Book Picks

September is associated with the end of summer, with a return to school and various deadlines and responsibilities. Perhaps you’d rather forget all those dreary things, or at least escape them for a time. Leonora Carrington’s The Milk of Dreams will transport readers to a land where children grow wings for ears and their heads fly away from their bodies, laughing. Carrington was a surrealist painter and the author of novels, short stories, and plays. The Milk of Dreams is a book of poems and drawings for children. Carrington’s enchanting, sometimes sinister dreamscapes offer an opportunity to look deeply at the world around us with wonder and with laughter.

When I crave a day with a good friend in New York City, but can’t get there, I go out to lunch with Frank O’Hara.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look 
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

“A Step Away from Them,” from the seminal collection Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, starts with this clear-cut scene from a typical New York day. It’s 1956 but it could very well be today that we walk the streets with him. 

With his trademark wit and intellect, O’Hara invites us into his life with a casual grace that can reach any reader. His observations about everything, from the way neon signs look in the sunlight to a master’s work of art, become a lively conversation between poet and reader. I read Frank O’Hara as if I am talking to a friend, highlighted here in these lines from “St. Paul and All That,” 1961. 

I am alive with you
                         full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety
hardness and softness
                         listening while you talk and talking while you read
 

Frank O’Hara graciously straddled the line of the Beat generation and the New York School. Lunch Poems, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, cements that idea. So, go out to lunch with our friend Frank, soak up his warmth and wit, and spend the rest of your day a little lighter and a little more aware of the world around you. 

Alice Oswald’s Memorial names itself a version, an excavation, of Homer’s Iliad. In her introduction, she advises the reader: “I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.” In this version of the Trojan War, Oswald beams light on and through the names of 200 men killed in the war. In the following lines some are granted lives: families, lovers, homes, qualities unrelated to the battlefield. Some are granted individual, particular deaths. Most remain only names preceded by the names of others and followed by the names of others.

Extended similes spread like water or clouds between the dead of Memorial. Each evokes scenes from the natural world, pastoral settings, and far-away homes—the familiar world startling and strange within the litany of violence and death. The nature of erasure, and the white space in the text, breaks apart the pair being compared. The reader learns what something is like, but not what that something is. Each “like” could be stitched to the description of the death preceding, but the word also points to what has been erased, to bright light of the chasm created by the white space, and what grows in the liminal spaces erasure creates.

In the introduction, Oswald, a classist and a poet, reminds us that “ancient critics praised [the Iliad’s] ‘enargeia,’ which means something like ‘bright unbearable beauty.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Memorial wears Homer’s epic down to the unbearable, which the reader is asked to bear: the beauty of the world and the horror humans inflict on ourselves and each other. 

Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth
And watered it and that wand became a wave
It became a whip a spine a crown
It became a wind-dictionary
It could speak in tongues
It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers
And then a storm came spinning by
And it became a broken tree uprooted
It became a wood pile in a lonely field

This book, made of letters, is a love letter itself. Not just from Sarah Ruhl to Max Ritvo, but to friendship itself. A true friend is a rare thing – not just someone whose company you enjoy, but someone who irrevocably changes your life for the better, who leaves their mark on your very soul. It is even more precious when two artists find each other in this way, as Sarah and Max did. They met when Sarah was Max’s student at Yale, but as any educator will know, our students frequently end up teaching us far more than we teach them (sometimes clichés are true for a reason), and Max was no exception. Over the next four years, the writing they inspired in one another is a true gift, one that we, the readers, are privileged enough to witness through their correspondence.

For example, from Max:

“Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That’s what your letter meant to me.”

And from Sarah:

“Courage, I say, 
is you, 
Max.

In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest 

a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.

You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting I hope, still warm.”

Grief and loss touch so many aspects of their story, and Sarah does not shy away from that in her retelling. It is an unflinching portrayal of the deep injustice of death approaching when one’s life has barely begun, when there is still so much more to say. Max passed away after his battle with cancer when he was just twenty-five years old. There is no way to spin that as anything but what it was: a heartbreaking loss. But in all her work, Sarah has an immense ability to provide us with hope, even within the darkest of moments, and with truth. This is not a sentimental tear-jerker of an illness narrative. It is honest. It is real. We see Max’s humor, his passion, his talent, and the joy he brought to everyone he met shine through the pages of this book. He did not waste one second of his (to borrow another poet’s turn of phrase) one wild and precious life, creating a truly exceptional body of work to leave the world before he left it far too soon. And now Sarah has given us yet another gift: Max’s memory becomes a living, breathing thing in her new play adaptation of Letters From Max, which the Poetry Foundation has the great privilege of presenting to the public later this month, following its off-Broadway premiere in 2023.

