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In 1869 in the remote northern Scottish village of Culduie, teenager Roderick (Roddy) Macrae brutally murders his neighbor, Lachlan “Broad’ Mackenzie, and two others. He readily admits to his crime, motivated, he says, by a desire to end the dreadful vendetta that Broad waged against his widowed father. The sympathetic defence lawyer, Andrew Simpson, urges him to write an account of the events leading up to the tragedy.  

Roddy agrees. In a surprisingly articulate essay, the young crofter describes his motive, originating with his birth and escalating through the lad’s mercy killing of an injured sheep belonging to Broad (interpreted as wanton), Broad’s sexual torment of his sister and mother, and his abuse of power as a constable that strips the family of land, crops, and finally their home.  

Given Roddy’s passivity, intelligence, and previously clean record, Simpson prepares a defence of temporary insanity and brings two physicians to assess his client, one a purported expert in the new field of medical criminology.    

The jury trial proceeds with an almost verbatim transcript derived from newspaper sources. The reader is able to juxtapose Roderick’s account with that presented in court. To report the outcome here would reveal too much.

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An extended essay on the experience of child immigrants woven around the forty questions that author Valeria Luiselli asks in her work as a translator for children seeking entry into the United States.

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The narrator tracks a hypothetical week in the life and work of a psychiatrist in a major Canadian hospital through the stories of individual patients, some of whom were willing to be identified by name.   

The book opens with “they are us” and the shocking discovery that a patient whose life has been ruined by mental illness is a medical school classmate.  

Other patients have been followed for many years—a woman with eating disorder, a man with bipolar disease, another with schizophrenia. A new patient with intractable depression finally agrees to electroshock therapy, and the first treatment is described. The painful duty of making an involuntary admission pales in contrast to the devastation of losing a patient to suicide.  

Goldbloom’s personal life, opinions, and worries are woven throughout with frank honesty. His mother’s metastatic brain tumor sparks the associated intimations of his own advancing age and mortality.  His genuine fascination with and appreciation of the effective modalities now available are matched by his frustration over how they are beyond reach of far too many because of the stigma that is still attached to mental illness and the lack of resources and political will to make them available.

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A family epic set in rural Mississippi and spanning several generations. Often described as a road novel by reviewers, the story centers on Jojo, a 13-year-old boy struggling to protect his younger sister Kayla from the disarray of his parents' influence: one Black, one White; one in prison; both addicted to meth. These forces contend with Jojo's stoic yet caring grandfather, his mystical-spiritual grandmother, his bigoted grandparents on the other side, and the strange passenger they collect while on the road.  

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Jean Sands' second full-length poetry collection, "Close But Not Touching," was published a few months after her death in October, 2016.  Sands had been working on this volume for more than a year, a process slowed by debilitating illness.  This collection, like her first book, "Gandy Dancing," is autobiographical, raw, plainly written, and powerful.  Both books deal with sexual abuse, marital abuse, dysfunctional family dynamics, divorce, poverty, and a woman's struggle to survive.  And in Sands' case, to write about that survival.

The 47 poems in "Close But Not Touching" are divided into four sections.  The first examines Sands' childhood.  Her mother, born in Hungary, as a child terrified of German soldiers, is failing. In  the book's opening poem, "When Mother Stopped Remembering," Sands introduces her themes of human rights, sexual and physical abuses, and the need to speak out against them. The poem closes with Sands'  mother forgetting words, growing silent, and giving up books.
"In Germany, they emptied the shelves, /  burned the books, the men, the women, the children." (pp 4-5).  Sands' response to the loss of words, of power, is her poetry.

In "Becoming Helen" (pp 7-9), Sands pays tribute to an older woman writer who became a mentor. "Forty years later the keyboard clicks under my fingers, / unseen hands hover above mine." The specter of sexual abuse is raised in "The Peach Farmer's Daughter" (p 15).  Abused by her father, even after his death the daughter can't forget "his liquor breath, his fingers inside." In other poems in this section, Sands addresses aggression ("Pigs" p 16), loss of innocence ("Plum" p 17), humiliation ("The Music Lesson" p 18), and desire ("Danbury Fair" p 19).

The second section takes a loving and yet brutally forthright look at Sands'  four sons and how her marriages and divorces affected them.  She doesn't spare herself--her poor choices--or the sons' fathers.  Especially strong poems include "Night Sounds," "Suicide," "Swimmer," "The Policeman Is Your Friend," and "Father Poem" (pp 26-30).

