trauma

The line between everyday truth and emotionally generated, alternative truth thins with every page turned in this new literary novel about a twelve-year-old girl, Cassandra, who loses her younger brother to undertow while swimming alone with him on a Delaware beach. But even at the beginning of this book, all is not as it seems. A few chapters in, Cassandra loses her brother again: this time, to a careless driver in their home neighborhood of suburban Baltimore. Rich sensory details make both versions of events feel believable, and as the novel progresses and Cassandra grows older, many more

“Poetry is a matter of life, not just of language.” Lucille Clifton 

This quote—a favorite, I freely admit—echoed in my mind as I read and re-read Bridget Lowe’s second collection, My Second Work. I understand Clifton’s quote to mean that poetry can be esoteric—a symphony of sounds that lull us into a state in which we choose to not question the meaning of it all simply because it sounds so good in the air. Let’s be clear: I love poetry that sings to me and, sometimes, I do not care “what it means” or if it means anything to me, personally, because the language of it lets me imagine/lets me

I was lucky enough to hear AS King speak when she visited our Library in August 2015. Eventually, after much fascinating talk, one of the moderators got around to asking her about her newest book, I Crawl Through It. "What's it about?" We all laughed, as we had earlier established how difficult it can be to neatly summarize a King novel. But then King's expression turned serious and she said, "It's about the way teens have to deal, daily, with both intruder drills and standardized tests - and how messed up that is." I had already been planning on reading King's new book, but now I knew, I had to read it now.