Heaven: Poems Rowan Ricardo Phillips Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 80pp Heaven, Rowan Ricardo Phillips‘s new collection, dazzles. Nominated last week for the National Book Award, it’s a playful inquiry by an imaginative poet-critic into the nature of capital-H Heaven. While its formal satisfactions derive from its subtle internal symmetries and architectonic qualities, Heaven is also continually surprising, as Phillips’s lexical invention and disruptive perceptions lend each poem a unique flavor. Flitting nimbly between Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, from Malibu to Colorado, and with a referential field encompassing Mel Gibson, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the stage directions of Cymbeline, it’s a rich reading experience. “Who the hell’s Heaven is this?” asks Phillips in “The Empyrean”; it’s a question that echoes through the rest of the book. There are gods in Heaven for sure — Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, the deity of the Old Testament — but there’s also an underlying tension between the notion of Heaven as a place beyond and “heaven” as a function of ekphrastic poetry. In “The Barycenter”, natural beauty becomes a kind of heaven in itself: Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds. How this light, like a choir of silence, Queues in the air […]

Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home Joe Klein Simon & Schuster, 2015; 320pp The mind, body, and spirit of the American soldier are at the heart of Joe Klein’s moving new book, Charlie Mike. Told in a brisk, anecdotal style, it’s the story of the men and women who came home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They came home to a country ever-more disenchanted with their mission, to families who didn’t understand them, to friends who didn’t want to see them, and to a Veterans Administration insufficiently equipped to help them readjust. Since 2001, the American soldier has existed at a point where politics, ethics, and civics meet, and has had to bear too much the burden of representation. Some of those whose lives Klein captures conform to type, but others do not. We meet men and women who joined up for all kinds of reasons, political and otherwise. Their attitudes towards the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are multifarious and complex; their experiences of those wars left them in very different physical and emotional shape. What unites them is their civic spirit, the adrenaline-boosting, community-building, get-shit-done-lust that they all seem to leave the armed forces with. Their lives back home continue to be lived at full volume, at a higher frame […]

Doug Wright’s work is a broad church. He won an Obie in 1996 for the arch, racy Quills, which imagines the last days of the Marquis de Sade in the Charenton asylum. In 2004, he won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife, a play about the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a man who somehow survived both the Nazis and the East German Communists intact, which Wright dubbed “a one-woman show, performed by a man”. He penned the books for the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens, based on the cult film; Disney’s The Little Mermaid; and Hands on a Hardbody, a hugely entertaining show about an endurance contest to win a pickup truck. His most recent play, Posterity, performed earlier this year by the Atlantic Theater Company, had Henrik Ibsen as a central character. It’s hard to think of a playwright working today with a range as fabulous, as historically and socially broad, as Wright’s. He doesn’t always see it that way himself. When a friend remarked that his resumé made him a surprising choice for The Little Mermaid, Wright pointed out that the protagonists of both Mermaid and I Am My Own Wife seek to change “below the waist” to win the objects of their affection. […]

The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky PublicAffairs, 2015; 400pp One of the most remarkable features of Emma Sky’s gripping account of her experiences during the Iraq War is the fact that she was there at all. Time and again, visiting officials — Colin Powell, Tony Blair, David Miliband, Barack Obama — were bewildered to find a slight, British woman embedded in the highest ranks of the US military. Yet over the course of several extended tours of the country, that’s where she found herself. (You’d think one tour would be sufficient, but I imagine it’s hard to resist emails from four-star generals asking for your help.) When, in January 2011, she was called before the Chilcot Inquiry, Sky saw immediately that her story required a step back to take in: I had been opposed to the war and naturally suspicious of the military. Yet I had volunteered for three months to help get Iraq back on its feet — and within weeks of the fall of Saddam I had found myself governing a province. By the time I left Iraq many years later, I had served as the political adviser to American generals through the surge […]

A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George by Kelly Carlin St. Martin’s Press, 2015; 336pp George Carlin plays the part of the magical storybook father for much of his daughter Kelly’s new memoir, A Carlin Home Companion, due to be published on September 15. He’s the fun dad, the dad who lets you do as you please. He mails cryptic postcards to Kelly with single words on, for her to string together as sentences; he makes peanut-butter sandwiches for her when she doesn’t fancy her mother’s cooking; and when he bakes with her, he makes one batch of “Kelly’s Spice Cake” and one of George’s (“another box of cake mix and a Baggie of weed”). The first third of this warm, witty, and ultimately wise book tells the story of George and Brenda, Kelly’s mother, up to the late 70s. Born in New York and inspired by comedians he saw at the movies, George early on hatched what Kelly refers to as the “Danny Kaye plan”: to become an entertainer. “There was never a plan B.” On the road, building his career as a stand-up, he met Brenda Hosbrook in Ohio in 1960. What, he asked her, does one do in Dayton after a show? […]