“I needed to know that others had endured what my family was going through, regardless of the outcome.”

“At its core, the madness memoir is an effort to impose a literary structure on an inherently disorganized condition.”

“I want to spring on you like a verb, like a wartime cat snatching a rare mouse from the floor.”

The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart.

“Time seems not so much to progress as to waft through each novel… solitude enables past, present and future to press in like ghosts.”

Imagine a society where we had empathy for those with opposing views. Imagine a society where we read more and fought less.

With the closure of bookstores and in-person readings impossible, sales opportunities for small presses have largely been stymied to the point of near fatality, and the fallout is widespread.

A book or books that you once loved isn’t quite the same thing as a painful memory, but for me, rereading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman felt similarly unapproachable because it had direct ties to a past iteration of myself.

It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal.