“Henry Thoreau wanted his nature-based Walden to be about everything, but he never had a wife and kids. Chris Dombrowski’s memoir about life in rural Montana—with all its hunting, fishing, foraging, philosophy, and home economics—is deepened by the presence of his wife, Mary, an elementary school teacher, and the children they share.”
Read Henry’s review in the Harvard Review Online
“John N. Maclean begins his memoir fly fishing on Montana’s Big Blackfoot River. Many years earlier, he had asked his father, Norman, why they no longer fished that stretch of river. His father had explained that it was because he didn’t know the new landowner, but the son also claims that his father ‘held many memories close, in a kind of time vault, to be reshaped and burnished without the nuisance of updates.'”
Read Henry’s review in the Harvard Review Online
“John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry has all the classic elements of a Western saga: endlessly promising yet punishing land, tobacco and booze, corrupt lawmen and kindly prostitutes, good guys and bad guys with guns blazing. But it’s the particular story of our hero, Jesse, and her gender fluidity that makes this a truly excellent book.”
Read Henry’s review in the Harvard Review Online
Tracy K. Smith’s fourth book of poetry ends with “An Old Story” of terrible times. Echoing Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Smith bemoans a ravaged land and rising hate—the “worst in us having taken over / And broken the rest utterly down.”
Read Henry’s review in the Harvard Review Online
“I believe, / despite my unbelief,” Todd Davis testifies in Winterkill’s opening “Homily”.”
Read Henry’s review of Todd Davis’ new collection of poems Winterkill in Harvard Review Online.
Read Henry’s review of Wayne Harrison’s new novel The Spark and the Drive in Harvard Review Online.
“Coming to That is the perfect fulfillment of an artistic life—to live very long and deliberately, to maintain a sharp mind and serviceable body, soaking up a multitude of paintings, films, plays, ballets, operas, books, songs, poems (and, yes, champagne) and bringing it to bear on one’s creative endeavors, right to the very end and into the future.”
Henry recently reviewed Ted Leeson’s book, Inventing Montana: Dispatches from the Madison Valley for Harvard Review Online:
Ted Leeson makes the disclaimer that he is just a “seasonal resident” who for over twenty years has spent several weeks every summer living above and fishing the Madison River in southwest Montana. “And if my familiarity with the place runs only skin-deep, I am satisfied, for it is our skins that wrap us in sensation.” Leeson’s distance, humility, acute sensitivity and tail-flipping wit make Inventing Montana a fresh, humorous, and insightful book on a region that is reverently fished, camped, explored, and over-described. “Montana” is, after all, just “a word that closes distances, a name for a curved roof of sky and a place fashioned beneath it.”
Click to read the full review.