quality alert

Charles W. Pratt's new book, From the Box Marked 'Some Are Missing,'is now available. It brings together most of his strongest poems from several decades. It puts me in mind of Richard Wilbur, of Frost, of Seamus Heaney. If you think that's hyperbolic, look at the book. Start, perhaps, with "Winter Squash," "For Sarah," and "The Merger"--though I could as easily name a dozen, two dozen, more, others. www.hobblebush.com

Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice will be released in April (ECCO). It has wonderful, original, convincing readings of Othello, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Hamlet, others. Along the way Yoshino reviews and clarifies a few analogical contemporary events, esp. the Simpson trial and Bill Clinton's (actionable) spinning of the truth in his sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case. But the book is mostly and even more memorably about Shakespeare.