Category: Aquifer

Reflex

Fumble on the big screen, everyone

up in arms. My daughter grasps my shirt

 while nursing and can’t let go. Across the room,

 my mother applies Chapstick without taking

her eyes off the screen. It’s Christmas. Everyone believes

in miracles and wants to hold the baby. My grandmother

 sits at the table holding a doll. Beyond her, a train

 slips through the snowy field carrying—what? Time

moves backwards on the field. Less than a minute left

on the clock. My grandmother’s lips barely close around the red

 spoonful of Jello with coconut. A marshmallow falls

from the spoon in all its puffed-up,

childhood ecstasy. The game is nearly over.  Pins

 and needles. The tree is heavy with color

 and ornaments of beans and children’s faces.

My grandmother tightens her fingers around the hanky

she has always held. Eventually, there is nothing

 left beneath the tree. Everyone kisses the baby.

 They each slip a finger into her palm,

and she struggles to let them go.

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Homer

I’m an old man and he’s an old man, seventy-eight, the two of us, on our birthdays just past. My wife is dead and his wife died too, a fact of life we’re living with. His children are grown and he lives alone. So are mine. So do I.

 

There are some differences, though. And here’s one. He exists and I do not.

 

It’s morning. His bulldog is licking his bare feet as he stands at the sink and drinks a glass of water to knock down the queasiness in his stomach. He drank too much last night and the slobbering tongue lapping at his toes is not helping his hangover. He shakes his leg at the dog. Getting the hint, she finds a half-dozen pieces of kibble in her bowl and finishes them before waddling into the room where he’s worked for the last forty years. She is already way ahead of him.

 

He takes a mug of coffee from the pot he’s brewed and walks it into the room where he turns on a lamp. He doesn’t so much need the light in the room. He needs the light in his head.

 

Last night was a bad night for him. It’s a year this month since his wife died. He’s been having trouble getting past the memories of all the years he devoted to her, the children, all that he did for them. For what, he muses, now that it’s all done and gone? He’s also having trouble keeping things straight in the here and now. His grandkids’ names, which he mostly can’t remember. Bills he paid or didn’t. Last week he stuck the TV remote into a potted plant, wasn’t able to find it for three days. So he’s been drinking alone at night and a little too much, thinking it will help and that he can handle it like he used to, and when he wakes in the morning it would be unbearable if he didn’t have me to knock around and focus his mind.

 

On the page on the screen in front of him, he’s left me in a tough spot. I’ve been here for eighteen, twenty hours now waiting for him to get me out of it. Or not.

 

In the life he’s created for me at the beginning of my story, he’s got me taking care of my grandkids, Sara and William, and William has just disappeared from the skateboard ramp where I think I last saw him. He’s had the kids’ parents go away for the weekend to visit old friends, and here I am in a park in Troy, New York, an ice cream truck crawling with tweens at one end, slackers and a couple of what appear to be runaway girls getting high at the other, the group of them under an overpass that filters traffic onto Route 7. I’m getting too old for this shit, and he knows it better than anyone, even as he begins putting words into my mouth.

 

“William! William!” He has me turn toward Sara. “Did you see where your brother went?”  Before she can answer, he’s got me climbing up the skateboard ramp, arthritic hip and enlarged prostate in tow, approaching kids I don’t know, asking if they’ve seen my grandson: long hair, T-shirt with a grinning skeleton, ripped Adidas. None of the kids seem to know what I’m talking about, however, and we jump into a scene where the cops come and start to question me as if I’ve lost my mind as well as my grandson. And now my granddaughter Sara is crying. This asshole made her cry. “Grandpa, Grandpa, what’s wrong?” he has her ask me.

 

It’s at this point he decides he needs another cup of coffee. The fucker.

 

Two nights ago, when his own daughter called to check in on him, he couldn’t remember which of his daughters he was talking with. Worse, he couldn’t remember what either of them looked like. Took him ten minutes of conversation, dancing around the weather, what he’d had for dinner, if he’d been taking his Plavix and Paxil, before he could make sense of the voice to visualize this tall girl with short brown hair, now a fifty-year-old woman going grey. He never let on and she hung up thinking all was well. Then he cried for a good half hour.

 

As it turned out he never put William there in the park with Sara and me in the first place. Apparently, the kid’s parents let him stay with a friend this time, leaving me with only my granddaughter to care for. Sure, slurp your second cup of coffee, you smug son-of-a-bitch. Whoever coined the term misery loves company must have been talking about you and me.

 

He has one of the cops ask me my name, where I live, what year I was born, who the president is. I tell him Jack Benny, Nome Alaska, 1834, Abraham Lincoln. The cop, tone deaf to my sarcasm, starts to write it down in his pad before I wave my hand, indicating that I’m making a joke. “My name is Homer Fairchild, I live at 367 Seaforth Street in Troy, I was born in 1940, and the president is . . .” He has me pause a beat for comedic, can-you-believe-it effect. “Donald Trump.” At least he’s given me a good sense of humor and the politics to go with it. His politics. His sense of humor.

 

But the cops are not smiling. Why did you think you were here with your grandson, he has one of them ask me? Sara—bless the empathetic heart he’s given her—tells the cops that I always watch the both of them, so I must have forgotten for a minute that William wasn’t here today. Yeah, I forgot that William wasn’t here today, in the same way he’s been forgetting to dress himself in the morning and comes down to greet me in whatever he’s slept in the night before, barefoot, sometimes in just his boxers and a sweat shirt, sometimes a robe with nothing under it but the hirsute body he’ll be buried in. It’s half that he can’t find the reason to dress any more, half that he forgets he hasn’t.

 

He’s not what you’d call a household name, but he’s written a few books and between that and his teaching he’s made a living. Over the years, this house he lives in became the port he returned to daily to scratch out whatever success he’s had, his wife and children being the masts he lashed himself to whenever the temptations of drink or the urge to end it all came too close to overpowering him. A page or two a day, a chapter a month when he could manage it, three classes a week, one book every few years.  Steady as she goes. Only now she does not go steady anymore. This boat that is his life is sinking, the sirens of the hereafter are singing his name louder all the time. All that’s left to him is his writing. It’s the wax he stuffs into his ears to resist the call to surrender.

 

The cops let me go, but Sara tells her mother what happened, and in the next scene he’s got me inside the whiz-bang of an MRI machine. It’s at that moment that I find out what my story is going to be about. It’ll be a short story and it’ll be about what all stories are about: life and death. But mostly death, or should I say the odyssey of getting there. Death sells. Death breaks our hearts.

 

When he was a boy, he rode a blue bike, a pinstriped Schwinn with a coaster brake and fat fenders that his father and mother saved up to buy for him. He cherished the bike in the way boys do and then someone stole it while he was inside a five and dime. This wasn’t in the days when there was a lot of that kind of thievery going on, and the loss of his bike was like the unexpected loss of a limb. He thought about revenge. He fantasized about finding who stole the bike and beating them half to death. But then the years went by and there was more of this kind of thing—a junior high sweetheart who dumped him for another older boy, his father dying of a heart attack when he was barely twenty years old—and he slowly realized that loss was not something you could revenge, that it was what we were put here to live with, and that’s when he found his calling. If he’s built his reputation on anything it’s as that author who writes about people who can’t seem to find happiness because loss keeps getting in the way. I wonder if it’s dawned on him that happiness is what you find after you accept that loss will keep getting in the way.

 

The tumor he has the doctors discover on my brain is massive and in a bad spot. To take it out they’d have to take out half my brain to get to it. He writes a passage that recalls the first thing I think of when they tell me about the tumor. A group of sentences about an uncle I had who also apparently died of a brain tumor and who, near the end when he was truly crazy, took all his money and rolled it up with rubber bands to stash it in the glove box of his Plymouth, wherein, one afternoon he took me out to the driveway and begged me to take the money and buy him a plane ticket to Greece so he could escape into the sun. Escape what, Uncle Tony, I asked him. Dying, he told me. Nobody dies in Greece, he said.

 

After that, he gets more daring and goes deeper into my mind, beneath the unpleasant memories and the fear of the pain I’m anticipating in the months to come, flooding me with a litany of those things I’ll leave behind when I forfeit the gift of my five senses. It’s as if he’s operating on my brain with words, not to remove the tumor but to remove and preserve the life around the tumor before it’s too late. My life. His life.

 

He has me recall the sound that the head of a zipper makes as it goes up the tracks of a jacket I’m putting on the first cold day of autumn . . . my mother walking into my room, thermometer in her hand telling me I’m not leaving the bed today, that delicious dryness of the fever that’s keeping me home from school . . . the unbelievable silence in the seconds after one of my infant children finally stopped crying after hours of crying in the middle of the night . . . the fat stack of property deeds on a Monopoly board after I’ve won the game . . . all the liquor I’ve happily drunk and how something so cold can feel so hot going down your throat . . . the last time I got caught in the rain . . . hit a baseball . . . kissed a girl I was not married too . . . lit a candle when the lights went out in a storm . . .

 

Writing this wears him out and in the middle of the sentence he gets up and leaves the room. He stands at a window in the kitchen and gazes through it. Two crows are squatting in a river birch he planted with his daughters in the back yard more than forty years ago. The crows are squawking at each other, bobbing in the branches at the top of the tree, snapping their beaks at the sky. With a writer’s force of habit, he silently translates the conversation he hears them having. Crow to English. Human to crow.

 

Don’t look now but somebody’s staring at us from inside the house?

 

Where? Who?

 

I told you not to look.

 

Right.

 

I’m hungry. You hungry?

 

Yeah.

 

Both crows turn their heads toward the window as if he might be the meal they’re looking for. What’s truly haunting, though, is how the conversation he’s put into their beaks times out so perfectly with the crows finding him behind the glass. For a second, he imagines he’s controlling their thoughts and actions in the real world, in the same way he’s controlling mine in the world he’s created for me. He feels powerful and terrified all at the same time. Yes, playing God has always had its downside. For years it’s made him ponder what those beings he’s created would do to him if they had the chance, given what he puts them through, him being the One that gave them life in the first place.

 

Without realizing it, he starts tapping his foot on the floor. It brings the dog over to him, her truncated legs working double-time to propel her, her tail wagging. She’s been around for fifteen years but right now he can’t bring himself to comfort her in the way she’s so eagerly walked over to comfort him. Yes, indeed. He deserves whatever he’s got coming to him from all those creatures he’s lorded over. All the more so as the dog begins to yowl when he walks away and closes her out of the room.

 

Once more now we face each other, he and I. He’s moved me from the doctor’s office into my daughter’s kitchen where he’s sat me down at a table along with my daughter and her family, a pointed party hat on my head. It might as well be a dunce cap. The muscles in my cheeks and jaw are mostly slack and across my mouth I endure the drooling smile of an idiot. He’s not happy he’s had to do this to me. As if that’s some sort of consolation for either of us.

 

Months have passed since the previous scene in the doctor’s office—lapsed time he tossed off with a double space of empty lines—and now it just so happens to be my birthday (my last from the looks of it). On the table in front of me is a cake blazing with candles and at my side he’s got my granddaughter blowing at them because I can’t.  Cheek-to-cheek we are, this girl and me, as if her having do this task for a dying man was not already enough pathos for a reader. And now this hack has everyone signing happy birthday to me, making sure to mention that I’m having a hard time recognizing the tune.

 

It’s in the writing of this last sentence that he stops cold. He’s begun to torture the both of us, and he knows it. It’s one thing to kill a man little-by-little, it’s another to murder a perfectly good story by feeding it clichés until it chokes on its own words.

 

Slowly at first and then with more speed, he backspaces over the last lines he’s written. I can feel the life he’s recently given me unraveling and let me tell you it’s not pleasant—my family unwound and made to vanish in mid-sentence, the flesh and blood pulled off my bones, and then my bones falling off the page as well. Who among us could watch a part of their life disappearing like this, bit-by-bit, without feeling pain, no matter how badly written that last chapter of our life had been?

 

And that’s when I see what he’s doing. It’s one of those ideas that begin with a thump of veracity in his chest before lighting up the circuits on the left side of his brain like fireflies among the trees. He knows what he wants from his story now. It won’t make any sense for me, but it makes perfect sense for him. It’s his story after all and this is how he wants it to end.

 

I reappear in an automobile which looks a lot like the one he drove until he had to stop driving it because he was having trouble remembering how to get where he was going. And now he has me in that car, my tumor temporarily forgotten about, or maybe gone all together. Either way, it’s a miracle that only a fiction writer could pull off.

 

Pushing the engine of this suburban hatchback to go faster than it’s ever gone, he’s got me speeding down a two-lane highway in the middle of who’s knows where—trees and roadside mailboxes blurring past—and I’m singing out loud to a Johnny Cash tune on a country western station. Reaching into my jacket pocket, he has me pull out a pack of cigarettes. Unfiltered Chesterfields no less, and when I light one up it’s a surprise for the both of us, let me tell you. Neither of us has smoked for more than thirty years. Though that’s not the real surprise. The real surprise is that when I catch sight of the flame from my lighter flashing in the rear-view mirror he has me raise my eyes to look at my face, and when I do it’s his eyes that are staring back at me.

 

Having ever so briefly reinforced the point that I am no more charge of this than anyone is ever in charge of anything, he turns his attention back to me. I’m getting high on nicotine, exhaling jets of smoke out of my nostrils, lighting another cigarette off the butt end of the first as I suck it down to my fingertips, the car under my feet overheating as I push it beyond its limit. You’d think this was reckless enough. But no, because now he has me reach under the seat and pull out a pint of bourbon. Cigarette in my teeth, I unscrew the cap, steering the car with my knees. I want to tell him to stop, that’s he’s going too far. But who am I to judge.

 

And then, from the back seat of the car, a loud, rubbery fart rips at the air.

 

It’s obnoxious and full-throttled and nearly human, except it isn’t. It’s the bulldog. He’s put the Goddamn dog in the car with me. I’m not really sure if it’s supposed to be his dog or my dog but whoever it belongs to, he has the animal’s head hanging out the back window, her jaws spread wide, that madcap bulldog tongue flapping like a banner in the wind. He writes in a look of release on the dog’s face that foreshadows dog heaven, as if little-by-little this animal is letting go of the old dog she was to be born again as a new dog with new tricks.

 

Pulling the strings inside me, he has me put my arm over the seat to get a better look at the dog, twisting my neck, reinvigorating an ancient pinch in the nerve. “That a girl,” he has me say, tears of pain in my eyes. “Who’s a good dog?”

