This week's recommended reading comes to us from poet extraordinaire and past CSU Poetry Center volunteer, Nathan Kemp:

Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch (Hawthorne Books, 2012)

Lidia Yuknavitch retells Sigmund Freud’s famous case study—Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria—in a modern setting. Yuknavitch’s Dora lives in Seattle and like Ida Bauer—who Freud labeled Dora—rebels against the psycho-sexual narrative Freud tries to impose upon her. Thanks to Caroline Crew for the initial recommendation!

Caroline Cabrera, The Bicycle Year (H_NGM_N, 2015)

Caroline Cabrera’s second poetry collection begins, “You keep trying to get all your ducks in a row,” but it is defined by its resistance to do so. Cabrera rambles into a kind of thought process that preserves through its attention to our most instinctual behaviors. This is a great summer book because of its common truths:

The first time I smelled lilacs

I couldn’t believe them

like the time a teen girl

sat across from me

in a coffee shop

and asked what it feels like

to fall in love