It’s perfect porch-sitting weather here in the the South, which means it’s a great time to cozy up with a new book! This month’s round-up includes a tall tale with Cuyahoga, some fantastic poetry from Nikki Giovanni and Destiny O. Birdsong, Allison Moorer’s lyrical memoir, and a collection of essays by writers of color on what it means to be a Southerner.
A Measure of Belonging:
Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South
Edited by Cinelle Barnes
October 6, 2020
Hub City Press: “This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome? Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South’s relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.”
Cuyahoga
By Pete Beatty
October 6, 2020
Scribner: “Big Son is a spirit of the times — the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders, shiny hair, and church-organ laugh, Big Son practically made Ohio City all by himself. The feats of this proto-superhero have earned him wonder and whiskey toasts but very little in the way of fortune. And without money, Big cannot become an honest husband to his beloved Cloe (who may or may not want to be his wife, honestly). In Cuyahoga, tragedy and farce jumble together in a riotously original voice. Evoking the Greek classics and the Bible alongside nods to Looney Tunes, Charles Portis, and Flannery O’Connor, Pete Beatty has written a rollicking revisionist (mid)Western with universal themes of family and fate — an old, weird America that feels brand new.”
The Radiant Lives of Animals
By Linda Hogan
October 13, 2020
Beacon Press: “Concerned that human lives and the natural world are too often defined by people who are separated from the land and its inhabitants, Indigenous writer and environmentalist Linda Hogan depicts her own intense relationships with animals as an example we all can follow to heal our souls and reconnect with the spirit of the world. In this illuminating collection of essays and poems, lightly sprinkled with elegant drawings, Hogan draws on many Native nations’ ancient stories and spiritual traditions to show us that the soul exists in those delicate places where the natural world extends into human consciousness — in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight.”
How Fire Runs
By Charles Dodd White
October 13, 2020
Swallow Press: “What happens when a delusional white supremacist and his army of followers decide to create a racially pure ‘Little Europe’ within a rural Tennessee community? As the town’s residents grapple with their new reality, minor skirmishes escalate and dirty politics, scandals, and a cataclysmic chain of violence follows. In this uncanny reflection of our time, award-winning novelist Charles Dodd White asks whether Americans can save themselves from their worst impulses and considers the consequences when this salvation comes too late.”
Negotiations
By Destiny O. Birdsong
October 13, 2020
Tin House: “What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body — a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity — both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.”
The Once and Future Witches
By Alix E. Harrow
October 13, 2020
Redhook: “In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters — James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna — join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote — and perhaps not even to live — the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.”
Make Me Rain
By Nikki Giovanni
October 20, 2020
William Morrow: “In Make Me Rain, she celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. Giovanni reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as ‘I Come from Athletes’ and ‘Rainy Days’ — calling out segregation and Donald Trump; as well as ‘Unloved (for Aunt Cleota)’ and ‘When I Could No Longer’ — her personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive home life. Stirring, provocative, and resonant, the poems in Make Me Rain pierce the heart and nourish the soul.”
Blood
By Allison Moorer
October 27, 2020
Hatchette: “Mobile, Alabama, 1986. A fourteen-year-old girl is awakened by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. On the front lawn, her father has shot and killed her mother before turning the gun on himself. Allison Moorer would grow up to be an award-winning musician, with her songs likened to ‘a Southern accent: eight miles an hour, deliberate, and very dangerous to underestimate’ (Rolling Stone). But that moment, which forever altered her own life and that of her older sister, Shelby, has never been far from her thoughts. Now, in her journey to understand the unthinkable, to parse the unknowable, Allison uses her lyrical storytelling powers to lay bare the memories and impressions that make a family, and that tear a family apart.”
Ride South Until the Sawgrass
By James Chapin
October 27, 2020
Lanternfish Press: “From the moment Nat Quinto and his wife Lucy set foot in the Florida Territory, they can’t seem to steer clear of Jake Primrose, a rancher whose schemes to increase his already plentiful wealth ensnare everyone around him. Between Primrose’s greed and the brutal conflicts brewing in the Territory surrounding them, will the Quinto family be able to stay true to themselves? In four tales, the paths of the Primrose and Quinto families cross, separate, and inevitably intertwine in this virtuosic debut set during the tumultuous years of the Florida Territory’s Second Seminole War and early statehood.”
The Lexington Six
By Josephine Donovan
October 30, 2020
University of Massachusetts Press: “On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In pursuit, the FBI launched a massive dragnet. Five lesbian women and one gay man ended up in jail for refusing to cooperate with federal officials, whom they saw as invading their lives and community. Dubbed the Lexington Six, the group’s resistance attracted national attention, inspiring a nationwide movement in other minority communities. Drawing on transcripts of the judicial hearings, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, hundreds of pages of FBI files released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with many of the participants, Josephine Donovan reconstructs this fascinating, untold story.”
Southern Review of Books 