Chapter 16

By David Madden University of Tennessee Press 225 pages $24.95 “David Madden’s memoir will appeal to creative writers, veterans, and the general reader. When he entered the army, he had already created many stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction. In reading and in writing, his focus was on technique, style, and imagery. Throughout his Army ordeals, Madden worked on his first novel, Cassandra Singing.” ~ the publisher

Marcus Wicker seems to hear hip-hop everywhere. First established by his two previous collections of poetry, Maybe the Saddest Thing and Silencer: A Second Collection of Lyrical Hip-Hop Poems on Police Brutality, Racism, and Resistance, Wicker knows how to forge verses that reflect the ear of someone who is both a rap scholar and a student of classical poets. In Dear Mothership, Wicker uses this same lyrical knowledge to chart us through planet Earth as though we were aliens.

In a 1961 poem, “Barren Woman,” Sylvia Plath depicted an infertile woman as “empty,” lost in a “museum without statues”; two years later she imagined suicidal depression as “a dark water” in a late poem, “Sheep in Fog.” Plath exerts a strong pull on Emily Skaja’s doleful new collection, Black Lake, a narrative cycle that probes a year of miscarriages and the misery into which Skaja plunged, at the age of 40.

In All the Sunshine in the World, her third middle-grade novel in verse, Nashville poet and educator Caroline Brooks Dubois once again examines the aftermath of tragedy in the life of a young girl. This time, her subject is the sudden, shocking loss of a sibling. What I’m learning is— the world has moved on. But the first thing I remember each day when I wake: My sister is gone— and nobody will talk about it.

By Ishmael Reed Scribner 208 pages $17 “Reed’s classic, sharp and characteristically funny story of the Civil War, now with a new foreword by the author and a fresh introduction by Victor Lavalle. … With myth-bending ingenuity, Reed merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high comedy as he parodies the fugitive slave narrative … . Flight to Canada’s preposterous episodes leap out from the pages of history to reveal a keen sense of America past and present.” ~ the publisher

By Kevin E. O'Donnell and Scot Randolph Honeycutt University of Georgia Press 308 pages $32.95 “This book features fifteen notable campus forests in eleven states in the eastern United States, stretching from North Georgia, on up through the Ohio Valley and the mid-Atlantic region, into coastal Maine. … Woodlands of the Mind serves as a travel book for wanderers and armchair adventurers alike.

By Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker Black Belt Press 176 pages $23.95 “On the approaching 250th birthday of the United States, a double-edged moment in the history of America unlike anything they could remember, Southern journalists Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker, one white, one black, who came of age during the civil rights years, paused to take a hard look at where the country is in the age of Trump.” ~ the publisher

By Varina Buntin Willse Broadleaf Books 244 pages $27.99 “If you have let the world lock God into a dark box, this is a book for you. If you have let the world lock you — your faith, your wonderings, your soaring love — into a dark box, this radiant book is also for you. It will lead you straight to a wild, uncontained God whose lavish love can be found not just beneath and between but within, among, beyond, and in every other place love can reach.

Christina Baker Kline, best known for Orphan Train, is back with a novel that is perfect for readers who enjoy the excavation of unique stories heretofore lost to time. The Foursome does just that, illuminating a striking piece of 19th-century history that requires a bold but deft hand in retelling: the double marriage of two sisters from North Carolina to conjoined brothers Eng and Chang Bunker, the eponymous Siamese Twins.

“Take ‘Em Down!” That was the cry in 2017 as activists rallied to remove Confederate memorials in Memphis, including the grand statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in what is now called Medical District Park. A year later, after more protests, legal challenges, and political maneuvers, the statues came down. In A Fight for Visibility, Donna Reeves explores the longer history that led to this moment. This tight, engaging book analyzes race, public space, and historical memory in Memphis.