Books Noted:

Black Girl, Call Home, by Jasmine Mans, is one of the most anticipated books of 2021, according O, the Oprah Magazine, and is “arresting as only spoken word artistry can be.” The publisher (Berkley Books) describes it as a “literary coming of age narrative” and “a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood.” It features many of Mans’ viral YouTube poems in print for the first time, as well as active phone numbers that readers can dial to hear her perform “bonus poems.” Poet Danez Smith has written that “Mans takes up the tools of Brooks (Gwendolyn) and Sanchez (Sonia) into her good hands and chisels us an urgent and grand work, proving why she’s the favorite of all the girls in the back of the bus.” Raised in Newark, New Jersey, Mans graduated from The University of Wisconsin Madison with a B.A. in African American Studies and currently serves as resident poet of the Newark Public Library. 

Spencer Reece, who struggled with rejection for years before his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale,was published to acclaim in 2004, now has a memoir out, The Secret Gospel of Mark: a Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). Poetry and faith are intimately linked in this saga that chronicles his battle with alcoholism, his orientation as a gay man, and his calling to the Episcopal priesthood. Chapters explore the work of mentor-poets who inspired him along the way, from Emily Dickenson and George Herbert, to Elizabeth Bishop and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others. National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon writes that Reece “brings into sharp focus a life of authentic despair and ultimate redemption…it is a tender but unforgiving, clear-sighted exposition of Christian faith.” Poet Carolyn Forche’, Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, calls it “A profound and necessary work, luminous and full of grace.”

Love Unknown: the Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, by Thomas Travasino, isn’t new — it came out in 2019 — but it’s notable for the comprehensive account it offers of this “poet’s poet.” Bishop published sparingly, but she won both the Pulitzer Prize (for Poems: North & South/A Cold Springin 1955) and the National Book Award (for her Complete Poems in 1970). Her poetry is “marked by precise description of the physical world” — much of it inspired by her extensive travels — while “her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing,” according to the Poetry Foundation. Her style is characterized by structured rhyme and a syntax that often reads more as prose than as formal verse. A selection of her work, including “The Armadillo,” can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.

In The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, author Christof Koch defines consciousness as subjective experience, “no matter how banal or exalted.”  It’s “the feeling of being alive,” he says, and speculates that it’s present in even the simplest life forms. A leader in the field of consciousness science, Koch asks the question, “How is it that a physical organ like the brain can give rise to feelings?” Arguing for a quantitative theory, he notes that science can now “detect and track the footsteps that any conscious experience leaves in the brain.” He doesn’t believe, however, that computers will ever feel. “Consciousness is not a clever hack. Experience does not arise out of computation,” he says. Nature has called his work “Invigorating…Koch tracks the ‘neural footprints’ of experience, swims off the wider shores of integrated information theory, and speculates about the ‘feeling of life itself’ in ravens, bees and octopuses —along with related ethical concerns.” (The MIT Press, 2019)