The Meaning of Home

Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri

Dzanc Books, 2019

Paperback, 197 pages, $17.00

Nino Cipri’s debut story collection is a wonderful exploration of the meaning of home, and what it means when we find it, if we ever do. Throughout each of these stories, characters are asked to relate to a new and changing reality, whether that be finding new life after divorce or rumbling with a mother’s rejection after telling her about being transgender. Cipri, a queer and trans/non-binary writer, explores many LGBTQ+ narratives through wonderful, often magical, speculative stories. Each story ponders on what family and reality look like, especially when others have turned their back on you.

The speculative aspects of this collection are done so well that it doesn’t matter how weird the plot might become, the reader is ready to roll with the surreality. In “Let Down, Set Free,” Melissa finds a floating tree on her neighbor’s yard and rides it into her future. In “A Silly Love Story,” Jeremy has a nectarine-loving poltergeist in his closet. In “Presque Vu,” Clay is haunted by keys magically appearing in his throat. These elements, wonderfully executed, allow the narrative to speak on a deeper-than-just-weird level. The reader physically experiences Melissa being uprooted and lifted off to another reality. Jeremy learns about his love-interest only after they bond over the poltergeist. Clay, not knowing what the keys physically unlock, has to wait for the other haunts to find out his future. Each of these characters has a tangible element to help ground the narrative, even if all the trees aren’t similarly rooted.

Other stories find their strength in form. In “Which Super Little Dead Girl ™ Are You?” the reader takes a Buzzfeed style quiz to find out which murdered girl they are. Through this imaginative form, the story contemplates what it would be like to be one of these little dead girls—how you’d live on after death, how you’d stay the same age, how you’d be different. In this fun yet harrowing story, Cipri creates a superhero-like adventure for the strong, spunky, and doomed girls who met their end too soon.

“Dead Air” is another story with experimentation in form. The entire story is told through a translation of recorded material, which makes the story ninety-nine percent dialogue. Nita, the person with a recorder, crafts an art project by recording interviews with her lovers. Because of the form, we fall in love with Maddie along with Nita, and we feel just as confused when trying to understand Maddie’s past in her small hometown. The mystery that holds people in the town, that eventually kills them, is still hidden from Nita and the reader, but we believe Maddie when she says we have to get out before it’s too late.

The heartbreaking “The Shape of My Name” is a hallmark example of this collection’s theme of changing reality. The narrator, a transgender person, wrestles with their mother’s rejection after their coming out. This story, like the others, is speculative in nature. The family has the ability to time travel, though that travel is limited to the years 1905 to 2321. This story effectively bends the view of reality within the narrator. They’ve lived in multiple timelines, gone back in time to see their mother, to come out to her while she was still young. The most heartbreaking moment of the story happens when Heron, as the narrator has chosen to be called, shows up to their mother’s stoop and sees their younger self playing in the background. The mother questions having a son, and they tell her she already has one. She pushes her child away, so the child can’t see their future self, and closes the door on Heron. “The Shape of My Name” gives us a character who has not only lost their mother because of her rejection but has also lost her to time.

Whereas “The Shape of My Name” is about a family torn apart, “Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff” focuses on a family mending. This final story of the collection, the pivotal story, follows three ex-colleagues and ex-friends—Damian, Lin, and Ray—as they work on a documentary about their discovery of the ossicarminis, an extinct weasel-wolverine animal that had supposed sentience. This story plays with form by being in all three points of view and by having section breaks that are sound bites from their interviews with the documentary crew. These sections allow each character to have a voice and a perspective throughout this narrative. When you reach the end, there’s never a question about what each character thought or what they felt in the moment.

The close proximity of the documentary allows Damian, Lin, and Ray to hash out their past to help rebuild their future. Damian, who wrote a book on the ossicarminis, finds his friends resent him for not including them and taking all of the money for himself. Lin, a PhD candidate, has the bones of the creature in her apartment while writing her dissertation and is caught not protecting them the way she should. Ray questions the dig and wonders about the ethics of not only monetizing the destruction of a type of sentient being, but also removing them from their final resting place. The dig has previously torn apart the group’s work relationship, as well as their friendship, because of their difference in perspective on the same event. This story showcases the blending of personal and professional relationships and how even ones that have been cut off for years can be mended with a little digging. When we see this trio drive off happily into the distance, we hope that the other characters in this collection can someday do the same.

Homesick successfully confronts changing (and challenging) realities and gives hope that no matter what today looks like, there’s always hope that tomorrow will be better, and that there’s always a place for you out there—you just have to find it.

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The Voices of Women

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade

Noctuary Press, 2019

Paperback, 270 pp., $16.00

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose brings together the voices of poets Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade whose harmonizing take the reader across a spectrum of topics—marriage, divorce, body image, motherhood, queerness, and womanhood. Duhamel and Wade’s use of the lyric essay format, propelling the reader by associative leaps and thematic recurrence rather than causal narratives, allows them to zoom in on individual words and concepts in order to peel back their associations layer by layer. This elasticity of the conversation between the two women pulls the reader into the conversation with them in a unique way. The authors are writing from different perspectives, Duhamel almost a generation apart in age from Wade, yet their assemblage of experience blends in such a way that it becomes a kind of Everywoman experience. The sisterhood cadence throughout is undeniable and takes us places we might not expect to go. One can imagine sitting on a sofa, late into the night, listening to an intimate conversation with two women as they compare their lives’ experiences and explore the challenges of womanhood from a generational standpoint—this is the intrinsic quality of The Unrhymables.

The book is constructed with thirteen thematically linked essays created by micro-memoirs, some of which are sub-titled, from both Duhamel and Wade, moving the conversation back and forth in a fluid motion within each essay. The most challenging aspect for the reader, but evidence of a discernible synergy between the two authors, is the fact that their voices are indistinguishable at times—only separated by inferences to their sexual orientation, coming of age experiences, and their childhood—which are filled with societal and cultural references that invariably reveal the particular author. In the essay “Pink,” Wade learns about the Nazi downward facing “pink triangle” used to identify homosexual Jews, and Duhamel responds with her experiences in New York City during the AIDS crisis and how the Silence=Death slogan’s logo “turned that pink triangle right-side-up.” Both authors experience the same kind of emotions, only years apart in different contexts. This kind of navigational point occurs frequently throughout the prose and directs the conversations. Should the reader not know some of the more intimate details of the authors’ lives, nor have read other works by Duhamel and Wade, one could conceivably read the text without knowing exactly which one is speaking.

However, the hybrid nature of this collection is what takes The Unrhymables to new heights. From writing about colors—“White,” “Pink,” “Red,” “Blue,” “Green,” and “Black”—and exploring their personal, historical, and cultural associations, to constructing a Scrabble edition including tandem essays “N₁E₁A ₁R₁”and “E₁ R₁ A₁ S₁,”both of which deal with homosexual acceptance in society, Duhamel and Wade take every opportunity to speak through other poets and writers or mention their work. In fact, the book has no less than 188 references. In an especially powerful and poignant moment, Wade recites Orlando poet Stephen Mills’s poem “The History of Blood” to weave into the narrative her fears about gay violence, “Another gay boy got bashed in Miami this week, nearly beaten / to death on his way home from a club. The man’s fist / smashed the boy’s glittered face, like my glittered face dancing / at the gay bar every weekend.”

The essay “S₁A₁L₁T₁” sings with Wade’s inattentional-blindness, referencing the poet Elizabeth Bishop without explanation to the audience. The reference is subtle to an average reader—probably missed by most—but familiar to poetry readers. Wade points out in the opening lines of the essay, “If this were chess, I’d choose the bishop and call her Elizabeth. I’d praise her for her smooth slants, her incomparable zigs and zags—never straightforward, never straight back. ‘Elizabeth is a queen’s name’ someone would say. Only poets would understand.” She follows this with “For years I read ‘In the Waiting Room’ in waiting rooms.” Then, a paragraph later, she does it again as she talks about ordering an omelet for breakfast while in Colorado and how she is chastised by her order-taker for expecting the waitress to associate a Denver omelet with a Western omelet, “But when the fluffed eggs appeared, folded sideways and smothered with sharp cheese, it was ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’—another Bishop poem.” All of this to explain the “extra-textual juxtaposition” of bringing art and life together in a literal fashion. It’s this sideways slide found in Wade’s work that makes her such a joy to read.

Nonfiction prose is a departure from Duhamel’s award-winning poetry, but experimentation within her work is not. She is known for playing with pantoums, villanelles, and forms of her own invention such as “porn poetry.” And it’s not the first time she has paid homage to her women forebearers or engaged with feminism in her work. Readers will not find the whimsical poet of “Rated R” in the pages of this collection, but they will find Duhamel’s candid approach as she brings to life the times in our history when our mothers and grandmothers faced much tougher times in terms of equality, racism, and sexism. On occasion, the poet does emerge and takes the reader on a delicious ride, as in “Kaboom,” the sub-titled essay within “Word Problems,” where she writes about wonky words such as boondoggle and conundrum. She even thanks Edgar Allen Poe for tintinnabulation. Readers will appreciate her simple and subversive delivery as she tackles difficult subjects, bringing wisdom to the page. Her details of the sixties and seventies, where many of her experiences resonate with an older generation of readers, also offer deep insight as her gaze is juxtaposed against Wade’s younger perspective.

The final culmination of the dual voices—and the voices even beyond their own two—comes in a glossary at the end of the book akin to Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker’s Fabulas Feminae; Duhamel and Wade’s version includes more than a hundred women and girls from the authors’ personal lives as well as public figures, from past and present, literary figures, and fictional characters. It’s really an homage to the wonderful mixture of women—the scholars, the feminists, the divas, the poets, the victims, the comedians, the fashionistas, the heroines, the goddesses, the icons, the red-heads, the singers, the writers, the sirens, the childhood friends, the movie stars, the classmates, and yes, even the grandmas—who inspired or influenced Duhamel and Wade specifically, but all of us really, in some way.

The book feels like a fresh approach to collaboration. While the authors each take turns giving their thoughts on the same subjects, I didn’t find an established order as I read. In other words, I might read two essays written by Duhamel, followed by one of Wade’s. As in a conversation, one person might have more to say than the other, and this is what makes their collaboration so fluid and natural. By placing their voices side by side, they allow the reader to gain insight into what has or hasn’t changed from one generation to the next. More importantly, I believe the prose embodies the voices of all women, past and present, as influencers of Duhamel and Wade.

After reading The Unrhymables, I have to ponder the idea of the collaboration as a hybrid in addition to the body of work. It’s that sideways slide again: the idea of the offspring from two varieties, composed of different elements, produced through human manipulation for a specific genetic characteristic. The result is a consonant cluster of sorts—Dwade, I call it—each of their notes produced simultaneously to create a particularly savory tone.

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Her Affective Labor

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles by Diane Raptosh

Etruscan Press, 2020

Paperback, 116 pp., $17.00

Diane Raptosh is the poet of the unlikely.

Of course, any creative act in itself is rather unlikely, whether it is the cosmic creation ex nihilo in which the universe is manifested out of an accident of strong and weak forces converging and dissipating, leaving some errant subatomic particles behind to crash together for the big bang, or the simple clapping of hands, a rhythm, a disruption, a repetition. A creative act is the convergence of everything, an impossibility, which only has to happen once, and there it is: the dreamy reverb by David Roback, the breath between H. D.’s lines, the abdominal contraction before Bill T. Jones’s turns.

Over her thirty-year career, Raptosh has produced wicked, loopy, political, surrealistic, and unforgettable poetry: experimental and wild, a free-roaming poet of the Idaho sagelands. Her work leaps madly into the mud-pools of language with a child’s abandon, but with an intelligence that is hard, uncompromising, and disturbing in its own playfulness.

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles completes Raptosh’s verse trilogy, a project nobly supported by Etruscan Press. The first in the series is American Amnesiac (2013), a book-length, ghazal-sequenced monologue spoken by a former Goldman Sachs exec, who seeks to recover his identity, to reconstitute himself as an improbable and decent citizen. In the second book, Human Directional (2016), Raptosh leaves the individual to explore the collective and atomized human consciousness via a slapdash of prose poems, exploded catalogues, and single-line jokes. In her trilogy, we are stuck in the hell-scape of an American post-capitalistic society: racist, punitive, commodified, cruel, and degrading. Yet, multi-vocal and therefore hopeful, precisely because of the fissures and fractures that occur amid all the digital noise.

With Dear Z, Raptosh brilliantly answers this world with a set of letters addressed to our pre-embryotic, single-cell existence: a single fertilized ovum, a “love speck,” which drifts down the fallopian tubes. Perhaps finding purchase on the uterine wall and becoming, and perhaps just being flushed out of the system entirely and not becoming. We will find that in Raptosh’s poems this difference matters perhaps less than we’d think.

