Memoirs in prose and poetry, murder on an airplane journey and the importance of Pembina, N.D., in our history. Something for everyone today.
“Before I Lie”: by Dralandra Larkins (Book Baby, $25)
(Courtesy of the author)
I’m Black, brilliant, beautiful, wise!/Anxious and ambitious./A mystic./I am not your statistic./Passionate and persistent./A dreamer, multi-gifted./A generational curse breaker./A builder./I am not a maybe./I am not negotiable. — from “Before I Lie.”
Dralandra Larkins is on the rise in the Twin Cities literary community with a debut collection and a spot on the cover of the September issue of Minnesota Women’s Press. Poet Danny Klecko, who has read with Larkins and watched her dynamic onstage presence, says she’s someone to watch.
In her debut collection, Larkins writes in-your-face autobiographical poetry and, prose, illustrated with big, bold artwork by Brian Alexander Serrano, to tell her story in poems such as “An ode to the Hood” (in Minneapolis where she grew up), “Black myths,” “Healing the Scar That Sings Back,” and traits she carries from her ancestors. Running through the collection is the story of how she found her authentic self as her hearing disability was corrected with hearing aids and by learning ASL.
She writes: “These stories don’t beg for approval or wait for applause.”
Larkins is an award-winning spoken-word poet whose words catch the cadence of real-life language, as well as an educator and a multi-genre writer. She characterizes her work as “moving between stage and performance,” weaving together rhythm, intimacy and vulnerability to create a haven for healing rooted in her background as a social worker.
“Before I Lie” is for every young Black girl who never had access to a mic to tell her story, Larkins says. For white readers it is an introduction into a Black woman’s life.
Larkins will be at the Nov. 8 Twin Cities Book Festival and will read Nov. 18 at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., with the Loft Literary Center’s program manager Marianne Manzler and spoken-word guru Tish Jones.
“Wayfinding”: by Renee Gilmore (Trio House Press, $24.99)
(Courtesy of Trio House Press)
But, there was only one thing I found, quite by accident, that could reliably distract my agitated mood. As counterintuitive as it sounds, taking risks and engaging in daring or dangerous behavior, on a small or large scale, was the true antidote to my anxiety. –– from “Wayfinding”
The title of Renee Gilmore’s frank and sometimes heartbreaking memoir has two meanings. It refers to her family’s love of car travel and the car culture she learned from her dad. It also refers to the ways in which she healed after a hard childhood of abuse and, later, rape. This violence left her with undiagnosed PTSD, seeking solace in drink and bad company, and a sad first marriage. Eventually she found happiness with her current husband. Besides her own emotional troubles, Gilmore dealt with the mental difficulties of her daughter, whom she and her husband adopted out of the foster system.
Each section takes its title from map language, as in “Back Bearing,” a bearing that is the exact opposite of your destination or waypoint.
Gilmore is a neurodivergent (meaning her brain works differently), multi-genre writer, essayist and poet, with a master’s degree from Hamline University. She never gave up her love for travel, journeying to all seven continents. And she’s a fan of international F1 car racing and car shows. Her writing about cars is like a a hymn.
You can meet her at the Trio House Press booth at the Twin Cities Book Festival.
“Airplanes, Atlanta & an Assassin”: by Mary Seifert (Secret Staircase Books, $14.99)
If you think you’ve had troubles with connecting airplane flights, be glad you aren’t Katie Welk, who’s chaperoning her high school students to a competition in this 10th Katie & Maverick cozy mystery.
Katie and her friend Jane separate from the students during a layover and take a private plane that crashes. Katie’s kidnapped by a guy who’s not too bright but knows how to hold a gun on her. Soon Katie uncovers a web of secrets, stolen documents, corporate espionage and dangerous toxins, and she needs to untangle everything before a killer strikes again. Happily, she has the help of Maverick, her trained search-and-recue Labrador retriever. Who doesn’t love a cozy featuring a lovable Lab?
Seifert, who has a background in mathematics, says she “ties numbers and logic to the mayhem” in this readable, entertaining series.
“The Beaver, The Buffalo, The Border”: by Gerald M. Sande (Anepeminan Press, $24.)
What a treasure of history Sande has given us as he writes of his childhood in Pembina, a small town in the extreme northeast corner of North Dakota founded in 1801. It’s subtitled “A Century of Small Town Pioneering,” but it’s about more than a small town because the area was vital beginning in the 18th century when the fur trade flourished, with voyageurs sending their valuable furs to St. Paul. Its history is part of the great expansion to the West.
Those were the days of the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company, based in London, versus The North West Company founded in Canada. He discusses the 1818 fixing of the international boundary between the United States and British North America, the 1852 destructive Red River flood, the 1861 establishment of the Dakota Territory.
This narrative is filled with names familiar to Minnesotans: Norman Kittson, John Jacob Astor, Jay Cooke, Ignatius Donnelly, James J. Hill, Zebulon Pike, Alexander Ramsey, Henry Hastings Sibley and the Rev. Henry Whipple.
History buffs will love the connections this book has to the history of St. Paul, which was growing right along with Pembina.
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