Broken Open

When the Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey was a child (Ecco). The two tucked a lamp into the nook, and crafted cardboard and aluminum foil into stars. As Trethewey revisits her past, she again turns on a light in the darkest of corners, piecing together the memories of her childhood and her mother’s death at the hands of her former stepfather. Her pain still feels primal, but the poet confronts shadows to reveal, as she writes, “the story I tell myself to survive.”—CJ Lotz