You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine edited and translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor
When the Palestinian-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha received the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, in her acceptance speech she said, “I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation. I don’t want to console.” I have read a not inconsiderable amount poetry, because historically I have written poetry and as everyone knows, it is almost entirely writers of poetry who read the stuff – this is only the slightest exaggeration – so I feel sufficiently informed to say that there is too much consolation in poetry by far, too many lullabies for the long ago sedated. It is a shame, because poetry is a medium of communication as versatile as any other, with nothing innately anodyne about it. There are many non-consoling things poetry that poetry can do exceptionally well: it can be the siren screaming through the night, a red flare; it can be testimony and indictment and howl and spell; it can rage against cruelty, tyranny, indifference—those crimes against life and love that poetry documents with its own incomparable, lacerating clarity. Poetry can sit heavy in your gut, can thunder through your skull, your heart, until you’re too sick and shaken to stay lying down. Poetry has all of these powers, and it is put to all of these uses in You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, an anthology of recent work by poets living and writing in Gaza and the West Bank. Editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor write in the introduction of the joy they felt simply to receive the poems, as cherished proof that the poets remained alive. But these are not joyful poems. They are poems of hunger and dislocation and world-devouring loss, poems addressed to scavenger dogs, poems like footfalls sinking into ashes. One poet describes the people of his city under siege as “drowned in stones”; another writes, “the war / arrived as a curse, ate at our bodies. / It left nothing for the hungry / but heartbreak. The dream that rots from waiting.” To be confronted with these poems, unconsoled, is painful. It hurts, of course; it has to. And that is poetry, doing its work.
Other Favorites from the Patten Free Library Poetry Collection:
Breathturn by Paul Celan
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser
Satan Says by Sharon Olds
The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy
Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
The Animal is Chemical, by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Primordial by Mai Der Vang
The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak
Erzsebet Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess, is frequently infamized as history’s most prolific female serial killer, alleged to have murdered housemaids and peasant girls by the hundreds, torturing them, draining their young bodies of blood so she could employ it in her toilette. Virgin blood, the ultimate anti-aging elixir. So goes the story, anyway, and it’s a good one, lurid and salacious, packed with a full serving of fairy-tale tropes: the gothic castle in the dark Eastern European wood; the vain, decadent, sadistically self-absorbed aging female villain; blood sacrifice; scores of innocent virginal victims. In some versions, there are even talking wolves. Bram Stoker took the Bathory legend as inspiration for Dracula, and nods to the so-called “Blood Countess” scamper rampant as rats through the canon of female vampire fiction, on film and on the page. Indeed, a new movie is out this month revisiting the abominations of the depraved maiden killer, by all signs a classy affair, co-written by Nobel-Prize-winning Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek and starring French icon Isabelle Huppert.
So, yes, it’s a rousing little yarn, but, as Shelley Puhak evinces in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster, it’s probably total baloney. Puhak dips into the archives, reviewing deeds, letters, and court transcripts, as well as recent scholarship on the Bathory case, and returns with scant evidence to bear out Bathory’s murderous rep. Instead, that portrait that emerges is of an independent woman targeted for character annihilation by a clique of choleric men resentful of her undainty step outside the lines of decorous feminine dispossession. The real story of the Blood Countess would appear to go something more like this: when Bathory’s husband died of the plague, she inherited his land and his political position as lord-lieutenant of two counties, to the horror of high-status men in the region, who were of the view that she should have neither, and thus concocted a gory saga of rabid madwoman debauchery to justify seizing her lands and exiling her from public life. People have been inclined to believe the smears, then and now, because women of influence are just not very well liked. Go figure. Puhak deftly argues the case for Bathory’s exoneration in this gripping blend of whodunit and feminist historical redress.
For fans of historical true crime, vampire lore, debunking misogynist mythology, and Eleanor Herman’s Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power.
I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right by Matt Kaplan
Apparently our theme for this month is posthumously vindicated Hungarians, since the leading man of Matt Kaplan’s new book about disgraced-only-to-be-later-proven-absolutely-correct scientists is Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian doctor who had the zany idea that it might be prudent to pause to wash one’s hands in between mucking around with dissection theatre cadavers and delivering babies, considering how many women were dying from a mysterious fever in the days following childbirth at the hospital where he worked. He suspected there might be some connection between the women’s deaths and their doctors’ unsalutary hygiene habits. Semmelweis’s colleagues and hospital administrators, offended at the insinuation of uncleanliness, were not overly friendly to this theory, nor to his research in support of it. Semmelweis was fired, shunned, and mercilessly mocked for his fanatical obsession with life-saving basic disinfection practices. Discredited and reviled, he died in an asylum from a gangrenous wound believed to have been inflicted when he was beaten by asylum guards. Today, of course, he is revered as a pioneer of infection control, and referred to as “the savior of mothers.” Although Semmelweis’s is perhaps the cruelest case of scientific cold-shouldering Kaplan recounts, the ill-treated Hungarian is far from alone in his persecution, as the author’s wide-ranging collection of historical and contemporary parallels amply demonstrates. Science, despite its mandate of constant questioning and questing after new discoveries, is not always as receptive to change as one might hope. Indeed, it can be brutally stodgy; stick-in-the-mud institutional paralysis too often reigns. I Told You So! is an enlightening (and sometimes infuriating) history of the underdogs who have taken on the thankless task of thinking against the grain, and a searing indictment of intellectual complacency.
For fans of character-centered popular science, medical and scientific history, and apostasy in every field.
This latest novel from Stephen King returns to the crime thriller territory he began with the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch). It’s another Holly Gibney story, with her private investigation business, Finders Keepers, front and center.
King balances two storylines that slowly build and eventually collide in a satisfying conclusion. Holly is tasked with protecting an outspoken abortion rights activist who has become the target of credible threats, while her sometime coworker and fellow investigator, Jerome, works alongside police on a serial killer case that has the whole community on edge.
What I continue to enjoy about these books is Holly herself — smart, observant, and quietly brave, even when she doubts herself. The tension builds steadily, and the alternating storylines keep the pace moving. As an audiobook, it’s especially engaging and hard to turn off. If you’ve been following Holly’s journey, Never Flinch is a strong addition to the series and another reminder that King knows how to keep readers on their toes right up to the final pages.
-Samantha, Development
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey finally dares to ask the questions: What if the American Hippo Bill of 1910 actually passed? And, once a community of meat hippos was established, what if outlaws and cowboys were able to tame and ride them? And, AND, what if they all set out on a quest for revenge?!
-Sarah, Reference
It may be cold, but we don’t mind! It’s the perfect weather to cozy up under a blanket and read something good. Here’s what PFL staff have keeping them company in the snow.
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn’t Work) in Words and Pictures by Michael Goodwin and Dan E. Burr
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
PAWS. 4, Hazel Has Her Hands Full by Nathan Fairbairn and illustrated by Michele Assarasakorn
A spare and eerie — and eerily peaceful — Austrian novel from the 1960s about a woman who wakes one day to discover herself seemingly the last human alive on earth, encased within the bounds of a glasslike wall that has come down overnight to separate her from a suddenly deadened world. The Wall cycles with the seasons of the unnamed narrator’s first years in isolation, as she settles into the rhythms of survival and reckons with the unavoidable anguish of caring deeply for mortal creatures. It crushed me utterly.
-Aurora, Reference
