NCBR review of Tenderness by Derrick Austin

BOA Editions

If ever something was needed in our contemporary world, it is tenderness. In this aptly named book, the poet treats the facts of his life with the compassion we all deserve. Through personal journey, myth, and the refreshed perspective that travel brings, Derrick Austin captures the briefest and most characteristic of tender moments in love and friendship. "Taking My Father and Brother to the Frick," a poem of lyrical beauty and meticulous honesty, paints how we long to be loved entire: "Entering the narrow hall/ I ignore my favorite portraits, their ruffles/and bodices, carnations and powder puffs/ afraid to share my joy with you/ yet your bearing in the space—the procession/ of your shoulders, the crowns of your heads—/ makes them sing anew." But tenderness also contains dark moments in the psyche, best told by myth. In "The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood," "We never came home/ before the streetlights buzzed./ All we do is dance in leaves/ Cackle and Dreaming, we call it/ Our mothers call it grief." Tracing the path of depression, the author expresses doubts "That I'm getting this all down wrong, that I'm getting it down at all." Austin's art manifests an ache it also heals: in "Ballet Folklorico" dancers/ wearing large, startling papier mache heads/ danced near me/ like family I had forgotten/ because I had forgotten how/ profoundly loved/ I have been." Beautifully wrought, minutely observed and profoundly honest, these are poems to which a reader will return.

NCBR review of A Symmetry by Ari Banias

W.W. Norton

Oakland poet Ari Banias throws his readers off balance. Deliberately. The title of his book, A Symmetry, is the thing and its opposite: balance on the one hand, imbalance on the other. Poem by poem he presents thrilling indictments of contemporary ennui. At times oracular, at times a collector of urban detritus, he melds the contrasting sophistications of Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara. As a connoisseur of post-colonial landscapes, he is perfectly positioned to witness the contemporary world's "apocalypse by attrition." He is, he tells us in "Museum Piece," "the filched marble / the headless goddess / dickless youth…/ clinging to absence." And what is that absence but the dragon's hoard of stories we grow up with, Western mythology, what he calls that "immortal pyramid scheme" which fails to offer any consolation in the desolate present.

In a sequence called "Spectra" he offers a mosaic of contemporary dystopia: "a half-clandestine meeting of underpaid workers…/ iridescent motor oil on asphalt, think unicorn piss…// I am listening the apologizers now say…" Nothing quite adds up. All promises are deceptions, "truth" a more elaborate lie. Even therapy, the twentieth century's greatest invention, offers only sham freedom: "people in group therapy trade off/ yelling at an empty chair." Clear-sighted, unflinching, Banias offers poetry that is a true measure of his diminished age.

NCBR review of Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang

Graywolf Press

With its masterful juxtaposition of collage, devastating and damning documents of US betrayal of the Hmong people at the end of the Vietnam war, and its language that butterflies into elegy for those gone and truth for those who survive, this powerful poetry/history/elegy should be taught in every poetry and "humanities" class. Mai Der Vang confronts the euphemism "Yellow Rain" (a term for bee feces) invented by the US government to avoid abrogating a treaty with the Soviets, who were suspected to be the perpetrators of these chemical weapons (although independent scientists found otherwise): "…(it) came in the midst of exodus, poison landed on the Hmong in the middle of escape. Specks descending from the aircraft overhead, falling onto trees, into water, and onto skin. Specks of a mysterious substance ranging in color: red, black, white, green and yellow above all. Specks of illness and death." Vang's voice of and for the Hmong people and the bees themselves makes the loss of life and culture searingly palpable, while the beauty of the poetry captures a necessary and raging sorrow. The word epic is often abused; while partaking of its history and its lyricism, Yellow Rain is a new model for that genre. In Vang's epic, however, there are no heroes but the truth: "I choose what belongs to the earth. I call for a reckoning of time. I follow what was left behind, fog of tropic lineage layered among the debris of old songs. I break the pages and let the bees fly out."

NCBR review of West Portal by Benjamin Gucciardi

The University of Utah Press

Poet Benjamin Gucciardi loves the neighborhood called West Portal. Actually there are two such neighborhoods, one in the western part of San Francisco and one that leads to the afterlife. Wandering both he engages their denizens, searching for connection, direction and meaning in life. Family and friendship are important touchstones, the template for which are his conversations with his dead sister. In "I Ask My Sister's Ghost How Dying Is," we get a totally unexpected answer: "It's like gathering dolls from the debris/ of the great Pacific plastic patch,/ filling your dinghy with their pale figures,/ lying down among them the way we hid/ in tupelo." Sadness mixes with innocence; loss mingles with tenderness and the memory of childhood companionship.

In addition to his gift for charting the lower depths, Gucciardi gives ample evidence of poetic ingenuity, offering us a new form, something he calls 'halos,' poems in a ring that end where they begin, like Tibetan prayer wheels, as if urging us to read them again and again. "Sonora Desert Halo" offers a brief meditation on the crisis at our southern border: "from the ironwood to the thermal to the slow descending circles the vulture draws around the lost boy's body and back." Rarely is despair so terse. Gucciardi offers few answers for the difficulties of contemporary life, except perhaps the simplest, compassion and understanding.