 

The dog barks loudly, twice, as if two solid barks were enough to cover the unmistakable irony that he’s put me in his car with his bulldog farting all over the ending of my story. All he has to do now is change the pronoun. And so he does.

 

We drain the bottle of Bourbon, drop the driver’s side window and toss the empty onto the road where it explodes into shards along the double white line. Taking a last drag of the cigarette we’ve been smoking, we toss that out of window too. After that, drunk with a drunk’s overconfidence, we slap on the brakes, skidding into a grassy rest area at the side of the road. We listen to the engine heaving until out of mercy we turn it off along with the radio. Outside, a wind is blowing in from the east, whistling through the crevices it finds under the fenders and wheel wells of the car.

 

In the backseat, the dog looks out the window and spots what we’ve come for, the origin of the wind. It’s the lake, a hundred yards off, and she barks at the sight of it. We’ve been here many times before in our lives. It’s where we’ve been headed all along.

 

Exiting the car, we help the dog from the back seat to the ground, her old legs no longer able to make the jump. Stooping down we take off her collar, and then teetering away from her, we hang it in a maple tree where its silver studs and brass name tag catch the sunlight filtering through newly sprung leaves. Behind us the dog shakes and flaps her loose skin as if she’s just shed twenty pounds of weight and fifteen years of life.

 

We walk on, focused on each step, overcompensating for the liquor, the dog shuffling behind. About halfway to the lake we stop again and, making sure no one can see us, we take off our clothes. First go the shoes and then the socks and then the shirt and pants and underwear. Stepping out of our shorts, we catch sight of our penis and laugh until we have to stop to catch our breath. This shriveled stump between our legs couldn’t even rightly be called a penis any longer; the thought of how it used to inflate itself at will, its little head with an ego of its own, being the most laughable thing of all.

 

Fully naked and reaching the edge of the lake, we put our feet in the water. We’re so drunk we barely register the glacial temperature around our ankles and, forgetting that the dog is not also drunk, we call out for her to join us. She’s still a few feet behind but this is where she’s going to draw the line. It’s as if she knows how cold and dark and deep the water is and if she doesn’t know that, well, she does know that she can no longer swim. And so we stumble back to cradle her up in our arms and carry the warmth of her into the water with us.

 

Up to our knees now, the dog squirming against our chest, we look out over the water and, there, materializing on the surface of the lake, is our wife. She’s swimming parallel to the shore, her hands arcing toward the sky before disappearing under the surface, water dripping down her arms with each stroke. She’s young again and she’s wearing a red, one-piece bathing suit, her auburn hair streaming in her wake. Behind us we hear our daughters arguing on a blanket in the grass, the sound traveling across the years. They’re fighting over the sandwiches in a picnic basket and we lap at the sweetness of their voices.

 

Up to our neck in the water, the dog hyperventilating in the crook of our elbow, we begin to swim, kicking both legs, paddling with the dog. We want to reach back in time to rejoin our wife, to kiss her wet lips and share the sound of our children giggling on the shore. But the sun has gone down more quickly then we expected, its flames extinguished by the lake. Everything has suddenly gone dark and quiet and we can’t find our wife, can no longer hear our children. It seems that we’ve lost them for good, and that’s the moment we realize why we did what we did for them and what it was for. Sweet Jesus, we were put here to convince them this world is not a dream, forced to play that practical joke on them because how could they have gone on living if we had not.

 

Frantic, the dog kicks her legs against our chest, her claws piercing our skin to form a rosary of pricks. We try to hold onto her, but she manages to break free, not yet realizing this isn’t the freedom she had in mind. She howls, swallows water and then begins to sink, great bubbles of air rising from her jaw as she goes under. We grab for her, more out of instinct than out of desire, and then we give up and follow her down.

 

I never asked for any of this, but then again neither did he. I want to tell him to write us out of this particular ending. To put us back in our chair in the room he sat in for forty years, to give us just one more day’s work, one last chance to forget the names of our grandchildren or the street on which we live, to misplace objects and go on enduring the pain of loss that we said we could no longer endure. Even that I’d put up with if he would just rewind us back toward shore, put the dog back in the car and the car in reverse, sober us up and let us die a natural, if altogether baffling death. Unfortunately, the best he can do now is to write us into a new life.  It’s the best any God can do.

 

I have become a catfish and so has he. His mouth is a gaping toothless oval and so is mine. He has foot-long whiskers that float backwards toward a shark grey body and morning to night he trolls the mud under black water feeding off the bottom, me inside him, him inside me. We are the same. We have the same cold stare, the same small brain, the same small expectations. In this moment, we remain as one.

 

Swimming toward the surface, we move in tighter and tighter circles, winding our prehistoric spine, waving farewell to the water with our tail as we jump into the air, the sun warming our back, our eyes reflexive, turning gauzy against the light. It seems like forever we are up there under the sky, but when we do fall it’s not into the water that we descend. It’s into that room in his house that he’s lived in for more than forty years.

 

Everything is quiet, but for the ticking of a clock, the panting of the bulldog on the other side of the door, the clicking of a last sentence and the pop of the final period. It’s then that I understand how he’s abandoned me.

 

I am to be left here alone, separated from him for the first time, endlessly swimming in a lake of his invention, living for eternity behind a scrim of his imagination. He, on the other hand, will get up from his chair and continue to walk on land, forgetting more and more of what made him who he was until he forgets it all and fades away.

 

I exist and he does not. I will go on living for as long as there are eyes to see, and he will not. There is a time for words and a time for sleep. No matter if any of this ever really happened or not.

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The Meek Awards NEW at TFR

Posted on by cahcmsadmin

We’re a bit late in getting this news on the website, but we’re proud to announce that a new donor has made it possible for us to select one author or artist (or to split the award between two) in each of our publication categories each year. These writers and artists are some of those who come to us through general submissions rather than contests or other means. At The Florida Review, we recognize that writers deserve to be paid for their work, and, though it remains financially impossible for us to provide remuneration for every writer and artist, we are happy that now every writer who submits to The Florida Review and Aquifer has at least the possibility.

For the inaugural 2017 year, we selected the following writers and artists for this special recognition. They represent the kind of work we love to publish at The Florida Review and Aquifer–both personally moving and aware of the wider world.

  • Esteban Rodriguez (“Roadside,” 41.2) and Sherrie Fernandez-Williams (“the crossing,” Aquifer) for poetry
  • Laura Farnsworth (“Salvio: A Short Story,” Aquifer) for fiction
  • Re’Lynn Hansen (“The Han Gan,” 41.1) for nonfiction [also recipient of recognition as a Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2018]
  • Aubrey Hirsch (“The Language of Trauma,” 41.1) for graphic narrative
  • Hannah Kaplan (“Dear Doctor,” Aquifer) for digital/electronic story
  • Jave Yoshimoto (“Meditation on the Purpose of Art Making,” Aquifer) for visual art

Congratulations to these and all of the other wonderful writers and artists we publish. In 2018, we will be adding a winner in the short film category as well, and look for that announcement sooner than November!

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The Divine Visions of Hildegard von Bingen

A short film visualizing the ecstatic visions of the divine by renowned German medieval nun, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, born in 1098, who invented the language Lingua Ignota, composed music and made discoveries in natural science. These were seemingly bestowed upon her by God through her visions in a period of time when this was forbidden for women. She was a writer, botanist, painter and a truly mysterious female trail-blazer. What did she see?

 

This abstract film by Paul Vernon was commissioned by Filthy Lucre supported by Arts Council England, with vocals from Josephine Stephenson, arrangement and recording by Joe Bates and music by Hildegard von Bingen.

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Muybridge Comics

 

“Muybridge Comics” challenges the division between comics and visual art. While all comics are necessarily a form of visual art, most comics do not encourage individual images, or panels, to be viewed independently from their sequences. “Muybridge Comics” attempts both approaches, with the final two installments assembling the two, interwoven, four-part sequences into combined images more reminiscent of traditional comics pages. “Muybridge Comics” adapts photographs from the motion studies “Two Women Kissing” and “Two Men Wrestling” published in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 Animal Locomotion.

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Maps

What do I do now? There are no maps

 

No brushstrokes gesturing to where I could have gone,

 

Whimsical curlicues pointing my way.

 

No celluloid images flickering my history at me.

 

“To become who you were meant to be, you have to kill the past.”

 

Is that what I have done? No phone calls with my parents for nine years.

 

Who gave me the right, one other human children never had, to

 

Sever that bond? To act like I’m made of metal, wielding a light

 

Saber that manufactures their consent. How many years

 

Am I allowed to stay this light? No burden

 

Other people roll their eyes and put up with. “Oh, Dad.” “Mom, please.”

 

When she decided nothing could stop her pulling me

 

Into her bed. When he explained how I would always deserve

 

Being cursed. “Beyond the pale?” But what if we were always

 

Too far behind the dark? Dark behind dark,

 

Moving where people couldn’t see.

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Interview: Hanif Abdurraqib

Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's The Crown Ain't Worth Much.     Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's Vintage Sadness.     Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His published work includes poetry in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN America, and various other journals and essays and music criticism in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016), was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, and others. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Vintage Sadness (Big Licks, 2017), which was produced in a limited edition and is no longer available.

 

He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. He now serves as poetry editor for Muzzle.

 

Yes, he would like to talk to you about your favorite band and your favorite sneakers. You can find out more at his website.

 

We caught up with Hanif at the Miami Book Fair in the fall of 2017, right before the release of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to talk to him about that collection and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.

 

Hunter Case for The Florida Review: I’m a little bit star-struck (laughter) and I’d like to have you start off by reading a poem.

 

Abdurraqib: Sure. This poem is called “None Of My Vices Are Violent Enough To Undo Remembering.” (Abdurraqib reads the poem, found here.)

 

TFR: The last couple of years have had you releasing a collection of both poetry and essays. Do you find it easier to go between the two forms? Or do you find you have a certain proclivity for one genre?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m actually at a point now where I don’t even think of genre as something that affects my approach to the work. I’m really driven instead by whatever it will take for me to figure out what’s latching onto me at the moment. Oftentimes, so much of my work is driven by my curiosities and knowing that I’m wrong about something. I’m interested in finding whatever avenue it takes for me—not even to find answers, but to find better ways to discuss my wrongness. Sometimes that’s a really long piece. Sometimes that’s a poem, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. But the sooner I gave up the idea of adhering to genre the easier the work came to me.

 

TFR: A lot of your poems are very narrative, or at least seem to be driven by some sort of distinct memory. I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but the ghost of the author’s mother and Tyler both play prominent roles in each collection respectively. And in “When We Were 13…” [a poem from The Crown Ain’t Worth Much], you say that a “piano can coax the most vicious of ghosts out of a body.” Do you ever find that your writing, or what you write, tends to do the same? That is the way of coaxing these ghosts out of your memory?

 

Abdurraqib: Yeah, or perhaps more efficiently, is that it’s a way of bringing people to life. Bringing people back to life I’ve lost. I think that’s important. I think that work is more vital than anything, which is why I don’t think of the work as sad when others might. I think of it as honoring—that it’s an honor for me to write about people who are no longer with me so that they might live on in a space that is outside of me. In a world beyond the one they inhabit while they are here.

 

TFR: You write so much about fear. The fear of loss, and there’s a fear of whiteness, blackness, violence. Do you ever find yourself being afraid of something in particular? What is the fear you find through your writing?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m afraid of the current state of the world. I’m afraid for the marginalized people I love. I’m afraid of empire and the way that America is positioning itself, not just in our States but globally. I’m afraid of all those things, and I believe that together we can work toward changing those things, but I’m even more afraid of the things I’m individually in charge of. I’m afraid of my anxiety overcoming my day-to-day life and not allowing me to live a life that chases some joy. I’m afraid of letting down the people I love in whatever way that looks like. And I’m afraid of not honoring and valuing the people I love while they’re still here to be honored and valued.

 

TFR: So since a lot of your writing is about honoring people, or being afraid of letting down people you care about, what is the most important part of that process? Getting those thoughts out? Living your life in that way?

 

Abdurraqib: The most important part of the process—for me at least—is trying to approach all of my relationships as honestly as possible. Trying to—and this is the real struggle—bring the vulnerability that exists on the page and bring the kind of honest tenderness that I attempt to bring to the page and bring that into my real life interactions. I think that’s hard work because it’s easy to write the thing, but it’s harder to live the thing sometimes. It’s easier for me to wax poetic about how I love my people and my work, but sometimes it’s harder to do that when I’m tired or frustrated. So I think the thing I’m working on endlessly is trying to live close to the way I write.

 

TFR: And do you think, coming from a masculine community, that tenderness is especially challenging to express on the page as well?

 

Abdurraqib: Yes and no. I will say this. A thing that I’m always aware of is the fact that I’m a straight, cis-male, so I am rewarded for showing vulnerability in ways that people who don’t identify like me are just expected to show vulnerability. Or that sometimes those who don’t identify as I do are punished for that vulnerability. I try to be very aware of that. Yes, vulnerability is a challenge for everyone. But all this stuff has to be seen through the lens of whatever privileges we hold. So I am cognizant of my vulnerability being applauded because of how I identify, but I also still earnestly chase after that because when I was young I didn’t have a real masculine blueprint for vulnerability, and what that led to was me growing up in a world in which I thought vulnerability was the work of women. I spent my late teens/early twenties in the punk scene, and I thought [vulnerability] was the work of my queer or women friends in the scene. And it’s not. So I want to work to strip that idea away, and I think it is stripping away honestly. I sometimes go into high schools and do workshops with students, and I think young men are really writing poems fearlessly and comfortably in a way that I wasn’t when I was their age because I was afraid of what writing a poem would mean. I was afraid of what writing a poem would tell me about myself. That if I put the emotions I was having down on the page that it would make them real and then I’d have to confront them. I think I’m seeing that in high schools—young men confronting those emotions in ways that I was not ready to.

 

TFR: And coming up in the scene that you did, did you ever get blow-back from attempting to get into writing—both as writing and as vulnerability—from anybody that you grew up with?

 

Abdurraqib: Not really, the most push-back I got was from being one of the few black kids in the scene. But I also came up in a particular era of punk/pop-punk/emo. The Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger era of the scene where everyone fancied themselves some kind of poetic person even though none of us were, right? The men who were the front-men of those bands, or the mouthpieces of those bands, were often the brooding writer types even though most of their writing was directed pretty poorly.

