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WATER LESSONS

Indelible poetry that turns on every light in the house—and uncovers enlightenment in corners.

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In this intimate collection, a poet explores myriad grief-related topics, from her childhood memories of systemic racism to her complex relationship with her mother, who grappled with alcoholism.

Imagery related to Dordal’s childhood home (and domiciles in general) is prevalent throughout the 29 poems, making a fitting metaphor to describe the reading experience, which is similar to walking through an old familiar house, turning on the lights in each room, and letting the memories wash over you. A line from Dordal’s “Ars Poetica” embraces the symbolism of home and speaks volumes about her life growing up with a parent who kept secrets: “So many rooms were closed off before we knew they were there." Featuring comparable household imagery, the beginning lines of “My Mother Is a Peaceful Ghost” are both nostalgic and heart-rending, as the poet remembers her mother and her struggles with alcoholism: “In my dreams my mother keeps walking out of the kitchen singing / You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. / She never sings past the first verse. / Last night, I dreamed I was back at the house—every light on when I arrived. My mother, forgetting / she was dead, smiled, said she was fine, everything / was fine.” In “My Mother, Arriving,” Dordal’s effort to come to terms with her loved one’s death—even after her own father had moved on and gotten remarried—is exemplified as she watches an old home movie on a projector of her mother walking toward the family home: “My mother, arriving. My mother, leaving. / My mother, not going away.” In “My Mother Speaks to Me,” the poet inadvertently describes this collection perfectly: “A friend tells me I write / ‘mother poems’ / not poems about love / or death, but I don’t know / the difference.”

The poems about Dordal’s revelations regarding structural racism are also highlights. In “Primer,” for example, the poet, as a young girl with a “white imagination,” reads Pippi Longstocking stories and doesn’t understand the wrongness of Pippi’s father being “king of the Negroes” or the girl painting her face black. Even more profoundly moving is “Housekeeper,” in which Dordal can’t remember the last name of a housekeeper who not only cleaned the house and cooked for the poet’s clan, but attended family graduations and weddings as well: “I saw her. / I didn’t see her.” Yet arguably the most unforgettable selection is “Welcome,” a powerhouse of a poem that will resonate with the audience long after the reading experience is over. In the piece, Dordal is staying in a hotel room and listening to the welcome channel on the television. During the historic 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. (“This Pussy Fights Back. No Ban, No Wall”), where hundreds of thousands were protesting in the streets, a pretty woman on the hotel’s channel—who reminded the poet of her mother—warned to keep the doors and windows locked and to never invite strangers into the room. The similarity to Dordal’s mother, combined with the political chaos outside the hotel, triggered very specific and disturbing memories: “Be alert, the woman says. As alert / as you are at home. Nice story, she said.”

Indelible poetry that turns on every light in the house—and uncovers enlightenment in corners.

Pub Date: April 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-62557-031-4

Page Count: 70

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2022

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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THE JAILHOUSE LAWYER

An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.

A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”

Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”

An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.

Pub Date: July 8, 2025

ISBN: 9780593834305

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025

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