Library Book Picks

Each Kindness, a picture book length poem by Jacqueline Woodson with illustrations by E.B. Lewis, is a rare treat. A meditation on the importance of kindness, it accumulates power through the eventual realization of its narrator, Chloe, that she has not been kind. Woodson, a deeply empathetic writer, trusts her young audience and never provides easy answers or a saccharine resolution to her tale. A new girl, Maya, moves to town and attempts to make friends with Chloe. Chloe and the other children reject her; eventually Chloe’s family moves away again, and Chloe is left to wrestle with the uneasiness her choices have produced. E.B. Lewis’ illustrations are a graceful companion to Woodson’s text, beautifully evoking both the loneliness of childhood and the splendor of the natural world.

Each Kindness was originally published in 2012 and was awarded both a Coretta Scott King Honor and the Jane Addams Peace Award. Its reminder to young readers about the power of our daily actions is one that feels especially crucial at this moment when, as Woodson writes, “Every little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”


 

Many people have given advice on how to write poetry - the books penned on this topic could fill several shelves (and in our library, they do). But few have formed an ethos as succinct and beautiful as the one Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido have given us with How to Write a Poem.

Their story does not outline various poetic forms or supply you with detailed writing prompts. It merely suggests you ask a question, and listen (to the world and to yourself) for the answers. It is a poem, in and of itself. A blank page need not be daunting, they say - let the words rain down upon you, then “write them into your paper boat and row, row, row across the white expanse.” A poem is plunging “into the silent sea of your imagination” and discovering your voice. A poem is unearthing the word that’s “at the tip of your heart where the light shines through.” A poem is showing us what you’ve found.

How to Write a Poem is a celebration of imagination on every page, aided by illustrator Melissa Sweet’s vivid collages. Sweet has forged a whole world, brimming with color and light, out of mere scraps of paper, showing us that art and beauty can spring from anywhere, no matter how humble the origins. This is especially fitting, as Alexander created this book to remind readers young and old that poetry does not need to be feared. He writes in his author’s note, “For so long, we’ve been taught that poetry is staid, complicated, and unfamiliar, and now many of us believe it. How did this happen?... When did poetry become something intimidating and inaccessible? We have forgotten its power, forgotten that many of the essential joys of poetry are the first ones we experienced as kids discovering the rhythm of language.” Poetry is power, but it does not belong exclusively to the elite, the old, the rich, or the few. Poetry belongs to all of us.

Now go write a poem!

When does a poem begin? How much of the writing and revising process happens away from a desk, from a keyboard, from a paper and pen? If I decide that my dreams are not a part of my poetry-writing practice, what does that do to the poems I write? The dreams I dream? If I decide that time spent in nature is a part of my poetry-writing practice, how does that change my poems, the natural world, and the relationship between?

In Edges & Fray: On Language, Presence, and Invisible Architectures, Danielle Vogel reshapes traditional Western notions of poetry-reading and poetry-writing, and the architecture of the poetry collection. Instead of reading poems in a carefully-choreographed succession, Vogel builds her collection as “a series of filaments.” She tells us, “I cast a thought, leave it to begin another fray, and then return,” in the manner of a spider weaving her web, or a bird constructing a nest. In a frontal note to the reader, we are urged to explore the collection in any order that, for us, “holds.” We are invited to wander, to sound out our own, individual paths, as we would move through any wild landscape. The page, like a meadow, a forest, is a collaborative, relational, space. 

