"Franklinstein" by Sue Landers

The March, 2017 Poetry Is Not a Luxury Book Club selection is Franklinstein by Susan Landers

A place of good blocks and bad blocks and brick roads
and boxwoods. The site
of America’s first gingko tree.
The birthplace of pushpins and Louisa May Alcott.
A place of sparrows and spires and schist

Franklinstein is both poetry and literary nonfiction. Its hybrid poetry/prose genre tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown—a historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Drawing from interviews, historical research, and two divergent but quintessential American texts (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans), Landers' Franklinstein is a monster readers have not encountered before.

"FRANKLINSTEIN is a church of stained glass truth- telling."—Yolanda Wisher

"In her study of Germantown, Landers derives a poetics of urban history, of being from, really from, a place—Philadelphia—that cuts itself into your skin."—Simone White

 

Susan Landers on how this collection came to be

At the beginning of this writing I was reading. Reading two books I had never read before: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Making of Americans. And as I was reading, I thought: I should make a new book. A new book from pieces. A new book using only Ben’s words and Gertrude’s. And so I did that. For months. Cutting and pasting little pieces. To make a monster. And it was so boring.

It was so boring, my dead thing of parts.

Then the church I grew up in closed. The church where my mother and father were married. The church where they baptized their babies. A church in Philadelphia in the neighborhood where I grew up. A kind of rundown place. A place of row homes and vacants and schist.

And when I went there to see that place—the place that was with me from my very beginning—I thought, this will breathe life into my pieces. This will be the soul of my parents. I thought: if I could write the story of this place and its beginnings, this writing would be the right thing, a kind of living.

This is where my writing began. 

from An interview with Susan Landers in Tinge magazine:  My project started when I could no longer stand the fact that I hadn’t yet read Making of Americans (as a Stein fan) or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (as a Philadelphian). So, I decided to spend 40 days of my 40^th year reading them both and writing down lines that stood out to me — either musically or semantically.

from A review in FemLit Magazine:  In Franklinstein, Susan Landers tells the story of Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood. The mixed-genre volume starts as an elegy for a closing church in Germantown. It is at once an ode to this place and a critical scouring of how the history of such places are made.

PhillyVoice explores Germantown with Susan Landers:  It was right around this time, this church [St. Francis of Assisi] I had grown up in, in Germantown, was closing. And I remember appreciating it as a child and said ‘I want to see it before it becomes’ — what I said at the time —  ‘another abandoned building in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings.’ So I wanted to see it before it became this lost space. And when I went down to see it, I realized that interpretation of Germantown was totally wrong. It’s not a place of abandoned buildings, even though there are some, and I realized that Germantown, this place, was really complex. It wears all of its history on its sleeve. You hear the language of the Lenape in the Wissahickon and the street names are all [named after] these Revolutionary War generals. And there’s like an — it’ll be an 18th-century mansion next to a steak and cheese [shop] next to a factory from the industrial revolution. It’s just all [these sights] combined. All these layers. 

 

the

we

of incense and boxwood and brick

pride and bullets and prayer

wisteria and helicopters and figs

turtles and burkas and hacks.

Yolanda Wisher, "Monk Eats An Afro"

Poetry Is Not a Luxury Book Club
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017 @ 7pm

Monk Eats an Afro by Yolanda Wisher

Yolanda's Philly launch party for Monk Eats an Afro at Big Blue Marble is legendary. The store was packed, the music went on for hours, the energy was through the roof and walls, and (we are booksellers after all) the sales were so busy Yolanda had to keep bringing more cases of books out of her car.

And that was before she was named Philadelphia's 3rd Poet Laureate!

Monk Eats an Afro is an extraordinary poetry collection, and Yolanda Wisher is an extraordinary poet. Not only talented, but outrageous, generous, inspired and driven to bring the gifts of poetry to everyone, everywhere.

Below you'll find a collection of resources to help you explore the book and the poet. Read up, because Yolanda will be visiting our book club as we discuss her book!

