Television, a memoir is a hybrid collection of autobiographical pieces, tragi-comic in spirit, that depict a woman’s life evolving through time and culture in fragmentary glimpses. Indeterminate in genre, Television is a fluid text that sometimes reads as poetry, sometimes as prose, while exploring classism, ableism, and feminism in a world defined by the advent of new media and, for the author, a privilege that often felt suffocating. Working structurally and thematically, television creates conceptual mileposts in the memoir, with certain programs and cultural references corresponding to specific eras in the author’s past, but it also gestures at an existential modality — the experience of a televisual life, the performative arrangements of nuclear families and neighborhoods, the periodic events and dramas of an adolescence watched from outside oneself.

To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical. To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season. This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.

The capstone of a quarter-century career in poetry, To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto González since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work. Mirroring González’s personal trajectory, the arc of this work articulates the course of a life: these poems recall leaving a beloved homeland, confront masculinity and sexuality in new adulthood, imagine the earth devoid of human inhabitants, descend into the realm of ghosts, and return to arrive at Dispatches from the Broken World. This latest section ventures into foreign terrain — an autobiographical confrontation with isolation and the aging body. His lyrical exploration, like the weather reports scrawled on ancient temple walls, will preserve this age-old message: “likely a poem, surely an epitaph.” To the Boy Who Was Night bears the fruit of 25 years of poetry, González’s boldest and most comprehensive volume yet.

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond.  Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond.  Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

Thomas’s short, musical poems make stops in the terrains of childhood, difficult and somewhat violent; middle life, with parents breaking down and children moving away into their own lives; and later life when memory falters but passion does not.

A stunning sophomore release, Linda Susan Jackson’s newest poetry collection, Truth be Told, looks at the myriad treasures and complexities of Black womanhood by channeling an eclectic cast whose rich interactions testify to the timeless neglect of girlhood, the bond of long-term friendship and the responsibilities of authorship.  Here Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist from The Bluest Eye, addresses herself directly to Toni Morrison and connects, over time and space, with Persephone, a girl herself, cycling always toward the seasons, caught between an overbearing mother, an incomprehensible father and a grooming god; Lot’s wife sets the record straight about turning back; and our speaker writes to and through her lineage, memorializing her great-grandmother’s distilled wisdom and others who have impacted her, such as when she writes to the great blues singer, Etta James.  In a meticulous inventory of our world and its historical inheritance, Jackson makes an undaunted cartographer, mapping “here: rag-wicked IED” to “there: t-shaped IUD,” from “here: the mother I longed for” to “ there: the mother I had.”  If Jackson recognizes the distance between our ideals and our reality as a kind of tragedy, she also resists despair, enjoining us to close the gap with hope for the future and to: “Step here: light the fire/ Step there: fire the cannon.” Every poem is a spark struck, a cannonade hailing the resilient and enigmatic joy of language.  “After decades with no history,” Jackson sagely celebrates, “That I sing at all is a mystery.” A mystery, yes, but moreover — a blessing for those of us enthralled by her song of love.