Category: Book Review

Review: The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

Review of: The Dissenters, by Youssef Rakha; Graywolf; $17.00; 272 pages; February 4, 2025

Review by Alex Ramirez-Amaya

 

“I sought permission to beg forgiveness for my mother; but He did not grant it to me. I sought permission from Him to visit her grave, and He granted it to me.” This epigraph, taken from Book Four of the Sahih Muslim, a collection of hadith, details two appeals: one of forgiveness, and one of remembrance—only the latter of which is granted. This aptly chosen epigraph encapsulates what readers will find in Youssef Rakha’s latest novel. Instead of forgiveness and black-and-white morality, we find the memories of a woman living through a tumultuous time in Egyptian history.

 

The Dissenters is Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English. For the better part of twenty-five years, Rakha has written fiction and poetry in Arabic. In an essay on “The Slow and Satisfying Discovery of Arabic,” Rakha recounts that, as a young man, Arabic represented two things: “the practical, and the religious,” two things which, in his mind, alienated Arabic from the possibility of literature. On the other hand, his lively and polyglot mother tongue, Egyptian Arabic, was a spoken dialect that proved difficult when it was time to get complicated. It wasn’t until after earning a BA in English at Hull University that Rakha realized both the potential of the Arabic language as a medium for creation and that his world was Arabic-speaking. If he wanted to explore this world, he needed to do it in Arabic, to capture the “intellectual and psychological kicks specific to that world.”

 

Rakha’s publisher aptly describes The Dissenters as “transgressive.” Transgressive works break with the moral and social conventions of their day or historical setting which, in this case, is Egypt in the twentieth century. Such transgressive works seek more than just hedonism and the erosion of archaic social norms; instead, they move us toward a radically new way of seeing and being in the world. Rakha pushes these transgressions further through his use of language. By blending vernacular Arabic with the standard and the religious, Rakha initiates us into a world where change can be enacted through the words we choose to utter. Rakha blurs the lines of language, dialect, life, family, memory, and desire—not only in content but in form and style.

 

The novel is framed as a series of letters written by Nour to his sister discussing the “secret” life of their mother, a woman who went by three names: Amna, Nimo, and Mouna. The opening page contains a jarring admission from Nour, who marvels at his desire for “Mouna, a Mouna that is and is not [his] mother.” In the pages that follow, Nour recounts to his sister, Shimo, their mother’s past, and, along the way, multiple decades of Egyptian history, spanning from the Egyptian Revolution of the 1950s up to the Arab Spring of the 2010s. Nour begins Amna’s (Nimo’s? Mouna’s?) story as a panicked Baccalauréat student on the morning after her wedding night because she cannot present a bloodied white bedsheet as proof of her virginity—though this is through no fault of her own: her husband, a much older man with a case of erectile dysfunction, cannot consummate their marriage. Amna worries about her absence from school and about what may be perceived as her questionable virginity.

 

What follows is a work of art unafraid of peeling back the layers of history to find the often ugly and complicated truth beneath. The novel’s short, nonlinear chapters and interjections read more like prose poetry than anything else. As I made my way through the novel, I could not help but think of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, another magnificent display of living language reminiscing on the dead. Yet, Rakha’s novel cannot be defined as simply continuing a tradition that began with European modernists. In The Dissenters, Rakha has successfully created a novel that is wholly his own.

 

Mirroring Rakha’s mother tongue, Egyptian Arabic, The Dissenters reflects a similar “polyglotism” in the way Rakha weaves globalization and imperialism past into a meditation on culture, revolution, and memory. One of the protagonists memorizes Jacques Brel’s “Ne me Quitte Pas” to the point that she can play it “in her head.” Others drive Cadillac DeVilles. Polyglotism is evident even at the sentence level: the narration and dialogue are often interjected with Arabic and French phrases—sometimes, there are three languages in one sentence. For the characters of the novel, Arabic, English, and French are not multiple streams of thought; rather, they are a single river of communication and existence. I’m often critical of multilingualism in English literature because it risks caricaturing what life in multiple languages is actually like. In Rakha, I find someone who understands the experience of multilingualism, which is not just a string of code-switching, but fluid movement and thought across many languages.

 

In an interview with afikra, an organization dedicated to a better understanding of the Arab world, Youssef Rakha opined that what makes a particular text different—and therefore important—is the writer’s “capacity to make themself vulnerable.” This goes beyond objectivity and intellectual curiosity; a writer must have felt the “horror, pain, and grief of being human, of being mortal, of being on Earth.” I would only add that being vulnerable and open to our worst experiences also requires courage—a kind of courage that is not easily found. We should consider ourselves grateful, however, that we can find such courage in the works of Youssef Rakha.

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Review: Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins

Review of Pretty: A Memoir, by KB Brookins; Knopf; $28.00; 240 pages; May 28, 2024

Review by Dani Sarta

 

KB Brookins’s third published book and first memoir, Pretty, is an artfully queer ode to growing up in a society that doesn’t “get” you and to the ongoing journey of crafting your own space amid recent, globally traumatic years. By way of Black cultural references, queer theory and literature, and a homegrown love of the Texan South, Brookins leads readers through their life growing up as a masculine Black girl learning to show the world who they really are.

 

Composed of essays and poems, and divided into four sections, this memoir begins with Brookins’s early days. After laying the foundation of their birth and adoption at two years old, they offer a brief disclaimer, reminding the reader that “the mind has a way of shielding the body from what it can’t contain… so know that this story isn’t the full one… but is composed of the moments too interestingly gendered to pass up.” The moments they choose to share are incredibly raw and relatable to anyone who grew up under similar constraints of gender, sexuality, and/or religion. From being told at five years of age to “close [their] legs” because of the men around them to starting the deconstruction of their relationship with Christianity at twelve, Brookins recounts hallmark memories shared by many queer people, as well as most girls raised in “the church.” Still, each experience is seasoned by the Texan conservatism they suffered, as well as their family’s deep connection to the Christian church, making these experiences uniquely their own.

 

 Later, the memoir focuses on Brookins’s struggles with sexuality as a teenager in a budding Internet space. They explore websites like MySpace and engage in relationships beyond what they are told is “normal.” And in the third section, Brookins turns the mirror to the darker, painful parts of self-exploration; frustration expressed in unhealthy ways; the concept of toxic masculinity in Black, queer spaces; and a misunderstanding of Black “man/boyhood” due to being socialized as a Black woman/girl.

 

This section begins with a poem titled “Toxic Masculinity,” which discusses the cycle of abuse, generational trauma, and racism against Black men, and how all of these pains manifest in other areas of Black men’s lives. The poem is followed by the titular essay in which Brookins admits to embracing toxic masculinity while in a queer relationship, feeling compelled to fall back on the examples of masculinity they knew when faced with a situation that forced them to see their gender in an unexpected way. The last two essays of this section, “I Get Least of You” and “23andMe,” address Brookins’s relationship with their adoptive father and his relationship to masculinity. Brookins also details their brief but unsuccessful dive into 23andMe to find their biological father.

 

In Brookins’s letter to their adoptive father, they write, “What does it mean to parent yourself in a world that sees you as a man while you are a boy? What does it mean to be told that you’re a boy—like I was told that I was a girl—and have Blackness cloak that boy in some predetermined fate? I was never a Black boy, but now I’m expected to be a Black man. I’d love to get the MO on all I missed from boyhood with you and dad #2.” Having no experience being raised as a Black boy, Brookins struggles to embody the image of a Black man. By the end of the section, Brookins has not been able to connect with their biological father, but there is a beautiful moment of reconnection with their adoptive father after Brookins begins social and medical transition. The two share “a conversation that wasn’t possible when [they] came out in high school” with “more understanding, more patience, less grief and loss in the air.”

 

A majority of the essays, like “23andMe,” conclude with a few paragraphs or pages of hope for the future. Some readers may find this tedious or unjustly optimistic, but such moments are best read as acts of resistance or self-love (which is resistance in its own right), in which Brookins reaffirms their author’s note. This is a memoir they wish had existed when they were transitioning, the memoir they needed as a teenager, as a child, and even now. To further this resistance, halfway through the memoir, Brookins writes, “We must believe people when they tell us who they are. We must create a culture where people’s reality always overpowers other people’s bigotry.” This centers the memoir around the act of forming an ideal reality, regardless of others’ discomfort.

 

This resistance comes into full view in the final section of the memoir. As Brookins writes, “Each adverse experience and day of literary discourse on Twitter should be radicalizing us to create a new literary America…Writing is an extension of living, so we have to study and practice love in the same ways that we study and practice craft.” Throughout this section, Brookins criticizes the ways that liberalism and “diversity” within companies and institutions (especially the publishing industry) often suffer from a normalized, hyper-white focus, and how, despite Brookins’s complex and layered background, they are often forced into the box of the “token” Black person in a room. They show from their experiences that very rarely does an organization that prides itself on its diversity or “wokeness” understand the nuance of multiple identities, such as those that Brookins encompasses. Such institutions, Brookins argues, generally alienate those they claim to care about.

 

Still, the memoir celebrates intersectional identities and Brookins’s journey to identify as a member of multiple communities, emphasizing the importance of existing for yourself while doing the systemic work to help others exist alongside you. As Brookins writes in the title essay, “We can shed ourselves, be limitless, and embody everything pretty. I am mine, you are yours, this world is ours, everyone’s, to be safe in.” While this call to action arrives long before the memoir’s end, the call is clear: live a life of love and care, and insist that the world change for the better.

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Review: My Infinity by Didi Jackson

The Frenzy to Live: A Review of My Infinity, by Didi Jackson; Red Hen Press; $16.95; 96 pages; September 3, 2024
Review by Emily Rose Miller

 

Didi Jackson’s second collection of poems, My Infinity, is a quiet, pensive reckoning with life and death by a speaker uniquely suited to discuss such enigmatic subjects. My Infinity follows the speaker of Jackson’s first collection, MOON JAR (Red Hen Press, 2020). Readers of MOON JAR will recognize that the poems in My Infinity continue to grapple with the aftermath of the poet-speaker’s late husband’s suicide. While these books complement and expand one another in delightful ways, My Infinity can be read as a stand-alone collection.

 

The book presents poignant, direct moments that meditate on the speaker’s grief, moments as in the poem “AFTER MY HUSBAND’S SUICIDE I VISITED A PSYCHIC IN CASSADAGA, FLORIDA,” which reads, “and I hoped for a way / into the dark // an escape hatch from this world / toward his spirit.” Likewise, in the poem “VIGIL,” Jackson writes, “I’ve learned how to keep / ashes in the firebox that heap / as high as decades. / They remind me of / his ashes, the ones / I keep on my nightstand.” Such lines owe their power to their gut-wrenching specificity. In their specificity, the words become universal, speaking to the grief, the loss, and perhaps most importantly, the living we all experience the world over.

 

My Infinity is broken into five sections. The second section consists entirely of poems about and from the point of view of Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist who lived from 1862 to 1944 and is considered to have made some of the first abstract art in the Western world. Af Klint was heavily involved in spiritualism, namely Theosophy, which informed her art, writing, and life. Jackson’s portrayal of af Klint is a fascinating addition to the collection and begs the obvious question: Why?

 

It is clear that af Klint’s work fascinates the poet-speaker, and that af Klint’s feelings of grief and inquisitiveness echo the speaker’s own. But the biggest moment of connection arrives with the poem “THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE,” which ends: “Like Hilma, I want to decode it all, / but I’ll never know why / I was left a widow. / Only that the two swallows are me, / dividing into two selves, my desire reawakening, / my sorrow forever rooted.” We see, too, elements in which the speaker finds uncanny connections between af Klint’s life and work and her own, as again in “THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE,” when Jackson notes, “[my husband] was only 44. The same age as Hilma / as she started the paintings of the temple.” Jackson’s poems surrounding af Klint underscore grief’s universality, as if to say: this may not be a unique struggle, which I take comfort in, but it is as uniquely mine as yours is yours.

 

For all the ruminations on grief in this collection, there is also joy, persistent and worth clinging to. In “THE LEISURE OF SNOW,” for example, we join the speaker on a quiet day as she witnesses “the leisure of the snow / falling like a Rothko // over the morning.” Almost prayerfully, the speaker allows the reader to sit with her in this moment of reprieve from the harshness of the world, saying, “I prefer to beat // the dawn; but this I shouldn’t have to explain: / for the morning is naked and beautiful // and yawns many times before turning / on the light. I am there // to see.” Yet, even here is the hint of hurt with the enjambment of “I prefer to beat.” Such subtle pain is masterfully rendered here and in the rest of the collection. Witnessing the soft beauty of the natural world is enough for the speaker on this morning. In the midst of life, so often filled with loss and turmoil, the quietness of this moment must be enough.

 

Still, the speaker finds joy even in pain. On multiple occasions, the speaker tells us that she suffers from migraines, especially after the exertion of sex. In “‘WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE,’” she says, “Frank Stella would be proud of my migraines / especially those that come after sex— // exquisite pleasure, then blindness” … “Under this geometric spell // and pills like wasps beneath my tongue, / I am the closest to my true self, // and I secretly love my agony.” Such lines remind us that life is an amalgamation of every emotion and experience, some good, some bad; without one, we could not experience the other. For the speaker, her “exquisite pleasure” and her “agony” are forever intertwined, a fact she not only seems comfortable with but embraces. And this is the driving truth of My Infinity: “so much of living is about death,” yet “[we] too catch the frenzy to live.”

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Review: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Review of Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; $28; 320 pages; September 3, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

Despite the limitless expanse of the mind, the body is a woefully constrained vessel. In Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, a mysterious illness seizes, reduces, and ultimately enlightens a poet. While the medical dilemma of the protagonist is harrowing, his rich, compassionate interiority provides succor. “I became a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul.”

 

The poet in Small Rain is an avatar for Greenwell who suffered an aneurysm a few years back and was left with a temporary inability to read anything save for the poems of George Oppen, whose work provides the protagonist of the novel solace. Analyzing one of Oppen’s poems, “And All Her Silken Flanks with Garlands Drest,” the narrator speculates: “It’s a whole theory of civilization, that image, the flowers and the slaughter, the flowers covering the slaughter. And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.”

 

Small Rain is as distressing as it is consoling. Greenwell’s stream of consciousness brings us close to the machinations of emergency room procedure, terror, and uncertainty. “Everyone had been so relentlessly heterosexual.” He unflinchingly illustrates the inherent humiliation of physical examination, the demoralization of pain (“It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence”), and all our misgivings with the American medical establishment. Trauma attends the triage experience and the mysterious illness that plagues the protagonist until a dreaded diagnosis is ultimately disclosed: an infrarenal aortic dissection.

 

“There was something terrible about watching the people around me, terrible and irresistible, I wanted to see into their lives, but had no right to,” the poet admits. “Most of the people in the waiting room were like windows left dark, blank or withdrawn, scrolling on their phones or staring into space.”

 

Upon diagnosis, a fleet of doctors and nurses treat the poet like a medical anomaly. The micro emphasis on the protocol of hospital personnel and their intensive care procedures fosters an experiential nightmare. Timing is no friend either, as the poet’s catastrophic biological incident unfolds during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the risk of infection heightens the already nerve-shredding scenario.

 

Also buzzing in the background, finding its way into the poet’s contemplations, are the national demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd murders. The poet is a highly conscionable empath, but Greenwell avoids tropes of virtue signaling. His poet is a complex human who is duly outraged by cruelty, injustice, and indifference; however, it is the juxtaposition of police brutality with the politicization of the coronavirus, mask mandates, and vaccinations that deeply troubles the poet: “Twitter was full of everyone calling everyone a fascist, so that the word meant nothing—which was the real danger, I thought, words meant nothing, the way any word could be made to mean nothing; it was a way of erasing reality, or of placing reality beyond our grasp, real facts, real values, it was a tyranny of meaninglessness.”

 

Small Rain is reminiscent of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit: a person of the mind is diminished and imprisoned by a dire medical condition, forced to confront memories and ideologies and shortcomings and desires and mortality. Here, the poet reflects on his life, including the fond introduction to his lover, moments from childhood (“childhood is not health…there is no bigger lie in literature”), exchanges with his mother, and growing up in an abusive household. There is a sense of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in terms of disease and the literary mind. The cerebral, lyrical thoughts find art, history, and philosophy to help comprehend the dehumanizing dilemma and find meaning in the suffering. “Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.”  

 

Sometimes that literary mind—impractical and useless when met with a clinical crisis, despite its salvation of the soul—crashes against the cold, necessary logic of medicine and technology: “My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core—though they were necessary to me.”

 

The poet, like Greenwell, possesses a generous mind, and his musing turns also to his husband, a renowned Spanish poet (“It was the least dramatic, the least anxious beginning to any relationship I had ever had: no anguished uncertainty, no sleepless nights, just a new fact in the world”); their house in Iowa, which is an old money pit in perpetual disrepair; his long-term teaching assignment in Romania; and his time in graduate school earning his MFA in poetry. The constant assault and failure and expenses incurred on his old house feels Job-like, and he finds metaphors to his health, as well as to birds and to poetry. He also considers the sad, beautiful demise of the oak trees on his property: “It was beautiful how they died, in the wild, in the forests; as they rotted and the wood softened, more animals took shelter in them, even after they fell, they served a purpose, enriching the soil, they had long lives and long deaths.”

 

Greenwell originally studied music in his youth, then poetry, and there is a musicality in his prose as a result. “I was the opposite of philosophical, a miniscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the entire world.”  Small Rain is written with warmth, sensitivity, and great accessibility, but never with even a hint of treacle. Instead, the novel leaves us with a desire to embrace life’s clichés: live fully, passionately, openly, and hold to the people and things that enhance you, not the least of which is art itself. “Poetry,” the poet tells us, “is the accoutrement of the self.”

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Review: All The World Beside by Garrard Conley

Review of All the World Beside, by Garrard Conley, Riverhead Books, 352 pages, $28, Publication Date: March 26, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

 

Though Garrard Conley’s transcendent debut, All the World Beside, is ostensibly about an eighteenth century gay love affair between Arthur Lyman, a physician, and Nathaniel Whitfield, a reverend, the novel is chiefly concerned with the nature of desire and the salvation of the soul.

