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Mailbox Monday #735

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 from Gaithersburg Book Festival:

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini, one of the featured poets.

Hajar Hussaini’s poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one’s language. The traces she finds—the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world’s nations convening to reject the full stop—retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.

Red London by Alma Katsu, one of the featured presenters.

After her role in taking down a well-placed mole inside the CIA, Agent Lyndsey Duncan arrives in London fully focused on her newest Russian asset, deadly war criminal Dmitri Tarasenko. That is until her MI6 counterpart, Davis Ranford, personally calls for her help.

Following a suspicious attack on Russian oligarch Mikhail Rotenberg’s property in a tony part of London, Davis needs Lyndsey to cozy up to the billionaire’s aristocratic British wife, Emily Rotenberg. Fortunately for Lyndsey, there’s little to dissuade Emily from taking in a much-needed confidante. Even being one of the richest women in the world is no guarantee of happiness. But before Lyndsey can cover much ground with her newfound friend, the CIA unveils a perturbing connection between Mikhail and Russia’s geoplitical past, one that could upend the world order and jeopardize Lyndsey’s longtime allegiance to the Agency.

Red London is a sharp and nuanced race-against-the-clock story ripped from today’s headlines, a testament to author Alma Katsu’s thirty-five-year 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.

Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall, who were both featured poets.

Breaking the Blank is a spirited dialogue between poets—and a meditation on love, parenting, gentrification, money, and the literary life. In accessible free verse, haiku, sonnets, and other forms, Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall honor the African American experience, make sacred the ordinary, and remind the reader of the marvelous in the everyday.

Breaking the Blank is a contemporary treasure.” —Sistah Joy, Poet Laureate of Prince George’s County, Maryland

“Crisp, riveting, and often tender meditations on love, parenting, and—to paraphrase the title of a National Public Radio program—This African American Life.” —Reuben Jackson, author of fingering the keys and Scattered Clouds: New & Selected Poems

Rebecca Bishophall and Dwayne Lawson-Brown met each other as juniors in high school in the late 1990’s and have been literary colleagues, and friends, ever since. Rebecca Bishophall has featured at Spit Dat, Afrocentric Book Expo, and others, and works in member services for a non-profit organization. She graduated from Trinity University in 2006 with a major in Communications. Dwayne Lawson-Brown, aka the Crochet Kingpin, is co-host of Spit Dat, the longest running open mic in Washington, D.C. Their poems were recently published in 2022 Pride Poems, they co-authored the Helen Hayes nominated play, From Gumbo to Mumbo, and they are an editor of the literary magazine Bourgeon.

Alchemy of Yeast and Tears by Patricia Davis-Muffett, one of the featured poets.

In her captivating collection, Alchemy of Yeast and Tears, Patricia Davis-Muffett lays bare the world of motherhood and daughterhood with a voice from the crossroads of these states. From what is passed “from hand to hand” across generations to choices that have no easy options, these poems offer us the compassionate and fiery voice of experience. These poems, like the leatherback turtle featured in “Never enough,” “plant hope” in the shifting sands of responsibility, love, celebration, and especially grief, in its multitude of guises. —Merie Kirby, Author of The Thumbelina Poemsand The Dog Runs OnPatricia Davis-Muffett’s Alchemy of Yeast and Tears is a self-aware collection that vacillates from yearning to wildness. These poems marvel through close attention. We are instructed about the tyranny of time. Loss interweaves with what it means to mother. There is an underlying theme questioning how we can hold our grief. From “Night Terrors”: “The person you were will die. / I hope the new one is strong, / fierce enough to survive.” How do we balance this desire to mend without letting slip the sacred remembrances of our past? The poet suggests what we can try to do. Because trying matters. —Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief, ONE ART: a journal of poetry

Patricia Davis-Muffett dedicates this tenderly touching chapbook to a mother who taught her anything was possible. In “What to do with your grief III,” she proclaims: “I do what my mother taught me./Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt./I bring this to you./….This piece of my day./I am doing what I know.” What the poet knows is that yeast and tears are inherent in all forms of mother/child relationships. Whether focused on a dying mother, the challenges presented by children, or the maternal impulses of leatherbacks, jellyfish, elephants, and orcas, Davis-Muffett’s poems are exquisitely rendered in language that touches the heart as it delights the mind. This chapbook is a gift to those who love authentic poetry. —Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., Poetry Editor, Kosmos Quarterly: Journal for Global Transformation

This Far by Kathleen O’Toole, who was a moderator of a poetry panel.

