This story was first published on February 27, 2024. We're highlighting it because Zilka Joseph and Isaac Pickell will read from their work for "Jewish American Poets of Color" at AADL's Downtown branch on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at 6:30 pm.

“From tumbled sands and shattered bark / blurred shadows dragged us,” writes Zilka Joseph in her new poetry collection, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman. 

These poems are immersed in the history, customs, and food of the Bene Israel people. The Ann Arbor poet shares about their shipwreck on the shores of India, worship of the prophet Elijah, and subsequent dispersing across the world. While Joseph imparts facts about the culture and community, she also makes the poems personal with her memories. 

This cultural and familial history informs Joseph’s poems, such as “Leaf Boat,” which is a longer poem that receives its own section of the book. Joseph describes “my body a leaf boat / lamp floated on water” in the context of the heritage of her ancestors, grandmother, parents, and herself who moved from place to place. Even her birth was during unsettled weather: “I was born Thursday in monsoon rain / night time East coast time / in Bombay a baby opens her eyes.” Water, especially oceans, flows through the lines, and “in my dream / the whales are singing.” 

Joseph focuses less on what is lost, though she does pay tribute to her parents, and focuses more on the richness that the traditions and foods of the Bene Israel pass along. One such food is “draksha-cha sharbath. Sherbet of raisins” for Shabbath, which Joseph writes about replicating on her own after moving to the United States. Earlier, she had prepared it with her grandmother and mother. As she writes in one of the short essays or prose poems that are interspersed throughout the book, making this recipe is like time traveling for Joseph:  

Divorce is not just one thing; it's not just the moment of making the decision or signing a piece of paper. The events before, during, and after hold rage, heartbreak, pain, fear, freedom, and many more emotions and qualities, as poet Carmen Bugan documents in her new collection, Tristia.

Yet, even from the start of the book, the poet makes clear that this pain does not define her but rather serves as an experience to surmount:

Those who caused us pain
Will be left holding the chains
They have fashioned for us.

We are rising on the back of the wind.

The rise demonstrates that more than one thing can be true at once—pain exists alongside cultivating resilience, finding joy in children and nature, traveling, and reimagining how life looks. “It’s Possible,” says the poem by that name, that “Like an egg, the soul / Is ready to break again. / Like a river, the soul is ready / To rush over the banks.”

The path through the dark woods of divorce and a father’s death does not cut straight or clear. As the poet shares, “Today I met an old man who was lost,” the similarities between these two people emerge on “Archer Street”:

“How do you / keep stones from sinking like that, I wonder? / How do you hold the wild shoots / of spring inside you, instead?” Now is the right season of year to contemplate these questions from the poem “Preparing” by Ellen Stone in her new poetry collection, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them.

The Ann Arbor poet will debut her book and be joined by two other local poets, Monica Rico and Ashwini Bhasi, on Wednesday, April 9, at 6:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch. The event will include a reading and Q&A. On Saturday, April 26, Stone will be one of the poets in the Celebration of Jewish Poetry from 2 pm to 6 pm at Temple Beth Emeth. One of Stone’s poems is on display at Comet Coffee in the Poet Tree Town project throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti during April.

The appearances of the moon in various forms generate a comforting presence in Stone’s collection as the simile “tidal as the pull toward moon” in “How I want the road to you” illustrates. In the second poem of the book, called “Bright side of the moon,” the poet shares how some things are nevertheless amiss since there is “Scarlet fruit scattered in the garden straw as if / the strawberry moon splintered. I gathered shards.” The poet discovers and picks up such shards for the rest of the book. The poems tell stories of lives unfolding through the natural order of marriages and motherhood as well as the pain of sexual assault and loss.

Poet Tree Town infuses public places with poems in windows around town as well as online. The poems are ephemeral, just up from April 1 to 30, during National Poetry Month.

