Last week we had the pleasure of hosting poet Natalie Díaz for a Zoom reading and discussion, and a few weeks ago in late June we had author Carmen Maria Machado for a similar event. I had the particular pleasure of being the one to talk to both, asking them questions drawn from our preregistered … Read More
Natalie Díaz will be (virtually) coming to Rutgers for a live Zoom session on Wednesday July 14th! Díaz won an American Book Award for her first collection of poems, When My Brother Was an Aztec, in 2012, and recently won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for her second collection (Postcolonial Love Poem) released last year. She … Read More
This post, and this poem, is about puberty… I chose Rita Dove’s poem “Adolescence-II” for this summer program in part because (like all of our poems this session, actually) I’ve taught it before at Rutgers and students really connected with it! I’m curious to hear what Summer Tales participants will have to say about it, … Read More
Are you taking classes this summer? The Summer Tales Books Club operates as a non-credit course in Canvas. Started first in the summer of 2020 in response to the changed learning environment, this fun summer program continues to promise short mental breaks from coursework through a fool-proof method of distraction: reading short stories and poems and … Read More
A heads-up: This post, like Machado’s memoir, discusses intimate-partner abuse. There are two distinctive formal features of Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House: A Memoir that are apparent from early on. The first is that this memoir is fractured into a series of short forays, usually just one or two pages, that approach the central … Read More
If you’re already someone who reads for pleasure, you know what that pleasure is like; if you’re not, then you’ll have to trust us that it’s a lot of fun to read when you don’t have to worry about a quiz or a paper. If picking up a work of literature can feel like wandering … Read More
Looking to get into poetry but not sure where to start? We’ve got some ideas, cross-posted here from our upcoming LibGuide called Books We Read: Poetry. Take a look at the LibGuide for even more suggestions and resources! Poets to start with: Billy Collins is the first poet I recommend to people who think they don’t … Read More
It’s actually not that hard: find one and start reading! OK, that was a little glib––when we talk about how to read a poem, we’re talking about how to process a poem as we read it. Often people worry that they’re missing something when they read a poem, some decoder ring that would help them … Read More
April is National Poetry Month! In celebration, the Books We Read team is posting a series on the poetry we enjoy, and why we enjoy poetry in the first place. As a researcher I focus on prose, but I think it’s fair to say that as a teacher I’ve had the most fun with poetry. … Read More
As a project and as a blog, we here at Books We Read have been very interested in what––and how––people are reading during the pandemic. Are people taking the time indoors to tackle classics that they’d always wanted to read, or falling back on the authors or genres (or even the same novels) that have … Read More