Cold Front Magazine, Best Poetry Books of 2014:

Yolanda Wisher’s Monk Eats an Afro is the most complete and perfectly constructed book of poems I read in 2014. Each poem seems built ideally unto itself and in the context of the full product. Every single note and line break is perfectly suited to the mood or condition of the poem, and she keeps our attention by fitting the entire manuscript with interludes–“Songs” that are deeply felt, that are deeply musical, and that read like standards

Yolanda Wisher on finding out she was the next Philadelphia Poet Laureate in Philly Voice

 How did you react when you first heard the news that you’d be the next poet laureate?

I danced to a Missy Elliott song on the third floor of my house.

 Philadelphia Neighborhoods, Interview with Yolanda Wisher

Poetry has always been a healing tool. I grew up in a house that was embroiled in some domestic violence and addiction and poetry was my outlet, so I knew what kind of space it was able to create. And I also knew what kind of dreams it could make for me.
So, as much as I can see that and connect with that in other people, regardless of age, I want to support it and guide it and create a space for it. Knowing that not everybody is going to want to be a professional poet, but the tools of poetry, expression, giving form to your emotions and your ideas, all of the little minute things about the craft that I learned as an undergraduate and graduate student can be boiled down to some way of connecting with people, some kind of human relationship.

Poetry Society of America on Yolanda Wisher

Yolanda Wisher's debut collection of poems Monk Eats an Afro is blues: sorrow, soul, rhythm, breath. The poems in this collection coincide with italicized song lyrics (Wisher is a singer and musician, not just a poet). The narrator of these poems often speaks to the reader colloquially (recounting stories, images) then shape-shifting words, sounds, and meanings. "I be the ruby flo / I be the ruby flowin / that jewel / anciently / aggravatin / undulatin..." 

Poetry Foundation on Yolanda Wisher

Wisher’s poems are musical, playful, and brutal, and she infuses spoken language with blues-informed cadence to engage themes of intimacy, power, and identity. In a 2014 interview with Lynn Rosen for the Philadelphia City Paper, Wisher stated, “I definitely saw early on the job of the poet being [to create] a collective and collaborative experience. I love the solitary experience of writing and mulling over and reflecting on things. But something about the exchange, whether it’s through a reading or a workshop, … the communal experience of poetry really speaks to me.”

Publishers Weekly on Monk Eats an Afro

“You are Black/ and have a right to this// this be your fiddle/ claim it,” announces Wisher in her debut collection, a blend of beat and slam poetry, peppered with lullabies and ballads. For all of Wisher’s songsmithing, her poems are strongest for their dexterous mix of gall (“America, you beautiful suitor of indigenous bitches. I am a slaveship and you are a skyscraper”) and lyric restraint (“the trees/ were her lovers/ the wet earth/ her alibi/ she knew the way/ forward/ was going back/ and she gathered us up”).

Hear Yolanda perform some of the poems from Monk Eats an Afro, including "Ruby Flo"

"Look" by Solmaz Sharif

Let it matter what we call a thing

The Poetry is Not a Luxury Book Club January selection is Look by Solmaz Sharif. 

Look is an astonishing first book that asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable losses of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

In Look, Sharif, who was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents who fled the country after the 1979 revolution, appropriates terms from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, which appear in small caps in a majority of Look’s poems. Through careful juxtaposition of military language designed to disguise and discount human life and of the lives of her family, Sharif makes private moments of everyday life precarious—a “thermal shadow” marks sexual intimacy deadly in “Look” and a “permanent echo” rebounds less divinely than ominously through the acoustically designed domes of Masjid-e Imam in “Break-Up.” In her most powerful political poems, among them “Safe House,” “Deception Story,” and the elegiac “Personal Effects,” the technique tears through the expected discourse put forth by the America government and media, forcing readers to confront the personal realities that grow out of seemingly distant policy decisions.


Below you'll find links to articles and review to help you more fully explore this amazing collection.


