"The Best of Pif Magazine Off-Line" offers a refreshing assortment of new stories and new voices. A standout among them is Mimi Carmen's "Love Birds". Ms. Carmen's tale of an aging mother and conflicted daughter resonates with idiosyncratic vision and gritty passion. The bird imagery is breathtaking. I also very much enjoyed "23 Johnson Avenue, 1985" by Diann Blakely. If writers were race horses, and I had money, I'd bet my wad on these two.

A wonderful collection - refreshingly different, but solid. My favorite is "Love Birds" by Mimi Carmen. I'd like to read more of her work.

I am bored with many print magazines nowadays. The same things, the same things. Ho-hum. I've been following this zine for a while now, open it every month with relish. They've definitely picked a lot of their best, and Camille Renshaw's intro says a lot about WHY I don't like other magazines. Here is something worth a read, something that will make you want to get everything the magazine has put out since the beginning. There's even a rationale for professional wrestling, something that wants me to buy a tape of the event with the Undertaker/Mankind Hell in the Cell match, and I NEVER watch that stuff! You should definitely have this on your shelf--impress your friends with how in the know you are.

One sentence on the first page caught my attention - the remainder of the book continued to hold my attention with the same mastery of depicting the complexity of people in simple terms. The sentence? "He could plow and sow, milk cows, cook potato pancakes, find wild boletus mushrooms even out of season, ferry people in his boat during high waters, weave baskets, hunt deer, rescue travelers and half-frozen animals, silence the stupid, and he knew how to laugh." - that is the description of Uncle Prosek who, to the young narrator, knew how to do everything.

It is Uncle Prosek who taught the narrator to fish, who helped the narrator's Jewish father poach a deer ... The independent chapters which make up this novel tell of the family adventures before the war - father becoming the world's best Electrolux salesman for the love of the wife of his boos, falling for a scam on purchasing a carp pond and years later giving the scam artist appropriate revenge. During the war, the two older sons and the father are sent to concentration camps; they survive but grandmother does not. Here the novels tells of the narrator's escapades fishing to survive - encountering mill owners who cheat him and fish wardens who act kindly to him. And finally the book follows his father into life after the war.

Throughout the book, the ability of the author to depict people - an attribute the narrator ascribes both to the narrator's father and to a famous painter known to the father - makes this "simple" memoir into a memorable study of human behavior. This is human behavior of the roguish, flawed but fundamentally kind nature.

Fishermen may enjoy this book but the book is of human nature, portrayed in conjunction with fishing, not a book of fishing. Well worth the short time it takes to read this book.

I fell quickly and completely in love with this book. Unpretentious, disarmingly honest, simple without being simplistic. It's also sneaky -- it purports to be a memoir of a simple, arcadian time and place, then blindsides you with the realization that this was not such a simple time after all. I wish I could give it six stars.

This gentle, unassuming book is one of the most powerful I have ever read. It is the story of a young boy's experiences with life as his days change from idyllic afternoons of fishing to the realities of WWII. Much more than a book about fishing, though it contains many wonderful espisodes about fish and fishing, it is a recounting of the hardships, terrors, and ultimate kindnesses that populate war. As you will learn, fish and fishing became the metaphor for freedom for Ota Pavel.

This is a 3-story anthology with nuclear war as a common theme. By far the best is Spinrad's entry, which (I think) is not available anywhere else. It's a hilarious tale of a pot-smoking Arab oil sheik bent on acquiring nukes to annihilate Israel, and an attendant power struggle between a screwball American president (a former used-car salesman) and a computer-animated corpse of the Soviet Communist Party Secretary General. All the comdey ingredients are there and Spinrad makes the best of them!

If this is not the first, it is undoubtedly the best, anthology of cowboy poetry available today. For many years I thought cowboy poetry was kind of, well, you know, cowboyish. That is, it was kind of cute in a nursery rhyme sort of way but was not really relevant when you compared it to real poetry. Fortunately, I was privideged to live in the west for four years and was introduced to some of the best poetry I have ever read. It was called, well, cowboy poetry! Not only was it as well written as any so-called mainstream poetry but it has a way of speaking to the reader that will forever change the way you view cowboy poetry. Thus, it was with great interest that I read Cowboy Poetry Matters. The book brings together some of the best and brightest cowboy poets writing today, most notably Linda Hussa, Linda Hasselstrom, and Laurie Buyer and places their work along side such well known mainstream poets as Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin. The result is a remarkable collection of poetry by diverse poets that discover they share a lot of common ground and that cowboy poetry can be, and is, as relevant and diverse as the poets. In addition to a feed bag full of wonderful poetry, the reader will find memoirs by Linda Hussa and Wallace McRae which will stir your soul. Not to be overlooked is a stimulating series of critical essays by Dana Gioia, Paul Zarzyski, and Kathy Ogren which will challenge you to view cowboy poetry in ways you may have never considered. I encourage readers that want to be introduced to some of the very best cowboy poetry available today to try this book. As they say in the west "How long has it been since you read some really bood cowboy poetry?" "Well pardner, that's to long."

