Book of the Day Roundup: September 1-5, 2025
Arty the Aardvark Is Counting on His Lunch
EB Mackie
CK Mackie, illustrator
World Changers Press
Hardcover $21.99 (28pp)
979-899033604-9
The bright colors and bold patterns and brushstrokes of abstract art bring added fun to this quirky counting book. Arty the aardvark is looking for lunch; along the way, he encounters several friends enjoying their own fare. An “orangutan ogle[s] one orange” and a “flamingo feast[s] on four shrimp,” but Arty only gets hungrier—until he spies ten tasty ants. The bright colors will enchant younger children, while early counters will enjoy adding up Arty’s gastronomical adventure.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
small lives
Gary Jackson
University of New Mexico Press
Softcover $18.95 (128pp)
978-0-8263-6842-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Gary Jackson’s stories-in-poems, superhumans of color navigate violence, visibility, and legacies in the fractured US.
Rather than battling traditional villains, Jackson’s superheroes—the Invincible Woman, the Telepath, and the Willpower Man—wrestle with identity, memory, trauma, and the oppressive weight of being “weapons to be / used, stars to be touched, [and] animals to be brought low.” Charged with protecting a world that decides who “qualifies as human,” these superheroes contend with the tension between exceptionalism and expendability.
Leading otherwise quotidian lives, the heroes experience hangovers, hookups, therapy sessions, and late-night stakeouts too. In “The Invincible Woman goes to a party,” pills and sex are a balm for the trauma of the morning; the heroine knows full well that “oblivion’s never been in [her] cards.” Elsewhere, the Telepath endures a microaggressive book club, while the Willpower Man steps over sleeping lovers to prepare for danger like it’s his 9-to-5. These ordinary encounters underscore the invisible labor of code-switching and self-erasure, implying that the heroes’ powers isolate rather than connect them. Pushing the superhero form in messier, more human directions is the book’s genius.
The narrative is directed at the audience, collapsing the distance between the observer and participant: “you always save the ones never meant to survive.” “You” becomes a stand-in for entire groups—Black and Asian people, superhumans, and survivors of state violence. Jackson rejects the luxury of situating the heroes and their powers within fantastical woes. Rather, he drags the “you’s” of the text into grief and impossible choices, daring them to stay. Herein, survival isn’t just a feat—it’s the only power that matters.
small lives is a daring poetry collection that fuses comic book myths with searing truths, asking what it means to be seen in a world that’s determined to forget you.
BROOKE SHANNON (August 25, 2025)
Meridian Rising
A Novel
Paul Burch
University of Georgia Press
Hardcover $28.95 (232pp)
978-1-58838-555-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Meridian Rising is Paul Burch’s inventive, entertaining historical novel about influential American singer and musician Jimmie Rodgers.
Rodgers, with his distinctive “blues yodeling” style, influenced American blues, folk, and country music. Evoking the emerging music culture of early twentieth-century America, his story is told here via imagined memoirs, letters, historical photographs, and fictional interviews with his friends, fellow musicians, and business associates. Descriptions of his early life in Mississippi point to the influence of his Aunt Dora, who taught him “all kinds of stuff,” as well as his fascination with the circus and his experiences as a railroad brakeman.
Riffing on documented facts, legends, and speculation, the passages of Rodgers’s “autobiography” reflect his droll, mischievous humor, as with an amusing episode in which he unveils “Thanks” painted on the back of a custom Martin guitar. Comparing the exquisite rosewood instrument to his “old 0018 box,” he observes, “The unplanned child will often beat the planned child in a knife fight.” He also has witty and ruminative exchanges with H. C. Speir, an influential Mississippi record store owner and music scout who is one of the first to record his music. There are descriptive profiles of Rodgers’s contemporaries, including Maybelle Carter and Howlin’ Wolf, too.
