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Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Big Breath In

Review by Alice Cary

At the start of John Straley’s Big Breath In, 68-year-old Delphine is staying in a Seattle hotel across the street from the hospital where she is being treated for Stage 4 cancer. The marine biologist is far from everything she loves: her home in Sitka, Alaska; her son and grandson in California; and the whales she has spent a lifetime studying. She is lonely and frustrated, feeling “she had so much more work to do, more photographs to take, more data to go through, more students to foster toward their own research. She couldn’t stand ruminating about her illness.” After all, “what she loved about her life was the sensation that discovery is an unending relay race of research.” 

Suddenly, however, Delphine finds herself in a very different kind of relay race. Her late husband, John, was a private investigator, and when one of his former colleagues asks Delphine to do some investigative work, she quickly becomes embroiled in a case involving an illicit infant adoption ring. Despite the danger and her exhaustion, Delphine feels alive again:  “This was the opposite of dying and she drank it in.” 

Straley has written 13 previous crime novels, but, as he explains in his moving acknowledgements, Big Breath In is inspired by his wife, a marine biologist who has had Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He created Delphine in her honor, and she is a memorable, whip-smart fireball of a character—a “sickly, thin and bald” woman who carries a stun gun and doesn’t hesitate to jump on a 530-pound Sportster motorcycle that another dying cancer patient bequeaths to her. 

Equally wonderful are Straley’s descriptions of whale behavior, which parallel the novel’s action throughout. Just as sperm whales “seem to foster a type of matriarchy” to care for their young, Delphine enlists the help of a group of women, including the motorcycle owner’s grieving widow and a lesbian biker gang, to hunt for the endangered babies. Despite the gruesome, gritty nature of the things Delphine sees and the characters she meets in her quest for justice, Straley’s prose shines with delightful images: “What the boys saw could have been a gathering of tribal huntresses from all the savannas of the world. In the middle of this herd sat Delphine on the Sportster.”

While this is a book about coping with serious illness and dying, it’s also about living, appreciating every moment to its fullest. Big Breath In is a nonstop, high-octane crime novel featuring an unforgettable heroine with a whale-size heart.

John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

About Face

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Ostensibly organized around the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 2019, About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art was an art exhibition before it became a book. Its curator, Jonathan D. Katz, is arguably the leading scholar on queer art history, and here he proves that he’s also an adept editor. About Face catalogs 350 artworks from a diverse array of artists from the past 50 years: portraits by Peter Hujar, largely recognized as one of the leading photographers of the 20th century, are positioned alongside work by Zanele Muholi, the South African photographer and activist whose art-world rise was comparatively recent. The essays in this volume skew academic, which provides a grandiosity to its subject matter. Katz cautions readers that to divide art along a line of queer and not-queer is to ignore not only nuance but the thousands of years of art history that existed before such classifications were foregrounded. Katz suggests we remove the binary and “return to a more expansive sense of sexuality.” The scholarship is deep and rewards multiple slow readings, while the artworks are sumptuous, thrilling and demand immediate appreciation. About Face is highly recommended for students of art history and queer studies, but also for anyone interested in how language transforms alongside identity.

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
FictionPoetry

Your Dazzling Death

Review by Laura Sackton

In their third collection, Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish (The Year of the Femme) grieves their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, and celebrates their love and life together—the good and the bad. These poems are raw and reaching, often addressed directly to Caldwell. They pulse with ongoing loss, as memory by memory, day by day, Donish is confronted with the fact of their beloved’s death, and their continuing love for her. 

Several poems begin with the line, “In my next life,” acknowledging how grief reforges the world of those left behind. Donish seems to reach for that remade world not only by looking back into the painful, tender memories of a shared queer life, but also by insisting on Caldwell’s continued relevance and presence. “I don’t know // if it’s then or now / anymore. If you’re here / or already gone” they write in “Agate Beach, Lopez Island.”

The centerpiece of the collection, “Kelly in Violet” is a palimpsest of The History of Violets by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio; some traces of the source text remain in gray. This piece is rich in imagery, overflowing with the daily challenge of living, particularly with grief and mental illness. The urgency and directness of loss haunts even the most beautiful lines: “The butterflies want you back, the hawks want you back, the moon is pining.”

