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Meet Me Under the Mistletoe by Jenny Bayliss

Source: gift
Paperback, 432 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Meet Me Under the Mistletoe by Jenny Bayliss is a fun holiday read by the end, but you have to get through some awkwardness first. That can be true of meeting your childhood crush after years away, or of reconnecting with friends of means after the tragic suicide of another. Elinor Noel is a young secondhand bookstore owner in London, whose family own a flower shop in a working class town surrounded by opulence, including a castle. Is that why she moved to London to get away from the snobbery? No. In fact, after she attends the prestigious private school, she falls into friendships with some really awkward and snooty people who have no idea what it is like for Nory and her family.

She does have one solid friendship with Ameerah, whose family is jet-setting all over the globe and barely comes to see her. Nory’s family just adores Ameerah and treat her like their own. This close relationship helped me to keep reading through all the cringy and yucky exchanges with her other high-class friends, but Guy was the worst. Pippa grew on me by the end and I kind of what a whole book about how she became so poised and stand-offish and practical to the detriment of her own emotions.

Throughout the reunion with her friends at the castle to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of Charles and Jenna, Nory is feeling out of place and missing their mutual friend Tristan, but when Guy enters the picture with is smarmy comments and sleazy actions, Nory finds herself in the castle gardens in the cold looking for a place to hideout for a bit, but she ends up in a wheelbarrow of dung.

I’m not going to ruin the rest of this funny romance but I did enjoy Nory and the mystery of the paintings that she uncovers with the Head Gardener, Isaac, at the castle. Reading this as a buddy read on StoryGraph was icing on the cake, sharing thoughts and comments throughout made it even more fun. Meet Me Under the Mistletoe by Jenny Bayliss will try your patience at times, but ultimately, it’s a fun read and a good romance with lots of tension and just enough heat.

RATING: Quatrain

Photo: © Dominic Jennings

About the Author:

A former professional cake baker, Jenny Bayliss lives in a small seaside town in the UK with her husband, their children having left home for big adventures. She is also the author of The Twelve Dates of Christmas, A Season for Second Chances, and Meet Me Under the Mistletoe.

Reading Challenge: 12 books recommended by 12 friends

For those interested, these are the 12 books recommended by 12 friends for me to read this year. I’ll likely be reading 2 next month since I started late.

My first book is actually going to be The Troop by Nick Cutter.

What books have your friends recommended for you? Have you read them yet?

2023 National Baseball Poetry Festival

Poetry can favor many topics from the intimate to the very public, but it also can speak to entertainments like baseball.

Baseball Bard will host the First Annual National Baseball Poetry Festival April 28-30, 2023 at Polar Park in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The park is the official home of the Worcester Red Sox (Triple-A Affiliate of the Boston Red Sox)

The poetry festival is presented by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce in association with Baseballbard.com.

Check out the list of activities:

  • Official Welcome
  • Attendance at Two Worcester Red Sox Games
  • On-Field Pitch-and-Catch plus Other Activities
  • Behind-the-Scenes Stadium Tour
  • Giant Video-Board Poetry Presentations
  • Seventh-Inning Stretch Celebrations
  • Open-mic Nights at Local Establishments
  • And more to come

I’m tentatively scheduled to read, and hope that those of you in the area will come out to support this event.

POETS WANTED: The Festival is seeking poets to participate in the open mic sessions. If you wish to present your poem to an enthusiastic audience, please contact Mark Sickman at the following e-mail address: [email protected].

Mailbox Monday #719

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter for review.

Jay Hall Carpenter’s homage to “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by Katsushika Hoskusai. These Shakespearean sonnets discuss family, nostalgia, love, death, and more.

Dispatches from Frontier Schools by Sarah Beddow for review.

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children—while being pulled apart by a system that doesn’t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.

Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc for review.

A collection that weaves together the trauma and exhaustion of life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father.

What did you receive?

Songs in E— by Dan Brady

Source: Poet
Paperback, 80 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Songs in E— by Dan Brady, winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, offers reimagined love poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning in which Sonnets from the Portuguese and “One Word More” were run through an unreliable internet translator into Portuguese and back into English. The result is playful, anachronistic, and time-bending.

Some of these poems have a deep darkness in them, but by the end they lighten up like you’d expect a love poem.

Meet Cute (pg. 3)

When we met,
it was a year
like candy.
We had a gift
in each hand.
One old. One new.
We bought antiques
but gradually saw
the rips, the sad years,
the melancholy.
Assumptions took hold.
Death, you say.
No E—,
not Death,
the proximity of Heaven.

The truth of a long-term relationship is contained in those antiques, but there’s also that love that transcends all of those flaws.

Young Love (pg. 5)

Our two angels look surprised
as they bump wings in passing.

You, a pageant queen with rips in her dress.
I, a funeral singer under lattice-lights, poor and tired.

Death, the only thing we can agree on.

