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![]() April, 2022 For the Love of Poetry ![]() The special edition of The Southern Bookseller Review celebrates Southern booksellers’ love of poetry “A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” -Salman Rushdie Read This Now | Read This Next | The Bookseller Directory |
Read This Now! Poetry beloved by Southern booksellers… |
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After Beowulf by Nicole Markotic Adult Nonfiction, Canadian, Poetry Beowulf has been translated time and time again, whether by scholars just trying to be as accurate as possible, or people thinking outside of the box, or people who literally are just here for a good time like Nicole. After Beowulf is the tale of Beowulf, but it does address why the Geats were so terrified of his death. Nicole just happens to tell it all in the funkiest, funniest way possible. It even had me reading it out loud at one point, trying to do funny voices and keep up with the flow. Reviewed by Caitlyn Vanorder from Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina ![]() About the Author: |
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Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi Adult Nonfiction, African, Poetry If Akwaeke Emezi is a “silly little god” then I’m about to become their most zealous devotee. Their debut poetry collection, Content Warning: Everything, lives up to its title, fair warning. This is a HEAVY book. Emezi doesn’t shy away from topics like sexual abuse, suicide, vengeance, and long-term trauma. And they’re absolutely gorgeous. They seem to draw divinity from the baseness of the earth, singing of rivers, eyeteeth, and fucking in fresh graves. Content Warning: Everything rallies against boundaries at every turn, shattering expectation like the trumpets did Jericho’s walls. It careens between heart-smashing and “are you allowed to say that about Jesus?” and yet this collection feels as polished and purposeful as any novel! It’s confusing, frequently concerning, and utterly entrancing. Confessional poet Sylvia Plath once wrote “The Moon is not my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.” Content Warning: Everything goes further, making the Virgin Mary a beloved auntie who “moves in with my mother / they are not so lonely now.” Not content to stop at confessing, Akwaeke Emezi has sculpted a book of poems that christen, excommunicate, and heal. Reviewed by Terrance Hudson from Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina ![]() About the Author: |
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The Necessity of Wildfire by Caitlin Scarano Adult Nonfiction, Women, Poetry “Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, The Necessity of Wildfire is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex.”—Ada Limón, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano’s collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality. The Necessity of Wildfire begins, “To not harm / each other is not enough. I want to love you / so much that you have no before.” These poems chase a singular, thorny question: how does where and who we came from shape who and how we love? Judge Ada Limón says the resulting collection is “hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous.” Scarano’s imagination is galvanized by the South where she grew up and by the Pacific Northwest where she now resides—floods and wildfires, the Salish Sea and the North Cascades, and the humans and animals whose lives intersect and collide there. In this collection, Scarano reckons with a legacy of violence on both sides of their family, the death of their estranged father, the unraveling of long-term relationships, the complexity of their sexuality, and the decision not to have children. With fierce lyricality, these poems—“stories without monsters, / stories without morals”—resist both redemption and blame, yet call in mercy. ![]() About the Author: |
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Golden Girl by Reem Faruqi I loved this new middle-grade coming-of-age story told in verse. Faruqi is able to capture so much about Aafiyah’s life and what it means to be a preteen in America. She uses careful precision and economy of words to tell us about the Qamar family, their privilege and love for each other, their heritage and sorrows. I love a novel in verse for the author’s ability to express a depth of feeling that is not possible in prose novels. I think this is the perfect form to tell this story and think kids will be affected by the nuance of the writing. Reviewed by Jamie Southern from Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina About the Author: |

Spotlight on: Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
![]() "People get really uneasy when you say, ‘My life is art.’ This. The present tense is worthy of art. I think there’s a great discomfort in the Western gaze, because immediately they want to say, ‘You’re pretentious. There’s museums where things are housed, there’s the stage where you get to speak your art. You can’t speak it here, not in front of me at the grocery store." —Ocean Vuong, Interview in The White Review ![]() What booksellers are saying about Time is a Mother
About Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius Grant," he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. |
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Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (trans.) Read the celebrated and reviled poems that Victor Hugo called “un nouveau frisson.” Follow the trail of Symbolism that once led Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot. Witness an unparalleled vision of decadence and disgust, in an as-yet unrivaled translation by Richard Howard. Go back to 1857 to experience a poetic modernité that heralds our future. Reviewed by Conor Hultman from Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi ![]() About the Author: ![]() Richard Howard was one of the most prolific and respected twentieth-century literary critics and translators. He won a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, a National Book Award (for Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)), a Literary Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Fellowship, the title of Chevalier from France’s L’Ordre National du Merite, and the position of Poet Laureate of New York. |
Parting Thought "We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society." |
Publisher:
The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance /
siba@sibaweb.com |
SIBA | 51 Pleasant Ridge Drive | Asheville, NC 28805
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