Best Sellers List

Four Way Books is pleased to announce that three of our authors have made the Poetry Foundation's Contemporary Best Sellers List for the week of November 8, 2009. Congrats to Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now; Sandy Tseng, author of Sediment; and Tom Healy, author of What the Right Hand Knows. For a full listing, please click on the link above.

Meg Kearney, Home By Now

Meg Kearney's Home By Now is reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Clink on the link to read her full review, and while you are there, check out the reviews of our other Fall books: Tom Healy's What the Right Hand Knows, Sandy Tseng's Sediment, and Daniel Simko's The Arrival. Of Kearney's collection PW says "Fluent and easy to like, serious in its take on the American life course, this second collection of poems for adults from Kearney (she's also the author of young adult verse) looks hard at the troubles and changes of Kearney's own experience..." (Nov. 2009)

Daniel Simko, The Arrival

Daniel Simko's The Arrival is a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Of Simko's debut posthumous collection, PW writes "these poems are fragmentary but always sharp, their emotional weight clear. [...] This book will be a bittersweet discovery to many who will wish this poet had more time." (Nov. 2009)

Tom Healy at the Miami Book Fair International

Tom Healy, author of What the Right Hand Knows, will be a participant at this year's Miami Book Fair International, an eight day literary festival. If you are in the Miami area, catch Tom's event this Saturday, November 14 at 3:00 PM at Auditorium Pavilion B. For directions and more information visit www.miamibookfair.com.

Mark Halliday on Kevin Prufer's "National Anthem"

"In National Anthem Kevin Prufer offers something that we may call political poetry, though it might better be called “post-political” because he imagines a world in which it is far too late to improve life via politics. National Anthem tries to express what it’s like to live in a society that provides, for now, apparent physical safety and material well-being, but which seems to be generating irresistible forces that will bring all-encompassing disaster." Check out the link to "Contemporary Poetry Review" for the rest of this review.

Joel Brouwer on Daniel Simko's "The Arrival"

"Tonally and formally, the poems are clear kin to the Soviet Mitteleuropa house style of Popa, Sorescu, and Holub: simple sentences, stark and dramatic imagery, wry fatalism, winks of humor. In terms of content, of particular note is the poet’s (wholly understandable) obsession with deracinations both geographical and lingual. The poems of displacement — from the homeland and from the mother tongue — are . . . well, stunning. They leave me speechless. They sound like poems trying to carve themselves into my head." Clink on the link for the rest of this review.

-September 23, 2009, from Harriet, a blog from the Poetry Foundation