NCBR review of Requeening by Amanda Moore

Ecco

Amanda Moore's debut collection, Requeening, starts with a poem called "Opening the Hive" and uses the workings of the literal hive as a kind of model universe—a way to explore motherhood and childhood, marriage and family, togetherness and isolation—how each of these things often involves putting aside the needs of the self, like a queen bee, who will "grow/ too fat to fly, lay eggs for years, and never again/ feel the sting of sun or ripple of wind…"

Moore makes use of a variety of poetic forms: much free verse, but also a sonnet, an elegy, an aubade and a section composed entirely of haibuns. Throughout, the poems remind us that, as in the hive, we cannot predict or rely upon finding honey, and that honey itself can sometimes lead to sting—that love cannot necessarily prevent the separations that happen between mothers and children, the lapses in loving relationships, or the threats to the bodies of the beloved through accident or disease. This is a remarkable book that reminds us that, like the bees, we are an endangered species, but that our connections to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet must be a devotional enterprise. Her vow in the penultimate poem draws us into the universal hive: "I will be alive this time/ to what swells and roils the colony, the first cluster/ gathering on the fence line. I will heed."

NCBR review of And If the Woods Carry You by Erin Rodoni

Ecco

Creating a landscape woven from fairy tales, myths and even lullabies, Erin Rodoni's And if the Woods Carry You places us on the precipice of both motherhood and childhood—overlooking the hypnotic beauties of the world around us and also its blood-drenched cruelties and dangers. Drownings, abductions, murder, wives sacrificed to flame—these poems do not shy away from the horrific; they also address global catastrophes like climate change and what that means for the planet's human and non-human occupants—for all those things we love.

These poems also refuse to forget what we have encountered and emerged from on our journey through the "dark woods" of childhood and adolescence, addressing as well the challenges of parenting, the uncertainties of health and the certainties of unexpected burials and loss. "They don't tell you the woods are like the past:/ haunted and evergreen. There is no forgetting."

Rodoni's book is about survival: How do we live, give birth, love in the face of these challenges? The speaker in the first poem speculates that: "maybe, like me,/ the only god you can conceive/ is a kind of wakefulness." The poems in this magnificent book are magical, lyrical, and full of wakefulness.

NCBR review of My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee

Riverhead Books

Chang-rae Lee's My Year Abroad is a gorgeous, riveting freakshow that somehow manages to inject genuine edge-of-seat drama into a deeply character-driven narrative, luxuriant maximalism into a small-scale story, intellectual gravitas into the absurd, and humor into the tragic. Its narrator, Tiller Bordman, a college dropout who's newly back from a bizarre trip to Asia, is locked down with Val, his much older lover who is under witness protection, and her savant son Victor Junior. Lee turns that premise into a psychedelically colorful odyssey, placing an eerie and misunderstood monster, nymph or demigod on every island of Tiller's memory. For a self-proclaimed "basic mostly white boy" from a Jersey suburb, Tiller's observational depth and ability to drift into extraordinary situations is anything but basic. Virtuoso prose, sincerely open-minded and far-reaching, and a keen, discerning imagination permeate this beautiful novel, which in the end is about what all novels are arguably about—the quest for love, connection and understanding, and the transformative power of storytelling itself.

NCBR review of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

Little, Brown and Company

In his debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, Tom Lin has already executed a tour de force. Ming Tsu, a Chinese orphan raised by a white crime boss to be a hired killer, embarks on a quest through the Old West in search of his beloved wife, Ada, who has been torn from him. First, though, he must wreak vengeance on her father, her former fiancé, and the other men responsible for destroying their life together and condemning him to servitude on the Central Pacific Railroad. His transitory companions include a seemingly ancient seer known as The Prophet and a traveling circus featuring, among others, a shapeshifter, a man who can erase memories, and a boy who is deaf but can "throw his voice" by speaking telepathically, all rendered with a refreshing absence of sentimentality. The suspense lies as much in understanding how Ming came to this place in his life as it does in the eventual headlong rush toward a devastating but ultimately inevitable twist. The book is so much more than a Western, so much more than an action-packed story, though it is those too. Lin juxtaposes an evocative, atmospheric lyricism and magical realism with an unflinching gaze at the brutal violence that permeates both Ming Tsu's life and the landscape he travels. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu raises questions about memory, mortality, dreams, and our subjective experience of ourselves.

NCBR review of The Confession of Copeland Cane by Keenan Norris

The Unnamed Press

The first-person voice of Copeland Cane grabs the reader on page one and thankfully doesn't let go. It's fresh, funny, and colloquial. Author Norris has a talent for twisting sentences in new directions. In this near-future rendering of America, in which the police state has merged with all-seeing, all-controlling media conglomerates, Copeland is very aware of what he's up against, which is nearly everything. He's recruited by a private school, where he enrolls, even as his parents face the bulldozing of their housing project to make room for a residential complex complete with security guards and fingerprinting technology. With merciless precision and sometimes razor-sharp wit, Norris traces the chain of small, seemingly innocuous events leading to Copeland's categorization as a criminal simply because he is a young black male. When Copeland participates in a protest rally against police violence, his life falls apart, and he, a track star, is literally on the run. The story is set in East Oakland, but the themes and plot take today's nationwide headlines, punctuated by police shootings of young black men and media coverage of these events, as their jumping-off point. Throughout all the plot twists, Copeland's compelling voice reveals his love for his friends and his complex relationship with his father. The frame of the novel is an informal interview with Copeland's journalist friend, which expands the novel's thematic reach to include how the media portrays Copeland, not as a victim, but a perpetrator.

NCBR review of Chouette by Claire Oshetsky

Ecco

Novels about motherhood are now commonplace, but there's nothing common about Chouette, by Claire Oshetsky. With humor and intense tenderness, Oshetsky. in her debut novel, wonderfully blurs the line between surrealism, magical realism, and realism, inviting the reader to walk the tenuous border, uncertain whether the newborn is a human baby or, as Tiny, the mother, claims, an owl-baby. The baby misses developmental milestones, doesn't speak, and becomes violent when frightened, all of which suggest a disabled or neurodiverse child. But what to make of the baby who is more attracted to the meat of mother than the milk? Or soon prefers frozen pinkie mice that are delivered in the morning? While Tiny's husband obsesses over a medical fix and moves into the room above the garage, Tiny dissolves into fierce mother-love. It's a tug-of-war between normality and authenticity, and the struggle strains and rips the marriage. Another strain that winds its way through the novel is the mother artist dichotomy. Through metaphorical language, Oshetsky beautifully captures the sacrifices the artist mother must make for a small child. Tiny is a cellist and wants to return to her music. With brute honesty, Oshetsky captures the anger and exhaustion of the mother artist. The conflicts feel real and at the same time fairytale-like. Chouette haunts because it's original; it's in between genres and worlds; it's playful and heartbreaking; and it's magnificent.

NCBR review of The Archer by Shruti Swamy

Algonquin Books

With a resonance not soon to be forgotten, Shruti Swamy's The Archer explores questions of motherhood, identify, and the exhausting struggles against cultural restraint that are the lot of the woman artist. The novel follows protagonist Vidya through childhood and young womanhood in 1960s and '70s Bombay, evoking the place and time, and their unquestioned misogyny, so concretely it's hard to believe Swamy herself did not come of age at that time and in that city. Shouldered with household responsibilities and the care of her younger brother, partly because as a daughter they are her role and partly because her mother is suffering from postpartum depression, Vidya comes to find joy in studying kathak, a traditional Indian dance form. Swamy captures the moment in which Vidya first experiences her own sense of self through her art in shimmering, poetic prose, echoed in the last pages of the novel when she must claim herself all over again. The titular "Archer" refers to the Mahābhārata story of Ekalavya, who becomes the greatest archer in the land only to have a terrible sacrifice demanded of him. The tale threads through Vidya's life as she comes to terms with poignant friendships, her marriage, and finally the fate of her mother. Swamy navigates fluid shifts in time and Vidya's point of view—at times a distant third, at others an achingly self-aware first—with the confidence of a writer, demonstrating that she is already a master of her own talent.

NCBR review of Her Honor: My Life on the Bench…What Works, What's Broken, and How to Change It by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell

Celadon Books

What do you do with a child who has murdered his brother? With two good parents who both desperately want custody of their kids? With a patient in a mental hospital who wants to refuse the electroconvulsive therapy her psychiatrist insists she needs? And with defendants who may be innocent pleading guilty to a crime to avoid the threat of long prison sentences? These are just a few of the high-stakes cases LaDoris Hazzard Cordell shares in her fascinating look into the world of trial judges and the impact their decisions have on the people who appear in their courtrooms—and on society as a whole.

Her Honor is both an engrossing memoir of the first African-American woman to serve as a trial judge on the Superior Court of Northern California, and an incisive look into our judicial system—where it succeeds, where it fails, and what can be done to make it live up to its promise. Cordell takes us skillfully and entertainingly into the mind of a trial judge. She also looks unflinchingly at the inequities and injustices of the judicial system while embracing the power that judges have to seek justice in the most challenging of situations. A talented storyteller, Cordell uses real-life cases, warmth, humor, and the ability to candidly view her personal journey to show us what really happens inside the courtroom and how it affects us all.

NCBR review of Loving before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White by Joan Steinau Lester

University of Wisconsin Press

Here we have a beautifully written and brave memoir about love, seeking, and activism in the midst of the Civil Rights, Women's, and LGBTQ rights movements. The author was a young camp counselor and activist when she met, fell in love with, and married a young black man who was the music counselor at the camp. It was 1962, when interracial marriage was illegal in some states and dangerously controversial almost everywhere. The two became deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, and Lester gives readers a front row seat at many of the most influential events of the movement. Her forthright writing and clear observations immerse readers in every scene. She is fearless as she comes to terms with her own naiveté and racism, and the mistakes she made working to become an ally. The marriage doesn't last, but Lester's commitment to social justice remains. She joins the fight for women's rights and, when she falls deeply in love with a woman, takes up the battle for LGBTQ rights. Lester interweaves a personal account of some of the most important social justice movements of our time with the coming into power of a woman who spent much of her life fighting fiercely for others and finally learned to fight for her own creative voice. The book is passionate, and at times raw and painful, and will strike a chord with anyone who has fought for both justice in the world, and the deep personal fulfilment we all seek.