 

TFR: A lot of your writing talks about growing up in the Midwest. Both in the suburbs and out of them. Or, as you say, “the less than suburban neighborhood.” How do you think your writing and you, yourself, would be different had you not come up in the Midwest? Because I know that that scene—both the Midwest and its punk scene, similar to Chuck Klostermann who writes a lot about the Midwest metal scene—is very influential and very present in your writing. How do you think it would be different if you had grown up somewhere else?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m growing a little more interested in how I talk about the Midwest because post-election I feel the Midwest person became this one entity—this singular being—and there are as many types of Midwesterners as there are anyone. I was recently in Nebraska and that’s a very specific type of Midwest different from mine in Columbus, Ohio. I was in Omaha and Lincoln and those are very different Midwests, but there’s an ethos that I think has to do with facing your people. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist on the coasts, but I think that I am writing, always, as though I am in conversation with an audience already. I want people to come to my readings or see me read and feel like they have already joined a conversation in progress—or that they’re welcome to. I don’t know if I’d have that ability, or I’d have an eye towards that, if I did not grow up in a place where I felt like I was always a part of a conversation.

 

TFR: Do you feel that that critical distance is something that helps when you’re unlocking moments of tenderness? Or do you think you’d be impeded if you didn’t have that lens thinking of your audience when you approach the writing?

 

Abdurraqib: I feel like it’d be impeded. But I also think that my music writing, knowledge, and education was totally born just talking about music with my pals. In diners, in bars, in living rooms and basements. That’s what I’m trying to recreate. I don’t want there to be a world in which I am the critic and I am writing down to audience. My audience are the people I want to talk to about music, and I want to create that large living room where we can all sit and talk about some songs that we like. Or don’t like.

 

TFR: Is that recreation, besides being an egalitarian measure, maybe a nostalgia for those moments which might be gone otherwise?

 

Abdurraqib: I think there’s some nostalgia there. But I also think there’s an interest in that. I don’t think people anymore are interested in reading the critic-on-high telling them what to like or not like. A lot of people want to dive into the discussion and may not have time to be music writers for a living or may not have the passion. I did a reading recently and there were these two guys in suits, two businessmen who came to this reading, and they were so eager to talk to me during the Q&A about the piece I wrote on Fleetwood Mac. I’m interested in that person. The person who has a day job but also loves music and doesn’t have the opportunities to talk about it as much as they want to. They want to seek out someone who’s speaking to them on their level, where they feel a part of the conversation.

 

TFR: Jumping off of that, in They Can’t Kill Us, all of your essays are framed by these vignettes around Marvin Gaye. And his final performance at the NBA All-Star’s game before he died. His 1983 performance. Why did that feel right to you?

 

Abdurraqib: So there were a handful of things. One, it was the year I was born. Two, I had this interest in Marvin Gaye—the unpacking of that moment and how it could sing to every part of the book. Because it encapsulates everything: there’s fear there, triumph, violence.

 

TFR: There’s vulnerability.

 

Abdurraqib: There’s vulnerability. I’m fascinated by Marvin Gaye on the whole, but that was the one thing where I thought, Gosh, there’s so much of this and that singing to the collection, and it’s such a fascinating story because it’s this performance that he performed miraculously under a great deal of duress. And he was able to find this small bit of freedom in that performance. I think everything in that book is arcing toward freedom, at least as I see it. So it was natural for me to insert that throughout.

 

TFR: So, in the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?” With you, I mean.

 

Abdurraqib: (laughs) A lot. Just in general?

 

TFR: In general. Today.

 

Abdurraqib: Today’s great. I’m just overwhelmed by this. I got here this morning, maybe I should have come the night before. But I got here this morning, I had to fly out of Columbus at six in the morning. And I’m thrilled to be here, so many of my friends are here. I think the writing community I came up in is that there’s so many people I love and consider dear friends, but we sometimes only see each other at things like this. Or if we’re in each other’s towns for a bit, so this is like a small family reunion for me. I’m really thrilled.

 

TFR: Do you think that kind of atmosphere also captures the feeling of leaving your twenties, where your friendships fall to where you see each other occasionally? It almost parallels that arc.

 

Abdurraqib: Yeah, it arcs that way. I think adulthood is sometimes honing your long-distance communication skills. I think that’s it.

 

TFR: Each of these collections is structured—you said They Can’t Kill Us is structured around freedom. What do each of these collections mean to you, if they mean something different at all?

 

Abdurraqib: I don’t know if they mean anything different at all. I think they’re both archiving a certain thing. I think Crown is more specific in that it’s archiving a very specific brand of East Side Columbus, adulthood, and a very specific brand of black male childhood. I grew up watching films like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, where I saw these black coastal narratives. So I think Crown was my attempt to kind of make Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City in book form for the Midwest. This portrait of a black childhood that is not entirely autobiographical—the bones of it, yes, but it’s not a memoir. I wanted to create a landscape and a storyscape that was like these things I grew up watching but specifically for my brand of Midwest.

 

TFR: The title, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, what is the crown to you?

 

Abdurraqib: So the title comes from the TV show The Wire and the full quote is, “The crown ain’t worth much if the person wearing it is always gettin’ their shit taken.” For me, because so much of the collection is about the generational impacts of gentrification on the East Side of Columbus or Columbus in general, I began thinking the crown itself is any thing or any place you love and want to believe is yours. It’s something that can be taken as easily as it can be given, which I think is true of it in the traditional definition but also in this metaphor I crafted about land and home and freedom.

 

TFR: You said it’s semi-autobiographical, do you feel that your writing might portray you as having a more exciting life than you may feel you have?

 

Abdurraqib: Oh, absolutely.

 

TFR: (laughs)

 

Abdurraqib: I think that’s always the case. Crown, I wouldn’t even call it semi-autobiographical in some ways. I mean I think the most autobiographical stuff is maybe in that third section where I talk about the anxieties of preparing to be married and all of those things. But, a lot of it is the bones of my life with more complex, newer, better flesh on top of them. The stuff that’s in They Can’t Kill Us is way more personal. Way closer to home. And of course, you’re always worried about how you portray yourself more than anyone else. I think I did okay.

 

TFR: I saw in an interview that you’re working on a second collection of poems. Are there any forms or topics that you haven’t had a chance to write about yet that you are excited to experiment with?

 

Abdurraqib: Topics-wise, I feel like I wrote a very large political book with Crown. I know it might not seem political because we weren’t in this “political moment.” But I think I may be picking an interesting moment in time to want to write about the minutiae of living. When I first moved back to Columbus, there was a tree outside my apartment, and the way the sun would hit it in the morning the shadow of a leaf would move across my bed and eventually end up on my face. I’m fascinated by that. I want to write about several small mercies as they come to me. I know that might not seem as impressive now because people are expecting the now-more-than-ever book. We need poets to be political now more than ever but, I think that for me, as a black person in America, my now has been now for a long time. So I’m interested in exploring that which will get me through.

 

TFR: While I think it’s important to speak about the grand narrative, you can also lose a lot if you don’t focus on the personal moments. It’s almost as though you can sometimes forget how to live.

 

Abdurraqib: Absolutely.

 

TFR: Before the interview, we were talking about Fall Out Boy and their importance in They Can’t Kill Us, and I wanted to ask you: if you could tell Pete Wentz something both pre-hiatus and post-hiatus, what would you say?

 

Abdurraqib: I’ve actually told him something post-hiatus. In short, I told him, through someone, that the new songs aren’t for me, but I’m glad to see that the band is still affecting young people in a good way. I went to go see them on the back of the American Beauty/American Psycho tour and I just thought that album was a nightmare to listen to, but I wanted to see them. It’s a different type of young person, but I don’t want to dismiss that. Pre-hiatus, it depends on which Pete, right? Because pre-hiatus there were four different Petes. There’s a Pete for each album. The Pete that’s most interesting to me is the Infinity on High Pete who was struggling with the idea of fame. He really wanted to be famous, but didn’t really want fame. Because now, Pete Wentz is mega-famous, he adjusted. But the whole band break-up was because he couldn’t adjust, he married Ashlee Simpson. I guess I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems like the whole tension between that last album pre-hiatus was because he couldn’t [adjust.] I think Infinity on High is their greatest album, but I think it’s the album where, as a writer, Pete is seeing through a lot of his tricks. He’s just writing plainly about this intense agony—and as I wrote about them in They Can’t Kill Us. I saw early Fall Out Boy shows—I saw the first Fall Out Boy show ever. It has to be a very specific kind of pain to come up in the Chicago hardcore and emo scene, to be Pete Wentz in that scene. To be beloved in bands like Race Traitor and Arma Angelus, playing to thirty people who were his best friends; to go from that to playing VH1 for Paris Hilton overnight. They put out From Under the Cork Tree, thought it would be fine, and then “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” becomes this massive hit. That had to be a real pain, where the band would play in Chicago and his friends couldn’t get into the show, or to have people from his scene, that he was in bands with, calling them “sell-outs.” My heart broke for that Pete Wentz. That writing scene means so much to me, I can’t fathom what it would be like to be so successful that it harms my relationship to it.

 

TFR: I love talking music and, given your writing, I know you do too. If you could make our readers a mixtape, who would be on it?

 

Abdurraqib: It’s hard to make a universal mixtape. A mixtape is a story, and you have to build a narrative, so I like leading off with songs that are haunting. I would probably lead off with “Devil Town,” the Bright Eyes version, because I don’t think the Daniel Johnston version is that compelling. I would put “Crazy” by Kehlani because that’s a really fun song. Cat Power has a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason” which I think is maybe the best cover of anything, ever. I’m just fascinated by Cat Power. There’s a piece on them that was cut from the book—I don’t think it should have been cut from the book, I wish I could put it somewhere else. I’d put some Otis Redding, you can’t go wrong with any Otis Redding. Anderson Paak. But if I put Anderson Paak, I also have to put A Tribe Called Quest because I think it’s good to put an artist and the lineage they come from. This could go on forever. I would put Fall Out Boy. Generally, if I’m making a mixtape for somebody, I’ll end it with Fall Out Boy’s “Saturday.” It’s the great closer.

 

TFR: Similarly, if you could have a “poet mixtape.” Not generally, but for you, who would be on it?

 

Abdurraqib: Oh, Angela Veronica Wong, who’s one of my favorite writers. Sam Sax. Safia Elhillo. Courtney Lamar Charleston. And Nate Marshall. William Evans, who’s my mentor from Columbus. Terrance Hayes. Kaveh Akbar. Franny Choi. Cameron Awkward-Rich. Ocean Vuong. Anne Sexton. Frank O’Hara. Gosh, I could go on.

 

Oh, Adrian Matejka. Sorry, that’s the last one.

 

TFR: (laughs). I read in a previous interview with you that you always manage to feel like an artist, even when you aren’t producing. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of writers, myself included. Any tips on how to keep yourself from being self-critical and feeling inadequate if you don’t produce constantly?

 

Abdurraqib: I think the answer is imagining the work living as the work. This society—because of capitalism and how it bleeds into the art world—is so obsessed with what we can produce and how much we’re producing when really the production is an ongoing thing. If I go out tonight and have a conversation that moves me closer to the unearthing of something that has been nested inside, or that allows me to see the world in a way that’s a tiny bit richer, that is also work. That’s also art. If I wake up tomorrow morning, look out my hotel balcony, and see a bird diving into the water and that motion brings to mind some poetic movement I haven’t been able to figure out yet, that’s also work. It’s not only work if I run to go write it down immediately—the witnessing is work. Conversation, laughter, and song, all of these things that sit inside of us and push us on a path towards whatever eventual art may exist that comes from us, or others, that’s all the art, too. So you’re an artist when you’re doing these things. You’re an artist when you’re consuming that which opens you up to something refreshing or new. You’re an artist when you’re enjoying a meal alone. You’re an artist then, too.

 

TFR: What advice would you have for writers, in general? Not just about self-doubt, but just about writers, for writers.

 

Abdurraqib: I think read twice as much as you write. That’s been my thing since the beginning. I read way more than I write. I guess this isn’t universal advice, because sometimes the people you love to read might be too busy to talk to you, but find the writers you love and don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask them who they’re reading. That’s how I built my poetry canon. I asked the writers I admired who they admired, or what books they loved. Because I don’t have an MFA, I didn’t really start taking poems seriously until around 2011.

 

TFR: Do you have a favorite piece from either of your collections? Or both?

 

Abdurraqib: In They Can’t Kill Us, “Fall Out Boy Forever” means a lot to me.  I don’t know if it’s the best piece. It’s the longest thing in the book by, at least, 3000 words. It was one of those things that lead to a lot of self-discovery. I also really like the piece on My Chemical Romance and feel good about the piece with Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson kissing.

 

TFR: From The Crown?

 

Abdurraqib: I like the first poem in the book, “On Hunger.” It’s the first poem I wrote for the book, and it’s an effective thesis statement for the book.

 

TFR: To echo what you said earlier, it’s very haunting, which is a good way to start off a mix.

 

Abdurraqib: I sequenced that book as though I was making a mix. I think that piece is probably my favorite.

 

TFR: Your author bios on your publications always say that you want to talk about music, love, and sneakers. So, what is your favorite sneaker and do you think it means anything that you were born right before Air Jordans came out?

 

Abdurraqib: Probably. (laughs) Although, the first couple of ones were pretty bad. I think my favorite sneaker of all time is the third sneaker: the Jordan 3. It’s just very clean and comfortable. It fits my foot really well in the way that some don’t because it’s a little wider. My foot’s a little wider. It just looks good with any pair of pants. Sometimes the thing about shoes is how they look with pants, and I think Jordan 3’s look good with every pair of pants. They’re not complicated, there are some Jordans that are complicated, like Jordan 6’s. The design is so muddled. The Jordan 11—those are beautiful with the patent leather on them, but it is just not a practical shoe. But I would say that the Jordan 3 is my favorite.