Donish rejects simple notions of time and loss, and instead writes into queer time and grief time, heavy with ghosts and rich with possibility. “Yet isn’t it a mistake / to say I know our story now? Isn’t that the thing? // I don’t believe in dying / fixing—stilling—anything.” This is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.

Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.
FictionPoetry

Scattered Snows, to the North

Review by Laura Sackton

In his 17th book of poetry, Scattered Snows, to the North, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips gazes both inward and outward. His work carries a signature heft, a musicality and syntax that seems to rewrite itself with each read. Phillips tangles his sentences like few other poets working today, and often, rather than untangling them, he lets the tangles linger, clause-heavy and potent, wordy but exacting. The knots he makes with lines, stanzas, images and always-startling juxtaposition are graceful but not easy. One of the distinct pleasures of reading his work is getting lost in the questions it poses, and Scattered Snows, to the North is full of questions.

The speaker of “Searchlights” embodies the contradictions at the heart of this work: “I can see the words, though I can’t / hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does, / Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of the rain, which is.” How does the memory of a relationship, or a place, or a particular moment reshape it? Can the present change the past? Why do we fixate on memory, rework the contours of a life over and over again in the mind? What changes as we age, and how do we reckon with what doesn’t? These questions hum through the poems, surfacing and retreating. Always, Phillips engages with them at a slant: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”

Phillips beautifully articulates the thorny conflict between reflecting on and being present in: reflecting on time passing while being present in your body; reflecting on the cyclical sameness of human history while being present in the specific ecstasy of a season, a love, a quarrel, the beach at night. The settings of these poems often feel mythological—fields and forests—but they also feel distinctly current. Nature is everywhere, and always changing; there are animals in various stages of life, the turbulent sea, weather, light.

The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” is a poignant meditation on loss both intimate and universal. In considering the people who lived during the failing years of the Roman Empire, the speaker muses: “If it was night, they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.” In “Stop Shaking,” Phillips asks, “What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive?” Over and over the poems echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.

The poems of Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.
FictionPoetry

The Invention of the Darling

Review by Kelly Ann Graff

Dedicated to those “Who Wrestle With God,” The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee utilizes familiar language and religious motifs to depict a sprawling yet personal approach to the sacred. Lee, the son of a political exile turned Presbyterian minister, previously penned six celebrated poetry collections, many of which ruminate on memories of family and love with religious undercurrents. In The Invention of the Darling, Lee’s retrospective writing goes further, seemingly recollecting the inception of life itself.

Many poems in this collection position parents as both sign and symbol of the creator. The epic poem “The Herald’s Wand” explores various manifestations of this almighty deity, alluding to the serpents of Norse, Greek and Christian mythologies. Through the voice of a speaker that seems to hover omnisciently, Lee establishes, “Before / the serpent was a serpent / she was my mother” and “Before the serpent was a serpent / he was my father.” Over the course of the poem, these mutable metaphors continue to link parents to God. At its conclusive section, aptly labeled “Axis Mundi,” readers are left with the bones of the Jörmungandr-like serpent at the base of an Yggdrasil-like tree. In Lee’s world, the death of a parent is the death of a god, an apocalypse. The speaker describes the hope, the terror and the devastation of three beings who witnessed the death of the parent-god-serpent before reaching out to the reader with the final lines: “Of those three, which one were you? / Whether or not you remember, you were there.” This is what Lee does so masterfully: balance the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.

While the collection explores love as expressed through grief, it also champions love expressed through awe, intimacy and worship. Countering the image of the earthbound serpent, Lee celebrates the glory of the hummingbird in the ecstatic “O, Hummingbird, Don’t Go,” and the sensual “Met and Unmet.” The ultimate image of the collection is one of hope. At the end of the titular “The Invention of the Darling,” the speaker realizes that “I thought I’d lost my mother. / It was I who was lost. / Here she is, a pure vibration / across two bridges.” This resonating image finds harmony between the many dialectics presented throughout the work: snake and bird, child and parent, ground and sky, earth and heaven, living and dead, the personal and the prophetic.

The Invention of the Darling relishes in the language and structures of religion, sanctifying parent-child relationships to depict the scale of the grief of parental loss.

