Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma, and Music
Writing in the Wound is a memoir about what it means to be shaped and repeatedly injured by migration, academia, gendered power, and the long bureaucratic violence of immigration precarity, while still refusing to let art go mute. Author Shumaila Hemani traces that struggle across Karachi, London, Edmonton, Harvard, Banff, Calgary, and beyond, returning again and again to music as both discipline and rescue. What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that the “wound” is not just a private sorrow but a structural fact, something lived in the body and sharpened by institutions, and that song can become not a cure exactly, but a way of bearing truth without surrendering to it. Scenes like the freezing Alberta night when she seeks refuge in a restaurant lobby, her charged decision between Chicago and Harvard, and the later episodes of artistic endurance under precarity give the memoir a real narrative pulse beneath its reflective surface.
What I admired most was the book’s emotional candor and the seriousness with which it treats art. Hemani writes as if sound were breath, shelter, lineage, prayer, argument, and last defense all at once. I found that deeply moving. Some of the strongest passages are the ones where sensory memory and intellectual reflection fuse cleanly: Karachi’s street sounds and household textures, the strange thrill of hearing the theremin in London, the feeling of Cambridge as a place that “held” her differently, the sea storms aboard the World Odyssey, the pink-moon stillness that arrives after so much psychic abrasion. The prose can be overtly lyrical, but for me, that ambition is mostly earned because it rises from lived intensity rather than decorative flourish.
Its ideas are forceful and, at their best, unsettling. Hemani’s central claim that exclusion is often discussed in abstract policy language while its damage is absorbed by actual bodies felt painfully persuasive. The memoir is strongest when it shows that argument rather than merely stating it: in the humiliations of school and class performance, in the uneasy academic encounters where she feels reduced to a gap to be filled rather than a mind to be met, in the grinding absurdity of years of achievement that still do not translate into belonging. There were moments when I wanted a bit more compression, because the book sometimes circles its pain. But even that repetition began to make sense to me as part of the memoir’s design. Trauma here is not tidy, and Hemani refuses to fake tidiness for the reader’s comfort. I respected that.
I found Writing in the Wound arresting, thought-provoking, and fiercely alive. It’s a memoir that believes art can carry knowledge that institutions cannot properly hear, and that belief gives the whole book its tensile strength. It keeps faith with fracture while still making room for beauty, devotion, and survival. I’d recommend it especially to readers drawn to memoirs of migration, music, trauma, and intellectual becoming, and to anyone interested in how a life in art can be both exalted and terribly precarious.
Pages: 290 | ASIN : B0FVQB8XGV
Reacting to the Reality of Lowell
Q: The Fraud of Eternity is a compact, bleakly beautiful collection of poems that circles death, suffering, and spiritual exhaustion in the industrial landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts. Was this always intended as a thematic collection, or did it evolve organically?
Darryl Houston Smith: Honestly, it started from the ground up—literally. I didn’t sit down with some grand master plan to write a bleak treatise on spiritual exhaustion.
It was just me, reacting to the reality of Lowell. When the cold brick of the mills surrounds you, the gray teeth of the Merrimack, and that heavy quiet in the cemeteries, that kind of everyday decay gets into your blood.
At first, I was trying to capture that visceral darkness with as much raw honesty and sharp imagery as I could muster.
But as the pieces started piling up, all that chaotic emotion needed a cage. That’s where the thematic unity really took over. I found myself leaning heavily into strict ABAB and ABCB quatrains, using really dense, hyper-metric lines to rein it all in.
The project naturally evolved into an obsession with dualities—the tension between the sacred and the rotten, the living and the dead. So, while it absolutely began as an organic reaction to my surroundings, enforcing that rigid structure is what ultimately hammered it into the thematic foundation for the rest of the trilogy.
Q: Was there a specific emotional progression you wanted readers to feel?
DHS: Absolutely. The whole point was to make them feel the crushing weight of the oncoming reveal. I didn’t want to offer a gentle, healing arc—it had to feel like a slow, suffocating build. From the very first line, I wanted the reader to experience a creeping dread, a visceral sense that the floorboards of their faith are rotting out from under them.
It’s an emotional progression anchored tightly in those dualities I constantly return to.
You’re pulling the tension tighter and tighter between the sacred and the profane, between the living and the dead, until it simply snaps. By the time that final reveal hits, I want the reader to feel completely, physically exhausted—as if they’ve been dragged through the same heavy, industrial dark that birthed the poems in the first place.
