Book picks similar to
Cyborg Detective by Jillian Weise
poetry
disability
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Hera Lindsay Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird - 2016
this impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl………with many beneficial thoughts and feelings………with themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is………juxtaposing many classical and modern breezesBird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog………or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert………this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness………heartbreaking and charged with trees………without once sacrificing the forest………Whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parent’s sleepout………………or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram………this is the book for you………………………heroically and compulsively stupid………………………………………………………………………………whipping you once again into medieval sunlight.
Fortune Favors the Dead
Stephen Spotswood - 2020
It's 1942 and Willowjean "Will" Parker is a scrappy circus runaway whose knife-throwing skills have just saved the life of New York's best, and most unorthodox, private investigator, Lillian Pentecost. When the dapper detective summons Will a few days later, she doesn't expect to be offered a life-changing proposition: Lillian's multiple sclerosis means she can't keep up with her old case load alone, so she wants to hire Will to be her right-hand woman. In return, Will will receive a salary, room and board, and training in Lillian's very particular art of investigation.Three years later, Will and Lillian are on the Collins case: Abigail Collins was found bludgeoned to death with a crystal ball following a big, boozy Halloween party at her home--her body slumped in the same chair where her steel magnate husband shot himself the year before. With rumors flying that Abigail was bumped off by the vengeful spirit of her husband (who else could have gotten inside the locked room?), the family has tasked the detectives with finding answers where the police have failed. But that's easier said than done in a case that involves messages from the dead, a seductive spiritualist, and Becca Collins--the beautiful daughter of the deceased, who Will quickly starts falling for. When Will and Becca's relationship dances beyond the professional, Will finds herself in dangerous territory, and discovers she may have become the murderer's next target.A wildly charming and fast-paced mystery written with all the panache of 1940s New York, Fortune Favors the Dead is a fresh homage to Holmes and Watson reads like the best of Dashiell Hammett and introduces an audacious detective duo for the ages.
Bruja
Wendy C. Ortiz - 2016
Ortiz has created a new literary form, a parallel plane where the cast of characters are the people that occupied one’s waking life; Bruja is a narrative that’s equal parts delicate and bold, a literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind."The book collects Ortiz's dreams over a period of four years, in spare and at times mesmerizing prose...It is a literary work in its own right...It's testament to Ortiz's courage as a memoirist that she's willing to live for a while on this submarine plane, among the elements that dictate her fate -- and to invite her readers along for the show." -The Los Angeles Times"LA-based writer Ortiz continues her innovative soul-search by weaving dream with memory in order to piece together a poignant story from the elusive symbolism of the subconscious...A few entries into this stunning dreamoir, it's evident that Ortiz is making bold statements about love, desire and womanhood as she defiantly navigates the absurdities and strangeness of everyday reality and taps into the comforting properties of fantasy and daydream." -NBCNews.com"Bruja is a personal history and a travel journal, a book of emotional heft and bizarre incantations, a revelatory experiment and a literary scar produced by life...This is a smart, strange, wonderfully expressive combination of fact and everything that hovers in the periphery of fact." -Vol. 1 Brooklyn"In Wendy Ortiz's dreamoir, Bruja, she finds an utterly fascinating middle ground between the two perspectives. Except that even "middle ground" is insufficient; rather, she presents an inclusive, paradigm-shifting theory in narrative form, one that embraces the interconnectedness of stories, focalization, the unconscious, and how we construct reality." -Angel City Review"In Bruja, Wendy C. Ortiz deftly navigates the land of dreams in what she calls a dreamoir. By telling us her dreams, by revealing her most unguarded and vulnerable self, Ortiz is, truly, offering readers the most intimate parts of herself--how she loves, how she wants, how she lives, who she is. Bruja is not just a book--it is an enigma and a wonder and utterly entrancing." - Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling book of essays, Bad Feminist"Bruja calls into question not only what is a memoir, but what is a life. Politics, books, mass media, random encounters, work, relationships tumble into the depths of consciousness, and the self spirals open, huge and passionate. Ortiz’s dreamoir is a multidimensional love story with the whole mess of existence. I loved it. - Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World, The TV Sutras, and Cunt-Ups"Wendy C. Ortiz has invented her own genre, in her sleep, no less. Bruja is at once lush and spare, funny and weird, disturbing and sometimes even beautiful in the way that dreams can be. She's crafted an absurdly real and compelling story here, one dream at a time." --Elizabeth Crane, author of The History of Great Things"A memoir of the dreaming soul and reportage from the frontline of a writer's consciousness, Bruja is surreal, mesmerizing, and beautiful. I completely fell under its spell." --Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles and managing editor of The Scofield
Ghost Wall
Sarah Moss - 2018
They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the "primitive minds" of our ancestors.
Mad Honey Symposium
Sally Wen Mao - 2014
Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."—Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing—but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."—Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious—how thin that line is, how breakable—with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There's voltagein your flowers—mulch skeins, armoryfor cunning loves. Your mouth pins every stickybody, swallowing iridescence, digestinglight. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Terrance Hayes - 2018
Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic
Jen Lancaster - 2020
We’re judged by social media’s faceless masses, pressured into maintaining a Pinterest-perfect home, and expected to base our self-worth on retweets, faves, likes, and followers. Our collective FOMO, and the disparity between the ideal and reality, is leading us to spend more and feel worse. No wonder we’re getting twitchy. Save for an Independence Day–style alien invasion, how do we begin to escape from the stressors that make up our days?Jen Lancaster is here to take a hard look at our elevating anxieties, and with self-deprecating wit and levelheaded wisdom, she charts a path out of the quagmire that keeps us frightened of the future and ashamed of our imperfectly perfect human lives. Take a deep breath, and her advice, and you just might get through a holiday dinner without wanting to disown your uncle.
Running the Rift
Naomi Benaron - 2010
Born a Tutsi, he is thrust into a world where it's impossible to stay apolitical - where the man who used to sell you gifts for your family now spews hatred, where the girl who flirted with you in the lunchroom refuses to look at you, where your Hutu coach is secretly training the very soldiers who will hunt down your family. Yet in an environment increasingly restrictive for the Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream of becoming Rwanda's first Olympic medal contender in track, a feat he believes might deliver him and his people from this violence. When the killing begins, Jean Patrick is forced to flee, leaving behind the woman, the family, and the country he loves. Finding them again is the race of his life. This is the third Bellwether Prize winner published by Algonquin. The Bellwether Prize is awarded biennially by Barbara Kingsolver for an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice and was previously awarded to The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and Mudbound.
Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Díaz - 2020
Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Chouette
Claire Oshetsky - 2021
Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Samantha Irby - 2017
With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life., "bitches gotta eat" blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making "adult" budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette--she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"--detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms--hang in there for the Costco loot--she's as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.Chapter titles:My Bachelorette application --A blues for Fred --The miracle porker --Do you guys pay your fucking bills or what? --You don't have to be grateful for sex --A Christmas carol --Happy birthday --A case for remaining indoors --A total attack of the heart --A civil union --Mavis --Fuck it, bitch. Stay fat --Nashville hot chicken --I'm in love and it's boring --A bomb, probably --The real housewife of Kalamazoo --Thirteen questions to ask before getting married --Yo, I need a job --Feelings are a mistake --We are never meeting in real life
Literally Show Me a Healthy Person
Darcie Wilder - 2017
Blurring the lines of the written word, literally show me a healthy person is a portrait of a young girl, or woman, or something; grappling with the immediate and seemingly endless urge to document and describe herself and the world around her. Dealing with the aftermath of her mother's death, her father's neglect, and the chaotic unspoken expectations around her, this novel is a beating heart at the intersection of literature, poetry, and the internet. Darcie Wilder elevates and applies direct pressure, but the wound never stops bleeding.
Elegy
Larry Levis - 1997
Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."
Incorrect Merciful Impulses
Camille Rankine - 2015
Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms."From "Symptoms of Aftermath":…When I am saved, a slim nurseleans out of the white light. I needto hear your voice, sweetheart. I seemy escape. I walk into the water.The sky is blue like the ocean,which is blue like the sky.Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.