All Aboard the ARC: Feel Your Way Through: A Book of Poetry by Kelsea Ballerini

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Kelsea Ballerini is the third singer-celebrity in recent memory to release a poetry collection. Following Lana Del Rey’s Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass and Halsey’s I Would Leave Me If I Could, Ballerini’s Feel Your Way Through is as much a memoir as it is a collection of poetry. It is also delightfully unpretentious and genuine in a way one wouldn’t necessarily expect from an artist who has achieved such success at such a young age.

Poignant, haunting, and yet never overly melancholy, Feel Your Way Through leads the reader on a journey with Ballerini chronicling her life up until now, with all of its fierce loves, heartbreaks, hard knocks, and triumphs. The title itself is revealing and may carry multiple meanings for both readers and Ballerini herself. Feeling one’s way through could refer to moving along a path which you can’t see clearly, so you have to rely on your gut and your instincts to keep from stumbling. It also could be taken more literally, urging readers to lead with their hearts even when it hurts.

Written with a seasoned songwriter’s ear for rhythm, this deeply heartfelt and startlingly intimate collection is sure to delight long-time Ballerini fans as well as people who haven’t listened to her music.

Written with a seasoned songwriter’s ear for rhythm, this deeply heartfelt and startlingly intimate collection is sure to delight long-time Ballerini fans as well as people who haven’t listened to her music. I can confidently say that this is a book I’ll be eagerly putting in the hands of my customers.

Feel Your Way Through: A Book of Poetry is due to be released on November 16th, 2021 by Ballantine Books and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: September 23rd, 2021

*Normal People: A Novel* by Sally Rooney

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

I think part of Sally Rooney’s magic is that she sometimes expresses the most profound truths about the human experience in the simplest language, in a way that makes you want to close the book, look up at the wall, and mouth wow over and over again. Her sentences are more prayers than anything else.

Poem for the Day: September 22nd, 2021

[The house was just twinkling in the moon light] by Gertrude Stein

The house was just twinkling in the moon light,   
And inside it twinkling with delight,
Is my baby bright.
Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling   
with the moonlight,
Bless my baby bless my baby bright,
Bless my baby twinkling with delight,
In the house twinkling in the moon light,
Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks
and he always thinks when he knows and he always   
knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he
is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby

Today’s poem is taken from Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas which was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1999. It is available to order wherever books are sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: September 22nd, 2021

Elegance is achieved when everything superfluous has been discarded, and the archer discovers simplicity and concentration; the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful. The snow is lovely because it has only one color, the sea is lovely because it appears to be a completely flat surface, but both sea and snow are deep and know their own qualities.

The Archer was published in 2020 by Knopf Publishing Group and is available to order wherever books are sold.

5 Books That Changed My Life

Link to original video posted on TikTok:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRbeke5d/

I’ve been revamping my socials to all have matching handles and this is my second attempt at #BookTok. The first one got a little bit of traction but I think I know what I’m doing a little bit better this time around. To accompany the video, though, I’m going to give you, my blog readers, a little something extra: a gallery of the book covers of the books featured in my #BookTok *and* a blog-exclusive quote graphic from each book that I won’t be posting anywhere else.

*The Voracious Bibliophile’s* 5 Books That Changed My Life

“I don’t want to lose the boy with the bread.” – Suzanne Collins, *The Hunger Games*

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” – Alice Walker, *The Color Purple*

“To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.” – Mary-Louise Parker, *Dear Mr. You*

“How wild it was, to let it be.” – Cheryl Strayed, *Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail*

“The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.” – Anthony Doerr, *All the Light We Cannot See*

A Small Reminder for You Today…

Alt Text: Reminder: You only get one shot at life. Do not waste your time or energy on people or things that don’t nourish your soul, invigorate your mind, and bring you happiness.

Poem for the Day: September 21st, 2021

*Somewhere Else: Poems* by Matthew Shenoda

Relics by Matthew Shenoda

Scrabbling bones together like a gathering of river stones

Bones become sacred
Human remains, memories of cartilage
Piled centuries high
Skulls and leg remnants begin to tell the stories of before.

I am the once-severed arm of a young girl
Scrambling for a foothold in this desert
Where once my enemy chased did not live

I am the fingers of a woman whose knuckles live beneath a flower box

We remember each other through these bones
Through the songs of calcium deficiency and famine strings that strum us into night
We are the gathering of old-timers whose eye sockets tell stories of victory

We are a memory shaped by vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time

I am the keeper of a man whose only hope was grounding toil
Scrubbing my skin with the earth for food

I am the elbow of children whose eyes switched at the thought of cold

I am the shin of garbage collectors building stamina for a city to come

We are a memory shaped by vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time
We are the dissipating by the skeletons of time
We are the dissipating cartilage of our great-grandchildren's memory holding to their sockets by a sinew of hope

Making sense of these bones we reassemble history
Making ancestral tapestries in the shape of retaining walls

We are a memory shaped by a vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time

You are the skin behind the clouds

Matthew Shenoda currently teaches at San Francisco State University and works as an activist in the Bay Area. Somewhere Else: Poems was released in 2005 by Coffee House Press and is available to order on their website.

Quote for the Day: September 21st, 2021

Big parts of us got broken, parts of our hearts, minds, and beings. Yet we keep getting up, lurching on. We dance with a limp.
Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

Resilience isn’t Annie telling you the sun will come out tomorrow; it’s Annie telling you it might not and helping you up anyway.

I love Anne Lamott. She’s like your childhood pastor if your childhood pastor was super-cool and swore sometimes. A large part of her oeuvre, at least what I’ve read, is focused on resilience. Almost everyone has heard of resilience but few people can actually tell you what it is. It is not Live, Laugh, Loving your way through life like a mindless simpleton. Resilience isn’t Annie telling you the sun will come out tomorrow; it’s Annie telling you it might not and helping you up anyway.

New Social Handles!!!

Hello there beloved readers, I have some exciting news. The Voracious Bibliophile now has dedicated TikTok and Pinterest accounts. So now, you can follow this blog on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog.

TikTok Discoveries: Confrontations – Single by Alex

I love discovering artists on social media and TikTok seems to be the best app out there right now for creatives to have a platform for showcasing their work. I was scrolling through TikTok this morning and ran across @songsbyalex and his new single, “Confrontations”. In it, he talks about the double lives queer people are made to live when they’re growing up. There are all these rules and codes you have to follow in order to fit into the larger heteronormative culture, because refusing to do so often leads to ostracism in the best-case scenarios and bullying/harassment/violence in the worst-case scenarios.

That’s really what “Confrontations” is all about—those first forays into learning and unlearning to find out who we really are when we can finally be free.

Even when you come out of the closet, you still have to do a lot of work figuring out who you really are. You’ve spent years, decades even, masking your true self behind behaviors that kept you (and your secret) safe from exposure. You don’t even know which parts of you are authentic and which you had to manufacture in order to make yourself palatable to the rest of the world. That’s really what “Confrontations” is all about—those first forays into learning and unlearning to find out who we really are when we can finally be free.

“Confrontations” is now available to stream wherever you get your music. Do yourself a favor and give Alex a listen.