Curriculum planning calls for a full-time commitment if we want the next generation of readers and writers to thrive. So, for the next few months I’ll be researching books in eReader, print, and audio forms in hopes of presenting the best titles and references to future students.

NLR has received stacks of advanced copies (thank you) and will continue to sift through those titles as time permits. For those publishers who also have a hand in children’s and YA books, please feel free to contact me regarding galleys and new releases. I will be working with a JK-8 population.

Blogging is a labor of love, but sadly, it doesn’t pay the bills. For those of you whom Night Light Revue recently interviewed – fear not – they will post as soon as possible. NLR will also continue to tweet, so keep the literary information coming. And, if you are a Michigan children’s author please reach out!

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

- Post by Megan Shaffer

The things we take for granted…

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

-Post by Megan Shaffer

The Library of Michigan’s annual Night for Notables is an event designed to pay tribute to those authors who have written works that offer high-quality titles with wide public appeal and are reflective of Michigan’s diverse ethnic, historical, literary, and cultural experience.

This year’s featured speakers are 2010 and 2011 National Book Award Winners for Fiction, Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones) and Jaimy Gordon (Lord of Misrule). The evening’s moderator is both a National Book Award Finalist and one of my favorite authors, Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage and Once Upon a River).

Authors to be honored at the Night for Notables this year include such names as Michael Moore, Jack Dempsey, Steve Hamilton, and Jim Harrison among others. Many of this year’s contributors will be on hand to sign and discuss copies of their award-winning books.

What are the Michigan Notable Books? Each year, the Library of Michigan selects up to 20 published titles over the last year that celebrate Michigan people, places, or events. Stretching back to 1991, the Michigan Notable Books began as the “Read Michigan” program but switched its name in 2004.

Anywhere between 250 to 400 Michigan-related titles are reviewed each year. Book selections are highly competitive and are reviewed by a board of 10-16 members who come from various literary backgrounds. The program is supported by sponsors and grants handled by the Library of Michigan Foundation.

For NLR coverage of a few of this year’s titles, you can link here. For a detailed piece on the upcoming event, link to this wonderful City Pulse piece by fellow friend and Mittenlit blogger Bill Castanier.

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

-Post by Megan Shaffer

World Book Night – believe in the power of books. It matters.

- Post by Megan Shaffer

And the Winner Isn’t…

- Ann Patchett for The New York Times

*Support your local bookstores, libraries and universities. It matters, right?

- Post by Megan Shaffer

One of the highlights of Milan for me were the small stands that raise their arthritic arms to reveal rows of used books of every genre. The vender fidgets close by while pedestrians take their time perusing titles or looking for that special treasure.

Books and art often hold hands. Should you make it to Milan, don’t miss out on seeing Leonardo DaVinci’s The Last Supper, which is housed at Santa Maria delle Grazie. I was completely unprepared for the painting’s magnificence. A bookstore is attached but absolutely no pictures are permitted.

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

Post by Megan Shaffer

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides the reader, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the “American Dream” in its various forms.

Sumner gives the reader a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and “winners” over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality—something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.”

Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.

Gregory Sumner, JD, PhD, is a professor of history at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle. Sumner has been awarded summer fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has twice been William J. Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Université di Roma Tre.

Books will be available for purchase and signing from the Book Beat bookstore.  You can also pre-order with Book Beat at 248-968-1190.

The Baldwin Public Library is located in downtown Birmingham at 300 W. Merrill Street and can be reached at 248-647-1700 or through the Library’s website at www.baldwinlib.org.

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

- Press release provided by Baldwin Public Library  and posted by Megan Shaffer

… and did I mention beautiful?

This is Libreria Rizzoli which is located in the breathtaking Piazza del Duomo in Milan. Though it appears to be just a storefront, it  actually connects to many other fine stores and rests opposite more high-end retail. The magnificent marble constructions extend upward where they blend and form a fantastic arch that covers the pedestrian walkways.

Piazza del Duomo – Libreria Rizzoli is through the arch to the left. Incredible.

The Light Between

- Review by writer and blogger Maggie Lane

Most books of poetry are like shuffled playlists:  where you begin and where you end are beside the point. But anyone reading Terry Blackhawk’s latest collection at random will miss one of the many pleasures of the book.  The intricate order of the poems in The Light Between unfolds a progression of healing as intimate as any memoir.

Blackhawk’s divorce after a 30-year partnership sets the book in motion, or rather deposits Blackhawk in one of those “in between” times so unnerving in a culture that marks time with status updates. In between jobs, in between symptom and diagnosis, in between youth and old age, and in this collection, in between losing love and finding it again, are uncomfortable spaces but spaces ripe for discovery and for poetry.  The in-between is where Blackhawk eventually finds the light in the collection’s title.

