…started with a poet I found via social media, Jericho Brown. His Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Tradition, is a wonderful mix of formality and colloquialism, with a voice that insists on the beauty amidst the awful at every level of Brown’s life, made most manifest in his amazing poem, “Duplex.”
September was a month of important books, at least for me. It included Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas, America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo, and The Body Papers by Grace Talusan. The books by Vargas and Talusan are memoirs that contextualize our present predicaments through personal histories, while Castillo’s novel is one of the best I’ve read in years, epic in scope with vivid characters situated in actual history. It’s also a kind of response & update to a classic Filipino-American novel called America Is In The Heart by Carlos Bulosan.
Vargas’s book is particularly topical at this time when immigration is such a hot-button issue in America. Vargas himself is a living embodiment of the paradoxes involved, and the way he confronts his personal predicament is nothing short of heroic. You can find out more about Vargas’s work at https://defineamerican.com/
Diamond’s novel is also one of the best I’ve read in years, though totally different than Castillo’s. A propulsive narrative filled with trenchant observations & heart-wrenching dialog, Close Relationships With Strangers is close to perfect, a dark pocket-universe of a novel that hits a masterful endnote.
Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged really tickled my lexicographical funny-bone. As online dictionaries supplant printed ones, Unabridged records a largely unheralded discipline and its fraught history. Plus, I’ve always found wordplay fun. And it’s always instructive to revisit the word-related scandals of the past for a little perspective on the pearl-clutching of the present.
I revisited Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself at the prompting of a couple of poets I know, and I’m better for it. The last time I encountered this poem was as an undergraduate at UNLV, but the particular edition I picked up this time combines both its first-published and last-published versions, which I found illuminating. If only Whitman’s exhaustively inclusive spirit were more popular nowadays!
Erin Singer’s Dangerland! novel was super-entertaining. Picture a middle-aged rom-com set in the Summerlin suburb of Las Vegas (where I actually live), filled with a colorful cast of characters and incorporating some local issues for truly comic effect. It’s a winner.
And the passing of Wendell Berry caused me to go back through his essays and poems. A real visionary who literally lived what he wrote, Berry was an unabashed advocate of each citizen’s physical connection to the land on which they live in a truly communal relationship that emphasizes every individual’s place in the ecology. I wish more people would read and learn from Berry’s work.
Wilbert Cooper’s The Black Shield is one writer’s reckoning with the history of his family and his city. Cooper's family includes at least 3 generations of Cleveland police officers, and his narrative relates their careers and their involvement in an organization of African-American cops called The Black Shield, which grows & changes over the decades in response to the political life of Cleveland itself. The Black Shield is also a history of policing in this country, and Cooper is clear-eyed about the challenges & pitfalls that beset the profession of law-enforcement.
As always, all of these books are highly recommended by me, though your mileage may vary.
