THE SHORT LIST: Horse Latitudes, The Mystery Guest
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The Horse Latitudes
Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus & Giroux • 10/19
Paul Muldoon’s 11th collection of poems is a delicate and clever balancing act wherein traditional verse forms are bent and enlivened by slang and near rhyme, and the poet’s playful language (“Here you’d catalogue/ each undersea smash-and-grab/ Frog. Grog. Waterlog.”) is checked by his oddly plain-faced yet frighteningly premonitory observations (“The black W/ on the cicada’s wings? War./ Hence the ballyhoo.”). Addressing his personal history as well as the greater history of his native Northern Ireland; the death of Warren Zevon; and even a Bob Dylan concert in Princeton (where Muldoon lives and teaches), The Horse Latitudes is a collection of witty and tight-fisted poems that are even more surprising upon a second or third reading.
Nate Brown
The Mystery Guest
Grégoire Bouillier
Farrar, Straus & Giroux •
Now available
The Mystery Guest is about the author’s surfacing from the hurt of his ex-girlfriend’s desertion. It is also about elastic constructions of life and the impositions we make; how we both beg and force everything to mean something, regardless of how convoluted or counterfeit that meaning is. Bouillier’s prose is quick and almost suffocatingly self-referential. The narrator hauls the reader through a spectral, neurotic analysis of himself, which is part memoir and part exaggerated internal monologue. While this necessitates some empathetic patience on the reader’s part, the story is ultimately a universal one of love lost, gained, and eviscerated.
Thea Brown
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