Diane Seuss questions and challenges the utility of poetry in her new book, Modern Poetry. The poems in this collection examine poetry directly and indirectly. One poem, blunt in its title “Against Poetry,” speculates, “Maybe what distinguishes / art from illustration / is its uselessness.” 

Death and love crop up frequently throughout this book, as is fitting for a collection titled Modern Poetry. In the poem “Love Letter,” death is reality—“It’s clear we die a hundred times / before we die”—and love is imperfect: 

When I first read the word denouement
out loud, my ex-husband
laughed at my mispronunciation.
I include it here as an illustration
of the fact that love does not conquer
all. Now when I think
of love, it’s like focusing too hard
on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing.
You can be blinded or suffocated
By that degree of self-consciousness.

Through these poems, Seuss articulates the inadequacy and necessity of our human constructs, both in poetry and in life. The poet asks, answers, and prods the reader to contemplate this as well. 

“In order to run a highwayman to the ground, you have to learn to think like him: drink where he drank, eat what he ate, bathe in the same stream, and sleep in the bed … .” 

This remembrance of what lawman Irons St. John said by retired Pinkerton detective Emmet Rawlings kicks off Rawlings’ research and recollections of St. John—known as Ike to his friends—in Iron Star.

Loren D. Estleman’s newest Western novel reprises the character of St. John from his appearance in Mister St. John (1983) and looks back at his exploits. In the book, film star Buck Jones commissions Rawlings, who worked with St. John, to assemble his story for a new movie. 

Estleman is based in Whitmore Lake. Westerns are not the only books that he writes. Estleman has penned many mysteries, crime, and detective books, some of which are based in Detroit. 

In Iron Star, St. John has worked as a deputy U.S. marshal and spent time in jail. These disparate experiences on both sides of the law are evident in his behavior and speech. He is wary of everyone he encounters, as this exchange from St. John’s perspective illustrates: 

Time can bring insights, and this proves true for U-M professor and author, Aaron P. Dworkin. In his new book, Lessons in Gratitude: A Memoir on Race, the Arts, and Mental Health, published this month by the University of Michigan Press, he reflects on his influences, formative years, career trajectory, and current state in life.

Lessons in Gratitude follows Dworkin’s life from birth through many milestones, including adoption, college, career, marriage, and family. He shares the messages he absorbed as a child and then how he continues applying them into adulthood. During his violin lessons when he tried to explain mistakes, his teacher replied, “You no talk. You play.” This led Dworkin to see that, “These words were probably the most important lesson Mr. Graffman ever taught me. One of my personal tenets is that ‘It’s not what you say, but rather what you do.’” This interaction, among many other encounters with music and in his home life, informed Dworkin’s subsequent approach to work and relationships.

Early in the book, Dworkin chronicles his education as he grew up in New York City and later in Hershey, Pennsylvania, attended Interlochen Arts Academy for two years, and then went to college. Throughout his life, such as when he was studying music and falling in love for the first time, his identity as a biracial and adopted person intertwined with his experiences. Dworkin tells how music has been a unifying force:

My relationship with music has been rocky at times, especially during my teens. Even so, I have never denied its hold on me. Music allowed me to express my emotions I could never articulate how it resonates deep in my soul, the hidden spaces known only to me and what one may refer to as god. Music is the story of mankind with its melodies and beats—the tragedies, the triumphs, the loneliness, and the wonders. It is a part of me that connects me to the rest of the world.

Keith Taylor is launching two new books published this year.

The University of Michigan lecturer emeritus and former bookseller offers 40 years of poetry in All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977-2017, which was published in January. Then he studies the natural and human world through his poetry collection What Can the Matter Be?, which debuts in August. 

Taylor will read from What Can the Matter Be? at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor on Saturday, August 10, at 3 pm. 

All the Time You Want begins with dancing and concludes with painting. A note to the reader informs us that the poems appear “in roughly chronological order.” These poems map the formative places in Taylor’s life by traveling through Canada and to Ireland, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Isle Royale, Paris, Big Sur, South Bend, North Fishtail Bay, and other places.

Another throughline of the poems is the birds—the crested shelduck, snowy egret, pigeon, cerulean warbler, great horned owl, and ancient murrelet. Or you can follow the art and see “the gaze out past the painting / to all the other stories / no one else could ever understand.” 

These selected poems encounter the ups and downs of the poet’s life and experiences. One day there is “a momentary sense / of the utter loveliness of things” and another day brings “nothing but the clear, sour odor of skunk.”

Priyanka Mattoo mines her life in her new memoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones. She reflects on not feeling like she belonged or knowing what she wanted to do. Her years at the University of Michigan offered a chance to explore, and she sought answers to the question of what to do even as she entered the workforce with two degrees from U-M. She writes about how she discovered her path forward as she later found a career and a family in Los Angeles. Along the way, she also contemplates music, cooking, family, and parenthood. 

