Shadowlands Selections: May 2024

By the Society for Women of Letters Leadership Council

“Shadowlands Selections” is a monthly column for paid subscribers of Shadowlands Dispatch that features recommended reading, listening, and watching from the Leadership Council of the Society for Women of Letters (Melissa Cain Travis, Julie Miller, Annie Crawford, Rebekah Valerius, and Megan Rials). Every month, we share the cultural products (books, films, podcasts, etc.) currently captivating our imaginations. Our May 2024 recommendations range from an inaugural poetry collection by Anna Lewis (published by Wiseblood books), a book on the cosmological basics of the universe by Katie Mack, the first installment of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next fantasy detective series, and Alan Jacobs’s magnificent biography of C.S. Lewis, The Narnian. Below, we explain our recommendations in greater detail. We hope you enjoy!

Memory’s Abacus: Poems by Anna Lewis

In this collection—Anna Lewis’s first—the narrator traces the shape of her life, reflecting on the dull ache of grief, the joys of parenthood, and the pain of broken relationships, among others. Particularly, Lewis’s deft references and allusions to Greek mythology build momentum over the course of collection not only to illustrate her life situations more in vivid color, but to fill in the edges of the author’s life that the strictures of poetry allow her only to hint at. Most impressive are Lewis’s mastery of meter and the rhythms of poetry and her deft interweaving of certain repeated words and images (such as water, traditionally associated with memory) across the poems, which serve to unify this collection covering a wide swath of life experiences. Most of all, Lewis’s poems spur readers to reflect on their own “one life, that’s more, / almost, than we can bear?” In “Memory’s Abacus,” Lewis illustrates the integral role memory places in this process and that we must not shirk either from the pain or joy in the process and growth over the span of a lifetime, for the two are inseparable.

—Megan Rials