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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Have you ever found yourself in the position of talking out loud to yourself all the while hoping some external force can hear you? Maybe there’s a motive behind talking out loud, maybe, just maybe someone or something is listening. In Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince delves into the deeply human desire to impose order on the world through knowledge. She combines science, mathematics, astronomy, and language as metaphors for our intellectual attempts to understand the universe. Yet, running through these poems is a countercurrent of chaos, reflected in her stream-of-consciousness style, which suggests that while we seek answers, both the cosmos and our own minds resist such clear-cut resolutions.
As the Bard himself once said, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” (AMND, 1.1.136) and that certainly is the case in C.J. Spataro’s debut novel, More Strange Than True, a story of fairy mischief in truly Shakespearean proportions. Instead of existing merely as a retelling of a beloved classic, the novel luxuriates in themes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expanding on and complicating them and sometimes rejecting them entirely.
The word love—and related affixes, including lover and beloved—appears 159 times in Maggie Nelson’s Like Love. That figure shouldn’t come as a surprise given the essay collection’s title. Nelson, a prominent and prolific writer who has previously examined the intangible and ever present idea of love in her autotheoretical book The Argonauts (2015), forms the title from a quote by writer Hilton Alys: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” Nelson satiates that need in Like Love, giving her readers chunks of critical theory to chew on and delectable bites of raw honesty and vulnerability to savor.
Kelle Groom’s memoir-in-essays, How to Live, is a journey that showcases to the reader exactly what the title suggests: how to live. But it’s living through loss, grief, and pain that Groom really tackles most. As Groom moves across the country, we witness her learning this more than we are told explicitly how to do it. The memoir exemplifies how a writer can use their prose to reflect the content of their work. Groom’s often disjointed mindset as she moves around to new places appears physically on the page in the form of short, staccato sentences, some of which are only a word or two long.
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