I do not remember when Last Exit Books initially opened its doors in Kent (turns out, it was 2004). Before that happy day, I had been perfectly satisfied with Heartland Books and Archer’s Used and Rare Books; however, both bookstores closed. Replacing them were Last Exit in the Heartland space, and an ever-changing bunch of stores in the Archer’s spot.

Laugh out loud. Go ahead. Take a deep breath—pause—and laugh.

Moroccan Holiday by Lauren Tivey (published in 2020 by The Poetry Box Press) is no holiday, but this poetry chapbook is gorgeous and heart wrenching. In brief, it tells the “story” of a married couple journeying to a far-away land as the husband relapses into alcoholism.

The original fairy tales written by The Brothers Grimm were not all sunshine and lollipops; rather, there are many brutal scenes and cautionary tales told in gruesome detail. Today, gory details have been sanitized to make stories more palatable to parents whose small children consume them with eager delight.

If I died tomorrow, I would want someone to read “The Wild Iris” at my funeral (from Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, published in 1992 by HarperCollins). “At the end of my suffering/there was a door./Hear me out, that which you call death/I remember.”

Is it an unforgivable gap in my education that I did not realize there were many Trails of Tears? When I recently read Joy Harjo’s thought-provoking poetry book—An American Sunrise…

Maggie Anderson’s wonderful poetry book, Dear All, (published in 2017 by Four Way Books) is a book to which I often return when I want to find a bit of solace.