Look is:

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry
One of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2016
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016
A Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2016
One of The New Yorker's Books We Loved in 2016
One of the San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Recommended Books of 2016

 

Click here for a video of Sharif reading from the collection at the 2016 National Book Awards 

 

Click here to read the title poem "Look" on PEN America

 

Solmaz Sharif in an interview with the National Book Award on who she wrote this book for:  

I wrote Look for the dead. For the displaced. For myself and my own outrage and perceived powerlessness. For history, believing that somewhere in our literary record, this outrage, this grief, this Mustapha Mohammad Khalaf, 15 months old must be registered, that the history of the “Wars on Terror” should not be left to the generals and the embedded journalists. read more

 

Lisa Higgs, in the Kenyon Review Online, writing about Sharif's use of "I" in the poems:

Sharif’s use of first-person in her collection invites readers into points of view that have largely been ignored, with the “I’s” as likely to be an intelligence officer or a battlefield soldier as the poet herself. At first, the effect is disorienting—who is talking, and to whom? Is it the poet as herself or the poet as persona? Am I the intended “I” in these poems? read more

Brandon Amico in The Rumpus on the forms Sharif uses in the poems:

Formally, the poems in Look defy expectation, and in some cases easy categorization—indeed, it appears that a static and predictable form might be seen as a form of creative oppression (“What is fascism? / a student asked me … The sonnet, / I said” – from “Force Visibility”). The poems reflect and channel the energy of a speaker that is agitated, uncomfortable with the way the world is shaped around her, and is actively attempting to enact change. They shift between thin, enjambed columns and prose; they take the shape of definitions or short encyclopedia articles; some have lines that stretch or alternate between the page’s left and right margins, that braid narratives; others make ample use of white space, lists, indentations, even erasure. read more

Elliott's Five Favorite Books from 2016 Author Events

The Great American Songbook: Stories by Sam Allingham (Philadelphia)
I started reading these stories while waiting for Sam's event to begin, and could barely stop in order to sell the book to everyone else. Remarkable, haunting, funny, smart.

This Is Not a Confession: Essays by David Olimpio (New Jersey)
Essays that take on the lingering effects of sexual abuse, divorce, and grief and still manage humor and playfulness. This book moved me deeply, and I fell in love with David's online pictures of his dogs, too.

Green Shoots of Democracy within the Philadelphia Democratic Party by Karen Bojar (Philadelphia).
Interested in changing the nature of the national Democratic Party? That change starts locally - only 2 of Philadelphia's Democratic wards are actually run through a democratic process. Karen Bojar explores how we got here, and shows us successful ways to organize for change.

god's breath hovering across the waters by Henry Israeli (Ardmore).
This new collection of poems by Saturnalia Books editor Henry Israeli was written and published before this election, but are eerily timely. Written in the wake of the death of his mother, who barely escaped from Nazi Germany as a young child, The ugly power of nationalism and fascism haunt these poems: "Germany created a Hitler, / and, in turn, Hitler created / a Germany he could embrace / without flinching."

Flat Head Zed by Ellen Marcus (Philadelphia).
This imaginative picture book tells the story of a girl who does NOT want to make the same kind of snowman as other children. Instead, she creates a fun-loving block monster she names Flat Head Zed. What will happen when the other kids see her unique creation??

Events Coordinator Elliott bat Tzedek, November 2016

Nasty Women Getting Out the Vote! ...With Cake!

Come to the store on Election Day with your "I voted!" sticker, and we will have Election Cake for you!

Celebrating Adoptive and Foster Families: A List of Books for Kids

Here are some books featuring families that have grown through adoption and/or foster care. Domestic and international, fiction and nonfiction, human and nonhuman, adoption from birth and new homes for older kids. There's a section for stories, a section for books celebrating families in general, and a list of links to further resources. The lists are by no means comprehensive, and there are links to other lists below; we'll keep updating as we add to our knowledge and collections.
Compiled by Jennifer Sheffield and Elliott batTzedek
----------
latest update: 7/9/17

