Dog

Dog by Michelle Herman   Hardcover: 188 pages

Dog is a novella about a cynical, reclusive poetry professor and her transformative experience adopting a puppy. Though she’s resistant to change at first, the protagonist finds that the emotional space she creates for Phil, the dog, opens things up everywhere: she begins reconsidering the meaning of “goodness” in her life, and she contemplates her past, present, and future with more kindness than she’d ever been able to muster. I enjoyed the changing tone of the professor’s musings as she grew more and more attached to the dog, and appreciated the depictions of her very different academic and domestic selves – a divide everyone can relate to on some level.  Ultimately a story about companionship and possibility, I recommend it if you want a rare feel-good but believable, engaging short book – it didn’t take much time to read, but the story is still hanging around pleasantly in my mind.

 - Aleta L.

Stranger from Paradise

The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake by GE Bentley Jr, 446 pages

It has become a cliche to refer to artists (even the most pedestrian) as "visionaries".  In the case of William Blake, however, it is no poetic exaggeration - he literally saw angels in the streets and conversed with fairies in his study.  As GE Bentley describes it in his sprawling biography, the reality of Blake's visions formed the primary basis for his understanding of art, religion, and the world, with the spiritual freedom of the imagination contrasted to the rational slavery of matter, the state, and organized religion.  Blake's faithfulness to this internal vision, however opaque it might be to others, led one of his friends, the poet Allan Cunningham, to confess that "what he meant by them even his wife declared she could not tell, though she was sure they had a meaning, and a fine one..." and caused the portraitist John Hoppner to dismiss his work as "like the conceits of a drunken fellow or a madman".  The verdict of history has tended to balance the two, echoing Robert Southey's view that "the highest genius alone could have conceived it, and only madness have dared attempt the execution."

A marginal figure during his lifetime, the material for a biography of Blake is somewhat threadbare, primarily consisting of diary entries and letters dealing with matters that seemed important at the time but assuming much and neglecting much that seems essential now.  Bentley's lack of organization, leaping quickly between analysis and anecdote, risks losing the narrative in the labyrinth of the London publishing industry circa 1800, but also lends his biography a feverish quality of half-hallucinatory (or perhaps heightened) reality which complements Blake's own "wildness and Enthusiasm". 

Three Books By/About Audre Lorde

Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, Alexis De Veaux  446 pages

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde 256 pages

Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, Audre Lorde 190 pages

      I can not believe that I lived my entire adult life without ever having read anything by Audre Lorde. Starting with the excellent biography written by Alexis De Veaux, the reader is presented with a woman who was fiery, a poet, an activist, and someone who never compromised who she was, ever. Lorde suffered from the stigma of being an African-American woman, feminist, and out of the closet lesbian well before any of that was in fashion or acceptable, which is part of the reason she did not get the level of attention that she so deserved.  De Veaux does a great job telling the story of a very complex person, by describing her life in separate stages, both the personal struggles and professional achievements of her lengthy career as a poet and activist.

     Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is one of Lorde's best known works, and functions as a biography and personal mythology.  As a reader, I responded to the idea that not everything she was writing about actually happened.  It was refreshing, raw, and well worth my time.

     Sister Outsider is a collection of essays that still resonates now, thirty years later.  In regards to issues of race and equality, she provides essays that are readable, moving, and stirring.  I recommend "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House". 

Fly Away

Fly Away by Patricia MacLachlan 
108 pages

Lucy’s family is on their way to help her aunt, Frankie.  Rain is on the way, which could mean flooding on her property and even though she insists she doesn’t need help, they are going anyway.  Lucy’s family is her father, her mother, her younger sister and her baby brother.  Everyone in Lucy’s family can sing except her.  Even her brother, who can’t talk yet, sings.  Teddy sings to Lucy at night.  It is their secret.  He doesn’t sing the words, but he sings the tunes and he has perfect pitch.  The rain starts while they are on the way to their aunt’s house and there is so much water that it is a little scary.  Then, while at Frankie’s house disaster strikes and Lucy finds that even though she can’t sing, she still has a voice.  A really short easy story for early chapter book readers, a lot of younger kids who like real life stories about family will enjoy this book.