The operator-assisted collect call comes on a July morning in 1987. It’s still early, before 9 a.m., and except for the telephone ringing, the house is quiet, my younger sister and I the only ones at home. My father is on his way to work, or already there, and my older sister and mother are in Brooklyn, having left the previous day to get my sister settled in the city where she’ll complete her studies now that she has finished high school in Jamaica. It’s the first time all three of us girls haven’t traveled with my mother together, and what is already an unsettled time with the dynamics of our family shifting becomes even more so within minutes. On the other end of the line, a cousin speaks above the operator’s voice, trying to relay her message before the operator secures permission for the charges.
Each month, Beyond The Page: A WGBH Book Club features a notable author, who takes part in a live Q&A with a WGBH personality to discuss the intricacies of that month’s novel. With each monthly book selection, we also ask the author for a list of reading recommendations. For its December edition, Beyond The Page selected Emily Gray Tedrowe’s The Talented Miss Farwell, an electrifying page-turner of greed and obsession, survival and self-invention that is a piercing character study of one unforgettable female con artist.
In these disunited states, containing within them many sovereign nations, we are in what Biodun Jeyifo called “arrested decolonization.” And yet, as Mukoma Wa Ngugi wrote, “The work of decolonization is as personal as it is political.” My debut novel, Subduction, flickers between the perspectives of two protagonists converging on the same community. Subduction opens with the anthropologist Claudia, a Chicana who doesn’t think of herself as such.
RIFT ZONE by Tess Taylor, is a Boston Globe favorite!
RIFT ZONE BY TESS TAYLOR
Taylor released two books this year: a Dorothea Lange documentary project, and this collection of original poems that mine personal, California, American history, and changes in climate and ecosystems for shimmering, shattering beauty.
THE SKIN OF MEANING by Keith Flynn featured on Third Mind Books
Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2020. First Edition. Softcover. “There are perfectly good explanations/ for the simultaneous risks we juggle./ There are shipyards of baubles/ and harbors that have dried up/ and martinis made up by Episcopalians/ that burnish them for the plagiarisms/ of the Holy Spirit. It’s only right/ that the room is furnished/ with importance and low light./ Gotta flaunt the groove, with flourishes/ and gentle force, I guess./
Virtual Conversation with THE SKIN OF MEANING author Keith Flynn on Hub City!
Enjoy a virtual conversation with widely traveled poet and performer, Keith Flynn, on December 18th at 7PM! We will be discussing his newest collection of poetry, The Skin of Meaning.
Tiny scriptures of truth, Elizabeth Bradfield’s TOWARD ANTARTICA
An old post from 2019, featuring Elizabeth Bradfield’s TOWARD ANTARTICA.
Though she writes in a completely different style than Oliver, Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books, 2019) also belongs in the hands of anyone still seeking a renewed appreciation for the grandeur of the natural world. The book is the product of notes and photos Bradfield took during two trips to Antarctica. In form and content Toward Antarctica feels intensely new. It switches between poetry and prose and includes Bradfield’s photos. The pictures are breathtaking, full of bright-eyed birds and sea ice smashing into land..
Melanie Conroy-Goldman gets a little shoutout in the Millions!
Generally, I don’t care about the new year. The clock ticking from December 31st to January 1st doesn’t mean much, other than time moving as it always does, bringing all that’s come before to all that comes ahead. But 2020 might be different. It’s been a truly terrible year, one I’m ready to let go. Reading, therefore, has not only been a comfort, but a necessary escape, particularly in months of isolation, when bad news of the world (Trump, pandemic, Trump, pandemic, Trump) only seems to get worse.
Tracy Daugherty author of HIGH SKIES on “I’ll Find Myself When I’m Dead” Podcast!
S2 E14 – Tracy Daugherty “In our Season 2 finale (probably), we welcome our friend Tracy Daugherty, the author of many books of nonfiction and fiction, to discuss his recent books in both genres, as well as a trio of short essays he selected. Also: the Sixties, West Texas, a West Texas cocktail, country music, the return of David Turkel, another mystery guest who stays mostly off-mic, and a lightning round.”
My list of the best Latinx poetry published this year includes After Ruben (Red Hen Press), a stunning collection of poems by Francisco Aragon, inspired by another of Latin America’s greatest poets and thinkers, Ruben Dari; Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press) by Natalie Diaz, a remarkable exploration of Mojave culture, oppression and bodies of water, as well as queer desire, ancestry and family history, and Guillotine (Graywolf Press) by Eduardo C Corral, a poetry collection that brings in personal experiences about queer desire and Latin American machismo, among other important themes…
Harvard Review Online features Francisco Aragón’s AFTER RUBÉN.
A post-confessional collection by Francisco Aragón, After Rubén probes personal history, political identity, and place. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and Aragón’s collection in response to Rubén Darío’s work shows his admiration for the modernist Nicaraguan poet as well as a patchwork of contemporary poets like Ernesto Cardenal, Andrés Montoya, and Juan Felipe Herrera. He venerates the tradition of gay poets like Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and Richard Blanco by imitating and rewriting their poems…
Welcome to our latest round-up of contributor books, featuring books published in the last half of 2020. (You can catch our round-up for the first half of 2020 here.) Below, you will find a selection of poetry, short stories, novels, and essay collections to keep you company through the winter months ahead. Happy reading!
Utah Public Radio interviews Katharine Coles on her collection “WAYWARD”
Katharine Coles, former Utah Poet Laureate and current Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah, joins us today for Access Utah to talk about her seventh collection of poems, Wayward, published last year.
Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn’t afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Coles brings these big questions into small spaces in her latest collection, Wayward, moving the reader at mind-speed through brief meditations on love, marriage, and family; the permeable boundaries of the self; death; and perception…