This collection offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poet’s creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs  ̶  grief and the desire to honor those “saints” who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console as they do. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, “this far,” and gestures to what lies beyond.

You Cannot Save Here by Tonee Moll, who was a featured poet.

Winner of the 2022 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, You Cannot Save Here is a collection of poems about how we live when each day feels like the world is ending. The poems ask what we do with the small moments that matter when so much around us-climate disaster, gun violence, pandemics, wars-makes these days feel apocalyptic. The book is a bit speculative and a bit confessional. It’s queer, punk, and woven tightly with cultural allusion-from visual art to video games, pop culture to counterculture.

Lo by Melissa Crowe, a featured poet.

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

In Kind by Maggie Queeney, a featured poet.

“This poet knows that to transform pain and anguish into words is to call on the ancient goddesses—earth women who spun new sources of nourishment, showing how to do the work that centuries of women poets, seers, makers, mothers, and wanderers would take up, take in, and become. How many ways can a poet invent to survive? Maggie Queeney shows us the old ways are infinite, umbilically connected to our now-howling, our new bodies beautiful amid the ageless brutality. No one can destroy this poet’s lived knowledge, though she speaks of destruction, because she also speaks of this regenerative line of women’s lived histories. In Kind is a book that mothers will relive, daughters will recognize, and the patriarchy will, if there is any justice of the kind Queeney imagines, shake in its boots. Shake then crumble, while Arachne spins triumphant.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

Elegies for an Empire by Le Hinton, a featured poet.

Emily Dickinson is known for saying: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Le Hinton’s poetry is that poetry—what happens when words erupt from the spirit to physically, emotionally, impact us—edify us. His work in Elegies for an Empire is concussive with craft, timeliness, reverence for Black life, family—and for every being timestamped to our fleeting days. The picture of living is never removed from dénouement, although we are often loathe to face its inevitable frame. Hinton faces it with authenticity and grace. Moreover, a depth of concern over the state of our fragile planet is clearly evident in the layers of his poems. In that light, this collection carries the solemnity of prayer. Therein lies its hymnal-like  power, in any meaningful literary service. ~ Truth Thomas, Poet, Editor, Founder of Cherry Castle Publishing

String by Matthew Thorburn, a featured poet.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn’s String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice―in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation―String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Bookish People by Susan Coll, a featured presenter. Sadly I missed her signing due to volunteer obligations.

Independent bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein is burned out on books. Mourning the death of her husband, the loss of her favorite manager, her only child’s lack of aspiration, and the grim state of the world, she fantasizes about going into hiding in the secret back room of her store.

Meanwhile, renowned poet Raymond Chaucer has published a new collection, and rumors that he’s to blame for his wife’s suicide have led to national cancellations of his publicity tour. He intends to set the record straight—with an ultra-fine-point Sharpie—but only one shop still plans to host him: Sophie’s.

Fearful of potential repercussions from angry customers, Sophie asks Clemi—bookstore events coordinator, aspiring novelist, and daughter of a famed literary agent—to cancel Raymond’s appearance. But Clemi suspects Raymond might be her biological father, and she can’t say no to the chance of finding out for sure.

This big-hearted screwball comedy features an intergenerational cast of oblivious authors and over-qualified booksellers—as well as a Russian tortoise named Kurt Vonnegut Jr.—and captures the endearing quirks of some of the best kinds of people: the ones who love good books.

The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson, who was a presenter. Sadly I missed her signing due to volunteer obligations.

When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend’s struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn’t easy. Bell River’s literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So, when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat.

And in Maggie’s world, book rules are made to be broken.

To help save the store, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything.

