1. “Poetry Exemplars” by Grace Cavalieri. “What a natural phenomenon. It’s a delight to read a fulsome description of a place or occurrence and then see it synthesized into nuance and essence. It’s even fun to track the mind to its crystallization. The form Mandel masters is fundamental to our senses. This defies belief systems and gets to the very core of experience. The prose is determined, interesting, descriptive. The haiku is about the prose, its convictions. Sentient thought is diving deep and appearing shallow and clear. Watching the haiku widen the overall meaning is a treat.”


2. Amanda Holmes Duffy’s review of Bunny: A Novel by Mona Awad. “Awad also has something to say about the psychological energy, time, and money such [MFA] programs exact from participants. She has a wicked sense of humor, and you get the sense she had a lot of fun writing this book. But her sense of the macabre takes a peculiar turn.”


3. Talmage Boston’s review of For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball by Bud Selig with Phil Rogers. “On the issue of team parity, until Selig persuaded owners to share their revenues, small-market teams lacked the resources to compete with elite franchises in signing free agents, which meant they rarely made the postseason. Such lopsided disparity had risen out of owners losing round after round to the players union in collective bargaining agreements, which had caused players’ salaries to skyrocket. This imbalance resulted in declining attendance and operating deficits that put several ballclubs on the brink of bankruptcy.”


4. “Silent Book Club: Events for (Noisy!) Book Lovers” by Liza Achilles. “The great thing about Silent Book Club is that it retains all the aspects of traditional clubs that I adore (the camaraderie, food and drinks, and discussions), while tossing out the aspects I don’t (those that feel like school). So, what is Silent Book Club? It’s a simple concept. At a Silent Book Club event, friends gather to read books quietly, eat and drink, and talk about books and other topics.”


5. Eugene L. Meyer’s review of 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War by Andrew Nagorski. “While Hitler and Stalin were waging strategic wars, Churchill was desperately trying to nudge FDR closer to an outright wartime alliance. It would take the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, to force FDR’s hand. Meanwhile, Japan’s decision to attack the United States rather than the Soviet Union’s Far East freed up Russia to send troops stationed there to the west to fight the Nazis. Such geopolitical decisions or whims, Nagorski writes, made 1941 the pivotal year.”

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