Frank Carlson Library

The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go. When a desperate woman finds herself on a date with a rugged man she has nothing...

Buried in the Suburbs easily turns over rocks that many might argue are too cumbersome to hoist. Right smack out of the gate Jamie is unwilling to blithely coexist with "our little / automatic robots / that allow us to / remain oblivious." This is a useful stubbornness, as we shamble about in a world where the things we've made have outsourced our good fortune: luck is of no consequence when we can open an app to pinpoint the arrival of rain or, quite...

"The idea for writing one poem a day for 100 days emerged slowly. In March, as we sheltered in place, I discovered that putting poems on Facebook allowed me to communicate with an immediacy that I usually only enjoyed at public readings. It tasted like bacon, like strong coffee. Naively, I thought 30 days would cover the worst of the pandemic. As I considered shutting down my daily posts, returning to sending poems out to small presses, I experienced...

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...