I want to recommend this book. It is a very suspenseful novel that takes place in Britain, the United States, and Ireland. The story has a very original plot and gives a lot of history behind the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Jarman and McDowell came along with their magazine, The Reaper, when it was needed most. They've done a lot to bring back narrative poetry (McDowell is the founder of Story Line Press). They wrote these essays together, and weren't afraid to say what they thought--they weren't afraid to make anyone mad (they remind me of Randall Jarrell in that way). Meg Schoerke's introduction and the first Reaper essay introduce those of us who are unfamiliar with The Reaper. "Navigating the Flood" takes on criticism, and they aren't afraid to name names. Their essay on Wallace Stevens discusses his impact on contemporary poetry and the narrative. Two essays, "The Reaper's Non-negotionable Demands" and "The Elephant Man of Poetry" (which is about Robert Frost) are the two best essays in the book, and two of the best essays about poetry. They attack the state of poetry with satire and humor in "The Reaper Interviews Jean Doh and Sean Dough" and "The Dogtown Letters", and both essays will make you laugh out loud. The sad thing is that it just as easily could have been real. In addition to four other essays, there is also a guide to writing narrative poetry. This collection is so great that you wish that The Reaper was still in circulation, and you hope that one day Jarman and McDowell will collect a "Best of" and release it soon.

From the eyes/connections of a senior veteran Microsoftie you can learn for yourself how business is done and has been changed by technology. A great communicator, Mr. McDowell clears the eyes of the foggy headed, old thinking business manager to the wonders and money savings of tech. A must read for any modernizing or future thinking executive looking for success. This is one of those books that are a cheap investment in the future profitability of your company. Your employees should read it too!

Excellent book for those in industry, as well as anyone who wants to better understand how profoundly technology can impact business success.

I have a clear understanding in my mind of all the things my company can do to help businesses evolve strategy with our IT products and why that is important, but I have had what I believe to be a somewhat difficult time articulating the "whys and wherefores." This book provides lucid, clearly compelling explanations and examples that crystallize the message of the power of information technolgy.

McDowell and Simon make strong cases for how information technology should not be used simply to do things better than you have done them before, but instead to use it to do things you have never been able to do before. If you don't fully understand technology and want some non-technical explanations of why you should be using it, this book was written for you.

McDowell's latest collection shows his skill as a story teller. There are both lyric verse and narratives in this collection, but the narratives are the true gems here.

Robert McDowell, whose Quiet Money and The Diviners showed him to be a master of narrative poetry, reveals his lyric gift in this new, long-awaited collection.

The Diviners is McDowell's book length poem about a family as it falls apart through five decades. It's a poignant story told in iambic pentameter, and is a prime example of the comeback the narrative poem has been making (as is Dave Mason's "The Country I Remember"). The first chapter, "The Fifties", is truly a great piece of work, and appeared in a slightly different form in the Best American Poetry 1989.

There's a lot in this book which the reader will see repeated in other books on prosody -- an introductory chapter dealing with the relations between form and rhythm on one hand and content and meaning on the other; an analysis of the changes between Romantic versification and the modern period, beginning with the work of Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, and Whitman; the importance of the Imagists; the opening shots by Pound and Eliot in the Modernist revolution; and a few other topics.

Most of the book is handled very well. It's refreshing to see an analysis of Browning's pentameter style which emphasizes not his "colloquial" approach, as so many others do, but instead lauds the extent to which he moves AWAY from the colloquial style and more toward roughness and jaggedness. The Modern period is handled with finesse as well. The drawbacks to the book, in my opinion, begin with the period closer to the present. Some of the analyses on free verse do not make as much sense as similar analyses in Paul Fussell's "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form," despite the more recent volume's indebtedness to the former. As D. H. Lawrence said, it is no use manufacturing fancy laws for the governing of free verse. Too much weight is given to some poets who are clearly minor, such as Maxine Kumin, and too little to poets whose craftsmanship is unquestioned, such as Robert Lowell. Most oddly, there is no attention given to two of the finer formal craftsmen of recent history, James Merrill and Derek Walcott; these two use free verse but also expand the boundaries of traditional metrical approaches, and their efforts here should not go unnoticed. And I might take issue with the expanded coverage given to the most recent trend in prosody, the New Formalists, simply because, as I noted in my review of "Rebel Angels" for Amazon, they aren't that good and they haven't ADVANCED metrical techniques that much.

Aside from these qualms, "Sound and Form" is a good survey of prosody of the ! last century.