This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV dialogue and the sentences in books are frequently inelegant. This isn’t a disaster: Clichés endure because they convey ideas efficiently; not all small talk can be scintillating; a bad sentence here or there in a novel won’t necessarily condemn the whole work.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: When your every decision feels torturous “Noon”: a poem by Li-Young Lee A prominent free-speech group is fighting for its life. The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting Poetry is different, however. We expect more from it. Not a single word should be misused, not a single syllable misplaced—and, as a result, studying language within the poetic form can be particularly rewarding. In March and April of this year, two of America’s great poetry critics, Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff, died. In reading Adam Kirsch’s tribute to both, I was struck by how different their respective approaches to language were. Vendler was a “traditionalist,” per Kirsch; she liked poets who “communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language.” She was a famous close reader, carefully picking over poems to draw out every sense of meaning. For Vendler, Kirsch writes, poetry made language “more meaningful.”Perloff wasn’t as interested in communicating meaning. Her favorite avant-garde poets used words in surprising and odd ways. As Kirsch writes, “At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention.”I’d reckon that neither Perloff nor Vendler relished lines that were smooth and empty, even though their preferred artists and attitudes toward reading might have differed. Ben Lerner has said that poetry represents a desire to “do something with words that we can’t actually do.” In that sense, poems are a declaration of hope in language: Even if we can’t pull off something magnificent, we can at least try.Through poetry, we can perhaps come closest to capturing the events that feel so extreme as to exist beyond our capacity to describe them. In the February 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ann Lauterbach published a poem called “War Zone,” dedicated to Paul Auster, another literary great who died recently. The poem depicts not scenes of violence and gore but the hollow wordlessness many of us feel in the face of war or suffering—then it uses images of silence, blankness, and absence to fight against that unspeakability. The last line, which I won’t spoil here, points to this paradox: Words may not be able to capture everything—especially the worst things—but they can, and must, try. Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Alan Thomas; Lilian Kemp / Radcliffe College Archive / Harvard University. When Poetry Could Define a LifeBy Adam KirschThe close passing of the poetry critics Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler is a moment to recognize the end of an era.Read the full article.What to ReadThe Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna LewisLewis’s exemplary Southern cookbook is interspersed with essays on growing up in a farming community in Virginia; many of the recipes in the book unspool from these memories. Lewis, who worked as a chef in New York City as well as in North and South Carolina, writes with great sensual and emotional detail about growing up close to the land. Of springtime, she writes, “The quiet beauty in rebirth there was so enchanting it caused us to stand still in silence and absorb all we heard and saw. The palest liverwort, the elegant pink lady’s-slipper displayed against the velvety green path of moss leading endlessly through the woods.” Her book was ahead of its time in so many ways: It is a farm-to-table manifesto, a food memoir published decades before Ruth Reichl popularized the form, and an early, refined version of the cookbook-with-essays we’re now seeing from contemporary authors such as Eric Kim and Reem Assil. The recipes—ham biscuits, new cabbage with scallions, potted stuffed squab—are as alluring as the prose. — Marian BullFrom our list: eight cookbooks worth reading cover to coverOut Next Week

When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny-backed, white-bellied, tufted-eared red squirrels, to be exact. For hundreds of years, society’s elites stitched red-squirrel pelts into luxurious floor-length capes and made the animals pets, cradling them in their lap and commissioning gold collars festooned with pearls. Human lives were so intertwined with those of red squirrels that one of history’s most cursed diseases likely passed repeatedly between our species and theirs, according to new research that Walker-Meikle contributed to.Uncomfortable questions about medieval squirrels first came up about a decade ago, after another group of researchers stumbled upon three populations of red squirrels—one in Scotland, two on different English islands—with odd-looking features: swollen lips, warty noses, skin on their ears that had grown thick and crusty. A search for microbial DNA in some of those squirrels’ tissues revealed