What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed-laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same?

In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 a.m. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager who is asked, “What will you become?” These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey.

After clearing Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of Federal troops, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bold invasion into the North reached the Maryland shore of the Potomac River on June 15, 1863. A week later, the Confederate infantry crossed into lower Pennsylvania, where they had their first sustained interactions with the civilian population in a solidly pro-Union state. Most of the initial encounters with the people in the lush Cumberland Valley and the neighboring parts of the state involved the men from the Army of Northern Virginia’s famed Second Corps, commanded by Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, who led the way as Lee’s veteran soldiers advanced north toward their eventual showdown with the Union army at the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

The book states plainly that both its speaker and the speaker’s mother have suffered near-deadly head injuries (“when I woke up in the hospital thirty years after you did,” “my head: / rotting pear”), resulting in loss of memory. However, rather than let a taxonomy like “family curse” sit unquestioned, Green writes toward the fugues (i.e., the condition of having one’s identity questioned) by making a kind of fugue (i.e., interweaving song). Johnathan Culler writes that “the fundamental characteristic of the lyric . . . is not the description and interpretation of a past event, but the iterative and utterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’ of lyric articulation.” The lyric in Fugue Figure allows the unspeakable past to be uttered in the lyric present, and the form of diptychs and triptychs through the book place disparate lyric utterances together on the same page. While lyric addresses allow the reader to reach toward the speaker’s unknowns, the triptychs and diptychs allow the reader to reach toward the unnamable place between left and right signifiers, both adding to the vital enigma of the poems.

Teaching Hemingway and Race provides a practicable means for teaching the subject of race in Hemingway’s writing and related texts—from how to approach ethnic, nonwhite international, and tribal characters to how to teach difficult questions of racial representation. Rather than suggesting that Hemingway’s portrayals of cultural otherness are incidental to teaching and reading the texts, the volume brings them to the fore.

The Old Man and the Sea is a deceptively simple work. An old man goes fishing. He catches a giant marlin after much struggle. Sharks attack and destroy the fish. The old man is left with the bare bones of the fish—a Monday morning “fish story.” But much lies beneath the surface. The action is condensed and presented in carefully crafted images, in words and details selected because of their multivalent meanings, and in several external narrative strands, present primarily as allusions and echoes.

This collection of previously unpublished diaries and correspondence between Maj. William Medill and older brother Joseph, one of the influential owners of the Chicago Tribune, illuminates the Republican politics of the Civil War era. The brothers correct newspaper coverage of the war, disagree with official military reports, and often condemn Lincoln administration policies. When shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the Medills mobilized, unaware how their courage would be tested in the coming years.

In “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known,” Paul Taylor examines the Union League movement. Often portrayed as a mere footnote to the Civil War, the Union League’s influence on the Northern home front was far more important and consequential than previously considered. The Union League and its various offshoots spread rapidly across the North, and in this first comprehensive examination of the leagues, Taylor discusses what made them so effective, including their recruitment strategies, their use of ostracism as a way of stifling dissent, and their distribution of political propaganda in quantities unlike anything previously imagined. By the end of 1863, readers learn, it seemed as if every hamlet from Maine to California had formed its own league chapter, collectively overwhelming their Democratic foe in the 1864 presidential election.

They have no witnesses. They have no case. With this blunt observation, Mariann Colby—an attractive, church-going Shaker Heights, Ohio, mother and housewife—bet a defense psychiatrist that she would not be convicted of murder. A lack of witnesses was not the only problem that would confront the State of Ohio in 1966, which would seek to prosecute her for shooting to death Cremer Young Jr., her son’s nine-year-old playmate: Colby had deftly cleaned up after herself by hiding the child’s body miles from her home and concealing the weapon.

Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already-fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified.

Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyper­attentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.

Ernest Hemingway is a writer we often associate with particular places and animals; Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Spain’s countryside, East Africa’s game reserves, Cuba’s blue water, and Idaho’s sagebrush all come to mind. We can easily visualize the iconic images of Hemingway with fly rod bent by hefty trout, with bulls charging matadors, or of the famous author proudly posing with trophy lions, marlin, and a menagerie of Western American game animals.