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Freya Sachs

Each of these poetry books is a balm—for the soul and for the world

Feature by Freya Sachs

We’ve all experienced sudden changes this year. When focusing is difficult and time is moving in strange ways, poetry can be a perfect companion, offering a window into someone else’s world or reflecting your own. For readers looking to make sense of our present moment, there are no better gifts than these poetry collections.

Make Me Rain

Make Me Rain is a marvel of scale—global and local, private and political—as Nikki Giovanni invites us into her thoughts and experiences. Whether grieving personal losses or finding clever ways of expressing a shared sadness, her voice is powerful. With tributes to Toni Morrison and references to Beyonce, Barack Obama and many more, public figures become familiar ones, and individual memory blends with collective. Giovanni’s deceptively simple language contrasts with complex, at times unanswerable questions. This celebration of a strong, compassionate voice in American poetry is a great gift for any reader who needs a deep breath after watching the news.

How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

While better known for her novels and memoir, Barbara Kingsolver also brings her gifts of observation and reflection to her latest book of poems, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). The book opens with a series of how-tos (“How to Have a Child,” “How to Cure Sweet Potatoes”) and from there shifts to memory and elegy, long poems and explorations of love and loss. My favorite section is the last, “The Nature of Objects,” in which Kingsolver shows how things work, making meaning of ephemera and taking the reader on “the risky road yes taken / to desire, escape.” For a reader wanting to escape, to fly while grounded, this book is a map that offers surprise and delight.

Coming to Age

Aging and the passing of time have always been central concerns of poetry, as we witness in Coming to Age, edited by Carolyn Hopley and Mary Ann Hoberman. This anthology gathers known and beloved voices—from Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and W.B. Yeats to Louise Gluck, Wendell Berry, Kay Ryan and Li-Young Lee—and places them in conversation, as each poem adds a new dimension to the experience of growing older. The sections move from the body to beyond it, leaving space for the particular, even as universal, shared connections are built.

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

Native American poetry is American poetry, and it’s anthologized for the first time in the essential When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, edited by current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. The collection is organized both geographically and chronologically, and as we read through each region, we see the landscape emerge, a sense of place made clearer and more complicated by the range of voices present, from early lyricists to some of today’s key poets, including Natalie Diaz and Tommy Pico. It is impossible to make sense of American literature without centering and highlighting Native voices. What a gift for this book to be in the world, an invitation for so much discovery.

When focusing is difficult and time is moving in strange ways, poetry can be a perfect companion, offering a window into someone else’s world or reflecting your own. For readers looking to make sense of our present moment, there are no better gifts than these poetry collections.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Book of Form and Emptiness

Review by Freya Sachs

What does it mean to listen? What can you hear if you pay close attention, especially in a moment of grief and questioning? In The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki explores how we find meaning in the world and why each of our voices matter.

As the novel opens, young Benny Oh’s father dies suddenly and violently. Benny’s loss and confusion is palpable, made all the more difficult by the voices he begins to hear emanating from all the objects around him. These voices are a burden, weighing Benny down with the emotional resonance of all things, from a silver spoon to a pair of scissors. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, and neither do the people around him. 

As Benny follows these voices and begins to sneak out of school, his mother, Annabelle, struggles to understand her child, even as she grieves and hoards. Annabelle’s job is to monitor the news, and her home bursts with plastic bags full of old newspapers and CDs, as well as her own piles of clothes in need of folding, unfinished craft projects and so much more. Ozeki’s brilliance is to never let Annabelle’s pile overwhelm the reader, offering glimpses of it only through Annabelle’s and Benny’s eyes, who in their grief often have trouble registering the tangible reality around them.

As Benny and Annabelle try to find ways to be in and make sense of the world, questions of communication, loss and connection emerge. Ozeki’s prose is magnetic as she draws readers along, teasing out an ethereal and haunting quality through an additional narrator: that of a sentient Book, who speaks with Benny and helps to tell his story. The Book’s observations are beyond a human’s scope, with a universal objectivity blooming from a communication matrix among all books, like a mycelial network.

Benny and Annabelle are characters you’ll never stop rooting for. They’re worthy of readers’ love as Ozeki meditates on the nature of objects, compassion and everyday beauty. After reading, you’ll be eager for this book to find its way into other readers’ hands.

