NCBR review of Dear California edited by David Kipen

Redwood Press

Running from January 1 through December 31, Dear California tries to tell the story of a place by arranging, in day-by-day sequence, though not chronologically, selections from centuries' worth of journals and correspondence written there. With writings from renowned figures, iconoclasts, politicians, actors, and artists such as Cesar Chavez, Allen Ginsberg, Groucho Marx, Octavia Butler, Susan Sontag, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Jane Fonda, Zora Neal Hurston, Frida Kahlo, John F. Kennedy, D.H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stegner, Dolores Huerta, and John Muir, among many, many others—entries play off each other in quirky, insightful, lewd, and clever ways. Many underscore how far we've come, many still, underscore how far we have to go; from indigenous stories told before the Spanish arrived on the Pacific coast through to present-day tweets, blogs, and other ephemera. Héctor Tomas says, "Dear California will cement David Kipen's reputation as a literary treasure of the West. With a series of intimate, spontaneous, and surprising moments, this collection revels in the many crazy and magical turns the Golden State has taken in its history." Dear California presents collected writings essential to understanding the diversity, antagonisms, despair, and abiding promise of the Golden State.

NCBR review of Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems by Maxine Chernoff

MadHat Press

Maxine Chernoff's Light and Clay is a fitting capstone to a long and distinguished career in poetry. This new volume continues her fifty-year love affair with the prose poem, illustrating her ongoing desire to expand the boundaries of poetic expression. But it also demonstrates her commitment to the world. Unlike many contemporary writers she does not write much about herself or her day-to-day life. As she tells us, "I am more interested in paying attention to the world than paying attention to myself. The world needs me more." Aphoristic, fond of fragments, and exquisitely curious, her work challenges us to re-think our most basic ideas. Time and space are illusions—everything happens everywhere all at once; as she notes, "we live daily in our youth; we live our dying too." Similarly, her fragments insist on the largest wholes; she quotes the Sufi poet Mahmud Shabistari: "In its qualities a drop of rain is like the Nile." Here is a philosophical poet who encourages (and enables) her reader to embrace the immensity and variety of the world.

NCBR review of In the Cities of Sleep by Elizabeth C. Herron

Fernwood Press

Elizabeth Herron's wonderful new book is a seismic song of global warning and connection—a great lyric report on the earth's history of human and environmental calamity—on the brutalities of war, the stripping away of the planet's resiliencies, the catastrophic ecological and human disasters and denials. Herron reminds us that we are, and have always been throughout history, too readily living in the cities of sleep—too willing to forget, to ignore the elephants in the room; too often unable or unwilling to do the work it will take to save each other and the planet. As you read these poems you will feel the earth shake; you will feel your heart quake; you will feel the daily shifts and shocks that lurk in the shadows around us wake you. The poems focus in on the many nightmares of the past as well as those that surround us now, but they do so while reminding us that there is still hope. As she says in "Meanwhile, Music": "Tree to tree, the birds fly to perch and sing / amid the sway and swing of spring's busy wind, / while wars go on, while the sea rises and the ice melts.… // All is perishing, and yet they sing—they sing."

NCBR review of Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan

Unbound Edition Press

Freedom challenges form in these contemporary pastoral (and bracingly anti-pastoral) poems set in the Midwest and Northern California. Using a template created by seventeenth century metaphysical poet John Donne, Nathan forges a new poetics of assonance, slant rhyme, and loose rhythms that, as Robert Hass says in the book's introduction, creates "an ecosystem of echoic effects." Covalently narrative and lyric, these poems interrogate landscape, history, human relationship, and poetry itself to, like the titular "eggtooth," break through the shell of tradition that shaped them and give birth to something vulnerable, shining, and new. In these pages, Nathan's apparent plainspoken style is illuminated by means of inventive diction and syntax to reveal the inner workings of a unique artistic imagination that transforms the everyday into something rich and strange. The journey from childhood to adulthood, from country to city, from past to present—these are familiar themes posing alienation against belonging—but here, they feel new, current, and vital to our time.

NCBR review of The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana

Four Way Books

The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana examines the personal as well as the historic by way of a dismantled dictionary, which the poet rebuilds and makes strange. The book's brilliant use of wordplay and language experimentation is announced by "Word," the lead poem: "unlocked / their wordhoard, they who / sent upon us wellcloud of / wordpour, abundance…" and the vastness of the concerns follow, "All the earth was / made wet and webbed-wide, / a well and a wellspring.…" The collection, the poet's first, utilizes an array of forms, including: epistles to the letters of the alphabet, odes, note/list poems, and abecedarian (and reverse-abecedarian) poems. The modes used enhance the concerns of the speaker, making for complex, curious poems that could have been written by no other poet. In "Dear O" the speaker begs, "O, // I am out of my mind / and in the woods with grief; / the world is whacked / and out of order." In talking about the personal (heritable illness, the mother) as well as more universal and historic topics (Hiroshima, night albums, the twin towers), Santana proves an agility that goes beyond use of language, while always reveling in it.

