Octaves by Tyler Dunston moves through a world where “As always / uncertainty is ours.” 

These poems bring in earthly realities like death and the dullness of the noon hour while also reaching more broadly to the skies in which “the moon and stars wilted / through layers of floor-to-ceiling glass.” The realms collide or overlap. A tangible structure interacts with the sun when “I looked outside / at a slab of brick buttered with light.”

The poet’s perspective is clear in the appearances of the first person “I” across the poems, as the poem called “On W.G. Sebald’s natural history of the herring” declares that “I always thought death was ashen gray.” First person plural expands the outlook to involve the reader through meditating “On emptiness” with the lines, “We understand the weight of ladled things, / time maybe most of all, easy to waste / and hard to throw away.”

In Dunston’s poems, his visual art background shows through because the poet is never only fixed on his own experience but rather takes in the full scene and notices the details. The whole time, “I’m feeling my way / in the dark toward you, the sea in my ear.”

Dunston is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He previously earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University. Octaves was also a finalist for the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest, and as the title suggests, many of the poems contain eight lines. 

Fellow poet Jason Barry joins Dunston in conversation to celebrate the release of Octaves at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:30 pm.

Dunston and I spoke about Octaves, visual art, his PhD studies, what he's reading, and what he's working on next.

This story originally ran on December 5, 2024. "The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry" continues documenting Michigan poets, and on Monday, September 22, there's a live poetry reading at the Downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library showcasing four poets from the project: Owólabi Aboyade, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Bryan Thao Worra, and Rebecca Biber.

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry:

Magdalena J. Zaborowska makes connections across the experiences of and influences on James Baldwin in her wide-ranging book James Baldwin: The Life Album. Unlike her earlier two monographs on Baldwin, this unique and deeply researched biography is written for a general audience.

However, Zaborowska did not write James Baldwin: The Life Album as a standard biography but rather modeled it after a double vinyl record with four sides (i.e., sections), each with its own tracks (i.e., chapters). The table of contents serves as a track list. Zaborowska elaborates on this creative approach in her book’s introduction:

His critics’ desire that Baldwin straighten out is among the reasons why in James Baldwin I tell his life story in a deliberately unstraightforward, even queer, manner. To honor who he was, and how he viewed and wrote about himself, I revisit his life both chronologically and achronologically, and at times by mixing the two approaches. A brilliant stylist of the English language, Baldwin leaned on repetition and revolution, even re-evolution, of themes, phrases, and points of view, some of which were inspired by Black English and music. Exploding traditional syntax, style, and genre expectations, his long sentences remixed ideas, characters, events, and locations, embracing what he called “the beat.” Fascinated with how experience and emotion drove embodied imagination, will, and speech, he channeled their restless dance into his works, syncopating dates, locations, and personae, repeating riffs and refrains like a virtuoso improviser.

The biography’s structure as an album lends itself well to telling Baldwin’s life story and reflects the very way Baldwin himself approached his work.

Nick Baumgardner has a front-row seat to University of Michigan football. That's partly because he's an Ann Arbor resident, but it's mostly because he's a senior football writer for The Athletic.

Over the past few years, when Baumgarden hasn't been providing NFL Draft analysis or other football coverage for The Athletic, he's been penning books on the Michigan Wolverines, including 2023's Mountaintop: The Inside Story of Michigan's National Title Climb and 2025's The Program: Michigan, A Curated History of the Wolverines.

The Program is a collection of in-depth essays that focus on pivotal moments that have helped shape the Wolverines' legacy as the most successful college football team of all time and the first to reach 1,000 wins.

In an interview with Booksweet to promote his August 29, 2025, appearance at the Ann Arbor District Library, Baumgardner said The Program "is like a magnifying glass. My other writing and podcasting is more like a 20,000-foot view of what’s going on. The book is going back and really trying to zoom in as much as you can on people, on dates, and on context and trying to find out why certain things happened on a deeper sense, as opposed to sort of chronicling what’s going on in real time."

Baumgardner's Wolverines football talk is the second he's given at AADL: He debuted with a January 10, 2024, event to discuss Mountaintop, which he co-wrote with Mark Snyder. The book covers Michigan's 1997 National Championship, which had some mystery about it due to a few factors, Baumgardner told Pulp:

“A lot of it has to do with Lloyd Carr, who doesn’t like to talk about himself a lot. That’s a big part of it. … The other thing, too, is a lot of these [former players] … they’re protective of it, and they aren’t very trusting about people getting their stories right, so it’s a hard group to crack.”

You can watch both of Baumgardner's AADL talks below.

A roundup of recent Washtenaw County arts and culture stories from local media outlets Life in Michigan, WEMU, Concentrate, Current, Ann Arbor Observer, WCBN, The Sun New Times, The Saline Post, and Ann Arbor City Lifestyle. 

