Penn Kemp's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Maybe you've watched the marvellous Gentleman Jack series by Sally Wainwright? Did you know the main character, Anne Lister, was a real and prolific Regency diarist? Anne is also the heroine in Emma Donoghue's fabulous new novel, Learned by Heart.

In 1805, at a York boarding school for girls, fourteen-year-old Anne met and roomed with a beautiful young orphan, an heiress from India, Eliza Raine. Closeted together, they fell in love in a riveting tale of young love and inevitable separation, the allure and yearning achingly described.

It's fascinating that fans of Anne Lister decoded many of her letters, particularly the seamers' descriptions of passion, as Donoghue credits in her book.

If you love mystical poetry, you’ll love Susan McCaslin’s glorious new collection, Consider. These poems inspired me to write in the same vein.

They led me into the mystical traditions of many cultures and religions, with poetry as music arising out of the profound silence of a meditation that the poems invoke in the reader. They pay homage to her “luminous companions,” guides, and teachers: Jesus Christ in his more cosmic form and the renowned poet Robin Blaser.

Her beloved magnolia and cedar are taken into deep consideration as she moves from appreciating the natural world through beloved apocryphal texts to the “spiral-knotted galaxy…half-shadowed half sun-lit.” McCaslin’s vision is as inclusive as the vision of Dante’s Beatrice: “who set her gaze on point zero…where the many and the one sing union.” She cracks koans as easily as she considers immensity. Read Consider, and be inspired.

Landings continues Rhenisch’s love affair with Iceland, first described in The Art of Haying: A Journey to Iceland. These visionary poems transport us to another world, parallel but far off, shimmering in perpetual shifts of weather and evolving language, in love charms and arresting images woven through the book so vibrantly that trolls and elves shape the landscape.

For all who love wild, magical journeys into the unknown, read these poems and be translated into another realm. Rhenisch writes, “There was once an exodus from the Earth. Now there is a return to it. I hope you will come along.”

Landings is the literary equivalent of grand adventure led by this wise, knowledgeable, and perceptive guide to lands less travelled by.