Exciting new titles in nonfiction and poetry.
Catherine Ricketts The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity. Broadleaf Books, April 16, 2024
This work of literary nonfiction blends memoir with studies of the art and lives of women artists who had children, including Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, Ruth Asawa, Joan Didion, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison, as well as many emerging contemporary artists. The Mother Artist debunks the myth that to be an artist you must give up a family life, demonstrates the very real challenges facing women who aspire to rise in their disciplines, and explores the uniquely humanizing vision that caregivers bring to the making and shaping of culture.
Barbara Crooker, Slow Wreckage, Grayson Books 2024.
“Opening a book of poetry by Barbara Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need: the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.”—James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion
Cammy Thomas, Odysseus’ Daughter, (Parkman Press) 2024 (chapbook) contains poems Thomas wrote over many years of teaching the Odyssey. Many focus on women: Penelope, a Siren, a sea nymph, a princess, a monster, and some of Odysseus’ family members, like his sister (who is in the text), and his daughter and granddaughter (who are invented). “…Buoyed up by a genuine understanding of the ancient text, and the extraordinary resourcefulness of her own imaginative power, the lines in these poems are taut as the rhythmical pull of oars, and everywhere the poems are alive with fresh enchantment…– George Kalogeris
Ann Wallace, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books 2024) “is a collection of poems chronicling, in real time, my severe acute COVID-19 infection in spring 2020 and three years of living through Long Covid alongside my (also sick) teenage daughters, with illness, pain, and healing laid against a national and global backdrop of pandemic deaths, mental health crisis, and social unrest. The final sequences of poems, written in years two and three of the pandemic, provide a respite from the loss and sickness and look through a reflective lens on what has become a chronic illness, at the same time that my younger daughter became incapacitated by Long COVID, reinforcing the themes of hope and love that run through the entire collection.”