what I’ve been reading lately:
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I Don’t Want to Be Crazy by Samantha SchutzPUSH (Scholastic), 2006
The prologue/first poem in I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, Samantha Schutz’s YA memoir in free verse about getting through college while coping with an anxiety disorder, narrates the experience of having a panic attack: My hands are shaking. I try to squeeze them, try to make it stop, but now my fists are shaking,…
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The Ground by Rowan Ricardo PhillipsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
The 44 poems in this volume are a mixture of city-poems and myth-poems; characters and allusions (Orpheus and Eurydice, Dante) recur, along with images (two different poems include the image of “a tree half aflame” inside the speaker). Phillips’s language is one of gorgeous rhythms, whether the syntax is straightforward or more complicated: “Tonight I…
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Two Serpents Rise by Max GladstoneTor, 2013
Two Serpents Rise is set in the same world as Three Parts Dead, but doesn’t follow the same characters: it isn’t even set in the same city. While Three Parts Dead centered on the city of Alt Coulumb, an old city still powered by an old god, Two Serpents Rise is set in Dresediel Lex,…
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Urban Tantra by Barbara CarrellasCelestial Arts (Crown/Random House), 2007 (Originally 2005)
This book, whose subtitle is “Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century,” is refreshingly queer-friendly, kink-friendly, poly-friendly, and body-positive. I’m skeptical about some of the concepts Carrellas presents, but that didn’t really keep me from enjoying the book. Take chakras: I can see the usefulness of them as metaphor/visualization technique, but I’m less convinced about things…
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An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History by Cynthia ZarinBorzoi (Knopf), 2013
A number of images and moments recur in more than one of the twelve chapters that make up this memoir: a film with a scene in which an actress wears yellow stockings, snowflakes on the collar of a violet coat, a tube of red lipstick found in a different coat pocket, a bathroom with a…
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Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy KnisleyFirst Second, 2013
I read Relish in the middle of a week-long vacation that started with amazing food in New Orleans (still-warm house-made potato chips! fried oyster slider! maple sriracha donut with candied thyme! lamb neck and beet green curry! condensed-milk cake with chicory ice cream and Meyer lemon sauce!) and proceeded to less-than-amazing food on Grand Cayman…
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Three Parts Dead by Max GladstoneTor, 2012
Three Parts Dead is set in a world where gods exist, and where the power of a god can power a city. That’s literal in the case of Alt Coulumb, where the power of the fire-god Kos fuels the steam furnaces that heat the city and make its trains run. In this world, gods gain…
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Elegy Owed by Bob HicokCopper Canyon Press, 2013
I like the humor and matter-of-fact tone of a lot of the sixty-five poems in this book, like the great simile below, which comes from “How we came to live where we live”: as when you stand before a painting in a museum for as long as you hope says something good about you, even…
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Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones in The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II (HarperCollins), 2007 (originally 2001)
Witch Week was published in 1982 and is therefore the third, in publication order, of the Chrestomanci books, but it’s the fourth one presented in the two volume set of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, and that set determined my reading order of the books. Actually, you could read Witch Week on its own, but it…
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The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne JonesBeech Tree Books (William Morrow & Co.), 1999 (Originally Macmillan, 1980)
This book is set in the same world as Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, except instead of taking place in a magical version of England, it’s in a magical version of Italy. Caprona, where the action takes place, is known for the quality of the magic spells it produces and sells. The…