Vogel’s somatic, textual, and sculptural work asks me to rethink the boundaries between the individual and the collective, foreground and background, matter and negative space. The white space wound through the poems slows my reading, reframes the connection between text and the field it vibrates inside, and changes how I pay attention when reading, and to what. In the first section of the book, lyrical fragments are woven between didactic poems, ars poetica, shaped poetry, and photographic images of a collection of nests in extreme close-up. These images, depicting nests held by a variety of museums, never depict the structure as a whole. Instead, the extreme close-up works to highlight the found materials woven into these structures, including scraps of newspaper, human hair, twine, scraps of cloth, feathers, grasses, sticks, and mud. Avian home-making is revealed as a kind of writing, how Vogel defines the process: 

the retrieval
of material       - - -       to produce a desired   ,    shape
                                  as open   :    archiving

In her sixth collection of poetry, Ada Limón explores autobiographical and reverent observations about the interplay between humanity and the rest of the natural world through four chapters named for the seasons. She begins in “Spring” with “Give Me This,” in which the poet watches a groundhog savor tomatoes from her garden. She asks, “Why am I not allowed / delight?” Her musings on nature and people’s place in it are imbued with the self-aware, brave naïveté of a hand reaching through a gate to a skittish horse. 

Though (or because) the earth is heavy with grief and indifference and though her mother’s horses “would eat the apples / with as much pleasure from / any flattened palm” (“Intimacy”), Limón cannot help but identify with and take solace in the plants and animals around her. This book constantly reckons with her desire to name, claim, and anthropomorphize. Watching two crows clinging to a tree branch, she narrates, “They say, Stop, and I still want / to make them into something they are not” (“Privacy”). 

She writes of imagining faces in flowers in “In the Shadow”: “Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? / How many flowers have I yanked to puppet / as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?” This poetic puppeteering of nature is felt to be “a lazy kind of love” inadequate at subduing human loneliness. By “Winter,” in the final lines of the final poem, she laments, “enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high / water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, / I am asking you to touch me” (“The End of Poetry”). 

This is a book to read outdoors or under sunlight coming through the Poetry Foundation’s windows. Its title poem, “The Hurting Kind,” is a breathtaking tribute to Limón’s grandparents that illuminates the poignant beauty that can come from refusing to name or reimagine. “Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort / of horse he had growing up. He said // Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it / rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.”

Robin Ekiss’s melancholy, evocative collection The Mansion of Happiness takes readers into a world of Victorian-era toys, illusions, and games. Like the novelist Elena Ferrante, Ekiss appears fascinated by dolls as inherently charged, frequently maternal objects. Within the poems in this collection, dolls are doppelgangers and surrogates, repositories for grief and longing. Dolls are also mechanical, and Ekiss employs the imagery of mechanization to stunning effect, as in these lines from “Conversation with Doll”:

Don’t feel bad: grief is also mechanical,
winding around everything we know.

I’m like that too—speaking only to myself
in the company of others. As they say:

wear the same dress every day,
rehearse your own forgiveness.

These are poems to read slowly, savoring their musicality and the intricate nesting of their images, an effect not unlike the layering of Matryoshka dolls. The Mansion of Happiness was Ekiss’s debut collection, published in 2009. Hopefully, readers won’t have to wait too many more years before gaining access to a second collection.

Goodnight Moon is one of the most popular children’s books of all time - since its publication in 1947, millions of people have read the classic tale of a little bunny saying goodnight to the objects and creatures in his great green room. But most people know little to nothing about the wild, spectacular life of that great green room’s creator, Margaret Wise Brown. Author Mac Barnett is here to change that.

In just 42 pages, one for each year of Brown’s life, Barnett paints a vivid picture of the radical woman who revolutionized children’s literature. This is not a detailed biography - the text and accompanying illustrations are both beautiful and profound in their simplicity, much like Brown’s own writing. He tells us only what is most essential, because, as he writes, “You can’t fit somebody’s life into 42 pages, so I am just going to tell you some important things.” Among those important things:

• She was a queer woman who had relationships with both men and women (hence the selection of this book for LGBTQ+ Pride Month)

• As a child, she had thirty-six pet rabbits - when they died, she skinned them and wore their pelts

• She swam naked in ice-cold water

• A conservative librarian banned her books from New York Public Library for many years (Brown herself was banned from even entering the library)

• Her favorite dog was named Crispin’s Crispian

Barnett acknowledges that many people think some of these things are not appropriate for children to read. But he includes them anyway, because they are true, and from what we know about her, this is exactly what Margaret Wise Brown would have wanted. She didn’t mind that many people (mostly grown-ups) thought her books were strange, and she kept writing because she thought children deserved to have quality books about things they were interested in, just like adults. She knew children liked stories about things they knew and saw every day, things like tables and telephones and kittens and balloons, things that grown-ups might call “ordinary” or “boring.” She knew all this because she actually talked to children, and used their opinions, thoughts, and feelings to form her stories. She wrote for children, in a way that no author had done before.