NCBR review of Model Citizen by Joshua Mohr

MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Joshua Mohr calls his riveting memoir a love letter to his young daughter, and it is. Yet it's hard for readers to wrap their minds around that idea because Mohr lays out, crazy-house mirror style, episodes that many of us would conceal, especially from our children. In kindergarten, he stabbed his hand, hard, with a pencil. He went on to wreck himself with booze, drugs, crime, and other forms of self-destruction, sometimes gleefully, sometimes not. Mohr throws a harsh light on his experiences as a husband, a son, a father, a writer, and an addict. His story is, in turns, insane and funny and painful.

This book is also a messy addiction and recovery memoir, but that description doesn't do it justice either. After he suffers a series of strokes, the first at age thirty-five, Mohr undergoes surgery to repair the heart condition that's causing them. The surgery is not wholly successful. Doctors tell him he won't survive his forties. So why struggle to stay sober if it's only for a few years? What will he leave for his adored daughter? How should he live with not-knowing? Mohr gives us no definitive answers, no neat summations. What he does offer is an unblinkered and self-aware account of a damaged life and an implicit trust in the power of writing. His voice is strong and compelling. In the end, this is a moving and beautiful memoir.

NCBR review of The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert by Shugri Said Salh

Algonquin Books

Shugri Said Salh's memoir, The Last Nomad, is about her childhood growing up in the Somali desert. "All of my ancestors on both sides of my family were nomads," she writes. "They traveled the East African desert in search of grazing land for their livestock, and the most precious resource of all—water." Salh, who now lives in California, is chosen at age six by her mother to live with her grandmother as a goat and camel herder in the desert. As the only one of her siblings picked for the role, she's taken out of school and transformed into a nomad, becoming the last in her family to learn these ancient traditions. Salh writes vividly about life in the desert, including the ins-and-outs of camel herding, chasing warthogs, and making butter and yogurt from milk. She also endures ritualistic female circumcision, abusive relatives, and a looming civil war. Finally, her family is forced to flee as refugees, first to Kenya and then to Canada. Flying over the Canadian mountains, she sees snow for the first time—a concept so foreign that the Somali language doesn't have a word to describe what she's seeing. She finds she must learn, again, to adapt to a new way of life. Told in a straightforward, optimistic style, The Last Nomad is an engrossing coming-of-age story about resilience and what it means to call a place home.

NCBR review of The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief by Liz Tichenor

Counterpoint

In the memoir, The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief, Liz Tichenor takes on one of the most difficult subjects: The loss of a child. As a recently ordained priest, Tichenor is living in an Episcopal camp in Lake Tahoe when her five-week-old baby suddenly stops breathing and is rushed to emergency care. Soon after, he's pronounced dead. Adding to Tichenor's grief is the recent loss of her mother, an alcoholic who died by suicide the year before. The Night Lake is Tichenor's account of her journey through a grief that "gutted me, sank me, its images flashing before my eyes, as I continuously relived it." She recounts this ordeal with unsentimental language, effectively plunging the reader into the raw sorrow and shock of losing loved ones. Juggling her roles as a new priest, wife, and the mother of a toddler, Tichenor is honest about the uglier side of grieving, such as her frustration at the empty platitudes of sympathy, the search to find meaning in tragedy, and the lingering repercussions of a difficult childhood. The Night Lake is a meditation on what it means to experience profound loss, live with heartbreak, and in the end, find hope again.

NCBR review of Czeslaw Milosz, A California Life by Cynthia L. Haven

Heyday

"I did not choose California. It was given to me." A random opening, and this line stands out. To read on, however, is to see that Milosz's concept of California is, like his life, compounded of dichotomies. Throughout this book, we see Milosz beset by the contradictions that inform his poetry: good and evil; life and death; beauty and ugliness; body and soul, and always, etre and devenir—being and becoming. Early in his California days, Milosz was fascinated with Allen Ginsberg, becoming swept up in the Sixties movement and student protests, on campus and beyond. As a professor, he was interacting with students every day, and energized his students to read and think deeply about the issues of the protesters. He found himself supporting the free speech movement. Later, when Robinson Jeffers was attacked by the establishment, Milosz undertook to understand his relentless poems of natura, and explored his own attraction to and terror of Jeffers's world. He became, whether he desired to or not, an American poet with Polish roots. This is a rich book, filled with anecdotes of his life, his loves, his exploration of his own ambivalences. As a reader, we are constantly thrust into an avalanche of poets, philosophers, new age thinkers, and old age sages. Throughout this mélange of thoughts about poetry, we catch flashes of Milosz as the only Nobel Laureate in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and as the eternal Polish poet, alive in what once was the burning city of Warsaw.

NCBR review of The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

W.W. Norton

Michael Lewis is the popular author of Moneyball and Liars Poker and numerous other best sellers. In The Premonition, he brings to life some of those who could see the next pandemic coming, from Laura Glass, a thirteen-year-old girl who developed a science project predicting the rapid spread of airborne pathogens, to many others, including Dr. Charity Dean, who understood the first signs of a deadly communicable disease. Dean was Health Officer of Santa Barbara County, usually a quiet, bureaucratic position. But when she read the law, she realized she had the power to take any measures she deemed necessary to prevent the spread of a disease. She had to fight her way through sheriffs and coroners and the Center for Communicable Diseases to prove to them her right to call a halt to dangerous practices. She would have shut down the entire county if she thought it necessary. But the CDC and the FDA and the NIH opposed any action. They might be blamed if they were wrong! The struggle of a few determined people willing to risk their careers to take arms against the spread of a pandemic is the subject of this fine book. Had they been listened to earlier many lives could have been saved.

NCBR review of This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Penguin Press

Have you tried kicking caffeine, the worlds' most widespread addiction? When Pollan tried, he felt "...a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality...the whole idea of ever writing...anything ever again...had come to seem insurmountable." Coffee. A so-called bean, a seed from a tree.

Opium poppies are not illegal to grow, as long as you do not grow them knowingly. But if you grow Papaver Somniferum with intent to make opium, that could get you twenty years with a million dollar fine. It's a plant, one that was for centuries used to produce the world's most common medicine, a powerful pain killer, a poppy. After crusading against "demon rum," the Women's Christian Temperance Union would relax with tonics based on laudanum.

Opiates can lift our spirits, relieve pain, and they can kill us. Unrestricted access to opium might compete with those industries dependent on alcohol and cigarette sales. Tobacco kills some 480,000 people a year in the US. Alcohol related deaths are only 95,000 a year. Last year, despite careful monitoring, opiate related deaths were some 75,000.

Mescaline is, for most in the United States, a banned psychedelic. For many Native Americans, however, mescaline from the peyote cactus is the center of their culture, a living being, a religion, a medicine. Aldous Huxley, famously took it. Those who tried mescaline experienced, "a tidal wave of awe." These plants are worth exploring, if not in person, then in this finely written book.

NCBR review of Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit

Viking

Rebecca Solnit's biographical essay on George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), Orwell's Roses, begins with roses and swings far and wee through the coal mines of Britain into the hapless struggle against Franco's fascism in 1930s Spain.

Orwell, in 1984, predicted the surveillance world we now live in. In his authoritarian world there is little or no privacy. Russia. China. People we trust turn into informers, were always spying on us. An independent mind is a threat. Even our innermost feelings are subject to control. There's no hiding place. We cling to love, but even that is subject to mind control. Against these losses, these defeats, we plant our metaphorical roses. Plants grow as Nature wills. Human systems can be perverted, but in Nature we can find peace.

Life is a struggle for most people, but we go on fighting because we hope for peace, for roses. We plant seeds of goodness. We tend them and watch them grow. We hope they will make a better life. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they sustain us as we hope along. If so many people want to make a better world, why isn't it better? Solnit asks questions. Sometimes she tenders her answer.

This is a beautiful book, not one to skim through, but thoughtfully written, multilayered, with ideas building on ideas.

NCBR review of By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution by David Talbot and Margaret Talbot

Harper

Civil Rights, Black Power, Gay Pride, The American Indian Movement, United Farm Workers, Women's Lib, all fueled by injustice and the resistance of young people opposed to the draft and to the war in Vietnam, coalesced to create a furious blaze of rebellion in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The Talbots, brother and sister, catch the souls of the main characters at critical moments. Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, John Lennon and Yoko Ono are brought back to us in all their flaming idealism, challenging the entrenched rulers of the hour, a government convinced it had the right to force the unwilling off to an unwanted war. LBJ, Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover in his tutu, dance before us. Heather Booth and the Janes fight for abortion rights. Beautiful Kathleen Cleaver, in her full natural, shouts, "Free Huey! Off the pigs!" John and Yoko bed-in for peace. Madonna Thunder Hawk and a hundred Oglala Lakota defy thousands of soldiers and FBI at Wounded Knee. Craig Rodwell and Harvey Milk march in the Gay Pride Parade to commemorate the Stonewall uprising. It wasn't all Beatles and Bob Dylan and drugs. If you want to know what happened then and who made it happen, this is a great book. These were real people, flaws and all, not heroes. We inherited many of the freedoms they fought for, and many we shall have to fight for again.

NCBR review of The New World Written: Selected Poems by María Baranda, edited and partially translated by Paul Hoover, from the Spanish

Yale University Press

Edited by Paul Hoover, with translations by Hoover and nine other translators, including Forrest Gander and Leticia Hernández-Linares, The New World Written: Selected Poems brings together work from 1989 to 2015 by celebrated Mexican poet María Baranda. Hypnotic and dense with invention, Baranda's poetry resists the contextualization of prose at every turn. This is a poetry that soars without a net in which, as Sharon Coleman writes, "each line is like a poem in itself." Baranda directs her gaze so forcefully at the natural world that she often becomes it: "I was a grain of sand and the insect plastered to the glass" (from Arcadia). Finding her voice and method in poetic sequences, Baranda's books typically swirl around a presiding subject or area of inquiry, such as in Dylan and the Whales (2003), where the poet addresses the spirit and language of Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. "I cling to no other reason than to sing to him, / to the last Odysseus of the fields, happy child / and wild as a blind horse in the meadow." An introduction by Hoover places the writing within the larger history of Spanish-language poetry, including that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

NCBR review of The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems by Shang Qin, translated by John Balcom, from the Chinese

Cambria Press

Born in mainland China in 1930, Shang Qin has lived the life of an exile in Taiwan since 1948. Greatly influenced by surrealism (his poems reference Max Jacob and the painter Joan Miró), Qin writes a poetry of enigmatic leaps and disassociation where the violence of war and colonialism (Qin has written elsewhere of his numerous escapes from captivity) finds a response. "They install two blood-red lights for my eyes/ They insert gear wheels in my mouth/… Out through an orifice it goes. My soul." Qin's poetics of disruption, conveyed through jarring metaphors and unexpected descriptions, can quickly shift to a graceful and humorous perception, as when a pair of eyebrows become "birds with wings only." Through a poetics that places instability front and center, Qin's poetry surprisingly delights with its steadfast refusal to submit to the logic of prose. Translated by John Balcom, the English versions of these prose poems set Qin in the wider context of ongoing global surrealism.

