Poetry Event, After Hours Party & Book Reviews. Hooray!
Mamie Morgan (poet) at Bookish plus the first Reading Challenge Party plus A Virgo Tells You What to Read. You can't pass this up!
Poet Mamie Morgan at Bookish Thursday, April 11th at 7pm
Poet, Mamie Morgan, reads from her newly released work, Everyone I've Danced with is Dead, Thursday April 11th at 7pm.
This is a casual, low-key event. We think you are great just as you are! Everyone needs more poetry in their lives. Swing in. Fill up.
Here's what folks are saying about Mamie Morgan's collection of poems:
Reading these poems is like sitting down with a friend for a conversation — the kind of friend you trust to tell all of the truth, but with mercy. These whip-smart poems don’t flinch, even at the hardest truths about what it means to be human — to love and to lose, to damage and be damaged, to live through moments ‘where the quake originates,’ that make you cling to ‘every word that had ever made me want to stay alive.’ These poems have an electric power, one strong enough to change lives. Morgan faces devastation with such an open grace and generosity that a reader can’t help but feel here’s one truth more real than any other: that even in the moments that shake us to the core, there is always hope.
—Emma Bolden
After Hours Reading Challenge Party!
If you’ve been reading along with our 2024 Bookish Reading Challenge, and you’ve tracked your reads on our Google form, then you’ll receive an email with event details on Monday! If you’re participating and HAVE NOT tracked your books with our Google form…don’t worry there’s still time. You only need to have read three. Tell us which ones you read here.
A Virgo Tells You What to Read (Kendra’s Book Reviews)
I am not sure there are enough good things to say about Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls. I know, for sure, that I owe Chelsey Goodan a debt of gratitude for so clearly laying out the mistakes we're all making in our interactions with teenage girls--the way we inadvertently misunderstand them, hem them in, make them feel desperate for freedom from our expectations--and how to FIX them (the mistakes, not the girls. The girls, it turns out, are WAY more okay than we imagine).
I took me forever to get through this very readable, highly narrative book, because I didn't want to miss anything. I wanted it all to soak into my brain--and I wanted to implement the suggestions and tips Goodan offers in communicating with my own teenage daughter.
Underestimated has changed not only the way I communicate with my daughter, but the way I communicate with all the people in my closest circle. For me, the biggest takeaway was LISTENING. And not listening with an agenda. Not planning what I'll say next. But deep listening that hears the meaning behind the words.
The chapters that floored me, that I literally had to just sit quietly with for a bit, were the last two chapters: Power & Liberation. Get ready for what teenage girls think about these topics. It will blow your mind. And give you a lot of hope for where these girls are trying to take us--if we can give them space, allow them to be themselves, and drop the old scripts that have confined and controlled women of all ages for entirely too long.
I want every person who parents a teenage girl, or who has a close kinship or chosen family relationship with one, to read this book. It will change everything in your relationship with her for the better...IF you are willing to listen, to take down your own walls, to do the work. It's an ongoing process. But she is worth it. Every time.
Rabbit Heart is an exploration of motherlessness. Of loss. And grief.
It is profoundly beautiful. And wrenching.
I recommend it to people grappling with grief. To people who have lost their mothers through death or estrangement. To women fighting to find their voice in a country still awash in patriarchy and violence against women.
There is so much depth here.
The text needs trigger warnings for sexual violence and suicide; is there a trigger warning for murder of women? There are all these triggers--and yet, I don't want people to miss this book. It's profound in ways I'm still ruminating on. I want readers to protect themselves--but to stretch if they can for this book. It is worth it.
Rabbit Heart is absolute poetry. And agony. It is singularly the most thought provoking memoir/true crime piece I've ever read.
It will stay with me for a long, long time.
The Girl and the Goddess is pure magic.
Narrative in nature, the poems take the reader through Paro's girlhood all the way through university. Powerful, evocative, mystical. The poetry is interspersed with retellings of Hindu myths--written to speak directly to pivotal moments in Paro's journey to womanhood.
The Girl and the Goddess was an impulse buy at an indie bookstore (I buy something at each indie I visit), and I've been incredibly grateful for that impulse. It feels like the perfect gift for a teenaged girl--not because it's "inspirational" (ew.) but because it has real substance and speaks to the points both brilliant and wrenching that make up womanhood. But, hell, it was also the perfect gift to me from myself--because I felt seen and nurtured by the stories. Because The Girl and the Goddess helped me remember some of the more universal truths about growing up (especially growing up queer). And it is always restorative to be brought back to who you are.
I can't say enough good things about this one. Buy it. Gift it. Read & re-read it.
This is definitely one for your bookshelf.