The poems in section three chronicle the author's divorce from her abusive second husband, specifically, but also her hard-to-shake feelings of entrapment and helplessness in the face first of childhood sexual abuse and then of marital physical abuse.  In "Car Ride" she writes "I can't do this anymore, // I can't do this, // I can't" (pp 38-39).  Forced from her home by police pounding at her door in the dark, she writes "You set me up / ex-husband with greed on your mind. / Money hungry at anybody's expense but your own" (p 40).  Divorce leads to poverty for the author.  "Divorce Settlement," "Working in a Discount Store after the Divorce,"  and "Saving the Universe" will ring true for many who must struggle for subsistence from day to day (pp 46-48).

Section Four brings this collection full circle, offering hope and resolution.  The author has met another man, a good man.  In poems such as "Rain" (p 60) and "As Evening Comes" (p 64) there is a softening, a willingness to open to this new life and new love.  In perhaps the most moving poem in the collection, "At the Vet's Office" (p 65-66), Sands looks back at her marriages ("The first one was a hitter-- / open palms, threatening fists . . . The second one, worse.  A handsome man / with no past.  I should have known / his clamming up was covering up") and compares her past with her present: "I am overwhelmed with gratitude / for the sweet man who will pick up the cat / and pay the bill without a word" (p 66).   This "sweet man" was married to Sands for more than 25 years, became her writing partner, a father to her four sons, and served as her caretaker through many years of her  illness.

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The book opens with Shep Knacker packing his bags for his long-dreamed of “Afterlife”—his word for retirement—in Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania. He plans to take his wife, Glynis, and his high school aged son, Zach. This plan is not unexpected because Shep and Glynis have made many “research” trips during their 26-year marriage to find the right place (though never to Pemba). But, there were always reasons not to act on their research. An intervention was needed. Glynis is not home while he is packing because she is at some “appointment.” When she gets home, Shep informs her of his plans for the three of them to leave for Pemba, and he further informs Glynis that he’s going whether she comes or not. In response, she informs him that she has cancer—a bad one (mesothelioma); he unpacks, so much for that.

What unfurls from there is more complicated than just the challenges Glynis’s disease produces, though these are monumental challenges. Other people, too, are in need of Shep’s attention. His father’s decrepitude is advancing, his sister is on the brink of homelessness, and his teenage son is detaching from him and life in general. Shep eventually loses his job as an employee at the handyman company he once owned (“Knack of All Trades”) then sold to fund his Afterlife. There’s more. 

Shep's best friend, Jackson, who also worked with him at Knack of All Trades has two girls, and one of them has familial dysautonomia. This progressive genetic disease of the nervous system produces a constellation of medical problems that are bizarre, intense, and serious, before it ultimately produces a tragic end. The trauma and tragedy this disease inflicts in this story (and in life) encompass the entire family, in spite of the heroic efforts of Jackson’s wife, Carol. 
 
The many plot lines in this novel at times proceed independently of one another, and at other times intersect. They concern serious illness experiences and the effects they have on families and also how the American health care system can place burdens on those who need it. Nevertheless, the two families, beaten down by illness, fatigued from encounters with doctors and hospitals, and exasperated from fights with insurance companies, rally enough to make it to Pemba. The trip becomes financially affordable as the result of some narrative gimmickry involving a financial settlement of $800,000 from the company that put asbestos in equipment Glynis had used years before. They would spend the rest of their lives there, longer for some than for others.   

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Approaching age 60 and childless, Fiona Maye is a family court judge who must decide if 17 year-old Adam has the right to refuse blood transfusions for his leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The Children Act does not allow a child to make this decision until age 18. Fiona is an atheist and her 35-year marriage to an academic is falling apart.  She takes the extraordinary step of visiting Adam to know him and understand his conviction. He is beautiful and gifted, he writes poetry and plays violin. Why would he not want to try to live? She makes her decision having no idea if it will be morally, legally or medically right. To say more would spoil it.

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In 1780, Thomas Silkstone, a young American surgeon and anatomist, is invited by Lydia to establish the cause of death of her brother, Lord Crick, a dissolute who held the Oxfordshire estate that she will inherit. Her goal is to absolve her husband of the suspicion of murder; however, as the investigation proceeds, it increasingly seems that her husband is guilty after all.

