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LitLoot is a free literary subscription box filled with a custom selected library book and other free goodies! We’ll contact you when your box is ready for pickup at the end of the month.
Head to the Library for some outdoor family fun. The pages of a book are arranged on numbered signs around the building. Take a stroll and enjoy the story at your own pace.
April: Mel Fell by Corey R. Tabor
Read the book of the month at home with your family. Then bring a grown-up with you to discuss and explore the story with a hands-on activity. This month's book: Kondo & Kezumi Visit Giant Island by David Goodner.
Disclaimer(s)
All participants should be accompanied by a parent or caregiver.
Teenage Sarah journeys through a maze to save her baby brother from the Goblin King. (1986, PG, 1 hr 41 min)
Stories, songs, activities, and more that are perfect for the school-ready child.
Ages 3-5 with a parent/caregiver
Disclaimer(s)
All participants should be accompanied by a parent or caregiver.
Join North Shore Senior Center’s Caregiver Outreach Specialist Glenn Earich for a presentation about local resources and general strategies for caregivers.
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Your library card gives you access to Hallmark+ BingePass through Hoopla!
Stream exclusive new original series, movies, and other feel-good content. Use Hoopla’s BingePass to get 7 days of unlimited access. Contact the Library to get help setting up a free Hoopla account with your Morton Grove Library card.

New in Poetry
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Love Prodigal
Amidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love.
Fiercely self-aware and “utterly present tense,” Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet “cannot live in or leave,” she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in “a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.” Told through various forms—aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay—Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.
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The Bearable Slant of Light
The Bearable Slant of Light asks what the burden and gift of madness brings to a family, to our world.
What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.
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The Last Song of the World
Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World delves into the chaos of the modern world, and searches for resilience in the face of environmental and societal devastation. Dripping with images of ancient ruins and mythological figures, these poems serve as vignettes of fatherhood, love, and desire against the backdrop of apocalyptic events.
Through the documentation of ongoing violence and natural phenomena, Fasano depicts the ever-present anxieties of parenting with concision and compassion. The Last Song of the World is a love letter to the world that could be--a world as tender as it is bold, as loving as it is brutal, as beautiful as it is horrendous.
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Forest of Noise
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • "A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.
You are alive
for a moment
when living people
run after you.
Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them.
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha's poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering. -
We Contain Landscapes
To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik's debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.
Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who "will not turn away from the ache of this world." For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship--of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.
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savings time
The Bronx born activist and poet Roya Marsh returns with a riveting exploration of Black joy, collective action, and healing.
what will come of what you leave behind?
do you
remember that time
you survived?
The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.
In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,” she writes, “‘see you later’ was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.”
As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless. -
Helen of Troy, 1993
*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick*
“By turns hilarious and provocative, it’s an affecting character study and modern mythic retelling.” —Publishers Weekly, Books That Should Be on Your Radar in 2025
Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.
In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone…
Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography… / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”
Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before. -
44 Poems on Being with Each Other
This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty-four poems carefully curated by the host of the internationally acclaimed Poetry Unbound podcast.
With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us and ourselves.
Blending humour with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, this collection articulates the power of poetry itself; it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly the ways we are inextricably linked to each other, and provides inspiration for grounded self-reflection.
44 Poems on Being with Each Other features a remarkable and refreshing range of exceptional poems from around the world including contributions from Wendy Cope, Constantine P. Cavafy, Chen Chen, Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith and many more. It is an anthology that will delight readers just as Pádraig’s podcast has done for millions around the world. -
What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt
A landmark literary event, What Remains collects Arendt’s complete poetic oeuvre—never before published in English.
Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth century’s foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetry—especially that of Dickinson, Goethe, and Lowell—informed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems.
In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography. For nearly forty years after her death, these poems remained hidden among the archives of the Library of Congress, until 2011, when they were rediscovered by scholar and translator Samantha Rose Hill. Now, for the first time in English, Hill and Genese Grill present Arendt’s poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York’s Upper West Side.
Throughout, Arendt uses poetry to mark moments of joy, love, loss, and reflection. In “W. B.,” written in 1942, she remembers Walter Benjamin, who died near the French-Spanish border while attempting to flee the Nazis: “Gentle whispering melodies / Sound from the darkness. / We listen so we can let go.” So, too, she reflects on mutability and transience in 1946: “I know that the houses have fallen. / We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they / were more durable than ourselves.” She tries to understand her place in the world: “Ironically foolish, / I’ve forgotten nothing, / I know the emptiness, / I know the burden, / I dance, I dance / In ironic splendor.”
