Saba Keramati writes about the hopes, dreams, characteristics, and experiences that form the self but that also stir up more mysteries in her new poetry collection, Self-Mythology. 

Keramati, born in America, writes from the perspective of being an only child of political refugees, her Chinese mother and Iranian father. Her poems probe how holding many identities results in feeling not fully one of them. The first poem, “THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY THIS,” conveys the pang of these distinctions: “I have to write this poem in English / I do not speak my mother’s language / I do not speak my father’s language / I am not grateful for this country.” These circumstances and the desire to claim an identity, while at the same time chafing against the divisions of self, set the foundation for the collection that asks, “Who am I being today? / … / You’ll always be wrong, and I’ll always be / here, chameleoning myself / with every shift of the light.” 

Self-Mythology is forthright about its focus on the poet, but the poems also look outward. A series of centos, poems with all their lines borrowed from others, are sprinkled throughout the book, and each is called “Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets.” The third such poem contains lines like “I hold things I cannot say in my mouth—” and “There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin. / I cannot help but know the words.” In addition to these recurring centos, poems also reflect on attempts to learn a language, miscarriage, what it is like to be in a relationship, fire season in California, social media, astrology, and 9/11. 

Moments of revelation emerge in Self-Mythology. In “Chimera,” the speaker listens to the radio and hears lyrics conveying a thought that had earlier seemed original to the poet: 

With the release of a new friends-to-lovers romance this month, Catch and Keep, Ann Arbor author Erin Hahn completes her spicy trilogy. The novels in this series are dual point-of-view and feature couples in the same friend group. Prior installments were Built to Last and Friends Don’t Fall in Love.

The main roles in Catch and Keep go to Josiah Cole, also known as Joe, and Maren Laughlin, whom Joe calls “Jig” for her penchant for fishing. Couples Shelby & Cam and Craig (Huck) & Lorelai from the previous books of the trilogy make cameos in this third novel.

Many years after knowing each other while growing up, Maren and Joe immediately take notice when they run into each other again. The location where they reconnect is the same place where they interacted in their youth: Cole’s Landing Resort, a lakeside getaway in Wisconsin. Joe’s parents own the resort, and Joe now works and raises his kids there.

Maren grew up going to the resort and vacationed and developed her excellent fishing skills on the lake. In a flashback to an earlier visit, Maren reflects that there is, “Just … something about this place. It makes me feel right. I’m more myself here than anywhere else in the entire world.” It takes a special place to have that effect. Maren and Joe’s shared appreciation for the location becomes part of their fast-growing spark.

Christopher Cosmos' ambitious second novel, Young Conquerors, is a fictional retelling of Alexander the Great’s life. The book follows the University of Michigan grad's 2020 debut, Once We Were Here. 

Young Conquerors begins with a departure. Hephaestion, the book’s narrator, is leaving his homeland just as he comes of age because his uncle will see him as a threat to the throne. When Hephaestion prepares to leave, he already recognizes, “If I’m going to grow, and if I’m going to find out all that I will know, and all that I can be, and the different type of strength I’ve been given, then I need to leave, and it can’t wait any longer.”

His subsequent journey from Salona in Illyria to Pella in Macedonia sets him on a new, irrevocable course, on which he will train as a soldier and conqueror, learn about politics, geography, and religion, and, perhaps most importantly, meet the love of his life. 

In Pella, Hephaestion describes how he meets Alexandros, son of the current basileus, Philippos. After Hephaestion wins the approval of Philippos, the two begin training together, along with Alexandros’ close companions. All these young men are around the age of 15, so this time together is formative and provides crucial preparation for their later endeavors. 

Alexandros and Hephaestion quickly become especially close, and Hephaestion ponders their future: 

This story originally ran on July 31, 2024.

Keith Taylor is launching two new books 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.

Taylor will discuss What Can the Matter Be? with Monica Rico at Literati Bookstore on Wednesday, October 16, at 6:30 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.”

In U-M alum Perry Janes’ new poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, the poems weigh desire by examining what you can express, what you hold back, and how you tell the story. These poems chase and dodge competing and sinister desires—and see what prevails. 

Janes, originally from Michigan, now lives in California. The poems in Find Me When You’re Ready involve both places, as the book’s description says, “Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles.” 

Janes returns to Ann Arbor for an event at Literati Bookstore where he will be joined in conversation by Peter Ho Davies, with a reading by Tommye Blount, on Friday, October 4, 2024, at 6:30 p.m.

On the topic of relocating from Detroit to the West Coast, Janes writes in the poem, “Ode to Xeriscaping; or, Regarding Austerity, I Find Devotion":

Ayokunle Falomo’s new poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, examines the concepts of decolonization, identity, and truth while also studying the poet’s relationship to self, family, writing, and growth.

Several poems in Autobiomythography of bear the title “Lugard & I” followed by a parenthetical, such as “Lugard & I (Meditation).” In the notes section, Falomo, a University of Michigan alum, describes that these poems “take/borrow/steal/repurpose words, phrases, sentences, images, ideas, etc. from The Diaries of Lord Lugard, Volume 4 as well as the personal journal I kept in 2018, during my residency at MacDowell.” Falomo, who is Nigerian and American, also notes that Frederick Lugard participated in Britain’s colonization of African countries, including Nigeria. These poems, related by title, “are poems through, by which I mean because of, or more accurately, by way of, Lugard.” The first one in the book, “Lugard & I (Ars Poetica),” offers a series of commands and command-like questions:

Count the cost. Ask questions. Are they loud,
the nouns. Do they speak back.
Consider each word as a rider must his horse.
How fit. How strong. Your adjectives,
how trustworthy are they. How much
does each word weigh. Can you account for every one
of them, for every single thing. Consider scale.

The characters in ’Pemi Aguda’s new collection of short stories, Ghostroots, set out to protect what they have or find what they want—sometimes at a major cost and often via circumstances beyond the ordinary. 

Aguda, who earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and now lives in Philadelphia, will be in conversation about her new book with author and U-M professor Peter Ho Davies on Friday, September 20, at 6:30 pm at Literati Bookstore.

All of the stories in Ghostroots, which is longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, are set in Lagos, Nigeria. One story, “The Dusk Market,” covers a woman’s interactions with an evening fair, where “When the sun slinks away, when the light of the day things out—oranges replaced by dark grays and purples, the women come out of nowhere.” Yet, “You don’t see the dusk market if you are not invited to the dusk market, but there are slippery moments, slits, frissons.” This unreliability, this capriciousness, catches the attention of this woman, Salewa, whose “eyes are willing to see more than is otherwise available to her.” 

Salewa catches on to the dusk market, but it seems to elude her attempts to go there. The market becomes her main goal because “forget these men, their syrupy tongues, their slimy hands that can break a heart, a body. It is the market that Salewa wants, the soft light, the pleasant hum of commerce, that warmth of camaraderie she had stumbled unto, into, for a short moment or two.” This market becomes a place to feel at home. 

As Salewa searches, she struggles to locate this event and to be recognized as a human. While continuing her quest, Salewa tries to speak to a person whom she recognizes, but the individual responds:  

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.