NCBR review of The Blinding Star: Selected Poems by Blanca Varela, translated by Lisa Allen Ortiz and Sara Daniele Rivera, from the Spanish

Tolsun Books

This meticulously curated bilingual collection brings Blanca Varela, one of Peru's most celebrated poets, to English-speaking readers. Known as one of "la Generación del 50," Varela developed a poetics steeped in surreal imagery, that emanates from the body, and that shifts from the most intimate sensations, appetites and desires, to fundamental questions of existence. Her poems often return to where self, otherness, and the world meet—the poet's eyes. In doing so, Varela writes the feminine unapologetically. What is most striking though is Varela's constant juxtaposition of oppositions and use of paradox that disorient patterns of cognition, as in these lines: "the sun is born in darkness / the fabulous egg / discharges grey rays / to the remotest corner." So many of Varela's poems are short and appear simple—but they stop you, make you reflect for a lifetime. This collection provides a breadth of Varela's oeuvre in chorological order with two complete books—The Book of Clay and Animal Concert. And in it we can see develop Varela's feminist challenge to western religion as it evolves into an agnostic spirituality of immanence. Lisa Allen Ortiz and Sara Daniele Rivera's translation is very exact and elegant, true in tone and meaning to all that the original unleashes.

NCBR review of Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated by Adam Morris, from the Portuguese

New Directions

In her outstanding novel Antonio, prize-winning author Beatriz Bracher tells the story of the remarkable Kremz family of Brazil—brilliant, enlightened, sophisticated, and multitalented. The family is swept up in the 1960s and 70s movements for social change and personal freedom, as well as tragedies of Greek proportions. Everything about this novel is original, from the intricate way the story unfolds, to the memorable characters, to the Möbius-strip plot twists. Antonio is like a multigenerational Faulkner epic, but set in São Paulo and the hinterlands of Brazil's sertão. Each chapter of the narrative peels back another layer of the story. Several characters in Antonio tell their own version of the events to Benjamim, the son of the youngest scion of the family. The narrators range from a free-spirited, outspoken grandmother on her death bed, to close family friends who see the family with an outsider's sharp focus. Each one reveals secrets that are astonishing and yet deeply recognizable as against our own desires. Bracher sculpts all the characters with dimension, sympathy, and individual traits, making this book a complex and captivating read. Adam Morris's skilled translation provides just the right touches to steep the novel in a Brazilian atmosfera while making the prose and dialogue accessible and contemporary.

NCBR review of I Was Never the First Lady by Wendy Guerra, translated by Achy Obejas, from the Spanish

HarperVia

Author Wendy Guerra takes the reader on an epic and engrossing journey through the eyes and voice of her protagonist, Cuban artist Nadia Guerra, whose mother, also an artist, left Cuba and abandoned her husband and ten-year-old daughter for unknown reasons. Nadia finds herself frustrated in Cuba, where she is DJ of a radio show that is censored and blocked from broadcasting. When she receives a fine arts grant, she takes the opportunity to travel to France, where she begins her search for her mother by seeking out and making contact with her mother's past friends and lovers. She discovers that she has moved to Russia, and when she finds her mother, she is incoherent and in failing health. Nadia decides to bring her back to Cuba with little more than some boxes of papers—sections of an unfinished book about Celia Sanchez, an important part of Cuban history and Fidel Castro's closest confidant, which Nadia decides to finish. The book continues to intertwine the past history and present state of Cuba in a most fascinating way. Throughout the book the author uses a constantly changing style of language—mixing radio scripts, poems, song lyrics, letters, diary notes, interviews, and more. Translator Achy Obejas, originally from Cuba, has translated two previous books by Wendy Guerra and includes a most relevant and interesting note on Cuban Spanish, which reflects how she has masterfully transferred the epic story into English.

NCBR review of Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, translated by Katherine Silver, from the Spanish

New Directions

Battles in the Desert is a classic in Mexican literature for the potency of its distilled narrative style and for its moving coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of social-class tensions, the repressive political landscape in Mexico, and expanding globalization. Through a young narrator, we see the politics seep into the playground/battleground of prepubescent boys. It's a look back without nostalgia where almost everybody—including the narrator—forges through life with various hypocrisies. The one exception of nostalgia is for a beautiful young mother of the narrator's friend, a compassionate woman whose personal life is trapped in a larger political drama. José Emilio Pacheco revised this groundbreaking novel relentlessly until it was published in 1981. Likewise, award-winning translator Katherine Silver has extensively revised her 1987 translation of Battles in the Desert to celebrate the 40th year of the novel's publication. This stunning new translation expertly conveys the English sprinkled through in the original—of film stars, cars, and mass-market products—and the Mexican context by preserving inventive phonetic new spellings like "jotdog" and "ayescreem" and key political terms in Mexican Spanish. Battles in the Desert delves deeply into how social and political divisions are played out in the daily lives of all the characters, and Silver's new translation captures the encroaching role of English in Mexican culture.