Q: Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
DHS: Oh, without a doubt. You can’t write about the rot of the modern soul without standing on the shoulders of the masters. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were constantly in my head—they understood how to drag unflinching truth and terrible beauty out of the gutter, which is exactly what I was trying to pull from the industrial ruins here in Lowell.
Then there’s Blake. He is the ultimate architect of dualities, that vicious tension between heaven and hell, which feeds directly into the dyads and strict structures I use to lock my poems together. Poe, naturally, gave me the blueprint for that creeping, psychological dread—the slow, suffocating build toward the dark reveal we just talked about.
And, of course, Jim Morrison. His influence is the bleeding edge of it all, bridging raw, visceral chaos with deliberate poetic intent. Since this collection is the bedrock of the entire trilogy, Jim’s shadow was always going to stretch across these pages. I wanted to take their collective darkness and compress it into something heavy, metric, and entirely my own.
Q: What does the phrase “fraud of eternity” mean to you personally?
DHS: To me, the ‘fraud of eternity’ is the great, comforting lie we’ve all been sold about salvation. We are taught to quietly endure the suffering of the present—the cold, the grit, the spiritual exhaustion of the daily grind—in exchange for the promise of some peaceful, golden forever. But it’s a scam. Eternity isn’t a transcendent afterlife; it’s the dirt of the cemetery. It’s the cold brick of the mills outlasting the flesh of the people who bled into them.
That phrase is about confronting the duality between the lie of heaven and the visceral truth of the grave. People want the romanticized comfort of the divine, but as a poet, my job is to look at the rot and call it what it is. The ‘Fraud’ is the false hope we use to numb ourselves to the present darkness. This collection is about stripping that hope away and forcing the reader to sit with the unflinching reality of our own decay.
Author Website: darrylhoustonsmith@gmail.com
Different Values: Cultural Shifts in America, From Covid to War in the Mideast
Karyn Elksong’s Different Values, the title of which speaks to well-worn values rather than more contemporary ones, is a wide-ranging moral travelogue through the last few bruising years, written as a series of linked reflections on what the pandemic, political fracture, technological acceleration, climate strain, gun violence, and the Israel-Gaza war reveal about the things we’re quietly choosing to prize. It moves from the intimate texture of Covid-era fear and isolation into big public questions about truth, power, and responsibility, repeatedly circling back to one steady claim: that a culture can modernize at warp speed and still be spiritually impoverished if it loses its capacity for empathy, conscience, and love.
What I kept feeling, as I read, was the author’s fierce insistence on tenderness as something practical. In the war chapter, she opens with that oddly perfect pop-culture parable: Sherlock asking a supercomputer, “What is love?” and the machine hungering for “more data” but never reaching the answer. It’s a scene that could’ve been cute or smug in another book, but here it lands like a small, cold bell. Elksong’s best pages do this often, taking a familiar headline-world object and turning it so you suddenly see the bruise underneath. I also appreciated how she lets grief stay grief. When she writes about children being swallowed by America’s gun “new normal,” the statistics aren’t abstracted into policy-speak; they sit there with a kind of terrible weight, especially when she threads Uvalde into the argument as a lived national trauma rather than a talking point.
Elksong writes in an earnest, essayistic voice that leans on quotation, reportage, and moral appeal, and the abundance of references can feel like a floodlight turned on the reader. Sometimes I wanted a little more trust in the image to do the work without being immediately explained. Yet, the book is also acutely aware of our exhaustion with overload. In the mental health sections, she draws on the language of loneliness and the strange seduction of “connection” without commitment, echoing Sherry Turkle’s warning that we keep people “in touch” while holding them at bay. That tension felt honest to me: the book is itself a product of the very era it critiques, an era where we cite and link and stack evidence because we’re terrified no one will listen unless the footnotes come marching in.