 

The story unfolds in Cana, Massachusetts amid the Puritan push for utopia. Arthur is married to the bold, scandalous Anne while Nathaniel’s wife is the accommodating, unwell Catherine. Both men have children. Arthur’s daughter, Martha, and Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, eventually become friends by way of Anne’s engineering, but it is Ezekiel, Nathaniel’s son, around whom the plot is framed. His letters to Sarah, years after the central events of the novel, anchor the story, providing an additional layer of tragedy.

 

We soon learn that Ezekiel, named after the prophet who saw the demise of Jerusalem, is answering for the sins of his father through exile. While Nathaniel is away with Arthur, Sarah becomes possessed by righteousness and castigates the citizens of Cana who are swayed by a swindler selling watches. She scolds them for their pagan proclivities, claiming they have become Satan’s puppets, especially her father who sins with Arthur, and her mother who hides his sin. Sarah feels responsible for the town’s great awakening. The Great Awakenings—a succession of religious revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers that gripped believers throughout the early eighteenth century and into the late twentieth century—play a central role in the novel.

 

When Ezekiel’s mother calls a group of French sex workers “nobodies,” Ezekiel internalizes the notion of a “nobody” as someone without a home, free to do as they like, including finding a home as they see fit, a “terrifying and exciting” prospect. We learn that Ezekiel was cast off to the hinterlands because he would not betray Nathaniel and Arthur, his “two fathers.” In his quiet despair, Ezekiel questions a “God who has created such impossible conditions.”

 

Conley does not hide his numerous parallels to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: pilgrim judgment, shunning, damning ostracization, banishment, and the weight of mortal transgression, along with the characters’ names themselves. The novel intrigues and mesmerizes with its density of complex histories, scandalous pasts, tormenting secrets, and haunting lies.

 

Conley’s revelatory 2016 memoir, Boy Erased, also dealt with the cruel and ignorant things people do in the name of religion, but with compassion and insight. Homosexuality and Christianity coexist in an uneasy arrangement in Conley’s personal world, as in his fiction. The characters treat each other with care, tenderness, and concern for their well-being. Even Nathaniel and Arthur are protected and loved by their families and communities.

 

All The World Beside is largely a meditation on the simplicity, beauty, and goodness of nature and faith, despite the pain both cause. The characters are at the nonnegotiable pull of a wild will and its demands, as well as the imagined expectations of God. The punishments doled out by religious law seem unreasonable, even draconian, but in Conley’s view, these are the products of fear and reverence. In a moment of the metaphysical melding with the scientific, Nathaniel says to Arthur, “You said wounds allow love to enter the body more freely.”

 

Conley’s voice is clear but ambiguous, gentle but never coddling, and firm but not merciless. His spare language is imbued with an assurance that disarms with its sincerity. The novel was born of Conley’s conversation with his Missionary Baptist father, and a subsequent objective to prove queer people existed and even thrived during the 1700s. The eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, after all, and enlightenment meant privileging science over blind faith. These dualities are at play in the relationship between Nathaniel, a man of faith, and Arthur, a practitioner of medicine. Nathaniel is responsible for the town’s spiritual health while Arthur bears responsibility for the inhabitants’ physical wellbeing. The soul and the body intermingle. The divine and the material parry.

 

By virtue of the milieu and period, Conley tells an elemental story about faith and nature, free from civilized constructions and cultural touchstones. The focus here is on engagement with God, with imagination, with the soil, and, finally, with each other. Still, there pervades a din of the superstitious, the anxiety of bearing a mark and being damned, the devil lurking in the shadows, ready to claim his due. “The devil never forces a hand. He is cleverer than that. He tempts.” Nature itself possesses evil, or at least, indifferent properties. But God is everywhere too. The divine is a constant presence and a perpetual promise, a goal to work toward, and a pleasure to be earned.

 

The love shared between Nathaniel and Arthur feels like an invention, even if the men discover that their shared feelings are all too familiar. Theirs is the possible start of a freer land, one of not just national possibilities but also a sexual renaissance. “We just invented it,” says Nathaniel to Arthur. “Never before has another man done what I have done or felt what I have felt. God did not create this. It is not natural. It is not divine. It is nothing but what it is, here in this bed.”

 

Though the families keep their secrets, Nathaniel and Arthur’s love harms them. Sarah, in her rapturous call to duty, believes that their sin prevents the salvation of the town. “A town must be safe before it may be saved,” claims a parishioner named Priscilla. Conley maintains nebulous motives for his characters, especially the men’s families. Do they keep the secret of the affair to protect their husbands and fathers, or to protect themselves? To ensure the awakening unfolds unsullied, or to preserve the fantasy of their faith? Catherine tells Sarah, “Men have the power to change. Women cannot change, not really; they have no such luxury, but men change all the time.”

 

All The World Beside’s bittersweet tone is perhaps best captured by Catherine who, overcome by her family’s lot in life, laments, “There is life yet to mourn the loss of beauty.”

 

Conley ends with an academic postscript that rigorously assays the hidden history of LGBTQ life. He so expertly evokes the eighteenth century that the modern thoughts and words of the closing essay stand as a jarring contrast and pointed reminder of where we’ve been and where we are. In the end, Conley tells a story that feels ancient but somehow new, and he does so with grace, restraint, and generosity. His characters are as alive and urgent today as they would have been over 250 years ago, and the world, though changed, remains in many heartbreaking and healing ways, the same.

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Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades 

Review of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron. 276 pp. $29.99 

Review by Samuel Zammit

Equal parts true crime and an exploration of Florida folktales, veteran journalist Rebecca Renner weaves together a thought-provoking nonfiction debut with Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. Renner quickly delivers on the promise of the book’s provocative title, sharing truths more thrilling than fiction as she intertwines impassioned narratives and dispels myths surrounding conservation.

 

Gator Country follows the story of Officer Jeff Babauta, his involvement with Operation Alligator Thief, and his grappling with morality as he completes one last job. Despite being the action-packed story of a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) officer going undercover to catch alligator poachers, Gator Country also presents difficult philosophical questions, bringing painful truths about poaching to light. As Renner tracks down Babauta, and their narratives collide, the book dissects the real lives of poachers, humanizing them in stereotype-shattering ways and calling the law itself into question. As Renner says, “The poachers in my life would balk at the idea that they’re hurting nature. They love nature.”

 

Renner draws on her experiences to bring to life the parts of Florida that only a Floridian could, and she makes careful use of her upbringing. Unpacking Florida storytelling motifs, Renner deciphers the tales of her fellow locals in ways an outsider might misunderstand. As such, Gator Country takes readers on an intimate romp through Florida swamps while simultaneously taking them on an undercover mission that feels like something pulled from the pages of a thrilling spy novel.

 

The story of Operation Alligator Thief, alongside Renner’s search for another folk hero of the swamp, Peg Brown, are delicately intertwined. Like a gator sinking beneath the surface, the reader is transported seamlessly between worlds: Babauta’s tale of the past and Renner’s hunt for the truth about Peg Brown and other seemingly kind-hearted poachers like him. Ultimately, these parallel stories converge into a bittersweet and satisfying conclusion for one of the biggest busts in FWC history.

 

Renner takes care to discuss the indigenous people who have had their land stolen, the impact of man on nature, and the truth about what realistically drives people to poaching, all of which stands in stark contrast to the cartoonish images of the British on safari at the turn of the century that readers might conjure when they hear the word poach. She highlights the positive and negative ways that humanity has interacted with nature and the livelihoods of their neighbors. Renner tells the story not only of nature, but of the people who have shaped and been shaped by the natural world.

 

Gator Country is a book for anyone looking for the juicy mess of reality in pages so suspenseful they read like fiction. In the end, Renner writes about the blurry morality of the law, friendships, betrayal, loyalty, and family, all while expertly building toward the crescendo of the true villain’s reveal, all of which gives way to an incredible ride and a riveting read.

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Review: All Bird: Brandi George’s The Nameless

Review of The Nameless, by Brandi George. 
Kernpunkt Press, August 2023, 199 pages, $18.00
Review by James Brock.

The late Dean Young famously instructs poets, “We are making birds not birdcages,” in The Art of Recklessness, expressing a gravity-defying Warner Brothers Cartoons ethos and New York School surrealism. Young committed to those ideas since his days as a graduate student (and one year as a nursing student) at Indiana University, some forty years ago. His ideas about recklessness broaden the scope of poetry, embracing creative processes that are truly disruptive, chaotic, comedic, and thrilling. (Anne Carson, Thylias Moss, and Denise Duhamel were busy with their own poetic larcenies those days as well.)

 

Meanwhile, there lived a punk-goth farm girl, haling from Ovid, Michigan, with living visitations from faery tale creatures and Old Testament demons; a Lady Gaga little monster who survived exorcisms and sexual abuse and suicide; a love-wrecked and love-worn lovechild of Walt Whitman and Thumbelina; and, eventually, a professor and Ashtanga practitioner. She would write unlikely long books of poetry, improbably to have them published. And that poet, Brandi George, has now gifted us with an incredibly demanding, rewarding, pleasurable, harrowing, and funny book of poetry, The Nameless. It is a monumental book that is all bird.

 

Part bildungsroman, part memoir, part enfevered vision, part nature study of fungi, and so, so much more, The Nameless is also the work of a serious, careful versifier, one whose mastery of iambic meter is as light and feathery as hydrae. It is also a book that runs some 200 pages, a visionary accomplishment published by Kernpunkt Press—a press that must be praised for its faith in the most unlikely.

 

Structurally, The Nameless operates ostensibly as a memoir, divided into two sections, and subdivided into short, individual chapters. And while one is to distrust the autobiographical in poetry as being merely factual, clearly the effort here by George is to construct a poetic record of her life. The speaker in her book is self-identified as “We”—and while that first appears to be a nod toward a gender-neutral self-naming, the “we” who speaks is a dissembling of voices, polyphonic, amorphous, and morphing. This expansive idea of self, certainly Whitman-like, finds its operative metaphor in the mushroom, in fungi. Yes, inside the pleats of the cap of a mushroom are ungendered spores, where 10,000 individuals can fit on a pinhead, and a single fungus constitutes the largest organism on earth, covering an expanse of over four square miles.

 

George’s “We” constitutes a self that is wracked with auditory and visual hallucinations, an identity we might consider as post-structurally fractured or profoundly schizophrenic, but one that becomes a representation of the poet, a being who is something of a receiver, without the usual filters, who hears the language of air and death in everything and who must then sing.

 

The book begins with death, where We, as a child, is the victim of sexual molestation—her parents instruct her to forget it—and, from that moment, death’s spores enter We’s body:

 

                          so now when we
completely forget      it Happened

the Thing forms      a fairy ring
inside our body     Now Death

lives inside us

Invariably, then, Death attends, embodies, and accompanies We through the book—a fact of her life that she has long been taught to ignore and deny. And, of course, in Ovid, death is everywhere, within and without, but with the promise of change and metamorphosis. For We, this means enduring an exorcism at her parents’ behest, the parents convinced their adolescent daughter is possessed by demons. They burn her poems. The irony, it seems, is that We is indeed possessed, but by Death in all its recombinant manifestations.

 

The book chapters are often prefaced by George’s brilliantly fractured tales of Thumbelina dying a new death with each iteration. We clearly identifies with Thumbelina—the strangest of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—whose queer desires and chaotic imaginings are continually corrected by her elders. George’s Thumbelina is “genderless, many-faced, guiltless, green, and as mysterious as twilight,” a runaway spirit who meets death recklessly, fully, casually, and intentionally.

 

And in this large book, there are abundant touchstones for We beyond Thumbelina: Kurt Cobain, tarot cards, success and the po-biz, and even animal husbandry. This is a poet’s memoir, after all, a testimony of the empathetic spirit, and here, with death living inside her, We’s empathy is almost debilitating. She feels too much (and this seems to be her chief sin, at least by her family’s reckoning). For instance, We recounts her work at a dairy farm, where her job is to separate the male calves from the female calves, after which the baby bulls will be sold for veal:

 

back in the barn we try to console the new calf
name him     Bocephus    after Hank    but without his mother

                                            he’s petrified
trembling    we hold him to our chest like a child

           his grief is so deep we can feel it    glacial    nothing will ever
absolve us of this

 

As much as We disassociates herself from her family, from middle-America banality, and from the grind of capitalism, she is inescapably complicit. Where others in her family and community routinely deny responsibility, she feels it keenly—it is the death in her. The poet’s task, it seems, is to receive everything, to name it, to own it.

 

Even so, much of the book is doomful, doleful love poetry, a tribute to We’s beloved Annette, an equally wild spirit (and later to We’s husband Michael, who co-authors several poems in the book). Here, the poetry is tender:

 

In the backyard we practice
flipping our hair
She-Ra mermaid rock star
it’s our thing hair      then eyes then

will we ever be beautiful?

          our longing for beauty is
crush of petals down our shirt
     leaves under our feet
dandelion heads on the sidewalk
                       sunburn like a hand

 

So, amid all the chaos, the disorientation of hallucinations, and the broken wheel that is the self, George’s reckless poetry continually finds its purchase in these fleeting moments. This unguarded work seems the very product of Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” The world that Brandi George has split open contains all the invisible names of death, all the fecund beauty we long for, and a billion seeds that will germinate from the dead.

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Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson

Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson
Four Way Books, September, 2022
$17.95, 102 pages
Reviewed by Thomas Page

Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson Cover

What would happen if someone were to break down our stereotype of the male poet, the one spending his time typing away at his keyboard about his problems with his body and those he wishes to share it with? Doug Anderson seeks to find this answer in his latest poetry collection. Undress, She Said is a vividly crafted poetry collection that takes the reader down the path of the traditional masculine poet-voice and his relationship with his sense of place. This sense of place forms the backbone of the collection’s debate about how pride, sexuality, and memory impact the mind of a man in a war-dominate society. Doug Anderson opens with “Prophesy,” setting the stage for the theme of accepting fate that is pervasive throughout the collection. In support of this theme, he writes,

 

“There is a storm coming,
clouds opening, closing their fists.
No point in boarding up the house” (3).

 

The speaker in this collection is subjected to a variety of influences that make him desensitized to the many problems of the collection’s world. Undress, She Said is divided into four parts that talk about each of these influences: “Love in Plague Time,” “The War Doesn’t End,” “Homage,” and “Mythologies.”

 

In “Love in Plague Time,” Anderson writes about the convergence of religion, morality, and desire that complicate how the speaker interacts with his world. This is the longest section of the book and serves as a “part 1” to the collection’s themes. The content of the poems in this section ranges from mental health (“When the Plague Came”) to sexuality (“Masturbation”). This section is imbued with the apathy that comes from a life conflicted between what the speaker wants to do and what he should do. For example, in “Skeleton of Water,” Anderson toes the line between these two ideas, writing,

 

“I was a failure as a libertine, always falling in love,
lacked the detachment of a true rake, drank to hide
my heart’s anarchy, the knowledge that the angels
I wrestled with were divine” (30).

 

His technical approach in this section is to alienate the voice from his world through various snapshots of his past. The focus on the past self and the present voice helps to characterize the kind of voice that will be taking the reader throughout the reflections in the rest of the book. The speaker discusses how life in an idyllic setting can make him feel ostracized by his own people.

 

Anderson centers these themes of morality into the realm of military veterans who come from his society in the second section, “The War Doesn’t End.” This section is primarily focused on veterans from the Vietnam War and how the war has affected their lives. In the title poem “The War Doesn’t End” Anderson reflects on a mixed-race solider he meets in Ho Chi Mihn City after the war has ended, saying that the soldier is:

 

“Mixed black and Vietnamese, unwelcome here,
unwelcome there, son of a soldier gone” (65).

 

This “soldier gone” forms the narrative backbone of this second section as Anderson navigates through the indoctrination the Marines received (“Killing with a Name”) to how this allowed them to inflict turmoil on others (“Somewhere South of Danang, 1967”). Anderson demonstrates his narrative skill in his poetry through the lyrical story his voice tells in this section. He also connects the speaker’s problems with his life before in “Love in Plague Time” to the lack of interest in the problems of “The War Doesn’t End.”

 

The two sides of the speaker—the apathetic citizen (“Love in the Plague Time”) and the desensitized Marine (“The War Doesn’t End”)—melt away and meld in the third section of “Homage.” Anderson spends most of this section in conversation with Li Po, another poet, about how his life’s two previous phases have affected him. He reflects on his aging (“Homage to Li Po”) and how that affects his ultimately nihilistic outlook on life (“Anonymous Civil Servant, T’ang Dynasty”). However, in “Two Poets Drinking,” Anderson realizes that this line of thinking is destructive and that being a part of a relationship is vital to survival:

 

“He keeps me from stepping off the cliff,
I catch him when he falls.
And fall he will, as will I” (79).

 

The speaker’s journey throughout this section is to destroy and rebuild who he was in this life, revealing the ways he is trying to be a better person. The conversational form of the third section serves as a paradigm shift in the collection’s overall tone and theme. Indeed it is the bridge of the collection’s lyrical structure.

 

Anderson ends his collection with “Mythologies,” a contemporary reflection of the themes of Greek mythology and Biblical stories with the themes and settings discussed earlier in the book. Some of his subjects are Odysseus (“Cyclops”) and Adam. In “Survivor,” he combines the legend of Circe with the setting of a strip club:

 

“I saw my men in that topless bar
that Circe ran, throwing their
combat pay up on the stage,
her tucking the bills in her g-string” (96).

 

He circles back to the themes presented in “Love in Plague Time” under the guise of using myths and stories to reexamine the themes of alienation. The section and the collection ends with “Age is Asking Me to Give Up Love.” Much like the cyclical nature of myth, Anderson says,

 

“Might be easier if love gave me up.
It won’t, nor has it sublimated
into something holy” (102).

 

Anderson’s text is striking due to its streamlined lyricism and juxtaposition of the natural and artificial. This is well-exemplified in the line  “I was shocked, thought in our madness you’d bitten my lip. But it was only blueberries” (82).

 

Undress, She Said will stand out to readers through its varied reflection of the male poet within the last century.