I could go on and on about my love for this beautiful book and my excitement for its new incarnation, but instead, I’ll leave you with a beloved quote from Sarah’s poem, “Lunch with Max on the Upper East Side,” which first appeared in Letters From Max and was later published in her debut poetry collection, 44 Poems for You (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“Max is a poet.
Max is a poem.
We all become poems
in the end.”

A reading of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Letters from Max will be performed at the Poetry Foundation at 2:00 PM CDT on June 29th, 2024. More details and registration information for this event can be found here.

In March my father passed away, and I understood something that I had previously known, but more shallowly: among its other uses, poetry is a container for grief. In Economy of the Unlost, the poet and scholar Anne Carson examines the ways two poets from vastly different eras and cultures invented new poetic forms for grieving. Born in Greece in 556 B.C., Simonides of Keos was a lyric poet known for his elegies and epigrams. Paul Celan was a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor who wrote poems in German, the language of his parents’ murderers. Carson has placed these writers “side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface in which the other may come into focus.” Carson lays a careful trail for the reader, guiding them through the particulars of the circumstances in which each poet was writing. Simonides, the first poet to craft verse for inscription on gravestones, employs a radical concision dictated by economy. Celan, writing in a language whose meaning had been perverted by atrocity, reshapes and excavates words in order to salvage their value. Holding both poets to each other’s light, Carson offers the reader a deeper understanding of one of poetry’s central impulses: to bear that which is unbearable, which all will bear.

I re-read Khadijah Queen’s collection, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, at least once a year. A series of kinetic prose poems that flow, without punctuation, from one encounter with a famous man to the next, and sound out the complex and muscular webs of power shaping each encounter along gender, race, class, age, and the double-edged gift of femme beauty. As the title promises, each poem presents one famous man that the speaker (or her ancestors) met (or nearly-met), and a description of what the speaker, in some poems aged 8 and in others aged 40, was wearing. Through these memories, which range from sweet to pathetic to disappointing to violent, Queen’s girlhood and young adulthood are rendered in such specific and hooking detail that she beats, alive, on each page as she learns how to move through a world where her beauty attracts attention, both wanted and unwanted. Where men tell her, again and again, what she already knows: the meaning of her own name. By the end, I move beyond my impulse to protect her. I want to listen to what she has to say.

The experience of moving through Anne Carson’s Nox, a collection printed on one continuous sheet of paper folded over and over into the dimensions of a book page, accordioned inside a box, evokes the archeological dig of personal, familial, and cultural memory.

After the death of her estranged brother, Carson, whose author bio always notes “teaches ancient Greek for a living,” turns, returns, to translation. A photograph of a Latin poem, Catullus’ 101, an elegy for his brother, begins the book. The unfolding text provides a winding path for translating the famously untranslatable Latin poem into English via a series of dictionary entries and etymological histories, interwoven with familial ephemera and Carson’s memories. The resulting work moves how grief moves—in a spiral, a flock of fragments, each present moment broken by the invisible and bleeding history.

Nox asks me to consider how reading, and remembering, are always acts of translation. It asks me to consider how my history (personal, familial, and cultural) shapes the text in front of me, and the me standing before the text. There is a vulnerability, and generosity, in baring and preserving the process of composition: the insistence on the tactical, the material artifacts orbiting an elegy; and the hand behind the book, the one that scores a word (DIES) into paper, that tears preserved letters into ragged scraps, that cuts family photographs.

Carson reminds me that asking questions, about history, memory, and language, is the work of the poet and the work of the historian: “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” At the moment I am writing this, in the second year of a global pandemic, I have, so far, survived. Many have not. This poem, this book object, shows one way to carry, to fashion a thing that carries.

“Odessa is everywhere,” writes Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminksky in his astonishing debut, Dancing in Odessa (2004, Tupelo Press). You may know him by the kerfuffle around his prescient and widely-misinterpreted poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” which appears in his National Book Award and National Book Critics’ Circle Award- shortlisted second collection, Deaf Republic. Dancing in Odessa attempts to reassemble, on every page, and every place that this book is opened, from the rubble time and distance has made of it in his memory, a coastal Ukranian city from which Kaminsky and his family became refugees in 1993. This assembly and reassembly gains a kind of propulsive momentum, as if set to the music of Kaminsky’s lyric, or, indeed, like the title of the book’s third section, “Musica Humana”-- that of our human lives. It sounds like something your aunts and grandmothers danced to, it sounds like a generation erased, it is heartbreaking– and yet, reading, you are swept up into it, for, as Kaminsky writes, “we dance to keep from falling.”

