The Historians by Eavan Boland

3/5 stars

What's it about? In her final collection, Eavan Boland returns to women’s histories, craft, and country.

How’d I find it? Praise be a Saturday browse at Powell’s.

Who will enjoy this book? If you’ve never read Eavan Boland and delight in Seamus Heaney, you’re in for a treat.

What stood out? Narrative poems and ars poeticas populate The Historians, with one section made up of a piece commissioned for the 100th anniversary of Irish women’s suffrage. Boland sure knows how to devise a turn in a poem.

Which line made me feel something? From “The Fire Gilder,” which opens the book: “My subject is the part wishing plays in / the way villages are made / to vanish, in the way I learned / to separate memory from knowledge, / so one was volatile, one was not”

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? Aside from the hot pink cover, I was drawn to the prospect of a vampire tale and the hospital as hunting ground.

Why not 3 or more stars? Detective Su-Yeon investigates a spree of suicides among a hospital’s older patients and encounters Violette, a vampire-hunter who suspects foul play. The Midnight Shift toggles between Su-Yeon’s story and the struggles of one of the hospital’s nurses, while doling out Violette’s back story in fragments. Though entertaining, the novel lacks in vampire lore to round out the narrative, and our characters remain one-dimensional to a conclusion befitting of the CW.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

4/5 stars

What's it about? This vivid and human account of the Nazi occupation of France is made all the more potent by the fact of the novel’s publication long after the author’s death at Auschwitz.

How’d I find it? Suite Française appears on “best of” lists, and I had to check it out.

Who will enjoy this book? Fans of Kristin Hannah’s work and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See should like this one.

What stood out? Suite Française collects two of a planned five-part series unfinished by Némirovsky; the work she was able to complete captures war in the intimate details of individuals trying to survive. The edition I read concludes with Némirovsy’s notes on the project, as well as heartbreaking correspondence that describes her deportation and disappearance.

Which line made me feel something? “Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this.”

What Is The Grass by Mark Doty

5/5 stars

What's it about? In essays both personal and intellectual, poet Mark Doty celebrates the impact of Walt Whitman — his spirit and his work — on the development of his own craft and identity. A rich, endearing read.

How’d I find it? Whitman seems to find me.

Who will enjoy this book? Fellow Whitmanians will gobble up this one. Those interested in contemporary poetics should find much to appreciate.

What stood out? It isn’t quite right to think of What Is the Grass as criticism. It’s more inspiration in action. Doty discusses echoes of Whitman in his life through a fusion of memoir, analysis, and praise, extolling the America imagined by Whitman in Leaves of Grass, a groundbreaking force. Swaths of Whitman’s work anchor each essay, inviting readers to revisit the source material. What Is the Grass argues for poetry’s possibilities.

Which line made me feel something? “What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry”. Shivers.

Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves

4/5 stars

What's it about? In his second collection, Roger Reeves interrogates the grief and suffering wrought by humanity. Best Barbarian lays out our ugly, violent, and racist wrongs and marvels at how we continue to reach for each other to survive.

How’d I find it? This was recommended by someone who knows poetry and my taste in poetry. A home run.

Who will enjoy this book? These poems should be appreciated by any poetry reader. Try Kyle Dargan’s work once you finish Best Barbarian.

What stood out? Like Anne Carson, Roger Reeves is a poet-scholar whose work mines history, literature, myth, and memoir as source material. Every poem contains a treasure trove of references deserving of multiple reads. Take “Domestic Violence,” a nod to Dante, Chaucer, and Virgil in which Louis Till is guided in the afterlife by Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. Yeah, it’s heady.

Which line made me feel something? Almost every line caused a twinge, but I was of course drawn to “The Broken Fields Mended,” which riffs on Whitman: “It is like the future and past of us meeting above and below us, our something in the way / Of disappearing, our something in the snow; though the deer past, though the angel burned, stay with me”

Every Deep-Drawn Breath by Wes Ely

4/5 stars

What's it about? Physician Dr. Wes Ely discovers that the ICU practice of sedating and immobilizing critically ill patients leaves many with chronic illness and disability if they survive their hospitalization. Through research, determination, and collaboration, Dr. Ely vows to cultivate a practice of beneficence (doing good) instead of benevolence (wishing good). An impassioned plea for compassion in critical care.

How’d I find it? A colleague recommended this title for our book club, and oh, how it fired up us nurses. I borrowed my copy from Multnomah County Library.

Who will enjoy this book? Every Deep-Drawn Breath pairs well with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which Dr. Ely lists as an inspiration for his book.

