From the author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple, Alice Walker, comes Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (37 Ink), a new, bilingual collection of poetry—Spanish on the left, English on the right—translated by one of Walker’s close friends. The subjects of the poems range from gentrification (in “Loving Oakland,” Walker writes, “If gentrifiers do not despoil it / which means getting rid of poor / and black and people of color / people / Oakland can be what it has been / for a long time: an urban Paradise.”) to perceptions of beauty (from “Is Celie Actually Ugly?”: “I wanted us to think about / how superficial our understanding /of beauty; but, also, how beauty / is destroyed. / And how, to bear our own disgrace / these hundreds of years / we’ve taught ourselves / to laugh at anyone / as abused and diminished / as we feel.”); from Palestine to Hurricane Patricia; from selfies to the Pope. In the poem titled “Refugees,” Walker writes, “They would not be running to us / if we were not chasing them / with the guns and bombs and rockets we sold / to crazy people: / out of their houses / out of their schools / out of their mosques, / churches, / synagogues / away from their favorite / prayer trees.” The collection is moving and timely, and highlights the still-raw trauma from our nation’s recent past; in “Welcome to the Picnic,” Walker writes, “A friend tells me she never uses the word / “picnic” for this very reason: that the mothers / and fathers and brothers and children of the psychopaths / came to the beating, hanging, quartering / eviscerations or whatever else could be imagined / to entertain at a lynching / and brought baskets of food / to enjoy with the show.” (Amazon)