Like the lineage of dissident poets he invokes across the collection– Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Isaac Babel, to name a few– and, indeed, like the current refugee Ukrainian poets whose safe passage and financial support Kaminsky has doggedly organized via Twitter, Kaminksy’s work as a poet is to devise “a human window” into a country where love, old music, daily embarrassments, and variously prepared fish existed among the horrors enacted by repressive regimes. The horrors of the past, Kaminsky says, compel him to write as if his hands have been set on fire. And while the horrors are ongoing? Our memories, too, are precious: “At night, I woke to whisper: Yes, we lived./ We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.” This prophetic book changed my life– it is the one to read now.

Making it through the frigid winter months is no small feat (especially for my fellow Chicagoans), and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the return of these blissfully warm days than heading to the park with my copy of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. The essays and vivid illustrations that make up this book are a love letter to the beautiful and bizarre creatures that call this planet home – from axolotls to catalpa trees, octopi to corpse flowers, Aimee’s lifelong passion for the natural world simply radiates off the page. She uses her beloved flora and fauna to paint an unflinching portrait of the joys and trials of childhood, coming of age, falling in love, motherhood, and the other milestones that make up a life. In her chapter on the narwhal, she writes,

“A white boy who would take my brown hand in his, putting it to his heart when he makes a promise so I can feel his heartbeat and the warmth residing there. If only the narwhal could have taught me how to listen for those clicks of connection, the echo reverberating back to me.”

In an age where so many of us spend our lives indoors and in front of screens, Aimee’s stunning prose is a reminder of the wonder that is truly all around us, just waiting to be discovered.

“To not be seen at home … / To not be seen at school, / not on the street, not anywhere …” So begins Alcides Villaça’s mysterious and delightful children’s book, The Invisible, illustrated by Andrés Sandoval and translated from the Portuguese by Flávia Rocha and Endi Bogue Hartigan. In this moving tale of a child whose special power is invisibility, Villaça’s elliptical text and Sandoval’s striking illustrations immerse the reader in a world that is constantly mutating, an effect intensified by the inclusion of red transparencies that render portions of the text and illustrations invisible to the reader at strategic moments. Using the form of the book itself as a poetic device, The Invisible submerges the reader in the wonder and sadness of moving through the world unseen, building to a moment of emotional catharsis when the narrator finally chooses to reveal himself, declaring, “Let them know me.” A book that will resonate with readers of all ages, The Invisible is a unique enchantment tinged with melancholy, a perfect companion for the last days of summer.

In The Work-Shy, The Blunt Research Group, a “nameless constellation of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds,” translate and transform archival documents from the first youth prison in California, asylums, work camps, and sterilization colonies. The resulting series of poems, each bearing the name of an incarcerated individual as title, tangle the language of the ward, the “fieldworker” and casefile author, and the ward’s family and friends into haunting, fractured forms. Fragments of salvaged language shape and are shaped by the silences and white spaces created by preservation practices and poetic composition. One of the challenges to the reader is to remain within the unnerving the silences and white spaces that systemic isolation, incarceration, pathologization, and sterilization both create and depend upon.

Wrenched out of an institutional context, the clinical language of the casefile is revealed as racist, classist, ableist, and ultimately dehumanizing. A series of mirror portraits of the wards, many children; drawings, writings, and other ephemera created by various wards; Agnes Richter’s asylum jacket, hand embroidered with layers of words, phrases, and sentences; and the found language of casefiles, counters with the indisputable humanity of the incarcerated. Each artifact acts as an evolving refrain, reminding us again and again: “the names are real.”

How to write the erased histories, to speak into historical silences, without perpetuating erasure of historically marginalized people, without speaking over the systematically silenced? The Blunt Research Group addresses the ethics of their project in a series of lyrical essays framing the collection, which offer that speaking can be an act of deep listening, all poetry is to some degree collaborative, and that research is a creative act. This collection is a must read for those occupied with found materials, erasure, shaped poetry, and collaborative poetic practices. In the spirit of deep listening, let us close with lines from the jacket of Agnes R.: “my jacket is/ me// my jacket is// I am not// I am not going home.”

“Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” a bat is asked in Randall Jarrell’s 1963 children’s book The Bat Poet, after he, the first bat to write a poem, has read one about a fierce owl aloud. Accompanied by striking black and white ink illustrations by Maurice Sendak, the very same year Where the Wild Things Are was published, Jarrell spins the aching tale of a young bat who becomes a poet in a world that’s hostile to it. In the animal world, bats, having slumbered through the daylight, are mainly ignorant to the day’s gifts– such as colors, like green, gold and blue. As bat learns to become a poet, so, too, does the reader. “He felt the way you would feel,” Jarrell writes of the first time the bat observes the world around him as deserving of poetic inquiry, “if you woke up and went to the window and stayed there for hours, looking out into the moonlight.” How to write the feeling of night holding its breath? Perhaps with the breath of iambic pentameter, but stopping short two metrical feet. How to show how, all day long, chipmunks scurry up trees and then into the ground, burying acorns? Perhaps with short and then long lines, so “it all goes in and out.” How to make a poem one likes though they shiver to hear it? How to make a poem that tells how a baby bird getting fed by its mother “cheeps as if its heart were breaking”? How to write a poem so good that, like the mockingbird’s song, one forgets it’s a poem? “A mockingbird can sound like anything,” the bat writes of his hero. “He imitates the world he drove away/ So well that for a minute, in the moonlight/ Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?” Bat soon understands that life is a poem, just as poems come from life– the way birds sing, the way one shivers at the thought of a menacing predator, and holds their breath, the sound of squirrels chattering their teeth, though all these we humans might call, rhyme, meter, line, image.

Jarrell is most widely known for his poetry collections for adult readers, including the National Book Award-winning The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), in addition to his literary criticism. A contemporary of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, W.H. Auden, and even close friends with Hannah Arendt, he is perhaps lesser known than his peers because of his tragic early death. In a 1964 review of The Bat Poet in the New York Times, Hardwick wrote, “The child who understands its lessons will be wise and they are easy to understand because they are found in life.” I urge you to read this forgotten treasure and ask yourself, and your young reader: Which lessons are about poems? Which about the world?

I firmly believe that great picture books are for everyone, regardless of what age you might be. Truly exceptional picture books are works of art, and this translation of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions is one of the best examples of this ideal I have ever encountered. Valdivia and Paulson have transformed Neruda’s text, considered to be his last great work of poetry before his death, into a breathtaking landscape of visual poems. The vibrant illustrations perfectly reflect the questions on every page, each one profound in its playful simplicity. On a mountainscape against a rich cerulean sky: “Who shouted for joy / when the color blue was born?” Beneath waves swirling into a shell, teeming with fish the size of ships: “And could it be that the earth / is briefly borrowing the sea? / Won’t we have to return it, / with its tides, to the moon?” The book invites you to dive in and explore its depths with fold-out pages, which reveal extended illustrations and hidden questions. For example, a seemingly peaceful hillside folds out to reveal an erupting volcano and a massive, scowling feline, stretched out beneath the words, “How many questions are in a cat?”

At its core, Book of Questions is a stunning meditation on the importance of curiosity. Neruda’s text and Valdivia’s illustrations urge us to look closely at the world around us, and to never assume we know the why, the what, or the how of Earth’s many wonders. In a time when the answers to nearly every query we can think of are quite literally at our fingertips, this book encourages us to push our boats out into the darkness of the unknown, to swim in the mystery of a question without one clear answer, or any answer at all. As the Editor’s Note states,

“These questions—playful, dancing, mysterious, paradoxical, and nourished by a radical lack of certainty—are all unanswerable. In a gracious and meaningful gesture, what Neruda shares with us as an old man isn’t an arrival at Truth, but the astonishing freedom of a curious mind that dares us to reimagine the world again and again.”

May we all be so lucky to live our lives like Neruda: insatiably curious, for the rest of our days.

I’ve been haunted by Atsuro Riley’s poem Moth since encountering it in the pages of Poetry in 2015. “Came the day I came here young / I mothed / my self. I cleaved apart.” The poem is marked by turnings where the speaker remakes a self in the wake of trauma, even as it is the hidden self that forms the basis for the poem’s devastating refrain: “My born name keeps but I don’t say.” Something of this cleaving informs all the poems in Heard-Hoard. Riley splits words apart and arranges them in counterpoint to create a singular music, an effect that reminded me of cracking open a geode to reveal its secret inner glittering. Readers of these poems will enter a fully formed world, with its own characters, myths, chorus, and repetitions. Sonically and emotionally complex, Heard-Hoard is a collection to treasure and return to.

