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Mailbox Monday #716

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:

Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex from Audible.

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

Grip by Yvette Neisser, which I purchased at her reading at DiVerse Gaithersburg.

Praise:
“From the horrors of the Holocaust to the grace of plié, from the pyramids of Egypt to her father’s passing, Yvette Neisser Moreno’s noble voice in Grip explores the ‘arc out of thinking’ between a dawn that ‘trembles with faint prayers’ and death like a ‘fluidity of grain.’ Neisser Moreno’s yearning for comprehension and her pristine sensitivity ‘grip’ the reader from the start. In her delicate poems she reminds us that strength rises from understanding and that poetry, at its core, is always a way to ‘untwist language from dreams.’ Enter the ‘stillness before snow,’ the compelling landscape of this extraordinary collection.”–Clifford Bernier, judge and author of The Silent Art

“’Some of us live at a slant’,” the poet Yvette Neisser Moreno writes in Grip and then proceeds to show us how, in language soothing and startling, both. The poems are ‘a slow plea/for the beating of human hearts,’ whether among the conflicts and struggles of the Middle East or within a single family or a single one of us wrestling with her grief. These are poems of great humanity. Read them for their crystalline truths and for the joy they find in our difficult hearts.”–Sarah Browning, director of Split This Rock and author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden

“Yvette Neisser Moreno’s poems shimmer in that mysterious space between rib and spine, body and sky, farewell and departure. This is where she seeks equilibrium. “–Barbara Goldberg

“With quiet precision and evocative narratives that take us from lovely Hussein smoking a sheesha after losing his sight to an inner landscape of the Great Pyramid and a passage into eternity with its endless, circling shades of deeper blue, Yvette Neisser Moreno takes us on a journey where the senses are the compass for being present in the world. This fine first book of poems takes us along the uncharted spaces between the body and the experience of the world, calling us into its winding, into the warmth and joy of its eloquent movements. The poet draws us up close and releases us into our own bodies, our own mindful breath.”–Naomi Ayala

What did you receive?

Iron into Flower by Yvette Neisser

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 72 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Iron Into Flower by Yvette Neisser is a journey into memory and identity shifts, following the passing of loved ones and divorce and even the journey of motherhood. In her opening poem, “The Arc of the Sun,” a mother takes a trip to Mexico and comes back changed, full of stories she didn’t want to share, and a new perspective, living life moment to moment. Travel can do that to us, inform our perspectives, shift our beings, and move us into a place where we are changed.

Travel weaves in and out of these poems like a teacher providing new perspectives and changing people profoundly. In “Compass Points,” the narrator stumbles “into adulthood,/veering from crevice to crevice,/scraping for my own space,/” reminding us that to traverse the world is to find oneself, carve out our own spaces, while being rooted in family and home like the rings of a tree — “the years … etched rings around my life/first with you, then without you.”

In “Nonfiction,” readers will learn how memory can be parsed out to new generations, even if the entire past is held back. A grandmother shares Holocaust through songs sung in barracks, but she also instills a mantra of “Never again” to the generations that follow. The narrator asks, “Have I borne it well?/Should I wield it/or hide behind it?” only to remind us “It’s not easy, you know,/clamping the lid/on the revolution.//”

By the final section of the collection, Iron Into Flower by Yvette Neisser, the poet has traversed through memory, history, culture, and so much more, to emerge into the flower she is today.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Yvette Neisser is the author of Grip, winner of the 2011 Gival Poetry Prize. Founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT), her translations from Spanish include South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri and Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. She also contributed to the anthology Knocking on the Door of the White House: Latino and Latina Poets of Washington, D.C.

Yvette has taught creative writing, poetry translation, and literature at numerous institutions, including the George Washington University, Catholic University, and The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD). She has lectured on translation at venues such as the Library of Congress, the Embassy of Argentina, and Georgetown University. For several years, she was a roving “poet in the schools” in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Her passion for international affairs and cultures has been a driving force in both her writing and her professional career. After studying in Egypt and Israel, her work in international development and research has taken her to Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Europe.

Mailbox Monday #709

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:

Above Ground by Clint Smith for the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith’s lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

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.

Sound Fury by Mark Levine for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Kisses at the Espresso Bar by Anita Nahal for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Accomplished by Amanda Quain, purchased from Audible.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Georgiana Darcy should have been expelled after The Incident with Wickham Foster last year—at least if you ask any of her Pemberley Academy classmates. She may have escaped expulsion because of her family name, but she didn’t escape the disappointment of her big brother Fitz, the scorn of the entire school, or, it turns out, Wickham’s influence.

But she’s back for her junior year, and she needs to prove to everyone—Fitz, Wickham, her former friends, and maybe even herself—that she’s more than just an embarrassment to the family name. How hard can it be to become the Perfect Darcy? All she has to do is:

  • Rebuild her reputation with the marching band (even if it kills her)
  • Forget about Wickham and his lies (no matter how tempting they still are), and
  • Distract Fitz Darcy—helicopter-sibling extraordinaire—by getting him to fall in love with his classmate, Lizzie Bennet (this one might be difficult…)

Sure, it’s a complicated plan, but so is being a Darcy. With the help of her fellow bandmate, Avery, matchmaking ideas lifted straight from her favorite fanfics, and a whole lot of pancakes, Georgie is going to see every one of her plans through. But when the weight of being the Perfect Darcy comes crashing down, Georgie will have to find her own way before she loses everything permanently—including the one guy who sees her for who she really is.

What did you receive?