The voice is materternal, not that of the mother but of the aunt: intimate, loving, world-weary, and transgressive. It is a voice that is fully queered and unmoored, wholly original:

Dear Zero,

Most humans evolved only once—in what’s likely

East Africa, 200,000 years ago. So don’t freak

when I shout out We share the same mama:

Mitochondrial Eve. Unlike the one in the Garden

of Eden, mtEve was not the sole woman on Earth,

but the one who made her descent into everyone.

So pray tell, teeny homunculus, as the line

from “Time of the Season” by the Zombies,

that British Invasion band, goes: Who’s your daddy?

Please know that should you come be, Big Data

will quickly conceive you as processing stream,

a more or less numeral entity—lacking internal lyric:

that giddiest hymnal. That solemn bee. The think feeling

fist that is inwit. Queerest iota, does this kind of talk

smack of hokum-humanist seething on my part?

Our shared mother mtEve was mostly a kink of statistics,

a ringing quark of a person: a true lovely, who probably

knew to venerate horses.

Here is a whirlwind of what Raptosh does so singularly well: the careening slant rhymes and punning, the clack of assonant syllables against sharp end consonants, and the driving free associations that make perfect sense. But amid all this dazzle, Raptosh is in impressive control of her material.

In this passage, she isolates “inwit,” a word she introduces in Human Directional, and a word she parses out in her essay, “Poetry is Where the Action Is”:

. . . inwit suggests the inner senses and interior sensibility: that collection of inner faculties the poet sets store by. Inwit is, by my reckoning, the very womb in which the poet thrives.

It seems to me that the entirety of Dear Z is an exceptionally crafted articulation and enactment of inwit. Indeed, one suspects it is a quality deep in our mitochondrial DNA, somewhere in our circuitry, we just know we must somehow “venerate horses.” Our capacity to engage in affective labor—to love, to imagine, to be awed, to empathize, to connect—surely comes from that first “mama” that Raptosh names.

Throughout these letters to the zygote, the speaker faithfully accepts the binary of becoming and not becoming, and she celebrates this suspended (and free-falling) state. After all, even the zygote that does “not become” has “been,” a sack of genetic coding as ancient as the first evolution.

Dear Z,

in the presence

of your latency—

that vacant shoe,

those shades

of facelessness—

let’s say

I think I feel

the sound of dots moving.

Our ancestral connections, both to the past and future generations, are but Morse code taps on our own genetic coding. We have the same mother running through us, the sound of dots moving. An un-extraordinary miracle-mirror. A tapping. Let.us.be.k.i.n.d.

Diane Raptosh gives us a speaker who possesses that womb-wisdom, who is generous and critical in her advice, especially when the news is harrowing. We have a great poet among us with commitment and daring and craft, who teases us and indulges us with her unconditioned and unconditional wisdom.

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’50s Movie Stars and Hong Kong Metro Stations

Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold by Dorothy Chan

Spork Press, 2018

Paperback, 103 pages, $18

Everyone deals with their own sense of identity. We’ve all experienced our own unique moments, and presenting these moments in a way that conveys the inherent emotions that lie therein can be a personal, soul-bearing thing. In Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, Dorothy Chan’s poetic protagonist talks about her life in snippets. Through tales of men the speaker has dated and meals she’s cooked with her family, we see how a Chinese-American identity was shaped, and how that affects the speaker’s everyday life in blunt, humorous poems that involve ’50s movie stars and Hong Kong metro stations.

The three sections in this book are divided by subject matter. Though everything connects because it all relates back to the narrator’s persona, the sections are split between overarching themes of family, culture, and experiences with dating and men in general. The reader is walked through these sections with a tone that feels half-sarcastic until it doesn’t. We get long lines, pop culture references in tow, that give the reader a chance to understand the speaker on a personal level. For example, when talking about attractive men, Chan writes, “… O, I don’t get wet for / the Hot Dads of US Weekly or the dad / bods of Star, but give me Frank Sinatra’s / voice crooning in a Hong Kong cab.”

The poems switch between multiple poetic forms that lean to the side of the traditional, including odes and sonnets, and yet use blunt language and modern-day references, producing a delightful whiplash in the reader. The easy way in which these verses connect with a contemporary reader makes this book a pleasure, and the book holds a similar range emotionally as well. Despite the fun nature of a lot of these poems, Chan doesn’t shy away from presenting the reader with poignant moments, such as one in which the narrator notes, “my mom tells me spirits never leave / their homes, and that we believe our loved ones / visit us in dreams about a week after they pass away, to say I love you.” Chan simultaneously opens up to the reader without presenting her cultural identity as something grim, sorrowful, or alien.

This is Chan’s second book. Her first, Chinatown Sonnets, also tackles some of the same overarching themes. What comes through most is the consideration of belonging as a concept. Chan’s narrator speaks to her parents in a mix of Cantonese and English, both languages belonging to vastly different countries and cultures. The speaker eats traditional Chinese meals with her father, but is attracted to bleached-blonde, lithe, toned surfer boys. There is a feeling of belonging to each place, but that is juxtaposed with a feeling of otherness. What exactly dictates the need to belong—or do you ever really need to belong? Chan tackles these questions by presenting her unyielding and unapologetic opinion on the subject, while also showing a complex identity can be exactly what makes a person belong. Her speaker is a loving daughter. She feels a certain sense of kinship with movie stars and musicians of the ’50s and ’60s. She still misses her childhood dog. All of these things make her unique, and she is confident in that—she belongs within herself. This exploration of the concept speaks of a time when she was not confident in this. We can all fall short—we can all question our place in society, at home and among friends. She has ruminated on this topic, and presented in a style that makes this book not only a beautiful read, but an enlightening one.

Chan accomplishes the feat of speaking about identity and belonging, and how they relate to the place one feels like they’re from—and she more than succeeded. This quick read is a gorgeous display of experimentation with poetic form and voice. The message it sends—though the words are personal to Chinese-American life—leaves the reader feeling just a little more confident about themselves, justified in the individuality and peculiarity of their own experiences, too.

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The Haunting of Memory and History

Hard Damage by Aria Aber

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Paperback, 126 pp., $17.95

The collage of memories that make up Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Winner, offers an opportunity to reckon with the undeniable fact that poetry offers a home for the past and an understanding of our relationship to history. Memory is integral to why poetry must exist. American poet Ira Sadoff tells us that “memory is required for poetry,” and what Aber does is showcase this truth along with the complexity of memory, while questioning whether “memory is a privilege.”

Hard Damage chronicles Aber’s understanding of the trauma ingrained within her familial lineage stemming from violence and suffering the family experienced in Afghanistan, as she grapples with the wounds inflicted by the political and personal remnants of history. In the poem “Family Portrait,” we get a glimpse of the microcosm of the family and how the uncovering of memory is ingrained within the familial unit. Aber writes:

Family, to me,

Is only the sweat of female secrecy

This discussion of family provides more nuance as we learn about the speaker’s mother’s political imprisonment in poems such as “Asylum” and “Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?” The aperture widens as the poems convey the inescapable reality of just how much the political is immersed in the personal or the generational:

. . . How much

of my yearly tax is spent to bomb

the dirt that birthed me?. . .

Aber challenges us to investigate a painful and violent history that begets a continued destructive present, and how these events shape the wounds that are passed down again and again through the generations. Hard Damage asks, with urgency, how living through—and with— trauma, violence, and war engages our understanding of the self, lineage, and survival. How does one live with the enveloping experience of violence? How does one access ancestral history and language? How can all of this be reclaimed?

By starting her collecting within the realm of the personal, Aber prepares us to journey into a series of enveloping worlds or sections of poetry interrogating the questions of access, history, language, and reclamation. Each world presents not only the opportunity to grapple with language but also to grapple with the reality of war. In the series of poems starting with “Rilke and I,” each poem elevates the conventions of the prose poem to discuss how we remember what has happened to us. Aber writes:

My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women’s Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me …

Within the poetic experience, the speaker is working to reconcile intergenerational trauma and the reality of being born after the original trauma occurred. How are we meant to grasp these memories? How do we accept that we are removed from specific traumas as individuals but are very much intertwined with the remnants of our family’s pain? Each of the worlds explored in Hard Damage offers a different understanding of the haunting nature of memory, of political violence, and the attempt to move forward. Aber’s chronicles of the historic realities of her mother’s political imprisonment, coupled with her awareness of her own privilege, creates a tapestry of the different ways that memories are consume us.

Aber’s voice is entirely her own within this collection, and yet it’s made possible by her intentions of honoring the resilience and death of her ancestors. Not only is Hard Damage a conversation with history, but it also presents a rich voice conversing with various aspects of history. From speaking to the German poet Rilke, using the etymology of German, English, and Arabic words and those of the speaker’s own family, Aber’s collection explores what we are left with when investigating the roots of our world today.

The profound attention Aber pays on the line-level to the crafting of her poems presents many opportunities to engage in the depth of moments recalled by the speaker and the intensity these moments have for the personal and the collective. In “Nostos,” the speaker notes:

In English the body is both dead

And alive, but I know the blight of grief

Has a heart and thus will love, and learn, and thusly

Learn to hate—

Ira Sadoff, in “Poetic Memory, Poetic Design,” does not simply claim that memory is needed for poetry. He asserts that “syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues line to line,” is needed for poetic expression. Alberto Ríos tells us that “lines are what distinguish poetry from all other art forms, and therefore they intrinsically mean something. They help us to see what makes a poem a poem.” Aber not only expresses a deep sense of care and attention on the line level but also a commitment in keeping the integrity of what a line must do in a poem.

On the line level, the poems in Hard Damage break and disrupt our own understanding In the poem, “At the Hospital, My Language,” for instance, Aber writes:

cousin with no empathy. But family

is family; the awkward shell

I harbor, crack—avian eyelids,

hospital, yolk—

These lines are not only enjambed, but media caesura allows for a break and redefinition of the language before them. Because of Aber’s syntactical construction, our understanding of family is reconstructed. It takes on multiple meanings. In Aber’s crafting of the line, she evokes multiple interpretations and provides a deepening of our understanding of the line itself and the poem as a whole. These moments of intentional meaning on the line level contribute to what I find most compelling about Aber’s collection. Hard Damage works to bridge the micro space of the line to the macro understanding of what makes poetry so altering to the reader. It is in the singular moments of surprise, redefinition, and nuance created within the line that lead us to unearth meaning.

This unearthing reveals the personal and political history that sits at the crux of the collection. Aber’s yearning to show the intricacies of the Afghanistan–US relationship, the Afghanistan–German relationship, and her own understanding of the traumas these political relationships have caused creates a collection intense in its ability to interrogate the political structures, while providing a deep sense of what it feels for a person to grieve the aftermath of violence, war, and imprisonment.

It is nearly impossible to not feel the haunting density of the memories Aber explores as we immerse ourselves further into the collection. The poems ask us to be consumed by the intricate experiences of the speaker, while also carrying the responsibility and gravity of the reality Aber exposes. An entire history cannot possibly be conveyed in a mere hundred pages, yet what Aber recounts is done with striking clarity and an acute awareness of the privilege writers have to tell a story. She says:

It is a terrible time

To be alive.

I say this with the privilege

Of being alive

We are born in the midst of past and ongoing violence. What does that mean as we reconcile our identities with the trauma rooted in our ancestry? What does it mean to be generations removed, and yet still contending with the inherited trauma of our ancestors? This collection reminds us of that undertaking. It urges us to wonder, reflect, and determine how to deal with the damage.

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Visiting Eight Little Universes

Quantum Convention, by Eric Schlich

University of North Texas Press, 2018

Paperback, 192 pages, $14.95

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction

By the time I reached the end of the first page of Eric Schlich’s Quantum Convention, I was engrossed in the world created in the eponymous opening story, where the protagonist, Colin, attended a “Quantum Convention” of his alternate selves from parallel timelines, in search of “Perfect Me,” or at least “Happy Me.” Then, once Colin headed home, “step[ping] through from the Marriott lobby to the Days Inn lobby in my home uni,” Schlich offered me seven more universes I wanted to step into and explore, from the revealing dreams of “Lucidity” to the set of The Wizard of Oz in “Not Nobody, Not Nohow.”

Schlich’s talents extend beyond cool ideas to clever prose and layered characterization. He moves deftly from humor to tragedy, even expertly riding the waves of tragicomedy, making his stories fun to read without coming off as shallow or glib. “Merlin Lives Next Door,” for example, begins with a vibrant and funny scene in which the wizard of the title “sneezes and flies into last Saturday when I was doing some landscaping” and the protagonist literally “yelled at him to get off my lawn.” With clever references to Arthurian legend—and other well-known wizards—“Merlin Lives Next Door” made me laugh a lot (pun possibly intended). But the story dips into pathos, as well, expressing the deep loneliness of an existence “unstuck from time” in which Merlin never stays in the same time period for more than nine months.

Schlich draws his characters with the same skill that shapes his prose, whether it’s the young girl wrestling with her faith in “Night Thieves” or the stifled one-eyed narrator in “Journal of a Cyclops.” Actually, the characterization I enjoyed most in “Journal of a Cyclops” wasn’t the narrator, Owen, but Darien, a boy whose attempts to befriend Owen offer the social contact that a housebound Owen desperately needs, but constantly hover on the edge of exploiting Owen’s unusual “birth gift” to impress other, cooler teenagers. Aware of this possibility, Owen struggles to take ownership of his atypical appearance, writing to his psychiatrist, “If I can survive this, I can survive anything.” Schlich gives Darien more complexity than the average middle-school bully, showing how Darien’s attempts to use Owen spring not from the standard Mean Girls attitude of a popular kid but from Darien’s own desire for the esteem of others.

Though most of Quantum Convention’s stories have modern settings—often, but not always, with fantastical elements—I would feel remiss if I failed to mention “Keeners,” the tale of orphan girls once paid to cry at funerals, not so much for the narrative of the keeners themselves but for the wonderful and, of course, tragic fairy tale of the banshee embedded within. In Schlich’s version, the banshee is a beautiful young woman whose rotted, tongueless mouth disgusts all her suitors. The banshee’s dying mother teaches her a sublimely beautiful song that must only be sung one night of the year, and complications ensue. Rather than spoil the ending with too much detail, let me say only that it involves a foolish king and a deaf gravedigger.

That said, Quantum Convention isn’t perfect. Schlich counts among the many writers who seem to struggle with endings, though he tackles them with more style and aplomb than most. While not every story in the book misses the mark at the end—“Lucidity,” for example, concludes right where it needs to—Schlich tends to err on the side of ending his stories too early rather than too late, potentially frustrating readers, as in “Lipless,” where I desperately wanted to see a final encounter between the married, bisexual protagonist and the straight man he’d loved since college, one that would give both the character Marcus and myself some closure. Sometimes Schlich leaves a little too much work for the reader to do at the end of the story, as in “Not Nobody, Not Nohow,” where despite the strong shared motif of The Wizard of Oz, I struggled to find the emotional parallels between the two protagonists: the actress reduced to a “crone” by her role of the Wicked Witch and a young boy humiliated by his classmates for dressing up as Dorothy. While Schlich offers me decent conclusions to either Margaret Hamilton’s storyline or the unnamed boy’s, they still feel like two separate stories; the ending’s attempts to tie them together fall short.

Despite this minor criticism, Quantum Convention remains absolutely worth the read. As Colin learns by the time he leaves his own quantum convention, none of us are perfect, either.

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Jam Session in Poems

Cross Country, by Jeff Newberry and Justin Evans

WordTech Editions, 2019

Paperback, 110 pages, $19

In Cross Country, a collaborative book of epistolary poems published by WordTech Editions (2019), Jeff Newberry and Justin Evans pay homage to poet Richard Hugo. Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977) popularizes an epistolary tradition that originates in Ancient Rome and finds acclaim with Horace and Ovid. Hugo’s poems often address other poets such as Charles Simic, William Matthews, Denise Levertov, and William Stafford. Readers become voyeurs, dropped into intimate conversations between some of the most prominent poets of the twentieth century.

Hugo’s poems are often imagistic reports of a place, as he writes in “Letter to Wagoner from Port Townsend”: “Dear Dave: Rain five days and I love it.” These epistles transcend the reportage of place idiosyncrasies to reveal Hugo’s vulnerabilities and anxieties—both about himself as well as the world around him. In “Letter to Bell from Missoula,” Hugo writes: “Months since I left broke down and sobbing / in the parking lot, grateful for the depth / of your understanding […].” It is this balance of the specific details of a place with the personal thoughts of a brilliant writer and flawed human that has been so appealing to Hugo’s readers over many years.

In Hugo’s letter poems, we are only privy to one side of the conversation, however. We do not know how the addressees respond to Hugo—or if they respond at all. Hugo’s epistolary poems are decidedly one-sided; Newberry’s and Evans’ Cross Country, however, is a mutual conversation where both poets relay their deepest fears, desires, and hopes—to each other and to their lucky readers.

Evans sets the stage for Cross Country in one of the earliest poems in the book, “Letter to Newberry about Past Memories of Colorado”: “Dear Jeff: I think we’re all looking / for something, looking to run / to or from something.” Indeed, Cross Country feels like a search for a meaningful spiritual faith, for familial acceptance, and for a way to exist in a contemporary world that often seems mired in violence, sadness, and a persistent irrationality. This is a book that emerges from a contemporary scene that includes the mass shootings in Sandy Hook and Orlando and the 2016 presidential election, but it is also a book that asks looming personal and philosophical questions about love and loss, a book where we “want to see the mystery unfold, / complex as it might be” (Evans).

Evans and Newberry allow readers to see them at their most vulnerable—particularly when they broach the topics of their children, as well as of their own fathers. In a particularly tender sequence entitled “Letter to Evans: Like Waves Breaking,” Newberry describes his fears about his young daughter’s spina bifida, and ends the poem by writing: “I take each breath with her, willing my lungs / do the work for her. She sleeps and I sleep.” Newberry’s helplessness is profound, but it is in moments such as this one where a subsequent poem from Evans acknowledges Newberry’s anxiety and empathizes with him: “As a father myself, I / understand what you are saying, though / I cannot know the specifics of your fears” (Evans). The dialogue that Evans and Newberry create in Cross Country is deeply moving precisely because in it they engage fully in the difficulties of each other’s lives and offer each other comfort and solace.

If literature’s job is to teach us what it means to be human and how to empathize with one another, then Cross Country delivers those lessons in honest and accessible poems. Evans’ and Newberry’s narratives weave in and out of each other organically. It seems as though we are present at a blues jam session where the musicians have known each other for so long that they finish each other’s riffs. In fact, in the penultimate poem of the book, Newberry writes, “Justin, when you unseal this poem, remember / that it is made of voice the way that music is made / from the guitar player’s deft fingers.” The music in Cross Country will break your heart. Just like the greatest songs, though, these poems also sound the bells of hope and grit because, as Evans reminds us, “We must each / set the bar each morning as we greet the new day, / as each new day is certain to find us, willing or not.”

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The Voices That Listen Behind Closed Doors

Up in the Main House & Other Stories by Nadeem Zaman

Unnamed Press, 2019

Paperback, 176 pages, $17

In many books that follow the struggles of the servant / lower class, the characters are so defined by their relations to those above them that their existences seem dependent upon and subservient to their masters and mistresses. Nadeem Zaman, however, circumvents this in his new and riveting short-story collection, Up in the Main House. By moving the master / upper class to the periphery, Zaman zooms in on the lives and humanity of those often oppressed in his birthplace of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The result is a collection of seven connected stories in which the protagonists contend with personal conflicts amidst social, religious, and political disparity and distress. In the titular story, Kabir must decide whether to stop his wife—Anwara—from playing mistress while the home’s owners are away, yield to her newfound power, or join her. Meanwhile, “The Caretaker’s Dilemma” explores Abdul Hamid’s struggle to negotiate a suitable marriage for his daughter before he dies while negotiating manipulative dowry shenanigans. In contrast, “The Happy Widow” follows Rosie Moyeen, a woman blamed for her husband’s death, as she tries to reconcile memories of her marriage with her bitter neighbor’s stories of ex-husbands.

Kabir’s description of his mistress as a “high-strung hag” at the beginning of his story starts the collection with one of the many unapologetic voices that populate it. When his wife puts on such a persona, the class-based conflicts of identity and power siege Kabir in more intimate ways than any master or mistress could. Ramzan—the old nightguard that winks with “both eyes”—advises Kabir to join his wife but also threatens a failed thief with death and imprisonment. The resulting dynamic is simultaneously hilarious and unsettling. Zaman entertains readers while keeping them constantly aware of the characters’ potential fates. The deft handling of character, voice, and tone are a joy to read.

While “The Caretaker’s Dilemma” possesses the same elements of craft as “Up in the Main House,” it employs them to subtler effect while weaving in interiority, dagger-like dialogue, and social masks. Hamid is repulsed by his friend Sobhan’s greed but still agrees to negotiate a dowry since he desires to protect his daughter from the “shame” that is “always the burden of the girl’s side.” Zaman simultaneously humanizes Dhaka’s upper class and increases the story’s sense of dread when Harun Qureshi, Hamid’s master, tells him that he will pay for the dowry and warns him: “Whatever your friend asks you for, don’t say no.” Sobhan, on the other hand, reveals his true nature when he says, “In money matters even family comes second.” His smiles, underhanded insults, speeches about “honest … men,” and objectification of people make him a character the reader loves to hate. Even his servants are tainted, as can be seen in how they “help with the luggage” the first time Hamid arrives but are unwilling to do so when they think the deal is done. In all of this, Zaman shows that none are free of this society’s expectations—and consequences when they are not met.

“The Happy Widow” synthesizes parts of the other stories’ styles. Mrs. Zaheer, Rosie’s neighbor, possesses a blunt voice. She describes her ex-husbands as “a bastard of the highest order” and “a gambling, philandering louse,” respectively. In contrast, Rosie exhibits a complex interiority like Hamid’s. The story examines a female perspective not often addressed. Rosie admits that “the way [Mr. Moyeen] loved her scared her,” and the story explores her reconciling with what she did and thought about doing to test whether he was human, fallible. Because of her thoughts and actions, it is easy to dismiss Rosie as a near-sociopathic woman if one forgets the cultural grounding established in “The Caretaker’s Dilemma” and at the beginning of Rosie’s own tale. However, “The Happy Widow” is an amazingly subtle and complex tale about a woman coming to terms with her story in a culture that says she has none. Through small, precisely crafted actions—such as worrying if she had washed the dishes wrong and, in an act of rebellion, “[leaving a picture] slightly out of place”—Zaman allows Rosie and his readers to acknowledge and break away from enforced stories.

Though links to the Qureshi family are what primarily connect the stories, they are also united by how the protagonists’ actions are motivated by pride. In a moment of clarity, Kabir realizes,

His damn foolish pride; that had done it. Just like it had done it countless times over the years, … doing no more in the end than undoing his grit to push it away, leaving him as he was now, too far gone to turn back, give in.

The collection begs the reader to consider if the preservation of pride always leads to self-destruction and when pride is worth the damage it can cause.

Amidst this conflict and complexity, Zaman weaves fresh, compelling, figurative language. Songs are as “out of joint” as their singers. “Laughter rattle[s]” around and within characters “like marbles in a tin can.” Stories are repeated like the songs in a “precious record collection.” Life is askew in slight, beautifully unsettling ways.

The collection is not perfect: long stretches of dialogue dilute intense moments and pull the reader out of the stories’ world at times. Nor is it for everyone. The stories often do not end cleanly as many Western stories do and, therefore, ask the reader to imagine the future fallout or triumph. While I find Zaman’s choice to end his stories on moments of change wise, other readers might feel cheated of a final scene. As a whole, though, the book is an engaging collection of stories that entertain and discomfort as great stories do. When I finished, I found that I—not the characters—was the one with my ear against a closed door, hoping to hear another word.

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The Thing That Has Caged Them

Bloomland, by John Englehardt

Dzanc Books, 2019

Hardcover, 192 pages, $26.95

Considering that we’re bombarded daily with footage from ground zero of one act of mass violence after another, I ask, “Do we need a novel about it?” After finishing the last page of John Englehardt’s stark, yet heartbreakingly human novel, Bloomland, the answer is a confident, “Yes, we do.” Because this novel isn’t about a mass shooting itself, which only takes about half a page. It’s about the closeness of circumstances a person has with a killer, the choices we make that define our behaviors, and the lives we come into contact with and ricochet away from.

Bloomland, which won the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, follows three characters: Rose, a young woman, a survivor of a natural disaster that killed her brother and who decides to attend college; Eddie, a professor at the same college Rose attends, married to a woman who’s more chaotic and alive than he is; and Eli, a young man in trouble, navigating the wrong choices of his life with a sense of malice and dourness. Each chapter covers a different moment in these characters’ trajectory toward tragedy, where they find themselves during the shooting, and what happens in its aftermath.

Bloomland is narrated in a perfectly executed second-person present until twenty pages in when the line, “I still think about you two every time one of my students gets engaged,” appears. We discover later that this first-person narrator is someone named Steven, who crafts a narrative style that shifts and skews details of events according to the identity of each of the three characters. This speculation of narrative is in the very DNA of a second-person narrator narrating for others. We accept that there’s no way for a person to know the lives and minds of others. Steven is not a character, though the three characters interact with him at varying points—Eddie more than others. We know he’s either a professor or therapist at the college, but other than that, he is simply our narrator.

This second/first-person bifurcation of truth vs. narrative reality mimics the unknown narratives presented by the media to us during the aftermath of a tragic event—like the narrator, who is not purely omniscient and therefore provides us with details that, in the end, might not be real at all. This isn’t frustrating in any way. In fact, it’s very, very smart. Bloomland is a third-person, omniscient-style novel told in the second person from a first-person narrator, Steven.

