Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book …
A short nonfiction collection by Rebecca Solnit. Most of the contents originally appeared online between 2017 and 2019. The pieces fell roughly into three categories. Some focused relatively directly on the theme described by the book’s title, the relationship between power and stories. The second category, which overlapped with the first, included a range of …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …
By Toronto-based writer and performer Kai Cheng Thom. Essays interspersed with poems. Smart. Thoughtful. Challenging. Names not just the violence of the mainstream but its more insidious correlates within communities that style themselves as being of marginalized belonging and/or of resistance. Less ornate in its writing than I for some reason (perhaps because the author …
Essays about schizophrenia and related conditions. Written by a multiple-award winning author (and highly skilled essayist) with a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. Draws heavily on memoir, of course. Intense, powerful, honest, sometimes hard to read, occasionally funny, and very well written. I can imagine it would be a topic where it would be easy to overdo …
Essays that use memoir in a mode the author describes as “fictionalized nonfiction” (20) to explore migration, (non)belonging, becoming, and the hypocrisies, indignities, and violence of white-supremacist, colonial, multi-cultural Canada. The author was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, grew up in Edmonton, has lived in and travelled to many parts of Canada, and for many …
A collection of essays by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott. I’ve encountered her writing online from time to time in the last few years and thought highly of it every time, so I was very excited to hear she had a debut collection coming out. I was not disappointed. These essays are strongly grounded in memoir, …
Essays by a Canadian now living in New York. Makes heavy use of sequential illustrative specifics to create feel, meaning, narrative beyond the linear flow of the words themselves, a technique I like and gravitate towards myself (though am not nearly as good at as she is). Particularly liked the earlier, longer, and more stylistically …
A book of essays – genre-bending ones – by someone who is “sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet” (101). Some are about writing, many are about life, and most feel like they follow closely the fluid movement of the author’s mind. Some cleverness and some lovely …
The author is primarily a poet, I think, but the back bills this book as “lyric essay/poetry,” which is an apt characterization. Along with the images sprinkled throughout there are some fragments that are clearly poetry, but most of the text is comprised of paragraphs written like they are from particularly lyrical personal essays. They …