M is for Miraculous Wordsmiths, Mary Karr & Mark Doty

Mary Karr is best known for her memoir The Liar's Club, but Cherry is my favorite of hers. It's a beautiful coming of age. The San Francisco Chronicle says: "Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms, and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter."
I recommend anyone that is writing YA read this. It brings back the wildness of those scary, exhilarating years in neon color.

I first read Mark Doty's transcendent book, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, when I was designing a themed college lit course I dubbed The Creative Life. Creative Life is also my theme in A to Z!

Doty's work is an extended meditation on a Dutch still life painting of oysters and lemons. Yet it's also much more!
Mark Doty paints with words. He wanders into a meditation on memory, the emotionally loaded symbol, and the irony of a "still" life. A snippet of Doty's words: "We enter the cool, gray suite of rooms, a space that seems to me, in memory, hallucinatory...Beautiful chambers, skylit, room after room of these somber poems of materiality... here are Beert's resplendent living oysters, ashimmer on their silvery shells, their pewter plate... the translucent asparagus spears of Adriaen Coorte, strudy good-natured vegetables that verge on mystery."

What book leaves you breathless, or talks about much more than just the story itself?