Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Tess Gallagher recommends My Name Is Not Viola by Lawrence Matsuda (Endicott and Hugh Books, 2019). “My Name Is Not Viola belongs to all of us who wish to experience the WWII Japanese American forced incarceration heartbeat through the eyes of Hanae Tamura. As one of the 120,000 victims jailed without due process, she was forced to inhabit humiliating and hope-sundered circumstances for over three years. Incredibly for the victims, they were invited to absorb a silent mandate from their government to forgive what had been done to them.”

Rigoberto González recommends From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer by Luis J. Rodriguez (Seven Stories Press, January 2020). “This superb collection of prose pieces provides incredible insights into our troubled contemporary era. Rodriguez explores everything from race relations to colonialism, including the prison industrial complex; yet still manages to ignite in us the spark of hope for a better future.”

DeWitt Henry recommends The Thirteenth Month by Colin Hamilton (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). “This is a sophisticated hybrid of Borgesian imagination and heart-broken, yet dry-eyed, memoir. The son of David Hamilton—professor, poet, memoirist, and longtime editor of the Iowa Review—Colin grows up surrounded by the urgencies of literature and Iowa City’s community of makers; then, as ‘touched by the divine finger of poetry’ himself, chooses international, postmodern exemplars for necessary kin. He writes with admirable grace, clarity, and appetite, whether about invisible cities or his mother’s fighting dementia.”

Margot Livesey recommends The Pelton Papers by Mari Coates (She Writes Press, April 2020). “In The Pelton Papers the wonderfully gifted Mari Coates recreates in gorgeous detail both Agnes Pelton’s work and the life that led to that work. Reading these mesmerizing pages, I felt that I understood all over again the hardships and the joy of making art. From first to last Pelton is on a journey of the soul and we, her lucky readers, are privileged to accompany her on that journey of darkness and radiance.”

Jay Neugeboren recommends Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick by Richard J. King (University of Chicago Press, 2019). “An exquisitely detailed and gorgeously written book that reminds us of the wonder of Melville's novel and of the natural world in which it takes place. Fascinating accounts and descriptions of whales, swordfish, sharks, giant squid, ambergris, etc., and of the sea itself: then and now. And informed by a writer who has spent years at sea, is now a professor of maritime literature and history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. King gives an original, loving rereading of Melville's novel. He is himself a master storyteller whose handsomely illustrated book is deeply informed and full of delightful surprises.”

Joyce Peseroff recommends The Light Outside by George Kovach. “In the first lines of the poet’s first collection from Arrowsmith Press, a man pries open an attic window he once painted shut, ‘careless and in a hurry to finish.’ Letting sun and air into dark, forgotten spaces is Kovach’s gift—he notices a son’s shimmer into adulthood by the boy’s ‘silences’ after fracturing a bone, and recognizes the life of a veteran who ‘refuses invitations, afraid he’d open/up.’ Through reflections on war, marriage, and the natural world, Kovach reveals a thoughtful and deeply humane sensibility rendered in language as transparent as snowmelt rushing through ‘fluted granite channels.’ The Light Outside celebrates connections made and maintained through a lifetime’s light and shadow, always acknowledging history’s heft and family’s gist.”

Richard Tillinghast recommends Savage Country by Robert Olmstead (Algonquin Books, 2017). “This novel is not brand new (it came out in 2017), but I’ve just read it for the first time. I am a huge Olmstead fan. He writes a robust adventure story as well as anybody, and his knowledge of the American West is vast. He has internalized this knowledge to an extent that it never comes across as mere research. You read him about white settlement of the West; the violent clashes with warrior tribes, like the Comanches, Kiowas, and Lakota; the slaughter of the buffalo; and come away thinking, ‘Yes, this must have been exactly how it was.’”

Dan Wakefield recommends The Town of Whispering Dolls by Susan Neville (University of Alabama Press, March 2020). “A haunting imagining of the women of a small town taken over by opioid addiction; winner of The Catherine Doctorow Prize for the best work of innovative fiction of 2019.”