The Annotated Nightstand: What Zoë Bossiere Is Reading Now, and Next

“I wanted to be a boy. To slide with the ease into the world people like Dad,” Zoë Bossiere writes in their memoir Cactus Country. “[Like] all the boys I knew seemed to inhabit without a second thought. But I couldn’t begin to say any of this out loud.”

After moving to Tucson with a short haircut and a name (Zoë) no one had ever heard of, Bossiere was able to pass, for some blissful months, as a maybe-boy, deftly dodged questions about it whenever they were asked by peers. The general terrors and vulnerabilities of growing up while trying to locate who you are is emotionally treacherous enough. Because of Bossiere’s queerness, growing up with markers of class difference, and in the outskirts of Tucson, this is all turned up to eleven.

The extreme desert landscape of Tucson is a broader metaphor for this experience. They write, “the sunlight was harsh had the threat of sunstroke all imminent. All the local wildlife could bite, or sting, or both. Plants were sharp and stoic, not to be touched with bare hands.” Having grown up in central Arizona myself, I deeply connect with the memories that you are surrounded by a landscape that so clearly didn’t care if you croaked—and probably will do something to help move that along. You have to learn its dangers young to survive. The terrifying truth is that society, too, can operate similarly.

Through these pages, in simultaneously lyrical and biting prose, we see powerful descriptions of Bossiere’s youth, including their body dysmorphia and the harmful ways Bossiere finds to cope, and a queer sexual assault and the emotional and social fallout on the other side of it. Yet there is also the undeniable glee of their friends, a ragtag group boys, at Cactus Country, the trailer park where they live. They describe them as

Boys who made games of knocking baby birds out of their nests and kicking the pads off of prickly pears in the cactus gardens. Boys whose rage was hot and pulsing, like the palms of our hands when we dared each other to hold them to the asphalt. Boys who spat insults like fire, who led with their fists, who always drew first blood.

Beyond this, Bossiere is, miraculously, able to locate a queer community in Tucson, online, and even their trailer park—particularly in a gay teen there named Angel who has an air of sophistication and life experience. “Do you ever wish you could be a woman?” a young Bossiere asks (Angel knows they’re queer). “Angel made a face. ‘And waste God’s gift to men?’ he said, gesturing to himself from head to toe.” Bossiere find people online, and through them tips about queer life and kinship in an otherwise often alienating experience.

The grip of gender expression and it twisting more toward the masculine shifts during Bossiere’s teens and young adulthood, becoming more feminine (though uneasily so). When Bossiere realizes their androgyny, the also balk at the difference of being read as a woman by the men with whom they interact. Overall, Cactus Country shows the sawblade ups and downs of a kid who locates a sense of belonging in communities society—and even its outsiders—habitually tell them they shouldn’t be or don’t fit.

Bossiere says of their to-read pile,

I didn’t realize until taking this picture how all over the place my to-read pile is in terms of genre and subject! But I guess that is an accurate reflection of my life at the moment. Most of my reading these days takes place in short bursts, often in the presence of my busy toddler. As a result, these books—comprised of titles by grad school friends, writers I admire, and chance bookstore encounters—are more often found on the play shelf than on my nightstand.

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Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content

Bertram’s collection started a (relatively small-minded) firestorm when it was published, prompting the publisher to offer a free sample and write, “Read it before you tweet about it.” Bertram describes the germ of this collection, initially hashed out with their brother, to train ChatGPT to recreate the voice of her late mother. They explain,

People have always longed for some sort of ‘direct line’ to the dead….[T]echnology has always been ‘haunted’ and seen as a gateway to other worlds outside of our perception. In the spirit plane lurk our loved ones, anxiously waiting for the right technology to close the circuit, to connect.

They go on to say,

My own work fine-tuning large language models is influenced by this kind of haunting, the what if, and inquires into how these models model voices that no longer exist, voices of writers we don’t often get to hear, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. (No offense, Shakespeare, but you’ve been dead a while and we hear you all the time.) It is perhaps wrong to say that these models model voices: some machine learning models do generate audible voices, but large language models use wizardry called deep learning to generate new text by analyzing textual data for its patterns.

