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Mailbox Monday #705

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?

Mailbox Monday #658

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.

This is what we received:

The Great World of Days: A Collection of Poetry Published in Bourgeon 2007-2021 edited by Gregory Luce, Anne Becker, and Jeffrey Banks from Day Eight, tentatively scheduled to publish in March 2022.

This is a compilation of poems from Bourgeon Online, and one of my poems is included.

Mikko Hakon Valitut Runot by Aino Kukkonen (toim.), which I received from a Finnish relative.

It is a collection of Mikko Hakko’s poems. He is a distant relative in my family tree. I will need to find a translator, as all the poems are in Finnish. But Mikko is partially referenced in my poem, Family History, which was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart.

Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner for review. You may remember my earlier cover reveal post.

Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager’s unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:

Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances–most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.

Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she’s been working to support the family following her husband’s breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.

Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she’s working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.

As they interact with various literary figures of the time–Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others–these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

What did you receive?