78 books like Mercy

Hirshfield’s craft of language in this book knocks me off my feet. My head rings in the resonance of her poignant and pointed images.

The way she fuses intimate, personal experience with the immensity of nature and the fearless way she takes on the loss and peril of climate change makes me want to be a better writer and a better human. When I read the poems in this masterful collection, I am at once moved to sadness and awe and inspired to take action.

My experience of reading this book is wooly, smokey, visceral, and consuming. His poetry takes a microscope to the guts, the excrement, the feel underfoot of the natural world. Just as he takes me into the detailed realm of the beech tree or lizard, he swoops me into the emotional feel-scape of loss, grief, belonging, and isolation.

Gander’s use of language is relatable and also stark, new, and encyclopedic. This book is perhaps his most famous work, having earned him a Pulitzer. It is condensed and distilled as rare bitters; open the bottle and let its pungent spirit subsume you.

Ah, Carver…where do I begin? This collection is packed with gems that, as Dylan sang, glow like burning coal. Carver’s poems make me want to drink too much, lament, get sober, and love so hard that my heart cracks open. These poems make me want to live a damn full life. Most of all, Carver makes me want to blow the shavings off my pencil and write.

This collection is a conversation with poetry and art itself; Carver invokes the pantheon from Balzac to Hemingway to Renoir. I want to join that conversation and write for dear life.

I love poetry that employs new takes on old forms. The sonnet is once again brought alive by Hayes in a collection that feels poignant, playful, and urgent. I personally struggle with writing in the form and am blown away by the range and inventiveness of the nearly 80 sonnets in this action-packed collection.

My experience in reading these sonnets is one of joy: the pointed wit that paints Sylvia Plath as a drama queen and Trumpet (thinly veiled) as sexually tormented, the clear-eyed social and political criticism, the warm, broken, self-knowing heart. This collection rings true to me as a full and authentic ledger of the American experience.

Every now and then I come across a book that I wish I had written, and Quashie’s Black Aliveness is among them. One of the motivating premises of Afro-Nostalgia is the sense that so much of black life is narrated through a trauma, oppression, and death. Black Aliveness operates from a similar premise and is centrally concerned with the “quality of aliveness” in African American poetry and literature. Here is one of my favorite passages in the book: “As necessary as ‘Black Lives Matter’ has proven to be, so efficient and beautiful a truth-claim, its necessity disorients me…I want a black world where matter of mattering matters indisputably, where black mattering is beyond expression.”

“Institutions are the rules of the game,” according to Douglas North, economic historian and Nobel Laureate.

Once created, institutions may be changed, but their legacy can be powerful. Economic history is a consequence of a dynamic, sometimes disruptive, process of institutional change, one for which a path to better institutions is not assured.

Exchange involves risks and uncertainty. In centuries past, kinship ties helped reduce uncertainty for exchange in insular communities. As exchange across larger distances expanded to engage with more distant communities, alternatives institutions were needed, such as contracts, laws, courts.

Whether one’s interest is promoting welfare, equity, sustainability, or economic growth (emphasized by North), this conceptual framework of institutional change offers powerful insights about how the world works and why it is organized the way that it is.

When I worked at the Academy of American Poets many years ago, I found a record of Stanford’s submission to the Walt Whitman Award. The Editors told him his submission could not be accepted because it exceeded the page limit—by about 500 pages.

The poem he submitted was The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, and if you’re interested in archetypal imagery that will shatter your heart and put it back together again differently, entirely differently, this wild ride is for you.  

This novel follows four adolescents in the 48 hours preceding September 11, 2001.

The characters are two girls and two boys living in different parts of the United States in very different families. By fully depicting the lives of each character before the world abruptly changed, Baskin shows us how a watershed event changes one’s perspective forever.

My favorite moment comes at the end when a character remembers “that day, a year ago, when nothing else was important to her except fitting in.” Without violence or direct loss to the main characters, Baskin brings home the point that September 11th affected Americans from all across the country.

In the face of tragedy, Baskin shows us how we are all interconnected.

When it comes down to explaining anomalous phenomena, my default position is to first consider physical laws.

However, I am also cognizant that science is catching up with explaining the mysteries of our universe. In the fabric of her well-researched book, McEneaney weaves stories and testimonials from various families, all the while sharing tangible details on the heroic people who suddenly passed.

She persuades the reader that many of those directly impacted by the death of a loved one lost on September 11, 2001, received “signs”. I strongly feel that McEneaney’s book provides a weighty perspective not just of the evil, terrorist-based historical events that shaped the state of our world, but also a glimpse into why the soul is often referred to and defined as “immortal.” A must-read in a post-pandemic era.

I felt an affinity with Dr. Melinek partly because we both started our careers right before or right after 9/11 when we were both “learning the ropes” in our respective fields. In Dr. Melinek’s case, she had been working as an ME in New York City for two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks; I started as a graphic artist at the FBI just two months after, in November 2001.

I loved this book because it gives the real day-to-day experiences of a woman working in what could be a depressing, ghastly environment. However, the author keeps her sense of humor throughout while showing the utmost compassion for victims. I found myself nodding my head in agreement at some of the cases she worked on, especially the one with an unidentified victim.