A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All tagged female text
Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022).
It is precisely these sorts of modern mothering moments, among other aspects of 21st-century womanhood, that inspire the poetry of Kate Baer. And Yet: Poems (2022) is her second full-length book of poetry, and it goes on sale on November 8. As with her first collection, What Kind of Woman (2020), which became and instant number one New York Times bestseller, And Yet scrutinizes what it is to be a white, American, middle class woman at this moment. Middle age, parenting, marriage, self-image, sex, health: all of these have their moments under the bright lights that are Baer’s poems.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (2012) by Terry Tempest Williams is both moving and masterful in its craft. This just-over-two-hundred-page memoir is a small book that fits easily in a purse or a large pocket. It is one designed to be taken along when you leave the house. When Women Were Birds weaves Williams’s personal and family histories with that of the land on which she came of age. As any fan of Williams will expect, this slender volume includes many a powerful metaphor, startling anecdote, and compelling social-justice perspective.
J. R. Thorp’s debut novel, Learwife (2021) is a lyrical, internal monologue of King Lear’s widow during some undefined point in British medieval history. The novel opens as news of Lear’s death, and that of his three daughters, reaches a convent in northern England. Here, amidst the stone walls and industrious lives of the nuns, resides the estranged wife of King Lear who slowly unravels her story while she grieves the family she had already lost. Thus, Thorp’s Learwife begins where Shakespeare’s tragic King Lear concludes and provides the missing queen’s perspective through her memories and her grief.
Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s part memoir, part translation A Ghost In the Throat (2020) is, as she states from the beginning, “a female text” (3). In fact, lest her reader fail to absorb this, she titles her first chapter “a female text,” her first line of the first chapter (after the epigraph of a few stanzas of Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” or “Keen for Art ó Laoghaire”) is all in caps (“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.”), and then her memoir concludes: “This is a female text” (282). It is clear, she means us all to associate her text, and Eiblín’s as well, with the female. As such, it is both organic and circular, dynamic and complex.
