David Mas Masumoto has a reputation as a remarkable writer. His previous work includes Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1996), Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil (1998), and Four Seasons in Five Senses (2003), among others. A third-generation farmer from California, his writing focuses on farming, his Japanese-American heritage, and what it means to live a good life. 

His latest work, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm, is thematically similar to his previous books but for the central revelation — a late-in-life discovery that his 90-year-old maternal aunt, whom he has never met or heard discussed, has been living in state care for 70 years. To reckon with this “secret” family member, Masumoto weaves speculation, family history, and farm sense into a story that is at once very specific to his family but is also rooted in the broader American landscape.

I heard Brenda Cárdenas read from her new collection, Trace, at The Hungry Brain in Chicago: an incantation, a call to action. By the time I got to the book table, there were no more copies to purchase.

Reading the poems on the page is a very different experience. Many writers who code-switch build in supports for the reader—italics to mark the transition, English versions of the unfamiliar language, explanations, notes. Not here. Cárdenas interweaves her two languages without making a distinction between the two means of expression, much like the people I worked with in public schools serving Spanish-speaking communities, who would start a sentence in one language, shift to the other and back again without missing a beat. For those of us not fluent in Spanish, we can read for the music or we can turn to a dictionary, which slows us down. That’s a good thing, as it forces us to think more deeply about the poet’s urgent words.

Between grief and relief, Francesca Bell’s poems don’t pause, they flow – like a warm bath, and someone quietly bringing a candle; then a cold shower, and the body awakened to spring.

In What Small Sound, Bell’s second book, we are placed among bruised words, in a world that makes us feel, that shows the effort required to deal with the possibility of healing, a world where we need to stay alert.

There are no pauses, true, but we sense the cadence of spaces between verses, words measured to allow the reader to breathe, and purposeful guidance through the path that suffering traces.

A long-overdue tale recounted by way of an erstwhile member’s memoir.

Climate disasters amplified by greed have rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable and space travel impossible; now just three deep-ocean merstations stand between humankind and extinction.

Desperate to ensure her last child’s safety, Sunniva’s mother surrendered her to Adm. Blaise and his wife, who name her Marisol. They’re Aqueous’ power couple, living in the merstation off the California coast (the other two are located in the Marianas and Kuril-Kamchatka trenches). A decade later, though grateful for the opportunities her loving adoptive parents provide, Marisol privately grieves her lost family. A top student and fierce competitor, she longs to become Aqueous’ first woman cuvier, navigating the ocean beyond the merstation.

In this compelling memoir, debut author and cartoonist Graybeal writes about her life living with chronic pain and her childhood diagnosis of the rare genetic connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

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In Pacific Light, his newest volume of poems, David Mason proves again that he is a poet whose roots are deep in the mountains and oceans and the time—present, past, and future—they contain. Many of these poems find a way to know a day placed solidly in the present, only to then remember, again, there is no present. That there is no life or object, regardless of age or apparent sturdiness, that isn’t being measured in moments.

After a phenomenal reception for her debut novel Aqueous at the Winter Institute American Booksellers Association convention in Seattle Washington this February, Oakville’s Jade Shyback is ready for the real publication launch right here in Oakville on May 10th.

Peter Ulrich writes his memoir as a witness to the rise of one of the most inspiring, celebrated, and enigmatic independent bands to come out of London in the ’80s. He maps 40 years of Dead Can Dance, from their early Australian beginnings playing the Melbourne club scene, to symphony-accompanied performances on the world stage.

Shyback has created an all-too-believable future with a consummate eye for detail and realism in this, her debut novel. Marisol and her companions are terrific characters, and the reader will cheer them on as they go through the angst-ridden years of young adulthood in a strange environment.

As with many of Dennis Must’s other fictions, consisting of three novels and three short story collections, MacLeish Sq. is a tale about personal identity.  Who are we, and how do we come to know the nature of our being in this world?  In this most recent novel, what the imagination seizes just might be true, or if not absolutely true, at least one valid means of coming to know ourselves, perhaps much more so than through reason or ratiocination.  But literature as storytelling is a second means. In this novel, the principal literature is that of the nineteenth-century American Romantic era, of Hawthorne and Melville, but add to that drafts of unpublished stories preserved in old notebooks as well. What do these stories tell us about our own lives and who we are? What is real?  MacLeish Sq. is a highly imaginative novel, stylistically brilliant, which contrasts the real with the irreal, the latter being the most compelling—and the most transformative.  

In confiding, conversational poems full of homey detail, Dower (Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave) plunges deep into motherhood, limning her relationship with her own mother and how it has shaped her life.

The expansive and formally inventive second collection from Flame (Ordinary Cruelty) considers the cornerstones of romance—doubt, surrender, grief, resolution—through poems about hunger, exploration, and forbidden fruit.

John Proctor is about to turn seventy when he decides to buy a small farmhouse on the outskirts of the now mostly desolate mill town where he had grown up. Nostalgia haunts his waking hours and he often reminisces about the happier times in his life. One day in wintertime, John sees a young man in a mackinaw jacket with cloth sneakers that are soaked. He invites him in for some hot tea with lemon. Little does he know how this young man would impact his life most unexpectedly. Read MacLeish Sq. by Dennis Must to find out more.

“Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal