100 books like Heartwood

I love this anthology for its activism, all too necessary now! Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future. In Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, celebrated poets and activists pay homage to the ghosts of lost forests and issue a rallying cry to protect remaining ancient giants and restore uncolonized spaces. Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and protection are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets.

This anthology is as powerful as it is still necessary: beware. Some pieces may be triggering, but they raised my awareness and empathy. These collected poems from writers across the globe declare one common theme: resistance. By exploring sexual assault and violence in their work, each writer resists the patriarchal systems of power that continue to support a misogynist justice system that supports abusers. In doing so, they reclaim their power and their voice. Resistance underscores the validity of all women’s experiences, and the importance of dignifying such experiences in voice, however that may sound. Because once survivors speak out and disrupt their pain, there is no telling what else they can do.

Voicing Suicide is a collection of poems about suicide and its impact on lives. When my stepdaughter killed herself, I desperately needed an anthology like this. Decades later, the poems here still resonate and console me. The book arises out of a conviction that poetry offers an opportunity to understand some of the difficult aspects of suicide by allowing us to give it voice; through memory, and elegy, through an honest declaration of the draw of death. In poetry, we can enter the spaces suicide shapes around loss and sorrow and give it voice. Poems can speak to the loss of a loved one, to considering suicide, to struggling to make sense of suicide and poems can offer the words of those who have suicided. Although intense and sometimes painful, the book is honest, in moments delicate and tender. It offers an important exploration of suicide by writers who have… show more.

This anthology attempts to answer ongoing questions about struggle in poems that engaged, challenged, and comforted me. What might survival sound or look like to us in our daily lives? Is it loud, refusing silence, demanding action? Or quiet, interior? What does surviving feel like in the body, this long into the pandemic? What techniques have helped us exist, continue to bear witness, learn to live with illness, grief, and pain? Is survival the continual interrogation of inequity and oppressive structures? What happens when we get tired of fighting?

Survival may very well be a composite of things; both a tending to one’s inner life and to the processing of life events, as well as the will to act, retrieve momentum. It is also a plurality/multiplicity of practices that serve to keep us well—as persons and with respect to our communities, the ongoing project of social justice/civil rights, which involves… show more.

This is the best book I read in 2023. If you’d asked me if it was possible to write a book entirely in second-person voice and poetic form, I would’ve said it’s impossible. Yet Ani Tuzman has done exactly that and done it with perfection and passion.

Tuzman writes as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, something I personally relate to. Even though she doesn’t shy away from describing intergenerational trauma, her words continually uplift through remembrance of the highest truths.

Michelle Mijung Kim offers incredible, nuanced insights about what’s missing from many of today’s conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Many of us are well-intentioned but ill-equipped to navigate some of the tricky challenges of making social change. Kim shares concrete and accessible advice to help people tackle these challenges, using personal stories, simple definitions, and clear frameworks.

This book covers topics like the importance of understanding context, getting called out, making sacrifices for DEI, and holding trauma—all of which are crucial topics for managers to build skills around.

This book is a bible for people who care about changing the system, rather than just tinkering around the edges.

A soliologist and organiser, Erik Olin Wright manages to map out strategic exits from our exploitative economic, social, and political structures. He pulls together building blocks for a different world, shows them to us, and offers them for us to experiment with. Olin Wright was writing about things like universal basic income way before they were sexy and he writes with both passion and precision.

As someone who’s spent most of my life trying to get closer to the roots of our collective struggles, Olin Wright’s work is a huge support. It’s often difficult to feel like we’re making a difference, like everything’s sliding in the wrong direction no matter what we do.

Envisioning Real Utopias is a solid manual and a vital companion, covered with ink stains and pencil… show more.

Two high-profile activists have edited this anthology, which tackles the problem of how to address harm without incarcerating people.

A lot of people get stuck on abolition because they see it as a tearing down of a system, without understanding what new structures we’d need to build in its place. These brilliant thinkers grapple with what a more humane and accountable process would look like.

I particularly recommend the chapter on the transformative justice approach to ending child sexual abuse.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “queer, black feminist love evangelist and a marine mammal apprentice,” has created an exuberant book—impossible to categorize. Undrowned is everything—a dramatic account of marine mammals’ struggles, a meditation, a call for action, a manifesto, a workbook with activities. Referencing the middle passage as a Black feminist, Gumbs considers the enmeshment of breathing, drowning, and undrowning, looking to “marine mammal kindred” as “teachers, mentors, guides.” I was deeply moved by how this book passionately voices love for whales, dolphins, and seals. But this love isn’t sentimental—it is active. The chapters call readers to do things, such as “listen,” asking how can we “listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” I marvel at Gumbs’ fierce, unabashed love for marine mammals. Gumbs inspires me to take more risks for others.

I contacted Gilbert Moore in 2014 to share how valuable his book Rage was to my perspective as an author writing about the ground-breaking defense in the 1968 “trial of the century”, People v. Newton. Moore covered that headliner for LIFE magazine as its first black reporter. He agreed to be interviewed for our documentary project American Justice on Trial. Tragically, he died before the interview occurred. Watching that extraordinary trial caused Moore to engage in soul-searching, quit his plum job, and write his critically acclaimed book about the epiphany he experienced. Rage is considered a classic in African-American literature – an unparalleled window into the impact of that unprecedented Movement trial on pioneering black professionals in a white supremacist environment – through the eyes and pen of a firsthand observer.