This
book has it all: love, mystery, obsession, and a wonderfully fractured
structure that fits right in with how we piece together personal histories.
And
I love the young protagonist, Alma Singer, who solves the mystery of lost love because the adults have given up.
Most of all, I love this book for its ending, which gives a satisfying and
hopeful conclusion to the human condition.
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
As
someone who is trying to understand and read more poetry, this book gives
background and insight into 100 poems that were written anywhere from 1815 to
2018.
It covers 100 different poems by 100 different poets—Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Donald Justice, Louise
Glück, Victoria Chang, and more. Although it’s a thick book, I love what I’m learning from it.
100 of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world, a collection that will comfort and enthrall anyone trapped by grief or loneliness, selected by the award-winning, best-selling, and beloved author of How to Read a Poem
Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a record. And poets are…
Camille T. Dungy offers a memoir of her Fort Collins
garden, the soil and the history it holds, and her experiences as a mother, a
Black woman, and a gardener.
I, too, love gardens, and restoring my plot of
earth to something more sustainable. The soil holds so much more than plants,
and I love this book for revealing that to me.
A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the…
There is nothing sweeter than arriving at the playground, seeing it empty, and knowing you have it all to yourself, the silent comfort of playing alone. Maggie is overjoyed to have that solitude to make her Salad Pie.
But then Herbert saunters over and wants to play, too. He just wants to help even though Maggie makes it clear she won't let him. Then, her imaginary pie takes a spill, and she realizes Herbert's intentions are not so bad after all.
