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Stop! Look! Listen! Catherine Owen's Book Recommendation

The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach

As an admirer of rampant kinds of poetics, I first discovered this Longenbach volume shortly after its 2004 publication and was instantly struck by its refusal to make poetry accommodating, accessible, to evidence the strain so many other poetics texts possess in their aim to convince the reader of the genre’s palatability, transparency, likeability.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Alex Boyd's Book Recommendation

I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Conor Kerr's Book Recommendation

Was it a coincidence that Jason Purcell’s debut poetry collection Swollening arrived in the mail two hours before I tested positive for COVID19? I’d like to think that this was their way of easing me into a week of fever/hacking cough/burning throat and making things just a little bit better. I’m not a person who isolates easily. I thrive in constant companionship and surrounding myself with people who have to put up with my inane ramblings about writing. That’s where Swollening became my friend.

Richard Cumyn: Oji Decides (And More’s the Pity), A Good Name, Yejide Kilanko.

Yejide Kilanko’s latest novel, A Good Name, is a page-turner written in simple, unadorned prose. The novel moves linearly through short chapters without flashback and is so compelling that, for this reader, the writing all but disappears. The story takes on new urgency around a third of the way in, when, after her wedding, an arranged marriage, in the Nigerian village of Oji, 18-year-old Zina travels to Houston, Texas, to join her husband, Eziafa. At first, Zina is excited by the prospect of life in America. Eziafa, 37, originally from Oji, has lived in the U.S.

Brian Bartlett's Reading Recommendation

For many years I’ve immediately re-read poetry books. Some collections pull me back for a deeper appreciation of their language, music and structures; others I find disappointing and frustrating, yet I remain curious enough to give them a second go. Immediate re-reading, however, rarely carries over into my experiences of novels or books of non-fiction (now and then I do read back through short-story collections right away).

J Brooke's Reading Recommendations

My wife and I moved during the pandemic, from the historic house in a former whaling village where we raised our kids to a late 20th Century human terrarium along a river. Every day since moving-in four months ago, I take advantage of the myriad pathways that wind through the woods along the side of our new habitat not facing the river, traversing a couple miles per wander in bucolic bliss. I have seen fox, heard coyotes, come upon wild turkeys congregating in groups larger than I’d imagined turkeys mingled. Neighbors report black bears, but I’ve so far been spared those encounters.

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