{"title":"Staff Picks: Hans","description":"A selection of books chosen by Hans from the Itasca Books shelves. Explore four distinctive titles that caught his attention, from experimental storytelling to art, ideas, and unexpected perspectives.","products":[{"product_id":"the-braille-encyclopedia-brief-essays-on-altered-sight","title":"The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs befits this daring exploration of a life that defies clear categories and boundaries, Naomi Cohn's revelatory memoir \u003cem\u003eThe Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight\u003c\/em\u003e shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge. Told in the form of imagined alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this meditation on progressive vision loss examines and illuminates Cohn's at first halting then avid embrace of braille as part of relearning to read and write as an adult. Using etymology, historical and medical research, and personal vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked micro-essays and prose poems is both Cohn's singular story of grieving and refashioning a life built around words and an evocation of the larger discussion of how our society views disability. \u003cem\u003eThe Braille Encyclopedia\u003c\/em\u003e is poignant, playful, and wry, providing a literary reckoning of the technical and emotional aspects of facing the loss of sight.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNaomi Cohn\u003c\/strong\u003e is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copy editor, community organizer, grant writer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, \u003cem\u003eBetween Nectar \u0026amp; Eternity\u003c\/em\u003e (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), and pieces in \u003cem\u003eBaltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003ePoetry\u003c\/em\u003e, among others. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Naomi Cohn's The Braille Encyclopedia is a story of a life told in moments, in asides, in meditations, in lyric observations that can be as nuanced as they are sweeping. There is an impressive unity to this collection and a momentum that casts a spell as the pages turn.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eIlya Kaminsky\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eDeaf Republic\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The Braille Encyclopedia shimmers—poetry in paragraph form. Compelling, often humorous entries show declining vision along with acute awareness. Readers meet Louis Braille and Adjustment to Blindness Training and a braille Torah that isn't kosher because it must be touched. By the end, we understand what 'touching my reading' means. 'When it's so much work to write a single word,' Cohn explains, 'it had better be worth saying.' Cohn's words are worth saying.\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Ranae Lenor Hanson\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eWatershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Naomi Cohn's engrossing debut memoir The Braille Encyclopedia is a wonderful wide-ranging rendering of a life in love with words and the world words make. Cohn brilliantly twines personal and familial history with the history of Louis Braille and his life on the way to creating a tactile language for people living with blindness. At turns poignant and humorous as it chronicles Cohn's progressive loss of sight, I finished this abecedarian collection of essays and prose poems gratefully feeling I'd gotten an 'all-around education.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eSean Hill\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eDangerous Goods\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rose Metal Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49362947572029,"sku":"9781941628331","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781941628331ita.jpg?v=1726080741"},{"product_id":"until-you-find-your-way-1","title":"Until You Find Your Way","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the aftermath of losing their eldest child, Beada and Porter have become an estranged couple, living on different continents. She's in rural Minnesota raising their two other teens, while Porter visits from Bangkok \"when he can,\" disguising his pain as arrogance. When Beada's only outlet—careful, unorthodox confessions to the local priest—take an abrupt turn, a quiet but seismic shift forces everyone in the family to decide what they cannot live without.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTold in spare, luminous prose, Until You Find Your Way walks you through grief and the many sides of love, showing how much the heart can hold when it learns to let go.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Howling Bird Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50947797319997,"sku":"9781736577790","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781736577790ita_84aeae4e-970e-498b-8012-9d3051be3afd.jpg?v=1762379528"},{"product_id":"a-ghost-has-no-fantasies-1","title":"A Ghost Has No Fantasies","description":"\u003cp\u003eThrough haunting poetry and prose, \u003ci\u003eA Ghost Has No Fantasies\u003c\/i\u003e illuminates the forgotten voices of LGBTQ+ individuals who suffered under Nazi persecution. Drawing from archival documents, survivor testimonies, and Gestapo files, Christian Bancroft weaves together the intimate stories of those imprisoned under Paragraph 175 and beyond — gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals whose experiences have long remained in the shadows of Holocaust memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the vibrant queer communities of pre-war Berlin to the brutalities of concentration camps, these poems bear witness to love, resistance, and survival in the face of state-sponsored violence. Bancroft transforms fragments of testimony into powerful verse that honors both the lived experiences and the silences that followed liberation, when many survivors faced continued criminalization and denial of their suffering.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt a time when LGBTQ+ rights remain under threat globally, this collection serves as both memorial and warning — a testament to the resilience of human love against the machinery of hatred.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Unbound Edition Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51172177936701,"sku":"9781968274009","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781968274009ita_b4a6921f-ed4f-4e6a-8b8d-d47eebda1a38.jpg?v=1765909989"},{"product_id":"child-boss-1","title":"Child Boss","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eChild Boss\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e follows a young boy who’s dedicated to becoming a tenacious baller. But his overworked mother can’t afford to nourish his dreams by giving him exposure to top talent, and his highly educated father doesn’t make money. This leads the boy to seek work at twelve.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePlayful and unflinching, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eChild Boss\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e throws its narrator into the humiliations and pains of being a worker. Moving between desire, free markets, debt, basketball courts, private golf courses, family arguments, school, high-revving engines, and subversive humor, the novel probes how a young boy metabolizes and resists a world marred by precarity, labor, competition, value, and exchange.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eChild Boss\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e obliterates and reconfigures the boundaries between boyhood and manhood, boss and worker, kindness and exploitation, public and private life, tenderness and brutality. It creates openings to interrogate how social, cultural, and economic rituals of domination seep into and structure daily life. It asks: How might we intervene and develop alternatives to the overbearing weight of capitalism and what it does to people? How can we nourish rituals that reward connection and humanity, not extraction and dehumanization?\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"128 LIT","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51817951199549,"sku":"9798988447153","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9798988447153.jpg?v=1781289775"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/staff-picks-hans.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}