Are you already tired of winter? Perhaps the poetry offerings this week are just the ticket to place you back in the moment: "both elegant and visceral," Theophanies, the debut collection from Muslim poet Sarah Ghazal Ali, "gives women's bodily and spiritual experiences primacy"; Russell Brakefield "draws from a deep well of emotional honesty and musical language" for the 52 poems in his Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West. And in Jump for Joy by Karen Gray Ruelle, illustrated by Hadley Hooper, the parallel yearnings of two strangers--a girl and a dog--carry readers through "this beautifully conceived and awe-strikingly illustrated picture book."
In The Writer's Life with Bangladeshi American writer Gemini Wahhaj, a theme emerges among the books to which she gravitates as a reader--characters who stand in their own power against reigning institutions.