Picture books about adoption and fostering:
A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza (1992)
Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born by Jamie Lee Curtis, illustrated by Laura Cornell (1996)
The Day We Met You by Phoebe Koehler (1997)
Over the Moon: An Adoption Tale by Karen Katz (1997)
It's Okay to Be Different by Todd Parr (2001)
Emma's Yucky Brother by Jean Little, illustrated by Jennifer Plecas (2002)
Felicia's Favorite Story by Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Adriana Romo (2002)
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson & Peter Parnell, illustrated by Henry Cole (2005)
Kids Need to Be Safe: A Book for Children in Foster Care by Julie Nelson, PH.D.; illustrated by Mary Gallagher (2005)
Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship told by Isabella Hatkoff, Craig M. Hatkoff, and Paula Kahumbu; photographs by Peter Greste (2006)
Bringing Asha Home by Uma Krishnaswami, illustrated by Jamel Akib (2006)
Motherbridge of Love by Xinran Xue, illustrated by Josee Masse (2007)
We Belong Together: A Book about Adoption and Families by Todd Parr (2007)
Murphy's Three Homes: A Story for Children in Foster Care by Jan Levinson Gilman, illustrated by Kathy O'Malley (2008)
In Our Mothers' House by Patricia Polacco (2009)
[Note: This author's books are generally more appropriate for an older audience than usual for picture books.]
Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles by Darlene Friedman, illustrated by Roger Roth (2009)
Sweet Moon Baby: An Adoption Tale by Karen Henry Clark, illustrated by Patrice Barton (2010)
Bad Kitty Meets the Baby by Nick Bruel (2011)
Wolfie the Bunny by Ame Dyckman, illustrated by Zachariah Ohora (2015)
Real Sisters Pretend by Megan Dowd Lambert, illustrated by Nicole Tadgell (2016)
My New Mom and Me by Renata Galindo (2016)
Quackers by Liz Wong (2016)
Real Sisters Pretend by Megan Dowd Lambert, illustrated by Nicole Tadgell (2016)
Home at Last by Vera B. Williams, illustrated by Vera B. Williams and Chris Raschka (2016)

Picture books about reproduction and families:
All Families Are Special by Norma Simon, illustrated by Teresa Flavin (2003)
The Family Book by Todd Parr (2003)
The Great Big Book of Families by Mary Hoffman, illustrated by Ros Asquith (2010)
What Makes a Baby? by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth (2012) [This book separates the genetic/biological components from the emotional component of making a baby, thus allowing for nontraditional families.]
Families, Families, Families! by Suzanne Lang & Max Lang (2015)

Links to more lists and resources
Chicago Now: Top Adoption Books For Kids: A Reading List for Children and Teens in Adoptive and Foster Families
Children’s Home Society of Minnesota (CH) and Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota (LSS): Favorite Adoption-Themed Children’s Books
MetroKids: Children's Books About Adoption
Parents.com: Children's Books About Adoption
Mothers' Bridge of Love: Who We Are
AdoptUSKids: Pennsylvania Foster Care and Adoption Guidelines

Big Blue Marble's Picks for Children's Book Week (May 4-10, 2015)

It's Children's Book Week! And so we offer you new and treasured book recommendations, from picture books to young adult, from graphic novels to verse novels. Read over our lists below, and come in and check out our offerings!

Among our own events this week are Shabbat Storytime on Friday morning, and an author reading Thursday night for Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist (ages 10 and up).

Check out the CBW website for national events and activities for kids of all ages.

---

From Elliott:

One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies (Candlewick, $6.99)

This Book Just Ate My Dog by Richard Byrne (Henry Holt, $16.95)

Library Lion by Michelle Knudson (Candlewick, $6.99)

17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore by Jenny Offill (Dragonfly Books, $6.99)

Me, All Alone, at the End of the World by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick, $16.99)

---

From Janet:

Before After by Anne-Margot Ramstein and Matthias Arégui (Candlewick, $19.99)

Journey and Quest by Aaron Becker (Candlewick, $15.99)

Three Questions by John Muth (Scholastic, $17.99)

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson (HarperCollins, $8.99/$19.99)

---

From Jen:

Julia's House for Lost Creatures by Ben Hatke (First Second, $17.99)

If I Had a Raptor and If I Had a Triceratops by George O'Connor (Candlewick, $15.99)

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman (HarperCollins, $17.99)

Skyscraping by Cordelia Jensen (Penguin, $17.99) -- coming in June!

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (Little, Brown, $7.99)

---

From Mariga:

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, $8.99)

El Deafo, Cece Bell (Abrams, $10.95)

The Brides of Rollrock Island, Margo Lanagan (Ember, $9.99)

---

From Micah (age 4):

Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall (HarperCollins, $17.99)

The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak (Penguin Random House, $17.99)

Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker (Chronicle, $16.99)

Where Do Diggers Sleep at Night? by Brianna Caplan Sayres (Random House, $7.99)

Digger, Dozer, Dumper by Hope Vestergaard and David Slonim (Random House, $15.99)

Splat the Cat by Rob Scotton (Harpercollins, $16.99)

Splash by Ann Jonas (Harpercollins, $6.99)

I Have a Garden and I Planted Cheddarbunnies ...oh, okay, that hasn't been published yet.

