Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property – these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey.

The moment I started reading this book I fell, head first, into a little boys world. The main character, from whose perspective we read the story, is a five-year-old boy called Jack. He was born and has spent his whole life, five years, in one small room. This room is his home. Jack and his mother, Ma, are being kept locked up there, by the man who abducted his mother seven years ago.
His mother’s pain is huge, yet to protect him she has built a special life for him. His life exists out of a complicated mixture of lies and truths, this all, of course, to protect him.  And since he knows no other existence he is completely content, not realizing what he is missing.

Jack’s thoughts are surprising, touching, frightening and joyful. The ability the writer, Emma Donoghue, has to pull you into the five-year-old boy’s mind is remarkable. It makes reading the book an intense and moving journey full of suspense, which you have to experience yourself to appreciate.

Boekhandel van Rossum welcomed the author to give his first book reading when he passed through Amsterdam a few years ago. In the Country of Men is the fictionalized account of the Kaddafi terror of 1979 which forced Matar’s family to flee Libya. The evening was particularly special and we were delighted to see that the book made the short list of the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

The Anatomy of a Disappearance which has just been published and exhibits the same poetic writing style and puzzles within puzzles which characterized the first book is once again a delight to read. It is a haunting story of a young boy with conflicting feelings for the members of his family and the impact that a disappearance can have on those who are left behind. Irene, our store manager, and I will be recommending this book to all who will listen!!

Kim Edwards debut, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, became a word-of-mouth bestseller and her ability to spin a good yarn is evident in The Lake of Dreams. After working overseas for years, Lucy returns to her hometown to confront the loss of her father ten years earlier.

But the discovery of a long-lost relative whose existence was obscured by the family nearly one hundred years earlier, leads her to delve into and confront the fragmented parts of her own life. Poetically written with a multiplicity of inter-linking plotlines, The Lake of Dreams, as one reviewer writes, is a kind of mystery novel of the self, about a woman caught in the undertow of history. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Just arrived in our store: The selected poems by American poet Ted Berrigan - "the leader of the New York School" as John Ashbery called him. Following the highly acclaimed Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, poets Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan have collaborated again on this new selection of poems by one of the most influential and admired poets of his generation. Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan’s poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially The Sonnets, but this selection encompasses his full poetic output, including the later sequences Easter Monday and A Certain Slant of Sunlight, as well as many of his uncollected poems. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan provides a new perspective for those already familiar with his remarkable wit and invention, and introduces new readers to what John Ashbery called the “crazy energy” of this iconoclastic, funny, brilliant, and highly innovative writer.