“Poetry is the language of intensity,” the poet C.D. Wright once wrote. “Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.” When I took a workshop with C.D. Wright in college I was frightened by her intensity. It was only years later, after her tragic and untimely death, that I discovered that I loved her work, and understood intensity as part of her poetics. It is the ruling logic of my favorite Wright book, her 1982 collection “Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues”-- now out of print and, luckily, available to read at our library. The collection is her third, and her first full-length work not published on Lost Roads, the press famously founded by Frank Stanford and helmed by Wright after his death. Though not as explicitly documentary in nature as some of her later works, the poetry of “Translations” is that of everyday utterances. These poems are sure-handed spells, stark and at times sardonic, as in the poem, “Obedience of the Corpse”: “She hopes the mother’ milk is good a while longer,/ The woman up the road is still nursing – but she remembers the neighbor/ And the dead woman never got along.” The perceptive knife with which she collages the world together is of unparalleled sharpness. Her poem “Falling Beasts” is, I think, one of the best and most instructive examples of the associative leap in contemporary poetry: “Girls marry young/ in towns in the mountains./ They’re sent to the garden/ For beets. They come to the table/ With their hair gleaming,/ Their breath missing./ In my book love is darker/ than cola. It can burn/ A hole clean through you.” The book brings no airs, down to its lack of notes, not a hint of sentimentality, at the back matter– only a curt biographical statement wherein she claims merely to have “earned a living in Arkansas, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco as a teacher of writing, as a publisher, and at various less gratifying employment.” If you are a writer, I urge you to let it teach you her language– the language of intensity– whether you are lucky enough to stumble upon a copy, or would like to come on down to the library, and read it amidst our collection.

I’ve never considered compound words to be a particularly beautiful thing. Helpful? Sure. A fun puzzle for early readers to piece together? Absolutely. But when I think of rich, gorgeous language, the compound word does not come to mind. And that is what is so special about this book – like all great poets, Erlichman shows us that if we look closely and listen carefully, there is a certain type of magic to be found in everyday things.

Be/Hold is filled to the brim with love – for friends, for ourselves, and for language. Erlichman tickles our hearts with her playful use of compound words both real and imaginary, like honeysong, bookworm, nightjar, slowpoke, yesbody, sweetpea, braincloud, jellyfish, seesaw, and the title of the book itself: behold. She writes in her afterword (also a compound word! They’re everywhere!), “To behold is to simultaneously be and hold. It is stillness and activity. It is presence and permission. Let go and carry. Life can be challenging. Learning to be/hold can keep us grounded and open.” A life lesson perfectly contained in six letters. And it doesn’t stop there. Erlichman also presents us with the idea that not only is friendship a compound word, but compound words themselves are friendships, as they “illuminate how much more interesting and vibrant life is when we unite.” They are poems in miniature, tiny odes to “the creativity it takes to merge many truths.”

This book, like many in our children’s collection, is intended for young people but can be meaningful for readers of any and all ages. Erlichman does not shy away from the fact that being alive is not a simple task. It is full of complications and challenges, many of which can feel insurmountable. But with its sparse, precise text and imaginative, abstract illustrations, this brilliant little book shows us how much more wonderful life can be when we choose love, even when we are at our lowest. When we learn to grow together, rather than drift apart.

“It’s not easy to be brave. The waves are high, the sea is dark. But come, become with me.”

I first encountered Heather Christle’s The Crying Book during a period when I found myself crying a lot in public, at less than ideal times, for reasons that were not easily explained. A colleague, both wise and kind, lent me her copy of The Crying Book. With its ornate cover of celestial tears, The Crying Book announces to the reader that is not going to be an apology for the inappropriateness of tears; rather, it locates episodes of crying and ideas about crying in art, science, and the author’s life as a way of understanding what happens when we cry. Christle employs a poet’s logic to weave together anecdotes of physical and emotional extremis, resulting in a work that is unique, startling, and insightful. Christle writes: “Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near, or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.” Those who have felt their tears to be a burden or a mystery will find solace in the brilliance of this elegant text.

Springtime has always been a season defined by both beauty and horror for me. In Chicago, the transition lurches between summer and winter temperatures; violent storms fell older tress, set off sirens, and cut the power; strange green shoots break through the ground and explode into soft, fantastic blooms. For May, I wanted to highlight a collection that holds both beauty and horror, and so teaches me how to do the same.