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Reverie of Gratitude

I would like to invite you over for butternut squash soup. I am excellent at making this soup, and I leave out the heavy whipping cream, but you won’t even miss it. The recipe recommends using an immersion blender, but I’ll tell you that my regular blender works just fine. You make batches. The color is burnt orange. It is pure autumn, the brand that Keats promotes, though whenever I read that poem, I think, it could end after the first stanza. That it doesn’t: a giant bonus. I would like to invite you over for mashed potatoes. I did not skimp on decadence this year, after Ken made his with low-sodium chicken broth. It would be nice if those were worth eating, but I fear they are not. I don’t like to pretend. I am aware that Thanksgiving is a problem: the pilgrim narrative can’t hold up much longer, what with Columbus’ reputation gone south. My job ignores him, altogether. That’s alright: I like my work. I even like cooking on a morning like this, when time is not a Harley driver with a doctored muffler in my blind spot. On the other hand: the noise makes me aware of their presence. To all the Harley drivers: I would like to make you butternut squash soup. I think it would cause less lane-splitting for it is a patient soup: close to a puree and distant from a broth. A friend once said of a clam affair: more a bisque than a chowder, which represented his general state of disillusionment. I do not feel that way. Certain things have gone egregiously right to balance out the egregiously wrong. The word reminds me of Spanish for “y”: i griega. Why oh why oh why oh. For the month approaching Thanksgiving, we receive emails from the local rescue mission, reminding us how little it costs to provide a family a meal. I give $180. My husband gives $250. I give another $180. It is a quiet competition. There are worse contests. I cannot invite everyone over for butternut squash soup and mashed potatoes, though I have enough of the latter for 24. The recipe called for 10 pounds of spuds. This year, I am following recipes. My son is now making a key lime pie. He will zest his knuckles within a moment or two, with 007 in the background, making love to a supermodel. He asks if I watched James Bond movies as a child. I said, they were too sexy for me. Twice today I drove inland and back to the coast. Both times the sky was whole driving east, and in tatters as we drove west. My approach to the fat content in my potatoes was ecumenical: one stick butter, one package cream cheese, one cup milk/heavy cream. Fair is fair. Tomorrow, a feast. I would like to invite you. My mother would say: “Genug shoyn.” Enough, already. As I peeled the 10th pound of potatoes. Seriously. We have more than enough. Be here close to noon, as my sister-in-law makes an artichoke spinach dip that disappears quickly.

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Evolution of a Production Landscape

The Production Landscape series profiles the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota, one of the four states it crosses. For people like me who grew up in suburbia, massive infrastructure projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline are abstractions. I benefit from the resources they transport, but the costs of such delivery systems are born by others in far away “fly over” places. Beginning in Fall 2016 I followed the pipeline route in North Dakota and photographed the landscapes it traversed. I wanted to see what construction looked like from the ground and view the range and agricultural landscapes reshaped by its insertion. The project does not attempt a comprehensive documentation of the pipeline route or the Bakken-producing region from which the oil is generated, but rather seeks to add context to an important public discussion about natural resource usage. The images highlight the physical disruption of the land’s surface and show the rural areas impacted by its construction. In doing so, the series explores the ways in which landscape photography contextualized current debates related to land-use and natural resource extraction.

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MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain

 

MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain is a rumination on why people remember certain trivial or mundane facts but might be unable to recall ostensibly larger ideas or details/events of greater significance. The works in this series, MEMORY, reflect different facets of human memory that I am interested in. They attempt to visualize my own questions about and inquiries into how human memory functions and how it might be reflected by the moving image. (Chung)

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Cocoplum

The neighborhood used to be a beach.

The streets run with clipped grass and trash

 

and potting soil when it rains—

a network of temporary rivers.

 

The landfill passes for real land most of the time

but fat Floridian storms bring up the truth

 

about the sea level and a neighborhood built

for families growing faster than the city.

 

The trees were planted to hold the ground.

The coastal forms are highly tolerant of salt.

 

The place is big and cold, with stiff rooms

for a quiet mother and two sisters living

 

in too much house, the space that’s left

from a bigger family. The father is dead.

 

The rain pulls ferns in through the cracks

in the white stucco. The kitchen blooms

 

while exhausted pool floats fill with water

and then with tadpoles. The hammock grows

 

green mold in the crosses of its ropes

and leaves wet diamonds on their backs.

 

The dog is tied to the stove.

The heat steams the jalousie slats.

 

The doors swell too big for their frames

but the girls never try to leave anyway.

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The Failure of the Verdict

Anagnorisis by Kyle Dargan
TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2018
90 pages, paperback, $18.00

 

Cover of Kyle Dargan's Anagnorisis.

 

In his fifth volume of poetry, Kyle Dargan challenges readers to engage with his experience of living in a society some of whose members continue to regard African Americans as less than equal. Dargan prompts readers to ask themselves what it would be like to walk in the shoes of the speakers of these poems, and readers may be surprised to find themselves uncomfortable, frustrated, angry, sad, guilty, absolved of guilt, and/or ashamed. Dargan’s voice is at his most confident as the poems comment on the world we face today—of an ultra-conservative administration; continued gun violence, especially aimed at African Americans; and continued racism.

 

The first poem, “Failed Sonnet After the Verdict,” sets the tone, as well as its historical context. The verdict of the title refers to the not guilty granted to George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. In the poem, this recent public racial discrimination hearkens back to the racism of the past, “dredging up the cotton gin’s gothic maw, / yoking it to another child devoured.” Although Dargan chooses to include the word sonnet in its title, the poem makes no attempt to follow the rhyme and meter schemes of traditional sonnets. Modern sonnets often are suggestive of the sonnet form primarily by having fourteen lines, as this one does, and are sometimes known as “ghost sonnets.” Dargan’s opening poem carries the ghost of Trayvon Martin and other young African American males throughout. Naming the poem a “failed sonnet” invites readers to ponder whether Dargan is referring not to the failure of the poetic form, but, rather, to the failure of the verdict to bring justice for the murder of a young black man.

 

Dargan has found his home in Washington, DC. Several of the poems in the first section, as well as the longer prose pieces in the second section, reference the city. “Eastland” references Anacostia, in Southeast DC, the quadrant of the city notorious for a high crime rate. Despite the violence, the area is, to the speaker, “peaceful” and “sleepy.” But,

 

 Our bleeding is not random. At nightfall,
 we are not here awaiting a chance to stalk
 the whites nesting your dilating irises.
 We have our own private violence to stir

 and sip just like you—most often
 not on the streets but inside our own homes.

 

The prose piece “Lost One” takes place on the same night that Michael Brown is shot in Ferguson, Missouri, though the speaker does not know this information yet. The speaker and friend are walking home through Anacostia, SE, and, in seeing two young black men, the speaker takes the reader through his too-familiar process of discerning whether the two young back men pose a threat to the speaker and his friend. First, he must “appear unfazed and devoid of concern.” Then, he scans the boys for weapons and signs of communication with each other. “I begin to accept how tired I am of feeling as though I have to treat these young boys as though they are our primary threats in the world.” At the last minute before encountering the boys, his friend suggests they cross the street, and the speaker sees them go through the gate to their own rowhouse. “They were merely trying to get home—just like Kirstyn and me, just like, for all we’ll know, Michael Brown.”

 

It is difficult to read this collection of poetry without noticing its many contradictions, which serve to shine a light on the contradictions that persist in the current environment. Many of us claim that we do not discriminate, while at the same time enjoying our lives of privilege without realizing it. One of the core questions the speaker of these poems confronts is whether he wants to be seen or to stay hidden. Put another way, should the speaker resist and question what has become the norm or should he accept the norm and stay hidden, which, perhaps, is safer.

 

Dargan’s study in contradictions begins in “Daily Conscription,” in which the speaker sees race as something “akin to climate change, // a force we don’t have to believe in for us to undo us.” Whether or not we want to believe in racism, or “whiteness,” as the speaker says, it exists and will affect us. In this same poem, the speaker crosses the street, keeping his head down, “straining to discern the crossfire from the cover.” In “Poem Resisting Arrest,” the speaker/poem asks “Where is the daylight (this poem asks and is // thus crushed) between existence and resistance?” The speaker in “Tredegar,” the name of a Civil War museum in Richmond, observes the ecosystem in the James River. In trying to understand why black dragonflies chase red ones away, a metaphor for trying to understand racism, the speaker says, “Just the law of things / here…,” as though the laws of nature should be enough to explain such contradictions. Later, in the same poem, the speaker laments, “I am the stupid human. My eye / unable to distinguish hiding from lurking—each a form /  of stillness.”

 

The poems in Section III, China Cycle, may seem wildly out of place in this book. However, Dargan uses his experience of travel to China to push through to a deeper questioning and exploration of identity. If he can feel displaced in his own country, how much greater can his experience of displacement be in a country where his being a minority makes him an enigma? He is mistaken for Ethiopian, Dominican, and Caribe in “The Shouts of Tanggu Station,” and is both being asked for money and heralded by a young boy. He practices the calligraphy of the Chinese characters, the hanzi, and seeks understanding of their meaning. The speaker of “Beautiful Country’’”learns that the translation of “American” is “from the ‘Beautiful Country.’” In the poem, the speaker “bemoan[s] / the translation, yet I was not brought here // to explain all the beauty not found at home.” Dargan recognizes his own privilege in being born in America in “Early Onset Survivor’s Guilt.” Speaking of the relentless smog in Binhai, he says,

 

 Where there is sadness,
 it bubbles from thoughts of the blue
 that awaits me, the blue I take for granted, the blue
 I never asked to be born beneath.

 

Dargan’s volume is aptly titled. In literary terms, anagnorisis refers to the moment, usually in a tragedy, when the protagonist comes to a full understanding of their own nature, situation, or vulnerability. The end of anagnorisis, at least in literature, may lead to catharsis in readers. The entire volume may be read as the speaker’s anagnorisis of enduring racism. However, the one moment that stands out as the moment of understanding appears in “Another Poem Beginning with a Bullet,” which could also serve as the title of this collection. The wrenching narrative of the speaker hearing gunshots on his way to his mother’s house and the pains he takes to change his path there so that the gunman won’t follow him and learn where his mother lives is harrowing. Arriving at his mother’s house, the speaker learns that one of her neighbors had been hit by the gunfire. Seeing the mother’s porch light on, the wounded man went to her house for help, tracking blood into her house. The moment of seeing the blood is the moment of anagnorisis for the speaker—that despite his best efforts, he cannot keep his mother safe. “The city no longer stops / at Mother’s door. It has come inside now, has bled / here. In the living room.”

 

Dargan deftly infuses historical and cultural facts into his poetry. He is a careful poet; each word, each line break, each form is studied and purposeful. Each of these choices serves the poem, calling attention to them, as though saying subtly: reader, pay attention here; this is important. The careful reader of Dargan’s work needs to be prepared to spend time with these poems. Dargan is an introspective poet—even in his anger.

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Suburban Primitive

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Quest for Truth

Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir by Sharon Harrigan
Truman State University Press, 2017
Paperback and ebook, 239 pages, $16.95 and $9.99

 

Cover of Sharon Harrigan's Playing with Dynamite

 

It is a very democratic notion, I suppose, that everyone has a story to tell. The ascendancy of social media certainly capitalizes on the idea that anyone and everyone can have a soapbox, but, as tweets, blogs, and online posts proliferate, the difficulty is that much of what is said is not worth reading, even if it is valuable to the writer. The ongoing boom in memoir publishing also points to a kind of populism. Readers who go to memoir looking for stories of great accomplishment, intrigue, or proximity to world-historical events will not always find it in memoirs being published today: The genre is no longer reserved for lives of eminence. But if readers are lucky, they will find in a memoir, such as Sharon Harrigan’s Playing with Dynamite, a story that demonstrates that even an ordinary life proves interesting when assessed by an intelligent and skillful writer.

 

Harrigan’s book was inspired by her quest to discover the truth about her father, who died in a car accident when she was a young child. Following the accident, her family, sealed in the reticence of grief, was reluctant to speak of her father, creating an aura of mystery around him. The mystery was enhanced by the fact that her father had lost his right hand “playing with dynamite” years before his fatal accident. Vague rumblings about the FBI’s interest in her father added to the sense that there might be a dark family secret lurking. Harrigan was reluctant to break the seal of silence wrapped around her family, fearful of what she might discover or what feelings she might dislodge in others. Harrigan sees how curiosity is stifled by the dread of unsettling relationships as well as by the shame of ignorance. “[E]ven as a little girl,” she writes, “I sensed that others carried questions in their heads they wouldn’t dare ask, things they never said so no one would know they didn’t already know.”

 

In the eyes of a young child, the two prominent facts about her father (the two accidents) amplified the typical, childish notion that one’s father is a larger-than-life figure, a man whose significance must be plain to all. As an adult and a parent observing her son’s reckoning with his relationship with his own absentee father, Harrigan realized she must finally come to terms with the lifelong puzzle of her father—of who he was, how he died, and what he meant to the rest of the family. To undertake this emotional journey, she has to break the long-held silences of her mother, brother, sister, and uncle. She has to overcome her own queasy, anxious concern that she will not be quite the same person she thought she was once the family history is more clearly disclosed.

 

Although there are no startling revelations for the reader—if anything, the surprise for Harrigan is that the circumstances of her father’s two accidents turn out not to be especially important—Harrigan’s reflections on her past are rewarding because of the tenor with which they are told. Reading Dynamite is like listening to a good friend tell you about her life over a long coffee or a couple of drinks. Harrigan’s prose is inviting and familiar. And, though the ostensible focus of the book is on her father, the real story is to be found in the appropriately inconclusive self-searching Harrigan undertakes as she attempts to connect with her relations and to review her identity in light of her new understanding of her family.

 

Two features of Dynamite give added depth and interest to this memoir of life in urban Detroit and rural upstate Michigan (with layovers in Paris, New York, and Virginia). First, Harrigan is unusually sensitive to the ways in which stories of self are shaped by the stories of others. She understands that one’s sense of one’s place in the world is formed in relation to how others are positioned. At a very young age, we receive our parents’ stories of who they are and of who we are, and these ideas have powerful and lasting effects on our understanding of our lives. We are not usually aware of just how much these ideas have infiltrated our thinking. For example, Harrigan comes to realize that what she took to be her memories of her father may actually have been ideas of him that came from her uncle’s stories about him, not her own experience of him. Further, as she undertakes to interview her family members, she sees that there are many variations of the same central narrative. As she says, “Stories change, of course, when different people tell them.” Thus, Dynamite is presented as a kind of collage, with pieces taken from Harrigan’s memory as well as from the memories of others.

 

In fact, Harrigan may be too sensitive to the responsibility of creating a nonfiction narrative. She bends over backward to label the passages of her text according to their source: her imagination, her memory, the memory of a relative, a recorded conversation. The fear that loved ones will resent what one writes, claiming it is untrue, inaccurate, or radically incomplete, plagues many writers and would-be writers. Even in fiction writing, authors may be concerned lest their words be taken as transparently autobiographical, offending the real persons who have been turned into characters or caricatures. In a memoir that takes family history as its subject, this worry can, understandably, run deep. Yet, I can’t help but think that Harrigan’s concern with accurate representation has the paradoxical effect of making her narrative seem less reliable. The caveats about the precise source of each passage come to seem intrusive, like someone trustworthy whose repeated urging, “You can trust me,” functions to undercut rather than to bolster her listener’s confidence. At least for readers outside her family, the caveats may feel like unnecessary interruptions. After all, it is at the end of the day, her memoir, and she is entitled to tell it any way she likes.