Laughing Hyenas formed in the mid-late 1980s underground rock scene that birthed more widely beloved acts like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and eventually Nirvana, as well as the mainstream grunge and alternative era of the '90s. Rooted in the hardcore punk flare up just a few years prior, combined with the blue-collar sleaze of Detroit's Alice Cooper and raw excitement of Ann Arbor's Stooges, the Hyenas melded stinging guitars with pounding rhythms and one of the biggest voices on record, giving equal nods to bluesman John Lee Hooker and Nick Cave's pre-crooner noisemakers The Birthday Party.

Founding members John Brannon, vocals, and the late Larissa Stolarchuck, guitar, had already made names for themselves in Detroit's Negative Approach and L-Seven, respectively, before bailing on the city to set up camp in Ann Arbor and immerse themselves in their singular vision of starting the "best band in the world." After recruiting Kevin Monroe—he and Stolarchuck both adopted the last name "Strickland" in the band—to make the move from guitar to bass, and adding Jim Kimball—son of University of Michigan and Olympic diving coach Dick Kimball—on drums, the band had a solid lineup of players all living together in an old house off of Platt Road, who set to making dark and dangerous sounding rock 'n' roll.

Stacks of fabric. Spoiled food. Personal care items covering every surface of the sink and shower. Mold overtaking a bathroom. Unfinished projects. A collapsed garage full of things. Unmaintained yard.

Welcome to the childhood and houses of the Longs, Amanda Uhle’s family, which she writes about in her new memoir, Destroy This House.

Uhle will celebrate the release of her book and be joined in conversation by Davy Rothbart on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:30 pm at AADL Downtown.

The exploits of Uhle’s parents, Stephen and Sandra Long, sound incredible. Uhle distanced herself when she left for college—and even before then. Yet, what is clear in the memoir is that the family ties were strong, at times humorous, and at other times painful.

The stories in Dylan Strzynski’s new book-like zine, Guadalcanal 2006, notice oddities and make up stories about them.

What if an old car was eulogized like a human?

Would the last man alive eat cockroaches?

Why does that person have lunch alone in their car every day?

Are lizards the squirrels of Florida?

What if a painting of Guadalcanal took on a life of its own? How does Guadalcanal live on in the psyche? What if plane travelers were transferred to a submarine en route to Guadalcanal?  

A mix of fiction and nonfiction, these 26 stories of varying lengths do not provide answers to all the questions but rather observe and, in some cases, expand on what is possible. This approach aligns with how Strzynski describes his visual art.

“I’m always using my artwork as a way to tell people about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen,” he said. “Even if it’s funny and weird, it’s usually referencing something I experienced. … Rather than try to solve every problem within everything I make, I recognize everything is of a piece.”

Dexter-based Strzynski is not only a writer but also a visual artist and musician. Yet, his writing has not been featured until now.

“Writing has always been a part of my life, but I kept it a secret,” he said.

The first tale in Dr. Ursula Whitcher's novella-length short-stories collection, North Continent Ribbon, offers a striking example of the sci-fi author's poetic prose:

I stepped toward him with a hanging parry, crystal chiming as our blades met. That brought my left hand near his hilt. I pressed his wrist back just long enough to raise my sword and strike his face. My arm absorbed the shock of cutting bone. He slumped and fell. No longer my opponent; no longer caught in the current of our dance. The golden ribbon in his hair was streaked with blood.

The Ann Arbor-based author and mathematician's debut book, which came out in 2024, is being recognized in the industry, too. It was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, with the committee writing:

Whitcher elegantly weaves a complex picture of the cultural and political history of the planet Nakharat—home to assassins, judges, sex workers, teenagers, and sentient starships—building a nuanced, tender understanding of how the politics of power plays out through the lives of individuals, and how collective resistance evolves within intimate relationships.

The architects of Dr. Whitcher's world-building are the queer characters she portrays across North Continent Ribbon's six stories. Yes, there are spaceships imbued with the human consciousness of prisoners, crystal swords, and artificial-intelligence books spouting poetry, but we mostly learn about Nakharat across 400 years through the eyes of its individuals, not its technological marvels. The private sides of these star-faring people are defined by the ribbons braided into their hair, which are then buried in a veil. These strips of fabric represent spouses, friends, family, work, contracts, gods, and more, tracing the wearers' histories but masking the information behind a head covering.

I spoke with Dr. Whitcher about North Continent Ribbon, what brought her to Ann Arbor, and what it means to be nominated for one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction.

During the Civil War, the United States was “a nation that was still younger than its oldest citizens,” writes University of Michigan professor Scott Ellsworth in his new book, Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. This young country was figuring out what it was just as much as it was figuring out what it wasn’t. This dilemma, as history shows, was divisive.

Midnight on the Potomac supplies a plot-driven, nonfiction account of the people involved in the Civil War, both famous and not, and how their actions influenced the trajectory of the war. Ellsworth examines the leadership during the war, as well as the conspiracies, attacks, weapons, and battles.

Most centrally, the book focuses on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln through profiles of both John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. Ellsworth juxtaposes Booth’s acting career with his support of the Confederacy. Ellsworth also discusses Lincoln’s habits and moods. For example, a description of Lincoln notes his features: