My review of Writers and Their Notebooks, an anthology of essays edited by Diana Raab, is in the new issue of Pleiades. Here's how it starts:

Writers use their notebooks for all sorts of things. Notebooks hold the raw material – startling images, snatches of overheard conversation, phrases jotted down before they are forgotten – stuff that may wind up in a poem or story tomorrow or two years from now. Sometimes, notebooks are used for journaling or free writing. A notebook can also be the place for a writer to chart her plans: doping out the intersecting plotlines of a novel, recording research notes or keeping a running list of possible book titles. Above all else, a writer’s notebook is a private place – no readers, no judgments – where theories get tested, dreams examined and secret voices given a confidential hearing.

In Writers and Their Notebooks, two dozen poets, novelists, playwrights and memoirists “pay homage,” in the words of Phillip Lopate, to their notebooks and the “intimate scribbles” they contain. In the anthology’s forward, Lopate points out the similarity between the words“musing” and “Muse” – and indeed these contributors describe how their notebooks are essential for the various kinds of musing they do to summon the Muse, that inspirer of artistic expression. They also open their notebooks to share excerpts that illustrate how this private writing leads to their published work. This is a book both about writers and mainly for writers; its appendices include a list of writing prompts to help those newly equipped with notebooks get started. As such, it’s more likely to elicit nods of recognition (“Dorianne Laux uses her notebook just like I do!”) than any lightning-flash insights into the writing process. While you are perhaps unlikely to read it cover to cover, this book is enjoyable to browse around in, given the brevity of the essays and the diverse group who penned them.

I love notebooks and have kept them and carried them around and written in them for years: Moleskines and little Japanese notebooks from Kinokuniya perfectly sized for a back pocket, or the cache of cheap funky notebooks I brought back from Shanghai school supply stores last fall. To read the rest of the review, pick up the new issue of Pleiades.

My review of Idra Novey's The Next Country is in the new, hot-off-the-press issue 31.1 of Pleiades. As a sample, here's the first paragraph:

The poems in Idra Novey’s The Next Country are almost always on the go. Novey writes about movement, about being transported—in both senses of that word. Whether they are set in other countries, at border crossings, in customs lines, or on trains or buses, Novey’s poems reflect the changing landscapes and often disorienting experiences that come with traveling abroad. She reminds us how a change in scene almost always changes the traveler as well. Novey’s poems also consider motion in terms of family: the ways in which parents and children move away from and back towards each other, both physically and emotionally, and how a marriage is itself a kind of journey. This double-stranded theme gives Novey’s first book a pleasing sense of cohesiveness – of adding up to more than the sum of its parts –while at the same time being broad enough to allow for surprise and variety.

And here's the last paragraph:

One of the dangers in writing about travel is the temptation to try to include every detail of the trip. Novey wisely avoids this. Her spare poems are enticing, rather than exhaustive, luring the reader in with just a few compelling, carefully chosen details. In “About A Road,” a man is driving the speaker to an old zoo near the Panama Canal. She wants to see the tigers, but he has to break the news to her: they have died. He offers some consolation, though. “There’s a blind donkey in the cage now. / People watch it just the same.” Novey ends the poem there, leaving the reader to marvel and wonder and want more. Perhaps after reading The Next Country you will want to visit these places yourself. As Novey writes, “There’s a road if you want to go.”

To read what's in between, order the issue -- or better yet, subscribe to Pleaides today.