Category Archives: Book Club

How to Juneteenth?

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It’s Juneteenth, and as I think about how—whether—to address that here in writing I’m reminded of a podcast discussion, with a guest who thought the newness of this “holiday” means many people do not yet know how to observe it, especially those who aren’t people of color. I think that’s true. I don’t even like using the word “holiday” to describe it; the day, what it commemorates, seems too solemn for that.

I think the best approach, perhaps, is to think intentionally about what this day means, what it celebrates and asks us to remember, and to find ways, large or small, to support people of color.

Maybe some reading? One of the books on my bedside shelf is The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an imagining (in poetry) of the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American author ever to publish a book of poetry. Captured and sold into slavery as a child, when her book was published she was forced to defend her very authorship of it in court. Jeffers’ tribute is eye-opening and the poetry gorgeous, and I would encourage everyone to read it, regardless whether you usually read poetry.

Another book I haven’t written about here previously is Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, by Justine Hill Edwards. Equally eye-opening to me, it’s an historical account of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, created by Congress in 1865 to collect and theoretically protect the savings of freed slaves, then driven into bankruptcy by mismanagement and fraud on the part of its all-white trustees. It’s heart-wrenching and, I think, an important telling of a sad piece of American history that continues to reverberate in our time.

On the front stoop…

You wouldn’t actually know from #frontstooppoetry that it’s Juneteenth. Commemorating the day there feels potentially appropriative (appropriational?), and so I went a different direction:

It had to be so hard for you.
You did your best.
I was always loved.
You were too.
6/19/26

I had fallen behind in sharing the porch poems here, so here’s one I missed, from a few days ago:

The cat, tethered
Changes its mind
Reverses
Back to the gangway
Is gone
6/15/26

Ours, of course, is not a cat household. There are two dogs and a rabbit, who’s intermittently hopping around the living and dining rooms and nibbling on his dinner as I type this. Fresh salad and herbs, a healthier meal than the Cuban sandwich I’m about to enjoy on the patio.

Praise song for the mind settling

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Has it really been almost three weeks since I posted a poem on the porch? It turns out it has, but National Poetry Month is around the corner, and I might try to be ready for it. There’s a new poem up today, in any case, courtesy of Mother Nature and the resilience of her creations.

We had an inch or so of snow on Thursday morning. I had to drive to work in it, walking through a slushy parking lot in indoor suede shoes to get inside. But it was followed by sunshine, glorious sunshine, and by the time I emerged from the building for my drive home you might not even have known it had snowed. Except on the shady patio to the side of my house, where it still coated the aging Adirondack chairs when dusk rolled around.

When I emerged from my front door for my after-work walk, I discovered the forsythia newly covered in blossoms not yet open but large and decidedly forsythia yellow. She is ready to bloom, and bloom she will, undeterred by snow or wind. I hope when she is fully in bloom we will have more days of glorious sunshine to adorn her, to adore her.

I’m nearly finished reading Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows. I’m sad to say I had a slow start with this book, which it didn’t deserve, as it is a gorgeous piece of writing and a love song to our natural world. It begs you to slow your thinking, let time take its natural, slow progression, be one with all the world around you. It’s a book I normally would devour, then probably go back and read again more slowly, and I think my slow start was due to my own state of mind, anxious and perhaps brittle, ill suited to contemplation—it certainly was no reflection on the book itself. Years back, I read Nick Hornby’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading, a diary-like series of essays on what he was reading, and aside from making me add a lot of books to my own reading wish list what has most stuck with me from it is Hornby’s recognition that writing and reading are a two-way dialogue, and sometimes we are simply not ready personally to read a particular book, that this isn’t a reflection of the book’s quality, that what might seem a dull or even badly written book to us might in fact just be a book that we have come to at the wrong time. My start with The Comfort of Crows was like that. I knew from the first essay that I loved it, but my mind wasn’t fully immersed, and I found myself getting up and walking away from it after each essay, not to savor and think about what I’d read but simply because I was not ready for contemplation.