NCBR review of Leviathan by Michael Shewmaker

Louisiana State University Press

"Leviathan: from the root 'to twist, wind, or coil, and…any gigantic powerful thing." Michael Shewmaker's book-length poem engages, outrages, inspires, and frustrates. Layer upon layer of façade is coiled and twisted as we meet J. Joiner on his deathbed. Named Job by his mother, J. refuses the moniker, insisting that faith has failed to sustain him. As J. dies he is called to task for a heinous crime he committed but never paid for, and a crime committed against him that left him ruined. His suffering is a pain worse than death. Surrounding J. are his cronies and "the unnamable one" who are mirrors and interrogators. As they argue for his guilt, J. justifies his innocence. The so-called friends are judge and jury. Self-delusion, denial and denigration are confronted as one after another reduces him to rubble. J.'s argument is that stories are lies, urban legend, fiction. Shewmaker's question: What is fact? What fiction? A story that on the surface is rural America, Texas, oil, money, and power is, at its core, a morality play. But where are the lines of morality drawn? Who draws them? Reading Shewmaker is to witness the ways in which we are trapped if not by guilt then by grief and memory. "A foolish man / finds wisdom in the world—tornadoes, silos, rusting backhoes. Foolish men insist they've done no wrong. Lord knows." Leviathan takes us on a dive into the depths of human consciousness, a daring work by an award-winning writer.

NCBR review of Songbirds of the Nine Rivers by Joseph Zaccardi

Sixteen Rivers Press

The poems in this wonderful book took root when Joseph Zaccardi—as an eighteen-year-old army corpsman/medic deployed to rescue and care for the dying and severely wounded during the Vietnam War—found solace in the discovery of an anthology of Chinese and Vietnamese poetry. Since then, he has continued to read and study many translations and the history which inspired the poems here—"not [Zaccardi says] to emulate Asian poetry, for that is impossible, but to treasure its quietness and celebrate its otherness." Steeped in the history, Zaccardi inhabits and reinhabits the spirit and events of the time, bringing alive the voices of the Tang and Le Dynasties—Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei, Nguyen Trai, among others. Through him we see the world as they would have encountered it—beauty, violence, passion, compassion—so like our world today.

Here the ghosts of the past come to meet us. We hold hands; we sip chrysanthemum tea with them. As Mai Saito says on the cover: "His voice is song; his sounds are prayers." Like the title of the first poem in the book, these "Poems Teach Us How to Breathe." From "Seed Clusters": "The harmony of sounds from times past scatters, / Then coalesces and gathers, then releases."

NCBR review of North Woods by Daniel Mason

Random House

This inventive, genre-blurring novel follows a New England home over the centuries, told through the lives of its inhabitants. North Woods begins with two lovers escaping a seventeenth-century Puritan colony to build a cabin in the woods. Over time, the cabin grows and changes under the influence of different residents: an apple-obsessed English soldier, a pair of co-dependent twin sisters, a lovelorn painter modeled after Herman Melville, a pompous hunter who hires a psychic to lead a seance, and a crime reporter investigating a mysterious murder, to name a few. Ghosts creep through the root cellar, panthers stalk the woods, and a lusty beetle inadvertently brings disease to an American chestnut tree. Uncanny and often very funny, North Woods examines the effect of human interactions on the natural world, reminding us that we're all a part of history, and that the past is still very much alive.

NCBR review of The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie

Penguin Press

This is a funny, freewheeling picaresque novel about the complex family inheritances that grace and disgrace us. Her "plan," our narrator Penny Rush explains on the first page, is to escape her "most recent failures" in Santa Cruz, and take advantage of a series of "Santa Barbara crises" that provide a convenient alternative. But no plan lasts long in this comic world —not Penny's disastrous marriage and dead-end job, her grandmother's scientific explorations, her grandfather's retirement, her parents' journey into the Australian outback. Or a toupeed accountant's offer of his van, the titular Dog of the North, as Penny's temporary home while she tries to sort through this tangle of disasters. Sometimes bizarre, sometimes heartrending, sometimes horrific, sometimes just hilarious, one scene topples into the next, pulling us along with Penny as she worries and argues, travels and reminisces, begs and cajoles, with friend and foe to salvage her sanity and learn what has befallen those she loves.

NCBR review of Wildflowers by Beverly Parayno

PAWA Press/Philippine American Writers and Artists

A girl experiments with chain letters and her sexuality; her father beats her. A servant overhears an argument between a doctor and her husband that ends in violence. A woman in a wheelchair returns to her war-ravaged home. A young woman watches a friend's wife go into labor while visiting. A woman volunteers to deliver Christmas food and ends up sitting for a portrait. These nine stories each feature a Filipino American girl or woman surprised by turns of fate: by kindness disguised as anger, mistreatment represented as good fortune, mortality. In each tale Beverly Parayno offers glimpses into overlooked worlds and lives, each one observed with a quiet, understated attention. Her subdued voice and patient command of detail underscore the emotional power while undermining the melodrama. This is a collection that haunts as well as provokes.

NCBR review of Forget I Told You This by Hilary Zaid

University of Nebraska Press

Amy Black is a queer single mother and calligrapher. A stranger asks her to transcribe a love letter for him but suddenly disappears, chased by federal agents. Or so it seems. But nothing is quite what it seems in this futuristic thriller that offers the beauty of hand-drawn calligraphy as counterweight to Q, the world's largest social media company where algorithms predict not just what people covet but where they are, what they do, and why. Or so it seems. But nothing is quite what it seems. Not Amy's memories of her past. Not her sudden erotic encounters with a woman named Blue. Not her association with privacy vigilantes plotting Q's demise. Not the worries of her needy family. And certainly not her discovery of the Codex Argentus, an illuminated manuscript that might or might not even exist. How these separate elements cross, double-cross, undermine and illuminate one another provides the intricate texture of this beautifully crafted narrative.

NCBR review of Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Riverhead Books

In this dystopian climate change novel, a manmade fog has covered the world, drastically reducing the food supply. An unnamed chef longs for the disappearing flavors of her past, the sourness of endive and the sweetness of strawberry. She's accepted to cook in an "elite research community" in the Italian Alps, privately owned by a reclusive capitalist, which sits above the smog, much to the resentment of the Italian population below. There the narrator meets Aida, the capitalist's daughter and brilliant geneticist who is breeding rare and extinct species in an attempt to reshape the world into her personal vision of utopia. As the chef cooks elaborate meals for wealthy potential investors, she finds herself an inadvertent member of the ultra-elite, able to indulge every appetite while other people starve. Increasingly, she's torn between her attraction for Aida and the complex role she must take on to help secure the funding necessary to maintain her lover's vision. A sensuous investigation into decadence, greed, and the consequences of dwindling resources.

NCBR review of What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World by Dorothy Lazard

Heyday

Longtime Oakland librarian Dorothy Lazard calls her memoir about growing up Black and female in the US in the twentieth century, What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World. Lazard takes readers on a series of journeys that move from St. Louis to California, girlhood to adulthood, innocence to wisdom. Personal and political, her book is about family members, friends, and pivotal historical events in her life: the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till; the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; and the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Insights abound about self-preservation, the hippie counterculture, blockbuster movies, and the role that music played in the rise of Black pride. Lazard offers striking portraits of the wise women who helped to shape her, plus tales of her brother, Albert, who was bound for prison. Her prose is inspired and inspirational. "Everyone has a journey of their own," Lazard writes. "Everything is connected to everything else." Her book has a place on the shelf along with Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi and Maya Angelou's Tell Me Why the Caged Bird Sings. It might also prompt readers to explore, with a sense of pride and curiosity, their own genealogy.

NCBR review of Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto, artwork by Patricia Wakida

Red Hen Press

David Mas Masumoto tells a bitter sweet story in Secret Harvests, his memoir about family's hardships, especially those endured by his Aunt Shizuki. Born in 1919 with what's now commonly known as "Down Syndrome," she was mistakenly diagnosed in girlhood as a "Mongoloid idiot." She was placed in a mental institution at the same time that most of the other members of the Masumoto family were "imprisoned," as the author calls it, at Gila River Relocation Center. For years, the Masumotos didn't know if Shizuki was dead or alive, and if they might find her. Mas's quest to solve the mystery surrounding his aunt, which he describes in riveting detail, brought him to an old woman who had waged "a private war" to survive the decades she was institutionalized. Secret Harvests offers a grim picture of a time when Japanese Americans were stigmatized as aliens, deprived of their civil rights, and by law not allowed to buy and own property. "I grew up confused and perplexed," Mas Masumoto writes. "Our family annals lacked a sense of certainty and predictability." He also describes his return to the family farm where he grew the peaches that have made him famous and brought him a modicum of joy. Again and again, Masumoto writes powerful one-word sentences: "Confusion. Disbelief. Mixed Emotions, Pain, Sorrow, Shame." At the end, he says, "I continue to struggle with my family's meaning, wrestling with the culpability, grappling with responsibility, feeling remorse, then guilt."