 

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Review: Marble Orchard by Emily Corwin

University of Akron Press, May 2023

68 pages

Emily Corwin’s third full-length book of poetry, Marble Orchard, subverts expectations of how we talk about anxiety and depression. This graveyard is divided into four sections that tackle mental health issues and physical ailments: “delicate as organ,” “my black sleigh,” “the wicked accident,” and “a field walks through me.” Each of these corresponds to a different framing style: a formal presentation of “lunacy,” ekphrasis of film, a collage of voices overheard, and the ekphrasis of paintings.

 

Though ekphrasis, the use of art as a framing device, is often used as a tool of distance, in Corwin’s latest collection, pieces feel personal and universal. One notable piece, “Kat Harvey,” named after the protagonist of the 1995 Casper movie, is a portrait of the namesake character:

 

to go. Dusty star anise, eyebright, the rosarian says,

good morning. And you, what were you like as a living thing?

 

I’d like to make contact. Can you hurt me? Can I hurt you?

Slither with me to the Lazarus machine, primordial muck.

 

I’d like to see you not see-through. Can I keep you? Earthy as a

cabbage rose—my woody perennial, my mortal slow dancer.

 

Corwin uses “Kat Harvey” and Casper to consider the separation of the mind and the body, and resurrection after a physical and even metaphysical death. The poem uses the movie to craft a painting of herbal medicines such as “dusty star anise,” that suggest healing properties. Death is only addressed with a rhetorical question: “What were you like as a living thing?” The biblical reference to Lazarus, the name of the machine designed to bring Casper back to life, arises again as “a/ cabbage rose—my woody perennial.” Here the reader may note “perennial” is a type of plant that comes back to life every spring and could signify the cyclical nature of mental health struggles.

 

The opening section of the collection, “delicate as organ,” begins with a bang and contains some of the most compelling pieces in the collection. Its first poem, “Lunatic as Abecedarian,” sets us up thematically for the rest of the book. The speaker of these pieces, “lived against it – a/ brutal music; I lived in it in/ clinics, in dresses disposable.” This section examines “lunacy” and “lunatic” by employing a myriad of forms that challenge us to reframe our relationship with these words.

 

Corwin is at her best when she deconstructs and rebuilds the world around her. In one of her “Lunatic as Erasure” pieces, readers see an “erasure of Fluoxetine medication guide” that takes medical packaging to create a portrait of what it is like being on an antidepressant.

 

“there may be            change in mood, behavior,

actions, thoughts, or feelings, especially severe.

acting on dangerous impulses”

 

Corwin captures the possible contradiction of antidepressants, stabilizing mental health—while potentially delivering terrible side effects. She notes, “if you take too much, call poison control,” highlights the fiction between pill as “medicine” and hazard.

 

The “wicked accident”, which consists of a multi-page poem constructed out of conversations overheard in public spaces, was another high point in the collection. Whether Corwin’s intention or not, this piece evoked the motif of “voices in your head” that is often associated with lunatics, a thread established at the beginning of the book. “I wasn’t there when it happened. You see where the crack started.” Corwin’s disembodied voice chimes two-thirds of the way through the piece. This brilliant landscape skips to a Betty White reference and the meme of the actress being older than sliced bread: “That was the old Wonder Bread Factory. We used to drive the turnpike/ to visit Betty.” Corwin subverts expectations, offering us a voice that is reflective, witty, sarcastic, and left me wanting to “cross my fingers,/ I mean, cross my heart.”

 

Corwin’s Marble Orchard delicately balances themes of mental illness with art and found poetry. Though its first section ran slightly long in its dissection of lunacy, Corwin’s meditation on mental illness offers a strong collection that will likely resonate with many readers.

 

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Review: I Felt the End Before it Came by Daniel Allen Cox

Viking Books, May 9, 2023
240 pages

In his tenacious and sharply written memoir-in-essays I Felt the End Before it Came, Daniel Allen Cox details his experiences as a queer man struggling against the lasting effects of his childhood indoctrination into the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cox’s fifth book and first memoir is a culmination of what he describes as “a lifelong project to redefine words that had once been used against [him].” Throughout the book, Cox trades the church’s Paradise for a Paradise of books and music, and a theology of shame for “a theology of queer tenderness.”

 

The memoir’s episodic essay structure is original and inspired. Each piece focuses on how Cox experienced and ultimately rebelled against a different method of indoctrination. “A Library for Apostates” highlights the Witness’s suppression of Cox’s education, and details how he became a writer and educator despite this. In “The Witness is Complicit,” Cox criticizes how the Witnesses use the promise of salvation from Armageddon to recruit new members, then ties this to his experience writing against the church during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cox’s effort to balance information and anecdote often results in a satisfyingly profound insight.

 

“The Glow of Electrum” powerfully delves into how Cox was shamed by members of the church for his early speech impediment, which made him, in their eyes, a “defective missionary,” then explores how he eventually “allowed strangeness of speech” back into his life. The essay does an especially good job of seamlessly moving between anecdote, research, and synthesis, never staying in one mode too long, and plays with language in a way that fits well with its themes, defamiliarizing the experience of stuttering. “Not all hesitations are composed of the same materials,” Cox writes. “A filler word can sound like the real thing. Sometimes the body continues moving through a word; the mouth freezes but the foot taps on.”

 

In some stretches of the book, Cox will focus on information more than memoir, or memoir more than information. In “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” Cox spends much of the chapter on Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s experiences in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “The End of Times Square” is almost entirely focused on the story of Cox’s time as an adult photography model in late 90s New York City. It can feel like these parts lose focus on the book’s project to serve as a blueprint for identifying and overcoming indoctrination, but they give a satisfying picture of the inner workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and an intimate view of Cox’s life, and keep the book from feeling monotone.

 

Cox’s memoir is smart, funny, and gripping throughout. “We Are the Ones Held,” an essay about his alcoholism, is filled with moving self-indictment and cultural critique, while also showing off Cox’s knack for choosing details that show his humorous, yet always sensitive and empathetic, view of himself and others: “I dismantled the wine rack in my bedroom and put it on the street, where someone picked it up within the hour, no doubt to set it up in another bedroom nearby.”

 

The most memorable essay in the book is the aforementioned “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” about how Jehovah’s Witnesses view the supernatural. The essay abounds with fun anecdotes and juicy insider strangeness, detailing, among other things, his church’s enmity with The Smurfs. Cox is especially playful with his barbs here. He suggests, for instance, that Witnesses might be “jealous of Smurfs because they live an exclusive Paradise.” The irreverence of the essay elevates a critique of the Witnesses’ hypocrisy by showing it at its most absurd.

 

In I Felt the End Before it Came, Cox ruminates with wit and insight on the universal themes of shame, identity, censorship, control, and emotional manipulation, while telling the story of his ongoing attempt to define his life outside of the church’s dogmatism. His meticulous approach to dismantling and overcoming methods of control and manipulation will feel cathartic to many readers.

Parts of I Felt the End Before it Came appeared in The Florida Review vol. 45.2 as “Death Trap”

 

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Review: Origami Dogs by Noley Reid

Autumn House Press, 2023.
Paperback, $17.95, 216 pages.

Origami Dogs, Noley Reid’s fourth book and her second short story collection, is not about dogs. Through Reid’s clean, often razor-sharp prose, the characters’ animal companions trudge alongside their emotional turmoil, both witnesses and hostages to the ways they love and harm each other.

 

Still, even as the animals are not the focus of these stories, they often serve as vessels, important points of connection that convey the characters’ emotions. In the title story, a young girl, Iris, is overwhelmed both by working in her mother’s breeding farm and by her first experiences with boys. After losing her virginity leads her to be ignored and neglected by her two romantic prospects, Iris names every dog and pup in the barn, breaking her mother’s rule to only refer to them by numbers. The pain of her own objectification leads her to break the cycle of distance and humanize those around her, reclaiming her own agency in the process. Similarly, in “Movement & Bones”, even as the narrator, a recent amputee, struggles to connect with her husband, her dog mirrors her movements, offering physical comfort and also representing the barriers between them: “He moves his body up against mine, as much as the dogs in between our legs allow.”

 

The connection between human and animal doesn’t always provide consolation. In “The Mud Pit,” when the narrator’s boyfriend’s old dog, Kizzy, passes away, she offers to replace her as an emotional safe haven, but he rejects the offer. “You can’t be my safe haven from you,” he says. Indeed, there is no safe haven for these characters: their relationships float on the page, tinged with melancholy and an unfulfilled sense of longing. Devotion, from human to human, manifests as a heavy weight that the characters struggle to carry.

 

In the more experimental second-person narrative “How Trees Sleep,” Reid carefully paints the portrayal of a young girl lying next to her mother, stopping herself from asking more of her. And in “Once It’s Gone,” a husband grapples with his wife’s past infidelity, having raised a child that isn’t his. As he contemplates leaving his family, he watches an elderly woman from the neighborhood feed a group of ferocious stray cats. “I don’t stay to see her scared to cry out for fear of chasing them away,” he says. Instead, he returns home, since, as all these characters, he must sit with his hunger.

 

Amidst the longing for human connection, perhaps inevitably, parenting emerges as a major theme. The narrator of “Once It’s Gone” is partially motivated by his hurt over his stepdaughter’s decision to have an abortion—not out of a religious stance, but because, as he says to his wife, “it could have been ours.” It, the nameless fetus, could have been what the narrator craved, something to fulfill his desire for a deep relationship. Similarly, the protagonist of “The Mud Pit” hopes to use her unborn child as a way to connect with a dead childhood friend. Another piece, “No Matter Her Leaving,” features a father grieving his runaway daughter, waiting alongside her old dog Malone. In her absence, the dog withers. Before the narrator is forced to put him down, he watches Malone put his nose inside a bowl and glimpses a trace of hope: “Have I found something he can love?”

 

This question looms over the collection. The characters search, untiring, for the love they crave, whether from a distant partner or a conservative mother. When the narrator’s daughter returns in “No Matter Her Leaving,” the piece—and by extension, the collection—ends on a note of hope. Brimming underneath, though, there is still the sense of something inherently tragic, in an unrelenting, animalesque sort of love.

 

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Review: Psych Murders by Stephanie Heit

Wayne State University Press, 2022.
Paperback, $17.99, 135 pages.

Stephanie Heit’s prose sequence “Z Cycle” from her debut collection The Color She Gave (The Operating System, 2017) mimics the mixed phases and shifting states that a person with bipolar disorder might experience. Short choppy observations, coupled with partial sentences and phrases, compress both space and time in a manner that arguably approximates a bodymind rapidly cycling through profound somatic sensations. Case in point are the following lines:

 

“Spots. Blurred vision. Brain not functioning correctly but can’t focus to identify what is off.  Curb.  Stop sign.  Passing car. All in heightened animation you blink to buffer.” (50)

 

The phrasing is punchy. The brevity of each unit, within an already compacted prose poem sequence, articulates a near sense of bombardment, the battering of the body against an excitable mind. Words like “blurred vision”, “brain not functioning”, “can’t focus”, and “blink to buffer” propose successive moments of cognitive slips that further imply multiple contestations with the body. “Z Cycle” enacts the feeling of bodymind cycles through textual embodiment by accumulating compacted phrases. The poem also serves as an excellent introduction for Heit’s subsequent work, Psych Murders (2022), that further extends the earlier sequence’s foray into American healthcare and mental health difference. In this new collection, the poet traces her experiences of psychiatric medicine, specifically electroconvulsive therapy (also known as ECT), with careful navigation of the embodied aftermath of her treatment. The ghostly figure of a “murderer”—explained as “the gutsy antics of suicidal ideation” on the first page—instantiates a different kind of political contestation on the gendered female bodymind. And haunting the poem, alongside this murderer, are the male Whitecoats and nurses, whose knowledge of clinical care seems to circumvent the poet’s desires.

 

Perhaps best described as a hybrid collection, Pysch Murders bridges the already murky borders of memoir, and Mad and disability studies, with a type of embodied poetry. The collection comprises of ten separate sections, some of which echo real clinical questions: “Do you think about the future?” What brings you pleasure?” “Do you have a specific plan?” In her own words, Heit’s collection “focuses on a five-year period between 2009 and 2014 when I experienced extreme mind states and suicidal ideation” (128).

 

Writing the personal—especially the intensely personal experience of mental health difference—carries a risk where a reader might overtly focus on locating a conflicting narrative of recovery, regardless if one is presented or not. But the strength of Psych Murders is the way that the collection denies these kinds of readings by posing subtle and difficult-to-answer questions about the spheres of modern psychiatric treatment. Namely, this collection asks us to consider the nature of care. What would it mean to refuse it? What could care—as an organising concept for empathy and kinship—really be? These questions push back on clinical inquiries of the section headings that impose an idea of bodily safety (“Do you have a specific plan?”) without attending to how the mind requires its own holdings. And underlying these questions is the dilemma: what if modern care is worse than the disorder? Heit makes these stakes clear when she registers her own feelings of abandonment: “I’m left at the ECT emergency exit,” she writes,

 

“Last shock done. No one to guide me through the next days, then months, then years. Whitecoat denial of memory loss. Traumatic Brain Injury. Damage. No rehab or support groups for what does not happen. Open sea.” (95)

 

A 2020 study showed that recipients of ETC were more likely to be white, female, and elderly in California, Illinois, and Vermont.[1] It is a gendered form of clinical treatment that Heit herself notes:

 

“Whitecoat places his hand on her foot while she is seizing (notice the pronouns, they rarely change)” (94).

 

ECT is also not without risks. Side effects include memory loss, autobiographical amnesia, mania, and cute pulmonary oedema. More rarely, but nonetheless possible, is death.[2] Strangely, how and why it works isn’t exactly known, although its side effects on the bodymind are clearly not insignificant.

 

Bodies and minds are also not separate entities although medical professional sometimes treats them as if they are. As Margaret Price notes, “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” so when we speak of bodyminds, we acknowledge the embodied entanglements of our psychic conditions and how they play out in the body, and vice versa.[3] In Psych Murders, the body is a graphical surface that receives violent seismic inscriptions from the “Shock Machine.” As one persona poem, written from the machine’s perspective, suggests,

 

“I leave indelible marks” (22).

 

In the process these inscriptions become a historical embodied text that offer insights into an unremembered past. In the poem “Dear Right Foot”, for example, Heit identifies her experience of ECT as it is expressed in a lower limb:

 

“I’m grateful you got to dance it out. Embody flutter and seize. Sense yourself in time and space. Keep the beat to an unfortunate tune, the staccato section of the ECT marching band.” (55)

The somatic imprint of the treatment forms a memory in the foot that reminds the poet of a moment she was physically but not cognitively present. Later Heit calls attention to her foot’s consciousness that she invites to stand in for her own:

 

“I develop pain in my right big toe joint. Attribute it to the seizures, all movement concentrated in the foot cuffed so the anaesthesia and muscle relaxants didn’t get there. It was awake for every session. It soothes me now that there was at least foot consciousness, my experiences registered by a body extremity.” (108)

 

Physical pain is a document of these momentary cognitive loss, but it is also a reminder of how embodiment and consciousness are not only staged in the mind but also in our body’s lower limbs. Yet the collection doesn’t rest upon these decentred consciousness. Rather, it concludes with a declarative articulation on the importance of the “I” as a way to acknowledge the fracturing that clinical medicine can impose upon the vulnerable bodymind. In the final poem, Testament”, Heit opts to repeat her various positionalities:

 

“I am risk
I am hard sell
… I am a high functioner” (122).

 

Repeating this “I” with its multiple medically-informed positionalities over several pages ironically serves to undercut the very ideologies and assumptions associated with institutionalised mental health. In the process, this repetition re-establishes the bodymind as a totality, as an “I” with many parts. It’s also not a recovery or recuperation. This is not a celebration.

 

Rather, Pysch Murders carves out a possibility for a different kind of bodymind health practice where desire and care might find a different mode of expression. As the final line of the poem declares, “I am the buck stops here” (124).

Works Cited

Heit, Stephanie. The Color She Gave Gravity. NY: The Operating System, 2017.

[1] James Luccarelli et. al. “Demographics of Patients Receiving Electroconvulsive Therapy Based on State-Mandated Reporting Data,” The Journal of ECT vol. 36, no. 4 (2020): 229–33.

[2] See M. Finnegan and D. McLoughlin, “Cognitive Side-Effects of ECT” and J. Waite, “Non-cognitive Adverse Effects of ECT,” both in The ECT Handbook, eds., Ed I. Ferrier & J. Waite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 109–128.

[3] Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 269.

 

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Review: Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel

Ren Hen Press, 2022
Paperback, $16.95, 119 pages.

 

 

Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to form. These earlier poems explored family history and contemplated contemporary manifestations of mythic archetypes. Her latest volume skillfully deploys many of the same aesthetic characteristics that distinguished her first collections, while the new poems range widely from past to present to future, from house and home to international, interplanetary, and even interdimensional settings. It is a volume full of vivid, imaginative poems, a good many beginning as thought experiments that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.

 

The title of the volume suggests that the act of questioning will be both a central motif and the principal modus operandi of the poems that follow. And, indeed, a number of poems instantiate this propensity for questioning, e.g., “Questions of Time and Direction,” “Questions from Four Dimensions,” and “Navigating the Questions.” The intellectual bent of the collection is summarized in “Listening in Deep Space”: “looking for answers / telling stories about ourselves, / searching for connection.” In one way or another, the poems in Questions all pursue this heuristic. For Thiel, “the simplest question” is capable of “opening the world again.”

 

Many of the poems recognize and ponder the complications that science and technology introduce into our lives, especially the consequences of relying too greatly on gadgetry. “Tritina in the Time of the Machine,” for example, addresses the implications of intrusive technologies at a time when “in nearly every pocket,” there’s “a small methodical machine” always “grinding on.” Another poem, “Remotely,” wittily mulls the consequences of living in the remote and virtual modes forced on us by pandemic realities. Whether it’s a remote control, internet access, Zoom video conferences, or even the electric typewriters of yore, in poem after poem the poet mulls the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating new technology into our lives.

