Thought Process
BOOKSHELF
Recent Releases Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning Cathy Park Hong ’98 ONE WORLD
Early in her brilliant new collection of essays, Cathy Park Hong tells the story of a poetry reading that went poorly because she was suffering from a gripping depression. Readings are always difficult for her, she explains, because she doesn’t look the part of The Poet. “Asians lack presence,” she writes. “Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.” Minor Feelings is simultaneously sprawling and narrow, geopolitical and generational, class conscious and cross-cultural beyond class, deeply moving and laugh-out-loud funny (like when her father opens a Cleveland phone book and calls a random Kim for a Korean restaurant recommendation, or her description of Oberlin’s art department). A poet with three published collections, Hong brings powerful, compact language and keen-eyed observation to these essays, and though she didn’t set out to write a textbook or a manifesto, there is much to learn in its pages, and much with which to reckon for any reader.
The Safety of Edges Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma ’98 MARROWSTONE PRESS
What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues Clifford Thompson ’85 OTHER PRESS
The narrator of one poem in this poetry collection delights in hearing a girl sing a made-up song in the quiet of a library, “singing that seeks no applause,” though he knows she’ll soon be hushed. In another, a young boy laments that his parents fail to see the magic of the music he creates upon learning the sloppy, knuckled version of Chopsticks from a babysitter. Many of the poems of Pruiksma’s first book-length collection concern themselves with sounds made but not heard or understood, or withheld for fear they wouldn’t be.
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Selected by Time magazine as “one of the most anticipated books” of the fall 2019 season, What It Is is Thompson’s attempt to understand his country in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. His exploration includes interviews with three Trump supporters he conducted as a way to pierce the bubble he had previously lived in— the one that prompts him to quip that he had once been “the only nonracist black person in America.” The Times Literary Supplement wrote, “An engaging and important book, an earnest attempt to analyze our chaotic moment and to project a possible way out of it through dialogue and reflection.”
Organized Money: How Progressives Can Leverage the Financial System to Work for Them, Not Against Them Keith Mestrich and Mark A. Pinsky ’79 THE NEW PRESS
Pinsky led the $150 billion community development financial institution industry for more than a decade. Here, he and his cowriter argue that by creating financial institutions and products that align with their values, political progressives can achieve their goals—from racial equity and reversing climate change to voting and labor rights. Progressive finance, they assert, has a 250-year history that has been hidden in plain sight but is now surging.
A History of African American Poetry Lauri Ramey ’74 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Covering African American poetry from its origins in the transatlantic slave trade to present-day hip-hop, this book argues, among other things, for a reconsideration of the American literary canon. Ramey, who is the Xiaoxiang Distinguished Professor (and director of the British and American Poetry Research Center) at Hunan Normal University and a professor and director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles, made extensive use of reference material from the Oberlin College Libraries and Archives and credits faculty members such as Calvin Hernton for playing important roles in developing her interest in the subject.