NCBR review of Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark by Sarafina El-Badry Nance

Red Hen Press

Serafina El-Badry Nance: woman, Egyptian-American, astrophysicist, person. Too often science is understood as something practiced by insulated, white coat clad, emotionless, frequently male, beings. Nance's memoir Starstruck is a remarkable narrative of the way that a life obsession exists within a life. This memoir is intimate, revealing, and a hopeful read for anyone but particularly for women in science. Sarafina El-Badry Nance's achievements are inspiring, her prose engaging, and her passion infectious.

NCBR review of Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein

Harper

Peggy Orenstein brings her acute powers of observation and keen sense of compassion to a world-wide cottage industry largely dominated by women in Unraveling. "Knitting," she observes in the next-to-the last-chapter, is a "a prism through which to view the larger world." With whimsy and wisdom, Orenstein probes the historical past, fairy tales, such as Rumpelstiltskin, colors, especially blue, and includes accounts of her mother, father, husband and daughter, California weather, and the America of Donald Trump. Through all her chosen topics she's enthusiastic, upbeat and brilliant as when she suggests that "life, like a sweater, can come together or unravel, slowly, arduously, then oh, so very fast." Unraveling comes together gracefully and with playfulness, as when she describes her "fondness for Doris Day and irrational hostility toward Debbie Reynolds." The digressions, plus the trenchant comments about the feminine and the feminist, cohere in a narrative in which the author insists that "making something with your own hands is now almost by definition political—knitting pushes back against the dehumanization of technology and consumer culture." This book may inspire both men and women to pick up needles and knit something useful and beautiful.

NCBR review of Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins—From Spices to Vices by Noah Whiteman

Little, Brown Spark

It may take many by surprise, but plants didn't evolve complex flavors and effects in order to heal, amuse and enrich human beings. The evolution of plant chemistry as a component of the survival of plants makes up a series of fascinating stories. Evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman walks us through places, times, and dramas that surround us, often overlooked. This exploration "reveals the origins of toxins produced by plants, mushrooms, microbes, and even some animals; the mechanisms that animals evolved to overcome them," and how this "co-evolutionary arms race," a chemical war, made its way into our daily lives. These stories, "based on cutting-edge science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience," may wind up on plates, and affect the world's history and possibly its future, with political and economic narratives woven throughout.

NCBR review of Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country's Deadliest Firestorm by Anne E. Belden, Paul Gullixson, Lauren A. Spates

Permuted Press

This extensively researched book chronicles the devastating effects of the ferocious 2017 Wine Country fire that ravaged Santa Rosa, California, with a focus on the occupants of two high-end senior living facilities, Varenna and Villa Capri. The authors create a dramatic narrative of fragile lives put at risk due in large part to the negligence of most of the homes' administrators. When fire struck these homes in the early hours of October 9, only courageous relatives arrived to evacuate the homes' helpless residents, some in memory care units, others in wheelchairs or otherwise incapacitated. We are given vivid portraits of both the homes' residents and of their rescuers. Suspense builds as the flames draw closer; no one can find the keys to vehicles used to transport residents, no evacuation plans are to be found, and no administrators arrive to direct the rescue operations. First person accounts of those on the scene create a terrifying picture of the hours these residents waited to be evacuated. The book highlights the lack of accountability for these senior homes, with subsequent investigations and court cases leading to no permanent solutions.

NCBR review of Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm by Gayle Greene

Johns Hopkins University Press

Teaching liberal arts is an art, a dance, a performance involving years mastering a subject and a deep understanding of human nature, as well as the inner freedom to accept unknown outcomes. It is the stuff of dreams. Those who would channel liberal arts into lockstep exams fool themselves; at worst they destroy good minds. Teachers are individuals with knowledge all their own; students, too, are individuals. Each student learns differently from different teachers. The myriad standardized public school exams we now have are an effort by political conservatives to exert control over our future, not to teach but to brainwash. To standardize us. They destroy the joy of education. .Democracy is messy. No one has ever portrayed the messy details of humanity better than Shakespeare. Business and Science are vital to our survival. But the freedom to be an individual, to think independently, is important if our souls are to blossom. Gayle Greene captures what it is to be a teacher in an era when the effort to destroy free thinking threatens to overwhelm us. She nails it. If you ever taught, if you ever wondered what it is to teach, you must read this beautifully written book.