 

Even so, Harrigan’s sensitivity to the ways in which her narrative is partial surely contributed to her ability to achieve interesting moments of personal growth, culminating in the claim that “[A]ll my life I had been telling myself the story of my father’s death all wrong.” A memoir writer who can admit that she’s gotten it all wrong is one whose writing has had a large transformative effect on her life. And it is the courage of this transformation that makes Harrigan’s book a friendly read—it is the kind of personal story we can learn from because we can translate Harrigan’s self-exploration into our own lives. I was all wrong is not the kind of thing you are likely to see on Facebook. But it is the kind of hard-won admission that can inspire readers to broach their own family secrets and unlock their own personal histories.

 

A second admirable feature of Harrigan’s book is the directness with which she thinks through the generational shift in attitudes about gender. Reflecting on her father’s sour moods, his cruel remarks, and the control he exerted over her mother, she wonders whether he was simply “a man of his time,” as her mother says with resignation, or whether his sexism was more grievous and culpable than that suggests. Harrigan works to put her family history into a larger social context, considering the prevalence of baldly sexist advertisements and other media in the 1970s. Her aim is not to pass judgment, not to decide ultimately whether he was or wasn’t a male chauvinist, or how to categorize his brutal and reckless personality, but simply to understand it better. She takes the lesson to heart, asking, “Will my children look back, decades from now, and try to forgive my anachronisms by telling themselves I came of age in another era? Will they explain away my insecurity and overeagerness to please by saying, ‘What do you expect? Hers was the first generation after women’s emancipation?’ There are always growing pains. Learning curves.” Such lines reveal Harrigan’s central strength: the ability to probe uncomfortable family issues, apply the scrutiny to herself, and treat all with compassion.

 

If social media’s popularity is partly a response to the need to be visible, to be remembered, memoirs are—as the name clearly indicates—dedicated to remembering and being remembered. Like social media posts, they are liable to the pitfalls of self-promotion, distortion, and an excess of self-concern or narcissism. However, simply in virtue of being longer and more complex, they offer their writers the potential for a more subtle and meaningful kind of self-representation. Such memoirs can provide something of an antidote to the present culture of click-bait headlines, mudslinging tweets, and drive-by Facebook posts that reduce public discourse too often to fear, anger, unearned righteousness, and rash judgment. The American appetite for memoir must reflect, then, a desire on the part of both writers and readers to engage in a deeper, more sustained form of self-reflection. Harrigan invites us to that kind of deeper reflection as we share in the experience of living with the complexity and uncertainty of family relationships. She invites us to risk finding the unspoken or hidden truths that have had a part in shaping who we are. In Harrigan’s hands, Dynamite may not be explosive, but it is a model for how everyday questions of identity, family, and the past may be addressed thoughtfully.

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The Cut-Through

Over Cobb salad and mushroom ragù our youngest son tells us he was pulled over by the LAPD, their guns drawn as they approached his 1994 faded turquoise pickup.

 

He delivers this news while we are finishing up Sunday dinner at a local French bistro on Green Street in Pasadena, a small town just east of Los Angeles where the wide boulevards are lined with palm and oak trees and former Rose Bowl Queens reside.

 

I put my fork down, look at him sitting across from me.

 

“Where did this happen?” I ask.

 

“On Alameda, right by Chinatown, at 4:30 in the afternoon.”

 

I know this stretch of Alameda, on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. The tracks of the Gold Line subway looming high above. This is an isolated spot, a cut-through where a young man could be killed and the story never told.

 

My son looks away like his eyes are being drawn back to an afternoon memory of officers with guns.

 

“They came up to my truck and asked what I was doing.”

 

I can only imagine what went through his mind. Did he think of us? Did he remember my departing words, “be safe and I love you,” said each time he walked from my door? Did he think of his father, a teacher at a high school a few miles away from where two LAPD cops have guns pointed at him? I know he must’ve thought of those other Black boys—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin…gunned down, gunned down, their blood flowing in America’s streets.

 

“What did you do?”

 

“I put my hands up. I didn’t want to get shot.”

 

“What did you say?”

 

He waits until the waiter fills our water glasses and leaves before he answers.

 

“I told them I was moving a sculpture from my art show. Then I said, ‘What’s up, dude?’ They were young, young like me, Mom.”

 

Our son is an artist; his rebellious nature and questioning mind was subdued that afternoon in front of officers with guns drawn. Perhaps it was the “What’s up, dude?” his hands in the air, but guns were put away. My son was told to go on, no ticket written, no violations, only by the LAPD. Somehow his Black body is a threat, his Black body can be violated, his Black body still must bow down, even now…yes’em, master.

 

The waiter returns and asks about dessert. Crème brûlée, flourless chocolate cake and a raspberry tart.

 

What does one order when your son is telling you about having guns drawn on him?

 

“Just two coffees, please,” my husband says. The waiter leaves.

 

“Were you afraid?” Such an obvious question, but it needs to be asked.

 

The answer is yes, but now anger and confusion fills the table. His voice becomes louder. His fist comes down near his plate. Water spills and a couple behind us look up. This is what he knows: his white friends never have this happen. They never are pulled over for no reason, lives threatened, their mere existence questioned.

 

—

 

When he was a baby I would kiss him over and over again, telling him how beautiful his dark skin was, it was the best. He believed me and as a boy always thought this skin, his skin, his deep dark blackness, his fine mind were blessings, something to be honored and praised. He now stomps around our home, declaring that young Black men are engaged in an endless battle, “They are trying to kill us, Mom. It’s a war.”

 

Each death is personal to my boy.

 

“It’s worse since Obama was president!” he says. “A Black man was president, and they still can do this shit to us.”

 

My husband says he understands. “I used to get pulled over all the time back in Boston. The cops always said a car that looked like mine was involved in a robbery. I drove a silver vintage 1965 Mercedes. There were no cars like mine.”

 

The waiter brings the check. A credit card is placed down on a silver tray.

 

“When did this happen?”

 

“April.”

 

It is now December.

 

“Why didn’t you tell us then? Why did you wait?”

 

My son looks at me now.

 

“Because, Mom, you already worry enough. I didn’t want to scare you.”

 

So this is what it looks like when you unpack this oppression, this seemingly bottomless pit of racism. He carries the responsibility of protecting himself, of calculating how to walk safely in the world that often doesn’t see his worth. In his America, where he knows his education and class sometimes protect him, his “What’s up, dude?” might have saved his life, this time. He feels he has to shield me from this.

 

“You should have told us then. Maybe we could have done something.”

 

These are hollow words, seem empty as they leave my mouth. I wonder what we could have done. Two armed police who left no visible trace. They hadn’t killed him after all, only drawn guns. What harm in that, easily erased, never recorded?

 

Dinner is over. The table is cleared. We make our way towards the door. The restaurant is more crowded now. The hum of conversations mixed with laughter and a mother soothing a crying baby fill the air. On top of each linen-covered table is a small candle, giving the restaurant a soft amber glow. Most times I would have been comforted by this place, by a good meal out on a Sunday night, knowing we have earned membership in this world of candle-lit dinners, chilled wine, and crusty bread pulled and delicately dipped in seasoned virgin olive oil. Yet, tonight this restaurant with its seemingly polite people dining on carefully crafted plates feels like a surreal tapestry, weaving itself around me as I try to find my way out.

 

In front of me I see a white middle-aged couple with their adult son. They are laughing. The mother reaches out and rubs her son’s arm tenderly. Clear long-stemmed glasses filled with deep ruby-colored wine are raised in a toast of celebration. The mother glances up at me and smiles. She thinks we are the same, out on a Sunday evening with our grown sons. She looks like someone I could have been friends with once. We would have shared a carpool, arranged play dates, worried over how to set limitations for our little boys while we organized a fundraiser gala for the PTA. I would have been her one Black friend. Yet, we would never truly talk about how my concerns for my little boy might be different than hers. She would never ask, and I wouldn’t reveal the things that divided us. I have no smiles for her tonight, no balm for my own rage. I look away and follow my son’s lead out of the restaurant.

 

I pause at the glass door, waiting for a moment before stepping out into the night. There are little sparkling white lights strung outside along the restaurant’s wrought-iron patio railing. Beyond the lights, I see my son and husband standing side by side. These two men, one young, the other older, sharing the same American story. My husband reaches up, hugs our son in a deep embrace.

 

It is winter in this desert. A cold chill sweeps across my face as I step outside. My son puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets. I’m standing next to them now.

 

“I love you, son,” my husband says.

 

“Me, too.”

 

My boy is lighter now, the dinner conversation behind him.

 

“Where are you heading?” I ask.

 

“Over to Echo Park to meet some friends. It’s still the weekend, you know, Mom.” He smiles.

 

“Okay. Be safe and I love you.”

 

He grabs me around the shoulder, kisses my cheek and then makes his way down the alley towards his truck.

 

My husband and I watch as he walks away from us. We don’t say anything, just watch his tall thin frame in black skinny jeans and a blue oversized jacket go off into the night.

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New Destination

This project investigates the unseen communication that occurs between the natural and built environments. Using mixed media, Nan Xu transforms nature into a magical-realist world that combines rocks and clouds with feelings and emotions to capture the space between the seen and unseen worlds. In these mystical landscapes, Nan Xu describes texture, space, and light to convey both rational and romantic feelings about the fate of the environment and humanity.

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Merry-Go-Round

Somnambulistic circus Ribera & Velazquez welcomes everyone to the show “Merry-Go-Round”, where shadows that escaped the Platonic cave turn the carousel in the foggy catacombs.

 

Producers: Ihor Dyurych, Liliya Mlynarych, Sergiy Nedzelskyy, Maxim Asadchiy

Director of Photography:  Serhiy Mykhalchuk

Art Director: Svitlana Makarenko

Music: Oleksandr Shchetynsky

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Delta 15: The Definition of a Circle in a World without Geometry

The Rycoffs have planted blood-red batface along the edge of the walk.
They will get all the hummingbirds and butterflies

Next year. Push play. Of course I have to mention how my mind
Does not want to mention

This entire night, underscored by Wilco’s lines
“I’d always thought that if I held you tightly /
You’d always love me like you did back then”
Omits, as Mayakovsky would call her, the target.
My son, Bay, and I, walk past Thing 1 and Thing 2.
How many ballerinas

Does one expect to see walking the streets this late at night?
Death is always on the prowl: the near miss of Rusty

By the Home Depot truck in New York City
Brings the near misses back today:

 

My idea of the soul is a dance party with palm trees
Wrapped in foil. Dancing is flying and the music

Always sounds like the first time you heard the Talking Heads
Combined with the second time you listened to Velvet Underground’s
Self-titled album all the way through.

My third eye takes naps. Nods off without warning.
Right now, I am asleep with two eyes open.

The hunchback of Notre Dame answers the door of the house

At the corner of Harbor Cove and River. The inmate, in his prison
Stripes, holds his one-year-old son, also in prison stripes.

The scantily clad prison guard swings her billy club.
Oh never to be stuck in commuter traffic again.

We all learn, eventually, “don’t read the comments.”
Minions have taken over the neighborhood.

A witch doused in gauze cackles

From her corner of the walkway; a skeleton sits on our bench
Doing its best impression of William Logan, right leg
Crossed over left, right arm stretched out to the right, skull
Tilted to 11, chin and right toe pointed to 4.

A bottle of hand sanitizer, almost empty, cranes its neck
Over the edge of the second edition unabridged Webster’s
New International Dictionary, 1958.

Paul Manafort walks by dressed up as a train engineer.

The Rycoff family, dressed as the knights of the round table,
Ring the doorbell of the largest house in the neighborhood.
The head of the HOA, a former porn star, shows up at the party
As a 2007 IRS tax audit of Jeff Sessions. A guy with a bonfire
Wheel in his driveway hands out Heinekens. Push stop.

The definition of a circle in a world without geometry
Sources its etymology from the fleeing prisoner, innocent
Despite all the charges, born in Candé, France, a short drive
From the Collège de Combrée where he learned

How to love an older woman. Where she and her sister
Took him after the school day was over, but time allowed.

“Never trust the living,” said Juno, played by Sylvia Sidney,
In Beetlejuice.

The line, a set of lines, intersecting Sumi lines, outline

The idea of the face of a ram, ink drops like mistakes, like eyes,
Like the image of planets in a solar system, like orbits,

Like the beginning moment that determines the weight of a line:
Samhain, the stray red balloon, the “somebody start something.”

I dressed as a wolfman, Bay, a wolfboy. We howl because we howl.
This is the root of how the moon turns us. The skeleton in the red shawl
Escorts us to the courtyard. There in the 18th card, an owl in the tree
Sees two wolves calling down the partial moon.

There in the distance the Sierras wait all winter.
A mastiff dressed in a tuxedo walks by, pauses.

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Good Pressing

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma takes my beating heart in her warm hands and holds it until it softens, until it knows it is safe to open. She sings stories so it will remember things it has never felt. She lulls its redness with her touch. When the heart opens she pours in all her love and all her fears with it. She pours in all her dreaming and her bruises. She touches its tissues to her swollen lips and weeps. The muscle grows bigger with her tears. The muscle grows tender, skittish to the touch. She sets a kettle on the stove and stirs in possibility, measuring out worries in her palm before sprinkling them in. She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells me to eat, to help myself to more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since age five there has been one constant: transit. Joint custody, foreign exchange, weekly commutes, overseas living. I left the home I knew because there were no other options for a girl who picked up the scent of rotting bodies buried in the women around her, who saw despair seething out tiny pores and ragged cuticles, the bloodied carnage piled high from generations before her, around her, closing in. Wasted. All this utterly wasted human capacity and the lethal rage it breeds. The biting perfectionism of the frustrated woman. The broken women who break babies the way they break mustangs. At twelve, I signed a pact in blood with momma swearing I would not marry or have babies. It was a pact with myself to remain human. At the first chance: a high school exchange program in Colima, Mexico. Free, except for airfare. Only two students per semester in a school of three thousand. I applied. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I saved money for the ticket from an afterschool job. I was sixteen. Because the violence of gendering was not taken seriously, I could not call myself a refugee. I could only say: Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Madrid, Sacramento, Chicago, New York, Brasília, Rio. I could only see my smiling white face in brochures and on billboards across Mexico advertising the international school I attended for free in the exchange. I could only say: I was privileged. I could only say: I was lucky enough to get away.

