On the day that I got my visitor’s card at the library here, I borrowed Marie-Louise Gay’s Mustafa (2018): a children’s story (Gay illustrates, writes, and translates) about a boy who searches for himself, in the space between his old country and his new country. Certains soirs, Mustafa rêve
Poetry is a place into which we can disappear from pain. In these collections, there are many other themes explored, but these passages intertwined like threads through my reading. In “A Toothless Crackhead Was the Mascot” from Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015): “This begins the concept
In the coming year, I don’t know if I will read so many collections or spend time with so many illustrations, but I have enjoyed my 2022 reading so far (partially discussed last week, here). Ai Qing’s Selected Poems (2021), translated by Robert Dorsett, are “characterized by his sincerity, a
Earlier this year, I resolved to take a closer look at the graphic novels and poetry collections accumulating on my library “saved lists” and my digital TBR “shelves”. Those lists have lengthened rather than shortened, but there’s been plenty of good reading along the way. In Just So Happens by
Last time, there was talk of Bevann Fox’s novel Genocidal Love (2020), Isaac Murdoch’s The Trail of Nenaboozhoo and Other Creation Stories (illustrated by Christi Belcourt, 2019), David Bouchard’s and Roy Henry Vickers’ The Elders Are Watching (2003), and Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and Memory of Water
