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January 4th, 2010

The Seawall’s Most Popular Reviews in 2009

Here are our most frequently read book reviews for 2009. Many thanks to all our friends who helped to bring attention to new writing and grow our audience.

POETRY

Salvinia Molesta, by Victoria Chang (University of Georgia Press)

January 3rd, 2010

on Burning Down the House, by Charles Baxter (Graywolf), and A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein (Algonquin Books)

“Insight is one of the last stands of belief in a secular age,” writes Charles Baxter in his punchy essay “Against Epiphanies.” Like many other assertions in Burning Down the House (1997), recently reissued by Graywolf with two new essays, this one prods fiction writers and poets alike to examine their most basic impulses and assumptions:

December 30th, 2009

on Desolation of the Chimera, last poems by Luis Cernuda, translated by Stephen Kessler (White Pine Press)

Born in Seville in 1902, Luis Cernuda left Spain in 1938 for permanent exile. He had emerged with Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Vincente Aleixandre and Jorge Guillén in the Generation of 1927, avant garde poets influenced by surrealism. But his experimental urge had played itself out by the time the civil war began in 1936.

December 14th, 2009

Non-Fiction: on Ghostbread, by Sonja Livingston; Utopias, edited by Richard Noble; and Squeezed by Alissa Hamilton

Sonja Livingston’s Ghostbread is a memoir about growing up poor, fatherless, white, Catholic, and one of seven children in the bleak neighborhoods of Buffalo and Rochester, the towns along Lake Ontario, and an Indian reservation during the 1970s.

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