 

 

 

 

[August 2001, St. Louis University, Madrid campus]

I made it to college. I read Alice Walker’s recollection of three gifts her mother gave her when she left home and went off to study. I underline one gift – a sewing machine – and the rationale for it: that it was the one tool she could use to make anything she needed so she wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. It stuck with me: the image of that sewing machine being part of feminist theory in an academia in which I felt so alien. I spent a day and a night in that basement apartment scrubbing the tile walls of their years layered in oil spatters, and in those hours, instead of the familiar shame, I felt proud of my mothers, my grandmothers. Of the practical skills they had gifted me. Of all they could give.

 

 

[September 2013, Rio de Janeiro]

I grew fascinated with language because language was the thing used to contain, to beat me into smaller pieces so that I would be easier for my family and my culture to masticate. They were busy. They didn’t have space for the room I needed. So, I studied the words, the syntaxes. I kept a spiral notebook where I composed rhyming poems, copied down strings of letters I didn’t understand and looked up their definitions. I made lists from a thesaurus of words to use in future rhyming poems. I turned to paper when punished for speaking. Dish soap and thumbs down my throat, the larynx closes. Be seen, not heard. Be accommodating and sweet. I was told terrible stories about myself, explanations for why I was so strange, so troublesome and mean. I became a bully who was bullied. I had no other way to say things. Bad words were off-limits but bad words turn toxic when kept inside a body. They eat away at the esophagus, erode the trachea. The difference between Brazilians and United Statesians, between those raised male and those raised female, it seems, has something to do with the way words are held and released.

 

It is strange to use text in this quilt, to employ written language in a tradition developed largely by silenced ones: the slave, the wife, the woman. But this is my reality now: writing, the privilege of my education. This is my contribution to the tradition, then. An expansion, not a breaking.

 

Bringing quilting into writing, integrating it: the only way this work is real. For it to exist only as Roman script on white paper would be a false making. Forced sterilization.

 

On paper, I cannot move my pen in a straight line. I have tried and it is terrible. Some would say good, but that’s not true. Things move sidewards. Lines round, contain too many hyphens, rests, commas, internal rhymes, refrains.

 

 

I give my head to clear thinking

My heart to greater loyalty

My hands to larger service

For my club, my community, my country, and my world.

– 4-H Pledge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[2003, California State University, Sacramento]

I design a Special Major in Chicano/Latino Literature & Art. It is not the novelty of an assumed cultural “other” that I find engaging, but the histories and articulations of rural, working class and Far West experience otherwise absent in academia. I resist the narrative that culture only travels East to West, North to South because I have seen it move in all directions. I know Indigenous America and Africa have had extensive influence on U.S. and European cultures. I know that Country & Western ballads are just boleros sung sideways and that cowboys are adaptations of Mexican vaqueros. I rebel against the cultural hegemony of an English Major. I study the ancient civilizations of this land, the Silk Road and the Islamic Empire, how Africa made its way through Portugal and Spain and into the so-called New World in ways our national narrative does not allow. I study how plants native to the Americas became the base for contemporary Italian cuisine because Italians were the only Europeans willing to experiment with fruits and vegetables new to them. I study the undocumented intermixing of our One Drop heritage, and the ways languages change and adapt just as readily as culture even in spite of institutionalized racism. It is through the language of Chicanismo that the Eurasian aunt who raised me and I can speak about our family: my Dust Bowl kin who call themselves White who were once High Germans who shame Low Germans who lie about Gypsies who marry poor Mexicans who marry poor Swedes who marry poor French Canadians who lie about any kind of Indian who marry poor Nicaraguans who marry poor Blacks who marry poor Blackfeet who marry elite Japanese who marry wealthy Englishmen who marry whomever the fuck they please. It is in the overlaps and blending, in the mestizaje I feel most at home.

 

 

 

[2012, Rio de Janeiro]

I cross the street to the pharmacy. The military police are outside yielding assault rifles, occupying the entrance to the favela down a side street. Rio has just secured its bid for the 2016 Olympics. I notice my visceral response to assault rifles on men in uniform is different from other passers by. I notice myself as foreign in this instance, as gringa hailing from the radical left and libertarian hills of Northern California: my response is terror, then rage. Milling around me are faces that convey we are used to this. This is normal. I mask my reaction. I enter the pharmacy, buy toilet paper, toothpaste. Commerce drones on down the boulevard: un suco de abacaxi e um pão de queijo, por favor.

 

 

 

[2013, Rio de Janeiro]

Apathy in a year’s time has turned to outrage, action, political mobilization. Protests one million strong all across the country finding solidarity in a global network of anonymous sites, authors. There is deep fear in the daily proof that life here is not valued. But there has been enough. Basta já! There are reverberations of Brazil’s past revolutions, of the Arab Spring, of Occupy. There is no face, only moving.

 

[2013, São Paulo]

We set up our table at Feira Plana, the largest artist publications fair in the country. Makers are enflamed. The medium itself again becomes an active one, full of nuance and risk. R staffs our table while I hop from press to press examining new work, swapping samples and talking shop. I return to staff our table while she tours the fair. We have become part of a traveling band of independent publishers in a place where independent publishing was long illegal. Until the mid-1800s, printing in the colonies was forbade; all published materials had to be printed in Britain and then imported from the Portuguese crown. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to acquire a printing press (Mexico was the first), let alone to legalize publishing in the colony. This is part of the reason we have found it hard to buy paper or print books locally: there is no strong tradition of papermaking or printing, and, by extension, a limited number of well-trained printers. There are letterpress printers from the Cordel tradition, but not much by way of commercial printing. Our small press had to limit a recent edition to 750 copies because that was the maximum quantity of a particular paper to be found in all the country. The past is present is not philosophy, but economics. Today at Casa do Povo, we are part of a blend of small presses, fine art presses, self-publishers, poster makers, book artists, artist-instructors, cartoonists, zine makers and poets. Many print with the aid of salvaged technologies that allow hands to smudge ink: letterpress, silkscreen, risograph, Xerox. The immediacy and resilience of our mediums are especially resonant now. Again.

 

 

 

You repair the thing until you remake it completely.

Louise Bourgeois

 

 

It is the compulsion of the Western fine art tradition to break from that very tradition. We call this Innovation and True Art and deny that it came from anything but Pure Genius. We are often blind to the continuity, even the continuity of the impulse to make it new.

 

It was not until age thirty that I could write in first person plural. It was not until age thirty that I felt entitled enough to write using the word “we,” to claim myself as part of a larger cultural conversation.

 

I resist the act of writing to be fully present in my body – stitching, making, moving. This need makes the shaming come alive: you are lazy, too feminine, too poor to be smart, too rural. A bumpkin. But if I keep moving, if I stay in this wordless making, I soak in its power on its own terms. I am released from the peculiar colonization of the written word upon my flesh.

 

 

[April 2014, California]

I begin sewing a welcoming quilt for my new nephew from scraps of worn-in clothing from each member of his family. Sometimes we must make a thing only for our love of the person receiving it. I am pulled to make him something to touch, something to hold over his little boy body when it feels fragile or alone or battered by this world, something to remind him he is loved. Something to protect him from the particular brutality this world holds for his little boy body.

 

The making of his quilt takes months away from my studio practice, places me in the bedroom with a fold-up table, sewing machine, chair. I love this making. It returns me. But, I cannot help but feel plagued by the notion that turning my making toward a loved one minimizes my work, places me back in the world of country crafts and women’s work –quilts, scrapbooks, embroidery. I have swallowed the myth of male genius, too, despite my body’s attempts to reject it. It poisons my love of other ways of making, insisting that I am less of an artist when I care for those around me, when I hold the capacity to hold them close and give.

 

I refuse this. I see all around me a world of makers, many of them women, equally adept at committing to their own making and at elevating those around them. I slash open a vein to drain the poison. I suck out the altered blood and spit mouthfuls on the ground. I cauterize the breakage, begin interviewing makers who also make space for others. I make plans to publish a series of these interviews, then a book.

 

In their most active years, members of the Royal Chicano Air Force —originally called the Rebel Chicano Art Front— did not distinguish between those who secured the grants, organized the events, repaired the engines, and those who made the artwork. This act of denying divisions was a conscious subversion of Eurocentric frameworks of art and life and culture. Or, as Dr. Ella Maria Diaz writes, “An important component of the RCAF’s creation of a Chicano/a mural environment was their collapse of artistic hierarchy in opposition to the idea of beauty and artistic genius as the realm of the individual artist.” In the tellings and retellings of their story in the popular press, however, this ideology is downplayed and the more conventional story of the RCAF as a core group of visual artists becomes History.

 

How does one convey a different narrative to a reader unwilling or unable to read any other way than the one they already know? The widespread exclusion of historically marginalized voices from prominent venues of culture is attributed to this unwillingness to think beyond convention.

 

People who have survived atrocities … witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.

Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery

 

Everywhere I carry my North American body – Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Japan as reconstructed inside the Sacramento home of my WWII-surviving great-aunt – there is a physical layer I must shed in order to be in that place. I am made acutely aware of a covering I carry in the place I most often call home, a shield crafted against the daily violence of life there. It is a different kind of shield than the one I carry in Rio on my way to work where the violence is honest – armed robberies, murders, looting. There are other kinds of violence, too: class warfare, threats of another military coup, hate crimes, rape. And yet my body remains open in particular ways as I walk the street aware of very real danger. I am guarded, yes. I am hyper-vigilant all the time. Watchful. Weary. It is exhausting. The artist Alma Leiva crystallizes this feeling in her installation-photograph series Celdas (Prison Cells), in which she recreates the interiors of homes in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and a narco-city now infamous for being the most violent in the world. Leiva brings outside elements such as playground sand and teeter-totters inside, giving the intimacy of home space the weight of the prison cell it becomes in a city where the danger outside seeps into everything. In her essay, “The Other Side of Fear: Alma Leiva’s Prison Cells,” Dr. Tatiana Reinoza writes, “Home spaces are records of embodied and situated knowledge that allow viewers to connect the private with the collective sphere of experience.” Reinoza goes on to cite the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, María Brito and several artists in diaspora whose work focuses on intimate space as sites of violence and memory. These troubled intimacies are more common than we care to admit.

 

We drink excessively in Rio. Drinking allows dance and laughter, but the weight of history and its consequences is left unaccounted for, untended. The body doesn’t close, but it craves numbing, a safety. We spend our days off from work indoors, attempting to unravel. When I am designing Leiva’s exhibition catalog years later, the sight of her photographs causes blood to rush to the surface of my skin. The feeling that radiates from the pixels haunts, finally distilled.

 

In the United States, it is the body that closes. It shuts in on itself to ward off the myriad micro-assaults to the senses: separation, subdivision, the aggressive insistence of a thing called personal space, the sound of English in the way we speak it, the threat of white male terrorism that knows no consequence: mass murder, serial rape, shootings by police. My skin braces for the chill of contact: the handshake, the monotone speech that inquires about what I do for a living, the askance looks at any slip into vulnerability, desire, feeling. There is little space to be human here unless I am alone. And while solitude can be cause for elation, the prolonged isolation of one human from others causes the heart to stop. It incites death by a slow, steady calcification layered upon the flesh. This subtle closing is not the same as one that threatens immediate survival, of course, but it threatens survival all the same. The body only breaks more slowly.

 

And what happens when intimate space itself is a warzone? Where does the body break then?

 

In empire, violence becomes a proud part of family narrative. We are sons and daughters and grandchildren of heroes who fight in wars to protect our freedom. We absorb the trauma of the soldier. We treat their pain as elevated, as honorable and just. And yet our domestic homicide toll accounts for more of our own deaths than all the soldiers in all the wars we’ve fought, but we do not honor these sacrifices or their repercussions. Violence becomes a comfort when tied to home life, like the scent of vanilla or a wood-burning stove.

 

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma dresses me in a button-down shirt, pressed with starch, dried by the fireside. She talks me through the binding of a tie, pointed at the end like my father’s, knotted perfect. Don’t you never kiss no man’s foot.

 

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Singular Songs

Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer by Steve Kronen
Eyewear Publishing, 2018
60 pages, paperback, $14.99

 

Cover of Steve Kronen's Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer

 

Steve Kronen is a master of what we might call the “high” art of poetry, by which I mean a poetry in which the craft is deep and various and the knowledge of poetic and cultural traditions informs—and even determines—the poet’s formal choices, intellectual range, and emotional responses to his chosen subject matter. In his most recent book, Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer, Kronen’s embrace of traditional forms is both assured and innovative. In the best of these poems, the poet’s wide-ranging, multi-faceted references to intellectual, cultural and scientific traditions feel embedded organically in the language, part of the very sinew of the verse.

 

The poems embrace a mind-boggling cast of characters from high and popular culture and ideas ranging across the Western canon, to say nothing of a host of well-known and not-so-well-known poets. In a less assured writer, in fact, such constant formal and intellectual pyrotechnics might seem mere affectation, a pretentious and show-off-y affirmation of the poet’s knowledge of the Western canon, a kind of acrobatics of the soul. In Kronen’s best poems, though, such acrobatics seem part of the poet’s blood and marrow, embedded in his heart and central nervous system. In these stronger poems, in fact, the present world and the world that lies behind and before it, are braided in fresh, original ways. This is a strong book, unfashionable in its artistic gusto and challenging in intellectual range, one that apprentice poets as well as long-term practitioners can learn from and enjoy.

 

One of the pleasures of deftly crafted, intricate poems such as Kronen’s, poems in which challenging formal structures are actively determinative of content, lies in the fact that they reveal themselves fully only after successive readings. Take for example the first two stanzas of a sestina-in-rhyme, “How I Became King”:

 

 Rumors from the capital: the caliph lowered

 his fork of larks’ tongues in dreamy hollandaise

 and ordered all of black-draped Constantinople

 to turn its mournful eye to the Emperor-

 to-be, a pleasant tow-haired boy, his snuff-

 sniffing father, Stefan the Garrulous,

 

 dredged from the carp-pond, leaving us ruleless

 at last, our village decking its huts with flowered

 wreaths and dancing the long-repressed Balinksnov—

 Yanka Hoy! Yanka Ruiz!—three days

 and nights, slitting the goat to make for purer

 days ahead while I, a baby at nipple…

 

Even in this short excerpt, Kronen’s wide embrace is emphatic and impressive. The pleasure in the play of language is manifest. It is also obvious that the poem won’t be captured on a single reading. Rather, one must sit with it a while. In the case of this poem, real rewards follow.