The search for belonging and understanding identity follows Mattoo over the years and in her writing. In her memoir, she shares about her family’s inability to make a planned return to Kashmir owing to the insurgency in the late 1980s and early ‘90s and how that change of plans set her life on a different trajectory:

In the spectrum of the diaspora, I fall neither here nor there. I didn’t grow up in India, I present as American, and I don’t exactly relate to either. This can be disorienting enough without the petulant urge to scream, It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to move back to Kashmir. I’ve been lucky enough to have a complex and meaningful life. I wouldn’t change a single twist or turn that landed me the partner, the kids, the job I enjoy now. But even if we hadn’t stayed in Srinagar, even if I had eventually left to pursue other opportunities, I still carry an anger and sorrow about having the choice taken away.

“the day unthreads, and then the next / day unthreads,” writes poet and University of Michigan Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry, Kelly Hoffer, in her collection, Undershore. 

The poems in Undershore find themselves submerged in grief, and later in the book, they explore the juxtaposition of loss with new life. During the “smoketrail/afterimage/premonition” in the poem called “Age of decadence/ /sericulture/ /summoning spell” (in this sentence, the slashes are part of the line and title, not indicating line breaks), we see both what is there and what has changed. The poet reflects on a silkworm’s effort to build a cocoon by noting that, “at the moments of greatest observational / pressure, desire seeps into perception.” Bereavement does not erase the persistent want.  

Another poem, “Sidelong: treatises,” points out that “the thing about a cliff is the cliffside, otherwise / it would remain a carpet unfurling in front of you, forever.” The drop-off defines it. They say that grief is an emotion that you must face to get through it, and Hoffer stands at the cliff’s edge and does just that. Hoffer includes two poems called “I want Abysses,” and at the end of the first one writes: 

There are many ways for a marriage to go wrong, and Caitlin Cowan’s new poetry collection, Happy Everything, records a number of them. The poem “Instructions for Divorce” recommends to “Know that there’s no manual / for this.” One must make one’s own path and “weld yourself / to the world’s blue ache.”  

Happy Everything contains poems masquerading as holidays and special days, though these writings do not veil how everything is awry aside from the book’s title and the supposedly happy occasions. The multi-part poem “Happy Halloween” looks at the “awful mechanics” of “film after unrated film because Mama / thought unrated meant the same as safe” and asks:

Petra Kuppers’ new poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, invites you to “Slide into the dive” and become the “lioness” in the “time river” where the “Acorn nut, un-hatted, veined, split, keeps the secret.” The poems navigate the soil and secrets and horrors of women who never made it home. 

Several events related to the book are upcoming. Kuppers will be at Booksweet on May 17 at 7 pm as part of the “True Crime Authors’ Night” with Christine Hume and Antoinette M. James. She'll also perform in Ann Arbor on June 15 at 3 pm in “Crip Drift by the Huron River” with Turtle Disco as part of Ann Arbor 200/Ann Arbor District Library Digital Projects. In the fall, Kuppers will read from Diver Beneath the Street and talk with Shelley Manis at AADL’s Downtown branch on September 25 at 6:30 pm.

Diver Beneath the Street begins with a preface in the form of a prose poem that shares all of the “ley lines” tying the collection together: murder, environmental pollution, fairy tales, the pandemic, and ecology. We learn that the fairy tales evolve from the 1960s Michigan Murder cases in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, from the Detroit serial killings in 2019, and from “access to space constricted during the COVID-19 lockdown.” They exist “Between horror and the soil’s plentitude.” The book goes on to Section I, which contains one poem named after the book, “Diver Beneath the Street,” which also references Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck.” The poet narrates: 

The details of who knows whom, and what happened in their pasts, result in drama in Ann Arbor author A.H. Kim’s retelling of Sense and Sensibility through her new novel, Relative Strangers, set in modern-day California. 

Kim was an attorney and worked at a Fortune 200 company before retiring to write full-time. She raised her family in San Francisco, is a cancer survivor, and now lives in Ann Arbor with her husband. Kim will be in conversation with Camille Pagán at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, April 2, at 6:30 pm.

The parallels to Jane Austen’s novel are revealed in the premise of the book.

Rosalind Thorne launches an investigation when Marianna Levitton hires her to find out the cause of her poisoning in the cozy mystery called The Secret of the Lady’s Maid by Darcie Wilde. As the plot unfolds, the attempted murders by arsenic are just the start of problems that expand to include jewel theft and murders. 

This book is the second in the series called “The Useful Woman Mysteries,” which begins with The Secret of the Lost Pearls and features Rosalind, who's the main character in other novels by Wilde.

Wilde is one of several pseudonyms for University of Michigan alum and Ypsilanti-based author Sarah Zettel. Her period novels take place in Regency London, where the haut ton socialize and those in domestic service wait on them. 

Rosalind possesses a keen eye for details that do not line up. Through observing people and delicately asking the right questions, she pieces together the story. As she is talking with Cate, a member of the Levitton family that Rosalind is scrutinizing, Rosalind displays her cleverness and discretion when she asserts: