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Poetry! Poetry is what’s new at the A.K. Smiley Library.

Poetry has had a bit of a resurgence lately and brings with it the ability to convey ever broadening ideas within an ever-changing art form. The great thing about poetry is that it gives voices to those who may go unheard and gives us, the readers, a chance to interact with those voices. This latest batch all centralize on the theme of being an outsider, trying to find a place within a society that while requiring their presence, wants that presence to be as small as possible. It requires loyalty with invisibility. These works call into question the results of that type of society and shows that such a way of existing fails all of us.

Felon:Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts is a work concentrating on the life and experiences of a formerly incarcerated person. The work speaks to the struggles of a system that is seemingly unbalanced and unfair while striving to accept one’s own responsibility and actions. Betts uses found poetry created from case files to describe the unfairness of the bond system and how difficult it is to rejoin society once the brand of “felon” has been put upon you. Not only that, but those acquainted with the “felon” can also become ostracized from society and forced to carry the burden regardless of culpability. Immensely moving and devastating in its prose, this work questions how fair it is to continuously punish those after they have already paid their dues.

Everything Must Go: the Life and Death of an American Neighborhood by Kevin Coval, with illustrations by Langston Allston, works to show the desolation caused by the loss of a neighborhood. The idea is turned on its head by showing that the great American neighborhood is not always what we think. Pulling on his own experiences in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago before and after gentrification, Coval shows how the identity of a place is made up of so many different people and how this loss of otherness is detrimental to society as a whole. How those that create a neighborhood are often pushed out and how can that neighborhood stand without the heart that was lost. Coval acknowledges his own role in the process of gentrification and seeks to find his place between what was there before and what has resulted.

Dusk & Dust by Esteban Rodriquez, describes the life of a young boy discovering his otherness within both his family and society as a whole. The work tells the story of the child of immigrant parents who want a better life for him even at the cost of estrangement with those of his own culture. It even refers to him at one point, as the boy from “el otra lado”, or the boy from the other side.  Rodriquez sees himself as someone lost between the two while trying to reconcile both. This work captures the essence of existing in two spheres of identity but belonging to neither.

Deaf republic: Poems by Ilya Kaminsky works with the idea of society in a different way.  Working with an imaginary town, Kaminsky creates a dialogue in which a factitious town falls deaf after the murder of a deaf boy by soldiers. The work postulates what happens to a society if we refuse to listen to what one another has say. The work focuses on our lack of hearing the voices we need to hear the most and is bookended with poems which question whether or not we in our society are deaf to those who need our help.

Each of these works brings us to the question of who makes up our society and do we listen to what they have to say. Give these books a chance and just maybe we all will be a bit closer to answering that question.

Making time to read for fun is tough when you’re a teen. Between bio homework and basketball practice and SAT prep and community service and YouTube and Insta and Finsta and a steady stream of existential crises…it’s like everyone wants a piece of you. Well, if you’re ever tempted to run away from it all, throw your phone out the window* and hide under the covers, I’ve got some reading suggestions for you. These books make excellent companions for those moments when you’re maxed out on memes and you’ve already watched every episode of The Office twice, but I’m warning you, they may keep you up all night.

First up, In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund. Have you ever played the board game CLUE? Remember Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum? This book is a totally modern, thoroughly edgy, perfectly spine-tingling take on the classic game…one that finds prep boarding school students Scarlet Mistry, Finn Plum, Beth “Peacock” Picach, Vaughn Green, Samuel “Mustard” Maestor, and others stranded in a school dorm after a violent winter storm. Things get worse when the teens discover the dead body of their school headmaster, Mr. Boddy. In the Hall with the Knife is a good old-fashioned murder mystery, teeming with a familiar yet fresh cast of characters, all of whom have shady secrets and dark motives that spill out in tantalizing bursts as the story unspools. Warning: this novel is the first in a trilogy, so don’t expect to breathe a sigh of relief after the last page.

Next, if you dressed up like the character Eleven for Halloween (a.k.a. you’re a superfan of the Netflix series Stranger Things) you must read the graphic novel series Paper Girls by Brian Vaughn. The year is 1988. Young newspaper delivery girls Erin, Mac, KJ, and Tiffany experience an Armageddon-esque morning-after-Halloween as they try to deliver their newspapers, clashing with mysterious black-clad figures, stumbling into a foreboding capsule, and slowly realizing they may be the only survivors in their hometown after a terrifying, unexplained blast. If time-traveling hippies, cave-people, dinosaurs, and the 1980s get your heart pumping, join these four bad babes as they battle to save the world…and each other.

Speaking of bad babes, the nonfiction book History Vs. Women: The Defiant Lives that They Don’t Want You to Know by Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams is a comprehensive look at some of the world’s most ambitious, fierce, and impactful women across time. What I really love about the book is that these women’s stories are told in depth, not just as accessories or sidekicks, or a list of heroic accomplishments, but as real people whose experiences often aren’t rosy. These women had to defy cultural expectations to get things done and they did. If you want to epitomize cleverness during Women’s History Month in March, namedropping defiant women from around the globe, get cracking on reading this book now.

No offense to the quadratic formula, but sometimes you need to set that homework aside (temporarily, of course), mute your notifications, ignore your existential angst, and treat yourself to a juicy story. Come in to the A.K. Smiley Public Library and we’ll do our best to help you find one that you can’t put down.

*recommended for ground floor windows only

Perhaps you are already having trouble keeping your new year’s resolutions, so why not try a new month’s resolution instead? A suggestion might be to enhance your knowledge and relax a bit with some new reading material from A.K. Smiley Public Library. Non-fiction books can entertain, educate, engage your mind, and satisfy your curiosity.

An entertaining and educational selection would be Mike Rowe’s “The Way I Heard It,” which is a collection of stories gleaned from his podcast. If his name is familiar, his voice may be even more familiar to fans of the early days of “QVC,” “Dirty Jobs,” and “Deadliest Catch” programs on television. He shares human interest stories about famous people, but does so by sharing interesting and uncommon tales using first names and not revealing their full names until the end of the story. You might pick up on the fact that he was a fan of Paul Harvey and recognize some characters from Rowe’s previous jobs, as well as some celebrities.

If history along with celebrity gossip catches your attention, “The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont,” by Shawn Levy is waiting for you. Originally built in 1929 as a luxury apartment building, Levy shares the evolution of the building into a famous celebrity hotel. He also reveals inside tales of many of its famous residents: Jean Harlow, Natalie Wood, Tab Hunter, Jim Morrison, Rock Hudson, Lindsay Lohan, and John Belushi (including his final stay), just to name a few.

John Belushi, his comedic cohorts and their antics are also revealed in “Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ‘80s Changed Hollywood Forever,” by Nick de Semlyen. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Rick Moranis, and John Candy are all chronicled. The author’s entertaining insider accounts also include behind the scenes information on the making of “Saturday Night Live,” “Ghostbusters,” “Caddyshack,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” and the National Lampoon movies, as well as other shows of that era.

Books, large print books, magazines, newspapers, audio books, music CDs, and DVDs, all on a variety of topics, can be found at A.K. Smiley Public Library. If this beautiful treasure of Redlands is not familiar to you, it is definitely time to come experience what you are missing!

If you fancy yourself a film buff, this could be your favorite time of year, Awards Season. The Golden Globes get the season started, followed by the SAGS, the Spirit Awards, and then, the most coveted of all, The Oscars. If you are like me and try to watch the Oscar nominated films before the big day, which is February 9^th, then come and visit A.K. Smiley Public Library and check out some of the Oscar nominated films on DVD.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” written, directed, and produced by Quentin Tarantino, has a total of ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor, and Best Supporting Actor. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a throwback film to the golden age of Hollywood. With an all-star cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, this film has a definite Quentin Tarantino feel to it that has made him famous.

Another big Oscar contender is the film “Joker” with a total of eleven Oscar nominations, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker. “Joker” is the origin story of the DC comic book villain the Joker. This film is a darker take on the character, which people are not as accustomed to seeing. Joaquin Phoenix has already won the Golden Globe and the SAG for Best Leading Actor in this role, but judge for yourself and come and check out this dark interpretation of “Joker.”

“Judy,” a biographical drama about the legendary Judy Garland, did not receive a nomination for Best Picture, but Renee Zellweger, who plays Garland, is nominated for Best Lead Actress in a motion picture. Like Phoenix, Renee Zellweger has already won both the Golden Globe and SAG awards.

So, get your favorite movie watching snacks and make your way to A.K. Smiley Public Library to check out these and other Oscar nominated titles available here for your viewing pleasure.

Tick tock, folks! The future is almost here!

It’s hard to believe that 2020 is upon us. To me, that date has always seemed to belong to science fiction, a time we can only imagine. Shall we bravely embrace this new world, or retreat into a bygone time, to something more familiar, if not to us directly, then to our ancestors? The good news is that you may come into A. K. Smiley Public Library and find materials with which to jump into the future or to escape into the past.

There is no better place to delve into yesteryear than the library’s Heritage Room. A treasure trove of local history of our town and its surrounding areas, you may discover examples of local stories ranging from broad topics to the minutiae of everyday life. A colleague of mine recently told me of a collection of letters being cataloged there, letters exchanged during World War II between two Iowan sweethearts while he was serving abroad and she was attending college. They married after the war, making Redlands their home in 1968. These letters will be available soon for viewing by those of us who wish to retreat from the great unknown of the 21st century and revisit the familiar themes of our youth or that of our family.

Of course, letter-writing was a common mode of communication in the WWII era. I wondered what else in the library might use this now older format, but in a literary way. You may be familiar with well-known novels like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” or Stephen King’s “Carrie,” as novels that use not only letters as story-telling devices but also forms such as diaries and newspaper clippings.

Smiley Library’s new book collection contains many of these epistolary novels, as they’re called. Not surprisingly, some use letter-writing in the themes of WWII, like our Redlands couple did. “Home Front Girls” by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan is one such work. Completely comprised of letters, it tells the stories of two women, the spouses left at home to wonder, worry and wait. Glory is a young mother of a toddler in Massachusetts. Rita, in Iowa, has a grown son and a husband who is really too old to go to war, but does anyway.

The great conflicts of this time and its trauma, for those at war and at home, fosters a deep bond between the two women. Their characters are drawn by use of the introspective quality inherent in the composing a letter, as well as the empathetic; each writer is compelled to consider her correspondent’s point of view. There is no omniscient narrator to tell their story; they essentially tell their own. Just as with the artifacts of our Redlands couple, epistolary novels tend to create realism, not only for the characters but for us readers too.

Now for those of us willing to look into the uncertain future, a new sci-fi book, “This Is How You Lose the Time War,” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, is set in an era of our descendants during a war taking place across time and space. In this poetic novella, also using the device of letters, we learn in dispatches between rival super-agents named “Red” and “Blue” that even enemies can find common ground in sharing and inquiring through a letter. Red seems to sum up the intent of the epistolary form when she shares that those in her faction, “… think in public. Our notions inform one another, correct, expand, reform. Which is why we win.” Hmm, maybe we needn’t fear 2020 and beyond; maybe the past and the future aren’t so disparate after all.