NCBR review of The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival by Lisa M. Hamilton

Little, Brown and Company

The Hungry Season tells the compelling story of Ai Moua, a woman from a Hmong village in Laos. Her Hmong ancestors were pushed out of their Chinese lowlands by imperial Han armies to make a subsistence living in Laos's mountains. Hamilton's vivid account of Ai's life allows her readers to see how tenuous and yet determined these people are. Facing hostile armies, unkind in-laws, a husband who beats her, a near-starvation diet, and birthing eleven children, Ai perseveres to achieve a relatively happy life in the San Fernando Valley. The book paints her life against the cyclical backdrop of the rice crop, with elegiac descriptions of growing and harvesting the rice. After one aborted attempt to escape Laos, an eight-month pregnant fifteen-year-old Ai and her husband swim the Mekong River and eventually are resettled in the United States. The lyrical descriptions of food and of labor create a picture of an agrarian life unknown to most readers. Even after the loss of her husband and her own declining health, Ai continues her extraordinary labors on her own farm.

NCBR review of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis

W.W. Norton & Company

Samuel Bankman-Fried, crypto king for a year, amassed a 22.5 billion dollar, bit-coin fortune in such a short time that the financial world, many of the most powerful people and corporations came crawling to him with billion dollar offers for a fraction of a share in his business. Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, and Moneyball, became fascinated by Sam, and traveled with him during a wild time in which he became the richest man in the world under 30. Along the way it seems Sam lost or, gave away, or somehow misplaced some six billion dollars. Exactly how that happened he could hardly say. He was a little distracted, probably autistic. There was plenty of money coming all the time, until there wasn't. Until investors wanted their money. Hey, he meant well. He was, after all, an "effective altruist." He wanted to make infinite amounts of money to help cure the world's ills. He was scornful of those who thought slowly and carefully. Who cares about the boring details? He was too busy meeting important people, like Presidents and sports stars, and playing video games, and obtaining constant mental stimulation. All in all, an intriguing read, another page turner by one of our greatest financial journalists.

NCBR review of Freedom to Win: A Cold War Story of the Courageous Hockey Team That Fought the Soviets for the Soul of Its People—And Olympic Gold by Ethan Scheiner

Pegasus Books

The book's title says it all: "A Cold War story of the courageous hockey team that fought the Soviets for the soul of its people—and Olympic gold." This fast-paced narrative, with its vividly realized characters and dramatic accounts of the matches, shows the determination of a captive nation to regain its freedom. From the small Czechoslovakian village of Brod came the Holik brothers and Jan Suchy, who began skating as children on ponds and who later became part of the juggernaut ice hockey team that defeated the Russians in the 1969 World Championship. Despite their relative poverty and lack of resources, the Brod community banded together to find resources and support for these young players. The Holik family's own resistance to the Communist regime embodied the deepest desires of their fellow Czechs. During World War II hockey had played a role in maintaining people's spirit, and in 1948 the Czechs tied the Canadians in the Olympics. After losing to the Russians in the 1976 Olympics, the Czech team defeated the Russians at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, winning the gold medal with a score of one to zero, to a swell of national pride.

NCBR review of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist by Derek Chung, translated from Chinese by May Huang

Zephyr Books

In her debut book of translation, rising-star May Huang introduces us to the Hong Kong poet Derek Chung and his poetic depictions of daily life in Hong Kong as it negotiates between its unique traditional culture that melds different traditions and broad social changes. Chung's poetry renders loosely metaphoric the daily life of Hong Kong, the streets, stray dogs, bleach, fish markets, spent firecrackers, kitchen smoke, cigarettes, potato soup and so much more. Often in the form of the sestina, Chung's poetics surreally orchestrate these everyday scenes into vast semantic webs of memory, history, and a paradoxical future, as in the poem "Lanterns": "The day before Mid-autumn, I buy cotton paper, bamboo strips, / And with the glossy, plastic film I used for binding books as a child / Fashion the frame of an insect, and the children / Rise from their homework to help glue pieces of colored paper / Over empty spaces. Smiling, we fly, / Meeting the moon before the moon arrives." Huang's translation deftly transposes Chung's work into rich poetic language in English, creating webs of association in the new language; indeed, she describes her process as "not so much translating the text, but writing it, or living it." This is a lovely bilingual edition with so much for readers who read the original and for those who do not.

NCBR review of Through the Walls of Solitude: Selected Poetry by Álamo Oliveira, translated from Portuguese by Diniz Borges

Letras Lavadas Edições/Bruma Publications

This first book-length of translation of Álamo Oliveira's poetry introduces us to a major contemporary poet from the Azores, whose work is celebrated in Portuguese-speaking countries. Oliveira's poetry lyrically weaves metaphysical and aesthetic concerns with the geo-political reality of living on an isolated archipelago in the Atlantic upon which global events have, at times, hinged—even as they mostly remain invisible to the rest of the world. Oliveira's poetics is economic, lyrical, with surreal turns, but most of all historically and psychologically uncompromising in its view. The first section of the poetic sequence "ode of sea and wind" brings us the depth of his voice: "by the sea and the light rain / i lament this hunger of warships. // i am from the naked island / the island discovered by fog sails / on a morning of nothingness. / at every point / a shadow dances the dance / that i did have / in wave steps. / i have a dress of foam / with limpet shells/ and between my fingers / of mist and moon / i sift the clarity that falls from my eyes." Diniz Borges has so adeptly translated the delicate timbre and soul depth of Oliveira's poetic vision from Azorean Portuguese that this book is a gift to the English language.