That has shifted in the last couple of days, and I have been reading as much of this book at a time as I can squeeze into the parts of my days that are available for reading. I think I might have the book itself to thank for slowing me down, settling my mind, and that is why this post is titled as it is, borrowing from Renkl’s own “Praise Song…” mini-essays (contemplations?) sprinkled throughout the book. This may be a book that I buy after reading my borrowed library copy; I may want to keep it around to revisit.

Today I’m grateful for…

  • Libraries
  • Bird song
  • The end to the thunder and rain that so tormented Elwood earlier in the week

More Frida

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I’m still reading Frida’s diary and still finding in it gems and inspiration. The result: There’s a found poem series progressing on the front porch now, word images from the diary replacing one another, walking a tentative path forward toward whatever comes next. Here are the latest two. More are likely to come as I continue to savor this beautiful book.

I write this while waiting for my morning coffee to brew before heading to my desk for a day of work. Today I’m grateful for:

  • Coffee
  • The quiet of morning
  • Warmer weather, even though it means muddy paws
  • Frida’s diary
  • Sunshine!

So much for daily!

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Already I’ve skipped a day of #frontstooppoetry. But I’m not daunted. I had missed more than a month before putting up this poem on Thursday, so a one-day gap is a big improvement. Right?

In any case,yesterday was a work day, and the start of a weekend so also a play day. And here I am today, and there’s a new poem on the chalkboard, so…progress!

Today is a Slow Saturday. I’ll get a haircut (overdue), get the rest of the Christmas decorations down (overdue), make a grocery list, maybe make or write a postcard or two, and otherwise probably just hang out with the pack. I’ve been on walks with both dogs already (separate ones, as somebody needs some serious leash work), so I already feel like the day hasn’t been wasted.

Looking for a good book?

Today’s reading is Parable of the Sower, my first Octavia Butler book ever. I’ve just started it. But there are two books I’ve read recently that I’m recommending widely:

  • Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, by Katherine Rundell, is a beautifully written collection of essays about some of the many animals that are threatened or endangered. I found it simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, a combination that seems impossible even after experiencing it.
  • The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free, by Pauline Bren, tells the tale of New York City’s women’s residential hotel, along with many of the famous women who called it home, including Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and many more. For me, it also was an unparalleled look at the culture of the 1950s and what it meant for women.

And if, like me, you’re a fan of mysteries and noir, check out March Violets, by Philip Kerr, set in Nazi Germany before World War II. If you’ve got a reading suggestion for me, drop it in a comment.

Doggedly bookish

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It’s a grateful Sunday. Gray and occasionally misty outdoors, following a day or so of strong but not scary wind, all I believe remnants of Hurricane Helene, which moved so much more quickly than most post-hurricane storm systems. I’m tired of gray, rainy days, but grateful to have my home in tact, no giant limbs ripped from trees, no heartbreak.

A friend in Georgia has heartbreak, a home and yard she loved in tatters, trees through the roof, ceilings collapsed. The home is uninhabitable, probably reparable eventually but currently with no power, a gas leak in the area, and of course that jagged opening to the sky. My friend has decamped to Atlanta, grateful that she, her husband and dog were uninjured, but devastated by this abrupt loss and the uncertainty that is now her world.

Friends in Florida were lucky this time, and they and I are grateful for that. At the same time, we’re reminded again how precarious the world is and especially the climate. We have done this to ourselves, and here in the Midwest it’s still easy—though terribly short-sighted—to not be worried. Our temperatures have risen, spring comes earlier, and here in September the leaves are already falling from some trees. Tornados and other dangerously severe storm systems are more common. It’s not the same climate I grew up in. While it’s a grateful Sunday, it’s also a wary one, worried for friends, worried for our interconnected future.

