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 parliament of owls. So this 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.
My Infinity: Poems
Didi Jackson, Red Hen Press, 96 pages. $17.95.
I wasn’t able to see the day turn aperture, / turn curlicue, quirk andwhorl…
In her second poetry collection, Didi Jackson shifts among lyrical strategies, sometimes earthy and elsewhere mystical. An assistant professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, she spends part of the year in Rochester, Vt., and many of these poems are meditations prompted by hikes in her Green Mountain surrounds. Here, she finds a quivering, sentient landscape busy with birds — sapsucker, kingfisher, yellow-rumped warbler — recurring companions for a writer fascinated by times of transition, dawn and dusk.
Jackson often makes passing reference to visual artists — Brancusi, Rothko, Stella — but a reader must already know their works for the allusion to land. Most fully realized among her poems of artistic homage is a series about a pioneering but long-obscure Swedish abstract painter, Hilma af Klint. Jackson summons af Klint’s living presence, combining biographical details with her own insights and, at moments, the elder artist’s voice: “Eros is the fusion of all colors.”
This is a book that may seem more in-process than unified and complete, yet the poet’s mix of approaches offers frequent insights and pleasures.
— Jim Schley
Feeding the Wild Rabbit
Angela Patten, Kelsay Books, 92 pages. $20.
He opened the tin of Mansion floor wax, / ladled thick orange paste in plopping gobs…
Angela Patten’s poems are traditionally metered: “Mornings I lie in bed sipping coffee / letting my mind off its weekday leash / to go roaming like a multicolored mongrel.” Born and raised in Dublin, she’s a longtime dual citizen of Ireland and Burlington, now senior lecturer emerita in English at the University of Vermont.
Her fifth poetry collection offers an uninterrupted stream of verse gliding to and fro through childhood memories and a present steeped in reemerging family stories.
Patten has an ear for words in startling combinations, as in “sullen, maybe stolen,” “tawdry” and “gaudy,” and “eagerness” and “auguries.”
Some of these recent pieces seem constrained by an old-fashioned decorousness. Yet Patten’s poems are consistently so well made — and her verbal wit so smartly employed — that a reader’s lasting impression will probably be the “thisness” she catches in expressive details, such as the layering of a mourning dove’s “low notes” with “the dull rumble / of a stumpgrinder at work.”
— J.S.
The Manager: A Tale of the Cold War
Christopher Shaw, Outskirts Press, 311 pages. $9.99.
She sat at the table, lit a bowl. We drank tea.
Not long after the “Miracle on Ice,” when the U.S. defeated the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics, magazine editor Walter Loving picks up a hitchhiker outside a Mexican restaurant — who just happens to be the manager of a Russian hockey team. That simple act will massively impact Loving’s life for the next 33 years, sending him careening into a world of KGB spies, beautiful figure skaters and corrupt FBI agents.
From a snowy road in Lake Placid, N.Y., to Montréal to Siberia to protesting at Standing Rock in North Dakota, Christopher Shaw’s latest book, The Manager, is an expansive and thrilling tale of espionage and the strange ways lives and love intertwine. It’s the third book the Vermont author and former editor of Adirondack Life has penned as part of a series set in the New York mountains. The book also delves into the business of journalism and how it’s changed over the decades, all set against a tapestry of Cold War politics and a love of Russian poets.
— Chris Farnsworth
Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn From Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Broadleaf Books, 302 pages, $27.99.
Motherhood calls on us to be birdlike creatures as we seek our belonging.
Bringing a child into a world facing ecological collapse prompted Rochester, Vt., writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder to confront her fears and conclude that human beings can best respond by mothering — their own children and the planet as a whole.
In a series of essays, written during her pregnancy and her daughter’s first three years, the poet with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School proposes a broad definition of “motherhood,” one severed from gender and a relationship with a child: “the capacity for expansive love and care that human beings are capable of extending to others, within and beyond the bounds of species.”
Barn owls, right whales, single-celled organisms and the writer’s young child all offer lessons on mothering. The Earth nourishes us, providing oxygen, food, water and shelter, Steinauer-Scudder writes, asking, “What, then, does it look like to mother the Earth in turn?” The author provides some compelling snapshots.
— Mary Ann Lickteig
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
Sarah Yahm, Dzanc Books, 347 pages. $27.95.
[H]is words sounded off to his own ears because the salt still burned in his pockets.
Some Orthodox Jews believe that putting salt in their pockets keeps evil spirits away. Louise Rackoff never bought into such nonsense, nor did her now-deceased mother, whose shiva Louise flees to hook up with Leon Rosenberg, aspiring therapist and nice Jewish boy. “My mother was raised an Orthodox Jew and then became an Orthodox Freudian, so she pathologized me with religious fervor,” Louise explains. Her mother might be dead, but Louise still can’t escape her scorn.
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, by central Vermont author Sarah Yahm, follows Louise and Leon as they build a life together. But when Louise is diagnosed with the same neurological disorder that killed her mother, she leaves the family she and Leon created so she can die on her own terms.
From its opening lines, Yahm’s debut novel crackles with wit, cleverness and heartbreaking tenderness. One needn’t have been raised by a New York Jewish mother to appreciate this gem. After all, what family doesn’t have its meshuggaas?
— Ken Picard
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
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