Rodgers has a dark side: He drinks, gambles, and has money troubles, frittering away the fortune he makes with his music. His death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five and reported addictions to morphine lead the book to a tragic end: “I suppose this story of mine is all about dreaming of leaving and dreaming of arriving. When you know you’re gonna leave the party early you notice a lot more.”
Meridian Rising is an imaginative, insightful biographical novel about an inimitable musician who had a fascinating influence on American music.
KRISTEN RABE (August 25, 2025)
All That Dies in April
Mariana Travacio
Samantha Schnee, translator
Will Morningstar, translator
World Editions
Softcover $19.99 (164pp)
978-1-64286-157-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Mariana Travacio’s compact and lyrical novel All That Dies in April, a woman leaves the parched landscape of her village above the Argentinian pampas to search for the sea.
For fourteen years, Lina begged her husband Relicario to abandon their small house in the quebrada. She hates the craggy, inhospitable terrain, which offers “less and less each day.” The skies darken but rain never falls, almost as if the quebrada is “rejecting” the clouds and sending them “somewhere else.”
But Relicario refuses to leave the place where his ancestors are buried; he feels that Lina’s desire to relocate is foolish. Though he insists that he and Lina are “too old” for new ventures, Lina departs on her own, taking a few supplies and walking down slopes of “jagged rocks” with anxious determination. Weeks later, exasperated yet lonely, Relicario decides that he has no choice but to follow her. He digs up his parents’ graves, gathers their remains, and acquires a donkey and a wagon to help him travel. Carrying his ancestral past into the uncertain future, Relicario moves from the quebrada toward the sea.
Lina is a pragmatic yet mystical heroine who knows deep within her psyche that she will likely die if she cannot escape her barren environment. In pursuit of his wife, Relicario shows poignant devotion; he and his donkey Jumento make their way through rough terrain. After Lina finds domestic work on a ranch, the book’s eloquent yet spare tone broadens to include various other evocative characters and local intrigues. And within a tensile entwinement of fates, Lina’s yearning to live closer to water leads her to a climate of surging, often perilous rainfalls.
A visceral and emotional migratory quest propels the haunting novel All That Dies in April.
MEG NOLA (August 25, 2025)
Preserving Greatness
Great Salt Lake in Photographs
Chris Carlson
Shadow Mountain Publishing
Hardcover $49.99 (256pp)
978-1-63993-457-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Featuring long horizons, unearthly colors, scrubby vegetation, and striking geology, Chris Carlson’s stunning photography collection honors the spectacular, otherworldly beauty of Great Salt Lake, showing the impact of human water diversion on the lake’s ecosystems.
This magnificent volume contains more than a hundred images of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, one of the largest saltwater lakes in the Western hemisphere. Panoramic photographs showcase the lake’s irregular coastline, diverse islands, and arid mountains. Aerial shots depict delicate channels carved in mudflats by seasonal runoff and rainwater. Shorelines are rimmed in brilliant shades of pink, red, and yellow, colors generated by salt-loving algae and bacteria.
The Great Salt Lake is introduced as a critical habitat for hundreds of bird species, playing a crucial role in north-south migratory routes. There are compelling close-ups of said wildlife, as well as of bison, pronghorn antelope, and burrowing owls. And microbialites, with a function similar to coral reefs, are shown, noted for capturing and recycling nutrients and sheltering brine shrimp and other crucial food sources for birds.
Carlson notes that the lake’s complex ecology is stressed by severe drought, high rates of evaporation, and extensive water diversion for agriculture and urban uses. As a result of climate change, the lake levels are falling; the soil is hardening and cracking; microbialites are drying out; and wildlife is threatened. Industries along the lake’s north arm are also described, including operations to harvest salt, potash, and magnesium. A railroad causeway that bisects the lake is noted to contribute to significant salt concentrations on the north arm. While Carlson acknowledges the economic importance of these industries, his book also calls for their responsible environmental management.
A dazzling photography collection, Preserving Greatness captures a unique and threatened ecosystem.
KRISTEN RABE (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
