Leslie Schwartz's powerful, skillfully woven memoir of redemption and reading, as told through the list of books she read as she served a 90 day jail sentence In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI and battery of an officer. It was the most harrowing and holy experience of her life. Following a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after more than a decade clean and sober, Schwartz was sentenced and served her time with only six months' sobriety. The damage she inflicted that year upon her friends, her husband, her teenage daughter, and herself was nearly impossible to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her altogether, if not for the stories that sustained her while she was behind bars--both the artful tales in the books she read while there, and, more immediately, the stories of her fellow inmates. With classics like Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome to contemporary accounts like Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, Schwartz's reading list is woven together with visceral recollections of both her daily humiliations and small triumphs within the county jail system. Through the stories of others--whether rendered on the page or whispered in a jail cell--she learned powerful lessons about how to banish shame, use guilt for good, level her grief, and find the lost joy and magic of her astonishing life. Told in vivid, unforgettable prose, The Lost Chapters uncovers the nature of shame, rage, and love, and how instruments of change and redemption come from the unlikeliest of places.
It only takes a moment for a life to change forever. Ethan Denton is a lucky man. Lately things have gone his way–like being granted custody of Nate, his three-year-old son. But when he takes the child up to Angels Crest early one morning to show him the mountains, Ethan’s luck changes instantaneously. In an impulsive decision any parent might make, he leaves his son asleep in the back seat while he follows a pair of magnificent buck, just for a minute–but when he returns the truck’s door is open, the child is gone, and snow is falling . . .As townspeople gather to aid in the search, the boy’s disappearance resurrects old wounds and regrets for each of them. But it also provides the chance for love and redemption, as they struggle to make sense of the inexplicable.
In stunningly varied poetic forms and a rich chorus of voices, Houston Poet Laureate Leslie Contreras Schwartz's third collection, Who Speaks for Us Here, uses poetry to examine the divide between individual and public bodies as it documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody while it also unpacks the history of her family, especially the women thereof. A Latinx poet, activist, and mother Contreras Schwartz shines in this stirring collection as she speaks directly to so many of the violent facets of our American moment.
How I Lost My Mother is a deeply felt account of the relationship between a mother and son, and an exploration of what care for the dying means in contemporary society The book is emotionally complex – funny, sad and angry – but above all, heartfelt and honest. It speaks boldly of challenges faced by all of us, challenges which are often not spoken about and hidden, but which deserve urgent attention. This is first and foremost a work of the heart, a reflection on what relationships mean and should mean. There is much in the book about relationships of care and exploitation in southern Africa, and about white Jewish identity in an African context. But despite the specific and absorbing references to places and contexts, the book offers a broader, more universal view. All parents of adult children, and all adults who have parents alive, or have lost their parents, will find much in this book to make them laugh, cry, think and feel.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody. Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. 'We've all cracked/in our own ways, ' Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices--missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the 'wild self choired, corralled in a thought box, ' where 'all of us together/can make a great sound, ' a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz's vision--that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.
Leslie Schwartz, born in Hungary in 1930, is a teenage survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. He lost his entire immediate family in the Holocaust. His lifelong search for wholeness led him back to Germany, where his dream now is to leave a legacy of healing and conflict resolution. In 2013, Schwartz will be awarded Germany's highest civilian honor - The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Book jacket.
In Nightbloom & Cenote, Leslie Contreras Schwartz traverses a nighttime landscape with eyes purposefully wide open. She descends into "nightcups of hurt and stains"¿navigates rugged territory¿¿where most would refuse to tread. In these darkened depths, Leslie pushes against every uncomfortable edge: personal and generational affronts. She relents, "there is too much to move, that won¿t." Yet, she keeps stepping with her gaze focused on what wilts and blooms.In her hometown of Houston, she reflects on both literal and metaphorical landscapes, "where streetlights bust out and stay busted." She¿s bold in her witnessing though her poems seem to palpate under her exacting "knife, the sharp edge/ that we use to make something, /Even if it disappears." In this brilliant volume, Schwartz instructs best in how she navigates loss. "Let me walk unsteadily. /Let me lose and lose/my body in parts while I watch and sing anyway." Her verse, though sorrow- tinged¿¿shouts a powerful song of resistance. She bade us sing no matter what we withstand.¿Glenis Redmond, author of What My Hand Say¿In Nightbloom & Cenote the smallest detail opens a kind of world all its own: ¿I am made of those sweat-filled / sheets of sorrow, / a clothesline of flinching blouses / waiting for that slap and back beat / to dry.¿ I loved this, and I loved also the intensity of being a single person as exhibited in the lyric voice of this work.¿¿Ilya Kaminsky, author ofDancing in Odessa
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