NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS |
“Flutter, Kick” from Anna V.Q. Ross
Poet Anna V.Q. Ross knows what to leave unsaid, knows the just enough to send the reader’s blood and mind alight. “One morning in December,/ my friend will go in to wake her two-year-old son,/ and find him.” What’s silent, but known, and sensed immediately, chills. Her new collection, “Flutter, Kick” (Red Hen), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award, traffics in beauty and threat, the “something unseen hungering near,” and our deep urges, as well as our abilities and inabilities, to protect ourselves and the ones we love from different kinds of danger. The book is especially interested in the certain strain of maternal protection; children are “perfect pink mouths/ of unknowing” and grow into storming teens, and the speaker of the poem recalls harms and violations from her own past, wondering what her children will enter into. Ross is especially good at the dismount; her last lines stick the landing in a way that launches the reader into new understandings, new truths, the ones that can’t be spoken all the way. And there are lines of such beguiling beauty: “You felt you should love horses/ but preferred trees — the way they moved/ without leaving.”
Antiquarian Book Fair
The Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair returns this weekend for its 44th year, bringing over 100 exhibitors and sellers from around the world presenting all manner of biblio-treasure and ephemera. Delights on offer this year: rare first editions of James Joyce’s riotous, rollicking, notoriously challenging “Finnegans Wake,” as well as Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”; Black photographer Dan Bollings’s collection of photographs from the 1960s of some of the brightest stars of jazz — Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Pharoah Sanders — performing at Boston’s Jazz Workshop and Lennie’s on the Turnpike, in Peabody; a collection of color-printed woodblocks from 1909 by Kamisaka Sekka; and a collection of botanical paintings of the plants of the garden of King Charles III signed by the king himself. And besides the books and objects on offer, visitors can attend a number of lectures and discussions, including talks on “Women in the American Wilderness,” “The Architecture and Furnishing of the Private Library,” a roundtable on artists’ books, “A Life of Dealing in the Exotic World of Rare Books,” and “The Trials and Triumphs of Collecting Romance Novels.” And don’t forget to bring along that mysterious old book you found in your grandparents’ attic — the book appraisals are free. The Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair takes place Nov. 11-13 at the Hynes Convention Center. Tickets to the opening preview event on Friday are $25; the rest of the fair is free. For more information, visit bostonbookfair.com.
Molly’s Bookstore in Melrose
A new, independent bookstore is scheduled to open later this month in downtown Melrose. Molly’s Bookstore, owned by Andrea Iriarte Dent and Brett Reed, will be a two-floor general interest bookstore, with an event space and children’s books on the lower level and books for adults on the second level. Iriarte Dent moved to the United States from Guatemala over a decade ago, and she and her family have been living in Melrose for the past four years. It’s been a dream of hers to own and run a bookstore, and when the space on Main Street opened up, she moved fast. Besides offering book clubs and literary and community events at the store, Iriarte Dent is also committed to offering a diverse range of books, recalling a Latino book club she was part of, and the trouble they had finding titles they wanted to read. The bookstore, named after a family dog, is scheduled to open on Nov. 19 at 667-669 Main St. in Melrose. For more information, visit mollysbookstore.com.
Coming out
“Flight” by Lynn Steger Strong (Mariner)
“Pathetic Literature” edited by Eileen Myles (Grove)
“Participation” by Anna Moschovakis (Coffee House)
Pick of the week
Lucinda Hannington at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, recommends “The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories” by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon): “These vignettes, none surpassing two pages in length, are ruminations on life, living, and, to a lesser extent, dying. The book is divided into thematic sections — memory, time, nature, belief — yet each story is so distinct from its neighbors that it stands out; there is no sense of repetition or even familiarity. The stories are about what humanity does with the knowledge offered by an apparition.”