 

In some others, though, in which the play is not so exuberant and the language not quite so scintillating, the poems—which in fact require explanatory notes to be fully grasped—one comes away merely befuddled. Even these less-successful poems, though, resist obscurity and work as poems—that is, as made things—as Kronen’s language is always clear and well-wrought. Kronen aspires not toward Ashbery or Carson; his contemporary masters are the likes of Justice and Wilbur.

 

In a few of the poems here, Kronen seems to relax, to allow a memory or an experience seem to speak for itself in a freer, less formally-determined language. These are among the freshest, most deeply moving poems in the book. Take for example “The Present,” quoted here in full:

 

 All of this too taking on the stilted look

 of childhood photographs:

 my brother and I on a couch, a small box

 unwrapped in his lap, both of us gray,

 couch and carpet gray, the day beyond the open window

 gray and its curtain pulled outside for the moment

 by a puff of wind. Hold up, again, delighted,

 to the photographer, Mom or Dad,

 your first watch, hanging from your hand

 like a caught fish, its darting eye grown dull

 in a blink.

 

Like his masters, Kronen delights in puns. These are almost uniformly refreshing and witty and very funny. One of my favorites forms part of a short series entitled “They May Not Mean to, But They Do,” which references a famous (infamous?) Philip Larkin poem of the same title. I’ve chuckled at this poem numerous times since I first read it a number of years ago. Here it is, in full:

 

 No one from our family

 had ever left to play baseball.

 Go ahead, said my mother,

 strike out on your own.

 

As in his two previous books of poetry, in Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer, Steve Kronen shows himself to be a serious artist, ambitious not for fame but merely (merely!) to make a good poem, that most worthy and difficult enterprise in which “… to speak of time was nearly to speak about love.”

 

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Interview: Forrest Gander

 

Poet, novelist, essayist, and prolific translator Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, California. The landscapes of Mexico, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert find their place in several books of his poetry, including his most recent, Be With (New Directions, 2018). He has translated poetry from Spain and Latin America, bringing the work of such writers as Pablo Neruda and Raúl Zurita to new audiences. Gander has also written two novels, The Trace (New Directions, 2014) and As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and received numerous awards in recognition of his writing. He formerly was on the faculty at Brown University. We caught up with him shortly after the 2016 publication of Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, which Gander edited for New Directions Press.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

This is such a fascinating work, Alice Iris Red Horse. You’ve worked with a lot of translations—how was it different working with one where the script is different, when you’re dealing not just with a different language, but different characters?

 

Forrest Gander:

Gozo Yoshimasu is a completely unique writer. In a way he is moving poetry into a beyond of writing, into a kind of performance. And he uses Korean Hangul and Chinese characters, as well as three different kinds of Japanese scripts plus French, English, and a colored system of writing kanji. In a way, he’s making available to us a whole new way of reading. You can’t read this book like you would an ordinary book.

 

Cover of Gozo Yoshimasu's Alice Iris Red Horse translated poems edited by Forrest Gander.

 

TFR:

It was very interesting—as an editor, you weren’t just looking at the different pieces but also you had the different translators. It seemed there were also different styles within the translations.

 

Gander:

That’s right, because his work is so unique and because it’s so open-ended in many ways. The sort of failures of earlier translations of Gozo have been that they flattened out his work a lot. Right now, we’re suddenly availed of a new generation of Japanese translators. And I was in contact with a lot of them and thought the best way to present his work would not be to have a single voice but to have people approaching his work from different directions. Because the book is as much about what translation is, how one would translate this, as it is about the particular translation.

 

TFR:

Did you always have the idea to have the translators’ notes as part of the book? That was fascinating. Reading how they approached the task of translation was so interesting.

 

Gander:

It’s just as interesting and sometimes as interesting as the poetry itself because it opens up all of the layers like the night-blooming cereus. Gozo is like the poet of the night-blooming cereus where there’s a flower inside a flower inside a flower. And the translators are able to talk about how they deal with subtleties of trying to bring some of that out, including homophonic play and typographic play that work in Asian languages that don’t work in English at all. In other words, they had to ask, How do you deal with that as an English-language translator?

 

TFR:

In some places, I noticed they chose to keep some of the katakana and hiragana and kanji. And in others they wrote in Roman characters. There was one poem where the type was in orange and then it said “mikon” [referring to a visual symbol, logo, icon, or avatar]. And I wasn’t certain how much of that was because of how it was laid out in the original or a choice in the translation?

 

Gander:

It’s trying not to just stuff the strangeness and the fabulousness of the multi-lingual original into a shoe of conventional English language. And so, looking for ways to expand the notion of translation sometimes by including both languages. And Gozo uses symbols that he makes up also that we have to translate or choose to keep the same.

 

TFR:

I wanted to kind of call my friends in Japan and be like, “I want you to go read the original and then I want you to go read the translations and then I want your feedback. ”

[laughter]

 

Gander:

But no two people, who read the original, even in Japanese, will have the same reading of his work.

 

This is part of the ethics of his work. I think of him as a very ethical writer and one who’s concerned with letting other voices speak through his work. He’s always giving credit to where he’s heard information or what came out of a dialogue or who he’s engaging. There’s that sense that he doesn’t want to dominate the performance or interrogation of, in many cases, absence—he’s going to places where people disappeared in Fukushima and trying to make contact with spirits. He’s very influenced by shamanism, by Okinawan shamanism and the notion that we can cross borders of language of the living and the dead, of the spirit world and the daily world.

 

TFR:

It different than a lot of poetry that one encounters in that it was so worldly—he mentioned so many places he’d been and people that he had met, along with the incorporation of different languages. Very centered in Japan but also very worldly.

 

Gander:

It’s super worldly. He’s really an international poet. That’s also an aspect of, I think, his ethics—to constantly sort of open up. He gave up—like our own poet Robert Creeley did—the sense of the poem as a beautiful, polished, finished thing. And his poetry is instead an inquiry that continues to question and that doesn’t have a certain closure.

 

TFR:

This range of languages was new for you, but you have worked on Spanish translations a lot. Do you speak and read Spanish fluently?

 

Gander:

I do, yes.

 

TFR:

How is that different when you’re working in a language that you know more intimately?

 

Gander:

I studied Japanese, but all of my Japanese translations and my work in Japan has been with a fantastic co-translator named Kyoko Yoshida. In Spanish, on the other hand, my translations are solo. The most recent book of Spanish-language translations I’ve done is Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems. The Neruda Foundation discovered these poems that had never been seen in these boxes, folded away, written on menus, and they were published in Latin America and in Spain. And I read about them them and thought, Oh, they’re just squeezing the last juices out of that great grape. And then I saw the poems, and they’re great. He’s just such a great poet, and the poems are fantastic.

 

Cover of Pablo Neruda's Then Come Back translated by Forrest Gander.

 

Even in Spanish, though, each engagement is really different, too. I’ve done a lot of Mexican translations and translations from the Spanish of Spain and Bolivia and Chile. And each country and area has a completely different dialect and completely different sort of secret words. One of the hardest poems to translate was the shortest one in here, and it was based on an old vernacular for abalone. Abalone in the ’50s in Chile by the sea were often called “orejas del mar,” little ears of the sea.

 

So Neruda’s got this poem to his wife’s ear that starts to seem to be about cooking his wife’s ear and it’s just this sort of mix between the abalone and his wife’s ear, and it took a lot, it took somebody’s grandmother to tell me, “Wait, I remember… ”

[laughter]

 

TFR:

Have you spent time in each of the countries that the poetry that you’re translating is rooted in?

 

Gander:

It’s absolutely necessary. Going to Bolivia to translate Jaime Sáenz was absolutely necessary. Seeing the territory that he lived in, the references that are so common in his books. And the same with Neruda. I spent a lot of time in Chile.

 

TFR:

Do you find yourself translating not just the language but the culture?

 

Gander:

You have to translate the culture. The culture is in the language.

 

TFR:

How do you find it to be both a translator and a poet yourself? Is there something that is fulfilled both in translation and writing your own work, and how are those two things different? How do you carve out space for both?

 

Gander:

I know some writers and translators who can do both at one time. And lots of writers who multi-task and do multiple manuscripts, but I need close focus on one thing. So when I am working on translations I can’t be working on my own writing and vice versa. But I’ve never felt it as a loss because when I come back to my writing I’ve learned things from the translation—new image repertoires, new ways of using syntax, new particular lexical phrases—that end up feeding my own work. So, though it takes time away, it gives to me and makes me, I think, a deeper poet in English, my own language.

 

TFR:

So you find that you can see some influences and impacts when you come back to your own work from what you’ve been translating?

 

Gander:

Absolutamente. [laughter]

 

TFR:

I happened to stumble across actually a podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, in which you recommended a poem for the newly elected President Obama (“Poems for President Obama”). You said in that interview, “The election of the President is a kind of wedding with the people.” If you were asked now to come up with a poem for the new president, would you participate in that exercise again?

 

Gander:

That would be hopeless right now. I know it seems less of a wedding with the people right now than something very unsettling. And I’m afraid Trump would be disinclined to read any poem whatsoever, but if I had to, for him, I’d say, “Donald, start with Whitman.” [chuckle] The sense of inclusivity, the sense of men and women being involved equally. The sense in which Whitman was looking critically at the slave auctions and his political generosity, his care for soldiers who’d been hospitalized… All of that.

 

Fantastic empathy I think makes anyone a bigger person. And that’s what I think poetry and art can do. They articulate things that we haven’t completely articulated for ourselves that expand what it means to be human.

 

TFR:

Yes. I came across your poem “Ligature” and in one line it says, “The man writes, I’m not given a subject but I’m given to my subject.” Do you find that to be something you still feel?

 

Gander:

I think the great poets are given a subject. For instance, someone like the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita—in his early twenties he’s arrested by the Pinochet dictatorship and tortured, and during a period of a few years thousands of people, hundreds who he knows, disappear. They’re killed, and they’re chopped up and dropped into the mouths of volcanoes and the sea. Something like that happens to you and what else are you going to write about? You’ve been given a subject matter that you can’t ever look away from. [Akira] Kurosawa has that nice line, “Don’t look away, never look away.” And sometimes the great subject materials are inevitable I think.

 

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the Dark Rift

We are pleased to present the final video in our series spotlighting the work of Michael Betancourt.

 

 

the Dark Rift is a 2 minute movie produced from a mixture of archival footage and a NASA video of the Moon rotating, synchronized with music by composer Dennis H. Miller, who also produces visual music animations. The title for this movie is a reference to Maya mythology. They believed the “Dark Rift,” a group of interstellar dust clouds that divide the bright band of the Milky Way galaxy lengthwise, and whose alignment with the Sun marks the winter solstice on Earth, was the road to the underworld. Moon imagery demonstrates this fantasy::reality dynamic throughout my work. The multiple windows and glitches appearing throughout this movie appear not as interruptions, but as shifts in resolution. It is only at the end when an astronomical photograph of the Dark Rift begins to appear ‘behind’ the Moon that these windows become physically present as layers of image—it is through the shifting relationship they have to the black areas on screen that they become physical. This change in perception is a shift between abstraction (the windows as glitched parts of the image) and realism (layers lying in front of a more distant background).

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Saying Goodbye to Your Body

Throw it in the forest before it starts to spoil.
Let birds shit it to obscurity.
It won’t be missed. Not by you and not
by the man on the train whose hand
you grabbed by accident. The lights flickered
and you let yourself get carried away by fear.
I don’t know you, the man said, excused
himself away from you. Everyone forgets eventually.
Even the boy whose disappointment you captured
on parchment paper and hung in your bedroom
for years. His body is far gone from your bed
and slowly yours will be too.
Think of it as an extended vacation,
a sweet Valium dream.
You’ll be reborn, a swamp-monster,
slick and diamond-tough.
You’ll tear into an avocado and eat it,
pit and skin and all. And you will have forgotten.
That’s the only way to keep living.

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Revelation and Resistance

The Light of What Comes After by Jen Town

Bauhan Publishing, 2018

96 pages, paperback, $16.00

 

Cover of Jen Town's The Light of What Comes After.

 

Lately I have heard folks in positions of power tell young people to go in fear of irony, that irony is a hiding place for the chronically disengaged and disenchanted, that it signals a deep cynicism when what we need is earnest, active resistance in an increasingly hostile world.

 

I have a simple quibble with this: without irony there would be no poetry, and without poetry there is no resistance.

 

Okay, maybe I am oversimplifying.

 

Maybe what I mean to say is, our language—by its very nature—is chock-full of contradiction, complication, subversion, and elision, but it is with language that we must communicate who we are and who we wish to be.

 

There is an irony here, and it is the poet’s job to expose it.

 

Irony, at its best, teases out the difficulties inherent in language and—by extension—in the self’s formation. It is a subtle art and requires a deft hand. Jen Town has such a hand.

 

“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch,” says the speaker in Town’s poem “Spun,” which, like many in her award-winning debut collection The Light of What Comes After, addresses the formation of identity through mediation and speculation.

 

The I of these poems is shaped in response to social and cultural expectations, creating inside itself a metaphysical window—not to be confused with an emptiness, but rather an opportunity, an opening between representation and reality, like a “space in the air where the ballerina momentarily spun.”

 

I say opportunity, because Town’s poems provide just that—a new way of seeing, a slant (to reference Dickinson, one of Town’s foremothers) way of exploring a young woman’s coming of age among books, movies, art—from a well-intentioned but sheltered childhood, to the sometimes-hard truths of life as an American woman.

 

These ironies aggregate throughout the book, are pasted and layered across the self with decoupage artistry. There are accusations in poems “Short Autobiography on Tiptoes” (“she’d been accused to of being too much and always / in earnest”) and “Spun” (“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch”) as well as the consequences of growing up “to believe / in the essential good” (“Short Autobiography on Tiptoes”).

 

In fact, in The Light of What Comes After, “goodness” and “happiness”—two touchstones of a virtuous, Midwestern upbringing—are repeatedly turned over and re-examined, questioned, and prodded, as we see in the poem “Invisible Self-Portraits in a Dark Room”:

 

 I believe myself to be

 a sympathetic character

 but formed to what

 purpose, I’m not sure.

 

Even more interestingly, in the world of Town’s poems, the self is not only created in the crucible of societal expectations but in the conventions of genre like autobiography, self-portrait, still life, romance, spy novel—poetics the self has internalized and re-contextualized.