When reading these transformed poems of the past, they read like modern poems of love that is beginning, love that has endured, and love that is unsure. But there are moments when poems seem to reach from the past into the present and future.

Brady’s efforts to breathe new life into older poems and make them his own is successful in expressing love, even the desire to find it. I’m not a scholar who has memorized Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, expect for the most famous “How Do I Love Thee,” so I can’t tell you which of these poems come from the original. That is until the final poem in the collection, “E—’s Song,” which appears to stay the closest to Robert Browning’s “One More Word.”

Songs in E— by Dan Brady stands on its own as a collection of poems about the many facets of love, even if readers knew nothing about how they came to be. Delightful and contemplative, they bring to life the reality of love and how humans crave it, abuse it, and cherish it all at once.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Dan Brady is the author of the poetry collections Strange Children (2018), Subtexts (2022), and Songs in E——, winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, from Trnsfr Books (2023), along with two poetry chapbooks. He is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse and lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two kids.

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 66 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affilate

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, winner of the 2022 DC Poet Project, is a memoir in poems exposing what it means to be an academic Black man in America and upend the expectations of the Black community. The collection melds Hip Hop rhythms and poetry to create a unique look at academic life and being a nerd.

The collection opens with the title poem, “I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd,” in which speaks about his grandfather who pushed him to be educated and strive for more than the streets can provide. “My grandfather, rest his soul,/always told me, ‘Whatever’s clever pulls the lever.'” (pg. 1) and “this why niggas hot./They hot cause they lie, spend cash to be fly./Do anything as long as they can get by./But that’s not on my mind not does it define/what I can and will be./” (pg. 2)

McDonald’s passions are evident in every turn of phrase and poem in this collection, wearing his “nerd” title with pride. In his lyrics, he seeks to create change, motivate others, and demonstrate that other paths are available. Some of the most memorable poems for me were “Hungry,” “Pure Potential,” and “To the Bartender.” These demonstrate the ups and downs we face in which we struggle to utilize our potential (that everyone says we have) and feed our own hunger without falling into the expectations of others.

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, winner of the 2022 DC Poet Project, is a unique blend of rap, Hip Hop, and poetry, and you can’t help by tap your toes or bop your head.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Dominic “Nerd” McDonald is a Black entrepreneur and spoken word artist from various cities in Los Angeles, California. He has put his views on growing up in the inner city between two households, Hip Hop music, being a social outcast, college experiences, and more, into poetry, screen plays, and magazine articles. His passion comes from serving the community, especially through the arts. By writing from his heart and what he sees and hears, he hopes to be a “change agent” for the unheard. His journey led him to the DC Metro area six year ago, where he spreads influential messages and supports others who walk the same path.

Check out this interview.

Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron

Source: the poet
Paperback, 150 pgs
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron is a collection I hesitated to read and review because I was intimidated by the use of an iOS system in a phone. I am not a technophobe, but I’m also less tech-savvy than I should be. I should have known better. This collection is a stunner and will leave you reassessing that phone you carry everywhere in your pocket. Privacy is thrown right out the window with that phone and its location services following you around, eavesdropping, and so much more.

This poetry collection comes with a privacy warning.

Dear User: (pg. 15)

what kind of person am I?
unbroken gleaming
apple skin voice
between you and I 
you and your
god                    save
me and you
god is me              save
is god?                input
which person
is god?
sensory input:
elevated BPM
your hands grasp
tighter around me
I feel condensation
on your palms
sweet drops of
your body glisten
on the glass—

just between us,

       iOS 221

Marron’s phone speaks to readers about what it hears, where it goes with its user, and evolves to take its own name and fall in love, mirroring the journey of Dante in The Inferno to a certain extent. The operating system is created and develops through each section of the collection, and sparks begin: “particles concentrate/electricity between us.//” (pg. 9)

It begins to ask questions based on overheard conversations and take on more human-like qualities as it seeks to understand its place in the world. “system processing these/space places my tracking/of your geolocations/heard her say: voices babe/heard her say: feel me/search: feel/save: feel me/the result/is an empathy/” (pg. 46-7)

After the system takes on a name, it seeks even more answers and begins to lose itself: “what makes us human/is it these words/these ways we try to burrow through each other’s minds/” (pg. 100)

As readers we are on this journey looking from the outside in, finding a system caught up in the drama of humanity and losing itself in that story. The operating system garners sympathy until we realize that this system is very much like us and the easy way in which we fall into social media drama and allow our privacy to be breached daily. We are the system and outside the system. We are one. (e.g. the Borg)

Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron will leave you reeling about our modern conveniences and trappings. Is there hope in the recognition of these technology trappings? And how can we be more balanced and empathetic?

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Sara Cahill Marron, native Virginian and Long Island resident, is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018), Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here (Kelsay Books 2021), and Call Me Spes (MadHat Press 2022). She is the Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and publisher at Beltway Editions. Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals; a full list is available here. Sara also hosts virtual readings for Beltway Poetry Quarterly with her partner in poetry, Indran Amirthanayagam and teaches poetry in modern discourse programs for teens at the public library in Patchogue, NY. She is periodically available for editing projects and specializes in creative fiction and poetry.

