The body remembers; the road remembers—everything reminds us of everything. Two Open Doors in a Field (2023), Sophie Klahr’s captivating second collection of poems, serves as a travelogue of the heart and mind, with each poem offering a postcard or snapshot of memories evoked by absence, presence, and emptiness.
For all of the words McKinnon uses to celebrate vegetables, the one you won’t find in her book — outside of a few descriptions of both herself and certain pantry ingredients — is “vegetarian.” Instead, as Tenderheart’s subtitle says, this is a “cookbook about vegetables.” That description, which serves as both a declaration and a clarification, is one that has become increasingly common in the cookbook landscape. Vegetarian and nonvegetarian cookbooks alike employ similar wording: In these pages you’ll find vegetables, they say — not vegetarian recipes, necessarily, but vegetables.
Party Lines is about the politics of dancing. It treats dance as resistance, as ritual, an unruly energy. A way to affirm life and to stick two fingers up to the world. Gillett is less interested in summer of love nostalgia or having-it-large anecdotes from superstar DJs than he is on the cycles of social panic generated by Notting Hill carnival-goers, free party travellers, even drill fans in the present day.