For someone who spends most of life reading and writing, dance is a miracle. Literature twists language to get at truth, but dance circumvents it altogether. Of course, this is only true at the moment of performance; the work of dance is full of language–often commands, usually unheard by the audience. Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, which I saw at NY Live Arts a couple of weeks ago, invites us to consider the interplay of communication and labor in dance. It opens with a two-word command, “Snaps, go,” spoken by one of six dancers in drab gym uniforms as they march into view, fingers obediently snapping. When another says “no-head, go,” they begin to shake their heads, still snapping. This continues, with about forty moves in different combinations—from sources including military drill, ballet, and cheerleading—for the first half of the piece. (My personal favorite was “pointers,” a raffish shaking of double finger-guns that I plan to try at my cousin’s wedding). It’s a strangely anarchic, nonhierarchical performance of command-giving: any dancer can call the next move, and the official vocabulary is interspersed with chatty asides. Controlling their own collective fate, they still end up doing things that none of them seem to want—like jumping up and down for what feels like ten minutes, breathless, awaiting instruction. Anyone who has had a job, or a family, will recognize the inertia of the group project. In the second half, the drill team, now in gold-spangled, softly jingling, not-quite-matching costumes, begins a magnificent disintegration, each dancer interpreting the moves from the first sequence in their own ways, then getting weirder, ultimately collapsing into a pile on the floor. There they chat, all speaking at once, repeating everyday phrases until they morph into new ones (“in or out/in and out/In-N-Out/have you been to In-N-Out?/best burgers…”). This psychedelic segment is a bit more exciting than the flawed austerity that precedes it, but you can’t choose a favorite—each half relies on the other for meaning. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

For his 1973 anthology The Oxford Book of Light Verse, W. H. Auden included poetry that took as its subject “the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being.” The collection, which includes Byron and Pope, confirms that “lightness” doesn’t preclude “greatness.” I wonder: would Auden consider Tim Key’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush light verse? Certainly, it tackles contemporary social life from the perspective of an everyman—it takes place during COVID lockdown in London, featuring a poet-narrator who traipses around the capital while talking on his iPhone. 

The book, subtitled “an anthology of poems and conversations,” is difficult to classify. It has theatrical and fantastical touches, and Key revels in an absurdity that verges on nonsense poetry—but this isn’t that. Maybe if you squint a bit—or a lot—you could call it vers de société. As with Key’s first lockdown anthology, I felt I was encountering a comic novel. It’s a preposterous volume, in which “the Poet” is contemptuous, rash, insecure, ridiculous, and farcically ordinary. His personality comes through so strongly in these pages that it’s easy to imagine him delivering each line, exasperated mumbles and all. Here’s a silly example, from “Leaning”:

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Amazon has released the first full-length trailer for its upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s set in Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. 

The new trailer promises to live up to the epic fantasy descriptor, with end-of-the-world stakes, a huge and beautiful world to explore, and an ensemble cast, including a young Galadriel and Elrond. Galadriel has seen an apocalyptic vision of death and destruction set to shatter the peace currently reigning over Middle-earth, and she is unconvinced by Elrond’s attempts to reassure her. As usual, though, there is also a group of hobbits, the Harfoots, that seem poised to take center stage.

The trailer shows glimpses of Elven and Dwarven realms, the home of the Harfoots, and more. We also see what appears to be Two Trees of Valinor.

The eight-part series will premiere September 2nd on Amazon Prime.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

“This report was birthed in trauma.” It’s a striking and heartbreaking opening statement for the groundbreaking 2022 Urban Library Trauma Study Report, released in late June at the 2022 American Library Association Annual Conference. While the beginnings of the study were rooted in library trauma before the COVID-19 pandemic, the initial grant application was written as the virus hit New York and days before many city libraries were closed. The two year long study was delayed and redesigned due to the pandemic, allowing researchers to capture some sense of the difficult working conditions urban library workers experienced pre-pandemic but possibly more importantly the increasing demands and disruptions because of the pandemic, resulting in extensive trauma, stress, and burnout for urban library workers.

The study and report were executed in a partnership between the New York Library Association, Urban Librarians Unite, and St John’s University. On the Urban Librarians Unite website, they introduce the report writing, “Almost every library worker has a story about one event at work that left them shaken. Sometimes it’s an abusive patron, sometimes it’s workplace bullying, and sometimes it’s that haunting feeling left behind when a patron needed more help than you could provide. The Urban Library Trauma Study looked to take these anecdotal stories, quantify them and build a pathway to practical solutions for the issue and move the library industry towards a culture of community care.”

The study included four stages including a comprehensive review of current literature on the topic, a survey of urban library workers, a series of virtual focus groups, and lastly a two-day forum of urban library workers to go over the research and create plans for the future.

