Recommended because it is a beautiful meditation on parenting at the end of the world, with a note of radical hope.

Hands down one of my personal favorite books in the CHP catalog! I absolutely fell in love with this book when it was released, a book published just when I moved from Rochester, New York to the Twin Cities—a move precipitated in part by a phone conversations with Allan Kornblum! I started teaching Lawson’s book pretty regularly at the community college where I got hired (from a job listing in the newspaper!), and my students, a majority of whose families had recently relocated to the Twin Cities from Somalia, Ethiopia, and refugee camps in Thailand and Cambodia, immediately fell in love with it, too.

These poems disrupt the line between conquest and curiosity, aid and extermination, using the language of bureaucracy to create a lyric of dissociation. Here the banker, the shareholder, and the sheriff merge into a broken mania of dissolution. Dreams, screams, silence, disappearance, money, mixed and remixed metaphors, breaks, re-breaks, but always the humming of the line, the lyric collusion, but still the line, the cost of living and dying, dying and living, “I want to avoid the persistent murmur of time and death.”

This is a book for the reader who wants to be fully immersed in the experience. Become one of the journalists in our narrator’s audience and experience her tour of The Sound Museum, the world’s most immersive torture museum. This book is for those who want a healthy dose of dark humor with their theory and can stare unflinchingly into the void.

Recommended because it's so intimate in telling but with a big-picture perspective and ties together disparate threads so concisely.

In 1875 an opiate-addicted Mary Todd Lincoln is institutionalized in an Illinois sanitarium, haunted nightly by a seething rope and a Savage Indian who scalps her. Is it ritualized revenge for her husband’s ordering the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota in 1862, the largest mass hanging in the United States and a blight on Minnesota’s legacy as a progressive state of the union? Howe’s Savage Conversations is a minimalist fiction-drama reminder that America must reconcile its history of racial violence despite all historical and contemporary attempts to rebut the truth.

Beautiful, vital, stylish, warm. Saeed Jones's poetry is lush and emotional, but can also deliver a side-eyed bit of snark or surprise. The themes of personal and collective grief make this a great companion to his memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, as well.