Hello. I’m writing this from that space of low-key joy and low-key dread that is a rainy Sunday evening in early- to mid-December. The world— the unrelenting violence in the world— feels heavy lately, but I hope you’re finding some light this season. From what I see on social media, some of my friends are making latkes, some are pondering the mystery of Advent. I’m just over here getting ready for the secular American/vaguely pagan celebration of Christmas/Solstice that is my wont. My mother and I have started a tradition, when we’re together on Solstice, of lighting candles, eating Swedish Visiting Cake, toasting with wine, and taking about our hopes for the year ahead. That and my yearly viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas are really all I need. (Surely we can learn all we need from Linus.) Well, all I need are those things and Christmas cookies. And new Christmas pajamas and a new book. [Cue The Jerk. “All I need is this ashtray. All I need is this lamp, this ashtray, and …”]
However you are celebrating, I thought I’d post a short roundup of some books that I am loving recently! Perfect to buy for yourself or a loved one for Icelandic Book Christmas Eve (Jolabokaflod).
Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023) by Jessica Cuello
I am in awe of this poetry collection in which Jessica Cuello recreates the voice of Mary Shelley, in the form of letters to her mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and others. As Philip Metres notes in the introduction to his great interview with Cuello, the book “offers keen insight into what fueled Mary Shelley’s imagination, from the wound of losing her mother when she was an infant to her confusion about her stern and distant father; from her vexation about her complicated relationship with Percy Shelley to the grief of losing baby after baby to early death.”
I deeply admire the way Cuello synthesizes her research into a book that conveys the shining, poetic intellect and deep losses of Mary Shelley in language that is vivid and startling and true.
Below are two poems from the collection:
Buffalo Girl (Boa Editions, 2023) by Jessica Q. Stark
This collection of poems is a masterclass in reapproaching, exploding, and reclaiming the narratives. The book moves between poems exploring Stark’s Vietnamese matrilineal inheritances and erasures of versions of Little Red Riding Hood, interwoven with collaged photos from her mother’s life in Vietnam.
From the Boa Editions description:
Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.
If you want to know what it looks like when an artist uses all her available creative and intellectual faculties to redeploy the inherited stories, read this book. You can read pieces from the collection here.
Bright (Sarabande Books, 2022) by Kiki Petrosino
Bright is a wonderful example of how fragmented poetic prose can help a writer and her readers approach and make meaning of trauma. (Full disclosure/a plug: I’m moderating a panel on “Fragmented Inheritances: Lyric Essay and Intergenerational Trauma” at the AWP Conference in February, and Kiki Petrosino is one of the panelists!)
As Petrosino notes at the beginning of the book, “Bright is an American slang term for light-skinned people of Black & white ancestry. It’s not a compliment.” What follows is an unfurling (unraveling?) of threads of national, family, and personal narrative, exploring the author’s youth in “a nearly all-white town” in Pennsylvania; her inheritances by way of her Italian grandfather, Prospero; haunting nods to The Tempest; and an uneasy consideration of American legacies of Brightness via Thomas Jefferson. Petrosino writes, “Jefferson is the shadow I can’t quite catch, hard white glint in the mirror of my own Brightness.”
You can read an excerpt here.
Happily (Random House, 2023) by Sabrina Orah Mark
I mentioned this essay collection in my last post, about using fairy tales to create a “necessary distance” when approaching life material. In this memoir-in-essays, Mark circles around and then dives straight into the messiest bits of life, her own psyche, and our collective American experience of living through All of It, and she does it with the help of the fairy tale. As the jacket copy explains, “Through these tales . . . , Mark excavates her life— the experience of being a third wife, of losing her grandmother, of step mothering, of raising Black Jewish boys in the South so far from her own upbringing in Orthodox Brooklyn.” I love these essays.
And speaking of reapproaching the available narratives, check out the glorious abundance of chapbooks and the literary zine/journal that is Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Selected and hand-sewn by my friend Sara Lefsyk, Ethel is a place for a rich and varied community of poets and artists to exist and intermingle. (The beautiful artistry of Ethel can even be found at the Whitney Museum gift shop!) Ethel’s 2024 Full- and Half-Year Subscriptions are on sale now, and they help support Sara-Ethel’s beautiful and important work.
And of course, you could consider a course from Muse!
I realized in writing this list that many of the books I’m loving lately involve creative research and a new exploration of the available narratives. As someone who’s engaged in literary scholarship and now focuses mostly on lyric essay and memoir-based writing, I am very drawn to the idea of “creative research” and how following one’s threads of interest can inform or round out life-based writing.
If you’re also interested in creative work with a research component, check out Megan Baxter’s winter course The Writer as Researcher, which just opened today!
And check out our upcoming January courses:
New Year Writing Retreat for Women
Writing Beyond the Known: Exploring the Possible through Speculative Nonfiction (self-guided)
Thank you for being here! Wishing us all peace and light.