What stood out? Dr. Ely’s belief in his mission comes through the page, and it’s hard to resist his conviction. For healthcare workers, this book will read as a call to action; my fellow nurses and I spent much of our book club meeting discussing ways to introduce long-term quality-of-life activities into our daily practice. Every Deep-Drawn Breath’s most valuable content is perhaps the resource section at the end of the book with practical information for patients, families, and the medical community.

Which line made me feel something? I need to know more about this Halpern: “Compassion can be understood as empathy in action. I had long been a believer in researcher and bioethicist Dr. Jodi Halpern’s work on clinical empathy, especially her teaching that compassion should never be an extra step in our care, but an adverb to describe how we care.”

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus

5/5 stars

What's it about? An accomplished ship captain impulsively allows her crew to swim in the sea, and everything that comes after goes awry. Most concerning: the voyage started with twenty sailors—now there are twenty-one. An eerie page-turner.

How’d I find it? I picked up a few titles from a display of short reads at Powell’s, and all have been bangers. Admittedly, this cover played no small role in my purchase.

Who will enjoy this book? The disjointed narrative and dreamy prose of Ultramarine recall Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea.

What stood out? Mariette Navarro knows what she’s doing. The shifting realities of Ultramarine keep the reader tense, but the siren effect of its atmospheric language make the discomfort worthwhile. That uneasiness lingers, even though the book is brief and can be consumed in one captivated sitting. The ocean is very scary.

Which line made me feel something? A representative example of Navarro’s beautiful writing: “They’ve left the sounds of the earth and of the surface: they discover the music of their own blood, a drumming to the point of jubilation, percussion that could lead them to a trance. Dark sound of held breaths, symphony of lightness.”

Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls

4/5 stars

What's it about? The narrator lives in her childhood home alone and can’t quite rouse herself to leave the small town where she grew up. She becomes fascinated by a visitor and invites him to stay, and before long the visitor consumes her whole existence. Funny, trippy, and endlessly strange.

How’d I find it? I love this influencer for translated book recs. She knows what’s up.

Who will enjoy this book? Overstaying embraces absurdity and tension in the manner of Samanta Schweblin. In fact, the fluidity of interiors reminds me of Seven Empty Houses.

What stood out? The narrator’s sense of humor makes this bizarre tale more fun than creepy, quite a feat when the visitor with his furry “brushfingers” mutates and evolves the longer he lingers. Overstaying fills inertia with small horrors (how I loved the sentient vacuum cleaners) and completes its sense of claustrophobia with short, choppy chapters. Koch pulls off an immersive mirage of a book.

Which line made me feel something? This tidbit had me laughing out loud: “It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.”

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

5/5 stars

What's it about? Isabel goes to work at the public library in Portland, nurses an impossible crush, and attends a party. Those are the happenings in this trim, satisfying novel that captures perfectly an ambivalent twentysomething circa 2010.

How’d I find it? The staff picks at Powell’s rarely steer me wrong.

Who will enjoy this book? The library link and worry about climate change in Glaciers make this reader suspect that Jenny Offill was heavily inspired by Smith’s work in writing Weather. Either way, the two books pair nicely. For another read that takes place over one day, try A Simple Man by Christopher Isherwood.

What stood out? Smith nails time to the wall, writing into a moment when rising sea levels and the war in Iraq joined the search for intimacy as prime concerns for young adults. Glaciers presents a tiny time capsule, made all the more potent by Isabel’s nostalgia and need to preserve the past as well as the possible. The novel ends with a circle of partygoers swapping stories; it’s an elegant departure from the focus on the individual and sticks its landing.

Which line made me feel something? This bit of banter between Isabel and her friend Leon: “Who darns socks? Girls nobody tells stories about.”

The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele Rivera

3/5 stars

What's it about? Rivera’s debut book of poetry gathers meditations on language, the uncertainty of our times, and the nature of grief.

How’d I find it? I picked up this collection while browsing the poetry shelves at Powell’s.

Who will enjoy this book? The Blue Mimes recalls Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother in its descriptions of losing a parent and the link between loss and heritage.

What stood out? Rivera writes in both English and Spanish; the mingling of language challenges us to find the right words for experience using the accumulations of our personal histories. The Blue Mimes fails the “wound” test, but Rivera’s plays with abstraction and form make for interesting reading.

Which line made me feel something? This description of holding a newborn from “The House It Is”: “You were astonished by her smallness, held her in two hands the way you would hold and funnel birdseed.”