6 books to check out this spring

With continued heaviness and grief in the world, spring is a good reminder of renewal and hope. To navigate these feelings, one might want to turn to books that encompass a range of emotions, including fear, sadness, nostalgia and love. Here are six books, spanning fiction, memoir, literary essays and poetry, to explore this spring.

“The Tree Doctor” by Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Graywolf Press, $17). “The Tree Doctor” is narrated by a woman who returns to California at the beginning of the pandemic to tend to her mother who has been taken into a care facility. Stranded in her childhood home, and reluctant to return to her husband and daughters in Hong Kong, she spends her days reviving the neglected Japanese-inspired garden her parents nurtured throughout their lives. She hires a local tree doctor to help her, and they work to bring the garden back to life, including a dormant cherry tree.

The garden also becomes a metaphor for her own life — a woman in middle age whose dormant career, emotional and sexual life undergo a transformation after she embarks on an affair with the tree doctor. “Can you wake up a body the way you can wake up a tree?” she asks him.

Mockett’s book is a thoughtful exploration of life and death and all the cycles in between, as well as finding one’s place in the world.

“Thunder Song: Essays” by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Counterpoint Press, $27). This collection of personal essays by Coast Salish author Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is beautiful and heartbreaking. Featuring a range of lyrical essays that reflect on the personal, familial and ancestral, LaPointe — who is from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes — writes about her personal experiences growing up as an Indigenous woman. She details how she learned to embrace her identity, empower herself and heal through music after experiencing sexual assault and violence, and a miscarriage.

Tender, vulnerable and thought-provoking the book is dedicated to LaPointe’s great-grandmother Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert, who “believed in the healing power of music.” Hilbert’s spirit is woven into the book through the stories that she passed down to LaPointe and others. 

“Something About Living” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (University of Akron Press, $16.95). Written before the invasion of Gaza, this moving collection of poems by local poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won the Akron Poetry Prize in 2022 and will be published this April.

Shifting between the Palestinian territories and the U.S., this heart-wrenching collection is, in part, an elegy for the dead, the dying and all that has been lost. While death, remembrance of the dead and preservation of a people and their history are key strands throughout the book, Tuffaha does an exceptional job of showing how life can be a living death through lines such as “we perform our ablutions / in tear gas / our limbs stun / our hearts grenade / our wounds live” and “all language is littered with corpses / of words.” One of the most haunting poems is “Tantoura Redux,” about a massacre of Palestinian Arab villagers in 1948 by a brigade which went on to form the Israeli Defence Force. Tuffaha writes about how the massacre was denied at the time but has subsequently been proven to have occurred.

“Bite by Bite” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Ecco, $26.99). Part personal history, part food history, the latest release from poet and essay writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a lively and delicious read. Each illustrated chapter is dedicated to individual ingredients from vegetables, fruit, herbs, spices and nuts, to a handful of cooked foods such as waffles, leche flan and lumpia. She explores her relationship to each, the memories she has, the history, production, and myths surrounding them — both savory and unsavory. 

Her book is an invitation to ask what nourishes us? As Nezhukumatathil says in the introduction, “What is home if not the first place you learn what does (and does not) nourish you?”

“You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” edited and introduced by Ada Limón (Milkweed, $25). Contemporary American poets were asked to reflect on their relationship to the natural world in this evocative anthology of poems edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Around 50 writers contributed, including local poets Cedar Sigo and Laura Da’. The poems range from meditating on planting flowers in a garden to flora and fauna in parks and the wild, and express how each poet has their unique — and frequently surprising — relationship to nature.

Some poets reflect on their lack of a relationship with nature such as José Olivarez: “my relationship with (love) (nature) (money) (fill in the blank) is like my relationship to weather — / i only see it when it’s pouring on my head. / i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with. / i didn’t ask. i never learned. or even wondered (about their names). / (their families) (their longings) i only dreamed of (me) / climbing onto their shoulders.” Other poets evoke lush imagery of their gardens, such as Jennifer L. Knox’s “Central Iowa, Scenic Overlook”: “First come sage, sun- / flowers, and bumblebees so pollen-socked they can’t lift / off, thus, they lumber over earthstar-perforated patchy grass / like unshaved sheep, dodging the dog, who will eat them.”

“Until August” by Gabriel García Márquez (Knopf, $22). Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez wrote “Until August” while suffering from dementia and asked for it to be “destroyed” because he didn’t think it was good enough to see the light of day. His sons disagreed with his assessment and published it a decade after his death.

The short novel is told from the perspective of a happily married woman who makes a yearly pilgrimage to her mother’s grave on a Caribbean Island. On one visit, she sleeps with a stranger. He leaves her money while she is asleep, and she feels insulted by the gesture. She projects her guilt onto her husband and slowly becomes unmoored from her life, her marriage and her children.

The short novel is fast-moving, and readers see the protagonist’s mind progressively deteriorate. Initially, the prose is rich and sensuous but becomes less sumptuous as the story progresses. It is unclear whether this is an intentional act or a mirror of the author’s physical demise. In either case, the novel shows how secrets can destroy people and their families.