The third rendition of Poet Tree Town is expanding to Ypsilanti, continuing in Ann Arbor, and launching with a kick-off event on April 1, 6-9 pm, at Dzanc House. The event includes an open mic, book swap, a community-written poem, desserts by local baker Fragola Forno, and a meet-and-greet with your local poets.

“Welcome to all, whether you are a poet yourself or a poetry appreciator!” said Poet Tree Town founder and organizer, Cameron (Cam) Finch, about the event.

The poems, written by community members, number 157 on display at 66 locations for 2025—up from 87 poets/poems at 38 locations in 2024. Ypsi will host 30 of the poems for the first time this year.

“The expansion to Ypsilanti felt like a very natural next step for this project,” Finch told Pulp. “At the same time, it was important for me to maintain the name Poet Tree Town, as a nod to where this project was born, and where it is growing out and up from.”

The lives of sisters Consuelo and Graciela intertwine and unravel, both with each other and separately, and then crisscross the globe in The Volcano Daughters, the debut novel by Gina María Balibrera.

Much of what happens to the sisters is not their choice. They suffer great losses of their mother and loved ones, abuse at the hands of the General in El Salvador, and repeated setbacks in their efforts to regain a home, sustenance, and love.

These two daughters of mother Socorrito begin their lives on a volcano where the women harvest coffee for el patrón of la finca (the boss of the estate). When their lives converge with the rising dictator, who despite despising their Indigenous roots also finds them attractive, the girls find themselves in significant danger, which they only fully comprehend looking back:

Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

Fagin the Thief comes with content warnings for all sorts of sinister actions: abuse, death, swearing, and crime, including property theft. Yet readers may find themselves on the side of Jacob Fagin, the thief and Jew at the center of the crime ring, in this take on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.  

Author and U-M alum Allison Epstein, who lives in Chicago, will debut her third historical fiction novel at Literati Bookstore on Monday, March 3, at 6:30 pm. She returns to Literati after sharing her previous book, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, there as well.

The main character, Jacob Fagin, who prefers to go by his last name, takes to a life of crime like a fish to water and quickly learns the ropes. When he begins stealing, he is enamored with the opportunities that it provides:

Michigan has its unique qualities, and author John Counts infuses them into his short stories in Bear County, Michigan.

Counts takes a page from William Faulkner’s writing by centering each story within a fictional county. Set in northern Michigan, the characters hunt, work blue-collar jobs, get hooked on drugs, coexist with the wildlife, spend time on the water, and go to a nudist resort on the lake.

Counts, who is based in Whitmore Lake and a journalist and editor for MLive, will read from his new collection at Literati Bookstore on Friday, February 28, at 6:30 pm.

The short stories in Bear County, Michigan study how life deals the characters tough hands and how they react. In the story “The Hermit,” Karl loses the love of his life:

To whom or what do we owe ethical consideration? What circumstances call for morality?

University of Michigan professor Webb Keane argues that the answer to these questions is inextricably linked to our personal context in his new book, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.

People don’t live moral life in the abstract, they live it within specific circumstances and social relations, with certain capacities, constraints and long-term consequences. Put another way, you simply cannot live out the values of a Carmelite nun without a monastic system, or a Mongolian warrior without a calvary, and the respective social, economic and cultural systems that sustain them and acknowledge their worth.

We are who we are—and we make decisions—based on the situations in which we find ourselves, according to Keane.

Animals, Robots, Gods contains five chapters along with an introduction and coda. In the introduction, Keane starts by sharing that one of the premises of the book is the question, “What is a human being anyway?” and says that, “we will explore the range of ethical possibilities and challenges that take place at the edge of the human.” As he shows, the delineation is not always so clear.

At the end of Pinion, the poet confesses, “Last night, I let in all the birds.” Ann Arbor writer Monica Rico does just that in her new poetry collection, Pinion.

Poems in Pinion contemplate birds. Moreover, the people—a father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, sister, and husband—take on the qualities of the birds: owls, a cardinal, a robin, ravens, and more species. The poem “Five Things Borrowed” shares a memory that merges with geese and an owl: