"Sandra Cisneros has a fondness for animals and this little gem of a story makes that abundantly clear. 'La casa azul,' the cobalt blue residence of Mister and Missus Rivera, overflows with hairless dogs, monkeys, a fawn, a 'passionate' Guacamaya macaw, tarantulas, an iguana, and rescues that resemble 'ancient Olmec pottery.' Missus loves the rescues most 'because their eyes were filled with grief.' She takes lavish care of her husband too, a famous...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime. The truth is always different from what anyone says out loud, but who really cares? Not I, said the man I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I-among the many of us she left teetering. Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Lines of Defense, Here...

Since Heather McHugh first began publishing her poems in 1968, poetry readers have marveled at the immensity and range of her gift. There seems to be nothing that McHugh can't do with words and do with high wit and sonic brilliance. In her chapbook Feeler, McHugh takes on the fraught subject of empathy-how much we feel, and do, for the afflicted. It also addresses the relation between thought and feeling: "Nowadays I cannot tell/ the two apart: can't...

In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace-clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars-and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better. Kimiko Hahn is the author...