All tagged sexuality

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.

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.

When Women Were Birds

When Women Were Birds

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction, Books for Writers

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.