Maggie will have to decide what’s more important: the books that formed a small town’s history, or the stories poised to change it all.

What did you receive?

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 88 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe, 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize winner to be published in May 2023, is an expression of grief, longing, and joy all at once as the young girl growing up within these poems and pages finds that the world is all at once beautiful and ugly. This song echoes throughout the collection from the opening poem, “The Self Says, I Am,” readers will see the whimsical imagination of a young girl surrounded by a rural landscape, but within that landscape blisters and sunburn can form, causing a young girl to learn to be “nimble” and “learned.”

The narrator of “Thrownness” says, “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t//be shaken loose.” Taking the lighters side of that observation it is clear Crowe’s roots in Maine are still with her in the imagery she chooses, but on the flip side of that, the darkest parts of our childhood lives leave indelible scars. “Remember how every branch/on that same street seemed blessed with fat red berries/your mother said would make you sick and how — always/hungry, cupboards bare — you would not stop tasting them/anyway.” (pg. 5-6)

In many of these early poems, a young girl is yearning and she cannot get enough, even when what she receives is not necessarily the best thing for her. She is loved, but there are parts of her story that include attention, not necessarily love. Part 3 of this collection houses a variety of poem structures that tell a traumatic tale, and each mirrors the emotional state of the narrator. (be advised these can be triggering) “Thank god I thought, burning,/somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me.//Thank god I thought, burning, knowing/for the first time maybe what he’d//done to me, that what he’d done to me was/wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told.//” (“When She Speaks of the Fire,” pg. 30) This is where the reader weeps for this girl. You cannot help but weep. It is because the narrator is speaking directly to the reader, even if it’s framed as spoken to someone else. You are drawn in, you are “watching through a crack as thick as a man’s/fingers what unfolds beyond your power/to undo.”

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe is not focused just on the trauma and telling of it; it is the emotional journey of telling it and learning how to navigate the debris and the disappointment with loved ones who were supposed to protect you and didn’t/couldn’t and didn’t want to speak aloud about it even when it is clearly needed for healing. Another not-to-be-missed collection; pre-order it now.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Melissa Crowe is a poet, editor, and teacher. She was born in Presque Isle, Maine, but she currently lives with her family by the sea in Wilmington, North Carolina. Crowe is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW. Her first full-length collection, Dear Terror, Dear Splendor was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2019, and her second book, Lo, won the Iowa Poetry Prize and is due out from the University of Iowa Press in May 2023.

Mailbox Monday #717

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:

Hunters Point by Peter Kageyama for review in January from literary publicist Stephanie Barko.

SAN FRANCISCO, 1958. World War 2 veteran, Katsuhiro, “Kats” Takemoto is a Nisei, second generation Japanese American and the private detective for those who don’t get noticed by the police or get the attention of traditional private eyes. The city is exploding with population growth and creative expression as the Beat poets and artists fill coffee shops and galleries. When a young Beat poet enlists Kats to keep his family from being pushed out of the Bayview Heights neighborhood by a shady developer, Kats learns that the conspiracy to take over the land around Hunters Point runs deep into Cold War fears and politics. Kats takes on the US government, the Navy, unscrupulous businessmen and the west coast mafia as he and his friends race to find the truth.

Award winning author Peter Kageyama’s debut novel brings the post-war San Francisco scene to life with historic characters including Jimmy Stewart, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Alfred Hitchcock and Shig Murao, along with the dynamics of racial identity for Japanese Americans finding their footing again in America following the war and internment.

Lo by Melissa Crowe, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize for review.

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

In Kind by Maggie Queeney for review.

Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.

Sex Work & Other Sins by Julianne King for review.

Unapologetic and honest, King once again forces forbidden topics to the forefront as she grapples with defining morality in the light of survival. Family, poverty, desperation, and humanity are laid bare in this unflinching journey. King returns with writing that is brutal and evocative in its honesty as she drives toward blistering indictments of herself, her family, and society as a whole. Sex Work and Other Sins holds up a mirror to the reader and asks: What would you have done?

Women & Other Hostages by Laura McCullough, purchased.

