Satan Talks to His Therapist

From Edelweiss:

“If the LOLSOB emoji could write verse that both sings and stings, the result would be Satan Talks to His Therapist.” —Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

In Satan Talks to His Therapist, Melissa Balmain explores the lighter side of dark times. Playful yet poignant, her poems perfectly capture our human fallibility and comedic sense of importance.

The collection begins with “On Looking at an MRI Cross-Section,” in which Balmain peeks inside her own skull to consider the jumble of thoughts and memories harbored there. After this introduction to the poet’s inner world, the book divides into three sections: Spiraling Down, In Limbo, and Climbing Out. The poems in this lyrical descent and ascent are about climate change, social media, pandemics, politics (sexual and otherwise), parenthood, consumerism, aging, loss, and ills, both physical and societal. Balmain writes in meter and rhyme, and she uses traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, terza rima) as well as ones she’s coined for the moment.

The poems in Satan Talks to His Therapist provide clarity and comedy in a time that feels anything but clear or comic, and they hint at the consolations of art, kindness, maturity, persistence, love, and, of course, humor.

“It turns out that the literary establishment can’t quite kill off humorous poetry. Melissa Balmain’s Satan Talks to His Therapist is a marvel in the tradition of Martial, Jonathan Swift, and Dorothy Parker and the more recent generation of poets that includes Wendy Cope, X.J. Kennedy, and R.S. Gwynn. It is poetry you will enjoy—and enjoy giving to a friend who needs to see some humor in a world desperate for the medicine of laughter.” —A.M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
“In one of the wickedly funny poems from Satan Talks to His Therapist, Dorothy Parker’s ghost drops in to comment on a political situation. Don’t believe it for a second, because if Parker’s ghost were to visit a Balmain poem, she would likely set fire to it out of spiteful envy. Melissa Balmain is the once and future Queen of American light verse, and only a ghost could keep from laughing all the way through this marvelous collection.” —Julie Kane, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Mothers of Ireland

Proof that not all poetry must mine your trauma and make you cry.

Satan Talks to His Therapist is a short collection of punny, rhyming verse – much of it about things that happened during the heaviest parts of the COVID pandemic – and also includes some Weird Al-esque parodies borrowing from famous classics (“Come live with me and be my love” etc., which I found to be quite touching). I found this collection while browsing through publisher catalogs and it was a really nice read.

Satan Talks to His Therapist is out today!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix

Summary from Edelweiss:

An epic meditation on loving oneself in the face of heartbreak, from the acclaimed author of Build Yourself a Boat, longlisted for the National Book Award.

When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything—from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics—shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this exquisite and raw reflection, Camonghne repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her childhood “dyscalculia”—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain?

Dyscalculia negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak, both romantic and familial.

I was browsing at the local indie bookstore before a reading the other month and spotted a signed copy of Dyscalculia, which I’d been hearing great things about. And what a beautiful examination of a breakup and how treating trauma and getting the correct diagnosis/treatment reframes that breakup (all the villains are victims and all the victims are villains and it’s a vicious cycle) and also helps with healing the author’s dyscalculia (which was never actually diagnosed, but in the end seems to be more of a side-effect of untreated Bipolar II). Stunningly beautiful prose poetry, almost like song lyrics in places. Which, as it turns out, Felix is a song-writer so it makes perfect sense.

CW: childhood sexual abuse, undiagnosed mental health issues, self-harm, effects of a broken mental health care system

Dear FTC: I read a copy of this book that I bought at a local bookstore. Also, #23for2023

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne

Summary from Edelweiss:

A novel-in-verse about a young girl coming-of-age and stepping out of the shadow of her former best friend. Perfect for readers of Nikki Grimes and Jason Reynolds. “Mahogany L. Browne’s debut YA is an absolute masterpiece. It will leave you breathless.” -Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X

She looks me hard in my eyes
& my knees lock into tree trunks
My eyes don’t dance like my heartbeat racing
They stare straight back hot daggers.
I remember things will never be the same.
I remember things.

Sky had grown used to living in Lay Li’s shadow. Her best friend was the sun, and Sky was more than happy to bask in the glow. But when high school begins, the rules seem to change. Suddenly, Sky is the brunt of the jokes, and Lay Li is the one laughing. And when boys come into the picture, Sky is left behind altogether. With gritty and heartbreaking honesty, Mahogany L. Browne delivers a novel-in-verse about broken promises, fast rumors, and when growing up means growing apart from your best friend.

Our Teen Book Group (which is pretty much adults, despite our attempts to invite actual teens, plus one members preteen kiddo who kind of circulates and inhales book vibes while we chat) picked Mahogany L. Browne’s Chlorine Sky for our August book.

And what a stunning novel-in-verse about a young Black girl and the nature of Being a Teenage Girl in America. Just…what it feels like to be made to feel smaller by your best friend. By your sister. By your (male) basketball coach. By the boys you beat playing ball. The way they try to box you in, make you the butt of the joke. The way my heart just broke for Sky at the beginning of the book when she’s discarded like a stray sock by her best friend. Ooof.

Sky is a fantastic voice in YA literature – a girl with dreams of playing basketball (maybe for the WNBA, one day), who wants to be seen as herself rather than fixed up as someone else’s…project (even if maybe a little attention by a boy might be nice). The huge breath of air Sky takes at the end, in the final few poems, where she figures out how to BE is amazing. I’ve already ordered the follow-up novel, Vinyl Moon, about a secondary character from Chlorine Sky named Angel.

This didn’t quite hit 5 stars for me. I went with 4.5 stars because I wish it was longer or a little more fleshed out in narrative as it related to Sky. Like, while I appreciated the poems about Angel and her situation, I didn’t quite get the tie to Sky or Sky’s story and I would have loved more of Sky herself on page. Even though Sky is the point-of-view character, a good chunk of poems were about other people in her orbit, and I would have liked more Sky-becoming-herself at the end. If that makes sense.