The novel is about transformation. More specifically: reinvention. Events reinvent people and places. A location becomes a specific place after an act of mass violence, forever stained by the Event. Rose, scarred by the natural disaster that destroyed her life, seeks reinvention by shedding her small-town life and joining the anonymous comforts of college and sorority life. She gives herself the name “Rose”—though we never know her birth name because it isn’t something Steven knows. Later in the novel, Rose begins to assist a woman who photographs infant deaths. The pairing of these individual tragedies with the mass violence and natural disaster works perfectly. Each feels completely senseless and leads the survivors to wonder: Why?

Good books feel both foreign and familiar. Bloomland feels like a familiar conversation between people you’ve never met but instantly recognize. Englehardt’s work is so intuitive, so wise, that I nodded at lines, such as, “If you punish someone for feeling caged in, you can only expect them to view you as the thing that has caged them,” and “You’re like someone in debt who starts buying lottery tickets instead of declaring bankruptcy.” The novel isn’t consumed by the oncoming violence. It’s concerned with life, how we all move around each other. Englehardt treats the ways in which we hurt or help each other with authenticity. The good and the bad both feel natural.

Eli, the shooter in the novel, is not sympathetic, nor is he demonized. There are no excuses. The reason behind Eli’s act points to choice. Englehardt steps away from the idea of creating a victim out of the victimizer and instead presents an active agency. A crucial moment supporting this comes while Eli works on a farm cutting the beaks off baby chickens. He works with the farmer, doing the exact same job, and yet Eli sees the work as beneath him. But the farmer isn’t like that. The farmer doesn’t see it as anything other than work. It’s an active choice for Eli to see the things happening to him as, “Ohh, the world is against me.” He’s active in his negative view.

Later, the narrator tells us Eli thinks “that there is some preordained, fixed destiny [he is] fulfilling, when in reality it has just been retold to [him] so many times that there seems to be no original model after which you are patterned.” What has been retold is the idea that society makes the monster, which is what people like Eli believe. The truth is that Eli reinvents himself by choosing to view the world as “against him,” by choosing to turn to dealing drugs and harassing young women, by choosing to believe in Heisenberg’s theory that reality doesn’t exist unless it’s observed—which places those who exist in reality at the whim of their creator. He chooses if they live or die. With this, Englehardt points at those who look at small moments, or hard moments, and consider that we are alone in it, that we are the butt of some ethereal joke, and that all of society is against us and our only way to take revenge is to lash out with violence or aggression.

In the aftermath of Eli lashing out through an act of mass violence, Englehardt explores questions around the death penalty. Is it about justice? Where is the justice in the death of a perpetrator? For Englehardt’s characters, it’s a matter of closure: will his institutionalized death bring closure to their lives, to the deaths, to the Event? Englehardt navigates these questions in a way that has no finite answer—just like these moments have no logical finality. Each is an open wound that heals but always leaves a scar.

The best closing lines ease you out of a world, tell you that the characters will continue but you cannot join them. The end of Bloomland puts a period on our participation in the lives of these three characters. We see their progress toward personal resolution through healing wounds and personal growth. This is often what makes finishing a good book so difficult—we don’t want to leave. This novel is hard to leave, hard to not discuss after one finishes reading it. It’s important and should be required reading. But with Bloomland, the closing line leaves that world open by pointing out that in the aftermath of these tragedies, we don’t “examine its decay” but instead “focus on […] the sound.” It tells us that we are always going to live in the gloom of Bloomland, that this is how our world works—which is what makes it so terrifying and heartbreaking.

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Nuanced Performances of Perfected Women

The Bird Catcher and Other Stories, by Fayeza Hasanat

Jaded Ibis Press, 2018

163 pages, paper, $17.99

A suicidal wife longs to return to the sea. A young woman is presented to potential husbands. A Professor of Literature grapples with a language not her own. These are the women we meet in the opening pages of Fayeza Hasanat’s debut work of fiction, her short story collection, The Bird Catcher and Other Stories. Hasanat weaves a distinctly Bangladeshi-American perspective through each of her stories. Themes of Bangladeshi diaspora, systemic patriarchy, and the struggle to communicate through a language not one’s own provide the backdrop for a collection that feels intensely personal yet touches on the experiences of so many women from different backgrounds.

The author’s dedication to her father, acknowledging she never learned to be a “perfected woman,” quickly prepares the reader for stories of failed performances of structured femininity by women who fall short of society’s expectation. There are performances throughout The Bird Catcher, characters who fall short of the expectations of their families and husbands, their students, and society. Lyrical and complex language frame each of these stories, all of which are marked by struggle and many by deep sadness. Hasanat employs the occasional use of all caps or boldface type or a spare multiple exclamation points, techniques not often used in modern literature. And while this type of visual emphasis can distract from the pace of a piece, the style serves to strengthen the idea that the English language, perhaps, lacks the specificity and emotion the Bangladeshi characters seek in their self-expression.

In the collection’s first story, “The Anomalous Wife,” a Bangladeshi woman living in Florida, happy by her husband’s account, is determined to end her life by returning to the sea. Hasanat presents her story in three chapters detailing the woman’s experience as she enters a treatment facility for an attempted suicide. The final chapter, “The Letters,” is composed of the woman’s journal entries for the two weeks she is undergoing treatment. Through hyper-close interiority, Hasanat reveals the woman’s increasingly sardonic view of those outside her own experience: “Thirty years. I have lived in this country for thirty years, and still haven’t found a way to drill into these people’s head the concept of my existence as someone not-Indian-now, but once was.”

It’s through this closeness that the reader quickly feels the depth of emotion churning in each character. In “Bride of the Vanishing Sun,” Aandhi, born unexpectedly on the eve of a great storm, is considered less-than desirable because of her dark complexion. Hasanat explores the prevalence of colorism in her culture, and the patriarchal system that enforces it, following Aandhi as each attempt at marriage fails until a bribe is required to secure a suitable husband. Yet Hasanat’s rich and graceful language presents Aandhi’s complexion is as beauty through her mother’s eyes:

“Don’t look away!” Sufia wanted to scream. “Her eyes are darek and deep; her lips curve the prettiest of smiles; unruly ringlets hang over her smooth forehead… Ooo, look, look, look at my beautiful girl as she bends her head slightly like a fawn and offers herself for this sacrifice.”

In addition to addressing skin-color as a failure of womanhood in her culture, Hasanat also addresses infertility in “Darkling, I Listen,” and what constitutes gender normative performance in “The Hyacinth Boy.” In “When Our Fathers Die,” becomes a lens through which a Bangladeshi-American professor and her ethnocentric American student find a common connection through the loss of their fathers.

He laughed every time I struggled on a word that didn’t want to come out of my forked tongue: one part third world, one part hyphenated American. My words were Rapunzel’s exotic hair, frantically guarded by the mother not my own. Accidents were bound to happen if I did let that hair down.

In her sensitivity to such cultural issues, we see Hasanat’s research interests inform her fiction. As a professor of English Literature at the University of Central Florida, Fayeza Hasanat’s research focuses on, among others, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and South Asian Diaspora. She crafts her stories with both great care for her heritage and enormous respect for the characters and situations she portrays.

The Bird Catcher is published through Jaded Ibis Press, whose mission statement positions the press as “a feminist press committed to publishing socially engaged literature with an emphasis on the voices of people of color, people with disabilities, and other historically silenced and culturally marginalized voices.” The publisher has a keen interest in merging of various forms of art and media into works that expand in meaning and in audience, and the artwork in The Bird Catcher is one example of the ideal marriage between a text and the visual art presented within. Artist Chitra Ganesh’s illustrations appear on the book’s cover, as well as throughout the book. Surreal and stylized, Ganesh’s images reflect each story’s sentiment, and add a dark sense of beauty to the work.

Hasanat’s collection of beautifully rendered stories is not one to read through quickly. Each story requires—and rightfully deserves—a careful, close reading to absorb the richness of language and the nuanced characters in all of their complexity and beauty.

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Artifact

View from True North by Sara Henning

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95

In “Camera Lucida,” the second poem in Sara Henning’s collection View From True North, the speaker says, “Let me be witness, Lord,” and “the discreet // side of revelation still / calls me home.” Those lines delineate both intent and subject matter here, for the book is a long and heartbreaking catalogue of the ways in which human beings can be cruel to one another.

Henning acknowledges that her grandfather—her mother’s father—is the primary character in the book, and here is what we learn about him: he routinely physically and emotionally mistreated his children and wife; he routinely drank to excess, and was a mean drunk when he did so; he was a closeted homosexual, who kept a photographic and diary record of his many trysts, which his family discovered after he died; he infected his wife with an STD, then refused to admit it. Other poems center on the grandfather’s slow death from dementia, Henning’s father’s suicide, and an attempt at same by her mother.

The grandfather appears in virtually every poem in the book, and the poems assume a variety of forms, from couplet poems to prose poems to sonnet-like sequences. Henning skillfully matches form with subject matter throughout the book; the almost-sonnet sequences—extended meditations on the complicated relationship the speaker had with her grandfather and has with his memory— are among the most successful poems here.

But the salient features in View From True North are the highly inflected diction and the sometimes-knotty syntax. In almost every poem we’re reminded—explicitly—of the demons being dealt with. In “How I Learned I Had the Shine,” it’s “my grandfather’s rage / when his martini lunch / cuts through modesty,” and “Vermouth’s nude / currency flits through / his glass now.” In “For My Uncle, Who Learned to Fly,” we’re told of “the nights their father forced them / into the cellar, spurred him / onto his sister with joint locks / and vital point strikes.” In “Song,” it’s “blue notes / The kind a father sings / while forcing his daughter’s body / to the floor.” “Baptize Him in Dark Water” gives us “Sesame chicken // exit-wounding from his mouth unswallowed.”

In “Through a Glass Darkly,” the speaker’s mother, after the grandfather’s death, finds a journal in which he chronicled his many homosexual assignations. For the speaker, the journal is an “artifact”:

What she found—Polaroids glued on back leaves. Naked men posed over

beds, their hard cocks stretched over bellies like sunning garter snakes.

Barely legals standing akimbo, underwear cupping their scrotums. Entries

itemizing names, prices paid in U.S. dollars, dimensions of each organ limp and

aroused. The positions in which he fucked them.

In “Baptize Him in Dark Water,” we encounter “Jags of heat-whelmed ice too sultry // not to thieve through the specular reflection / spiral into a raid of light.” In “Concordance for My Grandfather’s Dementia,” “Fox piss, tail feathers, a geography / of organs lashed into countries—no / heuristic for this whole bruised longitude of animal.” “The End of the Unified Field” gives us “I’m ensnared by his stroboscopic / motion. I trace his dervishes through each illumination / angle-tangent plane. Surface normal. I watch him, / susurration in the sky’s braille of snow.”

It is, of course, through conscious choice and artistic inclination about how to approach subject matter that poems are made. But when such charged diction and syntax are used to present already emotionally loaded subject matter the result is a lot of surface noise. Again, perhaps that is Henning’s intent here; perhaps she feels that a more subdued approach would be insufficient to convey the impact of what is being described.

But the cumulative effect is to risk compromising subtext. Just as it is possible to describe a fish or a sandpiper or autumn in language that not only describes the creature or object but also implies the speaker’s connection to it, so it is possible to describe horrific human behavior and achieve the same result. In many places in Henning’s book I can vividly see the bruises and the emotional harm the characters are experiencing. But I have a more difficult time understanding why I am being told about it, what the speaker of the poem desires me to take from it. Revulsion, pity, shock—those are natural adjuncts to the stories we are being told. But a newspaper account can deliver that. On finishing a third reading of this book, I felt that I would not be picking it up again. I was sated, yet longing for a texture and substance that isn’t quite there.

There is no doubt that Henning is a talented poet, one who is adept with form and is well practiced in the ways of making poems. This reader would hope that in future books she might find subject matter that lends itself to more subtlety, that offers more than cruelty.

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One House Back from One House Down

One House Down by Gianna Russo

Madville Publishing, 2019

Paperback, 96 pages, $17.00

The majority of the fifty-three poems that populate One House Down, Gianna Russo’s second poetry collection, are set in and around Tampa, Florida. As the poet guides us through a bit of Tampa’s history—the noisy streets, the voices of a hundred years and more—we locate the growth of a community. The constant is Russo, a poet of Tampa—remarkable and protean, not unlike the city itself. Russo’s poems are an honest record of a city’s quick evolution, but most importantly, these poems are a love song for the family, friends, and neighbors who inhabit Tampa with her.

One of the collection’s standout poems, “Where Letha Lived,” addresses the value of the places we get to call home. The speaker’s father begins the poem: “You know she helped raise you, says Dad. / They were lovely people. If you went by, she always invited you in.” For the father, it is important that his daughter understand the privilege of acceptance, the willingness of another family to open their home to her. As the poem builds momentum, the speaker declares: “I don’t know how to feel about all this now.” The poet is on the cusp of discovery, and the early placement of the poem in the collection elicits expectation in the reader—will the poet discover how she feels about all this now?

