Southwest Book Reviews

A ghostly father leads his living son through weeds to an owl’s hiding place.  The owl spreads its wings, taking father and son in.   This is the final image in Miles Waggener’s new poetry collection, Sky Harbor.  Sounds like the ending to a good ghost story, doesn’t it?  Indeed it is.  Ghosts of one sort or another inhabit these spooky but brilliant poems.

Sky Harbor isn’t at all about the poet lost in a world of airport Starbucks and Papa John’s pizza. It’s a reflection on life and death and place from the peculiar ungrounded state of a flyer caught between danger and home. 

This fall, the writer Ann Patchett did something radical.  She opened a bookstore.  This goes against the trend. The indie bookstores are practically extinct. I miss Flagstaff’s old landmarks, McGaugh’s Newsstand on Aspen, Aradia Books just across the tracks.  I’m glad we’ve still got Starlight Books on Leroux.

I was thinking, if you want to buy your child a book for Christmas, what are the options?  The big chain bookstores?  I guess.  The internet?  Sure.  Download Where the Wild Things Are and hand your kid a Kindle. 

Call me retro, but I say there’s nothing like a glorious, glossy, picture book to inspire the joy of reading.  So I decided to take a walk in downtown Flagstaff and see what’s available. I found some treasures.

Writer Sergio Troncoso graduated from Harvard, studied philosophy at Yale, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico.  But he started in a Texas barrio.  In his latest novel, he tells the story of upward mobility in a family much like his own. 

My father once said, “College may be the worst thing that ever happens to you. ”  Not a college man himself, he wanted educated kids, even though he feared it might erode the family—a common worry among parents who want better for their children than they had themselves.  El Paso writer Sergio Troncoso knows this story. In his novel From This Wicked Patch of Dust he tells how education and wanderlust fragment a tightly knit immigrant family.

Flagstaff, AZ – In 2006, Beth Alvarado published a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, "Not A Matter of Love." A graduate of Stanford and a writing teacher at the University of Arizona, her second book is just out with the University of Iowa Press. Ann Cummins has this review:

Flagstaff, AZ – I've heard it said that these days, there aren't any travelers only tourists. The tourist collects memories. The traveler engages the world and comes home changed. Judging from the essays and poems in Dispatches from the Republic of Otherness, Laura Kelly is a pilgrim of the old order, one for whom the road is a path to self-discovery.

Flagstaff, AZ – Ann Cummin's reviews Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist