Midwest Connections September Picks

From the Midwest Booksellers Association, four recent Midwest Connections Picks. Under this marketing program, the association and member stores promote booksellers' handselling favorites that have a strong Midwest regional appeal:

Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith (Graywolf Press, $16, 9781555977856). "Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. 'Some of us are killed / in pieces,' Smith writes, 'some of us all at once.' Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America, where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle."

Quiet Until the Thaw: A Novel by Alexandra Fuller (Penguin Press, $25, 9780735223349). "Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota. Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, though bound by blood and by land, find themselves at odds as they grapple with the implications of their shared heritage. When escalating anger towards the injustices, historical and current, inflicted upon the Lakota people by the federal government leads to tribal divisions and infighting, the cousins go in separate directions: Rick chooses the path of peace; You Choose, violence."

Tornado Weather: A Novel by Deborah E. Kennedy (Flatiron, $24.99, 9781250079572). "Five-year-old Daisy Gonzalez's father is always waiting for her at the bus stop. But today, he isn't. As the bus driver, Fikus, lowers her wheelchair to the ground and looks around, chaos erupts behind him as one child has an accident and the rest begin to scream. When Daisy says her house is right down the road, she'll be fine, and begins to wheel herself away, Fikus lets her go. And that's the last time she is seen."

Every Kind of Wanting: A Novel by Gina Frangello (Counterpoint, $16.95, 9781640090040). "Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a 'Community Baby.' Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel's sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begins a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past."

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