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Book Club
When someone you love dies, everything dies. Her blue dress dies. Empathy dies. Friendships die. You, having survived, die. Obit is a stunning lyrical distillation of grief, written by Victoria Chang after the death of her mother. Initially refusing to write elegies for fear of cliché, Chang heard the word "obit" and was moved by the strength of its sound, the long O and the hard T. She began writing obituaries for the many casualties of death-one long, skinny rectangle to chronicle each person, experience, object gone-and this became a new form with which to study sorrow. Chang's poetic obituaries are punctuated by formal interruptions, including a series of tankas that reflect on the emotional paradox of parenting while grappling with parental loss. In writing a book about grief, Victoria Chang has held a mirror to life-Obit reveals a stubborn search for language and for hope.
Bryn says: Chang, like most of us, is grieving personal losses that go beyond the deaths of her parents. She mourns Ambition, Friendships, and Memory in a way that is so full of life, and gives small moments the recognition they deserve. Chang doesn't look away and neither could I.
In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls' night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali's conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history's grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives.
Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine's Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book's final section, "Little Book of Woe," which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness.
At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you'll hear in return is "a lifetime of song."
Doug says: Not every book chosen for the store's poetry book club is a favorite. They are all good in their own way. But Dove's Playlist is the best I've read since its release in 2021. This poet speaks to me, and stirs my response. Perhaps her poems will resonate with you, too.
From the New York Times-bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, this novel of a deserted wife's descent into despair--and rage--is "a masterpiece" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman's experiences after being suddenly left by her husband after fifteen years of marriage. With two young children to care for, Olga finds it more and more difficult to do the things she used to: keep a spotless house, cook meals with creativity and passion, refrain from using obscenities. After running into her husband with his much-younger new lover in public, she cannot even refrain from assaulting him physically.
In a "raging, torrential voice" (The New York Times), Olga conveys her journey from denial to devastating emptiness--and when she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
"Intelligent and darkly comic." --Publishers Weekly
"Remarkable, lucid, austerely honest." --The New Yorker
The final book of poems by Tony Hoagland, "one of the most distinctive voices of our time" (Carl Dennis).
Over the course of his celebrated career, Tony Hoagland ventured fearlessly into the unlit alleys of emotion and experience. The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humor the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland's signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our ongoing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland's devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry.Doug says: Loved his work before he died, love it even more given this collection after his death. It's a safe bet that the works we choose for Poetry Book Club are must-reads for poetry lovers and aspiring poets. This one goes above and beyond. Hoagland inspires me to write the vivid real, convey with artful utterance things I resist saying in order to spare listeners, and expose my denial without excuse. The Afterword by his wife, Kathleen Lee, is a meaningful, personal and essential note.
I'm being led...I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock...
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather. Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Georgia says: It's a beautiful book of a child finding the family she needs and a good family finding a child to fill the hole in their hearts.
