Ada Limón was just named the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate in July. Here, writer/actor Amber Tamblyn speaks with her about this huge honor and how poetry can change the world: Mexican-American poet Ada Limón has long been the not-so-secret weapon of the poetry world—a powerhouse writer who belongs to the people. For two decades, Limón’s work has spoken directly to the hearts of our humanity, making us feel like we belong to her poems, and that, somehow, her poems also belong to us. Through her six...

Now that both record and bookstores are few and far between, where can you go to score the latest ‘zines? The answer may lie in your local library. You’re at your public library looking for a book on abortion. Searching the nonfiction shelves, you come up with nothing, so you make your way to the information desk and ask the clerk for help. The librarian looks in the catalogue and, sure enough, there are no books on the topic in the catalogue—but they do have a...

In light of the recent overturn of Roe V Wade, blocking access to legal abortion in at least 14 states, there has been a lot of conversation happening on reproductive rights and social practices. The book Ejaculate Responsibly by Gabrielle Stanley Blair uses 28 brief arguments fueled by meticulously sourced facts and studies to challenge men, particularly men against abortion, to take responsibility when it comes to unplanned pregnancies. Gabrielle Stanley Blair, a Mormon mother of six and creator of the parent lifestyle blog Design Mom, calls attention...

  There aren’t many astrology books that focus on the in-depth meaning of the moon. Luckily, Narayana Montufar’s best selling astrology book Moon Signs: Unlock Your Inner Luminary Power serves as the fantastic lunar book to boost and guide us through every element of the moon. In astrology, the moon represents our emotions, maternal instincts, emotions (how we express and experience our feelings), the divine feminine, intuition, memories, and comforts. But, it’s so much more than that. The moon shows us how we can help others —...

A cursed priestess, radioactive cockroach women, and a warrior with her head chopped off, along with many more symbolic and oh-so-real stories of the female race through the ages fill the book, Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby. A stunning debut, this collection of twenty-one flash fiction and short stories brings women from as far back as the Trojan era right up to modern-day life to the same level, presenting the reader with a stark reality of how similar we all are in the...

ACNE: A Memoir By Laura Chinn (Hachette Books)  Let’s say you were to pick up a copy of a book that had a very straightforward title, something that made you think of your own goofy teen years. Pretend that the first couple of pages in this book neatly adhered to said title and took you to that dorky, hormonal place. Imagine that the book then veered into a painfully funny, raw, and even scary collection of personal essays that—stay with me—still somehow managed to incorporate the title as a unifying...

Amber Tamblyn’s Poetry Corner  We Are Mermaids (Graywolf Press) is a potent meditation on personal excavations, written with wit, honesty, and introspection by the singular trans writer, cultural critic, and poet-at-large Stephanie Burt. Burt’s poems are illuminations of life’s many transitions; of living between worlds, identities, beliefs, and stories. In the poem “My 1994,” Burt writes: “I didn’t know. But I knew. I took off the dress/Kay offered and apologized for my striped boxers./I called myself a kid in a candy store/When I was a teen in...

Best known for her novels Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017), New York Times bestselling author Celeste Ng is a wildly imaginative creator of family sagas. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, is a suspense story revolving around a young man and his estranged mom that comes out October 4. Here, Ng shares the routines that keep her writing her way into the future. Your new novel, Our Missing Hearts, is set in a dystopian future America. What elements of today’s world did you draw upon to create...

My introduction to books about grief happened a few weeks after my mother died. It was 1996, the weekly support group I’d been attending had just ended, and the counselor invited me back to his office to give me a book that I “had to read.” It was new, he cheered, so very confident in his recommendation. The book was Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, and as the counselor predicted, it changed the trajectory of my post-loss life. In its 283 pages, I learned how other women,...

The Fortunes of a Jaded Woman  By Carolyn Huynh  (Simon and Schuster) At its heart, Carolyn Huynh’s debut novel is a love story—because love is the reason the entire Duong family is cursed. Long ago, their ancestor Oanh left her marriage for true love, a brave and unconventional decision that her mother-in-law wasn’t going to let her get away with. And so she sought the aid of a fearsome witch to ensure that Oanh suffered for her shameful choice. The curse? That no Duong ever experience true love...