Great Regulars: This book, her last, she hints,

is a journey though the writings, the past and present lives, the very heart and soul of National Book Award-winner Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the acclaimed Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. She gives us this precious gift: a memoir as poem and poem as memoir, freestyle verse telling the freestyle lives of woman/writer/warrior Maxine Ting Ting Hong, married to Earll Kingston "for three lifetimes, counting this one," still trying to "[g]et love right. Get marriage right."

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Free At Last

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Readers of [C.P.] Cavafy's poetry will be uneasily reminded that until the end of his life he remained in thrall to Art for Art's Sake. Yet by 1898 he had already written two of his greatest poems, "The City" and "Waiting for the Barbarians," while the "Philosophical Scrutiny" he made of his own prior work--written in 1903 (in English), reprinted here, and often credited in part for his emergence as a major creative artist--consists of little more than rambling obiter dicta about his literary preferences (largely borrowed, as Jeffreys points out, from Poe's essay "The Poetic Principle"). In other words, there is an intriguing qualitative disjunction between Cavafy's poetry and his prose, and this volume, far from resolving it, only intensifies the mystery.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: To the Poems!

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