(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's
by Bernie Krause

Few sound recordists have sat alone in the middle of the Amazon jungle, heard a cat's low growl, its breathing and its stomach rumbles through their headphones, and suddenly realized that a jaguar was no more than an arm's length from their microphones.
 

We the Animals: A Novel
by Justin Torres

The brief chapters move through half-a-dozen years of growing up with immediacy and intensity. There is love, fear, uncertainty and resolution, and there is a freshness to the writing and a simplicity which makes the boy's thoughts and feelings vivid and his awareness of his difference and his fierce animal anger understandable.
 

Gilbert Wesley Purdy reviews...
 

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
by Lucia Perillo

If the television character Gregory House had been a poet, instead of a doctor, he would have been Lucia Perillo (well, after the sex change operation anyway).
 

San Francisco Poems
by A. D. Winans

The lives in A. D. Winans' San Francisco Poems play out in the parts of the city Tony Bennett didn't leave his heart in.
 

Swimming the Colorado and Blue Trajectory
by Denise Banker and Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, respectively

The brief concatenation of stark and simple images leading up to these final lines arrives at a sense of devastation such as few poems possess.
 

Colleen Mondor reviews...
 

Four Picture Books
by various authors and illustrators

While Albertine's deep primary colors command immediate attention (her rendering of the birds is especially delicious), it is Zullo's text that made me wonder if Little Bird might belong more appropriately in middle school libraries where the days can be very dark, or on graduation tables as young adults face the daunting prospects of adulthood. This is a book about wonder, of all things, and hardly anyone writes about that anymore let alone combines it with such fine artwork.
 

Shipwrecked: A People’s History of the Seattle Mariners
by Jon Wells

There are few teams in professional baseball more forgettable than the Seattle Mariners.