Emily Choate | writer

I’m delighted to share my recent review of poet Lisa Dordal’s new, innovative collection, Next Time You Come Home. Dordal worked with a huge trove of letters written to her by her late mother, Milly, to create the poems in this book, “distilling” them and shaping them. The result is a startling, memorable exchange between daughter and mother. You can read my review at Chapter 16.

It’s new Ron Rash novel time! Last month, I had the chance to share my thoughts about Rash’s melancholy reflection on love and loss, The Caretaker. Rash is one of my favorites, so this was a treat. You can read my review over at Chapter 16 (another one of my favorites).

I really enjoyed the chance to write a new piece celebrating Georgia writer Janisse Ray for Chapter 16. Ray’s devotion to the natural world–and to bringing that world onto the page in innovative ways–has been a beacon for so many of us. Ray will be the keynote speaker at the MTSU Write Fall Conference on Oct. 6-7. I’m happy to say that I’ll be leading a craft session at the conference too. You can read my new piece here, and you can find the MTSU Write conference schedule and sign-up details here.

I look forward to leading a virtual discussion this week on Richard Powers’ masterwork of environmental fiction, The Overstory. Tuesday, July 18^th, at 7 PM. Join us via Humanities Tennessee’s Facebook Live or YouTube feeds. I’m delighted to participate as Humanities TN celebrates 50 years spent supporting all kinds of vital projects across our state!

Update: Click here to watch this event. Serenity Gerbman and I had a wonderful chat about The Overstory and about going off to the woods to write. Also, you can watch me talk with my hands a lot.

I really enjoyed spending time with (and writing some thoughts about) three recent poetry collections–Denton Loving’s Tamp, Evie Shockley’s suddenly we, and Susan O’Dell Underwood’s Splinter. Each of these collections finds a memorable, vibrant language for collisions between the past and the present. My review is up this week at Chapter16.

Dream Assignment Alert! As part of Humanities Tennessee’s 50 Books/HT50 Project, I had the chance to take a fresh look at Richard Powers’ masterwork of ecological fiction, The Overstory. This piece, up today at Chapter 16, became an encounter with wildness—in the novel, the Smokies, and my own nature. On July 18th, I’ll host a virtual discussion of the novel. Thank you, Humanities TN and Maria Browning at Chapter 16!

I know so many natural-world-obsessed readers who’ll get hooked on Katy Simpson Smith’s new novel, The Weeds, the way I did. This book brings together two unnamed women botanists, living a century apart, tasked with naming every species growing among the stones of Rome’s Colosseum. Writing about The Weeds for Chapter 16 was such a pleasure. My review’s up today.

I was knocked out by poet Anna Laura Reeve’s luminous debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, which finds moving, startling ways of entwining motherhood with the natural world. It was such a pleasure to write about this book for Chapter 16. My review is up today.

Anthologies are always challenging to review, but in this case, the puzzle was how to choose from such abundance. What Things Cost: an anthology for the people, edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones, is a landmark anthology of labor writing. It gathers well over a hundred poems and essays from a broad cross-section of communities—and not one dud. That’s a serious feat. My review’s up today at Chapter 16.

I was delighted to write a round-up review of three memorable, recently published poetry collections by Tennessean poets, including Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light, Katherine Smith’s Secret City, and Tyler Friend’s Him or Her or Whatever. The review’s up now at Chapter 16.