WBUR 2026 Fall Arts Guides
8 books with New England ties to read this fall

“Leap & Grow Feathers” is a poetry collection that transforms grief into a symbol of hope. Much like the mind does when the body’s at rest, Yona Harvey’s poems connect disparate ideas with dream-like logic and profound emotional resonance. In “Stream,” she encapsulates the blue light-tinged ennui of the COVID-19 pandemic: “The flicker of a Zoom/ party, Life as We Know It no longer.” She invokes Black ancestors like Harriet Tubman and Nikki Giovanni, writing, “Thank God for Black women on Earth to remind me who I am in this quagmire of isms and at-oddities.” Reverberating throughout the collection is the echo of the speaker’s sister’s tragic death by suicide. But even if all she has left of her sister can fit in two storage containers, this is how Harvey envisions her: “There’s a gentle wind on a tiny sail./ She embraces it.” Harvey is a professor at Smith College and a former writing fellow at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.