A gift to all readers of Arendt, this stunning, dual-language edition provides an unparalleled view into the inner sanctum of one of our most original thinkers. -
Love and Need
Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost’s life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson’s biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a “monster.”
In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost’s life—one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships,
heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.
Moving through Frost’s most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost’s poetry, tracing Frost’s distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together—the poet and the poetry—and draws us back into conversation with America’s poet.
Novels in Verse - Kids
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The Crossover
The Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award-winning middle grade bestseller! Basketball and heartache share the court in this slam-dunk novel in verse.
"With a bolt of lightning on my kicks . . . The court is SIZZLING. My sweat is DRIZZLING. Stop all that quivering. 'Cuz tonight I'm delivering," raps twelve-year-old Josh Bell. Thanks to their dad, he and his twin brother, Jordan, are kings on the court. But Josh has more than basketball in his blood--he's got mad beats, too, which help him find his rhythm when it's all on the line.
In this fast and furious middle grade novel of family and brotherhood from Kwame Alexander, Josh and Jordan must come to grips with growing up on and off the court to realize breaking the rules comes at a terrible price, as their story's heart-stopping climax proves a game-changer for the entire family.
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Alias Anna
The moving true story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias "Anna") and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaust. A middle grade nonfiction novel-in-verse by award-winning author Susan Hood with Greg Dawson (Zhanna's son).
She wouldn't be Zhanna. She'd use an alias. A for Anna. A for alive.
When the Germans invade Ukraine, Zhanna, a young Jewish girl, must leave behind her friends, her freedom, and her promising musical future at the world's top conservatory. With no time to say goodbye, Zhanna, her sister Frina, and their entire family are removed from their home by the Nazis and forced on a long, cold, death march. When a guard turns a blind eye, Zhanna flees with nothing more than her musical talent, her beloved sheet music, and her father's final plea: "I don't care what you do. Just live."
This incredible true story in-verse about sisterhood, survival, and music is perfect for fans of Lifeboat 12, Inside Out and Back Again, and Alan Gratz.
Includes extensive back matter with original letters and photographs, additional information, and materials for further reading.
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Odder: The Novel
Meet Odder, the Queen of Play:
Nobody has her moves.
She doesn’t just swim to the bottom,
she dive-bombs.
She doesn’t just somersault,
she triple-doughnuts.
She doesn’t just ride the waves,
she makes them.
Odder spends her days off the coast of central California, practicing her underwater acrobatics and spinning the quirky stories for which she’s known. She’s a fearless daredevil, curious to a fault. But when Odder comes face-to-face with a hungry great white shark, her life takes a dramatic turn, one that will challenge everything she believes about herself—and about the humans who hope to save her.
Inspired by the true story of a Monterey Bay Aquarium program that pairs orphaned otter pups with surrogate mothers, this poignant and humorous tale told in free verse examines bravery and healing through the eyes of one of nature’s most beloved and charming animals. -
Grasping Mysteries
Learn about seven groundbreaking women in math and science in this gorgeously written biographical novel-in-verse, a companion to the “original and memorable” (Booklist, starred review) Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science.
After a childhood spent looking up at the stars, Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet and to earn a salary for scientific research. Florence Nightingale was a trailblazing nurse whose work reformed hospitals and one of the founders of the field of medical statistics. The first female electrical engineer, Hertha Marks Ayrton registered twenty-six patents for her inventions.
Marie Tharp helped create the first map of the entire ocean floor, which helped scientists understand our subaquatic world and suggested how the continents shifted. A mathematical prodigy, Katherine Johnson calculated trajectories and launch windows for many NASA projects including the Apollo 11 mission. Edna Lee Paisano, a citizen of the Nez Perce Nation, was the first Native American to work full time for the Census Bureau, overseeing a large increase in American Indian and Alaskan Native representation. And Vera Rubin studied more than two hundred galaxies and found the first strong evidence for dark matter.
Told in vibrant, evocative poems, this stunning novel celebrates seven remarkable women who used math as their key to explore the mysteries of the universe and grew up to do innovative work that changed the world. -
Starfish
Ellie is tired of being fat-shamed and does something about it in this poignant debut novel-in-verse. Ever since Ellie wore a whale swimsuit and made a big splash at her fifth birthday party, she's been bullied about her weight. To cope, she tries to live by the Fat Girl Rules--like "no making waves," "avoid eating in public," and "don't move so fast that your body jiggles." And she's found her safe space--her swimming pool--where she feels weightless in a fat-obsessed world. In the water, she can stretch herself out like a starfish and take up all the room she wants. It's also where she can get away from her pushy mom, who thinks criticizing Ellie's weight will motivate her to diet. Fortunately, Ellie has allies in her dad, her therapist, and her new neighbor, Catalina, who loves Ellie for who she is. With this support buoying her, Ellie might finally be able to cast aside the Fat Girl Rules and starfish in real life--by unapologetically being her own fabulous self.