 

Thiel’s wry and sometimes whimsical way of looking at the world (a trait readily apparent in her previous volumes) is woven throughout these poems, often making light of, or even mocking, the slippery and careless use of language in social and corporate settings (“KwickAssess”). Other poems play with familiar expressions (“Sleeping Dogs,” “Baby Out with the Bathwater,” “Under the Rug”) and in so doing discover new angles on old clichés.

 

While Thiel’s outlook is sometimes droll, she is just as often attuned to darker concerns. The poet repeatedly worries over “a tear in the continuum.” Some poems, for example, evince a plangent concern for environmental degradation (e.g., “Navigating the Questions”), a concern that is carried forward from her earlier volumes (such as the powerful poem, “Punta Perlas,” in Resistance Fantasies). An underlying theme of these poems is “the way our actions decide / who or what is now / expendable.”

 

A central conceit in the book, running through several poems, involves the first-person observation of life on Earth from the standpoint of sentient, empirical beings located elsewhere in the cosmos. In the view of these distant observers, humans “generally / complicate things” and are “highly irrational.” The poem “Field Notes from the Biolayer” uses the distant observer conceit to tie together the volume’s key themes of technology, environment, and connectivity. Thiel’s extraterrestrial observers—whose view surely coincides with her own—note that as humans “are forced / to rely on the virtual world, some begin to realize / what they had been missing” and are now “recognizing the way their world is connected / within and also beyond—the rivers, the oceans, the air— / the lovely layer that makes their existence possible.”

 

As has been the case throughout her career, in these poems Thiel evinces a meticulous concern for the craft of poetry. Most notably, the poems are attuned to sonic patterns and echoes, or what Dana Gioia has referred to as the “intuitive music” of her poetry. She employs rhyme—full, slant, and internal—to good effect. There is also a good deal of assonance and consonance at work, as in this passage from “Time Won’t Do It”:

 

We expect too much of time,
give it mythical powers,
believe a certain set of hours,
days or years will be the salve
to solve it all. We treat it
like an oracle, believing
time will tell, expecting
time to heal because
our sayings say it will.

 

While Thiel is not a strict formalist, she pays close attention to form, with many of the poems taking one or another of the traditional forms, including a sestina, a pantoum, a villanelle, a tritina, along with several sonnet or sonnet-like poems, haiku, and tanka. When not employing traditional forms, Thiel devises nonce forms and often resorts to repeated stanzaic patterns. Several of the poems—e.g., “Sleeping Dogs” and “In the Mirror”—have a concrete quality. In her use of forms and sonic patterns, Thiel has much in common with her coeval, A. E. Stallings (the two poets share a connection to Greece as well, as both poets are married to Greeks and have spent significant time in Greece).

 

Thiel’s past work has shown her to be a smart, well-read poet, with a keen awareness of the poetic tradition. The range of references in this volume reveals some of her varied influences, both aesthetic and thematic. There are echoes of or direct allusions to numerous poets, including W. C. Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, D. H. Lawrence, Auden, Keats, and Swedish-language poet Edith Södergran. All in all, it is a collection rich with references to literature, science, music, and art.

 

In “looking for answers, telling stories…and searching for connection,” these poems succeed in “opening the world again.”

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Review: Girl by Camille Laurens

Translated by Adriana Hunter
Other Press, April, 2022
$17.00, 256 pages

 

 

Of all the great engines of fiction, from voice and setting to character and plot, point-of-view is surely the most misunderstood and overlooked. It is the current of fiction, the hidden energy that propels the waves of story crashing to a landed conclusion. Even the terminology is perplexing—for most readers, writers, and thinkers, point-of-view refers to an indication of which character’s eyes see the fictive world or whose movements the action follows. However, that term is perhaps more properly applied to the techniques—broadly, first-, third-, or even second-person—employed to render such a narrative lens, which itself can better be called perspective. Regardless, however, of nomenclature, this force is the most powerful and mysterious in fiction, and untold hours of writing workshops have been given over to deciding on which point-of-view to use for story X or novel Y. The choice is determinative of all that follows in a work, from pathos to plot to, yes, perspective. The workshop will soberly inform the young writer that only one of the three is suitable for use in a single project, a dictum largely followed. It is fitting, then, that in her intrepid and bold Girl, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, Camille Laurens throws over this rule entirely, employing all three in her depiction of the spectrum of experiences faced by twentieth-century women.

 

The book is the story of Laurence Barraqué, a young girl born in 1959 Rouen, France, whom we follow from in utero to motherhood, from the opening salvos of second wave feminism through to the “enlightened” 1990s. Along the way, Laurens alternates her point-of-view (while maintaining the single perspective), to tell her heroine’s story in a manner that sweeps far beyond the biographical to reach the socio-cultural, scathingly commenting on gender dynamics and inequalities over the last several decades.

 

For the majority of the book, Laurens employs the first-person, her protagonist narrating her story in a swift, active voice that dances across the borderlands between interior and exterior with much mechanical grace. As we move through Laurence’s early years and into the heart of the story, it is that skill in first-person point-of-view and comfort in voice that propels Girl forward. The early sections, when Laurence is a young girl beginning to make sense of the world, are filled with the childlike idiom and shrewd observations that come at an early age. Laurens knows how best to use her protagonist’s abilities, and the ironic distance and social commentary achieved via her heroine’s youthful naïveté—here, a belief that girls are made from infant boys who have their genitals cut off—are powerful:

 

And what are they punished for, these boys made into girls? I can’t answer that, it’s beyond me. I don’t remember ever being a boy, but somewhere deep inside me I’m not surprised. I feel like a boy, sometimes. Not exactly the same, but not different, apart from pink and dresses. They show off, move around a lot, and laugh loudly. But look at me, I can do everything a boy can, apart from pee standing up (and even that . . .). It’s just I don’t want to.

 

Most especially in the first-person, Laurens is able to capture both the authentic voice of the child and subtly nod toward the absurd nature of society’s distinction over gender and sex. When refracted through the prism of Laurence’s young eyes, the angst and antagonism directed toward women and girls is thrown into full, damning relief.

 

This strong and essential narration only makes its entry, however, some thirty pages in. Girl begins in the second-person, the first chapter layered richly with wordplay and grammatical pun. It is, rather cleverly, set up as a discursive narrative entity telling Laurence’s story until, around age five, she is able to take over for herself. Inventive as the approach is, it is fair to wonder if the book overthinks itself slightly here. The second-person is a debatable choice; while it does assist in making immediate the inequalities faced by girls from the moment of birth onward, it also is somewhat at odds with Laurens’ desire to position herself in her characters’ inner worlds. Given especially the skill and aptitude of the first-person that comes later, as the book progresses, the choice to narrate it in three points-of-view becomes at times questionable.

 

One wonders, too, how much of the effectiveness of this opening chapter in the original French, especially in the skillful use of language, was lost in translation—not due to any fault in the work itself, but the vagaries of French versus English. Early on, Laurens draws attention to the fact that the French terms for girl and woman—fille and femme, respectively—are the same as those for daughter and wife, and what that says about societal views on gender roles and worth: “This single word to identify you is a constant reminder of the yoke you bear, you’re always seen in relation to someone else—your parents or your husband—while a man exists in his own right, language itself says so.”

 

It is an interesting, important point, one ably rendered and deftly employed to underscore the book’s drawing of parallel between quotidian reality and larger societal structure, but one that does not quite land in English. Hunter can only spell out the passage while using the English terms, and to any reader lacking at least an introductory command of French, both the overall coherence of the moment and the finer point will be lost. That is, of course, the nature of translations, and throughout the book one admires Hunter’s skillful diligence in what must have presented a particularly daunting challenge, given Laurens’ penchant for linguistic amusements, while envying her polyglot access to the original.

 

As Laurence grows into a teenager, Laurens pulls back to a third-person that, while still intimate, makes use of this distance to narrate the strange years of adolescence and key moments of psychological depth. In an especially unsettling scene between pubescent Laurence and her lecherous uncle, the third-person’s composed and incisive voice adroitly handles the moment. The pattern roughly repeats itself across the book, with Laurens relying on the different tools available for varying stretches of her protagonist’s story.

 

Girl is an arresting and confident work. Laurens pulls precisely zero punches in her narrative, and the risky point-of-view decision largely pays off. Although she seems the most comfortable and adroit in first-person, and her protagonist’s clever voice is a regrettable one to set aside for stretches, the effect is clear. Her employment of three angles of narration, so drastically different yet attuned to the same wavelength, works to build upon and underscore her book’s raison d’être. By exploring the thoughts, feelings, and encounters of a young girl and then a woman from an array of narrative angles, Laurens demonstrates with verisimilitude and originality the female experience in the twentieth century. To a higher degree than would be possible with a single lens, Laurence comes to represent the stories of countless women, a character transformed, via narrative triangulation of perspective, into an archetype of literary representation. Ultimately, with its inventive narration and unabashed content, Girl is an admirably courageous work, on both the story and sentence levels, one that mines experience for verisimilar pathos and relies on skill for technical innovation.

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Review: Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Edited by Anjanette Delgado
University of Florida Press, 2021
Hardcover, $25.00, 270 pages

 

 

¿De dónde eres? Where are you from? It’s a simple question that’s difficult for some of us to answer. A new anthology, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, considers the question and offers responses from Latinx authors who have made the Sunshine State home. Edited by Anjanette Delgado, the collection features original and previously published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by award-winning writers like Jennine Capó Crucet, Jaquira Díaz, and Richard Blanco; luminaries like Judith Ortiz Cofer and Reinaldo Arenas; and other emerging talents. In Home in Florida, these writers construct a literary identity—one that simultaneously inhabits and traverses cultural and geographic borders.

 

Home in Florida shares forty-two works from thirty-three writers across the Latin American diaspora who have been uprooted from their homes for personal and political reasons. The anthology is grounded in this concept of “uprootedness,” or the experience of living in an environment that isn’t your own. “As with so many things,” says Delgado, the term resonates differently in Spanish and English. In Spanish-language literary culture, “la literatura del desarraigo” is prolific; in English, it’s rarely addressed. “Even the word carries inside the tension of seeming to mean one thing in Spanish and something never quite the same in English, the word itself with its dual meaning the very essence of the world in which a Latinx immigrant lives,” she observes.

 

The works in the collection speak to this duality. Though Home in Florida is mostly an English-language anthology, it includes Spanish works in translation and texts that switch, sometimes self-consciously, between languages. In Richard Blanco’s poem “Translation for Mamá,” the speaker considers what it means to write about his Cuban mother’s experiences in English. When he translates her life into artistic expressions she can’t access, whom is he writing for? What gets lost in translation when an immigrant’s experience becomes art? Blanco embeds Spanish translations of his English verses below each stanza, until the last stanza, where Spanish becomes the primary language and English is the language in translation. “En inglés / has aprendido a adorar tus pérdidas igual que yo,” concludes the speaker. These pérdidas, or losses, have dual meanings: the mother’s loss of her homeland and the son’s loss of his mother’s tongue. The poem articulates the disconnect felt by two people living in between languages.

 

That disconnect isn’t just linguistic. It’s cultural, too. In Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s poem “Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,” two opposing voices are juxtaposed in parallel texts with offset lines that literally and metaphorically break. “I write my body, as border between / this rock & the absence of water,” says the speaker on the left. “We have some bad hombres here / & we’re going to get them out,” says the speaker on the right. The first speaker’s self-image contradicts the second speaker’s grotesque distortion of her community. Even the punctuation is wonky. Read in tandem, the two voices reveal more than the sum of their parts.

 

This is true, too, of how Delgado curates Home in Florida, grouping pieces in suggestive combinations. She contrasts Raúl Dopico’s essay “Miami Is Cuban,” for instance, with Mia Leonin’s essay “How to Name a City,” which begins with Barack Obama’s claim that “‘[Miami] is a profoundly American city.’” Here, Delgado presents two tales of a city—Dopico’s Miami that “beats with a decidedly Cuban soul,” and Leonin’s Miami, where “miniature flags from thirteen different islands wave at you from rearview mirrors.” In other places, Delgado’s arrangement illustrates likeness. She pairs Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s short story “The Ugly Dyckling” with Jaquira Díaz’s essay “Monster Story,” for example. Both are fairy tale retellings with a Latinx spin—Negrón-Muntaner reimagines a European classic as a queer, Caribbean fable, and Díaz tells an American coming-of-age story inspired by Latin American folklore.

 

Immigrant narratives intersect in revealing ways throughout Home in Florida. In Ana Menéndez’s short story “The Apartment,” the narrator returns to Miami after her apartment tenant dies by suicide. She meets the neighbors to learn his story and hears, instead, their own tales of uprootedness, trauma, and isolation. The haunting stories of these lonely Cuban, Argentinian, Afghan, and Lebanese refugees mirror each other, revealing how often immigrants’ experiences overlap, even when they build imaginary walls to keep each other out. This self-imposed distance is echoed in Caridad Moro-Gronlier’s poem “Wet Foot, Dry Foot, 2002,” where the speaker’s Cuban-American family silently watches Haitian refugees arrive in Miami on TV, ignoring how they, too, once sought asylum here. “We do not speak of travesties,” says the speaker. “Only human when it comes to our own.” Their stories of uprootedness chart a similar course but end in different destinations thanks to America’s asymmetrical immigration policy, which privileges certain people above others.

 

Whose humanity do we acknowledge? Whose stories get told? In many ways, Home in Florida represents a diverse spectrum of Latinx experience. The book is a rich sancocho of culture—a blend of writers from different national, generational, socioeconomic, and language backgrounds, as well as those who identify as BIPOC and LGTBQ+. The collection’s diversity is deliberate. Delgado includes the work of recent immigrants whose “stories are the ones not often found in English-language anthologies” because too often these “writers are surviving and not writing.” She takes care to prioritize writers’ lived experiences, choosing to organize the collection “in the same experiential way in which rerootedness might occur, the emotional weight of each piece guiding the way,” instead of chronologically. And she mixes new voices with established writers, creating refreshing and unexpected flavor combinations.

 

For all Home in Florida includes, there are some things left behind. This may be inevitable in an anthology that is the first and only one of its kind. A single vessel can’t possibly hold everyone. While the collection features writers from across the Latin American diaspora, the majority of its contributors are Cuban or Cuban American. The anthology elucidates their lived experiences and history in luminous detail. Stories like Guillermo Rosales’ “The Halfway House” show what life in Florida was like for Cuban exiles who fled Castro’s regime in the 1970s, while essays like Chantel Acevedo’s “Piercing My Daughter’s Ears in Alabama” reveal how those families have evolved a generation or two later. The space the book gives these stories isn’t equally distributed, though, creating an imbalance that can sometimes feel like an exclusion. In Home in Florida, we witness the aftermath of the Mariel boatlift but not Hurricane Maria, for instance.

 

Curiously, for a book titled Home in Florida, not every piece is rooted in Florida. Occasionally the state disappears entirely before re-emerging in the next story. When Florida shows up, it’s drawn sharply and brightly, though, realistically rendered even if it’s magically imagined. Mercifully, the collection is careful to avoid the Disney caricatures of this place and its people that too often sap the popular imagination.

 

Instead, we get a view of Florida—where more than a quarter of the population is Latinx—that is usually obscured. We savor Liz Balmaseda’s Hialeah, where the distinctive flavors of Cuba refuse “to melt into any damn pot.” We experience the suburban wilderness of Yaddyra Peralta’s Carol City, “the verdancy of weeds, the bougainvillea overtaking the wobbly chain link fence.” And we see Patricia Engel’s “La Ciudad Mágica” sparkle brilliantly—from the manicured avenues of Coral Gables where bejeweled ladies lunch and bemoan their Latinx nannies, to the unnamed streets a few miles south, where you can “find people selling fruit out of tin shacks” and have “a spell cast by a brujo so you’ll be lucky in money and in love.”

 

The anthology doesn’t illuminate all parts of the Sunshine State with the same clarity, however. Miami shines brightest. So bright its light casts a shadow on the rest of the state. Home in Florida rarely ventures outside of Miami-Dade County, and when it does, it’s from a distance. Cities with large Latinx populations like Tampa and Orlando are mentioned only briefly, as the writers speed past on their way to somewhere else. The rest of the state is invisible. In an anthology that is otherwise so clear-eyed and attentive, this silence is loud. Where are the writers who have planted roots in majority-minority, Central Florida suburbs like Kissimmee or Latinx-populous, agricultural towns like Haines City and Belle Glade? What about their experiences?

 

Representation matters, and yet within the intimate space this anthology imagines, place and culture are less important than the writers’ lived experience of place and culture. Florida is a useful terrain to map out these experiences, but—as the collection repeatedly reminds us—its borders are fluid. In Home in Florida, Florida is more a state of mind than an actual state. It is the yearning for home, the hunger of hardship, and, eventually, the hard-earned hope of Nilsa Ada Rivera, who reflects in “I Write to Mami about Florida”: “Slowly, I’m realizing Florida is my home too. Despite all the years of trying to leave, I’m still here, adapting, evolving, and surviving. The fight to survive and the constant evolution are common themes for almost everyone in Florida, a constant reinvention of who we are.”

 

Impermeable identities don’t last long in a place where the tides are always changing. What endures instead are the experiential bonds connecting the people who call, and have called, this place home. This anthology’s writers—and potential readers—may be homesick and heartbroken, but they aren’t alone. From this literary landscape sown with tales of loss, grief, and loneliness, a community blossoms. After all, that’s what a collection is: a place where individual stories can converse, where the odd piece suddenly seems to fit, and where two different idioms understand each other. The book becomes a kind of communal plot, where these writers’ experiences of uprootedness vine together and grow toward the light. In Home in Florida, Delgado and the writers of this inventive anthology have cultivated a home of their own making—one that can go anywhere and never lose its roots.

 

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Review: Boyfriend Perspective by Michael Chang

Really Serious Literature, Sept. 9, 2021

Paperback. $14.95.

 

Cover of Boyfriend Perspective

 

Reading Michael Chang’s Boyfriend Perspective is like flipping through a fashion mag while reading a revolutionary’s diary. The poems celebrate their own arrival, their own awesomeness, sometimes slipping in the center to admit their limitations and vulnerability, only to resurrect themselves with wit and biting self-awareness. Incorporating poems from Chang’s 2021 chapbooks, Drakkar Noir (Bateau Press) and Chinatown Romeo (Ursus Americanus 2021), along with some new and previously uncollected work, Boyfriend Perspective is queer, Asian American, observant, fun, critical, urgent, and knows more than you.