KB Brookins, Pretty: A Memoir

This debut memoir is coming hot off the presses next week. Kirkus Review writes of Pretty,

In the first chapter, the author describes their mother being told her baby would be a girl. ‘That was the first sentence of a book that describes my undoing,’ they write. ‘That was the first story someone else told for me.’ Now twenty-eight, the author has made concerted efforts to center themself as the writer, literally and metaphorically, of their life story. Despite an admittedly fuzzy recollection of their childhood and adolescence, Brookins describes myriad hardships they faced…

This book, above all, offers a potent narrative of learning to live authentically, no matter the circumstances and challenges. Brookins relays their experiences and opinions with candor, usually in a colloquial tone. The author recounts their medical transition and the traumas of the last several years. ‘Transness is forty-nine lawmakers in forty-nine states wanting your carnages and spirit dead cause you dared to be yourself,’ they write.

Katya Apekina, Mother Doll: A Novel

The author of the powerful debut novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Apekina’s latest, Mother Doll, is making a serious (and deserved) splash. The multigenerational novel jockeys between contemporary LA and Petrograd a century ago. Jim Ruland at the Los Angeles Times writes in a profile of Apekina of the author’s interest in mediums, the dead, and the thinning between this world and others:

“If you’ve seen a ghost,” Apekina explained, “you don’t have to believe or not believe. You experienced it. It’s no longer in the realm of belief; it’s like an experience you had.” Eager to learn more about the nature of her own experiences, Apekina signed up for psychic meditation classes at Zen Meditation in North Hollywood and described her sessions as a form of guided meditation….”It was great until my grandfather died,” she said. “We were very close and I really wanted to talk to him, but I just felt so gross about it because it felt fake. It felt like my desire for it to be real was so strong that I was trying to convince myself.”

While wrestling with the limits of her own credulity, her grandfather came to her in a dream that night. “It was just his voice in my ear,” Apekina explained. “He said my name and I immediately woke up, terrified. ‘I’m not ready for this,’ I thought. ‘I don’t want this at all.'” Apekina had already started working on Mother Doll and her personal interest in psychics and mediums became research for the work in progress.

Davon Loeb, The In-Betweens: A Lyrical Memoir

In Adroit Journal, Kristi D. Osorio writes:

the memoir has a bodily effect on readers: at times we feel sticky, sweaty, and even breathless reading Loeb’s stories of growing up biracial in the Alabama heat and the suburbs of New Jersey. Spanning his childhood and teen years, the memoir represents Loeb’s search to find out what it means to be a man when the person you call “Dad” is different from the person you call your “father,”

as Loeb was raised by his Black Christian mother and stepfather, his white Jewish father absent. Osorio goes on:

Many readers may see themselves in images reminiscent of a sugar-buzzed, sweat-drenched childhood spent drinking Hawaiian Punch in the 90s—Nintendo, Power Rangers, Goosebumps, Sega, Transformers, Dragon Ball Z. Some readers, on the other hand, may see themselves in the way Loeb masterfully depicts his struggle to belong in a world that tells him he’s too much of one thing, not enough of something else.

Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

Reading a bit about this book, I’m reminded of a 2013 (!) article in the New Yorker by Michael Pollan (I know) entitled “The Intelligent Plant” in which the plant psychologist (you read right) Stefano Mancuso shows Pollan a time lapse video of a bean plant and a metal pole some feet away. Pollan writes,

Mancuso’s video seems to show that this bean plant ‘knows’ exactly where the metal pole is long before it makes contact with it. Mancuso speculates that the plant could be employing a form of echolocation. There is some evidence that plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate; it’s possible that they can sense the reflection of those sound waves bouncing off the metal pole.

Schlanger approaches plant intelligence with more nuance and suspicion of anthropomorphism. In an interview at NPR, she states,

[Intelligence] too muddled up sometimes with academic notions….Is this even something we want to layer on to plants? And that’s something that I hear a lot of plant scientists talk about. They recognize more than anyone that plants are not little humans. They don’t want their subjects to be reduced in a way to human tropes or human standards of either of those things.

Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West: Poems

I can’t remember the last time I read about a “sunny collection” of poetry, but that’s what Publishers Weekly calls Sullivan’s debut. They write,

Sullivan traces a lifelong journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance with deceptive depth. The poems capture relatable small pleasures of life and a spirit of resilience, as she recalls facing such challenges as a bad marriage, and acts of bravery, such as her relocation to Portland, Ore., for a new start. The most troubling parts of life provide an opportunity to seize the day: “Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of/ the matter is we’re all up against the clock. It makes everything/ simple and urgent: there’s only time to turn toward what you truly/ love”….Sullivan’s unpretentious and blunt recounting of her experiences is a breath of fresh air.

Katie Berta, retribution forthcoming: poems

I’m a little surprised that the indefatigable rob mcclennan’s blog hasn’t come up in my column yet. He writes of retribution forthcoming,

Across a lyric simultaneously stark and lush, Berta offers a stunning and expansive display of articulating devastating events and an enormous heart, one that no longer wishes to hold back….There is a clarity and a fierce self-protection, entirely finished with the nonsense of others, that is propulsive, across poems that are expansive, slick and scalpel-sharp.

mcclennan goes on to say,

Composed as short essays or monologues, there are poems here that are utterly devastating, all presented in such a clear, straightforward lyric, describing heartbreak, sexual assault, emotional brutality, thoughts of retribution alongside elements of absolute, open-hearted beauty, working through and across the worst of things toward something better.

Sara Daniele Rivera, The Blue Mimes

Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award, Rivera not only gets a solid purse and a residency in Umbria, “The Academy of American Poets will also purchase thousands of copies of The Blue Mimes to send to its members, making it one of the most widely distributed poetry books of the year.” I love this detail as an enormous part of this win.

Eduardo C. Corral selected The Blue Mimes for this award. He says of the collection:

Rivera writes “[a]bsence is playing, leaping, / reproducing.” A father’s death widens into an absence and an exhilarating range of modes and influences configure absence into a blood-warm nexus. Rivera reminds us that formal choices—lyric essay, intertextuality, line drawings—also resonate emotionally. Here, grief is connective. Here, grief is reflective. With memories rooted in New Mexico, in Cuba, and in Peru, grief is also earth-rich. Rivera’s poems are beautifully and deftly crafted—some of my favorites, though, intentionally refuse sense-making, which infuses the book with a mesmerizing strangeness. I felt deeply the grief in this book. I felt less alone after reading it.

Rita Feinstein, Meet Me in the Fourth Dimension

I can see the overlap between Feinstein’s debut and Bossiere’s own, with some cosmic and fantastical twists. Rebecca Jung at School Library Journal writes,

Crosby and Shannon experienced high school as wiccans, celebrating solstices and delving into astrology, tarot cards, and more. Crosby adheres to the teachings of hippie parents who practice homeopathic medicine, while Shannon’s home life has been volatile. Dismayed by Shannon’s departure for out-of-state school, Crosby holds on to the past while trying to adapt to college life with friends and teachers that challenge her beliefs. A dwarf planet heading towards Earth, an astronomical event that becomes the focus of conspiracy theories and doomsday cults and intensifies her obsession with apocalyptic omens.

The “verdict?” “Themes of misinformation on social media, cultural appropriation, and critical thinking make this debut from poet Feinstein one to give older teens looking for a unique, relatable issue- and character-driven book.”

Julia Sixtine Marie Malye, Pelican Girls

One of the “Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024” at Elle, Lauren Puckett-Pope writes of Pelican Girls:

A tale of female friendship unlike any I’ve come across before, Julia Malye’s inspired-by-a-true-story Pelican Girls is as incredible a feat of research as it is a daring work of fiction. In the mid-eighteenth century, a group of women “of childbearing age” are sent from La Salpêtrière asylum in Paris to wed settlers in New Orleans, where three unlikely friends must band together to survive abuses of both the body and the heart.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, in her blurb, calls it “Stunning, moving, and remarkable. Pelican Girls is more than a novel, it’s an act of advocacy for human rights and for historical acknowledgment.”