NCBR review of Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner, translated from German by Francesca Bell

Red Hen Press

In his English-language debut, contemporary German poet Max Sessner reminds the reader of the eerie, enveloping precision of the dream. Appearing in our waking moments, the dream evokes what translator Francesca Bell calls, in her introduction to the collection, "the strange magic of the ordinary." Again and again, these meditative poems reveal an ever-present, quiet reality that exists just beneath the noise of the world. Without the rational markers of punctuation, the lines and sentences and images wash together in subtle and unpredictable ways; in this regard, Sessner's poetry is reminiscent of the deep image poems of writers such as W.S. Merwin. Or, viewed another way, Sessner shares common poetic ancestors with Merwin, including French poet Jean Follain. Sessner offers the reader a gentle surrealism, a world we might like to inhabit, or perhaps already do: "They are smoking outside the / students of the dance school / right next to the cemetery / it is the last day of / winter they are young and / over-perfumed the trees / lean towards the / evening and the air is a / novel without beginning / and end.…"

NCBR review of Columns by Nikolai Zabolotsky, translated from Russian by Dmitri Manin

ARC Publications

Dmitri Manin's retranslation of Nikolai Zabolotsky's Columns brings out the full charge of this experimental and iconoclastic poetics. It shows a Russian poetry not often seen in English translation. It depicts an early post-revolutionary, urban USSR in a series of gritty vignettes that bring to life an outdoor market, a late-night bar, a brothel, a wedding, soccer, street cats, and so much more. Zabolotsky, a Soviet children's writer, was a founding member of the avant-garde group Oberiu, "The Association of Real Art," and his poetics mixes cubist techniques with a coy, child-like tone and rhyme that are so well relayed in Manin's new translation. "The People's House" spares nobody in its tenacious realism: "The People's House, a coop of joy, / A barn of otherworldly living, / A festive trough of energy, / A densely churning forge of being! / That's where Red Army pointed helmets / In tow with everyday coquettes / Flow like pensive forest stream, / At home in the big city realm; / Joy drew its easy finger here / And people are easy to amuse." Even as Zabolotsky's Columns took the Leningrad literary scene by storm in the late 1920s, it earned the poet a Siberian prison term in the late 1930s. His work later circulated in samizdat to become a classic, which is where Manin first encountered it. This bilingual edition with a generous preface and introduction brings context to American readers.

NCBR review of The Short End of the Sonnenallee by Thomas Brussig, translated from German by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson

Picador

This book is a Bildungsroman, a fun and funny coming-of-age story set in East Germany in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. It is a send-up of the dictatorship and all the convolutions that the citizens of the GDR went through to stay out of trouble with the authorities while maintaining dignity, hope, and humor. The translators have crafted resonant English equivalents for diction and expressions rooted in a specific time and place. Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson capture the book's tongue-in-cheek humor and oddball characters with grace and panache.

NCBR review of Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado, translated from Italian by Jamie Richards

Bloomsbury Publishing

This is an edgy, poetic book about a woman from Rome who travels to Shanghai to teach Italian following her twin brother's untimely death. The teacher then falls into a steamy and complicated affair with one of her female students. Jamie Richards successfully creates a style in English that matches the novelist's portrayal of current-day Shanghai, with all its glamor and underbelly. Jamie Richards artfully renders the daring and lyrical qualities of the author's prose.

NCBR review of Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim

Archipelago Books

This novel is a modern-day epic, a fairytale firmly rooted in nitty-gritty reality. The main character, a salt-of-the-earth woman named Geumbok, epitomizes resilience, determination, compassion, ingenuity, curiosity, and sensuality. She overcomes enormous obstacles in every domain of her life. Geumbok rebounds from setback after setback, and her story parallels the historical period when South Korea emerged from the cataclysms of colonialism and civil war. Whale includes a panorama of unforgettable characters from all walks of life, not to mention a lovable, eloquent elephant. Chi-Young Kim's translation skillfully conveys both the mythic and the earthy diction of the novel's prose, as well as the author's hilarious, wry asides that lighten the book's tone.

