A Worthwhile Protagonist Has "Agency" -- Like Dr. Kate, the Vet

Although I hosted a wonderful elderly dog at my home for two months earlier this year, it turned out that I'm not a very skilled dog trainer ... and am getting a bit past learning new tricks myself. It hurt my heart to return the sweet pet who'd come here for a try-her-out visit, but it was the right thing to do, before I either broke a bone by falling while she tugged me along, or lost too much sleep to her eager awareness (bark, bark, bark, growl!) of the other animals around this rural place.

Even without a "companion animal" at hand, I found strong interest in the creatures in the new "Dr. Kate Vet Mystery" from Eileen Brady, released this month: MURDERS OF A FEATHER (Poisoned Pen Press).

As in many a "cozy" mystery series, the complications of crime in this lively tale are paired with Kate Turner's aching heart and hope for romance in time for Valentine's Day. Too bad the new vet in the area, "Dr. Mike," is married with newborn twins, as the two adults work so well together in a barn, meshing one's large-animal skills with the other's deft surgical and medical approaches. This too will turn into a twist of the plot, of course!

The murders Dr. Kate discovers are very human ones, but she'll tug at the strands of the crimes for the sake of both her own staff members and the many related animal emergencies around her, in an upstate New York harsh winter. Ice, snow, and slippery suggestions of motive and means fill the pages in a well-twisted plot with abundant discoveries. Her insistence on "agency" — that is, independence and taking her own direct actions — moves the plot well.

The best part of reading Brady's mysteries is the way she weaves Dr. Kate's animal and owner experiences into the insights that sleuthing requires: "Obsessive love. Jealous vindictive love. You see it in people and in animals that fixate on one person. That one being is all they want, all they need. And when they can't have them—they show their teeth."

Similar to the progress in a true crime investigation, it takes quite a while for Dr. Kate to unwind the final strand she needs. And that, in turn, allows readers more time to meet and enjoy the intriguing pets and farm animals along the way.

Between its charm and its intrigue, MURDERS OF A FEATHER (yes, there are crows involved!) can be a rewarding addition to the winter reading stack, and a handy choice for a holiday gift to an animal-loving friend or mystery aficionado.

And it's so very different from the next book I want to tell you about, which begins also in winter ... in urban Detroit. No pets involved at all, but plenty of love and loyalty, and a deft hand with crime.

Judith Janoo's New Collection of Poems, JUST THIS — and the Resonance of Place (Book Recommendation)

As of 2022, Vermont (said the US government) had 130 people earning an income as writers. This figure looks ridiculously low to anyone who's been to an author event or book festival here ... but I suppose it's because of the income aspect. Vermont mystery writer Archer Mayor used to claim the average writer's income was $7,000 per year, which won't pay for the rent these days, let alone food and car. So most of Vermont's writers probably combine another paid gig with their writing. 

Cover art by Helen Stork.

Still, it's a small state and in a given region, you get to at least know each other's names and often faces. And that's about all I've known of Judith Janoo, after crossing paths with her at maybe a dozen writing-related events but never even having tea together. Plus I read and reviewed her 2019 collection of poems, After Effects, and recently saw and enjoyed one of her new poems in a literary magazine.

So I bought a copy of her newest book, JUST THIS (so new it's not yet on her website), and settled down to enjoy. And investigate.

Because yes, for me, a book of poems is a double-direction investigation -- looking at how someone else sees the world, and comparing it with my own experience, and learning from the gaps and overlaps. Before I'd finished reading the "front matter," I'd discovered things I hadn't wondered about ... including pointers that showed me that Judith's last name came from her late husband Vincent, born in Malaysia. Why hadn't I wondered about the name "Janoo" before? Maybe it just seemed to fit so well with Judith? 

The front matter also says she absorbed Malaysian culture for 27 years. Hungry for more about a culture I don't know, and how a "Maine-er" like Judith would connect with it, I began looking at PLACE in Judith's poems.

The first two are instantly located "here-abouts": one poem build in stubby and intriguing tercets, called "Route 132" (I know where that is, in real life!), and the next, "Bear Cub," also in tercets but with slightly longer lines and a rich trove of sensations, from touch to scent to bright color and hunger, and a deep tenderness. I'm home, I thought -- these are poems of "my place" in Vermont.

Then with a flip of the page I arrived in Maine, tasting the salt air and savor of my own mother's longed-for location, listening to the poet's childhood and new adulthood forming. "I am from the rocks and shore / of fishermen, lobster boats // dove gray mornings that rise / from blackness over water."

Abruptly, at the end of the first section of poems, I tumbled around the world to "Johor Bahru" on the South China Sea, and needed to press onward into the next section, that reader part of my mind whispering, "Tell me more! More!"

And so it went, through the collection. I might have asked for a sequence of poems that felt more geographically organized, but that, I know, is because I like organization. Instead, JUST THIS offered me five senses and a daring freedom of the map. 

