Sun Yung Shin dedicates her revelatory fourth collection, "The Wet Hex," to those "cast away," using a verb to remind readers that abandonment is an action imbued with intention and responsibility. In the formally innovative poems that follow, she demonstrates that castaways generate unique and vital knowledge from the obscure margins they have been consigned to.
“The Last Dress from Paris” is a book about discovering happiness. Oppressed by the world around them, Lucille and Alice take steps to forge ahead and change their lives, filling it with love and purpose. Combining this passion with incredible scenes from Paris and colorful descriptions of the Dior dresses, this novel is an amazing story to provide the reader with a glimpse of Parisian society during these two time periods.
One of the stranger aspects of lockdown for me was what I came to think of as my brain “defragging”. With so much less to do, so many fewer fresh memories to process, some kind of mental hard-drive utility seemed to spool up, intent on sorting through the inefficient data blocks scattered around my cranium. My nights began to be populated by faces I had not seen for years; long-submerged minor memories resurfaced at random. My dreams – particularly in the half-sleep of the morning – took on a kaleidoscopic quality of reflection and recomposition. Stuck in stasis, my mind decided to generate its own novelties: flowing and flashing through old files to turn the familiar contents of my memory into strange new matter.
I had forgotten about the defragging process until Will Ashon’s uncategorisable The Passengers brought it flooding back to me. Part oral history, part found poetry, his book uses the voices of ordinary Britons to produce a picture of the nation at a time of unique perspective. It is both a deeply quotidian book – the everyday as heard in the words of people you might meet at any bus-stop, pub, or supermarket – and an extraordinary one. Choral, polyvocal, symphonic, its evocation of Britain today had, for me, the special flavour of those lockdown dreams: an endlessly strange journey through the familiar.
The North, author Bernd Brunner tells us, has always had a profound influence on those who live farther south. It’s been feared, romanticized, mythologized and used for political purposes. While historian Brunner focuses his entertaining and thought-provoking cultural history on Germany’s relationships to the European north — Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland — much of what he has to say can be applied to the rest of the circumpolar north.