Beth Bachmann’s Temper begins with the murder of the speaker’s sister. As the poems unfurl, we learn that the sister was killed in a train yard, sometime after midnight, while waiting for her father to give her a ride home from the station. We learn that the father is the only suspect. The murder is never solved. This collection navigates media’s fascination with beautiful, young, dead girls, and society’s disinclination to actually engage issues of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence; femicide; human trafficking; or the alarming number of women and girls disappeared each year.

These poems are haunting and haunted. The nature of trauma is to return, to circle the wound: the body of the sister that appears over and over throughout the poems. In describing her body, Bachmann both writes into and through the glamorization of violence against women, by making the reader look, again and again, at the sister, and the world, including the men, surrounding her body. We, the reader, are implicated in that looking.

How to speak after unspeakable violence, about unspeakable violence, when the language and images you have inherited glamorize and sexualize violence, and the violated body? How could a sister speak of anything else?

Bachmann is telling one of the oldest stories in the world, and she does so in a way that not only resists dominant narratives surrounding trauma and violence. She forges a new language, a new story. The poems changed and continue to change me, as the speaker predicts in “After the Telling” describes: “You’ve put your hand// through my body and are caught/ in the rack of vines// I’ve descended into.”

Goodnight Moon is one of the most popular children’s books of all time - since its publication in 1947, millions of people have read the classic tale of a little bunny saying goodnight to the objects and creatures in his great green room. But most people know little to nothing about the wild, spectacular life of that great green room’s creator, Margaret Wise Brown. Author Mac Barnett is here to change that.

In just 42 pages, one for each year of Brown’s life, Barnett paints a vivid picture of the radical woman who revolutionized children’s literature. This is not a detailed biography - the text and accompanying illustrations are both beautiful and profound in their simplicity, much like Brown’s own writing. He tells us only what is most essential, because, as he writes, “You can’t fit somebody’s life into 42 pages, so I am just going to tell you some important things.” Among those important things:

• She was a queer woman who had relationships with both men and women (hence the selection of this book for LGBTQ+ Pride Month)

• As a child, she had thirty-six pet rabbits - when they died, she skinned them and wore their pelts

• She swam naked in ice-cold water

• A conservative librarian banned her books from New York Public Library for many years (Brown herself was banned from even entering the library)

• Her favorite dog was named Crispin’s Crispian

Barnett acknowledges that many people think some of these things are not appropriate for children to read. But he includes them anyway, because they are true, and from what we know about her, this is exactly what Margaret Wise Brown would have wanted. She didn’t mind that many people (mostly grown-ups) thought her books were strange, and she kept writing because she thought children deserved to have quality books about things they were interested in, just like adults. She knew children liked stories about things they knew and saw every day, things like tables and telephones and kittens and balloons, things that grown-ups might call “ordinary” or “boring.” She knew all this because she actually talked to children, and used their opinions, thoughts, and feelings to form her stories. She wrote for children, in a way that no author had done before.

Quite possibly the most important thing about Margaret Wise Brown was her commitment to truth, honesty, and artistry in her writing. Barnett writes, “Lives are strange. And there are people who do not like strange stories, especially in books for children. But sometimes you find a book that feels as strange as life does. These books feel true. These books feel important. Margaret Wise Brown wrote books like this, and she wrote them for children, because she believed children deserve important books.”

Wishing all readers a happy Pride, full of strange and wonderful books!

Robin Ekiss’s melancholy, evocative collection The Mansion of Happiness takes readers into a world of Victorian-era toys, illusions, and games. Like the novelist Elena Ferrante, Ekiss appears fascinated by dolls as inherently charged, frequently maternal objects. Within the poems in this collection, dolls are doppelgangers and surrogates, repositories for grief and longing. Dolls are also mechanical, and Ekiss employs the imagery of mechanization to stunning effect, as in these lines from “Conversation with Doll”:

Don’t feel bad: grief is also mechanical,
winding around everything we know.

I’m like that too—speaking only to myself
in the company of others. As they say:

wear the same dress every day,
rehearse your own forgiveness.

These are poems to read slowly, savoring their musicality and the intricate nesting of their images, an effect not unlike the layering of Matryoshka dolls. The Mansion of Happiness was Ekiss’s debut collection, published in 2009. Hopefully, readers won’t have to wait too many more years before gaining access to a second collection.