The charm in “Where Letha Lived” lies in how we come to know Letha. About a third of the way into the poem, Russo re-introduces lines and images, and this process of doubling continues to the poem’s end. In a coy bit of plotting, the poem initiates the engagement of our memory. The stories Russo re-tells us about the life of Letha establish a sense of familiarity. Our memories become the speaker’s memories. Letha becomes recognizable. Russo’s use of memory, her coaxing us into our own memories of Letha is not coincidental. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. Russo is reaffirming her own fading memory of an important person in her life. The speaker says of Letha, “She must have had a kitchen garden. / Do I remember? No.” The poet also points out the cultural boundaries during this time in her youth: “One end of the street, a clutch of tickseed. / The other end, the Italians, their tomatoes and greens.” She sees, as an adult, the invisible lines of division we are ignorant of in youth—a part of how she feels about all this now.

Russo works in free verse, but she also employs other poetic forms with similar, deft skill. There is an ekphrastic poem, a pantoum, a poem in the form of a cookbook recipe, and a poem in the shape of a standardized test, but the literal centerpiece of One House Down is “Pecha Kucha for Big Guava.” There are interesting and unlikely cultural connections in that title alone. Big Guava is a nickname for Tampa, and pecha kucha is a Japanese presentation method involving twenty slides, each accompanied by twenty seconds of dialogue. American poet Terrance Hayes adapted this storytelling technique for poetry, and Russo puts the form to great use, galvanizing the collection.

Russo’s pecha kucha consists of twenty photographs of Tampa. Similar to the narrative construct of One House Down, the photographs move through time (1920–1954). The photographs are necessary for the poetic form, but the poems that accompany the photographs stand on their own. These poems are so exquisitely written; the photographs are rendered moot. Here, you’ll see what I mean—the poem without the photograph:

She’s standing there like a ghost, but really

it was her house first. Those cabbage palms,

bougainvillea, white gardenia, beauty bush.

Her crone of a house wreathed in cracker rose. Now:

sandspurs, boarded up windows, a locked door.

One House Down is a deep map of Tampa and of the poet’s familial connections to its neighborhoods. It’s not quite written to the scope of Ulysses, but this collection reads like a peripatetic narrative. What the reader discovers is a southern landscape replete with oaks, azaleas, and magnolias. “In the Midst of Magnolia” is a singular, southern poem that is dedicated to Joelle Renee Ashley. Russo conjures the aroma of the magnolia: “Your stories buried in the blooms, the creamy bowls of magnolia.” The alliteration is wonderful. But the speaker struggles to get it right—this poem in dedication: “The fading house on Rainbow Road / where voices ping-ponged in your brain,” or “A raunchy clause where the sexy you stretched herself out.” These descriptions lead to the poem’s conclusion:

The poem I wanted for you has failed me. Here:

On long drives out to your house stars made a cliché of the sky.

There was a gateway to grief and you walked through it.

Magnolia perfume is the gist of it.

The speaker wants us to believe that these final lines are what exist on the other side of failure—how all of us feel, or should feel—about love, about friendship and family, but especially about the places we call home.

The collection ends with “Somewhere Jazz,” a poem of exuberant reflection. Russo writes, “I wanted this to be about the house.” It’s easy to believe the speaker is referring to the poem, but Russo has made this move before—directly telling us where her narrative intentions have gone off the rails. The speaker is talking about the book itself—the house of the book holding all of her loves, “The house where you called down all your ancestors. / Much before the house I thought was me was thrumming— / pure inside with jazz.” And there’s the turn, the moment where the poet figures things out. Russo has become the house she peers out from as the collection begins, and the house she dances within as the narrative of these endearing poems refuses to end, but instead plays on.

Please also see “After the Poetry Reading: A Condom” by Gianna Russo.

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Voicing Ghosts

MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello

zimZalla Press, 2019

Vellum paper and oak box or readers’ edition book, 796 pages, £47.00 GBP

A vexing problem for the poet is how to write for the dead. Inherent in the endeavor is an appropriation, a betrayal, and a reduction. I know this dynamic well as my first book of poetry, The Sunshine Mine Disaster, was an attempt to speak to/for the 91 miners who died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the most productive silver mine in the United States in 1972. There’s a point where the dead unveil the poet’s futility and hubris, where the dead say “not enough,” where the dead say “too much.”

Or I think of Muriel Rukeyser’s attempt to capture the thousands of deaths caused by silica exposure from the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster in the 1930s. There, she traveled with photographer Nancy Naumburg to study, document, and capture the suffering of the laborers and their families. The result was an abbreviated, incomplete section of U.S. 1, “The Book of the Dead,” where the project resisted containment.

Thus, I come to Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME, an excavation into the deaths of some 796 infants and children, who were housed from 1926 through 1961 by the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home under the administration of the Bon Secours Sisters, on behalf of the Irish State in Tuam, County Galway. These children were lost and buried in unmarked graves. Perhaps thousands of others were illegally adopted. They were, in essence, shame-ridden chattel of the Irish State and the Catholic Church; neither they nor their mothers had bodily autonomy.

Campanello’s work is a 796-page compilation of conceptual and visual poetry, of great expanses of nearly blank pages, disruptions of language and fragments, poly-layered type, explosions of text, all on large, letter-sized sheets of lightly transparent paper. In a brave collaboration with Tom Jenks of zimZalla Press, Campanello constructed both a reader’s edition, a bound paperback volume with a map of the institution grounds on the cover, and an “avant object” edition, a small set of individual copies made on loose sheaths of vellum paper housed in a hand-made oak box. Physically, both editions approximate the size of a coffin that could very well hold the skeletal remains of an infant.

The fragments—while highly manipulated by the poet, as they contort and bleed and reiterate on the page, as they communicate with other fragments visible through the layers of paper—are all external to the poet. They come from contemporaneous letters, documents, reports, decades of anguished cries and discomforting disavowals. They also come from current expressions voiced on the internet and in newspapers in response to the disclosures of the deaths by historian Catherine Corless in 2012. And so, among the fragments are harrowing words of mothers, rationalizations by priests, legalistic dodges by the government, and angry protests by Catholic apologists.

On one hand, it mimics the chatter of our currency—these could be tweets lost in the algorithms—and on the other hand, it channels the dead, directly, in their own words, buried, misaligned, and decomposing on layer, upon layer, upon layer of page. And as an anthropological record, the one lineal linkage is the chronological listing of the identified dead, the infants and children, all in impossibly tiny font (4-point, perhaps), with the years punctuating the individual sections.

One poem is a repetition of a single fragment, “programme of DNA,” reprinted three or four dozen times, overlaying one another, to form tiny stars, coalescing signifiers. Another poem is a four-page catalogue of diseases, ailments, and medical conditions. Clinically, the work on any single page may echo some early 1980s L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E experiments, a flashy and active deconstruction of language. But there’s a source content to Campanello’s work that goes deep and has absolute essence, and there’s an argument that challenges the reader to do the exhumer’s difficult and soul-demanding work. This book is a distressed artifact.

The final tenth of this book is a study of the word “delay,” a point that is amplified by the delayed report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, which was supposed to have been released this February (after one extension), and will not release its findings until early 2020. The deferral of accountability continues, remains suspended. MOTHERBABYHOME is clear and uncompromising in its keening.

Campanello herself acknowledges antecedents to her task in M. Nourbese Philip’s brilliant Zong! and in Thomas Kinsella’s Butcher’s Dozen, in honoring the voices of the unjustly dead. That is, from them, she has learned to put aside her own voice, to contend directly with the recorded voices themselves, and to cull through the officially sanctioned narratives. But it is in her indebtedness to H. D., who re-positions the poet as ritual maker, where Campanello’s considerable genius and courage come to the fore. Here, she compiles these documents and records, captures and releases all the noise among the living and the dead, and in composing upon ghostly translucent sheets, she builds a coffin and a monument. Each page is prayer. Each page is holy.

I need to say two more things.

First, the book, in its entirety, overwhelmed me. Its weight, these ghost voices and their truths, has the heft of the remains of one baby and her mother, times nearly 800. I feel that weight looking at just one page, which reads, “reverence / for / the grave / may / Dunne Patricia 25/03/1944 2 mths / derive / planting / centuries.” The grief expressed, released, is not individual, not of a single lifetime, but what will require centuries of collective work. There is no easy reconciliation.

Second, Kimberly Campanello’s steadfast commitment in this avant object is breathtaking and humbling. This is the work of a great, great artist, and of a single, attentive human being who listens with intelligent receptiveness and with full love.

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Pushing against the Familiar

Termination Shocks by Janice Margolis

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Paperback, 258 pages, $13

Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton

FC2, 2019

Paperback, 160 pages, $13

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

Small Beer Press, 2019

Paperback, 288 pages, $17

There is a familiar and sort of empty phrase that we come across from time to time in blurbs and reviews. This book left me wanting more. It’s an odd notion. Applied to novels, it’s essentially unfathomable: what more could be asked of Moby-Dick—Ishmael’s intervening years? Or Invisible Man: do we need “Part 2: Still Down Here in the Coal Bin”? Perhaps, while only seeming to laud, the critic-reviewer is giving a sneaky backhand, and that I want more actually implies there’s not enough here.

Maybe when applied to collections of short stories and poems, the phrase “this book left me wanting more” has somewhat sturdier—if still wobbly—legs. Perhaps the reader–critic enjoys the author’s use of language or metaphor so greatly that reading even more would simply be lovely . . . so, really, all that’s happened is that the critic–reader has tapped into his pleasure principle. Or maybe it’s something else; maybe it’s the setting of the scenes or the fascinating characters that entrance our reader–critic: a bit dulled by his own daily life spent watching baseball and eating Doritos, he’d prefer to linger in the well-imagined fictional setting, in a space richer and with people more interesting than those in his own poor surroundings. But if that’s the case, it’s not so much that the critic–reader wants more of the book—the poor fella just wants less of his current existence.

Left me wanting more. When describing authors’ first books, it takes on even trickier meaning (because if we don’t want more now . . .). As luck would have it, under review here are three such debuts: Termination Shocks by Janice Margolis, Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton, and Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker. Having read all three, I can honestly say one thing. I want more.

Quick admission: a few years ago, a collection of mine received the Juniper Prize. While Termination Shocks has also received the Juniper Prize, I don’t know Janice Margolis, and my current ties to UMass Press are more or less non-existent. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. UMass is an academic press, and it doesn’t have the family feel that many literary presses strive for. My point is that there’s no conflict of interest in my discussion of Termination Shocks.

I began Termination Shocks with hopeful anticipation. Here was a book chosen for its prize by Sabina Murray, a talented writer interested in language, tone, and structure. And the book begins strong—the first of its five stories, “21 Days,” is impressive in its reach. The story is a feverish first-person history of Liberia as told through the point of view of an orphan stuck in her family hut for Ebola quarantine in the days following the death of her mother. The title refers to the length of her quarantine, and the story foregrounds language, form, and meaning (social commentary) over plot and even characterization. Here a rat has as complex a characterization as the narrator’s romantic interest, or her teacher, or her mother (it’s a cool rat). Margolis relays the narrator’s experience cleanly and beautifully:

Everything crackles inside me. I could be made of lightning. A dying bird beats against my brain, swoops between my ears, pecking songs Mama sang me. It makes the notes bleed between my legs, and I cut the gold-and-green dress into beautiful rags to catch the falling sounds.

Of course, the situation Margolis has chosen to write about is one of intensity, sorrow, and fear, and the narrator’s feverish reveries lead to wonderfully revelatory moments, such as, “[My teacher] tells me how animals groom each other in the most vulnerable positions. How humans groom each other with language. Miss Browne grooms me for hours.”

“21 Days” is a beautiful work. And it does raise questions of appropriation, too—a white American author writing about a Liberian girl possibly stricken with Ebola. But to my reading, the story seeks authenticity, and it tries to dramatize the moment in brutality more than in beauty; the only villains are, if anyone, the white medical staff. It’s a challenging story to read and a challenging story to write, and credit goes to Margolis for taking the challenge on.

After “21 Days,” I read the second story in the collection, “Being Tom Waits.” This is a story narrated by a person who has become Tom Waits. I know very little about Tom Waits. He seems to need a shave. And I like the song about Singapore. But I also feel that what I enjoy about Tom Waits is not what fans of Tom Waits enjoy. This did not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. If you want to read a story version of Being John Malkovich transferred to the mind of Mr. Waits, here you go, minus the scheming plot. We are immersed fully in the head of the fictional Tom Waits. The story is plotless, but no matter—it’s funny, irreverent, referential, absurd, and loving:

Speaking of Normal Mailer, he and I had a brief correspondence in the ’70s. For some reason, a fan letter I’d written gave him the impression I was a tall dirty blonde. I didn’t disabuse him of his mistake, and allowed a non-existent part of my body to be described in a particularly lascivious exchange he later insisted was meant for Gloria Steinem. As requested, I destroyed the letter, which, as a lover of history, I deeply regret.