Quite possibly the most important thing about Margaret Wise Brown was her commitment to truth, honesty, and artistry in her writing. Barnett writes, “Lives are strange. And there are people who do not like strange stories, especially in books for children. But sometimes you find a book that feels as strange as life does. These books feel true. These books feel important. Margaret Wise Brown wrote books like this, and she wrote them for children, because she believed children deserve important books.”

Wishing all readers a happy Pride, full of strange and wonderful books!

Springtime has always been a season defined by both beauty and horror for me. In Chicago, the transition lurches between summer and winter temperatures; violent storms fell older tress, set off sirens, and cut the power; strange green shoots break through the ground and explode into soft, fantastic blooms. For May, I wanted to highlight a collection that holds both beauty and horror, and so teaches me how to do the same.

Beth Bachmann’s Temper begins with the murder of the speaker’s sister. As the poems unfurl, we learn that the sister was killed in a train yard, sometime after midnight, while waiting for her father to give her a ride home from the station. We learn that the father is the only suspect. The murder is never solved. This collection navigates media’s fascination with beautiful, young, dead girls, and society’s disinclination to actually engage issues of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence; femicide; human trafficking; or the alarming number of women and girls disappeared each year.

These poems are haunting and haunted. The nature of trauma is to return, to circle the wound: the body of the sister that appears over and over throughout the poems. In describing her body, Bachmann both writes into and through the glamorization of violence against women, by making the reader look, again and again, at the sister, and the world, including the men, surrounding her body. We, the reader, are implicated in that looking.

How to speak after unspeakable violence, about unspeakable violence, when the language and images you have inherited glamorize and sexualize violence, and the violated body? How could a sister speak of anything else?

Bachmann is telling one of the oldest stories in the world, and she does so in a way that not only resists dominant narratives surrounding trauma and violence. She forges a new language, a new story. The poems changed and continue to change me, as the speaker predicts in “After the Telling” describes: “You’ve put your hand// through my body and are caught/ in the rack of vines// I’ve descended into.”

I first encountered Heather Christle’s The Crying Book during a period when I found myself crying a lot in public, at less than ideal times, for reasons that were not easily explained. A colleague, both wise and kind, lent me her copy of The Crying Book. With its ornate cover of celestial tears, The Crying Book announces to the reader that is not going to be an apology for the inappropriateness of tears; rather, it locates episodes of crying and ideas about crying in art, science, and the author’s life as a way of understanding what happens when we cry. Christle employs a poet’s logic to weave together anecdotes of physical and emotional extremis, resulting in a work that is unique, startling, and insightful. Christle writes: “Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near, or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.” Those who have felt their tears to be a burden or a mystery will find solace in the brilliance of this elegant text.

I’ve never considered compound words to be a particularly beautiful thing. Helpful? Sure. A fun puzzle for early readers to piece together? Absolutely. But when I think of rich, gorgeous language, the compound word does not come to mind. And that is what is so special about this book – like all great poets, Erlichman shows us that if we look closely and listen carefully, there is a certain type of magic to be found in everyday things.

Be/Hold is filled to the brim with love – for friends, for ourselves, and for language. Erlichman tickles our hearts with her playful use of compound words both real and imaginary, like honeysong, bookworm, nightjar, slowpoke, yesbody, sweetpea, braincloud, jellyfish, seesaw, and the title of the book itself: behold. She writes in her afterword (also a compound word! They’re everywhere!), “To behold is to simultaneously be and hold. It is stillness and activity. It is presence and permission. Let go and carry. Life can be challenging. Learning to be/hold can keep us grounded and open.” A life lesson perfectly contained in six letters. And it doesn’t stop there. Erlichman also presents us with the idea that not only is friendship a compound word, but compound words themselves are friendships, as they “illuminate how much more interesting and vibrant life is when we unite.” They are poems in miniature, tiny odes to “the creativity it takes to merge many truths.”