 

For example, in “Needles Piercing Cloth,” Town writes,

 

 It was a world of décolletage,

 the diaphanous thrills

 

 of forgetting—lily skin

 draped in spring and sugar

 

 sifting through fingers—pollen’s

 golden settling on footstool

 

 and ottoman, pie rack

 and ice box. A world of garden

 walls aflame with bloom.

 

There is undeniable beauty in the configuration of these artifacts, in the positioning of sensual, musical language, but it is a scene without people. Then (emphasis mine),

 

 and yet: inside we drifted like

 smoked bees in a silence

 

 through which clocks

 ticked, sound of silver needles

 

 piercing cloth.

 

The latent violence becomes palpable via domesticity—the surface belies an underground tension. We peer beneath the female-centric, superficial benevolence (needlepoint and décolletage) to see the worry underneath, a technique found again in “Charming,” which opens with, “Her father says You’re living in a fairy tale,” and ends with:

 

 … She gathers flowers by

 the roadside, weaves them into a rope for her escape. They shrivel and

 curl up into tiny fists, a string of fists that blow apart in the wind.

 

These are poems that are at once in love with language and at odds with it—as we all must be. Town’s ear for prosody is playful, physical. Her lines are masterful. But what I love most about Town’s poetry is its subtlety. The poems’ balance between despair and delight is so elegantly calibrated, so delicately fashioned, so utterly attentive to the small fractures, fissures, disappointments, and fleeting joys of adulthood, that one could say Town’s sensitivity to language is preternatural and that her nuanced, delightfully subversive voice is a revelation. So, let me say it: Town’s The Light of What Comes After is a revelation.

 

She—like many of us—was a girl who grew up to be a woman, both charmed by the trimmings and trappings of her gender’s norms and highly critical of them. She faces the gaps between expectations and realities with a wry wit and realizes—rightly so—that who we think we are and who others think we are—creates a tension rife with both humor and pain. This is resistance.

 

Town’s poems aren’t for the faint-hearted, though they are very much the product of a delicate sensibility.

 

Oh, the irony!

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No te metas

As hard as she can, Griselda pinches the skin between her thumb and pointing finger. The pain is a distraction. Earlier today, her dad grabbed her heavy metal t-shirts, favorite black hoodie, and smelly socks and stuffed them inside a black suitcase. The suitcase now stands by the open front door, and Griselda can see her dad. He’s outside by the yellowing yard with his head tucked under the hood of a fender-dented Ford pickup. Griselda sits on the couch while her dad fidgets with Craftsman tools. He’s trying to get his truck started by working on the carburetor, which Griselda hopes he can’t fix.

 

Her mother left them eight months ago. Since then, her dad has gone weeks without bathing, days without eating.

 

After an hour of tinkering, he tries turning on the ignition. The engine flutters. It’s a false start, and Griselda is relieved. She breathes deeply, tilts her head back, and gazes at the sparkled popcorn ceiling. The music coming out of the truck’s speakers reminds her of when her dad, in exchange for a powerful sound system, put several crisp fifty-, twenty-, and ten-dollar bills in the palm of a vendor at the Roadium open-air swap-meet that had once been a drive-in theater.

 

Singing along to his music, Griselda is dismayed that she knows all the words to “No te metas con mi cucu.” She didn’t know she had that in her, and she hates herself because the song’s corny rhymes embarrass her. She’s sixteen, after all, and won’t admit that she likes the song, so she shakes her head as if the sudden movement will scare off the Spanish lyrics.

 

Her dad steps on the gas pedal, revving the engine. Griselda presses her lips together, tightening and rolling them into a thin line. The rumble of the motor intensifies, but soon, it peters out. Griselda relaxes. Her shoulders droop down, and her lips return to their normal, full shape, with an undefined Cupid’s bow. Getting off the couch, she closes the door, sticks a mixtape of Metallica and Iron Maiden songs into the home stereo system, and turns the dial to ten. The cassette is a gift from Sergio. He’s the scruffy-looking teen who wears a black Misfits t-shirt, rolled up at the sleeves.  He’s the only boy in tenth grade that has a tattoo. On his left arm, there’s a black and grey skull, which looks more like a deformed mushroom. Griselda likes Sergio’s badly done tattoo mainly because she likes him.

 

The speakers throb with fast, angry, and loud sounds, vibrating the floor and walls surrounding Griselda. She bites her teeth and digs her nails into her palms. Once the truck gets repaired, Griselda knows her dad will come in, wearing his blue trucker hat, motor-oil-stained jeans, brown work boots, and smelling of cigarettes and liquor. Despite any outbursts from her, he’ll grab her suitcase, toss it in the rear of the pickup, and take her away. Seven days ago, he told Griselda he was moving back to Méjico, where things were simpler, but that he wasn’t going to take her with him. Griselda had felt her body, especially her chest, tighten.

 

The bottom tip of her nose is red, slightly swollen, and stings when touched. Yesterday, without her dad’s knowledge or permission, she took all the money he had out of his wallet. And with her best friend, Sylvia, encouraging her, Griselda got her septum and navel pierced. She also wanted to get her tongue and eyebrow pierced but couldn’t afford it.

 

Standing in front of the mirror, Griselda yanks off her green army boots, and slides out of her black jeans. She walks in her underwear and makes her way into the kitchen and grips the sharp knife her dad uses to cut his carne asada on Sundays. Griselda kneels to where her pants lie and starts stabbing and scraping. Her jeans become frayed, almost destroyed. Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” comes to a stop. Outside, the truck engine maintains its roar. It doesn’t stop. The edges of her eyes turn red. She drives the knife into the floor, leaves it sticking up, and pulls her pants to her waist.

 

Griselda goes to the bathroom and finds her father’s beard trimmer. She holds it for a few seconds and then begins to shave her head. Long, thick hairs clog the trimmer’s blade, and Griselda has to keep removing them to clean it. But even with the blade cleaned, the trimmer doesn’t always cut all the way through; instead, it pulls the hairs. Griselda likes how it feels and pushes the blade hard against her head, inflaming the skin.

 

Her father walks in and leans on the doorway. He lifts a beer that perspires little, wet beads and sips it. Grime blackens his hands and streaks his cheeks and forehead. He looks like a zombie, she thinks. After he glances at the messy floor and sink, he observes Griselda. She smirks. And he says, “Jesus, Gris, you really want to piss off your mother, don’t you?”

 

Griselda’s smirk disappears. She wipes her eyes, and over her mouth she smears the heavy-black lipstick she took from the Rite Aid on Redondo Beach Boulevard. Looking at herself in the mirror, she says, “No. Not really.”

 

“You missed a spot.” He reaches to touch her buzz cut, but Griselda moves, avoiding his hand. She takes a hard, wet-sounding sniff and places the trimmer over the sink’s countertop.

 

He shrugs his tired shoulders. “Orale. Vamonos ya. Your mother’s waiting,” he says.

 

When she stomps out of the bathroom, her shoulder digs into her father’s chest. It feels hollow to Griselda, and she tells him, “About time you got that piece of shit to work.” She carries the suitcase outside. It’s heavier than she’d expected, but she’s still able to toss it in the back of the pickup. Before her father jumps in and pulls the Ford away, Griselda ejects his Sonora Dinamita cassette out of the truck’s in-dash stereo and plays her mixtape instead because he hates esa musica. Stuffing his cassette into her pocket, she’s not too sure what she’ll do with it. As he sits, buckles up, and drives, Griselda’s forehead, covered with bits of hair, thumps the glass on the passenger side window and rests there. They pass houses, cars, and she stares at the white lines on the freeway. Picking up speed, the truck shakes and screeches, and the lines become a blur.

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The Painted Skulls, Held by Wings, Glistened in Rain

 There is shadow
 of a sparrow
 left on the window ledge
 weeks after the poor bird
 had been removed.

 

The sun melted
 a permanent silhouette, tufts
 of feathers, and a faint point
 of beak still visible
 with three days of rain.

 

 Something is wrong.

 

 I had a dream
 where I said
 this is a dream.

 

 I’m certain
 no one noticed
 except my father
 who knew I’d try
 the salted rhubarb
 and pomegranate seeds
 that wept on my fingers.

 

 Beets turn
into sugar sweetly
 on the verge of burn and
 I am guilty with happiness
           of a kind,
 where I survive

 

 as a bird,

 an egret
 strange and white as my
 father’s mustache, a telltale
 for his murdered brother.

 

I don’t say
 I’m happy,
 a sort of guilty luck
 that I love because it fleets
 never follows, ripe to the point of rot.

 

 What if nothing moves
 still as sleep and my breath
 is not enough?

 

 I dream I am
 as steel as a swallow
 brazen head near bow and drink
 its forked tail a salute
 between death and habit.
The definition of egret
 is wrong,
 if I don’t hold
 the long legs in absolute stillness.

 

 Tonight, I find a cat
 near the shore. Let him eat,
 he will eat, he will return to
 animal, not pet. I say, here
            kitty, kitty. He reveals his belly
 to me and all who continue to pass.
 I have met people like this.

 

 Three egrets stretch
 above me in an arm full of rain
 I am older now than my Uncle
 dead at 36
all of history caught
 in those white wings.
 He too was killed for his
 feathers, a plume of decoration
       in a woman’s hat.

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Looking Both Ways

Demi-Gods, by Eliza Robertson
Bloomsbury, 2017
230 pages, paper, $26

 

Cover of Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson.

 

I have been a fan of Canadian novelist Eliza Robertson’s work since reading her short story collection, Wallflowers, released in 2014. Her work shows the precision and intensity of her gaze coupled with an easy and skillful exploration of language that always makes her work a pleasure to read. In Demi-Gods, her first novel, Robertson shows us a deeper settling into character and consciousness often not possible in the short story form. Full of secret interiorities and occupied with the essential question of how we view ourselves and how this choice affects our life’s suite of movements, Demi-Gods pulses with the energy of inner and outer life. It is remarkably consistent in focus, poetic and lucid in its articulations about the human spirit.

 

The novel is divided into three main parts that take place over different time periods in the narrator, Willa’s, past, followed by a short fourth section set in what is roughly the narrative present. Predominantly set in the ’50s and early ’60s, Willa recounts parts of her late childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood, spent in Salt Spring Island (between Vancouver Island and mainland BC) and, later, California. The narrative crux focuses around Willa’s relationship with Patrick, a sort of half-brother: he is the younger son of her mother’s new boyfriend and arrives on the island with the disruptive energy of unhinged youth. Willa is nine and Patrick is eleven and their relationship is charged: already he ropes her into games of strangeness and degradation. The first game they play is so surprising and aberrant I felt shock and surety that I was in the hands of a capable, original voice: “The vulgarity of the action made me want to laugh—it excited me in a strange way. I could pass all of his tests, even the naughty ones.”

 

From the relationship springs the core tension of the novel, that is, the power in the act of viewing one another and how this is tethered to the motion of control. Willa’s act of writing, in seeking to rationalize her past, is itself an act of control—we see how the past she is trying to articulate moves and shifts, as do her relationships and her impressions of them. Her fate of being twinned to Patrick, of being reflected in his image, is itself susceptible to warps of movement, to slips and loosenings of focus: themes which transfer themselves to the characters and the drama as the novel develops. We end up on a roiling sea where everything is tilting and the characters are taking turns at being drugged. Robertson seeks to show that there is no archetypal relationship, and yet everything is archetypal. There is always the push-pull of motion, of attention. People make each other do things because they can. Rather than seeking to understand why, Robertson unfurls this type of relationship in its mottled and kaleidoscopic essence. It is inhabited, and not explained: “We sensed the other person, of course, if anything our sense of the other person had intensified, but we allowed each other that civility, to pretend not to know we were watched.”

 

Because the action takes place in one person’s memory, Robertson can give us the action in full, aesthetically beautiful prose. Her words have a tack—a corporeality that fits with the narration described: “Dad let us live like beach clams. We burrowed in the sand and sucked nutrients from the salt, sand fleas exploring our noses like luminous shrimp. We built clam gardens. We cleared the rock from our beach and constructed a wall. The clams stretched their tongues and spat water between our toes.” Robertson’s emphasis on reflection and vision is repeated throughout the work in instances of stillness and quiet beauty: “Luke’s gaze hung on the lake, which glittered beyond the horsetails and spirals of blackberry […] The water glinted sharply—at that moment, it seemed a lake reflected more light than the sea. The ocean absorbed light, held the sun. A lake spat the sun at you.” There shapes she forms with her sentences are visceral. The work shows a focus on the gestural, which makes words feel like they are touching their subjects: “It took an hour to reach home because I rode one-handed, cradling the jar of cream against my belly-button. […] I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide this cream under my bed, then tiptoe along the trunk of my arbutus tree and think about the boy who drove the dairy cart.”

 

As the plot develops, Willa’s impressions become more adult-like: she sees her sister marry and then the fallouts of an unhappy union; she knows what it is to have sex. Willa, like Robertson, is an observer and is not drawn to explicitness. It is as though conveying feelings plainly or clear openness would break a spell or not describe the true state of things sufficiently. There are implied understandings, and there is a sense of uncertainty and equivocality that comes with the awareness of not being entirely in control of fate: “I could feel the future encroach as a shadow encroaches on a day when you spend every hour outside and fail to notice the sun slipping below the horizon.”

 

It is appropriate to end on an excerpt, displaying the essence of the book, Willa’s ultimate solitude, and the turning trajectory of the novel as it is occurring:

 

When I reached the side, I leaned over the gunwale. A school of fish hung suspended in the water, the light glinting off their bodies before the fleet lifted and tilted into the tide. I could hear Joan and Kenneth fighting in the galley. I tried to block out the sound, inhaled the ocean’s salt on my skin, the tang of seagull shit dried onto the deck. Slowly, larger shadows overtook the shadows of the helm. Then these darknesses—spilled by masts, the boom—were overtaken by the largest shadow, of Earth turning away from the sun. I closed my eyes. The wind fingered the curl that had dropped from my braid, dangling down the nape of my neck.

 

Languid in feeling yet tautly controlled, Demi-Gods looks at the interiorities we can’t explain to ourselves: what we show and what remains hidden. The final image leaves us with a full tidal pool, suggesting the underbelly of the ringing surface of the world, a multiplicity of hidden movements: “a pool gathered in the lap of a rock with mossy bunches of anemones and gunnel fish and barnacles.” How can we contain what we see when we look backwards? What is uncovered by the action of doing so?

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