New Books as of Late, the official list:
Star Girl by Jerry Spinelli
Dinner with Olivia by Emily Sollinger
Black Life by Dorothea Lasky
Obstructed View by Dustin Williamson
Asterisk 6
Nostalgia's Thread by Randall Freisinger
Other Flowers by James Schuyler
School Book Fair all this week. For some reason, I don't have a copy of one of my favorite YA books, Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, so I remedied that. And I also got "Dinner with Olivia". Olivia the Pig is one of the most precocious little piglets in literature and rather amusant.
I went to a poetry reading on Saturday, Dorothea Laskey and Dustin Williamson, in Cambridge, as part of the "Unaffiliated Reading Series," which I can attend in the summer without missing any work in the library because of out summer hours. And what a good thing, as the reading was a fantastic event. Excellent readers, a good crowd, an interesting little spat of thunder and rain, and some nice mingling and chatting afterward with everyone. I now have Dorothea Lasky's "Black Life" and Dustin Williamson's "Obstructed View", along with Asterisk 6, featuring Dustin Williamson, hot off the Fewer & Further Press that Saturday morning, apparently. (So new it's not yet up on the website, but due time.)
Speaking of, that brings me to my next new book, "Nostalgia's Thread" by Randall R. Freisinger. Jess Mynes's new book, "Sky Brightly Picked" is a book of poem that take their inspiration, so to speak, from the work of the painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Freisinger's book is a series of poem inspired by the work of the painter Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). I saw it listed on Library Thing's Early Reviewer list and requested it because I thought it would be an interesting thing to compare the two books of poetry that came out the same year (2009), which are both, respectively, about the two painters who, though living during the same time, were completely different artists. And the poems are as different as the painters. The only thing they have in common, besides relative inspiration, is book dimensions (8x5) and spine color (orange-red). Rockwell's paintings are almost narrative illustrations of nostalgic (albeit idealized) Americana. Freisinger's poems are the same; long lines, narrative poems, telling the story of the painting in verse.
Oh, and somehow this hasn't officially made it on any of my "new books" posts, so I should probably mention it now: "Other Flowers" by James Schuyler, which I have made a few posts about already.