 

The space provided by a full-length collection allows Chang’s work to explore a wider range of emotions and tones (bombastic to quiet), idea expansion (objects to emotions), and formal experimentation (free verse to haibun). Some of the best poems from each chapbook continue to function as anchors or whirlpool pieces that other poems in the collection get sucked toward or are stabilized by with linguistic or emotional resonance. The work is also a celebration of pop culture, queer life, queer sex, and the body as a sponge. The work situates itself in the world of Lindsay Lohan, mid-2000’s internet blind items about closeted celebs, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Notley, Sean Lennon, Frank O’Hara, Rick Ross, Bruce Weber’s photography, Annie Prouxl’s Brokeback Mountain, Wayne Koestenbaum, Cornel West, and ultra-famous queer ’80’s supermodel and icon, Gia Carangi.

 

Chang’s voice remains true to itself, at once contemptuous, teasing, and capricious, with moments of deep insight that feel like the cracking of an egg. One of the best qualities about their voice is its duality: a haughtiness and know-it-all attitude that rides shotgun with vulnerability, an anxiety that nothing will change despite the voice’s commands. The true emotion of the collection lies in the manic vacillation between ego and ego death. What is the modern experience but daily assaults of multiple validations and humiliations? Chang’s speaker is in all of us.

 

The collection offers a range of styles and forms—haibun, zuihitsu, short free-verse, all-caps list poems—but long lines and more essayistic or block prose poems are at the heart of this collection. These long lines tell us something: the speaker is not interested in cutting themselves off. Stylistic capitalization choices feel right in poems where power, hierarchy, class, race, capitalism, and value systems are examined and thrown up against one another. A sometimes lowercasing of the lyric “i” speaks to the vulnerability of our normally bullet-proof speaker. In “Two Shakes of a Lamb’s Tail,” Chang writes, “i’ll miss him, i’m sure, but / doesn’t it just eat at you when a boy is too perfect?”

 

“Yankee Yellow” is a prose block poem that looks to the reader to discern its patterns and associations. It’s no accident that the poem’s title is built from such loaded words; as the poem unfolds, the definitions of “Yankee” and “Yellow” start to expand, contract, or unravel as Chang places food, brand names, literature, and public figures alongside them, modifying their meaning. The repetition functions as a reminder that as far away as we wander from the phrase we are pushed back to its commanding presence. Maybe most importantly, Chang references the poet George Oppen: “Yankee Yellow Oppen’s G-string” and “Yankee Yellow New Rochelle” (Oppen’s hometown). Oppen, from the school of Objectivist poetry, provides a lens through which to think about Chang’s work. Louis Zukofsky defined Objectivism in terms of its focus on sincerity and approach to poems as objects; however, that definition may be less helpful than looking at the work as a link between modernism and language poets. The Objectivist movement was staunchly left-leaning, interested in ethical poetry, and Oppen famously joined the communist party: “Yankee Yellow commie scum.”

 

Chang’s work hovers around the influences of Objectivism, language poetry, and the coolest, wisest graffiti you’ve ever seen scrawled under a bridge: “There are two wolves named Dolce & Gabbana. First disarm them with / a compliment, defuse their racist anger.” Chang’s work becomes its own phenomenon complete with the peaks and valleys of vacillating popular trends. Each poem reads like a fashion fad or society spectating its own rise and fall, whipping in and out of style so violently that the somber truths that lie beneath emerge in gasping one-liners. In “Squeeze,” Chang writes, “Sometimes I feel like our relationship is two con artists trying to / con one another.”

 

“Incendiary Chxnxmxn” is a political language poem that appears as a code poem. When you solve for X, the first line of the poem—“AX XNGLXSH-CHXNXSX PHRXSXBXXK (1875)—becomes “AN ENGLISH AND CHINESE PHRASEBOOK (1875).” The date is important, as it’s not only the source of the found text below but also the date of the enactment of The Page Act (a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), which outlawed the entry of Chinese women to the U.S. The Page Act is often cited as sexually motivated, a way to stop women of color from entering the U.S. and becoming “sexual threats” across racial lines. Chang ends the poem with a purposeful mixing of commerce and sex: “SXME MXN LXVX CXPXTXL / & SXMX MXN GXT PRXFXTS / BXY XS MXNY XS YXX LXKX / CXN YXX LXT MX SXX XT? / YXXR CXCK, X MXXN” (“SOME MEN LOVE CAPITAL / & SOME MEN GET PROFITS / BUY AS MANY AS YOU LIKE / CAN YOU LET ME SEE IT? / YOUR COCK I MEAN”).

 

“America’s Sweetheart” underscores this tension regarding objectification, dangerous power differentials, and politics in sexual and romantic relationships. “Is Brett a human boy…” the prose poem begins, and though it’s not punctuated as a question, it is one. It goes on to describe all the objects that surround Brett, the achievements he’s earned, “his hand up the skirt of some unsuspecting girl who thinks she has found the one.…” By these descriptors, we know Brett’s class, race, and gender, and we’re still questioning if he’s human. We question it because at the end Chang warns, “Brett is so happy though he never throws a tantrum in public but she doesn’t know that Brett is an undecided voter.” How can we be so close to someone and not know them politically? Who benefits from that separation? Cis, white, hetero women and privilege are clearly under scrutiny here; who else would have the “luxury” of not knowing their partner’s politics?

 

In “Rage is Just a Number,” the speaker again approaches themes of sex and objectification but this time places themself more in the spotlight: “He lets me touch him till he shudders. / I’ve learned to feed the ducks within / me. They’re always hungry. / I’m the bag of old crusts, a vessel for / your hate: flip me over, turn me inside / Out. / You can journal your disappointment/ later.”

 

The speaker sees themself as something to be used, hated even, and in this moment our speaker is naming themself the object, “I’m the bag of old crusts,” and giving permission to be objectified, “flip me over, turn me inside/out.” Chang’s work and speaker is showing us here how consent functions, how sex sometimes works as permissive momentary objectification—how that’s different than the other exchanges and objectification taking place in the collection.

 

No one is safe from this speaker’s criticism, not even poets. In “Adverse Possession,” Chang writes, “Nobody: / Absolutely nobody: / Poets: SELF-PORTRAIT AS.” Critique is a form of protest, and Chang is asking for more—more from poets, more from lovers, more from America, more from a failing society, more from you, dear reader: “sex is good, but have you ever fucked the system?”

 

Chang’s work, not unlike the abstract art it references, finds resonance in what’s universal and yet is specific in its expression and vision. Questions that arise while reading Boyfriend Perspective stay with the reader long after finishing the text: What happens when you live in a disposable culture? Do you dispose of yourself before anyone else can dispose of you? If everything is an object, should we objectify ourselves before anyone else does? In order to safeguard oneself from disappointment or disappointing others, should you state out loud you’re disappointing or will disappoint? If we observe pop culture, will we become embedded in it? If we have sex do we become embedded in our lover? Is everything an exchange? or some kind of sale, or deal, including relationships? Is everything a trend or a moment, how do we know what moments are meaningful, or is that the point? None of it is more important? What if what or who you desire (by its very nature) will or wants to destroy you? Or what if who you love will never recognize your humanity? If your lover is shallow, should you be more shallow? Is your lover’s racism, ethnocentrism, misogyny as certain as their indifference to your pleasure? Or is this complicatedly part of the pleasure? Is your lover’s kiss no more valuable, no more intimate, than watching them shit? In the title poem, Chang writes, “sometimes it’s freeing to love someone/take off ur life jacket & plunge.” With these instructions, we just might.

 

After all the questions, the Lindsay Lohan references, the Brokeback Mountain quotes, the rifling through and examining of culture and objects, we might wonder what is left? Chang writes on the last page of their collection, “here is happiness / more or less / what saves us.”

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Review: The Last Unkillable Thing by Emily Pittinos

University of Iowa Press, April 15, 2021

Paperback, $20.00, 68 pages.

 

The Last Unkillable Thing

 

Few first poetry collections dazzle with the freshness, lyrical alacrity, and tender surprise found in Emily Pittnos’s debut collection, The Last Unkillable Thing, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize. At its center is the tragic, untimely death of the speaker’s father, with many of the poems asking how one can bear to live in the world after such loss. And while the imagery of death and the natural world forms the foundation of this collection, the poems are never afraid to venture onward, pushing past the immediate shock of grief and into the world in which one must continue. These poems ask questions a less intrepid poet might avoid. The result is dark and stunning—raw, yet crafted with undeniable guile.

 

At the heart of the collection’s opening poem, “Assuming, once again, it’s done with,” lie the lines “A lapse in grief / is another emptiness; a space, in turn, filled by the usual remembering.” This emptiness is the space in which The Last Unkillable Thing stakes out its territory, as if to say I knew to expect grief—but what comes afterward? The poem continues, “the unthinkable / made so possible as to become fact—he vanished / and she went on,” which is a dynamic that drives the poems without constraining them. What might it mean to interrogate the self in the face of all-consuming grief?

 

Yet, while the poems focus on tragedy, they still find ways to push against the establishment of genre, experimenting with punctuation, white space, the line, the sequence, the function of form. A series of poems, each titled “After,” alternates between fragments caught in justified blocks and gorgeous, italicized long lines. Other poems, such as “With Key in the Door,” use the colon as an associative tool, as in the lines “It is impossible to quit: / forecasting an alternate life : hazy glow in which : / I am brighter : kinder : unorphanable.”

 

As the different modes of language in The Last Unkillable Thing coalesce, a rich, complex interiority begins to emerge. Death may have been the catalyst for this collection, but the speaker allows her interrogations to venture beyond guilt, forgiveness, vulnerability, longing, and desire. Often, the speaker implicates herself by speaking through the lens of an animal. In this vein, “Study of a Lone Beast” oscillates between the fear of further loss and the precarious act of weaving a spider’s web, opening with the stanza “The false widow builds her web / in a chasm—the grace of risk, / her passage of silk an act / of survival,” a set of lines which holds the simultaneous beauty and danger of living clearly in front of the reader’s eye. The poem ends in a similarly haunting stanza:

 

Suppose the worst does happen—

by sunrise the web wrecked, glittering

With snowfall, and where has she gone

the queen of this realm?

 

There’s an unmistakable beauty in the destruction of the image, the spider’s home destroyed by glittering snow, the false widow implicated in disaster she couldn’t possibly have stopped. The line “Suppose the worst does happen” has haunted me since I first encountered it in this poem, though more haunting still are the moments where The Last Unkillable Thing accepts that the worst one could imagine has happened, and that the world has unforgivingly kept on.

 

Pittinos expertly uses the tool of the poetic sequence to ground the poems in this collection, holding the pieces together with bonds more powerful than mere similarities in subject. Halfway through the collection, “She Must Have Been a Bit Green to Look At” follows the speaker as “She steps into the wool of midnight,” into isolation, where she can confront the burdensome beast of grief that lurks in the shadows of the collection, reckoning with both “the menagerie inside her” and “the colorless ghost / at her bedside by morning.” Despite its length, this sequence constantly reinvents itself, taking ever-shifting angles of approach to its subject matter. “In the night hall she rises, razes / a vase to the floor,” begins one section, painting a portrait of the speaker’s psyche with the dichotomy of day. “In the morning: mice / casually rinsing / their puny hands in a puddle. // Even they, she thinks, cower not from me,” the section ends.

 

Another long sequence titled “Subnivean (or Holding Back the Year),” which is approximately the same length, serves to build the world of The Last Unkillable Thing in much the same way, though this poem thrusts us directly into the first-person perspective of the speaker, opening with “I expected the snow, but waking stuns. / A world of storm struck white—distance / collapsed by an absence of shadow,” taking in an expanse that opens endlessly outward, enveloping the speaker in the low light of loss. Here, the language is as striking as the content is shockingly honest, as the sections are unafraid to name what troubles them. One section reads:

 

I’d be lost

without my own bright footpath: tilled snow:

cloud cover: moonglow refracted: the shotgun crack

of a bough unburdened.

Could I walk off the hours

I’ve spent ashamed, attempting a life

that would make the dead proud?

What would it look like,

how much would it weigh?

 

The section shifts boldly from the image of bent moonlight to the violent roar of a shotgun into the interior. Beyond its lushness and deft command of language, these poems, particularly the sequence poems, show the reader how the speaker sees the world—one in which cloud cover might lead to shame, in which tilled snow might represent a good life.

 

Even with its consistency and generous worldbuilding, The Last Unkillable Thing leaves room for discovery and surprise, as in the reluctant eroticism of “I Grow Less Visible” (“A silhouette can sway / a person—the woman releasing / her bra behind scrim. My breath more alive / than when held in) or the violent embrace of “It Is Not Animal to Forgive” (“A man dresses a deer—quick split, blood / guttered by rainfall—before pressing a woman / to his own soft belly). Here, the emptiness of a snow-covered field belongs just as much as the possibility of “the touch of joy,” found, perhaps, in “the belly of a bridegroom” or “the oyster / even without pearl,” adding to an overall sense of fullness that gives the collection its depth.

 

There is an ever-present danger lurking on the outskirts of this collection, as “Nightjars bed down in snow” or the eye of the poem passes over “the wood duck, displaced, alone in a shadow.” Much like the poems in this marvelous first book, human experience is endlessly complex, surprising, and unexpected, as the myriad compelling images and emotionally striking landscapes in this collection so seamlessly portray. There’s a real vulnerability in The Last Unkillable Thing that gives way to so much more, almost as if to say to be human is to grieve. And while the poems themselves are unafraid to behold beauty, they never lose sight of the pain that lingers beneath them. After all, Pittinos tells us, “Doesn’t it hurt / to be human. I’m so human I could die.”

 

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Review: Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me by Choi Seungja

Translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong

Action Books, Oct. 1, 2020.

Paperback, $18, 102 pages.

 

Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me

 

In “Already, the World,” Choi Seungja writes, “My poems, short as a shriek, / will spread / over the white horizon.” The second volume of Choi’s poems translated into English and containing poems from five different books, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me exhibits the qualities that made Choi one of South Korea’s most influential poets. Her unflinching examinations of loneliness, of unfair institutions, and of what it means to be female in a world that continues to revolve around men combine to form a collection that disrupts and upsets the mind as much as it comforts. In lines that one of the book’s two translators, Cathy Park Hong, describes as “breathtaking and frightening,” Choi invites the reader to examine their own frailty.

 

Hong describes one of the central motifs as “the barren womb.” The womb is soft in its sound and the image it conjures—a cocoon of nurturing and safety. However, the uterus which Choi references in her poems is clinical—a simple organ. The uterus in Choi’s poems is often producing in ways that don’t coincide with the familial dream. In “I Have Been to the Sea in Winter,” the woman in the poem is impregnated by a contaminated sea, and from this contamination children

 

. . . lay their eggs

inside the earth of the Philippine jungles,

and spread syphilis or deliver stillborn babies

. . . Now and then,

they might start a revolution in the very long tedious night—

a revolution always destined to misfire.

 

Far from barren, this womb has created the entire world, a world that Choi presents at its roughest and grittiest, a world diseased and stagnant, unable to progress. Only a few pages later, in “For Y,” another being emerges from the uterus, called a baby but more closely resembling an underdeveloped fetus with fins, flying through the sky. In the world of Choi’s words the uterus is not without life. Instead, it is teeming with the creation of our reality versus our ideal. A reality that is built upon the things that confirm we are alive—our excretions, our mortality, our need for community.

 

Choi refuses to shy away from the facts about ourselves that we would most like to ignore. Her poems are riddled with rot and decay, presented through an unflinching lens that forces the reader to contend with the more visceral aspects of humanity’s impermanence. In “Not Forgetting or Memorandum 1,” the speaker describes years that “. . . left me mercilessly / alive,” after being expected to live on the very waste that polite society has deemed unacceptable. This decay is pushed toward violence in “The End of a Century”:

 

Oh, I wish I’d become a dog, beaten to death.

I’d like to become a carpet made of the skin of a dog

Beaten to death.

 

These are the poems that strike fear, twist the stomach, conjure uncomfortable thoughts in the mind.

 

Translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong, Choi’s poems beautifully capture the universality of feeling that can exist outside of language, while still sparking with the kind of diction that elevates strings of words to poetry. The notes on translation included, while useful, are almost unnecessary. To read of “rice mixed with tears” is to understand the sadness pervading the poem, even without the added context that in Korea, this meal represents a miserable life. The visceral and vibrant construction of these poems in English reveals the reverence these translators have for Choi’s work and transfers that reverence to the reader.

 

Choi’s work can be described as relentless, fatal, even grotesque. At the same time, her poems are also powerful, beautiful, and elegant. Choi makes use of these opposing elements in ways that both discomfort and reassure, reminding the reader that we are not alone in our darkest thoughts. To speak these thoughts aloud, to memorialize them in words, is the gift that Choi has given us.

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Review: Anything That Happens by Cheryl Wilder

Press 53, 2021

Paperback, 64 pages, $17.95

 

Anything That Happens

 

 

I feel tape break against my chest

But there is no finish line, no

Not knowing. When can I say,

It’s better now? It’s taken years

 

At the age of twenty, Cheryl Wilder “won the toss // of the keys / and rounded the corners // slid through the stop signs / then awoke in the car // the only one able / to choke silence into words.” She was physically whole. Four months later, her passenger woke up from a coma with a life-changing brain injury.

 

Starkness pervades Wilder’s collection Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection by Press 53’s poetry series editor. Each succinct word clanks in the echo of a tragic mistake. Wilder doesn’t hide behind poetic devices that can make trauma beautiful or romantic or at least palatable. Instead, when writing about the accident and its aftermath, Wilder’s choice is often sparse language with anaphoric qualities—titles like “Slipped I,” “Slipped II,” “Slipped III”—running through the collection haunting our subconscious. The lines, “I am taken” are sporadically and strategically placed—taken aback, taken to jail, taken by surprise that anything has actually happened.