When the lens widens to nature’s retaliation and then narrows to Gaza’s “death world,” is where my emotional resistance broke. The volcanic plume rising into the stratosphere and the blunt reminder of forces that dwarf us felt like more than scene-setting; it read like a rebuke to human swagger. And when she quotes doctors and humanitarian officials describing collapsed hospitals and a society made uninhabitable, she isn’t chasing shock. She’s asking what it does to our shared soul when we learn to tolerate that kind of suffering as background noise. The conclusion she presses toward is clear: love, nonviolence, and moral imagination are not naïve luxuries but the only counterforce strong enough to interrupt revenge. I finished the book feeling sobered and strangely steadied, like someone had insisted I look directly at the worst of what we normalize and still believe in our capacity to choose differently. I’d recommend it to readers who want a reflective, faith-inflected, socially engaged meditation on recent American life, especially those who don’t mind a book that thinks out loud, cites heavily, and keeps returning to conscience as the measure of what a culture is becoming.
Pages: 344 | ISBN : 978-0692038093
The Only Way Through It Is Through It
Dying to Meet the Newcomer follows the aging residents of a tight-knit mountain community who encounter an oddly ageless newcomer that pushes them to confront grief, secrets, and their fear of growing old. What first sparked the idea for this story?
I am now seventy-three years old. A little over ten years ago, relatives, dear friends and neighbors, in their sixties, seventies, and eighties began to announce they’d been diagnosed with certain maladies. In several cases they were diseases which are quite rare. A person my husband and I had hiked with only a year-and-a-half before, was diagnosed with a disease so horrible, it is nicknamed “the suicide disease.”
Only a few years before that, people I typically only visited with once a year at the annual holiday party decided to form a neighborhood-wide women’s book club. Everyone was welcomed. Over the months and years, we revealed ourselves in deep and meaningful ways through our discussions of the books we read together. Acquaintances became dear friends. As I marvelled at the number of people I cared about who were suddenly suffering pain, disability, and death, it also struck me how much comfort we in the book club seemed to be taking from our now intimate friendships. I wanted to explore this.
It also feels to me that there are few novels which examine the complexities of aging. There are a number of excellent memoirs. And many novels address older protagonists looking back at what they did when they were young (especially their experiences during World War II). But I wanted to be a part of telling the frank, painful, and important story of aging today in America. How the only way through it is through it. And how that experience can be made bearable.
Sen is both ordinary and symbolic. How did you develop him, and is he meant to be read literally, metaphorically, or both?
The character, Sen, is meant to be read literally. The story is an account of what he did as he interacted with his new neighbors in Mountain Ridge Village. But the reader is meant to wonder who, or what, this mysterious man really is. The ending, however, is intended to be taken metaphorically. There is a broader meaning to all that has happened, and even Sen’s antagonist, Ann, understands this.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
First of all, I wanted to isolate the issue of old age. Therefore, I wrote the story so that the characters faced no issues of poverty, lack of education, racial disharmony, or prejudice based on sexuality. Characters include a gay couple, a Black couple, an Hispanic couple, and an elderly single woman. So many things help the elderly endure: humor, positivity, valued hobbies, and learning in every form. But deep social connection (even for introverts, like me) seems to be that which is most helpful in facing the inevitable pain and loss that comes with growing old.
Did writing this book change how you think about friendship or aging?
I’ve been thinking about these issues for quite some time. Writing the book reminded me that, if, as I believe, friendships are essential, then I have to make an effort. I need to keep in contact with dear friends who move away. Just “showing up” is actually a large part of making and maintaining meaningful friendships.
Readora From BookTropolis, The Literary Superhero, ABCs in Sports
Readora From BookTropolis is a lively alphabet book that introduces children to sports from archery to zorb through brief haiku-style verses, framed by the larger fantasy of Readora, a reading superhero from the story-filled world of BookTropolis. The book opens by casting reading itself as a kind of magic, with Readora gaining her powers through words and then using them to spark curiosity in children. From there, it moves through the alphabet one sport at a time, pairing simple, rhythmic descriptions with bright illustrations and a cheerful sense of movement. It’s part concept book, part sports sampler, and part literacy pep talk, all filtered through an upbeat, child-friendly imagination.
What I responded to most was the book’s sincerity. It really wants children to feel that reading and play belong together, and that idea gives the whole thing a warm, encouraging pulse. I liked the way it doesn’t stay with only the most familiar choices. Baseball, football, soccer, and tennis are here, of course, but the inclusion of orienteering, quad skating, cross-country skiing, and zorb gives the book a slightly wider horizon. It tells a child that the world is bigger than the handful of sports they already know, and that discovery can be playful rather than intimidating. I also found BookTropolis itself rather charming. It adds a storybook glow that keeps the book from feeling purely instructional.
I admired the attempt to carry the whole alphabet in haiku form, because that constraint gives the book a distinct texture and a gentle musicality. Some of the lines land neatly, especially when they capture a sport in one swift image, like the football pass into the end zone or the tactile sequence in volleyball of bump, set, and spike. The book makes language memorable, not merely functional, and for a young reader that instinct has real value. The illustrations help carry that intention beautifully, keeping the pages animated, diverse, and inviting.
This is a generous, good-hearted children’s book with an imaginative core and a clear belief in what words can do. It has genuine charm, and its combination of literacy, motion, and encouragement gives it a sweetness that feels earned. I’d especially recommend it for young children who are learning letters, beginning to read independently, or already obsessed with sports and action-filled picture books. It would also work well for parents, teachers, and librarians who want something a little more spirited than a standard alphabet book. Overall, I found it earnest, colorful, and easy to like.
Pages: 32 | ISBN : 978-1665785839
This Story Was Coming to Life
The Organization: Operative Nova follows a rookie operative for a covert shadow agency who must survive three escalating missions that test her loyalty, confront her father’s mysterious death, and force her to choose between vengeance and protocol. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Dan: The original idea for this book was a story of a woman and man out to dinner. As the story unfolded, it would become clear one of the two was there to kill the other. I loved this premise, but then I started thinking: what type of agency would send someone on this type of mission, and why? As I answered those questions, it led to more questions. Before I knew it, this story was coming to life.
How did you develop the shadow agency at the heart of the novel?
Dan: I wanted this shadow agency to feel real without being cliché. In so many movies/stories, shadow agencies are corrupt and the protagonist must expose them. I wanted to do something different. What if there was a shadow organization that made tough decisions but actually cared about its people and tried to look out for their best interests? Even when that meant lying to them? Even when ‘protecting’ someone meant breaking their trust? These characters are trying to do impossible work with impossible choices. What you see in this book is my answer to those questions.
Do you see Bull as purely evil, or something more complex?
Dan: More complex. I see Bull as a man who followed orders for so long he became bored with it. So much so that he started to make a game of it—a game he desperately needed to win to feel alive. This is a tough world these operatives live in, and it affects them in different ways. In the eyes of his organization, Bull was effective and yielded great results. But Nova sees what they don’t: a man who’s become dangerous precisely because he’s too good at his job.
Can you tell us more about where the story and characters go after book one?
Dan: This is the first book of a planned trilogy. Book 2, The Organization: Kill List, shifts perspective to a shadow operative named Raven—readers might remember her from Nova’s first mission. Book 3, Blood on the Throne, brings Nova and Raven together as Handler B faces the consequences of decisions he’s made over two decades. All this will unfold while they work together to solve a complex situation which puts the nation’s security at risk. After that, this world will be available for me to explore wherever the story demands. There are operatives, missions, and mysteries I’ve seeded throughout Book 1 that I can’t wait to develop. I’m thrilled to have readers along for the ride.
Author Links: TikTok | Instagram | Website
They don’t answer to Congress.
They were built to protect the Republic from the shadows.
Nova Dunn has spent twenty-one years carrying her father’s dog tags-and the weight of unanswered questions. Jonathan Dunn died on a classified mission when she was eight years old. At least, that’s what she was told.
Now recruited into The Organization, the same covert force that sent her father on his final operation, Nova is beginning to realize that some classified secrets cut deeper than others.
Operating under federal cover, Nova is thrust into three escalating missions that will test her loyalty, discipline, and survival. She must confront a corrupt official selling secrets to Russian intelligence. Hunt down a missing nineteen-year-old girl and dismantle the trafficking network that erased her. And face a Russian enforcer known only as Bull-a man who believes he cannot be stopped.
He’s wrong.
Perfect for fans of Jack Reacher, Orphan X, and Atomic Blonde, The Organization: Operative Nova is a relentless, character-driven spy thriller featuring a new kind of hero-one forged by loss, driven by truth, and trained to operate where the light never reaches.
Lycan Lineage
Lycan Lineage, by Dorianne Ashe, begins as a high-school love story and then sheds its skin fast: June, a cautious senior counting down to graduation, is attacked in a park by a police officer who turns out to be a werewolf, only to learn that she herself belongs to an ancient lycan bloodline. From there, the book widens from local panic to hidden councils, hunter ancestry, supernatural politics, and a deeper reckoning with lineage, desire, and power. It starts with lockers, gossip, and band rehearsal, then opens into a paranormal world with old hierarchies and older wounds.
