The Arboretum Library’s book group explores the portrayal of western North American landscape in fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, letters, graphic novels, etc. The group generally, but not always, meets the 4th Wednesday of the month in the Arboretum Library. When the weather is good and the mosquitos are less active, the group will meet outside in appropriate places in the gloriously, beautiful grounds of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. At other times the group will meet in the Arboretum Library with social distancing and masking if desired. The group leader will decide each month whether the meeting will be in-person (in the Arboretum Library or outside on the Arboretum grounds) or on Zoom.
The group uses a modified version of the
Shared Inquiry™ method developed by the
Great Books Foundation. The discussion is greatly enhanced if the chosen book of the month is read, although we welcome those who just want to listen. Let the host know you want to listen. New participants are always welcome!
Click
here to see the questions already asked for this year’s past books and check out the history of the book club by hovering on the
tab and explore the books from previous years.
For more information and to be added to the e-mail reminder list about the Community Book Discussion Group, please contact, Arboretum Librarian Emeritus, Susan Eubank, at [email protected]. You must RSVP to Susan for the discussions you would like to attend.
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2022.
“Taylor is an expert at concentration; rarely deterred, though heavyhearted in her pursuit of truth, her poems are precise, crisp. “Normalcy devastates. Stillness lies to me,” she writes as the author is once again reminded, and here to remind us how purposefully memory can be erased, the way life goes on despite its wounds, that we are just filling the holes with sand until once again, it erodes. Concentrate begs us to do just that for our insured survival.”– Ashia Ajani, Split Lip Magazine
Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins–a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against–and between–women of color. Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”
