Book Covers :: Picks of the Week :: October 24, 2013

Here are some of the book covers I found intriguing while scanning the shelves this week:

The Body Geographic, nonfiction by Barrie Jean Borich, University of Nebraska Press

Between Chicago and Minneapolis Bonnie Jean Borich maps her own Midwest, a true heartland in which she measures the distance between the dreams and realities of her own life, her family’s, and her fellow travelers’ in the endless American migration. Covering rough terrain—from the hardships of her immigrant ancestors to the travails of her often-drunk young self, from the changing demographics of Midwestern cities to the personal transformations of coming out and living as a lesbian—Body Geographic is cartography of high literary order, plotting routes, real and imagined, and putting an alternate landscape on the map.

from “Senior Coffee”:

                                                 …I want her to have a life

     like mine, one lived, not for poetry but through poetry.
Everything—a car starting, bird song, the gurgling
     of a coffeepot, the whirr of a fan, the whisper of lovers,

     the silly noises babies make, the wisdom of the books
the mighty dead have written—all of that steps easily into
     poetry and makes itself at home there. Poetry and coffee:

     now there’s a combination for you.

Look for new book reviews on November 1!