Ruth Ozeki’s prose is magnetic as she draws readers along, teasing out an ethereal and haunting quality through a special narrator: that of a sentient Book.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Harrow

Review by Freya Sachs

The title of Pulitzer Prize finalist Joy Williams’ slim, wry novel Harrow, her first in 20 years, resonates through several connotations: to pillage, to plunder, to cultivate with a harrow, to torment, to vex. Indeed, this is a wonderfully vexing novel, one whose symbols open up to the real world.

Khristen is a teenager whose life has been shaped by a story told by her mother about when infant Khristen died and came back to life, and by her subsequent presumed specialness. The world that surrounds Khristen is in ruins, marred by environmental collapse. Her mother disappears, and her boarding school for gifted teens shutters. Little makes sense to her as she tries to figure out what survival means.

As we follow Khristen on her journey, we see the decimated landscape, hear harrowing conversations and observe a world that seems past redemption. Yet as Khristen arrives at a resort located near an odoriferous, puzzling lake known as Big Girl, we see her desire—and that of her friend Jeffrey—to save this place, no matter how challenging and gruesome it may be. Humans have destroyed the land, and yet in this novel, they can’t quite let it go. 

Khristen proves a compelling, ineffable character who escapes categorization. She’s worth rooting for and deserving of our curiosity as we try to understand her. Precise and distanced, beautifully rendered and sparse, Williams’ prose is fascinating, her voice captivating. The sentences are at once clear and mysterious. The descriptions of this world, one that is not quite ours but close, are striking. The dialogue is haunting and engaging.

Harrow creeps into your world. I finished the novel in two sittings and spent days trying to make sense of all that it offers, noticing water and land through a different lens, imagining the possibilities when we believe in the greatness that others see in us, and what happens when we choose not to.

Joy Williams’ slim, wry Harrow is a wonderfully vexing novel whose symbols open up to the real world.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Vixen

Review by Freya Sachs

In a world where facts are questioned but truth still matters, Francine Prose’s latest novel, The Vixen, raises questions of what we know, how we know it and whose stories get told.

Newly graduated from Harvard, Simon Putnam isn’t sure how to make his way in the world. After a harrowing evening with his parents, watching the execution of his mother’s childhood friend Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius (American citizens convicted of spying for the Soviet Union), Simon finds himself with a new job at a major New York publishing house. Once there, he is handed a challenge: to prepare for publication a salacious, pulpy, vaguely terrible novel about the Rosenbergs.

As Simon works to uncover the story behind the novel, he discovers more secrets than he could have imagined. While the plot of The Vixen is rich and surprising, Simon’s narrative voice carries the novel. As he goes along, he tries to make sense of how individual and collective histories interact with stories, and how they complicate and contradict each other. His engaging inquiry asks the reader to invest in this world, one that is both far from and adjacent to our own.

Simon takes us through New York restaurants and lush lunches, from Coney Island amusement rides to his childhood home, from the swanky publishing office to his roach-ridden apartment. In each moment, Prose evokes a sense of place that feels crucial to Simon’s process of discovery. This is, in many ways, a novel of New York in a particular moment.

The Vixen doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s a lot of fun to read. Prose is a master of language, and her captivating words are all the more striking in contrast to the novel’s intentional profanity. Good fiction entertains and asks questions, gesturing to truths beyond the novel itself. The Vixen does just that, with an extra note of fun.

Good fiction entertains and asks questions, gesturing to truths beyond the novel. The Vixen does just that, with an extra note of fun.
FictionComing of Age

Revival Season

Review by Freya Sachs

The events of Monica West’s debut novel, Revival Season, are a far cry from my own world in terms of cultural and religious experiences. But this propulsive story, narrated by a strong, young voice, is one of the most memorable and moving novels I have read in recent months. It’s the tale of a 15-year-old girl, Miriam Horton, whose preacher father travels to evangelical Christian communities around the South, and the summer that Miriam discovers her own gift of healing.

On their annual summertime tour of the South, Miriam and her family map a road trip from one revival to the next, where her father heals the ill and infirm. Miriam’s faith in her father has been shaken after an incident she witnessed the summer before, and she privately wants to believe in him and his abilities again.