The book begins with an empty bed and an unrequited desire for the lover who vacated it.  Desire turns to rage in “Medea—Garland of Fire,” a searing re-telling of the Greek sorceress’ revenge on the man who abandoned her for a younger woman.  Hell-hath-no-fury finds a fresh voice in Blackhawk’s hands:

These days I think emptiness

enrages most, flesh that cannot forget

its hunger turned to anger, blown

useless petals.  Among my people

women have ways of remaining 

supple with desire. Why do you scoff

at these offerings?

A cultural distaste for sexual passion in “women of a certain age” bestows on Medea a useful invisibility in her plot to murder Jason’s young bride:

I will put on a shawl

of smoke and haze.  Drape myself

in the gray peace of the dove.

I will be, quietly, like ashes

concealing fire.

But Fatal Attraction this is not. Sadness, not rage, is the weightiest emotion of the book’s early poems.  Everything reminds Blackhawk of her loss, of the years/he tossed like fish, back into the water:  the pulling down of her old roof (Who’d have thought a slow rot/ would have such fervor to it), a hearing loss, empty cicada shells, even household bills (the mute/ mail you forward, terse notes of interest to be paid).

Her sadness never turns mawkish or self-indulgent.  Bitterness is not her stock in trade.  She observes her own emotions as she observes the birds that animate the poems (Blackhawk is a birdwatcher):  patiently, precisely, with wonder and a poet’s relish of the extraordinary.

Her progression towards healing unfolds seamlessly, naturally.  In “The Eggplant” she sweeps a shriveled eggplant from behind a cabinet and sees in it a mirror of her own circumstance:

It had transformed

Silently, and without obvious flourish,

Until I poked around and found the beauty of it.

Blackhawk sequences her poems with the care of a master gardener, positioning poems to foil and highlight each other.  The eggplant poem is followed by “I Think of My Ex Husband Standing in the Sunlight” in which a frozen tree frog she keeps on her desk becomes a stand-in for her ex.  (A novel technique for dealing with those who hurt us.)  The juxtaposition of the two poems says what she will not:  she has evolved, but he’s frozen in time, unable to change.

The Light Between closes with a reversal of the empty bed that began it.  In the playful “Imagining Billy,” an unlikely sex object lounges in her bed:  poet Billy Collins in flannel pajamas.  Collins is too busy writing poems to engage her desire.  But this poem is followed by the full-fledged erotic coupling of “Into the Canopy” and a sweet love poem, “Not Wafting but Dofting,” light as the air that flows through it.

The movement from pain to healing forms the arc that structures the book, but The Light Between is more than a recovery memoir to be gifted to the newly divorced.  Vivid, precise language, not divorce, powers the book; and more so than lost love, birds populate its pages.  In fact, she can’t seem to keep birds and all manner of flying things—angels, skywriting planes–out of her poems.  The freedom of bird flight, the art of bird song, the beauty and variation of bird species all captivate her imagination and give occasion to many beautiful images. But it’s the elusiveness of birds that figures most in this collection.  Birds come and birds go, like love, like the muse itself.

Award-winning Terry Blackhawk lives and writes in Detroit.  She is the founder and director of Inside/Out, a writer-in-residence program in the Detroit school system.  The Light Between is her sixth book of poetry.

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

-The Light Between was published by Wayne State University Press

- Please link here for more from writer Maggie Lane

Nicola’s Books

On Tuesday evening, actor and author Benjamin Busch will be appearing at Nicola’s Books for a discussion and signing of his memoir, Dust to Dust. Busch, who currently lives in Reed City, Michigan, was born in Manhattan and grew up in upstate New York. He is an actor, photographer, film director, and a United States Marine Corps Infantry Officer who served two tours of combat duty in Iraq. In addition, he has appeared in the HBO series The Wire, Homicide, The West Wing, and Generation Kill.

Acting aside, Busch’s memoir is a heavy, thoughtful read that utilizes the elemental (water, metal stone, blood, etc) as device for examining the brevity of our existence.

Dust to Dust will hit stores this Tuesday, which happily coincides with Busch’s appearance at Nicola’s. The discussion and signing will take place on March 20, 2012 at 7:00 pm. For more on Benjamin and Dust to Dust, try this recent piece in the Detroit Free Press.

Also appearing this week at Nicola’s Books is author and debut novelist Christopher Hebert. Hebert is a graduate of Antioch College and earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was awarded its prestigious Hopwood Award for Fiction. Currently, he teachers at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with his wife and son.

The Boiling Season, Hebert’s debut novel, is a stunner thus far (I’m halfway through), and I’m quite shocked Hebert isn’t getting more airtime for this richly detailed and beautifully written work.

Hebert’s discussion and signing of The Boiling Season will take place Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 7:00 pm. For more with Christopher Hebert you can link to this Metro Pulse interview.

Nicola’s Books is located in the Westgate Shopping Center at 2513 Jackson Avenue in Ann Arbor. As always, events are subject to change so please call first before heading out the door (734.662.0600).

*Support your local bookstores, libraries, and universities. It matters.

- Post by Megan Shaffer