Poetry, “If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough’s poem, ‘Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]’ have grown ‘tired & suspicious of poetry’ WOMEN AND OTHER HOSTAGES will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where ‘What is stripped from you’ becomes a gift because ‘what’s left behind is all your own.’ Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, ‘memory in flesh,’ and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.”–Suzanne Frischkorn

What Follows by H.R. Webster, purchased.

“What a lively, funny, lacerating book of poems from this “gutsy little zombie,” H.R. Webster, who knows the world through direct, often brutal, experience, and ravishingly, through the senses. Here is a poet who knows “(t)he refrigerator warm with the animal smell / of butter,” “the shy hysteria / of doves,” “(h)unters storming through the gum trees like house cats / cut from their bells,” and “the dick velvet of the apricot under a thumb,” and also the reality of factory work, “those efficient little gestures, the left hand ready for what the right hand wrought,” that “don’t belong in a poem,” but here they are. Here it all is, trauma and the genius of survival via the genius of imagination married to the genius of truth-telling. There is so much muchness in What Follows–I must follow it.”–Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“Whether trafficking in the dark, alluring ambages of personal and cultural sexual powerplay, confronting the brutal indifferences of the body (and of what Roethke called “great nature”) to human volition, or boldly protesting all manner of crimes against the humanimal,  the arresting poems in H.R. Webster’s debut collection dare the reader to turn away from their gorgeously rendered, fearless and feral forays into one writer’s intense, perspicacious sensibility. “All else dims before agony,” Webster writes, and What Follows is part hagiography, part reliquary of a cosmos of beauty, want, and hurt. These poems will draw you into their experiences of the world and show you “desires [you] have failed to imagine.”–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

“H.R. Webster writes: “It’s the end of the world and we can’t stop saying the word tender.” Every poem in What Follows is both a beautiful and brutally honest account of what follows the end of love. Tender “is the only language left for flesh, for helplessness,” she writes. But Webster’s stance is far from helpless; this book is a brilliant, inventive, and deeply felt exploration of loss. It’s an image-rich catalogue spiked with concise, often painful wisdom that makes me catch my breath. Horses, calves, dried snapdragons, milkvetch, snakes with their “delicate purses of venom,” bees pouring from a breast, wolf spiders, a bus “kneeling like a girl,” and flowers “petaling themselves monstrous” weave an escape plan in the heartscape of longing, translating precisely what it means to inhabit a female body. Densely sonic, often in sonnet form, these poems are so sharp, smart, and vulnerable that I feel forgiven for every wrong I don’t even realize I’ve done. “Beauty opened a door, what tethered me back?” the poems ask, and this book provides an answer. An incredibly redeeming, courageous debut that through its incantations pulls back the curtain on our shared human suffering and offers hope for us all.”–Sarah Messer, author of Dress Made of Mice

Department of Elegy by Mary Biddinger, purchased.

Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger’s poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present.

“In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing.”–Jennifer L. Knox

“Mary Biddinger’s seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and–ultimately–hard-won expertise. The speakers’ words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of “Book” poems (“Book of Hard Passes,” “Book of the Sea,” “Book of Misdeeds,” “Book of Transgressions,” “Book of Disclosures,” “Book of Mild Regrets”). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once ‘…your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'”–Erica Bernheim

Always a Relic, Never a Reliquary by Kim Sousa, purchased.

WINNER OF THE 2020 ST. LAWRENCE BOOK AWARD

In her debut full-length poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, Brazilian American poet, editor and abolitionist Kim Sousa interrogates inheritance by reaching both backwards and forwards: backwards towards her father’s first border crossing and forwards past her own. Centered around a specific personal trauma, a later-term miscarriage, the poems also contain collective trauma: they ask what it means to live in the United States both as immigrant and citizen, addressing State terror and violence as if by megaphone at the protest line. In Sousa’s poems, the personal is political: they are anti-racist, ecocritical and proletariat. She sings diasporic resilience as both a horror and celebration. The poems are haunted but hopeful; here, there is always hope in rage and resistance.

What did you receive?