NCBR review of What Is Love? by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

Love is a word that children hear all the time, but it's not something they can see nor something they can hear. They probably know love is important; they certainly know that love is good, but what is it? Mac Barnett and illustrator Carson Ellis explore the concept of love in the beautiful and thought-provoking book, What Is Love? The story begins with a boy and his wise grandmother in the garden of their home. When he asks his grandmother to define love, she sends him on an adventure to find the answer himself. His first encounter is a fisherman who poetically describes love as "a fish." When the boy proclaims that he doesn't like, let alone love, fish, the fisherman responds with, "You do not understand." As the boy continues his quest to find an answer, he has similar frustrating interactions with an actor, a carpenter, a soldier, and even a cat! When he finally comes home after a prolonged journey, he realizes that love is his home, love is his grandma's embrace.

It's hard to imagine the reader being able to resist the urge to envelop a child in a big warm hug at the end of this heartwarming story.

NCBR review of Home Is in Between by Mitali Perkins, Illustrated by Lavanya Naidu

Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers/Macmillan

Is home a place, or is home a feeling? Mitali Perkins's Home Is in Between explores the complex concept of what home means to a child.

The story begins with a young child, Shanti, moving from a small Bengal village to a town in the United States. There are things in her new home that are familiar—her mom's cooking, stories in her native language—but those comforts evaporate the moment she sets foot outside. She is open to learning and exploring everything that's new but often feels stuck between two worlds and not firmly fitting in either one. She goes back and forth between remembering and learning, wanting to be back in her village while also craving acceptance in her new town. In the end, she sees some of the similarities between her old and new homes and realizes that she doesn't need to choose between her village and her town: she can embrace both and live in between. For any child who has moved across the world, or even across town, this story will help work through the discomfort of missing old experiences, embracing new ones, and finding comfort in loving both.

NCBR review of Out of the Blue: How Animals Evolved from Prehistoric Seas by Elizabeth Shreeve, Illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon

Candlewick Press

Evolution is a topic that has been tackled countless times in children's books, but perhaps not with the same curiosity and beauty as Elizabeth Shreeve's Out of the Blue: How Animals Evolved from Prehistoric Seas, gorgeously illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon.

The story starts with a question about which two animals are closest relatives between a hippo, dolphin, or shark, and then explores the answer across billions of years of evolution. Each spread explores an evolutionary period and pairs it with brief narrative and illustrated examples of some of the creatures alive during that time. The story of what's happening underwater and on land takes twists and turns as evolution unfolds. What could be a boring timeline becomes an action-packed story asking, "What's a poor fish to do?" when there is less oxygen in the oceans and more in the air. The story comes full circle and answers the question on the first page of the book about animal relatives. (Spoiler alert: the hippo and the dolphin are the closest relatives.) Children will spend hours poring over the pictures of the animals that bring this story of evolution to life.

NCBR review of The Lion of Mars by Jennifer L. Holm

Random House Books for Young Readers

Eleven-year-old Bell’s family is a group of adults, kids, and a cat named Leo, all living communally in a settlement on Mars. He had been brought as a baby on the long journey from Earth and grew up sheltered on the red planet. He pores over books about Earth animals and especially admires lions, who live in prides and raise their cubs communally, just as he and the other kids were raised. Their rules say that there can be no communication with settlements of other countries, whether French, Chinese, Finnish, or Russian. What Bell thinks is a meteorite (or alien ship?) falls near their settlement, and the children decide to “borrow” a rover to see what happened. They don’t know that a terrible rover accident had killed one of their crew members, under suspicious circumstances, casting a shadow over any hope of international friendship. Bell tries to be the brave catalyst for healing communication between the foreign settlements; he is the Lion of Mars, who needs to find a solution. Warm-hearted characters make a village of the settlement, including Salty Bill the cook, Phinneus the botanist, Meems the doctor, Sai the tough commander, all of them teachers and family. It's exciting to see science fiction written for middle graders. There is gentle humor, love, and innocence in this well-told story of the human spirit seeking community even on Mars.

NCBR review of Recipe for Disaster by Aimee Lucido

Versify

Hannah, her older brother Samuel, her Grandma Mimi, and her parents have a warm, joyous family life filled with Grandma Mimi’s recipes and the smell of baking. When her best friend Shira has a bat mitzvah, complete with dancing and a first kiss with Jeremy Brewer, Hannah decides that she wants one, too. And though Grandma Mimi is Jewish, Hannah’s parents say they aren’t, and she doesn’t understand why they are so determined that she and her brother aren’t. But Hannah still yearns for a bat mitzvah and believes that she is Jewish, for reasons she doesn’t really understand, though Victoria, her new Jewish friend, thinks her insistence on it is insulting. So, Hannah decides to make her own bat mitzvah, without anyone’s permission. She learns that a family secret is the reason they aren’t Jewish, somehow involving her estranged Aunt Yael, a rabbi. Grandma Mimi arranges for Hannah to secretly study Hebrew with Aunt Yael. While Hannah comes to know the truth about her family and her feelings about being Jewish, she grows up and even finds true friendship along the way. Short chapters are interspersed with recipes for rugelach and macaroons, recipe portraits of friends and family, poems, and letters. The result, in bright and engaging dialogue, is a deeply thoughtful exploration for the young teen of who or what is God, what it is to practice religion differently, and what it is to be Jewish.