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Other Words for Home
A gorgeously written, hopeful middle grade novel in verse about a young girl who must leave Syria to move to the United States, perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Aisha Saeed.
Jude never thought she'd be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives.
At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American movies that Jude has always loved haven't quite prepared her for starting school in the US--and her new label of "Middle Eastern," an identity she's never known before.
But this life also brings unexpected surprises--there are new friends, a whole new family, and a school musical that Jude might just try out for. Maybe America, too, is a place where Jude can be seen as she really is.
This lyrical, life-affirming story is about losing and finding home and, most importantly, finding yourself.
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The Canyon's Edge
One year after a random shooting changed their family forever, Nora and her father are exploring a slot canyon deep in the Arizona desert, hoping it will help them find peace. Nora longs for things to go back to normal, like they were when her mother was still alive, while her father keeps them isolated in fear of other people. But when they reach the bottom of the canyon, the unthinkable happens: A flash flood rips across their path, sweeping away Nora's father and all of their supplies.
Suddenly, Nora finds herself lost and alone in the desert, facing dehydration, deadly snakes, venomous scorpions, and, worst of all, the Beast who has terrorized her dreams for the past year. If Nora is going to save herself and her father, she must conquer her fears, defeat the Beast, and find the courage to live her new life.
Don't miss Dusti Bowling's new novel, Dust, available for preorder now. -
Rez Dogs
Malian loves spending time with her grandparents at their home on a Wabanaki reservation. She's there for a visit when, suddenly, all travel shuts down. There's a new virus making people sick, and Malian will have to stay with her grandparents for the duration. Everyone is worried about the pandemic, but Malian knows how to keep her family and community safe: She protects her grandparents, and they protect her. She doesn't go outside to play with friends, she helps her grandparents use video chat, and she listens to and learns from their stories. And when Malsum, one of the dogs living on the rez, shows up at their door, Malian's family knows that he'll protect them too. Told in verse inspired by oral storytelling, this novel about the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the ways Malian's community has cared for one another through plagues of the past, and how they keep caring for one another today.
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A Two-Placed Heart: A Memoir in Verse
Afraid her sister (and maybe even herself) could lose sight of their Vietnamese identity, twelve-year-old Bom writes a poetic memoir to help them both remember--a love letter in verse to sisterhood and the places we leave behind.
Bom can't believe that her sister doesn't see herself as Vietnamese, only American. She says she doesn't remember Vietnam or their lives there, their family there, their house and friends. How could her sister forget the terrible journey through Saigon and the airplanes and... everything?
And what about Bom? She remembers now, but how long will she keep her memories? She always found comfort in the sound of her father's typewriter Clickity-clack, clickity-clack. So she has an idea. She'll write down all that she can remember: the time when her father was a spy, when her mother was nicknamed a "radio," when they were so hungry Bom couldn't walk well, when the family all said goodbye.
Bom will even tell her sister, and herself, about what it was like moving to Tennessee. The ESL classes, bullies, strange new foods, icy weather, friendships, and crushes--and how her family worked to keep their heritage alive.
She'll type one poem at a time, until they'll never forget again
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Rhyme Schemer
A novel in verse about Kevin's journey from bully to being bullied, as he learns about friendship, family, and his talent for poetry.
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Good Different
Selah knows her rules for being normal.
She always, always sticks to them. This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. So that she has to tear off her normal-person mask the second she gets home from school, and listen to her favorite pop song on repeat, trying to recharge. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it.
Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student.
Selah's friends pull away from her, her school threatens expulsion, and her comfortable, familiar world starts to crumble.
But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn't mean damaged. Can she get her school to understand that, too, before it's too late?
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The One Thing You'd Save
If your house were on fire, what one thing would you save? Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park explores different answers to this provocative question in linked poems that capture the diverse voices of a middle school class. Recipient of four starred reviews!
When a teacher asks her class what one thing they would save in an emergency, some students know the answer right away. Others come to their decisions more slowly. And some change their minds when they hear their classmates' responses. A lively dialog ignites as the students discover unexpected facets of one another--and themselves.