MY TRADE IS MYSTERY by Carl Phillips 

Poet Carl Phillips writes about the writing life in My Trade is Mystery as if talking to a friend over dinner. Eloquently and honestly, he waxes on his experiences surviving forty years as a teacher and mentor to writers. Sections include Ambition, Stamina, Silence, Politics, Practice, Audience, and Community. “I don’t actually think of the writing of poetry (or any literary writing) as a trade—it’s just what I do,” he tells us at the beginning of this 94-page written conversation. Phillips gives us writers—beginners, seasoned veterans—a reference companion when self-doubt, nothing to say, and that we’re doing it all wrong creep into the interiority of our time at the desk.

Favorite line(s): I think that’s all art is, a record of interior attention paid. Is this what Horace meant, about poetry being like a picture? I think so. The pictures are various—a picture of what no one else can understand, or more often, a picture of what others do, in fact understand but can never understand quite as we do, through the personal lens of our own individual experiences of the world, which is to say art presents the world both all over again and—even if only slightly, sometimes—anew, made strange.

FLIGHT by Lynn Steger Strong 

It’s the first Christmas since their larger-than-life mother’s death. Henry, Kate, and Martin and their spouses and children convene under one roof, bringing their petty jealousies, inheritance drama, and parenting shame to the holiday week. There’s Henry, the artist, who the rest of the group dismisses for working on clay birds and his obsession with climate change. Alice, a social worker, cannot seem to abate her worry over a client’s daughter while struggling with her own fertility issues. Kate and Josh’s financial problems would resolve if her siblings would only agree to let her live in her deceased mother’s house. And Tess, Martin’s wife, with her judgments and an inability to let her emails go unanswered, seems ready to pick a fight at every comment. Flight is a metaphor for many themes in the novel. Most of all, the family’s collective grief and animosity when they finally acknowledge their heartaches and joys to one another.  

Favorite Line(s): She realizes now that living with lack does not prepare you for loss. Lack is an amorphous murk, difficult, unpleasant, but it weighs more, has a shape and texture all its own.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

This was our book club selection for February. The lessons in this mash-up of dizzying affronts to the female gender in the 1960s is that we still have a long way to go, but boy have we slayed many a patriarchal expectation along the way to 2023. Why does this shit take so long? Mainly because we’ve been made to feel, either by nature or nurture, that women are inferior intellectually and physically to men. Intelligent people (as well as dogs—yes, the reader hears the thoughts of the protagonist’s dog) know this is not true. You’ll laugh and cry and seethe with rage as scientist, partner, mother, friend—and then cooking show host Elizabeth Zott pushes up against the establishment as she lives one truth among all the ambiguities of femaleness: that there is no such thing as an average woman living an average life.

Favorite line(s): Neither of them had wanted children, and Elizabeth still fervently believed that no woman should be forced to have a baby. Yet here she was, a single mother, the lead scientist on what had to be the most unscientific experiment of all time: the raising of another human being. Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied. The questions were daunting and there wasn’t nearly enough multiple choice. Occasionally she woke up damp with sweat, having imagined a knock at the door and some sort of authority figure with an empty baby-sized basket saying, “We’ve just reviewed your last parental performance report and there’s really no nice way to put this. You’re fired.”