Emily Dickinson
Her poems are always earnest and honest and she simply put out those dashes without question because it felt right to her; she was just herself in a space where no one cared about her voice, which made it that much more eager and courageous.
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s divine comedy was a spiritual exegesis that still continues today to show us very much how we must go deep into our own shadows to find our exaltation; in order to rise, we must fall and that our existence is a continuous love story.
Ursula Le Guin – Lavinia
I loved this piece of historical fiction because, partly my bias, it hits home for me as someone of Samnite ancestry, but really, because of Ursula’s imagination. Le Guin’s ability to ‘literally’ map out stories, as she did in most of her books, with this setting and how she created a rich feminist historical novel from an unseen character of the old canon, Lavinia, in Virgil’s The Aeneid, then brought her to life with such an intelligent, perceptive emotionally charged eye. Le Guin’s prose was flowing; I was able to revel in intimate conversations between a reconstruction of why and how the poet created the protagonist and how that resonated for the character subconsciously in the book.
The Moon of The Crusted Snow – Waubgeshig Rice
I recently read this Canadian book. When a writer takes personal risks to be authentic and fearless, it resonates because it comes from heart and home and I really felt that. I loved this book because of how the third-person narration was done with the pacing of the novel, the surprises that make so much sense in the arc of the story due to the subject matter. I could see the risks that the writer took in this story with his characters. The protagonist and the villain showed me what it means to really ask yourself who you’re writing about and what they mean to you as a writer and how you can reveal and enrich yourself with them.
The Sentimentalists – Johanna Skibsrud
I just loved prose work in this book and how Johanna Skibsrud used structure to tell us a very simple story of a daughter’s understanding of her father. I felt like I was reading richly woven intersections of narrations where the protagonist was in her intersections, weaving and cleverly written language that I was searching with this character. I really loved the voice of this narrator.
Sonia Di Placido is a poet, writer and editor. Her works have been published in various journals: The Temz Review, Jacket2, Canthius, Minola Review, Juniper, The Puritan, The White Wall Review and others. She is currently completing her MFA Thesis, Creative Writing, with the University of British Columbia. Sonia has two books of poetry: Exaltation in Cadmium Red, 2012 and Flesh, 2018, published by Guernica Editions. A review of Flesh is found in the 11/18 issue of Quill and Quire. She is currently working on a forthcoming novel. Sonia’s meanderings can be found at diplacido.wordpress.com
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