So I read

Meanwhile, what better to do with gray days that read and cuddle with a dog? I’ve just finished my Roger Angell book (This Old Man), having started down the rabbit hole of other reading it inspired even before closing the cover. I’ve checked one Angell-inspired book out on Hoopla, placed a library hold on another, and read two poems that Angell singled out for praise: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem,” and Philip Levine’s “Turkeys.” I confess I don’t yet love either one as much as Angell did. But I’m still re-reading them, and one of Levine’s lines stuck its claws into me instantaneously: “… The next year / spring came late if / at all. …”

Wow.

Wonderland

The rabbit hole already has opened into a warren I might get lost in, as looking for the Bishop poem I chanced on this blog post about it, referencing an essay discussing it in the introduction of a book, and now I also have a blog post and a book introduction to read.

All of which reminds me of something I read not long ago in defense of owning books you might never read, wherein someone made an argument that books aren’t only for reading. That’s right. Discovering books nourishes the soul, too—reading the back cover or the first paragraphs or pages in the book store and having those grab your interest so that you want to read it right then, even if you already have 200 books awaiting your attention, even if after you get it home you never recapture that moment of being thrilled and intrigued and the book ultimately goes unread in your home.

Meanwhile, I’m off to book club in an hour to discuss Dawn Turner’s memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville, which I read shortly after it was published in 2021 and haven’t reread but hope to remember clearly enough to profit from the conversation. On our way to book club, we’ll stop at the library to drop off Roger Angell and pick up the on-hold book it led me to by Donald Barthelme.

Enter Elwood, stage left

Did you notice where I mentioned cuddling with a dog earlier? We said goodbye to our Tank on August 1—I hope one day to be able to write about this, but for now it’s still too raw—and have been living without a dog in the house for the first time in 30 years. That ended last Sunday, when we drove into Chicago and met Duke, a shy 6-year-old beagle. We brought him home on a trial basis—because we have two rabbits (Tank’s best friends) who occupy a hutch in our living room; any dog we bring in has to be able to co-exist—and so far, so good. We believe we are headed toward adoption, in which case Duke will become Elwood. We would not normally rename a 6-year-old dog, but this guy truly does not recognize Duke as his name and responded to Elwood the moment we tried it out.

Already we’re growing attached, both to this sweet beagle and to the renewed experience of living with a dog. The greetings, the wiggles, the cuddles, the outings to the woods, the soft scent of dog. Elwood bounds into the room and tiptoes into our hearts.




Bookish Saturday

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Gorgeous weather outside this morning, but so far it’s been a bookish Saturday. I ended the workweek at 11:50 p.m. with a dip into the Chicago poetry anthology Wherever I’m At, and I opened the weekend with my face burrowed back into Roger Angell’s This Old Man, which in the space of only a few minutes took me on a ride of reminiscences (Angell’s) that left me with multiple new additions to both my want-to-read book list and my want-to-see movie list.

Happy sigh, when my reading adds to, rather than subtracts from, my ever-growing book list. Also, when I need to add two random scraps of paper (today that would be a flimsy receipt torn into pieces) to the one bookmark actually needed to mark my place because, of course, there are passages in the book that I want to be able to go back and find easily when needed.

Let’s put “needed” in quotes, but honestly the soul does need these moments.

It’s not all happy news today, though. Our bookstore is closing. We’ve known this for weeks, probably more than a month, but I continue to face it with a mixture of sadness and denial. It doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps I’m at an age now where more and more of my good friends will quietly die off, but to start with my bookstore seems a cruelty. This shop has nurtured so many memories, supplied so many gifts to friends and family, provided so many hours of discovery, I can’t imagine life without it. The only good news is that it hasn’t failed to thrive; the owners have simply worn themselves out with its running. They don’t want to sell to someone else because they don’t trust anyone else with its name and its customer list. I respect that. And yet…

So later today, I’ll probably find myself once again cruising its shelves to see if anything calls my name and demands to come home with me. Bittersweet, as it feels more than a little like picking at the bones.

Heavy sigh.