that they had leprosy. “What’s it doing in red squirrels?” John Spencer, a microbiologist at Colorado State University, recalled thinking at the time. Scientists had long thought that leprosy affected only humans, until the 1970s, when they began to find the bacterium that causes it in armadillos too, Daniel Romero-Alvarez, an infectious-disease ecologist and epidemiologist at Universidad Internacional SEK, in Ecuador, told me. But that was in the Americas; in Europe, dogma held that leprosy had essentially vanished by about the 16th century. The most plausible explanation for the pathogen’s presence in modern squirrels, Spencer told me, was that strains of it had been percolating in the rodents unnoticed for hundreds of years.Bacterial genomes extracted from several of the infected British squirrels suggested that this was the case: Those sequences bore a strong resemblance to others previously pulled out of medieval human remains. The next step was proving that medieval squirrels carried the bacterium too, Verena Schünemann, a paleogeneticist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, and one of the new study’s authors, told me. If those microbes were also genetically similar to ones found in medieval people, they’d show that leprosy had probably regularly jumped between rodents and humans.[Read: Tuberculosis got to South America through … seals?]Schünemann teamed up with Sarah Inskip, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in the U.K., and set out to find an archaeological site in Britain with both human and squirrel remains. They zeroed in on the medieval city of Winchester, once famous for its fur-obsessed market patrons, as well as a large leprosarium. After analyzing dozens of samples from around Winchester, the team was able to extract just four leprosy genomes—three from humans, one from the tiny foot bone of a squirrel. But those turned out to be enough. All four samples dated to about the High Middle Ages—the oldest detection so far of leprosy in a nonhuman animal, Inskip told me. The genomes also all budded from the same branch of the leprosy family tree, sharing enough genetic similarities that they strongly indicated that medieval humans and squirrels were swapping the disease-causing bugs, Schünemann told me.Still, Schünemann wasn’t sure exactly how that would have happened, given that transmitting a leprosy infection generally requires prolonged and close contact. So, hoping to fill in the blanks, she reached out to Walker-Meikle, who has extensively studied medieval pets.Walker-Meikle already had the exact type of evidence that Schünemann and her colleagues were looking for: medieval artwork depicting people cradling the animals, documents describing women taking them out for walks, financial accounts detailing purchases of flashy, rodent-size accessories and enclosures of the sort people today might buy for pet dogs, Walker-Meikle told me. Squirrels were so popular at the time that she found written references to the woes of a 13th-century archbishop who, despite years of pleading, couldn’t get the nuns in his district to stop doting on the creatures. They were essentially akin, she said, to tiny lapdogs. Fur processing, too, would have provided ample opportunity for spread. In the High and Late Middle Ages, squirrel fur was the most popular fur used to trim and line garments, and clothes made with it were considered as high fashion as a Prada bag now, Schünemann told me. In a single year in the 14th century, the English royal household purchased nearly 80,000 squirrel-belly skins. Contact between squirrels and humans was so intimate that, throughout much of the Middle Ages, leprosy likely ping-ponged back and forth between the two species, Inskip told me.[Read: Admit it, squirrels are just tree rats]But the team’s work doesn’t say anything about the origins of leprosy, which entered humans at least thousands of years ago. It also can’t prove whether leprosy infiltrated humans or red squirrels first. It does further dispel the notion that leprosy is a problem only for humans, Romero-Alvarez told me. Armadillos may have picked up leprosy from humans relatively recently, after Europeans imported the pathogen to South America. The scaly mammals are now “giving it back to humans,” Spencer told me, especially, it seems, in parts of South America and the southern United States, where some communities hunt and eat the animals or keep them as pets.Human-to-human transmission still accounts for the majority of leprosy spread, which remains uncommon overall. But Romero-Alvarez pointed out that the mere existence of the bacterium in another species, from which we and other creatures can catch it, makes the disease that much more difficult to control. “Everybody believes that leprosy is gone,” Claudio Guedes Salgado, an immunologist at Pará Federal University, in Brazil, told me. “But we have more leprosy than the world believes.” The barriers between species are porous. And once a pathogen crosses over, that jump is impossible to fully undo.

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