 

The emotion is mature, unguarded, and adept, as though Wilder has written these poems for decades, while she learned how to live as two people, “the before and the after; one I’ve already forgotten / the other I have not met.” She never pleas for our pity or understanding.

 

Wilder flexes her craft muscles in language addressing her childhood, marriage, and motherhood: “My father reared me / unbridled . . . I plant phlox, milkweed, coneflower, drag my suckling // childhood into the nearest cave / and lick the wounds of generations.” Later in “Family Tree Potluck,” she recalls, “my father doesn’t speak . . . Word shards in potato salad. I was reared on unspoken.”

 

Mighty line breaks and sentence structure create a duality that magnifies meaning and the weight of veracity: “I didn’t understand anything // had just happened.” Wilder uses the mid-sentence stanza break so the reader feels all of the ways this can be read. In another poem, Wilder writes, “I wanted to run. I had to get help.” The choice to place the truncated sentences on one line causes the reader to absorb the two robust and clashing emotions at once, thereby recreating the speaker’s overwhelming experience.

 

In Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, Adrienne Rich writes, “Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity.” The complexity and fecundity of poetry often comes from the unconscious struggling to fulfill its desire for truth. In the absence of truth, there is a distance between two people and only truth spans this struggle. This possibility between two people is the power we witness in this collection—Wilder before and after the accident, the poet and the reader, the reader before and after their own anything happens.

 

Wilder grapples with honesty throughout the pages. “It hurts. To stand outside // a wrecked car, to remain on that street / year after year, to not want the truth.” She duels with candor: “I try to switch places /…but I won the toss.” She discloses with vulnerability: “I wanted to escape / with the mountain man who told me / I, too, could live with a warrant.” Wilder’s direct and concise approach continues throughout this text, beginning another poem with “You cannot trust me.”

 

She does this work unflinchingly and establishes a path for us to follow. Anything That Happens is Cheryl Wilder’s salve to the willing reader’s wounded psyche.

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Review: Variations on the Body by María Ospina

Translated by Heather Cleary

Coffee House Press, 2021

Paperback, 136 pages

 

Variations on the Body

 

María Ospina’s debut short story collection, Variations on the Body, follows the interconnected and complex lives of women in Bogota, Colombia in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The stories focus on women’s bodies and the ways in which they are marked—both physically and psychologically—by the widespread violence in Colombia that took place during the 1980s and 1990s between the State, parliamentary groups, and guerilla fighters. The scale of tragedy and horror can be difficult to conceive of in the abstract, so Ospina brings it into the bodily world. In her unflinching prose, she demonstrates the power that even wounded bodies have in resisting oppression and caring for one another.

 

In the collection’s first story, “Policarpa,” an ex-Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia member named Marcela starts a new job as a cashier at a superstore through a government reconciliation program designed to reintegrate former guerilla members into “civilian roles.” Yet, in her new life, Marcela cannot escape the physical reminders of her time as a fighter. She buys an exfoliating liquid from the Health and Beauty department at the superstore and attempts to remove a raised scar on her shoulder. At the same time, she experiences PTSD from warfare as an all-encompassing nausea that closes in on her while she rings up customers. Ospina draws disturbing parallels between the exfoliation product Marcela uses to cover up her past and the external pressures she faces from the superstore management and the government program to conform to society. They all work toward “sloughing away” Marcela’s true skin and intricate history.

 

Several of the stories also illustrate the various ways anxieties, desires, and bereavements are manifested in the body. In “Saving Young Ladies,” a woman becomes fascinated by the changing adolescent bodies of the girls from the Catholic boarding school opposite her apartment: an erotic pastime that quickly turns obsessive. In “Fauna of the Ages,” the protagonist keeps a detailed log of the hundreds of flea bites she receives during the night. Over time the insects start to consume not only her flesh but also her sanity. The final story of the collection, “Variations on the Body,” follows an elderly woman named Mirla who begins to experience heart attack–like symptoms after her husband’s death. To manage her grief, Mirla maintains her appearance through weekly aesthetic treatments of manicures, pedicures, and full-body waxes.

 

The women in Variations on the Body occupy different positions in society, but throughout the collection, Ospina demonstrates how each one navigates the nexus of ambition and coercion—how their bodies can be both an asset and an obstacle. Whether that means hiding a growing pregnancy or sharpening their features with plastic surgery, her characters are hyper-aware of the repercussions for unruly bodies. In “Saving Young Ladies,” Ospina describes the protagonist observing teenage girls walking down the street: “Aurora imagined there was more to their gestures than just the remnants of childhood, that they were resisting the passage into solitude and isolation of adulthood, the demands to which every lady is subjected: of being a discrete body.”

 

However, Ospina’s writing and the way she portrays her characters is anything but discrete. The collection fixates on the parts of our bodies deemed disgusting, embarrassing, or excessive—unafraid to expose what her characters desperately wish to conceal. Though even as the writing plunges into visceral descriptions of a scabbed-over flea bite or a young girl obsessed with eating dirt, it is not unrestrained. Ospina is in full control of the shifting voices of the women in each story. Heather Cleary’s brilliant translation expertly captures their distinct tones and personalities. She humanizes the characters who often, harboring shameful secrets, are outsiders in their communities. In the wake of political violence, Variations on the Body offers readers a vision of the power and perseverance of women’s bodies to forge connections with each other and find their tenuous place in society.

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Review: H & G By Anna Maria Hong

Sidebrow Books, 2018.

Paperback, 59 pages, $15.00.

Winner, Clarissa Dalloway Prize, A Room of Her Own Foundation

 

H & G 

 

Anna Maria Hong’s H & G is a darkly postmodern and feminist revisioning of the classic Brothers Grimm tale “Hansel and Gretel” that plumbs the depths of patricidal hatred, inherited misogyny, and the unsuccessful search for a family that is more than kin and less than kind. Intensely surrealist in its warped depictions of the traditional fantasy world in which the novella orients itself, while also exceedingly realist in the complexity of its main and supporting characters, Hong’s reification of the Brothers Grimm text is a meta-fictive trek into the dark recesses of the human psyche from which readers won’t want to return.

 

To call this novella a work of fabulist fiction is perhaps too simplistic a label, though the text wears its magical mundanity in quite an enchanting fashion. As great fabulist fictions—and to some extent, great fairy tales—do, Hong’s writing orients the reader in a fantastical situation or setting before propelling them into ever-deepening waters of ethics, philosophy, and cultural critique through the power of allegory and metaphor. As is the case with fairy tales, Hong’s work is instructive and has a motley cast of trope-like characters to fill archetypal roles: the father, the mother, the evil stepmothers, the witches, and the two children, Hansel and Gretel, referred to as H. and G., respectively. This, however, is where most of the similarities between the fairy tale and Hong’s work end. Hong stays true to fairy tale form inasmuch as it serves her greater purposes—she plays to the tropes in order to break them and keeps true to most of the particulars of “Hansel and Gretel” until intervening personal narratives and real-world elements interpose in the story and make it decidedly not a fairy tale, revisionist or otherwise. One-dimensional character types are rendered with human complexity and qualities, so much so that even the “villains” in H & G are given sympathetic backstories and motivations that impress upon the reader their humanness without absolving them of their flaws.

 

One scene with a markedly fabulist bent is in the chapter titled “H. Is Praying To The Great Eye.” In this section, H. makes a pilgrimage up the mountain each day to the New Witch’s hut to nurse from her breast—assuming the role of both the sacrificial offering and the one who proffers the sacrifice to this deity-like being—in order to save the world. Bizarre and grossly sexual, the conceit is a fascinating one, exploring the depravity of codependent relationships that stem from unhealthy obsessions and childhood fears of abandonment:

 

Someday the New Witch will tire of me too—prayer and fate of the world be

damned—or she will die and either way I’ll be abandoned again, surmises H.

Alone with nothing but this rocky, dirty peak to climb, and empty hut at the top.

 

By H. nursing from the New Witch and bringing a part of her into H.’s body, two things happen narratively: the New Witch’s face is restored to youth (though H. remarks that her body is still flat and shriveled as a hag’s), and H. is rewarded with the satisfaction of taking and not giving anything back but pleasure, which, he says, is incidental to the giver. H. is a supplicant—worshipful, dutiful—not from a wholly religious or sexual desire, or even to save the world as the New Witch remarks, but because in this H. has found what he believes is a sense of belonging. In a mere three pages, Hong builds a tiny world and fills this world with searching philosophical questions—what do we make of the reciprocal, if any, relationship between God and Believer? As Hong puts it,

 

If the Believer stopped believing, would the world cease to exist? H. thinks it

wiser to not risk it, so he prays every day, climbing the green and brown peaks,

until he reaches the New Witch’s hut where he will suck on the Witch’s cold

tits, ripe and smooth as the flesh of pale green fruit.

 

What of attention misplaced and masquerading as affection or as physical and emotional nurturing?: “The Witch strokes his golden hair as she suckles him, telling him how good he has been, how sturdy he is, how well he climbed the mountain, how good he is to save the world like this . . .”. What of the emotionally scarred person who can only take and take and in the process destroys what’s left of themselves?: “H. sucks like his life depends on it, because it is what he is good at—the only thing he has always been good at—eating, siphoning dominion and beauty from powerful women who want to save him and eat him.” In posing these questions, Hong conjures the familiar fairy tale into something fierce and dangerous, something so very heartbreaking that we want to look away, yet, enraptured by the story’s unfolding, cannot.

 

In H & G, the story becomes the stories, a twinning effect enhanced by the meta-fictive qualities of the writing. In this regard, H & G is intensely postmodern and feminist: experimental with its points of view (first-person plural, second-person, and third-person omniscient) and its many non-prose forms (bulleted lists, poems, blocks of prose that read as poetry, and, most interestingly, the inclusion of the alternate story endings that continuously pull the reader in and out of the text in order to hone in on story implications for our real and the story’s imagined worlds). Yet it also addresses real-life sexism and abuse of a hegemonic patriarchal society. Hong writes these fractured wholes as her own trail of leading breadcrumbs for the reader to follow, from context to context, from one rhetorical situation to the next, while bringing complexity and richness and a sense of wonder with her poignant and bittersweet tellings.

 

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Review: Bone Music by Joel Peckham

Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021.

Paperback, 90 pages, $18.00.

 

Bone Music

 

Joel Peckham’s latest collection of poetry, Bone Music, is his most daring yet, looking with utter honesty at the cartography of healing following substantial loss. Readers of his past work will recall that over a decade ago, the poet experienced a car accident overseas in which he lost his wife and eldest son. In Bone Music, Peckham continues his excavation of grief, sharing a full spectrum of emotions in which he maps the contours of love, joy, fear, sadness, loss, and abundance. These incantatory poems explore both sound and movement in their making of meaning, as readers become in many ways seated in a raft while wave after wave of ocean rocks and lulls and spins—just as any good music does.

 

Bone Music has a tight focus, concentrating on memory and healing, of rage and the numerous navigations en route to forgiveness, both of others and oneself. The collection has a strong theme of motion, with numerous poems that feature vehicles. In poems such as “Suffering Tape,” Peckham proves himself to be, once again, a god of sound and alliteration: “I could see myself spool out to blues and reds with golds of early evening sun and shadow as I shook and took the shape of starlings flocked or the flame of sunfish staring up at night from the windshield’s blue-black pond.” Here, readers are treated to a feast of momentum, a furious dance on the page.

 

Yet, this collection, is not intended as simply a quick read. It asks the reader to dwell in the poems, reading them again and again, steeping in the words as a cup of tea grows more potent over time—as memory also grows and fades and becomes in its potency, clearer and not in its being. The book contains two sections: the first, The Quantum Soul, seems to function as an exploration of the interior, of memory and soul-searching, our cosmic relationship to mortality and philosophy, and the second section, In Case of Emergency, as a deeper probe into the nature of life. The latter is an unabashed look at the poet’s own failings and guilt, how one seeks to repair damages, despite repeated trauma, with a will to better one’s self.

 

Bone Music opens with “Prologue,” in which the line breaks emphasize a kind of rhythm, where the ending line “and was lost” sets the stage for what is to come—a book about various kinds of loss. The five-part “The Wreckage That We Travel In” is particularly astounding, beginning with these lines: “The world must take us by surprise—in spite of all the warnings, all evidence. Even a man shaped by loss takes each new blow in bafflement.” The poem is the reader’s first glimpse of a fascinating form that Peckham echoes throughout the rest of the collection, wherein what seem like prose poems exhibit sudden line breaks in the middle of a sentence:

 

. . . a matter of perspective and a sheet of glass all that separates the one from the many, this life from the next—what could send us crashing, flying into it? As a boy hurtling

 

up 93 with my father to visit his father in the nursing home, I loved to stare directly at the trees until they blurred and I could feel that killing speed and imagine I was me and not me and me . . .

 

Here’s another example from “In Case of Emergency”:

 

. . . When everything is always at my earlobe breathing

and heavy and hot with lungs as full as any long distance runner’s, wild-

ness is just another kind of intimacy,

 

an intimacy of layering upon another and another: not one clock

but thousands—all ticking, all chiming . . .

 

The result of this style mimics a memory, somewhat corporeal, as one thought leads to another, at times without clear transition, yet always with a certain profoundness. Poetic form, even at times in a subversion of form, is exceptional in this collection, and Peckham caters to readers who might also be poets, giving overtures to craft in poems like “RE: Like a Box”: “And if a poem is not salvation it might just be its metaphor: it does what a metaphor does: sheds it skins and slides away….” As a result, many poems become a lesson in poetry writing without compromising the core messages of the collection. Bone Music aims to bring readers along, to help them in their own personal quests.

 

We glimpse Peckham’s searching in poems such as “Suffering Tape,” where Peckham proclaims: “I learned what breaking meant, how it was transformation; it was crackling; it was resonant.” Or in “Going Sideways,” where the lines  acknowledge and reach for greater meaning beyond self:

 

I do not travel backwards

 

easily. I circle back in widening arcs

 

to the same songs, the same pictures floating from between the

covers of the same books, the same unfinished arguments,

 

to the same desert highway under the same stars reflected on the

same dead sea.

 

Bone Music intends to take readers off the deep end, to dive into the waters of what living means when grief has followed a person for so long.

 

Perhaps the most encapsulating poem of the collection can be found in its ending. “The Locomotive of the Lord” is the poem the whole collection builds toward, in that it moves the reader from constellation into a singular picture: “This life is a beautiful / accident made of accidents we try to shape.” Bone Music closes with a precious message of gratitude for what one has, this precious life, including all that is not in the same way anymore but evermore precious in its existence.

 

In closing Bone Music in this way, Peckham offers a path forward. The acknowledgment of pain, even of continued pain, becomes oddly a comfort—and a source of healing through which one may fully grasp and find joy. Bone Music, as a result, becomes a guidebook for the grief-stricken. By reaching for the grayer edges of human experience, Peckham turns readers toward honesty instead of simple answers, which makes for a lasting poetry collection.

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Review: The Clearing by Allison Adair

Milkweed Editions, 2020

Hardcover, $22.00, 88 pages

 

The Clearing

 

Allison Adair’s debut collection, The Clearing, is a tumble down a familiar hillside that leaves the reader giggling or stuck in a blackberry bush. It is the sting of antiseptic on a hundred bramble scratches, but it is also the kiss on a forehead covered in bandages. The Clearing is painful at times, since it is a catalog of victimhood, loss, and domestic violence—desperate circumstance that sometimes ends in tragedy.

 

“Mother of 2 Stabbed to Death in Silverton” begins, “The woman was overheard in the town hall saying she was afraid / to do it, once and for all, that he would, like he’s said, and he did.” Adair shows little interest in overly intellectualizing sentiments. Instead, the sharp truth—like a late-night phone call—is often delivered deadpan, and the poetics do not suffer in the least. In fact, the plainspoken portrayal of surgically precise metaphors either jars the reader or leaves them misty-eyed. This poem ends on the neighbor’s front porch, “It was an accident, he said, I never meant it. They stood there still / as newsprint.”

 

I fear I am fixating on the grotesque, perhaps because it is captured so extraordinarily, but in truth the poetic landscapes found in The Clearing are equally delightful—the voices often nurturing and celebratory, even when wrestling with fear and darkness. In “City Life,” the narrator and her daughter are learning to live in a city full of rats: “For her, death / is the longest nap imaginable, / maybe four hours. But we always wake / at the end.” And no matter where Adair leads us—toward a mining disaster, a recurring dream, or a historical reenactment—there will likely be animals there to keep us unnerved or entertained. “I thought I knew the sound of darkness, / the slow leather collapse of a bat’s wing / folding into itself, the swollen fucking of a cloud / of them wrestling for space on the cave’s drapery.” In Adair’s world, the creatures morph continually, and the lines are winding and tourniquet tight.  “A ruined animal will drag itself miles only to become / a desiccated hutch, burrow of maggots, coyote trough.”

 

Adair’s phrases are rural incantations that swirl in the throat like heavy smoke, and each image is refreshing as a gulp from the backyard spigot—worth returning to again and again. And beneath each poem lies a meticulous sonic foundation. There is a rhythmic precision, too, that shifts in accordance with the whims of the poet. The reader is aware of their own slow breathing, for example, when an animal is trapped or desperate. At other moments, the rhythm almost mirrors the image, such as in the closing of “Gettysburg”: “The caterpillar inches along, lost / in its sad accordion hymn.” And while there are deeply personal poems in this collection, Adair is as—if not more—interested in writing about historical events and rural places, such as “Silverton, ”a town in Colorado with no more than seven hundred residents. These poems are not unlike blue whales with hearts as big as rental cars. Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing is a light show all its own, pungent and beautiful as a prairie fire. It is a collection one shouldn’t risk lending out, if they ever want to see it again.

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Review: Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman

Black Sparrow Press, 2020

Paperback, $15.95, 224 pages

 

Wicked Enchantment

 

One of the few good things to come out of 2020 was Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman, skillfully edited by poet Terrance Hayes. Describing Coleman’s work is not an easy task. Her outspoken work stretches for miles and leaves shockwaves where it lands. Hayes describes her as a “grenade of brilliance, boasts, and braggadocio.” Having lived on the edges of the poetry elitists, her body of work often neglected, she was still referred to as the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles by those who valued her work. A native daughter of L.A., born in 1946 in the Watts neighborhood, Coleman also wrote novels, nonfiction, and short stories. Known mostly for her poetry, she left behind a large volume of work and a legion of fans.

