Your goal, as you articulate with such elegance, was ' to tailor a beautiful, sleek, custom-made, expandable, steeped-in-history, and yet timeless feminism ' for your son. How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family (Sasquatch Books, April 6), reviewed below, is Jha's gorgeously rendered, deeply intimate and inspirational account of nurturing in her Indian American son, Gibran, the critical values that will guide his life journey as a feminist ally.

Jha is a contributor to Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19 (Central Avenue Publishing), an essay collection edited by Jennifer Haupt. Her debut novel, Foreign (Random House India), was long-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Neil Strandberg, director of technology and operations, Shelf AwarenessĪ respected South Asian literary voice in the Pacific Northwest and a professor of journalism at Seattle University, Sonora Jha worked as journalist in India and Singapore before moving to the U.S. And the beautiful, comforting, inspiring nihilism (really!) of Fernando Pessoa's Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (New Directions, $18.95) or The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Books, $20)-the book I now take wherever I go, just in case. Layli Long Soldier's use of past, present and the page in her Whereas (Graywolf, $16) The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, $16)-how a dozen lines can rival fireworks in the mind.

He taught me to suspend expectation, the key to unlocking first, Alice Notley's brain-stretching For the Ride (Penguin Books, $20) and then, whoosh, so much more. In addition to di Giorgio, books meaningful to me in recent months have included Dan Beachy-Quick's translation of six Greek poets in Stone-Garland (Milkweed, $16) and his own poetry in Arrows (Tupelo, $22.95). Reading from the bottom up can be as pleasurable as top to bottom, or one line at a time! Oh, and reading a poem once is like reading a poem never. Some poems change meaning with each reading others reveal secrets only when spoken aloud (or, conversely, when seen on the page). In fact, poetry is no country, it is a multi-dimensional universe filled with the strangest magic. It wasn't until completing in one long go Proust's In Search of Lost Time and I asked, what could I possibly read next? that I realized what the gift of this bizarre life-long desire to resist poetry has left me with in middle age: wide-open reading country. Vincent Millay and, later, because of the person I was dating, perhaps something by Sharon Olds. I recall a seventh-grade textbook that featured a poem by Edna St. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that I read my very first poem five months ago, on October 3, 2020-a poem from Marosa di Giorgio's scalp-tingling collection about loss, I Remember Nightfall (Ugly Duckling Presse, $20).

How i discovered poetry