NCBR review of The Samosa Rebellion by Shanthi Sekaran

Katherine Tegen Books

On the imagined island of Mariposa, immigrants have a life rich with community and family. But there is a cloud over the beautiful island, an anti-immigrant nationalism, a movement at the highest levels of government. The sinister president divides the citizens between Butterflies, who have lived in the country for at least three generations, and Moths, newer immigrants like Muki Krishnan’s family. His parents own a market and surveillance drones called Dragonflies swoop through their neighborhood and peer into windows. Paati, his grandmother, is the newest arrival. She wakes him at dawn in their shared bedroom, and makes him do yoga. Before she moved to Mariposa, he slept a lot and tried to fit in. Muki also has a scholarship to an elite school. For a school project, he is paired with the popular daughter of Mariposa’s intimidating top general. When Muki’s beloved Paati is taken to a detention camp, her rescue turns the school project into a rebellion of Moths against Butterflies, and the adventure of their lives. His resistance to the rise of the Butterflies' way of thinking, watching his parents, and his grandmother’s spunk, teach him to stand up for himself. The once idyllic nation suffers from racism, classism, and issues of xenophobia that parallel our contemporary national issues. After lots of swashbuckling, fast bike riding, and crawling bravely under barbed wire, Muki and his middle school pals attempt to become heroes and help bring change and hope to their country in this passionate and deftly written novel.

NCBR review of Luck of the Titanic by Stacey Lee

G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers

Valora Luck's dream of leaving England, finding her twin brother Jamie, and becoming a circus performer are all quashed when she is stopped from boarding a luxurious ocean liner because Chinese immigrants aren't allowed into America. But Val's acrobatic expertise comes in handy when she manages to stow away under a transported car. At first, she masquerades as an affluent woman of status who gets to model haute couture in first class. Then, she also disguises herself as a male crew member who eats and hangs out in third class on the lower decks of the ship. By pulling off the double charade, Val tracks down her brother and even creates new allies in the process. Eventually, she and Jamie audition for an influential circus owner who is also aboard and may offer to take them to America on a special work permit—until the unthinkable transpires, and all that matters anymore is survival. Vivid depictions of lush shipboard settings and period fashions, as well as compelling relationship dynamics, constitute this fresh perspective about one of the world's most tragic disasters. The event's historical integrity is preserved while informing us of the prevalent discrimination against Asians and many other minorities during this era. Fictional characters and actual personages intermingle in a deftly balanced story whose conflicts and plot twists never cease to surprise. From comforting to heartbreaking, celebratory to poignant, this book's haunting climax will stick with you long after the last page.

NCBR review of The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore

Feiwel & Friends

One shard of mirrored glass gets into Ciela's eye, and her entire world transforms. Trees disappear overnight, flower petals turn into mirrors, and even the Santa Ana winds don't come. What's worse is she loses her gift for creating enchanted pan dulce, along with her local status as La Bruja de los Pasteles, the girl who knows what baked goods customers want before they do. And all this is because she is haunted by the memory of a boy she barely knows.

As facts from a traumatic event at a party are slowly unveiled, it becomes evident that Ciela and the boy named Lock were both victims of a sexual assault. Lock, who also gets mirrored glass in his eye, represses any recall of what happened to him—it manifests as reckless anger. Eventually, they develop a guarded relationship during which Ciela tries to help Lock by hiding the truth of what transpired on that awful night. The non-linear storyline of this reimagining of The Snow Queen uses strong symbolism and eloquent prose to depict heart-rending trauma and the efficacy of healing. The transmogrification of the natural world's warmth and beauty into cold, glassy surfaces represents a defense mechanism; family, friendship, and culinary mojo signify empowerment. It all comes together through the evocative imagery and indelible characterizations of this spellbinding contemporary tale that leaves a lasting impression.

NCBR review of The Girls I've Been by Tess Sharpe

G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers

For five years, Nora has acted like a normal teenager, but that's about to change. The day after Wes, her ex, finds her kissing their mutual friend Iris, they all need to meet at a bank to deposit money from a fundraiser. If that wasn't awkward enough, they find themselves held hostage by armed bank robbers. As the situation escalates, Nora realizes she needs to draw upon her past skills as protegé to a con artist: her mother.

Intimate alternating flashbacks slowly reveal a complex character arc, and we discover each personality Nora inhabited to fulfill her mother's expectations regarding every con they performed together. But when Nora's mom falls for and marries a man they targeted, his abuse of them leads to a violent confrontation that results in Nora's rescue by her older sister, Lee. While Nora tries hard to ascertain her own true identity, it all comes together during the bank hold-up as she draws on her experience to conduct the ultimate con. Using MacGyver-like skills, unconventional problem-solving, and unusual psychology, she attempts to facilitate her escape and protect her friends.

With a plot that stands the bank-heist trope on its head, then takes it for a rollercoaster ride, this book is daring and bold, intense yet heart-warming. As varied as the protagonist's many guises, its densely layered narrative exemplifies the possibilities of being whoever you choose and standing your ground against all odds.