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Earth Day 15 Apr 2025, 3:25 am

How Can I Help?: Saving Nature with Your Yard
Douglas W. Tallamy
Timber Press

In How Can I Help?, Tallamy tackles the questions commonly asked at his popular lectures and shares compelling and actionable answers that will help gardeners and homeowners take the next step in their ecological journey. Topics range from ecology, evolution, biodiversity and conservation to restoration, native plants, invasive species, pest control, and supporting wildlife at home. Tallamy keenly understands that most people want to take part in conservation efforts but often feel powerless to do so as individuals. But one person can make a difference, and How Can I Help? details how.

Whether by reducing your lawn, planting a handful of native species, or allowing leaves to sit untouched, you will be inspired and empowered to join millions of other like-minded people to become the future of backyard conservation.

Carbon: The Book of Life
Paul Hawken
Viking

Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization.

Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.

In this stirring, hopeful, and deeply humane book, Hawken illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and asks us to see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined—inseparably connected.

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
Camille T Dungy
Simon & Schuster

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

“Brilliant and beautiful” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

A Walk in the Park
Kevin Fedarko
Scribner

Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril—and where, even today, there is still no trail along the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic park.

Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
Mariner Books

Rarely does a single book alter the course of history, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did exactly that. The outrcrythat followed its publication in 1962 forced the banning of DDT and spurred the revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. This is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.

The introduction, by the acclaimed biographer Linda Lear, tells the story of Carson’s courageous defense of her truths in the face of a ruthless assault form the chemical industry following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death.

Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year
Kerri ni Dochartaigh
Milkweed

Two days after the winter solstice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived, and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways, everything was forever changed. Mapping the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—Kerri tells the story of a changed life in a changed world. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical and deeply moving, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, the natural world, and most of all to a love that transformed a life. Guided by a voice that is utterly singular, this book is “raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical” (Katherine May), a meditation on home, the deepening of family, and the connections that sustain us.

Silent Spring Revolution
Douglas Brinkley
Harper

With the detonation of the Trinity in the New Mexico desert in 1945, the United States took control of Earth’s destiny. During the early Cold War years, the federal government routinely tested nuclear devices. Not only was nuclear fallout a public health menace, but radioactive materials contaminated entire ecosystems. During the 1950s, an unprecedented postwar economic boom took hold, with America becoming the world’s leading hyperindustrial and military giant. But this historic prosperity came at a heavy cost: oceans began to die, wilderness vanished, the insecticide DDT poisoned ecosystems, wildlife perished, and chronic smog blighted major cities.

In Silent Spring Revolution, Douglas Brinkley pays tribute to the crusaders who combatted the mauling of the natural world in the Long Sixties, including Rachel Carson, Stewart Udall, William O. Douglas, and Cesar Chavez. Brinkley explores how Carson’s book Silent Spring launched an ecological revolution that inspired landmark legislation signed by three presidents—such as the Wilderness Act (1964), the Clean Air Acts (1963 and 1970), and the Endangered Species Acts (1966, 1969, and 1973)—and explores other crucial events, from the Santa Barbara oil spill to the Great Lakes preservation to the first Earth Day.

With the United States grappling with climate change and resource exhaustion, Silent Spring Revolution reminds us that a new generation can save the planet from ruin.

Language of Trees
Katie Holten
Tin House Books

Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, roots, and seeds, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. In this gorgeously illustrated and deeply thoughtful collection, Katie Holten gifts readers her tree alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate beloved lost and new, original writing in praise of the natural world.

With an introduction from Ross Gay, and featuring writings from over fifty contributors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Holten illustrates each selection with an abiding love and reverence for the magic of trees. She guides readers on a journey from creation myths and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500-year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry, unearthing a new way to see the natural beauty all around us and an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away.

The Language of Trees considers our relationship with literature and landscape, resulting in an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art and a deeply beautiful celebration of trees through the ages.

Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite
Dean King
Scribner

In June of 1889 in San Francisco, John Muir—iconic environmentalist, writer, and philosopher—meets face-to-face for the first time with his longtime editor Robert Underwood Johnson, an elegant and influential figure at The Century magazine. Before long, the pair, opposites in many ways, decide to venture to Yosemite Valley, the magnificent site where twenty years earlier, Muir experienced a personal and spiritual awakening that would set the course of the rest of his life.

Upon their arrival the men are confronted with a shocking vision, as predatory mining, tourism, and logging industries have plundered and defaced “the grandest of all the special temples of Nature.” While Muir is devastated, Johnson, an arbiter of the era’s pressing issues in the pages of the nation’s most prestigious magazine, decides that he and Muir must fight back. The pact they form marks a watershed moment, leading to the creation of Yosemite National Park, and launching an environmental battle that captivates the nation and ushers in the beginning of the American environmental movement.

“Comprehensively researched and compellingly readable” (Booklist, starred review), Guardians of the Valley is a moving story of friendship, the written word, and the transformative power of nature. It is also a timely and powerful “origin story” as the towering environmental challenges we face today become increasingly urgent.

Turning to Birds
Lili Taylor
Crown

Most people don’t really know birds—or rather, they aren’t aware of them. Lili Taylor used to be one of those people. She knew birds existed. She thought about them, maybe even more than the average person. But she didn’t know them. And then something happened.

During a much-needed break from her work as an actor, Lili sought silence and instead found the bustling, symphonic world of birds that had always existed around her. Since then, she has kept a keen eye pressed to her binoculars in search of vivid stories that elevate the everyday, if only one pays attention.

Through a series of beautifully crafted essays, Taylor shares her intimate encounters with the birds that have captured her heart and imagination—from tracking flitting woodpeckers through oak trees to spotting majestic blue jays perched on a Manhattan fire escape; from the exhilaration of witnessing a migratory flock from the top of the Empire State Building to the quiet joy of observing a nest of hatchlings in her own backyard. Through simply paying attention to birds, Lili has been shown a parallel world that is wider and deeper, one of constant change and movement, full of life and the will to survive.

Throughout Turning to Birds, Taylor encourages mindfulness, inviting readers to be present and fully engaged with the world around them. Taylor’s lyrical prose and thoughtful meditations on both the art we make and the art we discover around us create a sense of intimacy and wonder, inviting readers to see the world through new eyes and to find joy in the most unexpected places.

The post Earth Day appeared first on Beaverdale Books.

Baseball 15 Apr 2025, 2:57 am

Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere
Lucas Mann
Vintage

An unforgettable chronicle of a year of minor-league baseball in a small Iowa town that follows not only the travails of the players of the Clinton LumberKings but also the lives of their dedicated fans and of the town itself.

Award-winning essayist Lucas Mann delivers a powerful debut in his telling of the story of the 2010 season of the Clinton LumberKings. Along the Mississippi River, in a Depression-era stadium, young prospects from all over the world compete for a chance to move up through the baseball ranks to the major leagues. Their coaches, some of whom have spent nearly half a century in the game, watch from the dugout. In the bleachers, local fans call out from the same seats they’ve occupied year after year. And in the distance, smoke rises from the largest remaining factory in a town that once had more millionaires per capita than any other in America.

Mann turns his eye on the players, the coaches, the fans, the radio announcer, the town, and finally on himself, a young man raised on baseball, driven to know what still draws him to the stadium. His voice is as fresh and funny as it is poignant, illuminating both the small triumphs and the harsh realities of minor-league ball. Part sports story, part cultural exploration, part memoir, Class A is a moving and unique study of why we play, why we watch, and why we remember.

The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife
Brad Balukjian
University of Nebraska Press

Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack.

On Balukjian’s trip in the summer of 2015, he spanned 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. Actively engaging with his subjects, he took a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watched kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and went to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Alternately elegiac and uplifting, The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue, and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the men on the front of them.

Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
Will Bardenwerper
Doubleday

What happens when a minor league team—the heart and soul of a Rust Belt town in western New York—is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?

Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players. As MLB considers further cuts and private equity buys up what remains, the mom-and-pop operations once prevalent in baseball are endangered. But for now, the sights and sounds of local baseball live on in Batavia—cheap draft beer and hot dogs, starry-eyed kids seeking autographs, and breathtaking summer sunsets.

Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments
Joe Posnanski
Dutton

Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It’s Willie Mays’s catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters. But Why We Love Baseball also reveals moments raw with humanity, the unheralded heroes, the mesmerizing mistakes drenched in pine tar. Whether of a real fan who witnessed it, or the pitcher who gave up the home run, the umpire, the coach, the opposing player—these are fresh takes on moments so powerful they almost feel like myth.

With his trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations, Posnanski gets at the real heart of the game. From nineteenth-century pitchers’ duels to breaking the sport’s color line in the ’40s, all the way to the greatest trick play of the last decade and the slide home that became a meme, Posnanski’s illuminating take allows us to rediscover the sport we love—and thought we knew.

The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series
Tyler Kepner
Anchor

The World Series is the most enduring showcase in American team sports. It’s the place where legends are made, where celebration and devastation can hinge on a fly ball off a foul pole or a grounder beneath a first baseman’s glove. And there’s no one better to bring this rich history to life than New York Times national baseball columnist Tyler Kepner, whose bestselling book about pitching, K, was lauded as “Michelangelo explaining the brush strokes on the Sistine Chapel” by Newsday.

In seven scintillating chapters, Kepner delivers an indelible portrait of baseball’s signature event. He digs deep for essential tales dating back to the beginning in 1903, adding insights from Hall of Famers like Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Jim Palmer, Dennis Eckersley and many others who have thrived – and failed – when it mattered most.

Why do some players, like Madison Bumgarner, Derek Jeter and David Ortiz, crave the pressure? How do players handle a dream that comes up short? What’s it like to manage in the World Series, and what are the secrets of building a champion? Kepner celebrates unexpected heroes like Bill Wambsganss, who pulled off an unassisted triple play in 1920, probes the mysteries behind magic moments (Did Babe Ruth call his shot in 1932? How could Eckersley walk Mike Davis to get to Kirk Gibson in 1988?) and busts some long-time myths (the 1919 Reds were much better than the Black Sox, anyway).

The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
Back Bay Books

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners’ team captain and Henry’s best friend, realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment — to oneself and to others.

The post Baseball appeared first on Beaverdale Books.

Poetry Month 15 Apr 2025, 2:27 am

Promises of Gold
Jose Olivarez
Holt

Love is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled, misrepresented, or narrowly defined. In the words of José Olivarez: “How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love—but what about our friends? Those homies who show up when the romance ends to help you heal your heart. Those homies who are there all along—cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.”

Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano González, “Promises of Gold explores many forms of love and how “a promise made isn’t always a promise kept,” as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American Dream laying bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.”

He writes, “For those of us who are hyphenated Americans, where do we belong? Promises of Gold attempts to reckon with colonial legacy and the reality of what those promises have borne out for Mexican descendants. I wrote this book to imagine and document an ongoing practice of healing—healing that requires me to show up for myself, my community, my friends, my family, and my loves every day.”

Whether readers enter this collection in English or Spanish, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life—and love.

Bluff
Danez Smith
Graywolf Press

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Woke Up No Light
Leila Mottley
Knopf

woke up no light is a Black girl’s saunter turned to a woman’s defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A mouth swung open and ready to devour. A quest for home in a world that knows only wasteland and wanting.

Moving in sections from “girlhood” to “neighborhood” to “falsehood” to, finally, “womanhood,” these poems reckon with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. The collection is sharp and raw, wise and rhythmic, a combination that lights up each page. From unearthing histories to searching for ways to dream of a future in a world constantly on the brink of disaster, this young poet sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail.

woke up no light confirms Leila Mottley’s arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice—brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die
Tove Ditlevsen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, and love poems—poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen’s poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail.

Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare qualities: the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.

A Little Daylight Left
Sarah Kay
Dial Press

Beloved spoken word poet Sarah Kay brings us her long-awaited second full-length poetry collection, a decade after her acclaimed debut No Matter the Wreckage. In A Little Daylight Left, Kay explores life’s most vulnerable moments of transition with courage, curiosity, joy, and humor. Each poem invites readers to consider what it might look like to boldly face the hard things we so often run from—a heartbreak, an ailing loved one, the fear that comes with new beginnings and uncertain futures. The result is a blueprint for discovering beauty in all that makes us human. With her signature wit and wisdom, Kay shows us how to navigate life bravely, with every single part of ourselves.

