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Mailbox Monday #707

November 7, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

Brave Like Mom by Monica Acker, illustrated by Paran Kim, for review from Media Masters Publicity.

As one girl watches her mom battle illness, she sees Mom being strong, brave, and fierce on both good days and bad ones. Mom is fierce as she catches and wrestles a fish and brave as she endures needles from the doctor. The girl wants to be brave like Mom! As she worries about her mom’s health, the girl realizes that bravery comes in many forms and that she can be brave too.

A poignant and sensitive story about a loved one living with a chronic illness, and an important lesson about how being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared.

Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration.

An operating system falls for its user. It waits, a journey not unlike Dante’s Inferno, from factory to glass face. Strangers, friends, lovers, predators, kin, all translated through the operating system’s code. Each voice, a whole character the system struggles to make sense of, held by a human hand. This device logs your locations even when you don’t ask. Undeniably, these actions lack all conditions, a form of loving.

Call Me Spes lays bare these overheard voices— tenderly, voyeuristically, a perpetual ride-along. The device deepens its relationship with its user, learning and updating with the solitary goal of closeness. Pressed against a page, these poems are siren songs marching through Inferno to the promised Heaven we scroll to attain, some kind of progress.

Common Grace by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration.

In 65 lyric poems organized into a triptych, Common Grace offers an important new lens into Asian American life, art, and love.

Part 1, “Soul Sauce,” describes the poet’s life as a practicing visual artist, taking us from an early encounter with an inkwell at Roseland Elementary in 1969 to his professional outdoor easel perched on Long Island Sound.

Part 2, ‘Ubasute,” is named after the mythical Japanese practice wherein “a grown son lifts / his aged mother on his back, / delivers her to a mountain, / leaves her to die.” This concept frames a wrenching portrayal of his parents’ decline and death, reaching back to his father’s time in the American internment camps of WWII and his mother’s memories of the firebombing of Tokyo. It also anchors the 2 outer parts in the racial trauma and joys passed down from his parents.

Part 3, “Gutter Trees,” gives us affecting love poems to his wife and the creative lives they’ve built together.

Ranging in scope from private moments to the sweep of familial heritage, Caycedo-Kimura’s poems are artful, subtle, but never quiet.

Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration.

In his debut poetry collection, Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe, Wayne David Hubbard illustrates journeys through physical space and abstract worlds of emotion.

Combining choreological precision with playfulness, readers enter the mind’s eye of a poet standing along the shoreline of powerful forces that shape all lives: time, place, and love.

Written over a ten-year period, the collection calls to mind the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and Carl Phillips. Importantly, these poems resist thick, impenetrable themes, instead celebrating ordinal wonders of life that are hidden in open view. This spare book offers strong, memorable imagery and questions that will delight thoughtful readers.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #706

October 31, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn, which I purchased.

The opening poem, “Cuban Polymita,” from which the title Fixed Star arises, serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn’s manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references, the book, too, is a series of spirals: mainly, a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript, both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language, geography, government, culture, and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, Normando Hernández González), and geographies (Cuba, Spain, Florida, Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz, jasper, sea glass, bougainvillea, contradanza, and coral reefs, Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song. ―Simone Muench

Country of Glass by Sarah Katz, which I purchased.

Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.

Taste: A Book of Small Bites by Jehanne Dubrow, which I purchased.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting.

Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment.

Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #705

October 24, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

DC Poets for DC Schools edited by Robert Bettman, purchased from DayEight.

The DC Poets for DC Schools anthology includes twenty-six poems by nine area poets. The poems in this collection were selected to introduce students to topics and techniques, history, and character. Included works explore growing up in Washington, D.C., sexuality, Blackness, aging, violence, womanhood, and more. Authors range from internationally renowned award winners to highly regarded and still very young poets.

Diaspora Cafe: D.C. edited by Jeffrey Banks and Maritza Rivera, purchased from DayEight.

An anthology by AfroLatinx writers, Diaspora Cafe D.C. is a collective investigation of survival by writers within a system that deprioritizes their existence.

