Year: 2022
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I’m the kind of person who always brings a book to the cabin and…never reads more than a few pages of it. I go on trips with several book and come back with most of them unread except for the audiobook on the plane. I’m often lucky if I get a single book read on…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. Findings by Wendell Berry, published in 1969. Wendell Berry (1934-) is a novelist, essayist, poet, environmental activist, and farmer. His work is grounded in place, and the landscape of Kentucky, where he was born and has spent a large portion of his life, is very important to…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. Today we’re discussing a new book: These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara. Hayan Charara (1972–) grew up in Detroit, and some of his poetry deals with the decay of this particular urban landscape, his Lebanese cultural roots come through mostly in meditations…
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I’m not going to lie–it took me a while to get through this collection: Selected Poems by Kenneth Patchen. And while the book wasn’t terrible, I’m really glad that it wasn’t the complete poems because I don’t know how much more of his work I really wanted to read. Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) wrote over 40…
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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The prompt for today was to talk about book covers that either were solely composed of type or used mainly typographic elements. I cannot think of many designers that design more beautiful covers than Jessica Hische. Hische is a letterer, author, and a Brooklyn transplant…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. Let’s journey back to 1968 today with George Huitt Atwood’s Thunder in the Room. Normally I start off these posts with a short introduction on the poet, but the only biographical information I could find on Atwood was on the inside jacket. He was born in 1919,…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. We’re talking about another new volume of poetry today, published in 2021: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson.. Andrea Gibson (August 13, 1975-) is a queer poet, whose work focuses on LGBTQ+, health, and social justice themes. They are a well known spoken word performer as…
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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Anyone else absurdly motivated by arbitrary reading challenges other people have set? I started subscribing to Book of the Month when I bought a 6 month subscription for my friend for Christmas. It’s now her annual gift. We don’t coordinate our choices–sometimes we choose the…
Allison Burris 