All tagged middle age

Wellness

Wellness

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peals the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are crushingly depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago contemporary storyline are a number of backstory character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult

And Yet: Poems

And Yet: Poems

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry

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.