‘Black Marks on White Paper’ by Michelle Antoinette Nelson (Love the Poet)
On the page, Love’s poems remind you that rhyme is the root word for rhythm. Contemporary poetry may have long shied away from the limits of rhyme, but Love’s wordplay is refreshing, executed with precision and a clear, performable quality. All of her poems have a direct relationship with their audience, relying on a rich sense of community instead of any writer-reader barrier.
‘Trick of the Dark’ by Val McDermid
Trick of the Dark (Bywater Books) is something old and something new from McDermid. A stand-alone novel (not one of her series detectives appears) and thoroughly, engagingly, compellingly lesbian as well as being just as bloodily intense as her previous thrillers.
‘boneyard’ by Stephen Beachy
There are some books that
‘Small Fires’ by Julie Marie Wade
In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade, who won a Lambda for her memoir Wishbone, considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue. With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her past—to skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond.
‘Lightning People’ by Christopher Bollen
A fun fact about lightning: a strike lasts for about 30 microseconds.
Lightning People starts with a similar flash. The narrator of the prologue, Joseph Guiteau, speaks in conspiratorial terms, suggesting a link between a rise in lightning-related Manhattan-area deaths and the fall of the Twin Towers.