I enjoyed this book most when it trusted its feral pulse. The early attack sequence has real momentum, and June’s voice carries a jittery, intimate urgency that makes the danger feel close to the skin rather than merely cinematic. I also liked the way the novel lets adolescence and monstrosity overlap instead of treating them as separate tracks: hunger, embarrassment, attraction, secrecy, self-invention, all of it gets folded into the werewolf mythology. That overlap gives the book its best voltage. Even when the prose leans melodramatic, it often does so with conviction, and conviction counts for a great deal in a paranormal romance. There is something unabashedly moon-drunk about the whole enterprise, and I mean that as praise.
Ashe’s writing is strongest in propulsion and mood. At times, the dialogue states emotion rather than letting it smolder, and some turns in the mythology arrive in a rush, taking June from shock to destiny quickly. But even there, I found myself pulled along by the author’s willingness to go full tilt: secret councils, bloodlines, hunters, Egypt, betrayal, desire, war. The novel does not nibble; it lunges. And while I wanted a bit more polish in places, I never had the bored, beige feeling that plagues so much genre fiction. This book wants to entertain you.
I’d hand Lycan Lineage to readers who like paranormal romance, urban fantasy, werewolf fiction, supernatural coming-of-age, and romantic fantasy with a strong first-person heroine and a taste for danger. Fans of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight will recognize the charged human-monster attraction, though this novel is wilder, pulpier, and less interested in chasteness than in appetite. Lycan Lineage is messy in the way a storm is messy, loud, darkly glittering, and hard to look away from.
Pages: 307 | ASIN : B0GNCD1Q6Z
Escala’s Wish
David James’s Escala’s Wish is an epic fantasy told as a tavern performance: a gnome bard, Wigfrith Foreverbloom, promises his crowd a true story about a pixie princess whose impulsive kiss ripples outward until it nearly unthreads two realms. Escala Winter slips through a fey crossing, charms a mortal for the sake of curiosity (and vanity), and triggers a brutal chain of consequences, a wolf attack, blood on fern-fronds, and the death of her closest friend, Rihanna. The fey justice system is a cold machine, exile or erasure, and Escala is cast out with a maddeningly cryptic “quest” to remove “boulders” obstructing the True Cycle. What begins as a personal reckoning grows into a campaign of alliances, betrayals, and escalating Void-magic, ending in the shattered ruins of Blackthorn Tower and a final wish that costs her dearly while buying one fragile second chance.
What grabbed me first wasn’t the lore (though there’s plenty), but the audacity of the framing: the book keeps winking at the idea of story as currency, Wigfrith isn’t merely narrating, he’s working the room, shaping grief into something an audience can hold without dropping their mugs. That choice gives the novel a lively pulse: the big concepts, law, fate, the ethics of interference, arrive braided with humor and performance instead of dumped like a lecture. Even when the fey court’s rules turn severe, exile, the Wane, the pitiless weight of consequence, the voice keeps the pages turning, as if the book knows that dread lands harder when it’s delivered with a grin that’s one degree too bright.
My strongest reaction, though, was how insistently the story treats “love” as both weapon and wound. Escala’s first choice is selfish, almost childish; she wants to feel something, to test a myth with her own mouth, and the fallout is not abstract. Later, when the conflict widens into Void-storm spectacle and hard-won camaraderie, the book keeps tugging back toward the intimate costs: guilt that doesn’t wash off, loyalty that frays under pressure, and the particular cruelty of memory, what it preserves, what it erases, what it refuses to forgive. By the time the climax cracks open at Blackthorn Tower, the action is ferocious, but the emotional argument is sharper: power without care becomes hunger, and hunger becomes apocalypse.
Escala’s Wish is for readers who want epic fantasy, fae court intrigue, portal fantasy, and romantic adventure with a storyteller’s swagger and a moral spine, especially if you like your magic system half-mythic, half-legalistic, and always ready to bite. If The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss hooked you with its tavern-born narration and legend-making, Escala’s Wish offers a tale that knows performance can be a form of truth.
Pages: 662 | ASIN: B0G1XRP6DW
