What We’re Reading

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving week with another installment of What We’re Reading. As Anne Lamott writes, “Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of the things that you don’t get in life … wonderful, lyrical language, for instance. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention and this is a great gift.”

Lookout intern Becky Eades is reading Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke.

Space, in Chains vibrates with memories of Kasischke’s youth, coupled with wrenching poems about her father, to form a narrative of both celebration and grief. The surprising image in “Hospital parking lot, April,” for example, tells us everything we need to know: “These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and / ether, they // have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, / like strangers’ faces, full // of winged mania, like television in waiting rooms.”

Today we kick off a new category, in which we reveal the books on our nightstand. Each week we’ll tell you what a few of our staff members are reading, or we’ll offer a peek at the stacks of our authors and friends. We may have disparate tastes, but the one thing we all share is a love of books.

Katie O’Reilly, Ecotone’s managing editor, is reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.

This week I had the pleasure of starting Bad Feminist, Gay’s recently released essay collection. Beyond bearing my favorite nonfiction qualities (i.e. being wryly funny and painfully honest and entertaining), Gay’s subject matter speaks to pop culture sensibilities. She also explores society’s tenuous relationship with feminism, detailing how she is “a mess of contradictions,” how most of us are. Although she doesn’t wrap anything into a tidy conclusion—another quality I respect in an essayist—I feel better already about being a member of that “messy” camp of feminists, those of us who fall subject to hypocrisy, who can’t always keep the rules straight, but who understand the importance of engaging in the kinds of conversations that Gay presents.

—Katie

Lookout celebrated National Poetry Month by releasing John Rybicki’s When All the World is Old last week. The book of raw and wise poetry pays homage to the brave love John and his wife, Julie, shared during her sixteen-year battle with cancer. If we do say so ourselves, it is a collection for every kind of reader. To continue to honor Poetry Month, some of the Lookout interns would like to share the other poetry currently on their nightstands.

“I just finished reading Rocky Dies Yellow by Michael Lally. Fantastic poems, but I may have some kind of a bias because Lally is a Jersey boy, too. Read it through one sitting, and plan to read it again before giving it back to my professor, Mark Cox. A+ for teachers who lend students awesome poetry all the time!”

(Rocky Dies Yellow is out of print. It was published by Blue Wind Press.)

– John Mortara, Lookout Intern

Every once in a while, we will profile what’s currently inspiring a particular staffer or intern at Lookout. Today’s victim is intern Toni Blackwell. This girl does it all: design, grant-writing, promotion, and more. Here’s what she has to say about what’s on her nightstand.

“Right now I’m reading One Morning in Sarajevo by David James Smith. It is a history of the events of June 28, 1914, surrounding the actions of Gavrilo Princip and the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which kicked off WWI.

The design of the book suits the topic: the cover is grainy and uses actual photographs of the involved parties and the assassination. There are another two sections of photographs, four glossy sheets with pictures of the assassins, their relatives, the guns used, and the memorial to the assassins (who are regarded by some as heroes).

The writing style is functional — no frills — but it gets the job done. It may not be the most artistic or creative, but this topic is so rarely addressed that Smith still comes off original.”

What We’re Reading :: Pub Lab Assistant Edition

The Lookout staff and interns wouldn’t accomplish much without the genius and faithfulness of the Publishing Laboratory teaching assistants. These lovely people actually know how to operate the scary machinery that makes our quality products, they keep track of where all our books are going, and so much more. In their honor, here’s a “What We’re Reading” that’s all about them!

“I am reading Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. It’s certainly not a fun read, but these days World War II history has a hold over me that I can’t shake. If the old adage ‘those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’ is true, I think the public should never stop looking at the events of WWII. That being said, the style of this particular book so far is pretty interesting, since it interweaves perspectives but follows one particular American soldier. Ink drawings, actually produced by that soldier, intersperse the sections and add some visual character to the book.”

– Lee Cannon, Publishing Laboratory Teaching Assistant

Today our Executive Director and some of our interns would like to share a few books and journals that inspire us here at Lookout.

Executive Director Emily Smith read A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash (April, William Morrow) en route to AWP. “I was so engrossed that the friend I’d arranged to meet during the layover had to stand directly in front of me, wave, and say my name twice before I even looked up. A smart, riveting debut.”