Diaspora Cafe D.C. is edited by Jeffrey Banks and Maritza Rivera and the contributors include: Ethelbert Miller, Saleem Abdal-Khaaliq, J. Joy “Sistah Joy” Alford, Jane Alberdeston, Kamilah Mercedes Valentín Díaz, Nick Leininger, Stephani E.D. McDow, Manuel Méndez, Hermond Palmer, henry 7. reneau, jr., Allison Whittenberg, Christine Williams, alongside poems by the editors.

While some poems consider identity and relationships, and others are love poems to family and lovers, all are united by a thread of resistance against invisibility.

Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey, which I purchased from Beltway Editions.

Throughout 2021, as COVID and climate change battled for supremacy in the hearts and minds of the world, American poet Heather Bourbeau and Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey engaged in a poetry conversation back and forth across the globe, alternating each week, to create 52 poems over 52 weeks. With poems anchored in their gardens, they buoyed each other through lockdowns and exile from family, through devastating floods, fires, wild winds and superstorms. Some Days The Bird, a collection of internationally recognized and award-winning poems, is the result of their weekly communiqués from different hemispheres (and opposing seasons) in verse.

Inheritance by Taylor Johnson, which was gifted to me by the new Takoma Park Poet Laureate.

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #704

October 17, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

The Art of Revision: The Last Word by Peter Ho Davies, which I purchased on recommendation from Melanie Figg.

In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision―even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject.

Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision―that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.

Because of Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea from Kellogg’s Feeding Reading Program.

It’s the start of a new year at Snow Hill School, and seven students find themselves thrown together in Mr. Terupt’s fifth grade class. There’s . . . Jessica, the new girl, smart and perceptive, who’s having a hard time fitting in; Alexia, a bully, your friend one second, your enemy the next; Peter, class prankster and troublemaker; Luke, the brain; Danielle, who never stands up for herself; shy Anna, whose home situation makes her an outcast; and Jeffrey, who hates school.

They don’t have much in common, and they’ve never gotten along. Not until a certain new teacher arrives and helps them to find strength inside themselves—and in each other. But when Mr. Terupt suffers a terrible accident, will his students be able to remember the lessons he taught them? Or will their lives go back to the way they were before—before fifth grade and before Mr. Terupt?

Find out what happens in sixth and seventh grades in Mr. Terupt Falls Again and Saving Mr. Terupt. And don’t miss the conclusion to the series, Goodbye, Mr. Terupt, coming soon!

Sway by Tricia Johnson for review.

Poems that welcome and embrace Mother Nature’s seasonal wind blown mysteries.

This book of poetry invites you to pause, kneel down in a meadow and experience the flora and fauna of Pennsylvania. To live among the rolling hills and valleys, as nature’s changing rhythms keep the time.

In Sway by Tricia Johnson, we imagine ourselves in the wilds of Nature with our heads resting on the back of our arms, eyes wide, observing the Living World.

The Wehrwolf by Alma Katsu, purchased.

Germany, 1945. In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis have been all but defeated. Uwe Fuchs, never a fighter, feels fortunate to have avoided the front lines as he cared for his widowed mother.

But Uwe’s fortune changes when Hans Sauer, the village bully, recruits him to join a guerilla resistance unit preparing for the arrival of Allied soldiers. At first, Uwe is wary. The war is lost, and rumor has it that Hans is a deserter. But Hans entices him with talk of power, brutality, and their village’s ancestral lore: werewolves.

With some reluctance, Uwe joins up with the pack and soon witnesses their startling transformation. But when the men’s violent rampage against enemy soldiers takes a devastatingly personal turn, Uwe must grapple not only with his role in their evil acts but with his own humanity. Can he reclaim what this group of predatory men has stolen from him?

Or has he been a monster all along?

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #703

October 10, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

Dear Wild Child by Wallace J. Nichols and Wallace Grayce Nichols, illustrated by Drew Beckmeyer from Media Masters Publicity.

A story inspired by a letter from a father to his daughter about wildfire, loss, and learning that we carry our homes inside us wherever we go

In the shade of ancient redwood trees, by a creek, not far from the ocean, a father builds a house for his newborn daughter, where she grows up wild and strong in their coastal canyon home. When a wildfire takes back their beloved house, he writes his now-grown daughter a letter telling her it’s gone. Inspired by the real letter the author wrote his daughter, this poignant story—written together by father and daughter—joyfully declares that a home is more than just wood and stone; it is made of love and can never be taken away. You carry home with you wherever you go.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #702

October 3, 2022 by

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.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

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:

Chalk Dust Memories by John Johnson for consideration for the 2023 Gaithersburg Book Festival.

John Johnson is a poet who loves language but also data and numbers. He resides in Northern Virginia where in addition to running his consulting firm as a professional econometrician, he loves pizza, professional wrestling, and regularly writes with his wild writing circle. John’s poetry tends to focus on humorous aspects of his geeky childhood and his journey as it relates to entrepreneurship, family and friendship, and failed athletic endeavors.

Everything Is Normal Here by Alison Palmer for consideration for the 2023 Gaithersburg Book Festival.

The title of Alison Palmer’s second poetry chapbook suggests the comfort of, or perhaps a yearning for, the known; but really it begs the question: What is our normal? The answers she provides often are far from comfortable, but she deals in necessary truths. She opens with a “Spark”: “The one-man-band kisses the silver lady. They become a flash / of sound.” And like thunder that flash and sound reverberate through these pages. “We’re designed to break after only years,” she reminds us, which brings an urgency to those years. “Honesty makes me nervous,” she admits – and no wonder, when her honesty contains both love and its loss, and entails great personal exposure. “It’s not enough to be awake / when the world winds away,” not enough merely to observe passively. Our normal world must be embraced, in all its pain and peril – and potential. “We try to be resewn of nothing left, lovely in our suits of armor. Only / the last will be exquisite, will be re-thought / into alkaline or ash.” She counsels (and comforts), “The way to master death is to make it be everywhere” – for that is truly our normal. In her appropriately titled closing poem, “The End,” she asks us to “Pretend I talk in tiny truths” – but while this collection may be tiny, her truths are large – and yes, necessary.

Why We Never Visited the Elms by Marianne Szlyk, which I purchased.

Why We Never Tried to Find the Elms gathers strands of poetry to weave them into a tapestry of memory and imagination. This whole includes a glimpse beneath a mirror that once appeared to show everything so clearly. Two examples are the title poem and “The Roadrunner,” poems that grew out of conversations with others about what they themselves remembered about the incidents depicted. The tapestry includes cultural and historical context as in “Woolworth’s, 1970,” a meditation on the absence of people of color in my memories of the small New England city where my mother grew up, and “Frida without Arms,” an imagining of Frida and Diego as young squatters in 21st-century Detroit. This tapestry contains not only my parents’ beach house in Maine or the Willow jazz club in Massachusetts but also Food Lion and Tippecanoe Mall as these too have been part of my quotidian. But the tapestry goes beyond myself and my perspective (and corrections to it) as later strands like poems inspired by Hung-Ju Kan reveal. Some say that the chapbook is best at presenting variations on a theme. However, even a chapbook is a whole world peopled by more than the poet.

Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here by Sara Cahill Marron, which I purchased.

From its vividly drawn, lyrically rich title poem to its digitally coded dialogues, Sara Marron’s dynamic and masterful nothing you build here, belongs here rails against the futility of urban living, wails against societal inequalities, and clutches its loved ones close amidst viral fears. A rush of vibrant imagery, this book skilfully counterbalances luxuriant elegiac language choices (“My Mountains Could Care Less About You”) with clipped syntax (“Clorox, Wellbutrin”), adept experimentation with form (throughout), and razor-sharp observation (“Applying for EBT in California”). Embodying a compelling urge to summon our shared humanity, this is an urgent and vital book of, and for, our time.

—Anne Casey, Author of out of emptied cups (Salmon Poetry)

“As if the heat is a thing / you can hide from,” Sara Cahill Marron writes in “My Mountains Could Care Less About You.” She draws a portrait of a world tottering, laid low by COVID-19 in particular, but also by our political fragmentation and by our laying waste to the environment, one in which Styrofoam cups are thoughtlessly discarded next to grand art—Rodin (“Chick-fil-A Styrofoam cups / dance semi-circles between feet”). Echoes of Yeats, Whitman, and Tennyson, but also experimental language are threaded through Cahill Marron’s collection. “Kiss10100love” the screen on her device says, despite the headlines. At first, this seems a cutely romantic but somewhat bewildered Apple product. But then, she carefully warns us, “Some will die.”

—Susana H. Case, Author of Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books)

Reading Sara Cahill Marron leads me on a voyage of lyrical bliss, a song-filled walking through a landscape filled, however, with fallen trees, buildings, and people of a world devastated by plague. “Nothing you build here belongs here,” she declares, and yet we have these beautiful verbal dwellings, written by a devotee to perfecting the harmony of sound and sense. Readers, you are witnesses here to the growth of an essential lyric poet, one we will read and learn from as we walk with her into the uncertain dark, healed by her word music, keeping contagions at bay.

—Indran Amirthanayagam, Author of The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press)

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #701

September 26, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

Not Happy Campers by Ash Keller, a Kindle freebie.

Lance Blakeman is an up-and-coming literary agent with a chance to represent the biggest horror writer since Stephen King. Unfortunately, the client doesn’t want to work with a bachelor. Lance needs a fiancée—fast.

Lainey Fredrickson is a struggling artist making ends meet by waitressing at a local diner. Or, she had been, until pretty boy Lance got her fired for accidentally spilling a beer on him. The way he carried on, you’d think she had deliberately doused him with radioactive waste. Now, she has exactly $4.23 to her name—not enough for an iced latte, let alone rent.

When Lance offers Lainey cash to pose as his fiancée, she can’t afford to say no, even if it means spending a week in a cramped RV with him. But can they fool the client without fooling themselves? There’s a fine line between love and hate. And with kisses this sweet, the line is bound to get blurred.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #700

September 19, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

Watchman, What of the Night? by W. Luther Jett, for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #699

September 12, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King, which I purchased from Audible.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.

Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: “What could you write that would make you happy?”

“As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city—deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”

Persuading the Captain by Rachel John, a Kindle freebie.

Romance at a family reunion is usually the start of a bad joke, but when the hunky neighbor everyone’s talking about turns out to be Anne’s ex, her plans for a relaxing cabin retreat fly out the window. Eight years ago, Anne broke off their engagement, afraid they were too young. It was a decision she’s regretted ever since. But Eric seems fine, and even suggests they stop avoiding each other and enjoy having mutual friends.

Eric Wentworth is not fine. He’s sort of accidentally dating one of Anne’s relatives. He’s introduced his lovelorn best friend to Anne and they’ve hit it off. Worst of all, they won’t be parting at the end of week like he thought. Anne lives in the city he’s moving to, and cutting her out of his life is impossible when she’s taken over his.

They swore they’d never give each other a second chance, but sometimes life has other plans…

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #698

September 5, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

2 a.m.with Keats by Eileen Cleary for review.

As I read Eileen Cleary’s 2 a.m. with Keats, I felt breathless, suspended in a place of red keys, plum stones, cats, willows, and sphinxes. It would minimize the reach of this brilliant collection to call it an elegy or a eulogy, or even a love story to Lucie Brock-Broido or John Keats – though it is all of those things. Here, in this place where “the elm says Grief and the oak, Grief,” the poems shine and scatter across the pages like “a phantom of stars.” Cleary engages the rhythms of another world, of “sweet music honeyed and unheard,” where “Lucie reaches forty years back. . . .”

Embracing the quirkiness of Brock-Broido’s imagery and the love of Keats’s line, Cleary creates a séance of astronomy, searching for the origins of human and poetic magic, where “looking for signs means I’ve / once been broken.” I will return to 2 a.m. with Keats again and again, to remember Lucie and Keats, to inhale “rose milk . . . mint.” – Jennifer Martelli, author of In the Year of Ferraro

Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun for review.

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.

As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s, and her own.

The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.

Red London by Alma Katsu from NetGalley.

After an explosive takedown of a well-placed mole within the CIA, agent Lyndsey Duncan has been tasked with keeping tabs on her newest Russian asset, deadly war criminal Dmitri Tarasenko. She arrives in London fully focused on the assignment at hand, until her MI6 counterpart, Davis Ranford, the very person responsible for ending her last mission overseas after they were caught in a whirlwind affair, personally calls for her.

After a suspicious attack on a powerful Russian oligarch’s property on Billionaires’ Row in the toniest neighborhood in London, Davis needs Lyndsey to cozy up to the billionaire’s aristocratic British wife, Emily Rotenberg. Lyndsey’s job is to obtain any and all information related to Emily’s husband, Mikhail Rotenberg, and his relationship with the new Russian president, whom CIA and MI6 believe is responsible for the sudden mysterious disappearance of his predecessor, the Hard Man. Fortunately for Lyndsey, there’s little to dissuade Emily from taking in a much-needed confidante. After all, misery needs company.

But before Lyndsey can cover much ground with her newfound friend, the CIA unveils a perturbing connection between Mikhail and Russia’s geopolitical past, one that could dangerously upend the world order as we know it. As the pressure to turn Emily becomes higher than ever, Lyndsey must walk a fine and ever-changing line to keep the oligarch’s fortune from falling into Russian hands and plunging the world into a new, disastrous geopolitical reality.

Red London is a nuanced, race-against-the-clock story that at times feels eerily set against today’s headlines, a testament to author Alma Katsu’s thirty-plus career in national security. It’s a rare spy novel written by an insider that feels as prescient as it is page-turning and utterly unforgettable.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #697

August 29, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

Love in Bloom by Jenny Proctor, an Amazon Kindle freebie.

Hating Cameron Hunter shouldn’t be this easy.

I’m basically a golden retriever puppy. I love everyone and want everyone to love me.

But Cameron is the singular exception to my “love everyone” rule, and the hatred goes both ways.

First of all, he’s one of THOSE guys. The kind that looks like he belongs on the cover of Yacht Club Weekly. Second of all, he’s way too good at his job. The man is a walking Wikipedia. His walking tours of historic downtown Charleston stay booked weeks in advance.

Did I mention I run tours along the same route?

When we’re both up for a magazine feature that could kick our respective careers to the next level, our rivalry turns into a heated competition.

Then we unexpectedly kiss (it’s a looooong story), and things get really complicated. Now my blood is boiling over Cameron for an entirely different reason.

Only one of us can win. Can I trust a man who used to be my enemy, or is everything—even our relationship—just a part of his plan to take me down?

A Beginner’s Guide to Being Human by Matt Forrest Esenwine, illustrated by Andre Ceolin, for review in October from Media Masters Publicity.

Being a human is a lot of work! Thankfully, humans experience many of the same feelings, situations, and challenges, so we don’t have to figure it all out on our own–we can help each other navigate the ups and downs. Full of humor and heart, this engaging guide inspires kids to be humans who are kind, empathetic, and thoughtful. No matter what our day brings, we can choose to practice self-control, compassion, and forgiveness. Don’t worry, young human, it’s okay to make some mistakes along the way–just remember that it’s love that keeps us all afloat at the end of the day.

My Dog, Hen by David Mackintosh for review in October from Media Masters Publicity.

“Why should we get a brand-new dog when Hen is as good as new to us?” asks the young boy at the center of this story. The adorable mixed-breed pup is brought home in a cardboard box, given toys, and some food–and then proceeds to enthusiastically eat up his loving home. When nothing can be done (and all the pocket money has been spent on new toys) the boy’s wise and thrifty grandmother finds a helpful solution. Readers of all ages will laugh at Hen’s boundless energy and parents especially will identify with the challenges of training a headstrong dog. Any family that has ever adopted a rescue pet will appreciate this story’s gentle lesson about finding value in our less-than-perfect belongings and loved ones.

I Am Coco: The Life of Coco Chanel by Isabel Pin for review in September from Media Masters Publicity.

Young Gabrielle came from a poor family, was orphaned at age 12, and learned to sew in a convent school. She worked as a seamstress and sang in cabarets, where she was given the nickname Coco.

This story—and the remarkable career that followed—is exuberantly told in Isabel Pin’s simple yet detailed illustrations. Young readers will learn about Coco’s beginnings as a hat designer, and how her earliest creations presaged the concept of sportswear.

