Page 32: Short Takes on Five Vermont Books

Seven Days writers can’t possibly read, much less review, all the books that arrive in a steady stream by post, email and, in one memorable case, a skulk of foxes. So this occasional feature is our way of introducing you to a handful of books by Vermont authors. To do that, we contextualize each book just a little and quote a single representative sentence from, yes, page 32.

The Long Grief Journey: How Long-Term Unresolved Grief Can Affect Your Mental Health and What to Do About It

Pamela D. Blair and Bradie McCabe Hansen, Sourcebooks, 416 pages. $16.99.

Are you ready to let go of some things or ask for help?

Grief is an integral part of being human. Grief demands attention. Grief changes us. And grief does not magically evaporate — or even ebb — 365 days after a loved one dies. Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that a year signals time to move on, but, as Pamela D. Blair and Bradie McCabe Hansen caution in The Long Grief Journey, “Healing from loss and grief is not a race to the finish.”

Blair, a psychotherapist, and McCabe Hansen, a psychologist, have applied their combined 50 years of clinical experience to write an invaluable guide and workbook for those navigating “the gauntlet of grief” and those trying to help them.

With jargon-free explication, meaningful anecdotes and actionable steps, the Shelburne-based coauthors provide a sturdy, supportive scaffolding upon which people can gradually climb toward the light “while holding space for [their] love and loss.”

— M.P.

Life Lines: Poems From the Pandemic

Cinse Bonino, Blurb, 177 pages. $20.

My father’s old hat suddenly feels like magical protection.

During the pandemic, Cinse Bonino wrote short poems describing her feelings and posted them on social media. “It was my way of coping with not knowing how long I, the people I loved, or even complete strangers would get to live,” she writes in the introduction to these 531 poems. “It was as if I were worried we would wake up and discover that the lifelines on our hands had gotten unexpectedly shorter while we were sleeping.”

Contemplating life expectancy became a lifeline of a different sort. Facing fear, sadness, isolation and uncertainty, Bonino, who lives in Middlebury, distilled potentially overwhelming emotions into potent poems that work like condensed therapy sessions. “I’m using the 1/4-sized teaspoon of hope I have to dig a tiny depression under all the heaviness,” she writes. “I can make room next to me here if you need it.”

Her observations, experiences and “little bits of glitter joy” that “glisten in the mire” fit five or six to a page. A former professor who has published four other books, Bonino writes that she highly respects physicists but “believes linguists might just save this world.”

— M.A.L.

Fire Index: Poems

Bethany Breitland, Green Writers Press, 64 pages. $15.95.

Maybe love doesn’t look like you / having to die so I can live either.

In her poem “Prayer for Something Else,” Charlotte poet Bethany Breitland imagines a kind of counterpoint between domestic tasks — sweeping the floor, crimping the pie — and a more spiritual realm: “Will you help me sweep my religion away? / Can you become a woman, and I a stag? / Can you become a tree and I a song?”

This thought-provoking poem is found in Breitland’s debut collection, Fire Index, winner of the 2022 Sundog Poetry Book Award. The annual honor is presented to a Vermont writer for their first or second manuscript. Breitland’s book, no longer in manuscript form, was published by Green Writers Press of Brattleboro in April.

The volume contains several poems, collectively titled “Glossary of Terms,” that are an exploration of language through a particular word: integrity, altar, hypocrite. Breitland pursues that theme in her title poem, which is organized in alphabetical order and presented like a reference book. Included in her S words are these lines: “Sister (see; snow) / Snow (see; sorrow) / Soil (see; home).”

— S.P.

Vermont Reggae Fest: The Power of Music: The First Five Years in Burlington Vermont

Bobby Dean Hackney, DL4 Music Enterprises, 97 pages. $45.

Don handed Bobby an artist pad with a colorful drawing skillfully sketched out…

Musician Bobby Dean Hackney founded the Vermont Reggae Fest in 1986, holding the inaugural event for a few hundred attendees in Burlington’s Battery Park. A member of legendary Detroit punk band Death, Hackney also started a reggae band, Lambsbread, in Vermont. His love of reggae led him to spearhead the truly grassroots festival.

As the Underhill resident documents in a retrospective book, over the course of his five years as director, the festival grew to an estimated 40,000 people by 1990. Along with his friend Alfred “Tuna” Snider, Hackney turned an idea into an institution. From local bands to big-time acts such as Burning Spear and Pato Banton, the festival consistently brought top-notch reggae to Vermont. Under Hackney’s direction, it was always free.

Hackney stepped away after 1990 and handed the reins of the Reggae Fest to others, who would continue the event until 2002. But his book shows that those five years were as important to him and his family as they were to the Vermont music scene.

— C.F.

Entanglements: Physics, Love, and Wilderness Dreams

Jack Mayer, Proverse Hong Kong, 123 pages. $19.95

Maria should be in high school, but Felicia is her third.

Child, that is. Author and retired pediatrician Jack Mayer has “seen the wide eyes of famine on the Canadian border” at his Enosburg Falls practice. There, the subjects of his poem “Madonna and Child” have come to his rural medical office because the infant isn’t growing. Mayer’s diagnosis, “failure to thrive,” applies equally to mother and child. The good doctor suggests three weeks in foster care for the latter. “You can visit, stay as long as you like,” he tells Maria.

Mayer’s second poetry collection and fourth book was inspired both by his pediatric practice and by a phenomenon in physics called quantum entanglement. Simply put, what happens to one subatomic particle instantly and inexplicably affects another particle with which it’s entangled, regardless of their distance apart. For Mayer, who now lives in Middlebury, this spooky interconnection also exists at the macro level, where similarly mysterious forces affect the trends of human behavior. Even readers normally wary of poetry will find Mayer’s free verse to be honest, accessible and real.

— K.P.