Content Warning: on-page bullying, off-page sexual assault of Sky’s friend

Dear FTC: I bought a copy of this book from my store.

23 for 2023: I’m not sure how I’m going to do this – since I’d already read 42, now 43, books by BIPOC authors this year, I have technically already filled the brief of the initiative. So I’m working on what my participation looks like. It’ll probably be digging out some of the TBR I haven’t got to yet or pushing some galleys farther up the reading list. But, anyway, Chlorine Sky very much fits the initiative. So #23for2023!

I Hope This Finds You Well: Poems by Kate Baer

Summary from Goodreads: The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Kind of Woman returns with a collection of erasure poems created from notes she received from followers, supporters and detractors— a ritual that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires readers to transform what is ugly or painful in their own lives into something beautiful. 

“I’m sure you could benefit from jumping on a treadmill”

“Women WANT a male leader . . . It’s honest to god the basic human playbook”

These are some of the thousands of messages that Kate Baer has received online. Like countless other writers—particularly women—with profiles on the internet, as Kate’s online presence grew, so did the darker messages crowding her inbox. These missives from strangers have ranged from “advice” and opinions to outright harassment. 

At first, these messages resulted in an immediate delete and block. Until, on a whim, Kate decided to transform the cruelty into art, using it to create fresh and intriguing poems. These pieces, along with ones made from notes of gratitude and love, as well as from the words of public figures, have become some of her most beloved work.  

I Hope This Finds You Well is drawn from those works: a book of poetry birthed in the darkness of the internet that offers light and hope. By cleverly building on the harsh negativity and hate women often receive—and combining it with heartwarming messages of support, gratitude, and connection, Kate Baer offers us a lesson in empowerment, showing how we too can turn bitterness into beauty.

I Hope This Finds You Well is a bite-sized collection of “found poems.” My only complaint is that I wish it were longer. *shrug* It seems all too brief, although on the flip side, wading through many more of the toxic comments to produce the erasure poems probably wouldn’t be all that fun, despite being able to turn the vitriol on it’s head to make art.

The original comments and posts that Baer derived the poems from are included in full, so just a quick content warning that some of them do contain hateful, racist, misogynist, sexist, fat-phobic, body-shaming, etc. language, but there are also some positive comments Baer used as sources too.

I Hope This Finds You Well is out now!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

I Am the Rage by Dr. Martina McGowan, illustrated by Diana Ejaita

Summary from Goodreads: I am The Rage is a poetry collection that explores racial injustice from the raw, unfiltered viewpoint of a Black woman in America. Dr. Martina McGowan is a retired MD, a mother, grandmother, and a poet. Her poetry provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the uncomfortable position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be a Black American.

This entire collection was created during 2020, many shortly after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, to name but a few.

Such a necessary, unfiltered collection of poems. All of which say “I am pissed and I am tired of having to explain my humanity to you and do your emotional labor for you.” Each one is just a fast punch.

Dear FTC: I read a review copy that was sent to my store.

A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok

Summary from Goodreads: In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.

A Nail the Evening Hangs On is a stunning debut collection that filters Sok’s family’s memories of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia through poems that are lush and stark at the same time. Particularly telling are the poems set at a prison museum dedicated to the bloody history of the regime, contrasting the behavior of the Western tourists gleefully handling weapons used by the KR with that of the narrator, a child of refugees and searching for evidence that a lost uncle had been there.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

In Accelerated Silence: Poems by Brooke Matson

Summary from Goodreads: “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split–terribly, wholly–by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time?

Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries–between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.”

Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence–selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize–creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

In Accelerated Silence is a heartbreaking collection poetry that uses the imagery and language of astrophysics to write about grief.

I’m terrible at reviewing poetry, especially contemporary poetry. Does it make me feel things? Do I like the imagery? Do the order of the poems seem to make sense/make a collection? All of these things are true for In Accelerated Silence. The juxtaposition of astronomical terms with the grief over losing a partner to cancer (and that journey) felt very unique.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

‘BEOWULF: A NEW TRANSLATION’ IS A NEW, FEMINIST TRANSLATION OF BEOWULF BY THE AUTHOR OF THE MUCH-BUZZED-ABOUT NOVEL ‘THE MERE WIFE’.

Nearly 20 years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’ – and 50 years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world – there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley that brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, re-contextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history – ‘Beowulf’ has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of ‘Beowulf’, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

Maria Dahvana Headley’s long-awaited (hey, she made an adorable Grim in the middle, so we’ll accept the wait) translation of Beowulf has arrived.

It might sound weird to say a translation of an Old English poem is “bouncy” but it is. It has a very jaunty, devil-may-care feel to it since Maria mixed older words like “scop”, descriptive terms like “opened his word-hoard” (which is such a great way to set up a long speech), and of-the-minute soundbites like “hashtag: blessed” (got a zing off that one because it nails the rhythm of the line and gives it an ironic cast). Even the choice of “Bro!” as the opening “Whaet” (or however we represent that Old English term that doesn’t have a direct translation to modern English) makes me think of a bunch of dudes sitting around drinking and someone goes “Bruuuuhhhh, tell me about that time Chet went snowboarding naked” (or whatever Chets do). So fun.

The introduction really sets up Maria’s attitude toward this translation and why she made the choices she did. And while you don’t have to be familiar with other translations of Beowulf, if you’ve read the Heaney or, especially, the Tolkein translation you can really see where this new translation is finding new ground. It’s very similar to Emily Wilson’s introduction to The Odyssey which also brought new facets to an old classic.

Beowulf: A New Translation published on Tuesday, August 25!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.