 

Wicked Enchantment includes selected poems from eight of her published collections. The book opens with an illuminating section entitled “Wanda In Her Own Words” that includes quotes from her other writing and interviews. There, Coleman says, “My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I’ve become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled . . .  I am glassed in by language as well as by the barriers of my dark skin and financial embarrassment.” Thus, the book is off and running, and delicious dilemmas of many kinds run through the entire collection.

 

Coleman’s voice as a Black woman fighting against gender and racial oppression is undeniably striking. Through poems like “Essay on Language,” Coleman gives the poetic middle finger to naysayers and cowards, “trying to be the / best i can spurred by blackness but they keep telling me the / best fashion in which to escape linguistic ghettoization / is to / ignore the actuality of blackness blah blah blah and it will / cease to / have factual power over my life. which doesn’t / make sense to me . . .” In those lines, she mocks the ivory tower advising her to take it easy and to be nice. Instead, she is “spurred by blackness” to sniff out racisms and other degradations, and she doesn’t hesitate to make them plain and clear. In “Essay on Language 6,” Coleman writes,

 

there are those who have no passion but who

are sensitive enough to sense the void within

and therefore must imagine passion. i often find

that among that kind, there are those who

detest the truly passionate out of an envious rage

that has always faced us passionate ones.

 

Sometimes the poems are surprising, laced with humor and irreverence. The title alone of “I Ain’t Yo Earthmama” suggests trouble, and then the first line throws down the gauntlet: “boogers are not my forte.” Exactly whose forte are boogers? Despite her claim, Coleman does quite well with boogers, at least as a jumping off point. From there, she goes on to combine Poseidon, experimental sex, and vomit in this juggernaut of a poem.

 

Coleman continually pushes into new territory, seeking poetic freedom. In “Dream 924,” the speaker drives a car, “and i’m flying as the speedometer / needle presses urgently against the edge. ah – the power. i / am looking for the answer. and i move forward . . .” In that speeding urgency toward freedom, Coleman has picked up descriptions like, as Hayes has described her, a “flesh-eating poet,” while others have described her as simply mean. Coleman’s intensity can be felt throughout Wicked Enchantments with lines such as “pseudo-intellectuals with suck-holes for brains” (from “American Sonnet 3”), but it’s the quiet moments in poems such as “The Saturday Afternoon Blues” where Coleman’s mastery is best experienced:

 

saturday afternoons are killers

when the air is brisk and warm

ol’ sun he steady whispers

soon the life you know will be done

 

This languid summer scene, which could feel invigorating, instead showcases Coleman’s adept ability to layer grief within quiet, even sunny, moments. To hark back to the speeding car from “Dream 924,” that same car that pushes the speed limit is perhaps most powerful when simply idling in the sun, all its inherent force just waiting beneath the hood.

 

An already strong collection, the book hits hyper-drive with the inclusion of work from Coleman’s last book, Mercurochrome. In “American Sonnet 94,” she writes:

 

weeper. this is your execution

weeper. this is your groveling stone

weeper. yours is the burst & burnings of a city

 

With each “weeper,” followed by those strangely indefinite almost percussive periods, Coleman hits a bass drum of sorrow, and the propulsive music continues throughout the book’s final section. The poems here jump as if alive, as if charged from within. “Thiefheart” is full of stunning one-liners—“i’d steal the t from the end of time”—and ends with a line that seems achingly prescient, given our current American moment of racial discord and political upheaval: “i’d steal the poison from this muthaland.”

 

Coleman’s poems are electric and profoundly inspiring. They make readers want to write poems, to read more poems, to have more faith in poetry—more faith in the difficult task of living—and to shove this book into as many hands as possible. If someone is disenchanted with poetry, or with the state of the world, I recommend reading Wicked Enchantment. Wanda Coleman’s poems turn on the lights. They set off sparks.

 

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Review: Bosses of Light and Sound by Nickalus Rupert

Willow Springs Books, 2020

Paperback, 180 pages, $21.95

 

Rupert cover

 

If short story collections had singles, the chart-topper in Nickalus Rupert’s debut collection, Bosses of Light and Sound, winner of the 2019 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, would be the deliciously irreverent “Aunt Job,” which depicts an alternate reality in which coming-of-age rituals like bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras have been replaced with aunts initiating their teenage nephews into manhood with a hand job. As the father of the story explains to his appalled pubescent son: “Aunts have become a kind of sexual starter kit . . . It’s the way of things.” And yet Rupert’s charm as a storyteller is that he’s never satisfied with one idea (however perverse that idea may be!). Instead, Rupert’s stories are jammed full of dazzling turns and inventive world-building. In this way, Rupert’s stories resemble Donald Barthelme’s self-described “slumgullions”—the narrative equivalent of well-stirred and savory stews.

 

The title story serves as the perfect aperitif to whet the reader’s appetite. In “Bosses of Light and Sound,” a nostalgic movie projectionist takes the reader through a director’s cut of his youthful pranks and lost love, recollecting summer nights spent editing and manipulating Hollywood films to the chagrin of unsuspecting moviegoers—splicing Daniel Day Lewis into Finding Nemo, inserting pirates into dystopian sci-fi films, etc.—all while struggling to translate this mastery of light and sound to life outside the projectionist’s booth. In “Hale in the Deep,” a prolifically divorced protagonist, haunted by his innumerable marital failures, is lured by the promise of a late-night infomercial that offers him an array of sci-fi gadgetry to “de-member” all the painful and awkward gaffes of his past. In “Oh, Harmonious,” a chain-smoking and exasperated Mother Nature descends to a local gymnasium to hold a press conference and announce her retirement. In “The Temptation of Saint Ravine,” a fame-flirting recluse—known for talking locals out of committing suicide in his plummet-friendly backyard—strikes up a friendship with a troubled teen, all while a rogue mountain lion stalks the premises.

 

Frankly, it’s Rupert’s brain-candy sentences that are the real treat of this collection. The pages of Bosses of Light and Sound resound with “combinatorial delight” (to borrow a phrase from Nabokov). Rupert’s language is adept at shifting tones and offering a double-barreled wallop. In the flash piece titled “If the River Drops,” the fatal rocks of a whitewater rafting resort are imbued with dental-mythic registers: “molars from the mouths of giants.” In a nostalgic ghost story titled “Deadman’s Island,” the sunset is staged as “a flashlight aimed through pink Jell-O.” It’s hard not to think of the linguistic felicity of a writer like Jim Shephard while reading through Rupert’s collection: both share a knack for defibrillating the world with a charged turn of phrase.

 

Throughout Bosses of Light and Sound, Rupert dramatizes the friction of hope rubbing against the bristles of reality. Underneath the comic and off-kilter veneer of many of these stories is the aching of lost souls and foreclosed hearts. As the disillusioned protagonist of the story “Jewels of Mt. Stanley” claims, “Hell of a thing, belief. Like spraying yourself with OFF! before entering sharky waters.” And yet, the prospect of certain doom never quite prevents Rupert’s characters from cannonballing into the ocean of belief, aspiring in spite of expiring.

 

There’s an admirable messiness to Rupert’s stories—characters botch epiphanies, flirt with gravity, taunt passersby to pelt them with tomatoes, and unleash their inner spirit animal (in this case, a howler monkey) to mixed avail. Each story encourages a redrawing of simple maps, a recharting of the twined territories of yearning and despair. In the world of Bosses of Light and Sound, relationships might end, but there’s always the possibility “the universe might cobble together a second chance—a redo”—to quote the story “Bonus Round.” And perhaps that is the secret charm of Rupert’s collection. The hearts in these stories are simultaneously spiking and flatlining, suspended in cardiac superposition. The closer we look through Rupert’s narrative microscope, the fuzzier and more fascinating our lives become.

 

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Don’t Muddy the Waters, Do Rock the Boat

Everything That Rises by Joseph Stroud

Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Paperback. 159 pages. $14.00

 

Everything That Rises

 

Stroud is remarkable, having both lyric and prose gifts, a reverence for nature, and a willingness to face up to hard truths. His craft allows him to write necessary poems with immediacy, yet maintain a certain distance in a plain, powerful voice. W. S. Merwin said, “The authority of Joseph Stroud’s poetry is startling . . . it is the recurring revelations that poetry brings to us, the crystal of our ordinary days. Stroud’s poetry comes from the clear source.”

 

Everything That Rises is an ambitious collection with seven sections, including masterful translations of Tu Fu, Catullus, Neruda, and others. Stroud moves back and forth between lyricism and his more classical distance with ease.

 

In “The Perfection of Craft,” Stroud gives us a sample of what he does best. The speaker takes us on the hunt with a great blue heron who “stalks among the reeds,” halting to snare his meal. The bird “stabs its beak, flings, into the air a roiling snake, and catches it / tosses it again, . . . / still alive, slithering down the heron’s throat.” He treats his meal as if it’s a game. While the imagery stands out, this poem is really about craft. Is the poet like the heron, and the poem is the snake? The ideas and point of view are complex, the images vivid—a signature Stroud six-liner.

 

His previous book, Of This World: New and Selected Poems, contained many brilliant poems like this one in the book’s opening section, “Suite For The Common.” And again, in this new collection, with “The Tarantula,” he takes us to a place “below Solomon Ridge,” where this arachnid “the size of my hand” rears up, “feels the air with its front legs / its body covered in silky hair.” The speaker kneels down, and it follows the shadow of his hand, “a little dance before pouncing on the twig I hold before it.” The Theraphosidae is curious, intelligent; then “its fangs click open,” and the speaker stands, takes a step back.

 

It watches, unmoving,

waiting inside its own arachnid time,

before continuing on,

touching the ground delicately

with each tip of its eight legs,

heading out into the Mojave,

 

A powerful nature poem, like D.H Lawrence’s snake poem, this tarantula, “walking like a hand,” seems like one of the lords of life, “disappearing into a world where we cannot go.”

 

Mortality is the undertone and undertow in this book. At the end of Stroud’s first section, we get “Remember This, Sappho Said,” where a nameless shade from the underworld tells the speaker, “remember that / among the living you were once offered love— / you, with your great pride and haughty disdain, / remember, love was once offered, and you refrained,” setting the tone for the scenes of death that follow.

 

In “Heart Attack in An Oregon Forest,” an anonymous “you” directs a sheriff by cell phone to a remote river where the speaker waits, hearing this stranger on the phone, “his voice calling your name, / asking directions from the dead.”

 

In “Homage to the Water Ouzel,” Stroud begins, “Times you get so down into pain . . .” but then the speaker thinks of the water ouzel, “into / this aching cold water the little bird plunges / and walks the bottom just trying to stay alive. Imagine that. Jesus Christ. Try to imagine that.” What’s striking is the speaker’s detachment at first, and then the immediacy.

 

This dark undertone continues in the next section of the book. In “The End of Romanticism,” Stroud gives us a college teacher’s talk to his students at the end of a course on Romanticism. In this powerful prose poem, the teacher talks about Charles Lamb, whom they have not studied, who took care of his mentally ill sister after she had to be confined in Bedlam, “a hospital worse than prison,” for stabbing their mother to death. Later released into Lamb’s care, she and Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare. When her illness recurred—and they had learned the signs— “they knew she had no defense.” “All semester,” says the speaker, “we’ve been discussing Romanticism, The Sublime, the articulation of Personal Emotion, and the power of Imagination.  Now imagine this. Holding each other, carrying the restraining straps with them, Mary and Lamb, sobbing, walked the long road back to Bedlam.”

 

In “The Bridge of Change,” the suicide of Stroud’s teacher and mentor, John Logan, is the subject. We see Logan at the No Name Bar in Sausalito in the 1960s, drinking and holding forth about a boy who witnessed his mother’s death—jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge—as he and his father watched, helpless. Logan offers insight by telling his own theory of poetry,

 

the poem as a bridge

connecting me to you,  

you to me, poetry
in whose healing music we might trace

how to forgive, how to cross over,

making our long difficult way

into grace.

 

Stroud renders the death of his own parents with restraint in “Campfire.” The speaker remembers a night with his father in the Tehachapis, “How ghostlike his image / appears to me now, how he seems almost a stranger, / and the boy sitting next to him, staring / into the flame, unable to make anything of it, / what do I make of him, / what would I tell him that he should know, / comforted as he is by the warmth of the fire / and the presence of his father sitting next to him / within the deep fatherless night surrounding him.” The speaker’s distance makes this moment universal.

 

A lot can be learned from Stroud regarding craft. He builds vivid imagery, much like with the blue heron, in “Imagining (Poetry).” Young Stroud and his twin brother hook up a walkie-talkie with tin cans and tell each other secrets, intimate words connected by a string, “hearing at each end only what we might imagine.” And in “Oppen / Praxis” Stroud instructs, “Say what happened in a way that makes it happen again . . .  Clarity and accuracy honor the reader. / Don’t muddy the waters. Do rock the boat.”

 

Stroud has traveled the world searching for poems, novelty—and possibly grace. He’s looked in dangerous places— “somewhere out past Swat, near the Korkorams, no road into it, Westerners forbidden. It was important to me that it be secluded, that to get to it I would have to leave my whole life behind.  What was it I so yearned to find?” In the section, “Convergence,” we get a persona poem of a young Incan girl chosen to be sacrificed to the god. In his notes, Stroud says he was haunted by this image for years. He continues this section with omens and religious touchstones, as if the poet is “shoring fragments against his ruins.”

 

Everything That Rises has no simple arc from grief to redemption. The deaths of family, friends, the coming extinctions in nature, his own mortality, his pain due to the nature of this violent world are all real, but he asks, “Who was it that said / in some long-ago poem / this world is all we have / of Paradise?” Stroud’s instinct is praise.

 

Winner of many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lamont Foundation, Stroud gives us poems of nature’s abundance with craft folded around absence. In “My Diamond Sutra,” Stroud mentions “dragon boats of poems, set on fire, pushed into the stream.” In this way, he balances light and dark, showing one man’s search for transcendence. His work deserves a wider audience—not only poetry readers. Stroud’s poems do rock the boat.

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A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World

Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper

University of Tampa Press, 2019

Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00

 

Wild Persistence

 

Patricia Hooper’s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence, is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. Her forms range from haiku with surprising turns to blank verse that is plain and elegant. Her range is unusual—she gives us graceful poems, witty poems, complex ones, and powerful ones.

 

“Sightings” is a poem that demanded my attention from the first reading:

 

The world leafs out again, the willow first

and then the river birches near the road

we’re driving down, you in your car seat watching,

for hawks or smaller birds returning home.

Two years have passed since you could walk or stand

alone.  The winter-damaged fields are sown,

and there, along the ridge, unraveling,

spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,

restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.

And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:

you’re lowering the window, looking up

at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.

 

As we’re drawn into this car drive in spring, a bird-watching trip, the language is quiet, not calling attention to itself. Then those “winter-damaged fields that now are sown” make their entrance. The “you” is the speaker’s paralyzed grandson. Hooper has raised the stakes, and we feel her urgency with the “drifts of dogwood trees,” an injury that “could not be healed,” heart-breaking beauty, “miles of wings, your face alive with joy.” Clear images, deep feeling—the grandson’s wonder and the speaker’s joy and gratitude—this poem is also a gift to the reader in the way it finds beauty in the natural world even in the face of tragedy.

 

The word beauty sometimes takes a beating in the streets. I met a well-known poet who said in a disparaging way, Nay-chuh poems, as if it were a skin condition he thought had long ago been cured. However, Hooper’s poems go beyond the simple observational nature poem. Often, she starts with the plainest things. For example, in the book’s first poem, “Sketchbook and Journal,” she catalogues items found in her friend Dan’s freezer: “birds found dead along the trail / in snow ruts, autumn’s crevices, the wren / almost mistaken for a leaf.” The poem moves to Dan’s essays, other “sightings, swift details / that can’t be seen in flight, wild, secretive, / a voice, a look, a gesture half-concealed.” It ends with “wing-bars and stripes, the margins of a feather, / what the mind salvages to study later.”

 

In other poems, Hooper gives us an elegy for a son-in-law, a move from Michigan to the Piedmont, news of a grandson’s accident, a copperhead, nine birds, a spider, and an evening at a country inn. In a sometimes-witty haiku sequence, Hooper says, “I left those three crows, / the last corn in my garden, / and not one thanked me.” In “My Junco,” the bird has hit the speaker’s picture window with its “slate feathers and soft gray throat,” and she buries it by “those Whirlwind anemones / I planted under the oak tree / beside him— / next summer’s wings.” A hopeful, quiet walk-off.

 

In “August in the Little Field,” Hooper’s speaker addresses us and asks if we have “ever heard of a purpose as clear as this one . . ., the resolute persistence” of this goldfinch that all spring “flew back and forth over the meadow, watching,” then fed her offspring seeds all summer, as if knowing “the fields and their bright design. . . ,” / . . . her faith so simple / I could only wish it were mine.”

 

Hooper has aptly personified the bird and attached human fate to it. The poet Erin Belieu has said that Hooper’s feeling for nature reminds her of Mekeel McBride, who in fact provided a blurb for one of Hooper’s earlier books: “Craft and vision here, lighting from the inside the most common things.”

 

Hooper’s vision is complex, and this leads her to take a surprising point of view sometimes. In “Copperhead,” she writes in third-person about this snake about to strike in her garden—“its orange head lifted, / body a silk rope, / the hourglass bands around it like a bracelet.” These images are precise, almost pretty, but this speaker steps back for a shovel, thrusts it down, and the snake hesitates,

 

not long enough to see the rims of trees,

to see the houses leaning toward the hills,

to see the hills far off, the gray blue mountain,

to see the pink crepe myrtle in the yard,

to see the front porch with its pail of berries,

to see my knees blue-stained from berry picking,

to see the bare skin shining at my ankle,

to see, if it sees at all, the chance before it,

to see what I might see for the last time,

if no one came . . .