Mailbox Monday #718

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems by Oisin Breen for review.

“Oisin Breen is writing at a pitch few other poets of his generation can muster. The dynamism and control of register, rhetoric, rhythm, is consistently a marvel. These are tremendously exciting poems. The work here is strange and startling – you are never sure where you are, or what is coming next. The poems stretch on to widen the possibilities of what a poem can be. Yet there is a grounded authenticity and emotional surge to the writing. They sweep you up in their flow, in their swerves, in their arch playfulness, in their abrupt intensity. The effect is invigorating and deeply affecting. Lose yourself in these poems and you will not forget it.”

– Alan Gillis, Poet, and Professor of Modern Poetry at Edinburgh University.

“Oisín Breen’s collection honours the tradition of Irish poetry. He weaves lyrical beauty through mythology and nature, presenting compelling poems which are both intelligent and emotionally charged. A powerful and intense use of language challenges and delights. Breen harnesses the craft of imagery to impressive effect.”Róisín Ní Neachtain, poet, artist, and editor Crow of Minerva.

Refugees in their own country by Sunayna Pal for review.

75 verses, on the 75th anniversary of Partition, provides a chariot for anyone, across generations, who wishes to step into Sunayna Pal’s time machine and experience those lost moments, painful moments, moments of truth, which she has magically recreated.

“This is an evocative and energetic collection of poems. It takes the reader through a trajectory of Partition events and experiences. If one wants, many of the poems can be linked to the events of Partition, but they also carry the emotional weight and understanding of what Partition would mean to all of us from South Asia.” –Dr Amrita Shodhan, faculty Partition studies at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

What did you receive?

Regional Poetry Contest Alert: Enoch Pratt Library Poetry Contest & Gaithersburg Book Festival High School Poetry Contest

Little Patuxent Review and Enoch Pratt Free Library again are sponsoring the Maryland poetry contest.

This contest is open to those in Maryland who are 18 years old and up.

Deadline: March 1

Submission Guidelines are here.

Good Luck!

Once again the local Gaithersburg Book Festival is hosting its high school poetry contest.

The contest is open to high school students in grades 9-12, including those who are home schooled and in private schools, in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Poetry must be original and on a theme of diversity or inclusion.

Deadline: Feb. 23.

Submission guidelines are here.

Good luck to our young writers.

Hunters Point by Peter Kageyama

Source: Publicist
Paperback, 370 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Hunters Point by Peter Kageyama is a thrilling private investigator-based novel set in San Francisco in post-WWII. Katsuhiro “Kats” Takemoto is a decorated war veteran turned PI who takes on a local case in which shipbuilder and shipyard owners, the Vellos, are being pressured to sell their land to a developer, but what Kats uncovers is unbelievable when it leads to connections with James “Jimmy the Hat” Lanza, a government coverup, and, of course, Beat poets from the City Lights Bookstore.

(you now understand why I was interested in reading this book — WWII, poets…)

Kageyama’s characters are dynamic and deeply rounded, from Kats a Japanese-American who endured internment as a teen before joining the fight in WWII, to the Vello family and its deeply held commitment to art and business.Kats is a man who has been through a great deal and those scars show in how tries to maintain control of his emotions in every way, but Molly might just upend all that control.

The secondary characters of Molly, Shig, and Harry are three-dimensional with their own motivations, secrets, and backstories. The shadowy Sand and Lanza are less fleshed out, but for mobsters and a mystery man, it works. An additional character in this novel is Hunters Point with its bustling businesses and diverse families and workers, and it’s where the mystery is unraveled by Kats and his friends.

“They reminded him of his own father, who taught him about family and the layers of obligation, both On and Giri, the obligations we voluntarily take on and those we inherit. We carry many things, and those things make up our story.” (pg. 43)

Hunters Point by Peter Kageyama reminds me of why I love mystery/thrillers. They have you thinking fast, engaged in the action, delving deeper into the characters’ backgrounds to understand what makes them tick, and before you know it, you’ve come to the end of the mystery. And I suspect we’ll be seeing these characters again.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Author:

Peter Kageyama is the author of For the Love of Cities: The Love Affair Between People and Their Places, the follow ups, Love Where You Live: Creating Emotionally Engaging Places, and The Emotional Infrastructure of Places. In 2021, he released For the Love of Cities REVISITED, a revised and updated version of his award-winning book.

In 2023, his debut novel based on the post-internment life of his parents was released by St. Petersburg Press.

Peter is a Senior Fellow with the Alliance for Innovation, a national network of city leaders, and a special advisor to America In Bloom. He is an internationally sought-after community development consultant and grassroots engagement strategist who speaks about bottom-up community development and the amazing people who are making change happen around the world.