WE WILL NOT CANCEL US / adrienne marie brown / 2020
What a challenging, compassionate book! I’m glad our social justice movements are amplifying voices as brave and nuanced as brown’s. I read this book in one sitting, and it took maybe two or so hours, carried through by her lucid and urgent writing, her asking the questions we need to consider to continue to grow the abolition movement.
I’ve grown a distaste for some of the prison abolitionist communities I’ve known, only because some seem to know much more about what they’re against than what they’re for. Sometimes they too gleefully launch obvious critiques against our current system while not actively seeking to build up alternatives to carceral justice. There are abolitionists who don’t give people in their own communities the resources and time to work through conflict or harm. Abolition demands that we build systems that truly care for and protect people, which means we need to get used to giving our time and mucking through the yuck of our comrades decision-making, traumas, and so forth to gain enough clarity to understand what needs to be healed, because that’s the only way to prevent violence instead of simply exiling it to another community.
I give this book a 5/5. I recommend it for anyone interested in social justice, social work, Black studies, feminism, and queer lit.
If Mother Braids a Waterfall / Dayna Patterson / 2020
Perhaps feeling limited by all the stereotypes and connotations of bitterness and fury that ride along with ex-Mormon, Patterson coins a new terminology and in doing so carves out a new space for herself in what she calls the post-Mormon. Becoming post-Mormon is a process of grieving, where Patterson writes letters to her ancestors in attempts to honor or decipher their legacies, where poignant moments in Mormon history are unfolded from their origami shapes, and where Patterson finds not only sorrow but relief. My favorite poems are “Still Mormon,” “Our Lord Jesus in Drag,” “When I Beach,” “Thirty-Three Reasons Why: A Partial List,” and “I Could Never Be a Jehovah’s Witness.”
I recommend this book for anyone interested in Mormon studies, the West, religion, and genealogy through verse. 3/5
The Desert Hides Nothing / Ellen Meloy and Stephen Strom / 2020
This book is precious for the way it helps others appreciate and understand the beauty of the Southwest in all its hot, sandy, and dry beauty. Quick vignettes of Meloy’s startlingly poetic prose seduce readers into the landscape with odes on flowers, remoteness, liquid silence, ancient sea beds and more. As someone who somewhat grew up hating our desert, Meloy’s words invite me in, tell me what to look for, help me see the richness where my eyes once only saw thirst and sunburn. Strom’s photographs invite deeper meditation and contemplation, at once realist and abstract. Anyone living in the Mountain West knows it’s immensely difficult to capture the beauty of this place on camera. Strom’s photographs have a detail and breadth that lulls your eyes to meander over its pixels. I’m grateful for this book and will be using it to help my friends understand the beauty in this stark, dehydrated place.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in landscape photography, the West, environmental literature, and poetry. 5/5
Index of Haunted Houses / Adam O. Davis / 2020
Fans of John Sibley Williams rejoice! Here comes another moody lyricist with an eye capable of seeing in the darkness. These poems read bullet-fast if you let them, passing by like ghosts, leaving you shifted—troubled and intrigued at the same time. There’s an interesting wrestle with the hauntings of racism in “Pacific Americana,” where the poet moans “Forgive us, History. We orphan everything we touch.” Those curious of whether or not they’d vibe with the poetics and imagery of this book, here’s a litmus test: Can you appreciate the haunted stillness of this image from “Ghost Story, 2020”:
The Earth a blue penny in a black pool.
My biggest beef with this collection is that when I interviewed Adam O. Davis for the Utah Book Festival in 2020, he seemed to imply that he didn’t really believe in ghosts. As someone who regularly communes with the religious, psychics, poets, spiritualists, and mystics, it seems clumsy to write a whole book using ghost as a lyric metaphor for your grief if you have not been haunted. The ghost seems boiled down to something abstract, rather than something visceral here.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in lyric poetry, contemporary American poetry, or someone who just needs something moody to play in the back of their skull.