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Mailbox Monday #735

May 22, 2023 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.

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?

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Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall

December 20, 2022 by

Source: the publisher
Paperback, 90 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall is a poetic conversation between friends and parents about parenting, their experiences in a society where Racism and toxic masculinity infect everyday life, and where they seek out the joy.

The collection’s first section is titled “Breaking the Mold,” and is a meditation on being a parent to young children and the sacrifices that entails. From “Parenting” about a parent sitting very still in vomit covered clothing as a baby sleeps to “Cash and Respect” where a son reflects on the dedication of a single working mother who raised them, Lawson-Brown and Bishophall paint a picture of childhood that is protected and unprotected at the same time, the immense strength it takes to raise children, and the full circle of respect and love when those children grow.

“Blank Space” follows this parenting section and reflects a search for fulfillment, whether that is through writing, love, friendship. It’s a filling up of space and search for contentment and solace, for love and understanding. But there is loss here too. One of the most emotional poems for me was “For Immortals That Live on Soundcloud” by Lawson Brown: “A simple ‘pardon me’ would have been nice/As you bumped your way to heaven/Showing up at the gates/Before anyone saw your invitation//” (pg. 20) It’s a meditation on a life gone too soon and how we struggle with the empty space left behind, the anger we feel at them leaving us so soon, and the sadness.

Naturally, “Fill In My Blank” follows up this section with a set of poems about crushes, texting after breakups to rekindle the past, and more. Some favorites in this section include “Three Little Words” and “Honestly” for their sensuality and tenderness. But there are so many others you could fall into.

Playground Pause by Rebecca Bishophall (pg. 54)

Cops
near
playground
turn laughs to
silence. Adults still
until the lights turn the corner.
Pain Per Due by Dwayne Lawson-Brown (pg. 55)

...
Embarrassment and prejudice
Go down easy
With blueberry compote
The French toast
Sweet as erasure
The tab
covered in the price of my past.

In the final sections, “Breaking the Cycle” and “Breaking the Rules,” our poets are here to resist societal norms and demonstrate to readers that breaking rules and cycles of the past does not spin the world out of control, but brings us closer as a people. These sections are full of power and must be read.

Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall asks readers to pause their own lives and perspectives and listen. Just listen. Similarities will emerge, and we need to learn that pain and love are universal and essential to everyone’s well-being.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poets:

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.

Check out this interview with the poets.

Filed Under: challenges, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Mailbox Monday #710

November 28, 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 for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration:

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald from Day Eight Books.

Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, the 2022 DC Poet Project winner, is the author of, I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd, a memoir-in-poems that fearlessly details the author’s intersecting experiences of repression and self-development. The intersecting worlds of hip hop, higher education, and literature combine in this book as an anthem for nerds everywhere.

“McDonald shines brightly and lights the path for those who will walk it next.” – Susan Scheid, author of After Enchantment

Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall from Day Eight Books.

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.

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams from the poet.

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir is an autobiographical story told in poetry through the eyes of a woman whose life paralleled the second wave of feminism, a movement that began in the 1960’s and focused on equal opportunities and equal pay for women.

The second wave changed the expectations of women from the homemakers of the 1950’s to career women. The author was a freshman in college in 1962 determined to enter the workforce in a professional position. After completing her graduate degree in 1969, she was rebuffed in job interviews by men who assumed she would leave her job soon after she married and had children. She accepted a job in an office where she was the only professional woman. She married in 1970, had her first child in 1976 and her second in 1984. She worked for 41 years, retiring in 2010.

Placing her story in the context of women’s marches and feminist goals, the author tells how she grew up in a world that expected women to become homemakers and how she combined her desire for a professional career with marriage and motherhood at a time when mothers with careers were just starting to be accepted in our culture.

We by Sarah Freligh from Small Harbor Publishing.

This me-too guide to We takes a deep dive into golf greens, mom & pops, cornfields, & figure salons to rescue the wreck eons of Kingship has wrought on everyone from the school shooter to Cassiopeia & the holy roller girl. Freligh’s voice is fresh & flagrant, tender as it is Olympic, the curse that works its own godspell—& this book broke my heart open.

—Jane Springer, author of Dear Blackbird and Murder Ballad

Slowly/Suddenly by Allison Blevins from Small Harbor Publishing.

“If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger,” a reasonable creed for navigating a life continually demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Allison writes the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. “Some unbecomes happen slowly.” This book provides precise detail of ascendance above survival.

Handbook for the Newly Disabled by Allison Blevins from Small Harbor Publishing.

“Allison Blevins’ lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled, is a whirlwind of stunning and startling reflections on the body, disability, memory, and motherhood. Nostalgia blends with the present, a self trying to make sense of pain. ‘What is left in my body to confess?’ she asks. Those of us who have lived chronic pain and illness will find ourselves understanding all too well. Those who haven’t will gain new insights into what a disabled life can feel like. ‘All of us will never be something we might have been. You see us smiling in our chairs, leaning on canes in commercials for pills and infusions. To love me, put your legs in ice.’ Spending time immersed in the world of this book helped me, as a disabled person with chronic pain, feel seen and less alone.”

—Alana Saltz, author of The Uncertainty of Light and editor-in-chief of Blanket Sea Press

Handbook for the Newly Disabled is a beautiful lyric memoir of disability: of the dailyness of grief, parenting, queerness, and pain in the setting of navigating illness. Allison Blevins writes gorgeously around, inside, and through illness, welcoming and challenging readers on every page, in every lyric turn.

—Krys Malcom Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child

For a very long time we have needed Allison Blevins’ lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled. The lyrics are in quintets with titles such as “Brain Fog” and “My Neurologist (Who Doesn’t Have MS) Explains Pain Is Not a Symptom of MS.” For a very long time we have been reading books by physicians instead of books by disabled poets. “This is the chapter about hope. Fuck him,” one line reads. “I’m alive in Missouri,” another line reads. Blevins’ lyric memoir expertly talks back to medical ableism and, more than that, makes self-determination into an art.

—The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective and The Amputee’s Guide to Sex

Ladies’ Abecedary by Arden Levin from Small Harbor Publishing.

An abecedary, or alphabet book, teaches letters, the primary pieces of language and of story-making. In Ladies’ Abecedary, each letter is a woman, each woman is a poem, and each poem is a narrative of female identity. These micro-biographies-in-verse present a series of anonymous characters (historical and mythological, contemporary and composite, unique and universal) in a collection that reveals “the diverse and complex nature of women’s interior and external lives.” Letter by letter, Ladies’ Abecedary “exemplifies the importance of the project to reclaim voice, agency, and equality for women,” and raises a remark about how a woman’s story is told.

What did you receive?

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