Incidentally, am I the only one who notices that incessant ringing?

The story veers between confused recollection, wanderings of Los Angeles, Waits’s frustrations, paranoias, conceptual albums, lost genitals, and more. Between it and “21 Days,” my expectations for the final three stories in Termination Shocks were considerable, but the returns diminish a bit. The fourth story in the collection is narrated by the Berlin Wall, an interesting concept that becomes a bit static (and very removed from the present day). The concluding title story is another structural experiment, wedding the stages of rocket liftoff with personal relationships; by the story’s end, the design feels more scattered than accumulative. The collection’s middle story, “Little Prisoners,” is an interesting outlier: a 170-page novel-length piece written as straight realism, even as historical fiction, following an archaeology student in Syria who falls in with government protesters and becomes accused of spying, which leads ultimately to a big reveal about her past.

Termination Shocks is an odd collection that creates, at its best, wonderful literature. It features two challenging, strange stories—one risky and rewarding, and the other inanely effusive and immersive. While the final two stories also lean toward innovation—of structure, of concept—they, and certainly the very long “Little Prisoners,” don’t quite match the sheer ambition and exuberance in the first two pieces. It’s fair to say that the collection left me wanting more.

In her debut Famous Children and Famished Adults, recipient of the FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovation Fiction Prize, Evelyn Hampton includes quite a few stories: twenty-two that collectively span just 160 pages. Given the stories’ relative brevity, it’s only logical that this is a very different book from Termination Shocks, especially in terms of the foregrounded fiction elements. Rather than progressive narrative tensions (“plot” is a four-letter word here), or characters existing over long periods of time feeling the deep impacts of upsetting life events, the stories in Famous Children and Famished Adults are swifter, stranger, and more concerned with language and the mindsets of their many strong-voiced narrators. These stories are elusive in terms of being plot-reducible; that the collection was chosen as FC2’s Sukenick prize-winner by Flournoy Holland is no surprise, since she is a writer as much immersed in mood and the line and deep evocations of point of view as anything else. Hampton’s fiction seems very Holland’s type of fiction.

Which is great. It leads to the publication of stories like Hampton’s, works that push against the familiar. It’s hard to group the collection: these are stories as glimpses, hints at strange characters in stranger relationships—and we’re only ducking in to watch them a few moments. This is seen often, in stories such as “Choo and Cream” (a couple joined together by a “a nearly transparent child who clapped its hands not out of glee or approval, but because of the awkward way its body was dangling”); “The End of History” (a nameless female narrator “wants to discover . . . a framework for her content”); “Every Day an Epic” (among other things, we learn that the narrator has “been looking at the world through a lens,” enters into it, and “open[s] intervals and unravel[s] across them”); and many more.

There’s a slightly tendency in Famous Children and Famished Adults toward the surreal parable in metaphorical situations that explore more mundane experiences (“Choo and Cream” could be read as a metaphorical description of what it’s like to have a newborn). But even that tendency isn’t very pronounced; more than anything, it’s easier to say what isn’t in the collection. Throughout, Hampton shows an impatience for context and clarity, which makes the normal experience of fiction—enjoyment, emotional impact—a bit hard to come by. One piece, “At the Center of the Wasp,” goes thusly: someone who bottled and sold scents has died; there’s an island that is either literally or figuratively made of shit; the dead person has to be buried; the narrator doing the burying (and complaining all the while about the shit and the island and the smell and burying) is related to the dead person. The story is an effusion of frustration with context barely provided; it’s like stepping onto an elevator with a person on a cell phone engaged in a furious conversation you cannot quite piece together. Which can be enjoyable and meaningful, especially if you sit back and enjoy the lines, the point of view, the strangeness.

“At the Center of the Wasp” lies at the far end of the collection; most of the stories have a bit more clarity, and the strangeness shines rather than muddies. In “Cell Fish,” the narrator learns that her significant other is dying, and Hampton tells this story through elision rather than a more predictable head-on style. Her patience and ability to let white space do work is admirable, as is her ability to let small gestures convey tone, character, emotion: “The doctor pressed her fingers together, enclosing the space in front of her face. When she spoke, the voice seemed to come from the space enclosed by her hands.” Rather than pursuing the story into the territory we might generally expect—hospitals, progression of disease, the impact on day-to-day life—Hampton more often keeps us caught in the impending doom rather than stepping into the more familiar literary ground of the doom itself. This is a harder task; with most writers, it’s not intuitive. That Hampton prefers in her fiction to move us into—and to remain in—those quiet spaces before the dam breaks is impressive and admirable.

A great thing about story collections is that they rest on their strongest pieces. For me, the greatest works in Famous Children and Famished Adults are the ones that, perhaps begrudgingly, do allow more narrative context. A bit of familiarity, for me, makes strangeness even stranger, as it allows situation, voice, and language to become more uncanny rather than entirely uprooting the reader. The story “Jay” is the easiest example: the narrator’s friend, a possible spy, has vanished from her life, and we see the impact of the two’s strange interactions play out over a longer period of time. Other stories, too, give us more context: “Fishmaker,” “Cell Fish,” “The Slow Man,” “Since All the Cats have Vanished,” for instance, let the reader in a bit more and so, at least for me, have greater impact. At its best, Famous Children and Famished Adults is a successful, unique, and commanding collection, though sometimes it’d be nice to get a larger picture of a given story’s disaster, a larger sense for how it plays out on the characters’ lives. Just a little more.

Sarah Pinsker’s debut, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, is less like the other two collections here under review. Foremost, it’s not a contest winner chosen by an academia-established literary author; rather, it’s published by Small Beer Press, an indie known for works that, while literary, lean toward the fantastic. It’s no surprise that the stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea were previously published in genre-aligned journals including Asimov’s Science Fiction and Lightspeed. While Hampton and Margolis certainly feature experimental-leaning fictions, their works are, at least to me, a more familiar type of literary experimentation—more academic than commercial.

I opened Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea with a feeling I had when I was much younger and reading books not as a writer but simply as a reader, with no expectations, no hopes or skepticisms, no begrudging or apprehension. Pinsker’s stories only magnified my childlike sense of excitement and wonder: the worlds they contain are imaginative, vivid, and well-designed, almost like Cornell boxes—vividly adorned and other-worldly while still being tilted versions of our own. “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” about a young man who loses an arm in a work accident, sadly and poignantly captures the longing, interestingly, of his replacement robotic arm:

It didn’t just want to be a road. It knew it was one. Specifically, a stretch of asphalt two lanes wide, ninety-seven kilometers long, in eastern Colorado. A stretch that could see all the way to the mountains, but was content not to reach them. Cattleguards on either side, barbed wire, grassland.

Other stories throughout the collection twin the surreal with the poignant ordinary. “Remembery Day” features an annual parade for military veterans; the twist is that on this day, the veterans vote whether or not to lift their “Veil,” a perpetual forgetting of their war traumas. In “No Lonely Seafarer,” a genderless narrator confronts sirens who have laid waste to a town’s shipping industry. “Wind Will Rove” asserts the need for people to hang onto the seemingly unimportant textures of their shared history—especially while stuck on a spaceship adrift in the universe. The title story features a scavenger who finds a woman stranded ashore in a boat; we learn from a slightly unwieldy narrative style that the lost woman was living, as many do in the story’s world, on a cruise ship, playing bass in a house band that exists to entertain the privileged wealthy. In the quietude of the scavenger’s abode, we see a collision between consumerism (the musician) and being a hermit (the scavenger), between a life of accumulation and a life, if lacking in material things, more attentively lived.

The stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea remind me in style, tone, and world-construction of the stories collected in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man; this is true of their thematic underpinnings, as well. If Evelyn Hampton’s stories lean toward the parable, Pinsker’s don’t lean so much as announce meaning via loudspeaker. As with Bradbury’s, these are message-driven works of fiction. Their intricate architectures are often overlaid onto moralistic messages, and at times this serves to reduce the stories’ emotional valence. There are cautioning moments, as well. “The Low Hum of Her” is implicitly a Holocaust story in which a father has built for his daughter a replacement robotic grandmother; this story, too, is poignant, as the daughter begrudgingly comes to love the robot, but as the story doesn’t once mention the horrible sufferings of the Holocaust, the fraught setting seems almost whimsically chosen.

Of course these aren’t boxes—they’re stories, ranging from as brief as three to as long as forty-plus pages. But to carry the Cornell comparison further, as with the artist’s famous boxes, the stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea rely on the reader to infer from or project emotional complexity upon their dazzling arrangements, and as we gaze at the design elements, some of the more literary elements—especially character complexity—get shorter shrift. For a debut collection, Sooner or Later shows remarkable promise—if only the real complex human stuff of it were given a little more attention.

One last side-note: while these three collections are very diverse in terms of form and craft, it’s important to observe diversity of both voice and represented experience, as well. Other than “21 Days,” I’m not sure these collections are expanding diversity in those ways. These are three very white collections, very middle class. That’s just an observation, not a criticism. Of course, writers can only write best what writers can only write best, and Janice Margolis, Evelyn Hampton, and Sarah Pinsker are writing awfully damn good fiction. There is plenty here—plenty to admire, to envy, and to praise. These three collections are pushing against the ordinary, pushing against the familiar (if imaginary) line that wraps neatly around what fiction, what literary fiction, should be.

And they should be pushing against that line; they should be pushing against any expectations. That’s what we should expect from these books given to us by such innovative and important presses. While the reader–critic in me thinks, I really hope Pinsker/Hampton/Margolis goes out now and writes a greater novel with more emotional impact, the teacher–writer part of me rolls his eyes and disagrees. Shut up, critic–reader. To hell with your notion that fiction should conform to your expectations. You’re not in charge. They are, these three talented authors. Let them keep on doing their work. They’re doing a great job—well more than enough.

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Forthward: Guy Psycho and the Contemporary Epic

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame by John King

Beating Windward Press, 2019

Paperback, 206 pages, $17

Epic heroes are traditionally paragons of the societies that invent them, extolling the virtues that those societies find most desirable. Guy Psycho, aging rock star and titular hero of John King’s debut novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame, is no exception in that regard. He’s a hero for the postmodern era, and so he’s somewhat different from his classical counterparts: He’s tall and thin, in black lipstick and eye makeup. He wears Wayfarers and wingtips (size 14). He has a surgically implanted voicebox that occasionally goes on the fritz, causing him to blat certain syllables with a tinny, synthesized version of his otherwise golden pipes. And, far from being the sole agent of fulfilling his quest, he gets through most of his adventure due to the unfailing support of his band mates: from the musicians, to the discretely differentiated backup-dancing Postmodernaires, to the band’s new manager and accountant. Their adventure, like their professional lives, is something that they all do together.

The book doesn’t only evoke epic literature stylistically and thematically, but literally. The story itself is a wild romp through the tablets described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as Guy and the crew are plunged into a dreamlike prehistory in search of the lost thirteenth tablet, which they have to find before an angry Ishtar and the other Sumerian gods destroy the world. King lovingly deconstructs the larger-than-life deeds of the original Gilgamesh and gives us a different, almost surreal reinterpretation—or, really, a reiteration—of them.

Along the way, he relies on several distinct elements of each character that quickly become their own sort of nods to traditional heroic epithets: Guy Psycho of the size-14 wingtips and Gaultier gauze, Lulu of the auburn hair and motorcycle boots, Trudy of the black ringlets and silver-ruffled party dress. This also helps further differentiate the various characters (there are eighteen) in a relatively short amount of time, as all of them are far more complex and interesting than they initially appear—the musicians are more than the instruments they play, and every single one of the Postmodernaires has something more than mere dance steps that informs their voices and characterization.

Despite the book’s clear love for the classics, the rest of its presentation is a playful, joyful rejection of convention, as King enjoins the text itself to participate in the narrative. Pages go black as characters are plunged into darkness, punctuated on the next page by cones of onomatopoeic flashlight. Lines of narration from characters lost in a maze spiral around the page in neat right angles, helping drive home the sense of uncanny disorientation. Far from seeming distracting or gimmicky, this quintessentially postmodern acknowledgement of the text as an ontologically distinct artifact reminds the reader to enjoy not just the book, but the experience of reading the book. King includes small moments of explicit and implicit intertextuality, as well, that drive home the point that the book doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the astute reader is rewarded for Googling the serial number on the otherwise nondescript crate in Mr. Youngerman’s curio collection, for example, or for noting the title of the book one of the guests at the Bull of Heaven’s party is reading (which, with any luck, is the tacit promise of a sequel).