Key Takeaways from the Urban Library Trauma Study

The survey was distributed between August 7, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The survey received 568 responses, of which 435 were from urban public staff. Responses from rural, suburban, academic, school and special library responses were filtered out to focus the scope of the study but the report does mention that library workers at all kind of libraries are dealing with many of the same issues raised in this report.

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Whether you’re in public schools or libraries or aren’t but support your local public institutions, one thing you can do right now to prepare for the fall and its inevitable wave of “parental rights” discourse and book challenges is get ahead of the misinformation. By openly addressing what has been happening over the last year and setting the record straight, you become the transparent organization that these groups are desperately demanding (even when they then are mad when it happens exactly as they demanded).

Build a guide to the current climate on your website, your social media, and affiliated groups to challenge the narrative being pushed by Moms For Liberty, No Left Turn, and others. Be upfront about the claims being made against libraries and schools in a broad way, then focus it on your local institutions.

Here’s a stellar example.

The Forest Hills Public Schools (Michigan) has been subject to a local group’s demands to things like “removing CRT” from the curriculum and “focusing on fundamentals.” They’ve been especially intent on highlighting the so-called Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools, beginning their quest for information via FOIAs last spring. The school board meetings have also become a space for right-wing political rallies.

A Political Action Committee in Forest Hills — developed and run by parents in the district — has stepped forward to right these claims through their group SupportFHPS. Included on their website is a thorough guide to all of the claims being made about education right now, both nationally and locally, with links to credible sources about why such claims are wrong and why they’re being made. It is a handy, easy to use guide that is accessible and understandable to people who are not staying on top of all of this news — which is impossible! — and it is a vital tool for passing along and ensuring that everyone has the same correct information at hand. What makes this guide especially good is that it’s usable to people inside the community specifically, as well as broadly applicable to those outside it.

If you’re a millennial on Twitter, or at least if you follow millennials on Twitter, you’ve likely come across the “We need an American Girl doll who…” meme. It’s a hilarious trend that combines one of the most sought-after toys of the ’90s with hyper-specific situations, and book lovers are not immune from getting called out by it. Because we can’t resist catching the latest social media wave, we’ve collected the best bookish American Girl doll tweets for your reading pleasure.

Since their introduction in 1986, American Girl dolls have highlighted a variety of different points in history and unique experiences. Fans could even create a doll to look like themselves and buy matching outfits! But leave it to Twitter and Instagram to find the gaps in American Girl doll representation.

Wow, meme one and I’m already feeling attacked!

For those of us who grew up obsessed with books, taking trips to the library every chance we got and memorizing the check-out limit, books have always been our safe spaces. They’re where we go when we have too much to do, or we’re going through something, or just need to escape for a while. I’ve spent many an hour with my head tilted sideways, reading every title on the shelves of the library or hunched on the floor, flipping through a book before buying it at my favorite bookstore. Libraries, bookstores, they’re my favorite places in the world!

With all of that time spent in the quiet of a library or lost in the shelves on a darkening afternoon, I realize just how quickly that setting can turn sinister. A scream in the silence, eyes peering from the other side of the spines. The quiet is only comforting until you want — no, need — someone around to help you.

And some authors have tapped into that fear, turning the places we love so dearly into an accomplice to a crime. Have used the darkness and the silence and the wandering as a way to heighten tension rather than relieve it. If you want to read about the ways a bookstore or library — and not the books inside — can scare you, here are eight novels to get you started.

Disability Pride Month is in full swing, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with all of the wonderful books by disabled authors that are making their way around the internet. I love when people discover disability literature and realize the incredible range of books out there. From romance to poetry to memoir, disabled authors write it all. For some folks, I know this year is their first foray into disability literature, and I appreciate the effort to learn new things and expand one’s understanding of the world. 

While I love seeing nondisabled people pick up books by disabled authors, I’ve noticed that when able-bodied folks review disability literature, they often say things like, “I can’t relate to this” or “the writing is just too clunky.” But disability literature is, at its core, for and by disabled people. These books entirely center disabled folks and our experiences. But when able-bodied people review disability literature, they often write their reviews through an abled lens, which skews their understanding of the book.

Let’s look at the medium of the text itself. To create a print book, many of the writers used accommodations because the very method of communicating in a book format is inaccessible to them. Working on a computer, formulating ideas into written language, or looking at a page aren’t actions that every disabled person can do. So to even communicate, some disabled people have to adapt to get anywhere close to the able-bodied norm. 

For example, I write by not looking at a screen or by using voice-to-text, and that changes the rhythm and flow of my writing. Using accommodations to write will change the prose and structure of essays. It is literally impossible for some of us to reach the literary standard based on able-bodied folks’ abilities. So if you assume disabled people will write like able-bodied people, you may be disappointed.

If you apply the expectations and assumptions of an abled lived experience, disabled literature may not work for you. I often see nondisabled people say they can’t relate to disabled people’s stories, that our lives are too “different” from their own. Or some able-bodied people say that they feel they didn’t learn enough from disability literature to make it worth reading.