Water, Water
Billy Collins
Random House

In this collection of sixty new poems, Billy Collins writes with more intimacy than ever before about the beauties and ironies of everyday experience. A poem is best, he feels, when it begins in clarity but ends with a whiff of mystery.

In Water, Water, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight, while revealing more about himself as a poet than we’ve ever encountered. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar. It’s no surprise that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both call Collins one of America’s favorite poets.

The Monet Conundrum

Is every one of these poems
different from the others
he asked himself,
as the rain quieted down,

or are they all the same poem,
haystack after haystack
at different times of day,
different shadows and shades of hay?

Doggerel
Reginald Dwayne Betts
W.W. Norton & Company

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic—but equally rich—lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)—and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

“. . . every story becomes a multiplication,

If the naming is filled less with names than

With the best parts, the barking & everything

Else, because who among us hasn’t been

As mangy as a rescue, even on our best

Days, desiring mostly to be loved.”

—from “Rings”

Scattered Snows, to the North
Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true?

In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “Yet the world’s still / so beautiful . . . Sometimes // it is . . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.

A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025
New Yorker Magazine, Kevin Young (Editor)
Knopf

Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

Kitchen Hymns
Padraig O Tuama
Copper Canyon Press

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns opens with a question: “Do You Believe in God?” — but the bee, “gone extinct,” cannot answer, and the grass calls believe “a poor verb.” This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative. Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a “favorite emptiness,” longing still has things to say: Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell’s exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting “you”: an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns “reckon[s] with the empty,” and becomes “busy with a body / not a question.”

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The Browser – April 2025 28 Mar 2025, 5:26 pm

Celebrate Indie Bookstore Day at Beaverdale Books!

We strive to provide a great selection of books, outstanding author visits, and excellent customer service. Stop by to celebrate the joy of reading!

Read the newsletter.

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Women’s History Month 10 Mar 2025, 10:38 pm

Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stunt Woman
Mallory O’Meara
Hanover Square Press

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as “The Most Daring Actress in Pictures,” Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era’s biggest action stars. Her exploits on motorcycles, train cars, and horseback were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials–yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of cinema in the decades that would follow her.

Fearless and Free
Josephine Baker
Tiny Reparations Books

Josephine Baker’s autobiography is filled with her effervescent personality, and her voice rings as boldly today as when she first wrote to her admirers, “Stay young, lively, fearless, free, and go fast.”

After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans—Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them. She strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah wearing a diamond collar. With her signature flapper bob and enthralling dance moves, she was one of the most recognizable women in the world.

During World War II, Josephine became a spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

First published in France in 1949, her memoir will now finally be published in English. At last we can hear Josephine in her own voice: charming, passionate, and brave. Her words are thrilling and intimate, like she’s talking with her friends over after-show drinks in her dressing room. Through her own telling, we come to know a woman who danced to the top of the world and left her unforgettable mark on it.

American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Juustice
Daniel Stone
Dutton

At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was, perhaps, the only person who could prevent tragedy from happening again.

When Alice Hamilton arrived at the lead factory, she stood as a doctor who had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. Hamilton specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. She was the first female faculty member at Harvard. She guided numerous studies on the dangers of lead. She had saved countless lives, changing industrial practices at a time when exposing workers to hazardous chemicals commonly led to strange and frightening deaths. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.

The 1920s were an exciting time. Industry was booming. New inventions seemed to be everywhere, including automobiles. And in a laboratory, hunched over his periodic table, Thomas Midgley triumphantly found just the right chemical to improve the engines of those vehicles, setting himself up for a financial windfall and the sort of fame that would land his name in the history books: Leaded gasoline.

Soon, Hamilton would be on a collision course with Thomas Midgley, fighting with all her might against his invention, which poisoned the air we breathe, the water we drank, and the basic structure of our brains.

American Poison is the gripping story of the shocking lengths some will go to in the name of innovation—and the ramifications that continue to echo today.

Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Tori Telfer
Harper Perennial

Inspired by author Tori Telfer’s Jezebel column “Lady Killers,” this thrilling and entertaining compendium investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages

When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”

Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject, and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.

Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America
Dahlia Lithwick
Penguin Books

In the immediate aftershocks of Donald Trump’s victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016, women lawyers across the country, independently of one another, sprang into action. They were determined not to stand by while the Republican party did everything in their power to pursue devastating and often retrograde policies.

In Lady Justice, Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, illuminates these many heroes of the Trump years. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought the Muslim travel ban, to Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to Stacey Abrams, who worked to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians, Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail the women lawyers who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic presidency in living memory.

A celebration of the legal ingenuity and indefatigable spirit of the women whose work all too often went unrecognized at the time, Lady Justice is destined to be treasured and passed from hand to hand for generations to come.

Dancing Woman
Elaine Neil Orr
Blair

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
Mona Chollet
St. Martin’s Griffin

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft?

Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores the types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, the childless woman, and the elderly woman, who for centuries have been censored, repressed, and even killed. Chollet concludes that rather than being a brief moment in history, these women continue to be harassed and oppressed. Women today are direct heirs to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions, facing the same sort of judgements and stereotypes that women have battled for centuries. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who seek to live their lives on their own terms.

A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire
Emma Southon
Harry N. Abrams

This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.

The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “the Doing of Important Things.” And as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history.

From Romulus through the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers have relegated to the background, or designated as domestic, feminine, or worthless.

Good Girl
Aria Aber
Hogarth Press

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial, anti-immigrant tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila’s stops to ask herself the most important question: who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.

Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire
Stacy A Cordery
Viking

Elizabeth Arden was a household name on six continents and a millionaire several times over before her death in 1966. Arden counted British royalty and social elites from the overlapping worlds of New York, Hollywood, London, and Paris among her clients. She revolutionized skin care and cosmetics, making it acceptable for all women to embrace glamour and wear makeup—not just actresses and prostitutes. She created a successful international business empire before women gained the vote and at a time when virtually no woman owned or ran a national company. She developed the first luxury spa and insisted on a holistic understanding of health and beauty. Unconventional and driven, Arden fervently believed that every woman could be beautiful.

Acclaimed biographer Stacy Cordery does full justice to one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs. Canadian-born Florence Nightingale Graham turned herself into Elizabeth Arden, using her uncanny sense of the possible to take full advantage of everything New York City offered, building her company and becoming one with her brand. In an astounding rags-to-riches tale, Elizabeth Arden came to personify sophistication and refinement. Her hard work and innovation made makeup, fitness, and style not only acceptable but de rigueur. Arden prospered throughout the Depression, reimagined women’s needs during two World Wars, and by pioneering new approaches to marketing and advertising, ushered beauty into the modern era. Cordery delivers a compelling picture of a modern CEO whose career provides a model for aspiring businesses to this day.

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music
Alison Fensterstock & NPR
HarperOne

Turning the Tables, launched in 2017, has revolutionized recognition of female artists, whether it be in best album lists or in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music brings this impressive history and fascinating reshaping to the page and includes material draws from more than fifty years of NPR’s coverage of great musical heroes and intriguing creators. This book is a must-have for music fans, songwriters, feminist historians, and those interested in how artists think and work, including:

Joan Baez talking about nonviolence as a musical principle in 1971
Dolly Parton’s favorite song and the story behind it
Patti Smith describing art as her “jealous mistress” in 1974
Nina Simone, in 2001, explaining how she developed the edge in her voice as a tool against racism.
Taylor Swift talking about when she had no idea if her musical career might work
Odetta on how shifting from classical music to folk allowed her to express her fury over Jim Crow

This incomparable hardcover volume is a vital record of history destined to become a classic and a great gift for any music fan or creative thinker.

Women Living Deliciously
Florence Given
Simon Element

Women Living Deliciously wants us to fall in love with our lives. It will help women uncover the sense of awe and wonder that has been buried by the layers of shame, perfectionism and self-objectification that get piled on us by the patriarchy. For too long we have internalized the belief that our bodies are things to be looked at—instead of lived in. That it’s embarrassing to fully express ourselves. That we cannot trust the parts of ourselves that are so full of desire.

This book will unpack the many barriers women face when trying to access joy so that they can discover the delicious life that’s theirs for the taking.

International-bestselling author Florence Given wants to restore your lust for life and your sense of agency, giving you the courage and permission to inch closer to the wildly expansive life that you FULLY deserve—not in the future, not when you’re perfect, not when you’re prettier—but right now.

The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America
Stephanie Gorton
Ecco Press

In the 1910s, as the birth control movement was born, two leaders emerged: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. While Sanger would go on to found Planned Parenthood, Dennett’s name has largely faded from public knowledge. Each held a radically different vision for what reproductive autonomy and birth control access should look like in America.

Few are aware of the fierce personal and political rivalry that played out between Sanger and Dennett over decades—a battle that had a profound impact on the lives of American women. Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, The Icon and the Idealist reveals how and why these two women came to activism, the origins of the clash between them, and the ways in which their missteps and breakthroughs have reverberated across American society for generations.

With deep archival scope and rigorous execution, Stephanie Gorton weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating women and the political history of a country rocked by changing social norms, the Depression, and a fervor for eugenics. Refusing to shy away from the enmeshed struggles of race, class, and gender, Gorton has made a sweeping examination of every force that has come in the way of women’s reproductive freedom.

Brimming with insight and compelling portraits of women’s struggles throughout the twentieth century, The Icon and the Idealist is a comprehensive history of a radical cultural movement.

Mad Wife
Kate Hamilton
Beacon Press

In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost.

In the tradition of Know My Name and The Argonauts, Hamilton braids her own story with cultural criticism to argue that we must face the misogyny lurking in the shadows of marriage in the 21st century. She examines the beliefs and conditioning that held her in an increasingly destructive marriage and unflinchingly documents what she did to keep her family together—therapy, unwanted sex with her husband, swinging, affairs, an abortion—without always knowing what she freely chose. And she considers the damage that was done, to herself and others, until she could acknowledge that to save herself and her sons, she had to destroy her marriage.

Emotionally intense and timely, Mad Wife interrogates how marriage and the institutions that support it provide the perfect ecosystem for abuse of women and children, endangering their lives and denying them autonomy—all in the service of men’s desires.

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The Browser – March 2025 1 Mar 2025, 2:46 pm

Big News: Spring Brings Bestselling Authors, DSM Book Festival

Of course, our big news this month is the DSM Book Festival which we will be presenting on Saturday, March 22 at Franklin Event Center from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Don’t miss this FREE fun-filled day of celebrating reading!

Read the newsletter.

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The Browser – February 2025 13 Feb 2025, 8:39 pm

A Short Month — Packed Full of Exciting News

Hard to believe that we made it through January with so little snow. And now we arrive at February, a little month filled with so much exciting news we hardly know where to begin!

Read the Newsletter.

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We LOVE books, authors, and readers! 13 Feb 2025, 8:28 pm

Celebrate the love of books with us! Check out all the new books and recommendations. We also have author events weekly, book club meetings, special ticketed events, the DSM Book Festival, and of course lots of books.

Read our TBR newsletter to learn about all that is new in the Beaverdale Books universe.

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New Books, Big Books, and True Crime 24 Jan 2025, 1:41 am

We’ve got new Beaverdale Books Merch! Show off your Beaverdale Books love with some great new gear for 2025!

Check out the new merch!

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New Books, Big Books, and True Crime 16 Jan 2025, 2:45 pm

It’s January, so come in out of the cold and grab a hefty book, a sizzling true crime story, or a hot new bestseller. No matter the genre you love, we’re sure to have something for you. And of course, there’s always plenty of events and activities going on at Beaverdale Books–because WE READ YOU!

There are dozens of new books hitting the shelves, plus take a peek at titles that are on the way.

READ THE NEWSLETTER.

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