I enjoyed it. I didn't put it down until the end, and then a few hours later I picked it up again and dipped back for more tastes. Let me know if you feel the same way about this resonant new collection.

More Poetry Publications on the Way

I've probably spent too much time today, trying to figure out how to convert a recorded poem from one format into another -- and failing the tech aspect! But I have hope that the digital natives at The Post Grad Journal will figure that out for my poem "Teen Summer," lined up for their next issue.

Plus this morning I had the amazing experience of learning, before being fully awake, that two other poems of mine, "Crossing Over the Moose" and "This Tree of Ripened Fruit," earned honorable mentions from the Northwind Writing Award, sponsored by Raw Earth Ink. 

In this amazing interior + exterior season, I also am excited that "Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)" is scheduled for the November issue of Does It Have Pockets. 

None of the links above will show my poems yet -- but as soon as there are links for you to see them, I'll let you know! Now I need to get my feet back to earth, for today's exploration out on a back road in Danville, for my next North Star Monthly feature. Which will NOT be poetry!

To Wrestle With Abuse, Pain, and Anger -- in a New Noir Crime Novel by Matt Phillips, A Good Rush of Blood

The first time I started reading A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD by Matt Phillips, I had to stop. Thanks to the heavens, the fates, a few better decisions, and a middle-class upbringing that cloaked me in some forms of protection, I haven't lived on the street or sold drugs. But Oh Dear God, I've known plenty of others who have (if you haven't known any, you've cut yourself off from the sad side of America), and more than once, I've experienced a dangerous locale and wondered how I'd deal with being sexually violated, should it happen. Probably the worst season for that last issue was in my late 30s, living in a rough cabin and often alone at night, creating fear out of the darkness.

I finally reached a quirky and only marginally rational conclusion, but it was enough to let me get some sleep: I had heard that nerve cells, the slowest in the body to regenerate, are made anew every seven years. So, I reasoned, if rape took place and I became estranged from my own body, I would just need to survive seven more years until every cell would be clean and new. 

The mind, unlike the cell, doesn't regenerate. We'd be lost if it did, having to start all over again with how to balance on two feet, how to move food to our mouths. The drawback to this continuity is, most of the time, the hardest scariest parts of life are not fully forgotten, are they? We just make a sort of peace that lets us move forward.

So the young woman named Creeley Nash, driving a valuable load of potent drugs to Portland, Oregon, scared the you-know-what out of me. Not only was she balancing her life on "ordinary" drugs like booze and weed, but in order to earn a decent living, she'd agreed to run the transport for a man named Animal. 

What Creeley was: Thirty-nine years old, unwed, poor as sh**,  and somewhat proud to be a second-shift waitress at Walburn's in downtown Portland. But no, she was not Animal's girl.

The constant danger she's in when driving illegal drugs reflects the nastiness, cruelty, and crudeness of most people in that business. But to Creeley, who thinks a lot about what's going on, the treatment she gets from the people she delivers to is a predictable part of life as she understands it:

She expected it because being a woman meant being seen as a possession—men thought they deserved her. Or wished they deserved her. At her age, Creeley found this dynamic amusing. She'd stopped being afraid of men a few boyfriends ago, and now she steered clear of them. She'd given up on love. Didn't exist. Not for her.

A tip of the hat to Matt Phillips: The author's gender is almost irrelevant to this 300-page crime novel.

Creeley's inner commentary on drug running is revelatory: Rich people commit as much crime as poor ones, but hide it better. All cops are bent in some fashion, from her point of view. In a way, that reassures her, because it lets her finally ask for help from one, when she realizes she's got to know for sure whether her imprisoned mother really did murder someone, or was framed.

OK, I had to stop reading early, in my first dive into this book. I wrote to one voice of the publisher, Vern Smith, about the way the book trampled on old traumas of mine. I wasn't sure I'd do the review.

Vern replied, in part:

I think we always considered that this might be read as a heavy book, and accepted it as such, seeing literary and social value in that, too. I do believe that eliciting such a response is more of a blessing than a curse in that a book like this should spark conversations, and the best thing, I think, we can do in response is talk, which is sort of what we’re doing here.

So you can guess what I did. With the lights on brightly and the locks on the doors double-checked, I stepped back into the story.

Turns out, within the violence and peril, A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD is a classic crime novel after all. A murder took place. Blame got distributed. Someone—Creeley in this case—is searching for both truth and justice and willing to make sacrifices for that.

So it turned out to be a powerful book worth reading. The investigation makes sense, the voices are real, and yes, Vern and Matt, there will be more conversations about it, when I find some other folks who've read this (that's a hint, folks). 

And if I didn't especially like some of the resolution, and would have made different choices in Creeley's shoes, well, thank goodness those shoes aren't mine. Because despite all the strange and scary parts of my earlier life, I found a really great set of decades eventually. Sometimes life really is stranger than fiction. Safer, at least. And happy.