All Booked Up

Windsor Library's Newsletter for Readers

April 2025

Are you a Bridgerton enthusiast? Join us at the Windsor Public Library for a Bridgerton Inspired Picnic. This program will feature picnic foods and trivia. We encourage regency attire. Registration is required. The program runs on Saturday, April 26 from 2:00 to 3:30 PM. Registration required. Please call the Reference Desk at 860-285-1918 with any questions. 

Coming to a bookshelf near you!

(click on the cover to place your hold today)

O, let America be America again--

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

The land that's mind--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

--Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again, written 1935.

Listen Up (Audiobook)

James by Percival Everett

Narrated by Dominic Hoffman

Length: 7 hours and 49 minutes

Audie Award Winner for Literary Fiction & Classics

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the rivers banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jims agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Book Club Corner

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. She pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. Mami is determined to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, and Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. When she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she can't stop thinking about performing her poems.

Spotlight: Poetry Month

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó. Tuama

Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives.

Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

In Hope is the Thing with Feathers, we follow the story of a little bird who brings joy to everyone through his song. When a storm hits, the little bird's song is diminished, but he never gives up, and when the storm passes he is there to give joy again as people rebuild. Emily Dickinson's beloved poem is beautifully brought to life by bestselling artist Tim Hopgood in this beautiful picturebook that champions poetry and shows that, even in the darkest times, there is always hope.

A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is a master of form and technique. The form she chose for Emmett Till's poem is called a heroic crown of sonnets. In her words, "a crown of sonnets is a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line of the next," and in the heroic crown, the last of 15 sonnets is composed of the first lines of the preceding 14. Attention to form in this case helped cushion the intense pain of the subject matter. Nevertheless, she says, "I wrote this poem with my heart in my mouth and tears in my eyes." You will find this amazing work of art and grief in the Young Adult section in the Windsor Public Library.