 The earnest young doctor methodically examines each new lead—performing experiments on tissues and with various poisons in his effort to determine the cause of death – and in so doing solve a murder. Before long, another person is dead and Thomas is in love with Lydia, a scarcely concealed complication that calls his testimony into question.

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This collection of poems is a memoir in verse: it is a lyric and epistolary exploration of what it is to live in the limbo of an emotional and psychological ambiguity whose genesis lies in maternal loss, mourning, depression, and despair.  The poems are arranged in three sections:  “Crossing,” “Asylum Song,” and “Holding.” 

The “Crossing section generally conveys to readers the nature of life in this limbo, even as it discloses some of the familial anguish that has brought about a repressive silence in the poet’s mother, as well as a depression that wreaked its havoc on the poet’s growing up.  The family mysteries and the suffering of the poet prompt her to research the death of her maternal grandmother, and we learn many details of that loss in the poems of the “Asylum Song” section. 

A Czech immigrant, the woman had, in the old country, lost her parents and sister, and she’d apparently abandoned—for reasons unknown—her illegitimate child.  She’d married an older man and moved to the States.  After giving birth to another child, she suffered a postpartum depression, for which she was placed in an asylum, and was heavily and inappropriately medicated.  She died within three weeks, at age 34.  Her daughter, the poet’s mother, grew up in her absence and, in turn, lost her own child—the poet’s sister—in infancy, prior to Baptism. 

According to widely held beliefs of Catholics at the time, the infant would thus be relegated to Limbo for eternity: she would be barred from union with God, this is to say, though kept free from any punishment or any suffering, other than the longing for a bliss she could never attain.  Such a belief would clearly exacerbate the feelings of failure and guilt that a mother might feel in losing her infant.  The poet’s mother’s depression resulted, unsurprisingly, in a bewildering absence of maternal care in the poet’s life: she is stuck in her own “asylum” or Limbo—a state of emotional confinement where she maintains some vision of “beatific” maternal love, but feels it forever beyond her reach to experience.  The poems of the final section, “Holding,” convey the struggle and surprising joy of inhabiting this Limbo.

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In "Mandatory Evacuation Zone," Felice Aull has gathered 63 beautifully crafted poems in which she examines the intricacies of language and loss, of grief and healing.  Each of the book's five sections considers these themes in slightly different ways, always in language that is understated, vivid, and exact.  In Section I, we read poems that focus on the author's complicated family history and her early loss of homeland.  In "Tracings" (page 15), an unknown relative (thanks to online genealogy searches) reaches the narrator and wants to meet her.  She, however, only wishes to learn ". . . how my parents / and my infant self / made our tortuous way out . . . . " Brought in infancy from Germany to America, the author suffers the loss of both native homeland and native language ("Notes from an Alpine Vacation" page 16).  She searches photos of her mother and ponders museum note cards illustrated by Holocaust survivors ("Museum Notecards" page 18), imagining what she can't quite know and yet can't quite forget.  

Section II finds the narrator as a young woman in American, awakening to sexuality ("Gay Blades," "Camp Counselors Make Out,"  "On the Staircase" pages 29-31), becoming a wife and mother, and then a grandmother.  A grandchild's birth is both joyful and yet another "slipping toward / the edge of separation" ("Daughter in her Eighth Month" page 37). 

In Section III, the author turns her gaze to observations of the world around her, around us, aware of how many come to loss and death.  "Be prepare to mourn," she tells us in "Disaster in October" (page 49), and in the moving poem, "I Saw the Smoke," re-visions September 11th in words stripped of sentimentality and therefore made more powerful. 

Sections IV and V confront bodily loss through aging and illness, noting how, in so many ways, we try both to capture and to let go: "You snap photo upon photo / hoping to grasp and preserve / what cannot be grasped" (Capturing Alaska" page 66).  We learn of the most personal losses in poems of biopsies, surgeries, and chemotherapy.  When facing the unknown, every event might seem to hold a prediction.  In "Stunning Blows," a doorman stuns a mouse, claims that it's dead.  But the narrator, aware of the wages of time, writes, "But I still see it, like death, / moving toward me" (page 81).  At the book's end, we return to language, how it too can leave us ("Forget That" page 90).  Yet in the collection's final, gentle poems, the poet is "able, finally / to walk past the park's redbud tree / without weeping" ("Immunity" page 96).

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