NCBR review of How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press

Mac Barnett and illustrator Jon Klassen are back together again to create a whimsical tale that asks the age-old question, How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? Their story explores both practical and fanciful permutations of how Santa delivers presents on Christmas Eve. For every option the author explores to answer the question, there is an accompanying illustration that puts Santa in even sillier, more awkward potential answers. After exploring a few different ways to get down the chimney including headfirst, feetfirst, and turning himself into fire, the book introduces non-chimney entry points from the mail slot and the faucet. It raises questions more than it provides answers, encouraging children to think about each option's possibility. Children will delight in the creativity and wackiness of Santa's adventures to deliver toys. Barnett and Klassen sprinkle Christmas-y magic on every page and never miss an opportunity for a good giggle. The book ends without answering the question about how Santa goes down the chimney, but rather leaves it open to the child to pick their favorite method…or perhaps think of their own.

NCBR review of To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by Angela Dalton, illustrated by Lauren Semmer

Harper

This enthusiastic biography of Nichelle Nichols begins with the author's Black family settling in for TV night and Star Trek. They delight in Nichols's character, Lieutenant Uhura, thrilled to see a Black character in the space exploration show. Nichols's career moved from ballet into singing and acting. Cast in Star Trek (before anyone realized how popular and influential it would be), she helped develop her character, the starship's Communications Officer. Poor treatment from the network made her decide to leave. But her hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, approached her at a fundraiser to say he was a huge fan of her work on the show. He urged her to stay, saying her character was deeply important to many people. She stayed, and later worked with NASA to help recruit women and minority people to the space program. Bright, striking illustrations help tell the tale of a performer who came to realize the impact of her work.

NCBR review of The Shape of You by Mượn Thị Văn, illustrated by Miki Sato

Kids Can Press

In this beautifully illustrated, heart-warming meditation on the shapes of familiar and unfamiliar things, Mượn Thị Văn and Miki Sato combine their talents to create a long poem that reaches from the shape of the Earth (a sphere) to the shape of a mother's fingers resting in a child's hand. The Shape of You is much more than a simple geometry lesson. As it takes unexpected twists and turns, it not only teaches younger readers about rectangles, triangles, and squares: it inspires all of us to contemplate the shape of water; the shape of clouds; the shape of a tangerine/chartreuse/mulberry sunset; the shape of quiet thinking; the shape of questions; the shape of friendship, love, and home. The Shape of You is only twenty-eight pages long, yet it succeeds in creating a narrative that connects young children to community, friendship, family, and the security of being cherished by loving adults while stimulating their intellectual curiosity and inspiring them to see universal forms in the world around them.

NCBR review of The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, illustrated by Shawn Harris

simultaneously by Knopf Books for Young Readers and McSweeney's

"Freedom begins the moment we forget ourselves." This observation is from Johannes, a young, free-running dog who lives in a large urban park near the sea, not unlike San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and presages the narrative arc of this wonderfully creative story by Dave Eggers in which all the main characters are animals. Johannes, who runs at a speed somewhere between rapid and super-sonic, is the "Eyes," taking note of all that transpires in his park, and reporting to the bison, wise bovines who live in a paddock in the park and manage issues involving its animal inhabitants. Assisted by Bertrand the gull, Sonja the squirrel, Yolanda the pelican, and Angus the racoon, Johannes has a series of adventures, both suspenseful and humorous, before seizing on a goal that transcends anything he's done before—freeing the bison. In the process, Johannes learns who he is, and the story unexpectedly takes on additional meaning, revealing itself in the end as a classic coming of age tale. This astonishing book can be experienced repeatedly over the course of a reader's lifetime—as a preschooler hearing it read, as a middle-grade reader, and finally as a parent, passing it on to the next generation. It really is that good.

NCBR review of Farther than the Moon by Lindsay Lackey

Roaring Brook Press

Junior astronauts reach beyond the stars to find differently-abled inclusion in this meticulously researched and vibrantly written summer camp and coming-of-age story. After their father leaves, thirteen-year-old Houston Stewart promises his younger brother Robbie, who has Cerebral Palsy, that they will visit space together one day. Houston attends NASA's Junior Astronaut Recruitment Program, hoping to take first steps to making good on his promise and also to repair ties with his estranged maternal grandfather, astronaut Carey Broderick. But there are obstacles: Houston's mother rejects rapprochement with her father, Houston's crew struggles to mesh, and Houston encounters a space program that, for all its wonderful energy, excitement, and diversity, is still not accessible to people like Robbie. Drawing on personal experience with a family member, Lackey writes credibly and compassionately about the challenges of full-time caretaking, as well as the solace and joy that community and family—of all kinds—can bring to the task. Tension is kept taut with a series of creatively conceived "competitions" campers must complete, and the well-paced and well-plotted story ends with a surprising and heartwarming twist. Along the way, Houston learns (and teaches us) about the Space Program, his family, himself, and how to transcend limitations that sometimes seem to keep our dreams out of reach.