In his seventh collection, The Invention of the Darling, poet Li-Young Lee balances the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.
FictionPoetry

Forest of Noise

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Fresh on the heels of his debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a dispatch from Gaza and a call for peace while there is still time to save his people. Abu Toha’s poems describe life in Gaza before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and the result is a harrowing but powerful account of surviving a genocide.

Forest of Noise begins with a tribute to several childhoods: those of Gazan children currently living under constant bombardment, and of Abu Toha himself, who recalls seeing a helicopter shooting a rocket into a building at 7 years old. The rest of the collection performs a similar act,  looking back while recounting the atrocities of the present and, at times, offering glimpses of an unknown and potentially catastrophic future. In “A Request,” written in response to a poem by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, Abu Toha hopes for a “clean death,” one where he is not buried under rubble or disfigured by shrapnel, and where the clothes in his closet remain intact for his burial. Other “after” poems, like “After Allen Ginsburg” and “Who Has Seen the Wind [after Bob Kaufman]” rewrite the chaos of other turbulent historical moments in an attempt to make sense of the present. And yet, there are pockets of stillness and quiet reflection. In “Palestinian Village,” the speaker reclines in a peaceful town without conflict. The scene is beautiful, but the idyll is fleeting. By the collection’s final poem, “This is Not a Poem,” imagery collapses in a litany of dismembered limbs. “This is a grave,” writes Abu Toha, “not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.”  

Forest of Noise is a difficult but necessary read. As good poetry often does, these poems will keep you up at night and will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?

As good poetry often does, Forest of Noise will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?
FictionPoetry

Letters to Forget

Review by Laura Sackton

Published after poet Kelly Caldwell’s death in 2020, Letters to Forget is assured, electric and devastating. The collection comprises three sections: the first and third contain short poems written in one of two forms, either prose poems titled “[ dear c. ]” and addressed to the poet Cass Donish, Caldwell’s partner, or poems composed entirely of end-stopped lines, with titles like “[ house of rope ]” and “[ house of bare life ].” The middle section contains three long poems that engage with the story of Job through a lens of queerness, transness and mental illness. 

Within these constraints, Caldwell’s imagery and imagination soar. The epistolary “[ dear c. ]” poems were written during time Caldwell spent in a residential hospital receiving treatment for suicidal depression. There is deep sorrow in these poems, and a sense of restlessness—as if the lines are trying to break out of the page. Caldwell leaps from image to image, her mind and body constantly in motion. “Here are some awkward questions, and you can say what you’re thinking. How many bruises can I put on the scale before it tilts? How much does a marriage bed weigh? How to place this body on an actual body?” she writes in one. In another: “I wish starlings carpeted the floor of this rainy April morning instead of a beige spread.” 

There is a delicate playfulness in Letters to Forget, despite the severity of the subject matter. Caldwell writes with intellectual curiosity and emotional vulnerability, pondering the heaviness of memory, the power of claiming her own self and body, the balm of loving and being loved, and the often dark reality of living with bipolar disorder. Her inventive use of end-stops is nothing short of stunning; she divides sentences into new worlds with periods, creating a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from.

“What comfort does, we mimic, and we hope for marvelous clouds, and burned fog, and lovers’ spit,” Caldwell writes. It is heartbreaking that this debut will not be followed by other books, but the words that Caldwell has left us are not mimicry. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.

The poems in Kelly Caldwell’s debut collection, Letters to Forget, have a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.
Audio

We Solve Murders

Review by Deborah Mason

Famous for the Thursday Murder Club series, Richard Osman has inaugurated a new series with We Solve Murders (10.5 hours). Amy Wheeler, a professional bodyguard, and her father-in-law, Steve, a retired police investigator, stumble upon a money smuggling scheme involving ChatGPT and murdered social media influencers. With all the energy of a Carl Hiaasen novel, We Solve Murders also has the dry wit and well-defined characters of Osman’s earlier books.

Audie Award-winner Nicola Walker is a superb narrator whose exquisite comic timing makes We Solve Murders an engaging audiobook. Walker resists the temptation to play comic characters broadly, and instead gives even minor characters individuality. Her portrayal of Rosie D’Antonio, the world’s second-bestselling author (after Lee Child), is a terrific blend of world-weary wisdom, generosity and killer amounts of tequila. Walker similarly teases out the nuances of Amy and Steve’s relationship, leading us up to an outcome not only believable but inevitable.

Read our starred review of the print version of We Solve Murders.

Audie Award-winner Nicola Walker is a superb narrator whose exquisite comic timing makes the audiobook of Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders terrifically engaging.
FictionPoetry

Bluff

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Danez Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Bluff, is a robust and inventive read, with poems ranging from essayistic to wordless. (One piece, “METRO” is a QR code that takes readers online to over two dozen pages that didn’t make it into the printed collection.) Bluff begins with a personal query: Has the poet betrayed their community by making art about Black pain? This is a topic the speaker returns to again and again in early pieces, where they critique both white audiences’ appetites for anti-Black violence and the rewards that come to those who can satisfy those cravings. At the same time, there are poems about the persistent beauty of Black communities, even in the face of generational violence and the unfulfilled promise of progress: Neither exoduses from the Jim Crow South nor the first Black president have improved the lives of most Black Americans.

In “Minneapolis, St. Paul,” and “My Beautiful End of the World,” two mini-essays that cordon off the center of the book, Smith delves into the problems plaguing America’s heartland, ones that are in fact happening all over the country. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” describes the protests following George Floyd’s murder in diaristic fashion, while “My Beautiful End of the World” chronicles how gentrification is killing the land and restricting access to what remains of its natural beauty. Later poems make clear that the dream of peace and the possibility of a utopia can exist, if in no other place, then in the poetry, right alongside an unabashed reckoning with poverty and racism. Bluff asks, “What shall we do with this land we were never meant to own?” and “How shall we live on it together in the little time we have left?” The answer may lie in the final lines of the book, where the speaker awakens next to a lover and is reminded of the power of the love they make together.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires: It interrogates the poet’s past work and revises it, while resisting the powers that threaten to sell us out and sell us short. In the end, it offers joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires, offering joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.
Audio

Connie

Review by Maya Fleischmann

Legendary journalist Connie Chung narrates her tell-all memoir with the same warm authoritativeness she built her legacy on decades ago. The first Asian American to anchor a major network’s evening news program, and one of the first women to do so, Chung never let the fact that journalism was a white man’s world deter her from her goals. Inspired by her idol, Walter Cronkite, the determined 5-foot-3-inches tall Chung, the youngest of five in a Chinese household, used moxie and motivation to land herself a job as a CBS correspondent in 1971, at just 25 years old.

Now in her late 70s, Chung delivers her life story with her signature soft raspiness and confident authenticity. Her reflections on her professional life, as well as her personal life as a wife and mother, are infused with tenderness, chutzpah and humor. Chung gives insight into American history with its changing sociopolitical landscape, and names those who helped (and hindered) her success, while throwing in delightful impersonations of prominent individuals.

Inspiring, entertaining and strikingly relevant, Connie (11.5 hours) will appeal to those interested in the changing roles of women in society and the evolution of American media.

Read our review of the print version of Connie.

Inspiring, entertaining and strikingly relevant, Connie will appeal to those interested in the changing roles of women in society and the evolution of American media.
Audio

Mina’s Matchbox

Review by Deborah Mason

Mina’s Matchbox (8.5 hours), by award-winning author Yoko Ogawa, is a magical coming-of-age story centered on two girls on the brink of adolescence: sturdy, pragmatic Tomoko and her fragile, artistic cousin, Mina. Told from Tomoko’s point of view and set in Ashiya, Japan, in 1972, Mina’s Matchbox is touched with fairy-tale enchantment, depicting a family in quiet crisis with delicacy and wonder.

Stephen B. Snyder’s translation is lyrical and humorous, and it’s enhanced by Nanako Mizushima’s nuanced narration. Mizushima conveys Tomoko’s awe towards her cousin’s wealthy, enigmatic family, expressing both her extreme awkwardness and her intense loyalty to Mina. Mizushima’s depiction of Mina is equally convincing, revealing both Mina’s frailty and her boundless heart. The result is a delightful audiobook that captures the everyday magic of friendship and love.

Read our starred review of the print version of Mina’s Matchbox.

Mina’s Matchbox is a delightful audiobook touched with fairy-tale enchantment, depicting the friendship between two cousins in 1972 Japan.

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