrand brothers. That MacPherson was able to find a central narrative on which to hang all of these baubles is not as impressive as his ability to maintain a lively voice for each of the brothers.

Not having cable, I haven’t had the pleasure of watching the Discovery Channel’s show Deadliest Catch. After reading Time Bandit, I’m not sure that I need to. MacPherson uses the narrative of Jonathan’s rescue from being adrift alone during a salmon fishing run to organize the biography of these life-long fishermen as well as a brief lesson in the history and mechanics of crab fishing in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. While the stories are told with first-person immediacy, the book doesn’t lose the narrative drive like the disappointing Jorgy. While some chapters may go on a bit, the overall rhythm of switching from Jonathan’s narrative to the related tales and obeservations is generally effective. The suspense of Jonathan’s situation carrying you over the wave ahead.

The “as told to” approach of Time Bandit robs it of the literary quality of the fisherman/authors collected in Leslie Leyland Field’s anthology Out on the Deep Blue: True Stories of Daring, Persistence, and Survival from the Nation’s Most Dangerous Profession or the memoirs of Linda Greenlaw, but Time Bandit is not simply two old salts telling war stories. Throughout the volume, both Hillstrands reflect often on the nature of humanity that would put themselves through such danger and also on what drives them personally to continue in an industry that will most likely kill them. Their ruminations go beyond hyper-masculine chest thumping to the questioning of human motivation.

At one point describing themselves as dinosaurs, the Hillstrands represent a unique brand of fisherman that was raised with the old, practically unregulated, system and is now transitioning to an era of fishing that is much more controlled by the government. The Hillstrands admit and illustrate the necessity and even effectiveness of the new regulations, but they also fear that the heart of the industry is being eroded by the encroachment of bean-counters and bureaucrats. Time Bandit may then stand as a salt crusted monument to the frontier long after it has been rationalized into the ground.