NCBR review of Boomi's Boombox by Shanthi Sekaran

Katherine Tegan Books

A fresh and contemporary take on the beloved classic A Wrinkle in Time, this book tells twelve-year-old Boomi Gopalan's account of the painful year following her father's death from Covid. Boomi's support system is failing: her mother is pressuring her to lose weight so she can regain her spot in a San Francisco ballet academy; her aunt is absent; her grandmother is retreating into dementia, and her best friend has pulled away from her grief. Then she finds her father's old boombox, with his note saying, "You can change your life" and a mixtape/time machine that allows her to reunite with him when he was her age. Boomi's adventures with her teenage father and aunt lend insight into the racism the family faced as East Indian immigrants in England, as well as into Boomi's own struggles with the sorrow of losing her father and with the constrictions of American culture. In the wonderful world of fantasy time travel all issues are resolved, including a village's xenophobia, by means of a fantastically exuberant dance-a-thon. Through the experience, Boomi comes to new appreciation for her own family and culture, her strong and intuitive dancer's body, and also her grief, realizing that our beloved dead are always with us, so long as we remember them.

NCBR review of The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent by Ann Jacobus

Carolrhoda Lab

After a past suicide attempt, eighteen-year-old Del does her utmost to remain sober and treat her mood disorders. She also volunteers at a suicide-prevention hotline while living with Aunt Fran in San Francisco because her mother is deceased and her father estranged. Though she saves lives at work, she discovers she can't save the person she cares about most when her beloved aunt is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Del soldiers on regardless, becoming Aunt Fran's caregiver, even as she prepares for her first semester at college and comes to terms with a major crush. But when her aunt asks for a final request, Del must confront her fears and reassess everything she thought she knew about life. Ann Jacobus has adeptly rendered many sensitive subjects with a deft balance of compassion and honesty. Her sympathetic characters are affectionately fleshed out and their respective situations are conveyed with true dignity. Spot-on urban settings imbue this narrative with the verisimilitude it deserves, enhance relationship dynamics, and anchor characterizations in every scene. What could have been a depressing account becomes instead an inspirational testament to the healing power of familial connection and a life-affirming promise of hope.

NCBR review of All the Yellow Suns by Malavika Kannan

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Sixteen-year-old Indian-American Maya Krishnan is very protective of her single mom and multi-cultural immigrant community; however, she knows not to challenge the status quo of the conservative Florida suburb in which she lives. Her enigmatic classmate Juneau Zale, on the other hand, is white, wealthy, and reckless, particularly with affairs of the heart. When Juneau encourages Maya to join a secret society of creative mischief-makers called the Pugilists, Maya's life is upended. Together they fight for social justice over the bigoted policies at their high school and form a strong bond that inspires Maya to confront many personal issues. As their connection evolves emotionally and romantically, Juneau might not be the person she appears to be. And, as tension between BIPOC students and the school administration reaches a breaking point, Maya's increasingly risky activism begins to jeopardize her relationships—and her future. The passionate voice and raw emotion of this novel are vividly expressed through an intimate first-person narration and evocative prose. It's a cathartic account of self-discovery and first love set against a crusade for social change within a divided community. Themes of identity, racism, and misogyny are explored with astute perception and elegantly complement the major conceit of speaking your truth.

NCBR review of Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater

Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

Dashka Slater knows that no one is the villain in their own story—and that this doesn't change the fact that real world harm can arise from an impulsive act—perhaps especially on social media. This is a journalistic but also lyrical exploration of a group of Albany High School students after one of them launches an anonymous Instagram account featuring racist content against several Black classmates in 2017. The story unfolds in linear time, shifting from one point of view to the next in short bursts that mimic the feel of hyperlinking from one web page to the next. Journalistic reportage mingles with free-verse poetry as Slater spins a narrative kaleidoscope: with each turn of the wheel, the pieces reassemble into a different, but always radial and inter-reflective, picture. We never stop being aware of that interconnectedness as she brings us into the minds of teachers and parents, perps and bystanders, social schisms and trauma-bonds. Teacherly without being didactic, Accountable brilliantly humanizes each of its characters while demonstrating the very meaningful difference between discernment and judgment, between making excuses and providing context, between shame and accountability. Slater deftly demonstrates the ripple effect of online bullying and denigration while also showing us that harmful speech doesn't always come from affirmative ideological hatreds—it can easily arise from unexamined insecurity, personal pain and disaffection, or a blinding desire for social acceptance. She shows with adamant clarity that for the victims of hate speech, the impetus is often irrelevant.