The language, too, at the sentence level, is a melodic free-form jazz of excellent description, fluid and rich in metaphor, that whisks the reader effortlessly along through the book’s two-hundred-or-so pages. For example, during a reminiscence, Lulu, a Postmodernaire with a background in archaeology who helps guide the crew through ancient Mesopotamia, reflects on when she hit rock bottom:

Lulu remembered, in a single flash, a time when her face was mashing her nose down against a tabletop, her sweaty, auburn hair crawling with sticky airs, in some murmuring necropolis of a bar in the underside of Tangiers. . . [H]ere she was, across the globe, a cipher in a ledger that no one would ever read, an empty egg cracking in the back of the fridge.

The visceral detail, the vibrant verbs, the fresh and interesting figurative language—all are typical of King’s prose throughout the novel.

In addition to the quality of the language, the passage above also illustrates one of the things that makes the novel work so well: while it never loses its spirit of fun and adventure, King isn’t afraid to treat his characters seriously, to let the reader in on their doubts and vulnerabilities. The nagging problem with many of the ancient epic heroes is that they were portrayed with precious few real faults, few true weaknesses, save a near-ubiquitous hubris. This worked for the societies who birthed them, who seemed to desire these larger-than-life supermen. Guy Psycho and his coterie, however, are products of the contemporary (or postmodern) age, so a big part of their heroic nature comes from their courage in the face of their own faults and personal tragedies. The result is a story that not only has a harmonic resonance with the ancient adventure tales—in a way, the forebears of the craft of fiction itself—but a story that still has a melody all its own, that doesn’t hesitate to march “Forthward!” in an attempt to excavate a new niche in the bedrock of myth—and turn it into a rock-and-roll stage.

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Before & After the Pinnacle of Happiness

The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé by Mario Benedetti
Translated by Harry Morales
Paperback, Penguin UK, 2015

“In only six months and twenty-eight days I’ll be in a position to retire.” So begins Mario Benedetti’s The Truce—a novel that takes the form of the brief and intimate diary of the forty-nine-year-old Martín Santomé, a Uruguayan widower living in Montevideo in the 1960s. Martín’s attention to life’s mundane details, like the shapes of strangers’ legs and his coworkers’ nervous sneezes, combined with his frequent accounts of exhaustion, are what make him feel real and familiar right away. Although his world is small and provincial, his reflections are universal.

The novel was originally published in Spanish (Editorial Nueva Imagen, Montevideo, Uruguay ,1960) and was published in English by Penguin UK Modern Classics in Harry Morales’s English translation in 2015. Readers should be grateful to Morales for not only capturing the contradictory nuances of Benedetti’s resigned-yet-open voice so perfectly in English—but also for inviting a wider audience to enjoy this timeless story of love and sorrow. The translation in today’s context gives the novel a fresh, new meaning. The novel is about learning to appreciate the present, but the way in which it approaches the present is charmingly old-fashioned.

Early on in the novel the protagonist’s daughter, Blanca, laments to her father, “Sometimes I feel sad, over nothing more than not knowing what I’m missing.” The girl’s sentiment is one that hardly exists today. On the contrary, modern readers tend to be acutely aware of what we are missing; we are inundated with online images and texts that remind us of what-could-be on a daily basis. It’s amusing to think that the very reality we have now is what Blanca might have been yearning for. Yet it’s precisely this feeling of Blanca’s desire—a desire her father also shares—that serves as the emotional premise for the entire novel.

The novel embodies the thrill one feels when finding something he never even knew could happen. It’s about the retrospective discovery of a hole—a discovery made only after that hole has been unexpectedly filled. In the case of our protagonist, this hole is romance. Romantic love is the last thing Martín Santomé expects or even wants to find. He is tired. He seeks only leisure and some rest, yet at the same time is depressed by the prospect of a blank agenda. The love affair he begins with his twenty-three-year-old assistant, Laura Avellaneda, just before he enters his retirement, is hardly original. But it’s the way in which this experience moves and reinvigorates him, that is so potent and inexplicably memorable.

Martín’s celebration of his own surprising happiness is made all the more intense by his keen acknowledgement and understanding of the fragility of life and its transcendence. In a small moment midway through the novel he narrates:

She had got out of bed, just like that, wrapped in a blanket, and was standing near the window watching the rain. I approached, also looking at the rain, and we didn’t say anything for a while. All of a sudden, I realized that that moment, that slice of everyday life, was the highest degree of well-being, it was Happiness. Never before had I been so completely happy than at that moment, but still I had the cutting sensation that I would never feel that way again, at least at that level, with that intensity. The pinnacle of happiness is like that, surely it’s like that.

Martín Santomé’s unexpected bliss is poignantly balanced with an underlying fear of loss: “Are we burning?” he asks his lover. The novel beautifully explores the frightening contradictions that are inherent in love, and it’s easy to see why the book still stands as such a revered classic in Latin America, and why it deserves to be read everywhere else. Harry Morales’s translation of La Tregua is a novel you will read without stopping and will never forget. It will be a physical experience that marks you, twists you, and pulls something out of you. It will make you weep and narrow your eyes at details you’d never before noticed: the wood of a table, a dog outside a window. It will make you think about your own emotional life like a chart on paper: where do the peaks and the valleys lie? And, most importantly, what happens in between them?

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Melting Among Echoes: The Elusive Narrative Voice of Z213: Exit

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni trilogy) by Dimitris Lyacos
Translated by Shorsha Sullivan
Shoestring Press, 2017
Paperback, 152 pages, $12.00
Please note: the entire trilogy has been re-released by Shoestring Press as a boxed set as of October 2018.

Z213: Exit—the first installment of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy—eludes a straightforward interpretation and defies easy genre categorization. One of the most striking features of the text, which offers an admixture of poetry, prose, and fractured discourse, is the varied, evanescent nature of the work’s narrative voice. It is at once discretely anonymous and richly polyphonous—a voice that is both an echo of a dying oral tradition and a singular windswept report from future underworlds, or perhaps contemporary nightmares. A voice that wanders a crumbling cerebral maze of déjà vu as it grapples with bouts of pre-cognitive amnesia. This narrative ambiguity, elliptical and serpentine, allows for a wealth of themes and mytho-religious motifs to surface in the text, such as the mercurial relationship between memory and nominal identity and the symbolic resonance between Greek myth, Christianity, and European folklore.

The fragmented, wandering narrator of Z213: Exit and the dislocated world (suffused with a sense of impending dread) in which they exist is prominent in the work’s first line: “these names and that’s how they found me.” Immediately, we get the sense that either a bureaucratic body, or perhaps an entity, is cataloguing and in pursuit of some targeted group of people. But the list of names—the “they” —and the “me” never come into focus, and so the narrative trope that we are teased with in the first line—one of straightforward persecution and pursuit—never quite coalesces into a recognizable shape. Instead, over the course of 152 pages, the narrator—the at-first unidentifiable “me”—slides between sensation and memory as it struggles to individuate from the host of shadowy presences that surround it and to identify the pain, suffering, and mystery that the environment itself seems to breathe forth. For example, later in the text, as the narrator (who at this point we can deem an anatomical male) engages in a fleeting sexual encounter, which seems to be more discomfiting than pleasurable, he muses, “Where did I come from? My name? Where was I heading?” Here, the somatic pressure of an erotic experience in a darkened world evokes sharp questions of origin, identity, and purpose. However, as we move toward the conclusion, the narrator seems to find a paradoxical certainty in letting all his questions dissolve into the prevailing sense of ambiguity and in doing so, he offers a contradictory assessment of the circumstances implied in Z213: Exit’s first line: “Nobody is coming after me. Surely they have forgotten about me. Nobody will ever come here to find me. Nobody ever.”

As the fragmented narrator of Z213: Exit quests through his broken world in something of an atemporal haze, echoes of Dante, Beckett, and even Proust can be detected in Lyacos’ careful and subtly erudite writing. But we also find rich allusions to ancient Greek myth and Christian ritual, which primarily enter the text through a Bible that the narrator finds in the pocket of a jacket, which he has taken from a partially conscious solider. The Bible proves to be a palimpsest containing erasure marks, blank space among biblical verses, “the words of a stranger,” and the writing of the narrator (perhaps they are all actually the words of the same person), who states “I walk through other names” before he briefly describes the Bible’s contents. In this book within a book, truncated excerpts from the Old and New Testaments float next to fragments from ancient Greek sources and original, darkly lyrical imagery. It is within this intertextual Bible that we encounter Z213: Exit’s most phantasmagoric layer, which Lyacos weaves in a rhythmic, episodic manner through the body of the text. Here we find scenes where Christ’s harrowing of Hell merges with Odysseus’ suffering-rich nostos; the mortification of Christ’s body upon the cross fades into the image of Dionysian sparagmos (or ritual tearing asunder); and the ritual of the mass and the ritual animal slaughter central to the ancient Greek sacrificial rite carry the same numinous weight.

A central motif of With the People from the Bridge, the second installment of the Poena Damni trilogy, is the revenant of European folklore. The revenant, which is somewhat akin to the zombie and the vampire, is a reanimated corpse or a revivified spirit who stalks in terror the living. The shadowed presence of a revenant also appears to be active in the text of Z:213 Exit. There are moments when the narrative seems to emanate from the twilit consciousness of a revenant, such as when the multi-voiced wanderer and narrator declares, “You are somebody else, but you are the same, you are him. This is continuity, you travel…” This lends a profound sense of liminality to the text. The reader is not only betwixt and between the pursuer and the pursued, but also the material and the immaterial, the pulse of life and the cold of death. There are also times when the narrator seems to be haunted by a revenant for dimly perceived reasons with the pursuit itself following a non-linear dream-logic. This is most vividly seen on the text’s final page, which we are led to believe is a page from the multi-voiced Bible that the narrator carries with him: “get away always, but feel he is coming, as time goes by he is approaching, and still now that the distance increases, and now that you draw away still the distance decreases.”

In noting the spectral influence of the revenant, we are brought back to the polyphonous narrative voice of Z213: Exit. As mentioned above, the page that ends the text is taken from the Bible that the narrator carries, but we are not told if the writing is that of the narrator, the words of a stranger, or even of someone else. Any hope for a unified voice or an integrated protagonist dissolves into uncertainty. What Z213: Exit leaves us with is something of a snapshot from the collective unconscious. An unmoored myth of wandering and suffering as likely to be plucked from the pages of the Western canon as from the dreams and nightmares of strangers in the contemporary world.

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The Funhouse Mirror of Humanity

The Internet Is for Real

Chris Campanioni

C&R Press, 2019

534 pages, Paper, $25.90

Imagine the internet told your life story and fucked it up. That is the unspoken thesis behind Chris Campanioni’s The Internet Is for Real. Although it becomes clear early on that, while Chris will spend time discussing his family history and other autobiographical details, the life story he is really telling is that of the modern world, as filtered via internet culture. His work views the internet as humanity’s id: sometimes charming, sometimes profound, but mostly idiotic, vain, and vapid. While large portions of the book are dedicated to celebrity worship and the distracted nature of internet communication, he also turns his attention to the way our political past and present has been affected by this new technology. A winding discussion with his father about his relationship to his native Cuba after fifty years melds into a meditation on dreams versus reality versus nostalgia, the distance between his father’s recollection of his youth becoming a cipher for Campanioni’s own distance from his father’s homeland.

My father dreams in Spanish. I am writing this down in English.

Where are the gaps and slips, I wonder, as I hold the tape recorder with

my left hand, and with my right, scrawl the notes that will eventually

re-constitute this story.

Where are the gaps and how can I make them wider, instead of trying to

fill them; how can I make them wider so I can breathe within them, in

and out, out and in, and make song from all those unknowable breaths?

He recognizes that the memories and dreams he uses to feel a connection to his ethnic heritage are for a place that no longer exists, that may have never existed, but one which he cannot escape. This could very well describe social media, where we hold on to, document, and obsess over memories and the image of ourselves those memories conjure. The way people communicate with us on social media is through a manipulated, nostalgic view of ourselves that polishes the rough edges of our personalities. In turn, complete strangers come to relate to us in the same way the child of an immigrant relates to the memories of their parents’ homeland—we know it is a myth, but we can’t bring ourselves to ask the tougher questions that arise from that myth.

Another instance where Campanioni uses the internet to make larger statements about world affairs is his chapter on ISIS as an online creation. The piece is a tour de force that demonstrates the way that terrorist groups can promote themselves using the same sort of branding and merchandising as a clothing line or television show. A new video of a beheading, for instance, is treated the way the new trailer for a Marvel movie might be. The violence is a show, and, for people seeking meaning, a global conflict is incredibly appealing, as is the hierarchical society offered by ISIS. This impulse for meaning and fighting for a cause is as old as humanity itself, but because of the internet a cause can reach an unprecedented scale by utilizing the tools of consumerism.

YOU

Senior media operatives are treated as if they’re emirs.

Emirs?

YOU

(sharply)

More important than soldiers. Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers, and editors … they form a privileged, professional class with salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of every soldier.

Isn’t ISIS concerned about the fall-out? A drop in the soldiers actually willing to fight its war?

YOU

(shakes head)

The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not only to inflict terror on an adversary.