They’ll learn about her iconic designs— the little black dress, the impeccable suit, the squared-off perfume bottle, and the acclaimed logo. And they will learn how a freethinking young artist who freed women from the corsets and extravagant ornamentations of the early 20th century grew into a ferociously ambitious designer who staged her own comeback at the age of 70.

Whether they are interested in the history of fashion, or looking for encouragement to pursue their own dreams, young readers will find this entertaining biography both fascinating and inspiring.

Hair: From Moptops to Mohicans, Afros, and Cornrows by Katja Spitzer for review in September from Media Masters Publicity.

During the Rococo period, wealthy women tucked shells, necklaces, fruit, and flowers into their hair, which was styled into towers that reached as high as three feet over their heads.

In 1970s London, young, disfranchised “punks” made themselves feel powerful by drawing on the 2,000-year-old Native American practice of shaving their heads except for a narrow strip from forehead to neck. These are just a couple of many fascinating moments of hair history whimsically illustrated in this book.

Katja Spitzer’s colorful illustrations are presented in double-page spreads that offer an engaging description of a hair trend or style and its cultural and historic significance. Readers will learn why hair braiders in West Africa can spend an entire day working on one client; and how Black Americans signaled their opposition to racist laws and practices by not styling their naturally frizzy hair.

Filled with important history and giggle-inducing facts, this wide-ranging book crosses cultures and oceans to offer an important lesson about self- expression that will encourage readers of all ages to let down their hair, and to let others do the same.

The Power of Architecture by Annette Roeder, illustrated by Pamela Baron for review in September from Media Masters Publicity.

From private residences to affordable housing, stadiums to factories, museums to libraries—this book takes young readers across continents to learn how architecture is improving the world one building at a time.

Although popular culture and classrooms are filled with references to classic and iconic buildings such as the Parthenon, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the Great Pyramids, there are equally valuable lessons to be learned from modern architecture, and especially from buildings situated in the Global South and among underrepresented populations.

This beautifully illustrated book investigates how contemporary architects from a variety of cultures are addressing issues of climate change, income inequality, and limited resources by designing buildings that are as innovative as they are beautiful. Each building is presented in a double-page spread featuring Pamela Baron’s exquisitely detailed illustrations that highlight the design, natural surroundings, and the people who live, work, or play there.

Annette Roeder’s pitch-perfect text outlines the structure’s unique contribution to the field of architecture, and invites readers to wonder aloud why the building works and to find out more about it. A perfect stepping stone for designers in the making, this book also teaches kids how architecture can help the people it shelters and the planet on which it is built.

What did you receive?

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Mailbox Monday #696

August 22, 2022 by

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.

Velvet, 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:

Falling for Your Fake Fiancé by Emma St. Clair, a Kindle freebie.

What happens when the man I love to hate becomes the man I must pretend to love?

I can’t seem to escape Thayden Walker and his infuriating charm.

Even his mother and his Great Dane seem bent on playing matchmaker. But I’m totally immune.

Until I’m presented with an offer that puts my ability to withstand him to the test. If I marry Thayden, all my student debt goes poof, and he’ll take over the family firm.

There’s so much more at stake than money or a job, especially when I start to see the man beneath the mask.

Playing house with Thayden is the most dangerous game of all.

And we’re both set up to lose more than we could ever win. Unless we’ve been on the same side all along …

The Prince I Love to Hate by Iris Morland, Kindle freebie.

This prince?
He’s anything but charming.

I’ve never been the girl who’s dreamt of a prince rescuing me from a fire-breathing dragon before whisking me away to his castle.

So when I fly all the way to Ireland to find my long-lost dad, I have no intention of playing the damsel in distress to some dude.

But the night I encounter—and accidentally wallop upside the head—Prince Olivier of Salasia, my plans are completely upended.

This prince is the opposite of charming, though. After thirty seconds in his presence, I want to feed him to a dragon.

But fate is a fickle b*tch. Before I know it, I agree to team up with Olivier in the search for my dad.

As I travel across Europe with this actual honest-to-god prince, I wonder, what’s the worst that could happen?

It’s not like I’ll be stupid enough to fall in love with Prince Charming.

What did you receive?

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