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It’s a little preposterous to say that the most affecting section of this tremendously affecting memoir is Jones’s prelude, but the prose poem “Elegy With Grown Folks’ Music” is a remarkable précis of the book’s central themes: Saeed’s relationship with his mother; her early death; the volatile unknowable-ness of other people’s desires; the sweet-bitter tug of one’s own wants; and what it means to be a queer Black boy and man within one’s family and country. “Some songs take women places men cannot follow,” Jones writes; lucky for us, Jones’s skill as a memoirist brings the reader into cultural, emotional, and sexual territories that, though vital, would be unnavigable without such a sure-footed and generous guide.

Writing about Jones’s debut poetry collection, Prelude to a Bruise, critic Amal El-Mohtar noted...

As a therapeutic foster mom, private investigator, and journalist whose nonfiction work has focused on street children in Portland, Oregon, it makes sense that Rene Denfeld’s fiction would likewise center on children in untenable circumstances, and the adults who savage or save them. She does so with deep compassion; Denfeld’s ability to expose the filth and violence of street life without disgust or shaming is a clear lesson to the reader in finding the humanity within people and circumstances most of us shy away from.

Her latest novel, The Butterfly Girl, is both a companion to The Child Finder, featuring the same stubborn, traumatized investigator with a fixation on lost children, and an absorbing standalone. In The Butterfly Girl, Denfeld tells the crossed stories of PI Naomi, now adult and newly married, and Celia, a 12-year-old runaway...

It’s not a surprise when celebrity musicians write beautifully crafted memoirs (especially talented lyricists like Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen), but it certainly elevates the already heady fan experience of being invited into their private thoughts and memories. Really good rock memoirs like Born to Run or Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl transform what could be a predictable biographical narrative (think of any biopic, ever) into a psychologically astute portrait of a budding artist and the world they’ve grown up in; when the writing is deft and thoughtful, fans and casual listeners alike walk away with a deeper appreciation for the unique impetus and skill behind a person’s music. Indie pop musicians Tegan and Sara Quin do just this in their dual memoir, High School, which thoughtfully articulates their coming-of-age, a process both ordinary — love, identity, experimentation — and extraordinary due to the sisters’ early musical success and unusual perspective as identical twins...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not the first modern novelist to use the supernatural as a metaphorical device for exploring the American slave trade. Colson Whitehead’s eponymously titled novel about the Underground Railroad is the most recent to do so, but writers like Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Octavia Butler utilize magical tropes to tremendous effect in masterful books like Beloved, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Kindred. As Constance Grady notes in her Vox review of The Water Dancer, integrating the supernatural — hauntings, superpowers, time travel — into otherwise realistic historical fiction demonstrates that “slavery is such a monstrous evil that in order to understand it fully we need the supernatural to explain it to us.”...

In a 2018 reflection piece in Literary Hub, Margaret Atwood writes about The Handmaid’s Tale, “I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior.” Still, reading the novel in the mid-’80s and ’90s, even up through 2016, it was easy enough to shudder at Atwood’s proximity to the most draconian American positions on female autonomy and flirtations with theocracy without feeling too threatened. Even offences that had been committed within living memory, like separating children and parents and suppressing minority access to voting and banking, were far enough removed from the life of the mainstream reader that they too could skirt by unconsidered. As horrifying as the people and events in The Handmaid’s Tale are, part of the book’s pleasure derived from the unconscious privilege of discounting it as speculative fiction...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison.

Leslie Jamison’s writing wins frequent comparisons to Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Rebecca Solnit, arguably three of the finest nonfiction prose writers of the last 70 years. What Jamison shares with this elite crowd is an uncommon knack for drawing on disparate narrative threads and concepts to elaborate on a grand idea, be it loneliness, art, politics, illness, or an unexpected fusion of several themes. These writers also stretch the popular maxim that the personal is political; with Jamison, especially, one gets the sense that the personal is cultural...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Darkly funny but steeped in grief, Hanif Abdurraqib’s stunning poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster, reckons with the violence of the world and the violence that fills the hollows grief has carved inside the poems’ speaker. For the speaker, who is by turns grateful for emptiness and filled with desire, love, death, memory, and forgetting are both curses and choices: it is possible to take action toward forgetting, but the ghost of lost love haunts that act; as Abdurraqib’s poems make clear, heartbreak is what motivates forgetting and it’s what‘s waiting when the distraction ends. The choice is not to mourn or move on; it is to move on within the corpse embrace of loss...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo.

Over the last, distressing two weeks, it’s been an unexpected jolt of joy to remember that our current U.S. Poet Laureate is Joy Harjo. Even now, when so much bigotry is being sanctioned or tolerated or passively renounced by America’s leaders, the official poet of the United States is a Native woman (Muscogee Creek Nation) whose work is inspired by First Nation history and traditions, and rooted in social justice and feminism. If Washington is a swamp, Harjo’s appointment is like chancing upon a field of marsh marigold; it’s an encouraging reminder that not everything in our capital needs to be drained....

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

It’s not a spoiler to share that Tolentino ends her thoughtful, fraught collection with the admission, “I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to.” This conflict between striving for a more just life for herself as a woman — in which beauty, consumerism, and submission are not the keys to social value — and half-knowingly giving in to those ideals in order to be happy forms the core of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. As Tolentino takes the reader through a rigorous exploration of Internet culture, reality TV, literary heroines, wedding culture, and more, she, and swiftly the reader too, are confronted with a difficult existential question: What are the traps that patriarchy and 21st-century feminism have created for women, and do women want to escape them?...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! by Mo Willems.

The Pigeon loves hot dogs (and cookies). The Pigeon loves buses (and staying up late). The Pigeon loves puppies (and walruses). But you know what this bird doesn’t love? School. It’s too math-y. Too read-y. And too scary for a little pigeon who hasn’t yet left the nest.

The Pigeon HAS to Go to School!, Mo Willems’s latest picture book in the Pigeon series, taps into children’s fears of change and the unknown in his characteristically hilarious and on-point style. When the book opens, Pigeon is slowly ramping up his argument (the unsympathetic might say “tantrum”) for why going to school is a terrible idea. He’s worried that it will be too easy or too hard, that the teacher won’t like him, or that his head will explode from knowledge overload. Willems’s deceptively simple line drawings catch the Pigeon in various stages of protest and melodramatic anguish that any parent of small children will recognize...