---

From Nif:

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (St. Martins Griffin, $18.99)

Penderwicks in Spring Jeanne Birdsall (Random House, $16.99)

Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente (Square Fish, $7.99)

Sleepover with Beatrice & Bear by Mônica Carnesi (Penguin, $15.99)

The Martian by Andy Weir (Random House, $15.00)

Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee (Simon & Schuster, $17.99)

---

From Sarah:

Lumberjanes Volume 1 by Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis (Boom!, $14.99)

The Adventures of Beekle, The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santant (Little, Brown, $17.00)

Julia's House for Lost Creatures by Ben Hatke (First Second, $17.99)

Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty (Abrams, $16.95)

Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke (Scholastic, $8.99)

---

From Sheila:

Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox (Square Fish, $8.99)

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Random House, $10.99)

Sabriel by Garth Nix (HarperCollins, $9.99)

Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede (Scholastic, $9.99)

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (HarperCollins, $6.99)

---

From Tiara:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic, $12.99/$10.99)

Other HP favorites: The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Order of the Phoenix

Paper Towns by John Green (Speak, $9.99)

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett (Atheneum, $6.99)

A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara (Seven Stories Press, $9.99)

Elliott's Five Poets That Will Make You Gasp for the Beauty of It All

As proof of Alfred Corn's assertion that "poetry has never fully disengaged itself from its associations with shamanism," five contemporary poets who will woo, sway, and shake you.

me and Nina by Monica Hand (Alice James Books, $15.95)

Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press, $18)

Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay (BOA editions, $16)

Traveling Light: Poems by Linda Pastan (WW Norton, $15.95)

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas (New Directions, $9.95)

BONUS BOOK!
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, illustrated by Chris Raschka (Candlewick, $9.99)

Elliott batTzedek, December 2013

Five Books That Were Even Better Than Elliott Thought They'd Be

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (Penguin, $16.00)

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch (Abrams, $9.95)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Press, $12.95)

Collected Poems, 1965-2010 by Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, $35.00)

What It Is by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95)

Elliott batTzedek, November 2013

Celebrating Translators – Elliott’s Five Favorites You Don’t Know You Already Know

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris (Random House, $13.95)
Can you imagine not just translating the meaning, culture, and emotions of the text, but also making sure the words will fit in the captions and speech bubbles? This team of translators brought us a work that changed how we think about Iran, and was the first graphic memoir many of us fell in love with.

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Maria Tatar (Norton, $16.95)
Grimms' fairy tales are so deeply part of our culture that it’s easy to forget they are translated from German. Maria Tatar has made the stories fresh, and restored a cultural depth that has been lost in simplified, scrubbed, mass-media versions. Definitely a version for adults. (How did these become “children’s stories,” anyway? Read her intro to find out!)

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, translated by Richard Dixon (Houghton, $27.00)
Richard Dixon says that, including brief interruptions, translating Eco’s novel took eight months: “I worked fairly slowly on the first draft because there was a lot of research to do. That first draft is always the most important – it’s the stage when errors creep in. I then worked through another two drafts, trying each time to work on getting it to sound as natural and readable as possible, especially the dialogue. After the third draft I printed it all out, gave it a final read-through, made the last few changes and sent it to Eco and the publishers.”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland (Random House, $15.95)
Translator Steven Murray, who translates in UK English under the name Reg Keeland, has produced books which prove it DOES pay to translate crime. Only about 3% of all the books published in the U.S. each year are translations — but Murray’s English versions of Larsson’s Millennium Series may help change that.

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Random House, $14.95)
Who would we be if we did not have access to other lives, other stories, other cultures? Without translators, there would be no Women of the World book club, no Homer, no Hans Christian Anderson, no Bible. Even though translators often work in anonymity, with their names appearing only in small print buried in a book’s front matter, they are no slouches. Chi-Young Kim has received the Man Asian Literary Prize (2011), the Korea Literature Translation Institute Translation Grant (2011), the Daesan Foundation Translation Grant (2008, 2005), and the 34th Modern Korean Literature Translation Award (2003).

June 2012, Elliott batTzedek