Through Miriam’s narration, we see the ways that religion, belief and a deep connection to family guide her, as well as the ways that doubt disturbs her. She is highly observant, noticing details about the language of prayer, her father’s behavior and where holy oil comes from. In her attempts to help family and friends, Miriam asks questions and is surprised and intrigued by the answers she discovers. As she learns that she, too, might be able to heal those who suffer, she finds herself butting against the gendered limitations of the church.

Readers will root for Miriam as she finds her sense of self. She’s a fascinating character, and her transformation over the course of the story is impressive, especially as violence upends and reverberates throughout her world.

The plot and characters of Revival Season are remarkably well rendered, but West’s language is especially compelling, pulling readers into Miriam’s most defining moments. The sentences are downright musical, and each chapter paints a picture, leaving the reader eager for all that awaits.

Monica West’s language is downright musical, pulling readers into this novel of religion, belief and transformation.
FictionFamily Drama

Unsettled Ground

Review by Freya Sachs

What happens to our secrets after death? What do we do when we discover things we never imagined—about ourselves, our families or the stories we tell to make sense of the world? These questions drive Claire Fuller’s engaging Unsettled Ground. 

As the novel opens, 51-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius are at a loss when their mother, Dot, dies unexpectedly. The twins lived in a cottage with Dot; Jeanie, who has a heart condition and never learned to read or write, tends the garden, while Julius brings in a small income by way of odd jobs in town. Their home is their sanctuary until Dot’s death, when the careful life she controlled and constructed for her family begins to crack. Questions arise about past and present relationships, land and money.

The reader travels with Jeanie and Julius as they begin to grapple with the complexities of adulthood and the truth about their mother. This exploration builds a sense of mystery at a slow and steady pace. There comes a moment when the reader must know what happened, and they won’t be able to stop reading until they discover how it all resolves.

Even the title opens up questions, about what it means to settle or to remain unsettled, and about the nature of home and how one is made. The story exists on ground that has been disturbed by secrets and money, by the need for both independence and connection—and that ground continues to shift underfoot as the novel progresses.

Readers will root for Jeanie and Julius to survive and, even more than that, to live.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Claire Fuller is one of our 2021 Writers to Watch: Women on the rise. See the full list here.

After their mother’s death, two adult twins grapple with the complexities of adulthood in Claire Fuller’s engaging novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Seed Keeper

Review by Freya Sachs

The story of a bold, strong Dakhóta woman named Rosalie Iron Wing unfolds in captivating ways in Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper. As much as this is Rosalie’s story—of her past, her separation from her family and her marriage to a white man—it is also the story of seeds, land and connection to a place.

Told in a range of women’s voices, The Seed Keeper spans from the recent death of Rosalie’s spouse back to her childhood in the foster care system, then goes even further back to reveal the stories of her ancestors and the land they called home. The women in Rosalie’s family and family-by-choice are fascinating, and each offers her own perspective on both the story and the setting in which it unfolds, adding depth to our understanding of Rosalie and the complexities of her character. It’s a rich tale of trauma and choice, history and meaning-making.

But while this story is about the legacy of Dakhóta women, it’s also about white settlers and the ways that Western ideas and farming tactics have impacted rivers, soil and the lives of people and animals. The contrast between how white colonizers use the land and Native Americans care for it viscerally demonstrates the inextricable connection between the earth and the people who love it. When the Dakhóta people were forced to cede their land, the women took seeds with them, and those seeds now form a connective thread of memory and ancestry between generations.

Wilson’s memoir about her life as a Dakhóta woman, Spirit Car, won a Minnesota Book Award. In her first novel, the writing sings in compact, careful sentences, lending a timelessness to the narrative and making it clear that this compelling story is not just about these characters but also about culture, landscape and how we can—and often cannot—understand each other. Haunting and beautiful, the seeds and words of this novel will find their way into your world, however far from the Dakhóta lands that might be.

The story of a bold, strong Dakhóta woman named Rosalie Iron Wing unfolds in captivating ways in Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper.
FictionFamily Saga

Bride of the Sea

Review by Freya Sachs

The opening premise of Eman Quotah’s debut, Bride of the Sea, is intriguing: Muneer and Saeedah marry, move from Saudi Arabia to the United States and, as the relationship deteriorates, decide to divorce, going against Muslim tradition. As their world crumbles, Saeedah abducts their daughter and disappears. The novel only gets better from this setup, transforming into a family saga that spans from 1970 to 2018.

