THE CARRYING by Ada Limon

I have been reading a ton of poetry in the year of COVID. Discovering a new poem or poet is the one thing I look forward to every morning when my eyelids open. Who will deliver me out of this fresh hell of political insanity and pandemic angst? Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, and now Ada Limon, if only for the minutes to read a handful of poems and let the visceral experience of feeling through a new set of eyes sink in. Yes, all of it: humanity and nature and the invisible in the visible. Limon’s tenderness in verse is a cool hand on a fevered brow.

Favorite line(s): Lines and lines in every poem. Read for yourself.

THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams 

Until recently, I had never heard of this novel. Apparently, everyone has read it. I can understand how it became a cult (maybe not the right word) classic. It's part fairy tale, part magical realism—probably why the novel wasn’t on my radar. But that might be too confining a label for Williams' story about a woman, Pearl, who loses her husband and an infant baby in a plane crash. Soon after, Pearl returns to the island where she had lived with a replacement baby. Things are crazy on the island with a slew of biological and adopted children running around Lord of the Flies like, ignored and unparented by her dead husband's family. To cope, Pearl drinks all day but is the only adult who cares about these vagabonds. It's not a book you can pick up and put down in fits and starts. If you like the bizarre, this novel is for you. 

Favorite line(s): The meaningless hazards of life. The world that slumbered beneath the world of appearances that was the same world, both painful and boring at once, savage and playful, radiant and hideous, benignant and inspired.

THE TENDER LAND by William Kent Krueger 

Our book club selection for January. A blend of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn meets The Orphan Train, Krueger's coming of age story set in 1932 follows two brothers, their mute Native American friend, and a grief-stricken young girl, Emmy, as they run away from the Lincoln Indian Training School run by a merciless couple and their sadistic sidekick. Traveling down Minnesota’s Gilead River in a canoe toward the Mississippi and ultimately St. Louis to lookup an aunt, the group meets others along the river banks adrift in their own Depression-era horrors. The story didn’t veer off into sentimentality and surprised this reader with its twists and turn of emotions. 

Favorite line(s): We met in the gymnasium, where we got demonstrations on how to hone an ax or knife blade to a razor edge, how to identify plants and trees, and birds and animal tracks. Outside on the old parade ground, we were shown how to pitch a tent, how to lash together branches into a lean-to for shelter, how to construct a fire and how to start it with flint and steel. In summer, when fewer activities were scheduled because of the reduced student population, all the boys were required to attend. If the situation hadn’t been so tragic, I’d have found it funny, this heavy white man showing a bunch of Indian kids things that, if white people had never interfered, they would have known how to do almost from birth.

CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS by Isabel Wilkerson

This well-researched and brilliantly written book about the underpinnings of oppression, especially African Americans in America, Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Untouchables in India, should be required reading in every middle school in America—or at least high school. Wilkerson lays out in rich narrative history, interspersed with human interest stories, the violence, and injustices African Americans have suffered at the behest of the white dominant caste system. The author shows us how we’ve evolved into our biologies of class and race and ordered caste groupings and what is needed if we have a hope of changing the playbook. The book left me raw with rage and shame for how little I paid attention and how little we’ve moved the needle on racism in this country. 

Favorite line(s): Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. . . Cast is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH by Heather Clark

Plath only lived to the age of 30, so you can guess at 1100 pages (including notes) this biography covers every bit of detail about this troubled poet’s life. From the loss of her father at an early age and her brilliant academic achievements throughout high school, college, and on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge University, Plath pushed herself to be better, achieve more, and then to show everyone she could be both a wife, mother, and a working published writer. Her expectations, of course, were shot down frequently by the patriarchy as it exists(ed) in families, society, and the publishing world of the 1950s and 60s. When her marriage to poet Ted Hughes, who Plath made it her mission to help his work reach the masses—derailed because marriage and family was too much for him and he fell in love with another, Plath lost her mental footing and the help and support from family, friends, and professionals she so badly needed in the midst of her depression. It’s a sad tale of a truly gifted woman beaten down by betrayals, bad advice, and for wanting and expecting too much. It’s infuriating how the inequities between genders still exists sixty years later. The pandemic has shown us this. 

Favorite line(s): Like Sylvia, Janet veered between visions of herself as a writer and herself as a mother. “I knew these two images were in conflict. What I didn’t understand was that the choice might never be made, that my life could unroll, or lurch, or cascade, with the tension between them constant. Sylvia had convinced herself, when she married Ted, that there was no conflict. But when the marriage began to dissolve, so did the glue with which she had fixed together these two seemingly irreconcilable selves.