a.c.'s Reviews

The audio version of The Tide should be read by that extreme-movie-preview voiceover guy—you know the one—because this writer is More Intense About the Ocean Than You. Melville, eat your heart out! Challenging, intellectual, flowery, and epic, the book opens with 13 hours of the author watching the tide go in and out. Thereafter, The Tide takes us on a tour of Greek mythology, classical history, the art of Andy Goldsworthy, and the linguistics of water…for crying out loud, people die tied to stakes on the shore! Delightful madness.                                                                 —a.c.

This is the sort of poetry that leans on prose—is direct, is conversational—but that is so imagistic, brazen, and obsessed with meaning that each word imprints itself on your very bones. I love this collection. Ruefle looks at the world with a wry, mature gaze, resulting in a work definitional and sometimes dark but also too beautiful to be entirely jaded. I had the uncomfortable impression that she was staring into my eyes and advising me, woman to woman, on how to live. —a.c.

Mischling opens at the doorsteps of Auschwitz as twin sisters first enter Josef Mengele’s infamous “Zoo,” where he affronted the human soul with a series of unforgivable experiments. Told from their dueling perspectives, this story isn’t a historical Holocaust narrative—instead, it is a literary, experiential kaleidoscope, using precocious young narrators to wrest meaning from that abyss. Horrible reality here gives way to poetic, lyrical prose which is affecting, powerful, and transcendent.  —a.c.

Damn you, Toobin, you’re a genius. I have loved this author since The Nine, but am still floored by his ability to transform one historical moment into a lens through which we can view the weight and meaning of entire decades. I didn’t care a whit about Patty Hearst until he used her story to unveil the cultural underpinnings and outcomes of the 60s and 70s. Peddle this to everyone you know who loves history and don’t stop until they’ve all read it.  —a.c.

Compulsively readable, real, and important, Jeff Chang’s new book provides a topic-by-topic overview of how racial tension, pain, and calls for justice have risen to the current moment—from Donald Trump to Rachel Dolezal, police brutality to campus protest. The author writes as one aware that, stranded in discomfort, many people elect to stay silent about racial issues. The invitation he writes toward is simple: Screw silence. Join in. You are needed.  —a.c.

To me, Adrienne Rich is the beautiful, brazen, contemplative, powerful, deeply complex feminist heroine of all modern poetry. I pass on her poems to struggling friends like a missionary trying to woo converts—give them as gifts to embolden and uplift—and carry her collections for courage during long travel. I wish this complete edition of her poetry, beautifully bound, could be passed out to young women everywhere.  —a.c.

Amply praised by respected peers like Ada Limón, Adam Clay’s writing is euphoric yet accessible; direct yet powerful. Stranger, his third collection, has such an incredible forward motion that forget where I am while reading. Clay explores the disorientations of transition but rejects a good existential wallow, with each poem instead insisting that “the space/ a body holds in any moment/is a marker of something greater/ than ourselves.”   —a.c.

A conversational microhistory of last-place cyclists, this treatise on the Tour de France worked for me even with my rusty-spoked lack of knowledge about the race. Charting the Tour from its 1903 inception (when it was launched to save a dying newspaper), through the world wars, and all the way on to its recent doping scandals, Leonard ultimately focuses on human determination. He explores each race compellingly by focusing on its “loser,” and generously shares his own relationship to cycling so that we feel the grace it offers.  —a.c.

Millie is a compelling, original, funny, and sometimes downright obnoxious new protagonist in modern SciFi. She’s an urban film school dropout with no legs (but great prosthetics); a mental illness for which she offers no apologies (ever); and a sense of ironic humor which ties together a completely unexpected storyline. Mishell Baker’s faerie-driven explanation of Hollywood movie making is such a well-built world that, as Millie says, “Walt Disney would be peeing right now.”  —a.c.

My favorite book in a year, this collection is for the postgender, the whimsical, the anti-establishment fiction lover who refuses to read the same thing twice. With deft skill and beautiful language, Oyememi pushes the boundaries of each story until they snap—and magical surrealism takes hold. Widely diverse in style, these tales begin to subtly connect early on, an initially slow blurring of shared characters and themes that calls for attentive reading. Makeless! Ideal for fans of Kelly Link.  —a.c.