The Necessary Pages: A Short June Edition

Orbiting Jupiter, Professor Gary D Schmidt

Devastation. Original in thought, Schmidt’s attention to the emotional embodies a human-like yearning, where desires to fairy-tale endings must be done within such short chapters. You outline your future with children whose grief is profound in limited pages, whose words shock the body and guard the truth, until getting old seems impossible. It leaves one on the seat never wanting to leave, unless they need to go grab some tissues.

Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson

All that is lyrical. Nelson carries the soul, molds his hands to make love between two, seem so natural. Surpasing modern romance presently, the maturation toward adoration develops the friends to lovers narrative which carries most of Nelson’s work (i.e Small Worlds). Truly, the movement of generational history and cultural connection, fosters an entirely new world of what love could be, or what is has always been if we had the right words.

Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Hortense Spillers

“The African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated – the law of the Mother- only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law.”

Rich in theory. Spiller’s once again delievers the necessary voice which speaks upon the flesh of the black body and its gendering from American grammar. A vital breath to literature, Spiller’s analysis leave little room for interpretation, allowing her words to simmer between the space the bodies are meant to hold even decades later.