Carolyn Kellogg admires Stewart O’Nan’s “light but steady touch” in The Odds: A Love Story. (LATimes)

Alex Clark is impressed with Edmund White’s “enjoyable chronicle of love and friendship,” Jack Holmes and His Friend. (The Guardian)

Charles Isherwood digs into Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life, noting that the author’s “analysis of Jonson’s writings is necessarily condensed, given the sheer mass of words produced, but he makes incisive arguments for the great comedies of contemporary London life, and gives almost equal due to the now all-but-unknown historical dramas, “Sejanus His Fall” and “Catiline His Conspiracy.”” (NYTimes)

Jeannine Hall enjoys the ride of Steve Fellner’s latest volume of poetry, The Weary World Rejoices. (The Rumpus)

“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”

-H.L. Menken

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In Adrienne Rich’s latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, reviewer Stephan Delbos finds a poet “still capable of caustic, graceful expression.” (The Prague Post)

Diane Morasco gushes over If Fried Chicken Could Fly by Paige Shelton. (Seattlepi.com)

Peter Bridges gives John Lewis Gaddis five stars for George F. Kennan: An American Life. (California Literary Review)

Scott Martelle admires the historical depth in John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul. (Los Angeles Times)

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

- William Faulkner

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Richard Rayner discovers The Real Romney, or at least the one described by the Boston Globe’s Michael Kranish and Scott Helman. (LATimes)

Jeannine Stein takes a rollicking ride through Carrie Fisher’s latest memoir installment, Shockaholic. (The Chicago Tribune)

Jeremy Noel-Tod finds a dash of Monty Python in Simon Armitage’s The Death of King Arthur. (The Telegraph)

Patricia Cohen finds Cullen Murphy a worthy guide through history in God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. (NYTimes)

“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”

- Seamus Heaney

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Jeff Ayers gives resounding approval to retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with Jon Land, Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Lizzie Crocker and Malcolm Jones team up for rapid-fire reviews of ‘This Week’s Hot Reads.’ (The Daily Beast)

Daphne Guiness finds a starkly honest take on a world-famous artist in Christopher Simon Sykes’ Hockney: A Rake’s Progress. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Steven Pearlstein’s admiration is evident in his analysis of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest. (Washington Post)

The Internet has been pretty good for poetry, at least inasmuch as it preserves and makes accessible the great works of the past and offers a venue for contemporary poets to share their work and viewpoints.

The downside is that it can also sometimes lead to a loss of focus and a dilution of theory and form built over centuries of dedication to the craft.

Enter The Resurrectionist—a new project by poet Kieran Borsden, who serves as the site’s managing editor, and his assistant editor Mary Shehan—which seeks to enshrine formal elements for a modern audience of writers and readers.

Borsden describes the site thusly:

The Resurrectionist is a biannual poetry journal dedicated to modern formalist poetry. By modern we intend poetry that makes use of contemporary language and grammar, experiments with verse forms or that handles contemporary themes.

While the thrust of the site is to serve as a primary resource for formalists, Borsden also envisions the site “as a hub for poets to find markets/outlets and resources elsewhere on the net that I can endorse through my experience as well as a weekly blog for sonnets and a literary journal.”

We wish Kie and Mary the best of luck with The Resurrectionist, and we’re always happy to see a new site dedicated to poetry. Pop over and have a look…

“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. ”

-Kurt Vonnegut

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Susanne Pari is impressed with the methods employed by Wael Ghonim in order to pull off Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater Than the People in Power. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Roz Kaveney discovers a “nicely measured taste for historical irony and plausible conspiracy theory” in Edward Wilson’s The Midnight Swimmer. (The Independent)

Ben Greenlee declares Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son “a novel of immense compassion and hope, written with such empathy that no reader can visit its pages without asking themselves what their lives are really worth and what they’ll pay to live them.” (The Rumpus)

Ken Dilanian lauds the ‘fascinating” Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Kenneth Turan comes away impressed with PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberley. (LATimes)

Andy Beckett discovers an “admirable analysis of recent global protests” in Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. (The Guardian)

Crime fiction fan? Get the critical response to a new batch of crime novels. (The Telegraph)

Pagan Kennedy swoons over William Gibson, whose “writing enters the bloodstream like a drug, producing a mild hallucinogenic effect that lasts for hours” in the essay collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor. (NYTimes)

“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”

- Pearl S. Buck

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Reviewer Stephan Lee finds “proof of the author’s intelligence, wit, and insight” in Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles. (Entertainment Weekly)

Dante Chinni is impressed with some of the points in Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire, saying that, at its best, it offers “”answers and humor to disillusioned MSNBC evening talk viewers” but that, at its worse, “it is simply a left-wing version of the hyperbole liberals say they hate when it comes from the right.” (Chicago Sun-Times)

Colin Grant offers an insightful look at the mystical side of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and the Bunny Wailers in I & I: The Natural Mystics. (The Independent)

David L Ulin has mixed feelings about Shalom Auslander’s debut novel, Hope, noting that it is “angry, funny, shocking, but in the end, it never fully resonates.” (LATimes)

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

-E.L. Doctorow

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Michiko Kakutani peruses a “daring and remarkable novel” set against the oppressive backdrop of North Korea in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. (NYTimes)

Bob Minzesheimer gives Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas three-and-a-half stars. (USAToday)

Terry Eagleton says that what Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists does is “is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure.” And that’s the nice part of the review. (The Guardian)

Dinesh Ramde finds Lunatics, by Dave Barry and Alan Zeibel, “creative, unusual and over the top.” (Chicago Sun-Times)

“The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.”

- John Updike

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David Peak takes on the monumentally challenging task of reviewing a book of poems written in Russian, Novaya Yunost’s A Fire-Proof Box. (The Rumpus)

Lionel Shriver comes away unimpressed with Miranda July’s It Chooses You, which “interweaves memoir with cameos of strangers she sought out while struggling to finish the script of her second film.” (Financial Times)

Catherine Taylor discovers a “self-denying yet resonant work” in Samantha Harvey’s “troubling second novel of a modern-day Socrates,” All is Song. (The Telegraph)

Ben Ratliff takes trip in the wayback machine in Ed Sanders’ FUG YOU: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. (NYTimes)

“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”

-Gustave Flaubert

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Dwight Garner comes away impressed with Gil Scott-Heron’s posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday. (NYTimes)

Peter Lewis lauds how Julian Flynn Siler “fashions a sense of intimacy in mood and atmosphere” in Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Adrian Turpin finds Tessa McWatt’s symbolism a bit overbearing in her newest novel, Vital Signs. (Financial Times)

Carol Memmott discovers the fascinating history of one of America’s favorite handguns in Paul M. Barrett’s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. (USAToday)

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.”

-Edward Albee

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