A double homicide in Sicily. Innocent, eccentric, small-town characters. The Mafia, the church, and a stifling, frightening nightmare world portrayed with humor, humanity, and a diamond-tipped eye for detail: that’s Leonardo Sciascia’s 1960s detective novel classic, To Each His Own (A ciascuno il suo). The writing is clean, clear, nervy, and seductive—some of the best crime writing, period. It even survives translation. This book is at least as good as The Godfather and better than anything by Andrea Camilleri. As you turn the pages, you’re not only transported to off-the-beaten-track, real-deal Sicily. You feel the grit. You smell it. You enter the heads and hearts of Sicilians. Written over 50 years ago, To Each His Own needs no refreshing. That world never changes.

Sometimes the compelling central character of a book is the author. So it is with this one, by the current poet laureate of Montana. Page after page, I was mesmerized by what La Tray could weave out of a single, seemingly simple thought that, it turned out, contained galaxies of complexity and nuance.

I think La Tray is a true original in Western letters, a man of deep conviction, conscience, humor, righteousness, and love. His talents are on full display here.

I love this book, because it fuses personal history with American history in the most searing, heartbreaking, and incisive ways.

I taught this book to high school students, alongside the work of James Baldwin, since they both call to account America's founding, its brutality, the moral injury and legacy of slavery, and also the corrosive nature of popular culture. My students were stunned. It woke them up and demanded that they pay attention.

I love the simplicity of this book and the direct way in which the poet conveys his experience as a volunteer for a group that provides medical care and support for migrants crossing the Sonora Dessert.

Gamble’s close-up view of objects like an abandoned Hello Kitty backpack and a can of pinto beans with ants crawling into the slit allows him to shed light on much deeper stories of human suffering, evoking the reader’s sympathy without proselytizing. 

This is not a book I normally would have picked up on my own. But when someone in my book club recommended it and described that it was blackout poetry made from angry posts/emails, I was intrigued.

When I dove in, I found not only some of the most painful comments and emails from internet trolls but also beautiful, empowering poetry made from the dark and painful words.

I truly enjoyed this unique take of turning a negative into something truly powerful and moving.

This was my first eye-opening introduction to family history imaginatively shared through lyric poetry, prose poetry, and flash prose. 

Stories of women and men from Michigan to Illinois to the Netherlands, women dealing with infant mortality, vanity, housewife skills, divorce and other hidden stories, even a brave heroine saving a family's home. 

Who doesn’t want to read about ancient Egyptian cannibalism? The title seems sensational, since no actual cannibalism is involved—at least as we might conceive of it in the world of the living—but Eyre employs the standard designation for the specific spell in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest major corpus of religious texts to survive from antiquity. A reader new to ancient Egypt might well read the translation of the Cannibal Hymn at the beginning of the book and be utterly confused. By the end of the book, however, the secrets of this 4300 year old text, including its relationship to butchery rituals and the mundane aspects of animal husbandry, are revealed.

If you’ve ever dreamed of the proverbial knight in shining armor who will protect and save you (and who hasn’t?), this epic medieval tale shows where the idea came from. Lancelot is the perfect knight who must rescue his kidnapped beloved, Queen Guinevere, and off to battle he goes. But Queen Guinevere is married to King Arthur, an inconvenient fact that isn’t a problem in this story. Being crazy in love with your majesty’s wife was not a big moral problem in the twelfth century, apparently. In fact, they ate it up.

When he finds her, he overcomes the villain and is rewarded by having hot sex all night with her, which both lovers desire. I love that Guinevere is an equally passionate lover, not an idealized pure-minded maiden.

Westlake, a poet of Native Hawaiian ancestry, incorporates influences from Chinese Taoist and Japanese haiku poetry, Dada concrete poetry, the writings of Kerouac and Bukowski, as well as local pidgin and Hawaiian literary traditions. Westlake’s editor and friend Richard Hamasaki writes that the early poems are “calm, contemplative, and serene, often playful, celebratory”—humans interacting with nature, from rain, moonlight, and mountains, to bugs, frogs, and dandelions: “Looks of disbelief: / I’m on my knees / Washing a rock.” The later poems are political: “Westlake blasts away at Waikiki’s rampant tourism and American materialism, which replaced the native culture in his native land. He wonders, “how we spose / feel Hawaiian anymoa / barefeet buying smokes / in da seven eleven stoa ...?”

The Taliban have long used poetry as a means of disseminating their messages, and their website features work in many different languages. Poetry has a very long tradition in Afghanistan, and so while the Taliban have tapped into this cultural current, it would be wrong to dismiss all of the poetry written (or even published) by the Taliban as mere propaganda. The poems in this work provide insight into the hearts and minds of Taliban fighters, who long for peace and for a multitude of things lost in war, who celebrate victories and lament defeats. A very human view of what are often seen as a faceless enemy.