This ambitious tale moves between Saudi Arabia and the United States, touching on the Gulf War, 9/11, increased Islamophobia in the U.S., the beginning of women being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and other moments of social and cultural upheaval. Through it all, the secrets, desires and fears of Muneer, Saeedah and their daughter compose a complex picture of how society and the individual shape and inform each other. When society’s expectations render certain decisions impossible, how can an individual choose to live? This question shapes the novel, from Saeedah’s choice to run away with their daughter and Muneer’s search for her, to considerations of journalistic integrity and how familial ties bind and dissolve over time.

Impressive, too, is the sense of place, the ways that bodies of water connect characters to each other. The details of each country are so richly and vividly imagined that as characters travel, so does the reader.

Structurally and syntactically, Bride of the Sea is a gem. The shift from the opening in 2018 to the events in 1970 is abrupt, and these moments fuse again as the novel concludes. Quotah structures these connections to maintain the reader’s sense of wonder, to keep you reading through the loop as you learn of each character’s identity and fate, their secrets and stories.

The opening premise of Eman Quotah’s debut, Bride of the Sea, is intriguing: Muneer and Saeedah marry, move from Saudi Arabia to the United States and, as the relationship deteriorates, decide to divorce, going against Muslim tradition.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Hades, Argentina

Review by Freya Sachs

Worlds blend rapidly in Daniel Loedel’s debut, Hades, Argentina. As the novel opens in 1986, Tomás Orilla, living as Thomas Shore in New York City, has “spent eight years officially disappeared.” But his world begins to crack open when he is called back to Argentina for the first time since 1976, the year of his torture and escape.

He travels to Buenos Aires for a funeral that yields to a search for a lost love and the desire to revisit and reexamine the past. Like Orpheus seeking Eurydice, Tomás accepts a challenge from his old mentor, the Colonel, and returns to the places and events of 1976 to see what could have been, and how one choice could change fates.

As Tomás reenters the world of Argentina’s dirty war, time blurs, and the surreal blends with reality. As he relives trauma and torture, readers experience it with him, seeing a slice of history that is rarely talked about and feeling immersed in the ways that love, guilt and regret drive so many decisions.

Loedel’s prose is clean, tight and engaging, with a rhythm that invites you to keep reading and to see where the story goes and what sense you can make of it. Most interesting, perhaps, are the questions posed: What does it mean to be a hero or to be complicit in a dangerous regime? What choices do we really have? Who are we, and who did we imagine we would become?

Even as the novel invites questions and focuses on language rather than answers, the reader won’t be able to look away. They will bear witness to human choice and compunction, to love and loss, to the fantasy that helps make sense of what is real.

As Tomás reenters the world of Argentina’s dirty war, time blurs, and the surreal blends with reality. As he relives trauma and torture, readers experience it with him, seeing a slice of history that is rarely talked about and feeling immersed in the ways that love, guilt and regret drive so many decisions.
FictionFamily Drama

Sisters

Review by Freya Sachs

Daisy Johnson’s control of language keeps the reader utterly engaged in her new novel, Sisters, from the story’s opening words—a list in which each item begins with “My sister is” and ranges from “a black hole” to “a forest on fire”—all the way to the final searing sentences.

July and her older sister, September, have moved with their mother to the coast of England and into the old, deteriorating home where both September and her father were born. In this house, we see the ways that setting shapes everything that can, or might, unfold. We see where boundaries are and where they all but disappear. 

The concept of boundaries is at the center of July and September’s relationship. So much of their interaction is predicated on September’s control. Interesting, too, is the mother’s voice and perspective in this story: when we hear from her and when we don’t; what she knows and what is hidden from her view.

As the novel unfolds, Johnson brings readers more fully into the complexities and contradictions of the sisters’ relationship. Where does one girl stop and the other begin? How does biology bind us? How do our actions impact someone else’s life? And how does a person find their own voice? The novel raises many questions, and even as it poses some answers through July and September’s story, many other curiosities—delightfully—remain.

Sisters casts a spell, and Johnson’s ability to make her language twist and turn, to hint and suggest at something much larger, is truly remarkable.

Sisters casts a spell, and Daisy Johnson’s ability to make her language twist and turn, to hint and suggest at something much larger, is truly remarkable.

