Category: Books

What is our relationship to the land on which we live? What is our relationship to our family? I’ve reflected a lot about these questions in my writing. Many writers have and will continue to explore them, but one book in particular that left me dwelling on how I’ve lived with these questions is Blood Belies (Wolsack and Wynn, 2024) from poet Ellen Chiang-Richardson (who was also my mentor for the 2025 TWUC BIPOC Writers Connect conference).

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary sonnets and am a bit in love with their surprising manifestations, their intricate weaves, their speed and motion.

In alignment with my poem in the Summer Issue of The Fiddlehead, I recommend How I Bend into More by Tea Gerbeza. Her exploration of the changes in her body due to scoliosis and the experience of surgery were profound for me, the mother of a relatively nonverbal kid who could not express all that he has endured with his spine. We intuit so much. Thank you Tea.

Two books of poetry in particular have deeply moved me and altered my view of myself and my place in the world as a disabled person.

I brought Joanne White’s first novel, Bay Island Girl, on a recent vacation, expecting to dig my toes into the sand and let the breeze carry me through the pages. I don’t usually read the crime genre, but thought it would be a great vacation read. I wasn’t expecting an in-depth look into the psyche of a female police officer suffering from the same debilitating brain disease as I do, PTSD. Compassion is a driving force in this text.

If I were to choose a last book to finish off my life with the way one might choose a last meal, I’d choose Anne-Marie Turza’s The Quiet. Even after years of rereading, I’m still moved to think and look and breathe differently after spending time with it, asked to attune to smaller, overlooked orders of life.