This book, like many in our children’s collection, is intended for young people but can be meaningful for readers of any and all ages. Erlichman does not shy away from the fact that being alive is not a simple task. It is full of complications and challenges, many of which can feel insurmountable. But with its sparse, precise text and imaginative, abstract illustrations, this brilliant little book shows us how much more wonderful life can be when we choose love, even when we are at our lowest. When we learn to grow together, rather than drift apart.

“It’s not easy to be brave. The waves are high, the sea is dark. But come, become with me.”

“Poetry is the language of intensity,” the poet C.D. Wright once wrote. “Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.” When I took a workshop with C.D. Wright in college I was frightened by her intensity. It was only years later, after her tragic and untimely death, that I discovered that I loved her work, and understood intensity as part of her poetics. It is the ruling logic of my favorite Wright book, her 1982 collection “Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues”-- now out of print and, luckily, available to read at our library. The collection is her third, and her first full-length work not published on Lost Roads, the press famously founded by Frank Stanford and helmed by Wright after his death. Though not as explicitly documentary in nature as some of her later works, the poetry of “Translations” is that of everyday utterances. These poems are sure-handed spells, stark and at times sardonic, as in the poem, “Obedience of the Corpse”: “She hopes the mother’ milk is good a while longer,/ The woman up the road is still nursing – but she remembers the neighbor/ And the dead woman never got along.” The perceptive knife with which she collages the world together is of unparalleled sharpness. Her poem “Falling Beasts” is, I think, one of the best and most instructive examples of the associative leap in contemporary poetry: “Girls marry young/ in towns in the mountains./ They’re sent to the garden/ For beets. They come to the table/ With their hair gleaming,/ Their breath missing./ In my book love is darker/ than cola. It can burn/ A hole clean through you.” The book brings no airs, down to its lack of notes, not a hint of sentimentality, at the back matter– only a curt biographical statement wherein she claims merely to have “earned a living in Arkansas, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco as a teacher of writing, as a publisher, and at various less gratifying employment.” If you are a writer, I urge you to let it teach you her language– the language of intensity– whether you are lucky enough to stumble upon a copy, or would like to come on down to the library, and read it amidst our collection.

I re-read Khadijah Queen’s collection, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, at least once a year. A series of kinetic prose poems that flow, without punctuation, from one encounter with a famous man to the next, and sound out the complex and muscular webs of power shaping each encounter along gender, race, class, age, and the double-edged gift of femme beauty. As the title promises, each poem presents one famous man that the speaker (or her ancestors) met (or nearly-met), and a description of what the speaker, in some poems aged 8 and in others aged 40, was wearing. Through these memories, which range from sweet to pathetic to disappointing to violent, Queen’s girlhood and young adulthood are rendered in such specific and hooking detail that she beats, alive, on each page as she learns how to move through a world where her beauty attracts attention, both wanted and unwanted. Where men tell her, again and again, what she already knows: the meaning of her own name. By the end, I move beyond my impulse to protect her. I want to listen to what she has to say.

I’ve been haunted by Atsuro Riley’s poem Moth since encountering it in the pages of Poetry in 2015. “Came the day I came here young / I mothed / my self. I cleaved apart.” The poem is marked by turnings where the speaker remakes a self in the wake of trauma, even as it is the hidden self that forms the basis for the poem’s devastating refrain: “My born name keeps but I don’t say.” Something of this cleaving informs all the poems in Heard-Hoard. Riley splits words apart and arranges them in counterpoint to create a singular music, an effect that reminded me of cracking open a geode to reveal its secret inner glittering. Readers of these poems will enter a fully formed world, with its own characters, myths, chorus, and repetitions. Sonically and emotionally complex, Heard-Hoard is a collection to treasure and return to.