The Alignments (on Considerations of Earth and Sky by Temple Cone; Radiant Field by Naomi K. Long; His Longing: (The Small Penis Oratorio) by Paul Allen; Solstice by Emmy Pérez; The Wrong End of the Rainbow by Charles Wright; The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook by Karl Elder; Myths of Electricity by Kevin Meaux; The Lowell Poems by Tom Sexton; and Days When Nothing Happens by David Tucker)

Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.