This Mental Health Awareness Month, our team sat down to think about some of our favorite books that depict mental health and mental illness in thoughtful and considered ways. Living with mental illness can all too often be an isolating experience. Thankfully, books offer us a window into someone else’s mind and life, allowing the author to create direct connections into experiences that otherwise would go unseen or unspoken in ways that few other genres can. We wanted to put together a list of books that explore mental health with care and not as a plot hook, turn of phrase, or way to differe ..read more

“My house holds sound / like the sea inside a shell,” writes Lesley Harrison in the poem “Convergence.” And this is the sense one has while reading Kitchen Music, a poetry collection filled with as much sea and wind as a house on the coast of an island. Conversing with a variety of artists and historical narratives—John Cage, Marina Rees, Johannes Kepler, and nineteenth-century whaler Captain William Barron, among others—Harrison’s sixth book of poetry, and her first to be published in the US, feels both eclectic and also pre-utterance. Her work exists on the border between language of natural ..read more

Of all the people who ever lived, only a tiny proportion have their names remembered by history. And even when someone’s name is remembered, celebrated, taught in the history books, the knowledge of who that person actually was—not just a name we recognize—is elusive. This is particularly true of women in history, and even more true of women of color, whose stories, if they were preserved at all, have been heavily filtered and shaped by the priorities of those in power. The most widely disseminated transcription of Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was rendered in a folksy spea ..read more

Annelyse Gelman’s curiosity and passion for language, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and experimentation imbue all her projects. Two of them—her new full-length poem, Vexations, and website Midst—also prove her fascination with craft and process. In our free-ranging conversation—encompassing poems as objects, durational art, text scores, endless beginnings and endings, and generative collaborations—Gelman’s enthusiasms are front and center. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Mandana Chaffa There’s something thrillingly ambitious—and leisurely—about a full-length poem in ..read more

Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, begins with a character you wouldn’t want to be stuck with in your MFA workshop. Seamus is the only white male student in his graduate poetry seminar, where he doesn’t think anyone’s work is any good, since it’s all tied up in their individual traumas and not grounded in what he believes transforms writing into art. He doesn’t, for the record, think his work is good either, or else he doesn’t think it matters on the grander scale. Nevertheless, he doles out his cynical assessment of everyone’s work weekly until all but his friend Oliver are mad a ..read more

Rachel Louise Snyder’s propulsive new memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned begins with the death of her mother. Her father then marries another woman, moves to the Midwest, and raises Snyder in a suffocating Christian household where religion is repeatedly used to justify abuse. Snyder’s impeccable prose lets us live vicariously through her struggle to survive these compound losses, putting us in the middle of her fight against the forces determined to crush girls’ lives into smaller and smaller spaces. We join Snyder as she learns to thrive on a global scale, as she traces the insidious ro ..read more

When you get to know someone, you aren’t presented with their life story in a linear narrative with well-timed beats. Instead, anecdotes and feelings bubble to the surface irregularly; clear personal development is established in retrospect, if at all. Jane Wong’s debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, resembles the latter, creating what she refers to as “constellations of speculative memory.” Like the stars in the sky, all kinds of shapes and stories can be crafted through the non-chronological format of the book, which made rereading sections of it after finishing all the more power ..read more

Sean Maguire was supposed to be the exception. After making it out of a West Belfast community haunted by economic precarity and the ever-present ghost of the Troubles, Sean was destined to get his college degree in Liverpool and never return. But outpacing your past, and leaving behind the city that molded you, is easier said than done. Close to Home soon finds Sean back home, working dead-end jobs that help him scrape together enough cash to sustain an increasingly troubling coke habit, and completing two hundred hours of community service he was sentenced to for knocking a stranger out cold ..read more

In King: A Life—the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published in decades—Jonathan Eig describes King as “a gravitational force” in the Freedom Movement. From the earliest days of his involvement, Eig writes, King proved capable of “pulling in reporters, financial donors, and young volunteers,” and transforming a social and political struggle into a moral crusade.  Eig’s King: A Life emerges at a critical juncture for the King legacy. Today we find it beset on one side by a 40-year campaign to erase the truth-speaking radical King of whom most white Americans d ..read more

Maheshwata Devi’s urban novella, Truth/Untruth, set in 1980s Calcutta, is a story about dirty pasts that catch up with the present, and how money is often built on this belief that it won’t. It’s fiction that tingles with real-world politics. Translated by Anjum Katyal, the book begins in Khidirpur, a seedy part of central-west Calcutta. In the opening chapter, Devi invites us inside our non-human protagonist: Barnamala, a high-rise building. The surrounding landscape is in tatters, but rapidly urbanizing; a slum adjoins from where Barnamala “gets its labour.” The second chapter introduces us ..read more