 

This is one of Hooper’s signature moments. The snake, almost outside of time, is allowed its point of view. The gaze moves to the sky, as if to evoke all the things the copperhead will lose. The feeling of distance here is odd, making the world slide sideways. The blank verse—easily readable and at the same time carefully crafted with alliteration, other sound ladders, and anaphora—gives an odd formality to the scene. The idea is complex, the language is plain.

 

In “The Spider,” we see “blowsy / overblown roses, heavy as hydrangeas,” then an empty spider web “tattered but glistening” in the speaker’s garden. “It’s strange, something dies, and the world stays,” she says. The speaker goes back in her mind to her childhood lake—not to the lake really, but to this moment after she, a girl, has returned to school in the fall and pictures “the dock, the sand’s hard ridges, and the waves still there without me, lapping at the shore.” This memory re-imagined, a frame inside the frame, gives this moment a poignant, unearthly quality.

 

Hooper has played this hide-and-seek game with the world throughout her previous four books. This strategy of up-close and far-away is a key to her craft and vision. In her first book, Other Lives, we have a surprisingly effective second-person point of view in “A Child’s Train Ride,” where the speaker is able to perceive the child’s thoughts about existence and non-existence. Now in Wild Persistence, we have “In the Clearing,” where Hooper’s speaker sits in the woods after rain, studying the light: “If I sit still enough / by the damp trees, sometimes I see the world without myself in it, / and—it always surprises me—nothing at all is lost!” No matter where she is in her own life trajectory, Hooper seems able to imagine the world without herself and her loved ones.

 

We also get powerful autobiographical poems mourning a loss, such as “After,” which begins, “After I left your body to be burned . . .” In a matter-of fact way, the speaker catalogues all of the details she has had to take care of. The poem ends with this speaker looking down from a great distance at all of the things in a house, as “if she were looking back from the next world,” an ending which seems to slam the door shut.

 

Sometimes her humor rests alongside solace. In “Sandhill Cranes,” two birds walk up to her window “in their scarlet caps.” The male sees his reflection and begins dancing: “his wings six feet across, / rose in the air / as he leapt in his black leather slippers, / his coat of feathers, / and pranced like an Iroquois brave to impress his bride.” The narrator expresses wonder and delight at their unusual “bowing and strutting” thinking “it was just in time / that they found their way to the house / in which I was grieving, . . .” gently reminding the reader of the poet’s loss.

 

There are some very witty poems in this book, too. In the heat of Hooper’s newly adopted South, her speaker says she sometimes thinks of “heroines / in southern plays or novels: sultry, steamy / women whose ways I didn’t understand / before—like Blanche du Bois reclining in a chair, / restless, desirous, half-daft, but barely able / to rise, to lift a hand.”

 

It’s hard to find any weaknesses to comment on, even beyond the particular aspects focused on here. Although I haven’t discussed Hooper’s poems that address the world’s injustices, they take their place in the story of her poetics and have contributed to the fact that her books have won a number of awards, including the Norma Farmer First Book Award, Bluestem Award, Lawrence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review, and most recently, for Wild Persistence, the Brockman Campbell Book Award from the Poetry Society of North Carolina. This book deserves such widespread recognition. And, perhaps, a re-examination of how far nature poems can actually take us.

 

 

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An Array of Possibilities

A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

University of Akron Press, 2020 

 

A Brief History of Fruit

 

My copy of Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ A Brief History of Fruit soon ran out of page corners to dog-ear. After reading each poem, I had to read it again; I didn’t want to misread any lines or miss any new words. And when I finished this collection, I returned to all the words I had circled, delighted not only by the poems in what has become one of my favorite collections of the year, but by how much they had taught me. A small sampling of the words this collection added to my vocabulary:

 

corrugate

brackish

bougainvillea

aqueous

whuffling

misprisions

copula

 

As I searched for my circled words, I found myself rereading each poem, and then the entire collection, in its entirety. It is a collection that rewards re-reading. Andrews signals her attention to the meanings of words—and asks for readers’ attention to the same—in poems such as “n: Shield, or Shell Covering”:

 

Swaddling provides a newborn with a sense of the womb’s safety.

I fold countries around myself, false familiarity, some serene carapace.

 

That “carapace” is the noun from the poem’s title: an object with a protective function, a kind of casing. But Andrews finds the tension between a swaddled baby and a suffocated self in a suffocating country in a way that feels both heartbreaking and necessary. The poem renders this tension using a series of long couplets drawn across the page, with the second line of each couplet pairing carapace with a rhyming, rhythmic, hypnotic sequence of modifiers: crystalline, serene, unseen.

 

In “The Collapse,” Andrews combines her playfulness about the meanings of words—“Ravine (n): a place where it is difficult to build condominiums”—with a formal inventiveness that uses the page as a way to think critically about what white space means in the poem and in the world. Through these formal choices, Andrews makes the connections between whiteness, capitalism, and ecological disaster both evident and non-negotiable. The poem opens with an epigraph about Manila’s infamous mountain of garbage, the collapse of which killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the summer of 2000. Andrews, though—whose mother was born in the Philippines—follows the epigraph with a passage that suggests an impatience with the need for storytelling as a rhetorical device:

 

Is it alright if I just go ahead and say

that the moral of this story

will have something to do with the scourge of capitalism? Will you keep reading?

 

This poem is frenetic and challenging, cataloging Manila’s financial growth and environmental ruin with an anger that at times transforms into reverence: “all hail the need for condominiums / all hail Manila’s 10,000 tonnes per day.” These images, stacked one on top of another, threaten their own form of collapse, mirroring the compounding pressures of capital and climate change.

 

If there is a feeling of helplessness that comes from the magnitude of the current disaster facing us, what Andrews does so well across the collection is face these impossible catastrophes. She arrives to the page with new ways to communicate loss, absence, and grief. The language with which we understand the climate change that may destroy us is also the language we use to understand the elements that give us life. Andrews converges these lexical groups in “Pastoral,” where words such as “environment” and “field” and “America” can and do hold a number of meanings:

 

By field, I mean both the expanse across which

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

and the sum of all possible relations between a person

and the objects in their environment

 

The punctuation of a double bracket [] translates to an array in JavaScript, and I think of array here as a kind of absence but also as the formation of possibilities, answers, and meanings—a box to be filled. The poem does not concern itself with sense so much as it does with sound, which props open the door to the poem. The arrays provide the fill-in-the-blank-ness necessary to push the reader toward a range of meanings:

 

By America, I mean the sighing sense of moving from body to

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

 

A Brief History of Fruit is inventive, textured, and deeply interesting. One of the many powers of this collection is the way it navigates possibility. Andrews writes into questions such as, How do we name ourselves? How do decide who we are? How does one name and navigate the world? These poems are fervent explorations of the capacity for language to name what can’t be named and to help us understand tensions that, as argued by Diane Seuss—who selected the collection as winner of the Akron Poetry Prize—do not “resolve; [because] to resolve would equal self-abandonment.” And to pretend to resolve the questions at the heart of this collection—for one, “What does it mean to live in a country?”—would be far less interesting than what Seuss rightfully says that Andrews does so well: to “inventory a parallel history.”

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Identity and Empathy in America and Assam

His Father’s Disease by Aruni Kashyap

Context / Westland Books, 2019

Hardcover. 184 pages. 

 

Cover of His Father’s Disease

 

In His Father’s Disease, Aruni Kashyap asserts himself as a master of the skill of empathy-building. This is no fluke. It is common to read the debut story collection of an author and feel that there is a lot of technical prowess—say of dialogue, or of voice, or of structure—but little sense that the characters are in fact alive, or come from a lived space. Kashyap, however, who is from the Northeast Indian state of Assam, has already established himself as one of India’s rising literary voices. He has published novels in both English (The House of a Thousand Stories, Viking, 2013) and his native Assamese (Noikhon Etia Duroit, Panchajanya, 2019) and edited an anthology of stories centered on the experience of insurgency in Assam (How To Tell the Story of an Insurgency, HarperCollins, 2020). It is no surprise, then, that in each of the ten stories in this collection, one reaches the end feeling completely immersed in the world Kashyap has created.

 

The stories in His Father’s Disease can be roughly divided into two settings: either a remote part of the Indian Northeast or a provincial American suburb that a Northeastern Indian has made their home. Kashyap addresses this dichotomy directly in “Skylark Girl,” a metafictional narrative of a Northeast Indian author being paneled at a festival in Delhi, interval-led with a folk story about a woman who is killed out of pettiness, only to come back to haunt the village as a ghost. During the panel’s Q&A session, a woman asks the narrator, Sanjib, “why [he] had . . . decided to write about this magical world, instead of the insurgencies, the violence, and the more immediate topical stories. [Sanjib finds himself] surprised by the question because . . . back home, his Assamese readers did not expect him to write about this or that topic. He was free to write anything.” Much like Sanjib, Kashyap’s stories are foregrounded by a Northeastern perspective, not because he wants to limit himself, but because he feels the freedom to write whatever he wants. Perhaps he chooses to write about Northeast India because this part of India is rarely portrayed in international literature.

 

Again, this is by no means a limitation. In fact, part of what makes Kashyap’s stories work so well is that they mine locations the author knows so well. The most successful story in this regard is “Bizi Colony,” which details the haphazard and troubling life of a youngster named Bablu, told from the perspective of his brother, who explains how Bablu’s glue addiction and penchant for violence affects everyone in their family:

 

“Long before my younger brother Bablu began telling our neighbours that Ma sucked Papa’s best friend Hriday Uncle’s dick while Papa was away on official tours to New Delhi, he would touch the breasts of our forty-year-old maid and ask her how it felt. When the timid Geeta-baideo wept, saying that she was the one who brought him up, washed his ass after he crapped as a baby, he beat her up with a cane.”

 

Bablu is a heinous example of a twelve-year-old, with all of the makings of a sociopath. He causes his mother to cry at odd times and take out her anguish at her husband, just as he causes his father to reflect after traipsing around the house, “‘Am I a failed father?’” The story is a melodrama; what saves it from the common pitfalls of that form is the sense that while Bablu sells drugs and associates with prostitutes, tarnishing the family name with no self-awareness, his behavior is fully his own. Glue addiction is a common problem in South and Southeast Asia, and there are children who seem almost born to be malicious in all parts of the world. No matter how heinous Bablu’s decisions appear, they are rooted in realism.

 

Kashyap also foregrounds “Bizi Colony” not as Bablu’s story, but as a story about the effect of Bablu’s behavior on his family. When “Bablu [breaks a] tall, thick juice glass on [Ma’s] head because she’d refused to give him money to buy Dendrite or Eraz-ex,” we don’t see it from Bablu’s perspective, but from the narrator’s, who doesn’t cry but “[feels] a strange burning sensation in [his] chest, and a strange, choking lump in [his] throat.” This distance allows readers to observe Bablu’s actions while still benefiting from the emotions and proximity of the first-person peripheral narrator, as if Bablu’s behavior is very much happening in front of us.

 

 “The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn” is another story that benefits from Kashyap’s command of point of view. The third-person narrative tells the story of a writer heading to an international conference in Michigan. He bonds with a woman on the plane, in a way that suggests a possible sexual attraction, until she says, “‘You know, you remind me so much of Kal Penn . . . you look like him, quite a lot, do you know?’”

 

I am a person of Indian origin, so I too receive this comment often. The actor Kal Penn is one of the very few people of Indian heritage who is prominent in American media, so people are quick to say that anyone who is South Asian looks like him. Therefore, I relate more than the average person when the narrator Arunabh is offended and frustrated by the comparison. The manner in which Kashyap arranges Arunabh’s reaction in language is what summons empathy for readers of any background. In the taxi after this encounter, Arunabh “[studies] his reflection in the rearview mirror, and more than once had considered asking Jim whether he saw any resemblance to Kal Penn. And he will always remember the fall colours, his first fall in America: the gold, the yellow, the orange, the red; the blue sky that was slowly turning grey; and his yearning for snow.”

 

By melding the reaction to a very particular moment, and the feelings evoked by the natural world framing the scene, Kashyap creates multiple spaces for a reader to react to or reflect on Arunabh’s experience. If they cannot relate to Arunabh’s gripes, seeing fall in a new country for the first time may resonate, and if not that, provide a sense of nostalgia through the colors, sensations, and feelings of fall in the USA.

 

Kashyap also employs this multi-pronged narrative approach to empathy-building in the titular “His Father’s Disease.” The story details the frustrations of widowed Neerumoni as she discovers that her son Anil is homosexual, much like her own husband. She repeatedly walks in on her son with men and finds herself bereaved. The village also reacts hostilely to her son’s sexuality. At one tragic point in the story, soldiers shoot Anil’s lover. The idea of the scene is harrowing enough, but what grounds it as a piece of literature is how Kashyap describes the aftermath: “The blood looked like a red rose blooming on the white bedsheet, and the room smelled like coconut water.”

 

In choosing such evocative language, Kashyap renders the moment not merely as a violent one, but one grounded in nature. The scents and colors give the reader a critical distance from an extremely emotional moment. The reader is allowed to come back into the scene with their own feelings attached to it rather than only those evoked by the violence.

 

The power of fiction is to make the reader feel as if these imagined characters are very much living real lives, and more, to feel connected to them even if they reside in completely different worlds. Kashyap understands that to write is not simply to get lost in the individual sentences, but to create characters that resonate. Anyone who reads fiction to explore emotional spaces, both interior and exterior, should absolutely seek out His Father’s Disease. They will find themselves not only intrigued, not only inspired, but utterly absorbed into the world of Aruni Kashyap’s imagination.

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A Refusal of Despair

Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano

Etruscan Press, 2019

Paperback. 122 pages. $16.00

 

Cover of Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano.

 

Although published more than a year ago, Ill Angels, with its indomitable refusal of despair, may be one of those books we need to read in the year of escalating climate crises, social, political and cultural warfare, and the resurgence of and the promise of more biological pandemics. Ill Angels does not wince in the face of the terrible cruelties that haunt the world, but it also does not cede ground in its insistence on hope.

 

On the one hand, Dante Di Stefano’s second book of poetry is a neoromantic paean to possibility, to faith in a future embodied in children and teenagers (especially his students). On the other hand, a countervailing, or perhaps complementary, tendency in Ill Angels finds Di Stefano celebrating the present and presence, represented as much by the distant indifference of inanimate objects (“Jubilate Pluto”) as the proximate insouciance of wild animals (“The Porcupine Climbing the Apple Tree”). Because Di Stefano is all too aware of the cruelty that lies beyond his classrooms—see, for example, “Verruckt,” “45th,” and “O Trampling Empire”—he insists on a love that is the equivalent of ungrounded theological faith.

 

This means that at times Di Stefano echoes the passionate declamations of a Ross Gay, a Cyrus Cassells or an even earlier John Clare. But unlike Gay, Cassells and Clare, Di Stefano’s aestheticized fervor is more metaphysical than quotidian, his tender poems to his wife and his children notwithstanding. This unadulterated sincerity has its risks: many of these poems approach a too-sweet sentimentality, and a few, unfortunately, broach the border, weaving back and forth between good taste and self-indulgent rapture.

 

Fortunately, the balance of this book finds Di Stefano celebrating his good-faith fantasies— “I know all prayer is merely the patter / of little feet coming down the stairwell / in a daydream of a future household”—with well-crafted, often playful, metaphors and similes, bolstered by over-the-top alliteration and assonance that wink at pop culture icons like Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton, to say nothing of literary warhorses like Swift, Pope, and Hopkins. Still, Di Stefano’s unrestrained gaiety in the age of what he aptly names “Stump Speech” demands a robust defense, and while a poem like “And Why This Ridiculous Happiness?” takes a giant step in that direction—there’s no gainsaying the stunning transcendence of lines like “If you speak to eighth graders as angels / and to angels as eighth graders, already / you have become fluent in paradise”—I can’t help but wonder at this excessive faith in language, in poetry, that sidesteps—not overrides—doubt. For that faith seems to depend on delayed endorsement, on retroactive belief: one hopes for love and happiness, and when it happens one believes it appears, in hindsight, as predestined.

 

Di Stefano implicitly acknowledges this slippage between faith and imagination, which is why he also knows that joy can only be truly joy if it is utopian, literally nowhere, unchained from time and space. At the same time other slippages—between past and future, between presence and absence—enable a kind of manic happiness, a man inebriated on both the past and future. Di Stefano and his beloved wander among his “memories of imagined futures,” adrift between innocence and suspended disbelief: “for now we listen / and nothing can curb the sound of this band / as it plays ‘I Ate Up the Apple Tree.’” And if such a postlapsarian moment could last, the two would always be nearing “the Mardi Gras of / an Eden we’ll be forever leaving.” The traditional secular realm of this nowhere is, of course, art. Thus, we are to “imagine the string, / attached to a red balloon painted / in oil on muslin, a gentle tether / that holds us nowhere amidst the cosmos.”

 

To be fair, Di Stefano is not always this overweening and serious. Several poems find the poet in a comic, jocular mood, however much these light flourishes veil darker political and cultural realities. These modest reprimands are best captured in punchy lines like “I think I dated the national debt / on a dare for a week in middle school; / I didn’t like the way she chewed bubble gum.” Ill Angels is peppered with these kinds of tongue-in-cheek delights, and for this reader, sweet tooth aside, they leaven the saccharine confections. As a whole, Ill Angels suggests that Di Stefano is, in the end, an Omni-American, to use Albert Murray’s phrase, a true believer in the country’s destiny which, for Murray (as well as fellow travelers like Ralph Ellison and the recently deceased Stanley Crouch), redeems its past. One implication of this story of redemption is that racial, class, and gender differences evince democratic diversity more so than they do intractable hierarchies. For example, Di Stefano’s odes to jazz greats like Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins focus less on their aesthetic achievements than their populist implications. In practice, then, the Constitution is an open-ended document: “Anyone who opens her mouth to sing / erases and rewrites the preamble.” For Di Stefano, this is hope, and hope is only love in action (to paraphrase everybody from M.L.K to Cornel West). Ill Angels thus unites religious, political, cultural, and domestic faith under one flag—hope—and, like Jesse Jackson, who once proclaimed the same during his 1988 presidential run, Di Stefano wants to keep hope alive.

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