FictionFamily Drama

Hieroglyphics

Review by Freya Sachs

It isn’t a mystery, yet in many ways, Jill McCorkle’s Hieroglyphics builds like one as characters appear, slowly reveal more of their pasts and secrets and eventually expose their connections and how the story fits together. Overlapping memories—of the things one tries to bury or make sense of—create layers of meaning for the characters and their children, whose voices compose the story with a range of experiences and perspectives. The prose is magnetic, drawing you in and holding your attention as questions slowly turn into answers.

Place functions as a link across time and between seemingly disparate lives as retirees Lil and Frank return to the site of their earlier lives in North Carolina. The early deaths of parents haunt them both. Lil dives deep into her memories, exploring moments that, perhaps, might best have been left alone. Frank keeps visiting their former home, and his presence impacts Shelley, who now lives there, in unimaginable ways as she cares for her sons and goes to work as a court stenographer each day. Shelley’s life is full of her own secrets and the stories she tells herself to make sense of them.

Each of these adults—Shelley, Frank and Lil—focuses much of their energy on making an effort to communicate with and care for their children. As the parental figures struggle with their histories, choices and actions, it is through the lens of the children that these secrets find power and meaning. This echo, this sense of connectedness, of how we care for and hurt each other, gives the novel a clear resonance.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jill McCorkle shares how one of her father’s memories became her own.

It isn’t a mystery, yet in many ways, Jill McCorkle’s Hieroglyphics builds like one as characters appear, slowly reveal more of their pasts and secrets, and eventually expose their connections and how the story fits together.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Crossings

Review by Freya Sachs

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives. A bookbinder receives a manuscript from a baroness with explicit direction to not read what it holds. When the baroness dies soon after, the bookbinder discovers that the manuscript contains three tales—a ghost story written by Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl, a dark love story of a Jewish German exile who is unable to leave Paris at the edge of the Nazi invasion, and the tale of a woman who lives through seven generations.

Each story is rich with characters, ideas and keenly imagined moments. The points of connection, however, are what make the text compelling and open to so much discovery. As the preface ends, readers learn that the book can be read in two modes: one narrative at a time, or through the “Baroness” guided sequence that hops between the three stories. In this method, the stories weave through time and space to create a fourth text, one in which nuances and subtext emerge through unexpected connections. As characters, objects and phrases appear and reappear, time blends, and the questions of what makes us who we are, how our choices impact our futures and how other people perceive us become central to the telling.

The prose is engaging, asking you to keep up as the story jumps from ending to beginning, tangling time and stretching the edge of what a narrative can do. There’s a tension between wanting to read quickly, to let yourself be absorbed in this fantastical and real world, or slowing down to allow each story to breathe. The beauty here is the multiplicity of the reading experiences, of the chance to do both, as each iteration of the novel asks different questions and demands a different mode of attention from the reader.

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Scorpionfish

Review by Freya Sachs

In Natalie Bakopoulos’ richly told Scorpionfish, readers step into contemporary Athens with Mira, a Greek American woman who has returned to the city while she grieves her parents’ deaths as well as a dissolving relationship. As we enter the mess of her universe, counterpoints appear from her neighbor, the Captain. The alternating voices of these broken, fragmented people explore how each tries to repair and save the self, and how their personal connections become integral to that process.

As Mira and the Captain get to know each other—sitting together and apart, talking across their balcony walls—the conversation reveals their layers and the ways that each sees the other. The newness of their connection allows them to puzzle through the complexities of their past loves, friendships and familial bonds. Each is navigating the ending of a relationship; each is reevaluating priorities. As we witness this growing friendship, the specificity of place—of the sea, the city and the interior emotional realm—cradles the characters’ attempts to understand what it means to be human and to love.

Bakopoulos’ prose is descriptive, full of images and details, and yet some sentences are so clear and axiomatic that the reader may need to pause and think, recognizing truths they’ve always known. In a certain way, reading Scorpionfish is a rereading, a remarkable recognition of how language can work, how grief and love and loss can be so particular, so meaningful, so universal—and how words can make those resonances propulsive and haunting.

In Natalie Bakopoulos’ richly told Scorpionfish, readers step into contemporary Athens with Mira, a Greek American woman who has returned to the city while she grieves her parents’ deaths as well as a dissolving relationship.

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