Rebecca Spiegel's debut memoir Without Her is subtitled "A Chronicle of Grief and Love," and you feel both in impressive measure. Throughout the book, Spiegel pieces together the events leading up to and following her sister Emily’s decision to take her own life. Grief and love are vulnerable fields to till when someone is disclosing to an audience. However two perhaps even more powerful and more vulnerable themes run through Spiegel's work: regret and blame. Unspoken emotions can weigh the heaviest when working through a tragedy because they aren’t the emotions that we’re supposed to feel: inconsolable sadness, heartwarming memories of the person who’s been lost, an appeal to the senselessness of it all. These are the societally prescribed ways that we should talk about our lost loved ones. What makes Spiegel's narrative unique is how she comes to terms with the emotions that have no useful manual for traversing this kind of loss: How could Emily do this to herself? What if I had done something differently? What if I’d done something differently my whole life? What if I had something to do with Emily’s death? How can I ever be at peace if I never know the answers to these questions? Spiegel's courage to open up to her readers and bring them along in her journey makes for both a compelling read and an impressive examination of the kind of difficult questions that need to be confronted to heal.
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“The forest wears perfume. You’ve smelled it: sun-baked pine, heady as fresh bread. Forest dresses stout in summer, all kinds of layers. Then she strips naked in winter—the opposite of people. Forest sings and sighs, moans and hums. Voices legion, connected millions: leaves in windblown tremble; gray-brown trunks hushed as soldiers, some kissed by sun, some drowned in shadow; rain whisper and thunderbowl” (32).
It is evident that Darrin Doyle, author of the book Let Gravity Seize the Dead has a deep appreciation for nature. He describes the outdoors with such detail and respect you feel that you are deep in the thick of it. He speaks of it with human-like qualities, as if it were a living, breathing person with a past and feelings. And while these aspects give the book life and beauty, Doyle’s novel also evokes a sense of eeriness that leaves the reader with a chill that is hard to shake even after the words on the page end. This chill gets even more sinister as past and present intertwine and weave a story that transcends beyond time, leaving us encased in these vivid descriptions of nature with the question: “why?”
It’s an interesting experience, being a Black woman. Traversing this world born as two marginalized identities, not receiving support from either at the same time. When standing up for ourselves we are painted as aggressive, too passionate, perpetually angry, the villain. The experiences of being a woman differ globally but there seems to be a consensus that being a woman entails some sort of suffering at the hands of patriarchal society. At least that’s how it is explored within white women’s spaces. Albeit true, when Black women come into these spaces to impart their own experiences being a woman coupled with being Black, suddenly we are shunned. Suddenly we don’t know what it’s like to be a woman because we are Black. What they refuse to realize is that our womanly experience is unique. It’s beautiful, it's painful, it’s joyous, it breeds community. This is explored within Angelique Zobitz’s poetry book Seraphim.
Author Jessie Van Eerden is not content to offer simple or comforting conclusions about faith; instead, she presents prayer as a practice that can be both comforting and uncomfortable, both a yoke and a feather. Her latest book, aptly titled Yoke & Feather, is an intimate collection of braided and lyrical essays that weaves together themes of spirituality, identity, and the search for meaning in the mundane.
The Salem Witch Trials are infamous in American history. Nineteen people in Salem were hanged after four young girls accused local women of witchcraft, and things spiraled out of control. Two of the most well-known people from this incident were 12-year-old Ann “Anna” Putnam, Jr., one of the original accusers, and her father, Thomas Putnam, Jr. No one will truly know what was going through their heads during this time, but Greg Houle tries to answer this question in his historical fiction novel, The Putnams of Salem.
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