(beat)

Now it wants to command a global audience.

The ISIS section may seem like Campanioni’s most damning statement about the world, but it is really just the most explicit and sensational example of a theme that runs throughout the book—the internet is, above all else, a tool that compounds loneliness and despair by promising to eradicate those very things. The desire to connect with a celebrity, with one’s father, with a cause, all arise from a sense of missing something in one’s life (again, this is not new behavior, but the reach and scope is). Making friends with stranger’s online image instead of in person is a symptom of a greater disease—humanity is retreating into its id, disconnecting from interaction and empathy with others, creating entire lives in a fictional platform—and we are miserable. That misery manifests in a number of ways, from extremism across the political spectrum, to blocking people and ideas we don’t agree with, to outrage culture, to an increasing lack of complexity in the way we approach problems, ideas, and policies. The internet is the most powerful technology in history, and it is winning by holding up an ever-uglier mirror at humanity.

If the internet is the antagonist of Campanioni’s book, it is still a charming one. One with endless diversions, humor, and charm. It is the abusive boyfriend made digital, and our world has yet to find a way to either take the relationship to therapy or cut all ties. Campanioni’s book is wise enough to not try to answer those questions, and is instead interested in asking questions that grow increasingly profound. The book offers a visceral thrill that feels more like a great song or movie than a written text. It is a bold statement in the age of Tweets to release an almost 600-page novel that is in large part about Twitter and the culture it has cultivated, and Campanioni uses every page to excite the mind, cleanse the palate, and ignite your imagination. The next time you find yourself wanting a break from the internet, I highly recommend you pick up The Internet Is for Real. You get the same addictive experience, minus the dirty aftertaste, and you’ll feel better about yourself in the morning.

Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the formatting of the second quoted passage due to readability of the web page on the internet. A little irony there.

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Griefs Spun to Gold

Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley

Burrow Press, 2019

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00

In his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is “skittery,” that “would prefer to remain skeptical,” and that “prefers knowing to feeling.”

Susan Lilley’s collection Venus in Retrograde is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (“confessional”) poetry. Lilley’s poems also demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.

In “Champagne Road,” the second poem in the book, is this couplet: “There must be an easier way to quit a house / than to touch everything in it.” Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book—love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)—and the ways in which Lilley’s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the “kitchen laughter, / hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing” that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley’s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in “Experienced: Jacksonville, 1967,” in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy “stood up and burped the alphabet;” when a “boy way too old” showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin “grabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,” and when he asked how old the speaker was, “I said, I don’t know.” And the result of these transgressions? “We had to write extra Ten Commandments / for not staying with the group.” Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is “Song for a Lost Cousin,” which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls “powdering our faces / geisha white, love potions / in the blender with nectarines / and stolen Cointreau.” And later,

Even the peacocks I love

are shadows of my first, a bird

now dead for decades, once

opulent and princely on a dirt road,

calling for love against black

storybook trees and a moon cut

from tracing paper.

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker’s memory.

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. “A Man in a Hurry” chronicles the sudden death of her father, how “On the Sunday we now know was his last” “he fell / into a long moment and stayed there, / stayed no matter how we called him back.”

“Palm Court,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker’s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother’s childhood home, the speaker wants “to ransack the air itself / for evidence of afternoon / piano lessons, dark braids / flying behind a rope swing, / hopscotch songs in the street.” But then comes the honest and moving truth:

But our faces are not

yet dreamed of,

here at the very place

her girl laughter might still

be trapped in the trees.

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the “burnt cake / perfume that citrus refineries blew,” the beach houses “at the end of two-track driveways / soft with sand and flanked by / crowds of hissing palmettos / and sea grape.” Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley’s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde succeeds at both tasks.

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,” included in Venus in Retrograde and previously published here in Aquifer.

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Stories Inspired by Midnight at the Havana Zoo

A Kind of Solitude by Dariel Suarez
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
Willow Springs Book, 170 pages, paperback, $19.95

Elena, the keeper of the address registry in her neighborhood in Havana, is an outstanding citizen and an exemplary neighbor. But all that comes undone when the police come knocking at her door, find out about the contraband cheese in her fridge, and demand the name of the supplier, her old friend Emilio.

Isidro hauls his eighty-year-old father, a Santería practitioner who is writhing in pain, in a wheelbarrow through the storm-lashed, flooded streets of Havana to the hospital. As Isidro struggles getting the proper treatment for his father in a hospital with limited resources, he finds himself reconciling his family’s beliefs and his own lack of faith.

In both these stories, “The Inquest” and “Possessed,” Elena and Isidro find their solitary lives disrupted; there’s palpable angst and longing, and that sensibility forms the heart of Dariel Suarez’s debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude. The mélange of eleven stories, set in Cuba and largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, offers an intimate, penetrating, and nuanced sociopolitical commentary of living in a communist country facing severe economic crisis. There’s critique, criticism, flavors of patriarchy, but also a portrayal of the infallible beauty of hope, yearning, and ambition. Suarez’s characters are neither heroes nor victims. They are, in turn, bold, shrewd, cruel, corrupt, melancholic, contemplative, kind, dignified, and—as portrayed in the story “Primal Voice”—actual rock stars.

The opening story, “The Man from the Zoo,” is at once magnificent and heartbreaking, and appropriately sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Two men, Arquímedes and Orlando, steal a giraffe from the Havana Zoo in the middle of the night for an American trophy-hunter family. The story is fast-paced, yet periodically slows down to let you catch your breath and to reveal the history of the men and their motivations.

Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Suarez moved to the United States as a young teenager in 1997 during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. His writing is reflective and critical of his country of birth; his prose is lyrical yet incisive, but not pedagogical. His Cuba is not a private or enigmatic Cuba, where revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries are smoking cigars and plotting government takeover (though some of his characters have fought alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and marched in service and in protest of the country), but a Cuba that is deconstructed via the power of fiction and rendered approachable and open.

The title story, “A Kind of Solitude” [originally published in The Florida Review 40.1, Spring 2016] takes us deep into Cuban countryside, where sixty-year-old Eladio, a man who prefers the company of his farm animals over humans, prepares to leave for the city after he realizes that at his age he needs the protection of companionship. Haunted by the suicide of his wife, he nonetheless looks forward to uniting with his long-term mistress, Griselda. He ruminates about his love and devotion to both women, but as the evening progresses the focus changes—there’s an intruder on his property, and Eladio must act, for better or worse. The story showcases powerfully the way that fleeting choices can change our paths.

In “Mudface” we come to terms with the games and cruelty of young boys. In “The Comforter,” corruption and a young man’s integrity come head to head. And here we see Suarez’s brilliance in how he portrays the ugly interiority of complex, flawed characters, shaped by the sociopolitical landscape but shown without unnecessary judgments or justifications. The Special Period in Cuba was a time of great economic crisis with overwhelming shortages in food, medicine, energy, healthcare, and opportunities. Through the eleven stories in this collection, Suarez offers a multitude of perspectives and plot lines that wade through these difficulties and showcase human desire and ambition. In the story “Hope” we follow the motions of Vladimir who is yearning for a better life, a life his mother doesn’t want. We find a similar yearning in the story “Daredevils” where Suarez explores the friendship and love between two young men, Yaisandar and Miguel.

It was the story “Marching Men,” however, that affected me the most. There’s a moment toward the end of the story when the protagonist, Eloy Manduley, participates in the parade at La Plaza and brings to fore the triumph and tragedy of the Common Man:

. . . and the steady chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” resounded within different pockets of the crowd. Eloy held his umbrella against his chest—the handle down at his right hip, the metal tip at his left shoulder—and raised his chin like a proud soldier. He was in sync with the throng. He knew the majority of people had been forced to participate, yet the men marched on with determined steps, stout voices, and celebratory gestures … for the first time in his life, Eloy was physically part of el pueblo, a nation brought together despite all odds. If only Gladys could see him. Maybe he could surprise her at the airport. Maybe he could take her dancing at the carnival at El Malecón.

At a recent reading from A Kind of Solitude at Boston’s Brookline Booksmith, Suarez also spoke about the process of writing his book. He spoke of the research involved, the craft and linguistic choices he made, and the challenges of choosing to write about a Spanish-speaking world in English—a language not his first but preferred because, he said, even though he loves speaking Spanish he didn’t think he could do justice to the Spanish language by writing in or translating his stories to it. He further talked about how writing about Cuba through his stories helped recalibrate his world view. For me, both the talk and the book reinforce the importance of reading international (and multilingual) authors. Dariel Suarez’s story collection contributes further to the American publishing landscape what Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others like them have helped evolve and enrich—the scope and possibilities of what constitutes the universal experience in literary fiction.

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A Balm to Soothe the Fevers

Bluer and More Vast by Michael Hettich
Hysterical Books, 2018
Paperback, 82 pages, $15.00

In Michael Hettich’s Bluer and More Vast, the reader bears witness to a man who is barely and beautifully tethered to the world around us. These small prose poems are evocative, tender stories of companionship, confusion, home life, memories of fathers, and dreams of wives and husbands dreaming together. In “The Double Dream of Sleeping,” we are invited inside:

One night, my wife and I dreamed the same dream: we had carried our mattress to the ocean, thrown it into water and climbed on. We lay together in that bed as we drifted out into the deep water, in a night that was teeming with stars and silence.

What happens next, as throughout the collection, asks more questions of us than provides answers: What is memory? A dream? Family? Can small things save us?

The man and his family here reside in tandem with opossum families and insect worlds and the forest dwellers and everywhere the presence of birds, the birds, the wild Florida birds. Their homes are in the water and in the branches and the moss and the boat. We are all in it with him and looking around and wondering. Hettich brings a David Byrne-like beautiful befuddlement to it all: Is this my beautiful wife? Who am I? How did I get here?

Reading a new collection by a white male poet isn’t usually first on my poetry list these days. I have spent too many years on assigned books written by white men, and I need to catch up on years and years of missed and silenced voices from my queer, brown, trans, young, female, Asian, and other and other and other poetry family. I approached Bluer and More Vast with my armor up. I was curious. What does a seasoned white male poet have to say to me, a woman, right now? Right now?

In the end, I am grateful for the read and review. Taken as a whole, the collection feels like a balm to soothe the fevers whipped up in my body—and so many othered bodies—these days. Oh, these days. Even my teenage daughter has been taught dozens of dark, dystopian YA books in recent years—a response, they say, to our untethered, anxious world. Hettich’s prose is like a pill one can take to quiet some of the angry male voices on the air, across the bumper stickers that berate us, the defiant, spewing Supreme Court nominees.

The speaker of these poems is a man at once fully grounded and light as air—someone who puts a soup in the crock pot and carries injured long-necked herons to bed (“The Guest”) and who loves his wife. Really loves her. So many love poems here. Did Hettich know we needed this? In “Sunday Morning” a man recalls a long list of the books he and his wife are reading, and the passing of the days together:

We were putting our reading aside and going out to putter in our garden, to listen to the cardinals and mockingbirds and mourning doves, to smell the spearmint we’d planted by the henna tree. It was raining then, softly, and we let ourselves get wet, soaked through to the skin, which belonged to us now.

The beautiful, dreamy poem “To Sing The World” almost asks what is love? And it is not too sentimental; rather, in Hettich’s hands, it becomes serious meta-commentary in a world battered by a lack of gentleness.

Magical realism works well for these poems, especially because they occupy that murky, liminal place: the prose poem. Hettich’s emphasis is on story and mood more than traditional poetic elements like sound or metaphor. What is happening to these people, these fish, the deer with bird nests nestled in racks on their heads at the beach (“Solitude”)? Strange and confusing things, sure, but the reader is not scared. The language is evocative and beautiful, so the brevity of each piece lends an urgency to the collection that is hopeful instead of harried.

Hettich’s words play with idea and imagery, giving us just enough weirdness to want more. Does he want us to know he is dreaming or does he want us to just not care for once, to get in the poem and go? “The Ordinary Wonders” encapsulates much of the trip we are taken on, via spider web and the neighbor’s lusty libretto. These poems and this speaker are something to sing about. And so, in turn, are the little and big lives always happening around us. Like Mary Oliver, Hettich skillfully slows us down, and we look together on the wading birds in ways more studied than sappy, more insightful than ordinary in spite of the quiet subject matter.

And we wonder, too, as we sink in steel lawn chairs with Hettich and our ancestors all around us smoking pipes and bringing wayward turtles to our laps. All along the birds and the neighbors and the mothers keep singing and the opossums lumber. It is the big world in our small yards. It is knowing:

Everywhere we look there are reasons to go home

I felt like the poet carried me through this book because I needed to rest. It felt good to know, just a few poems in, that I could be taken well care of with words. The poems were the lullabies, the myths made by us, and maybe they were breadcrumbs, too. Maybe Hettich is a kind of prose poem Pied Piper, but he is not leading me far from home. He is trying to tell me, trying to tell us, that home is the safe place and the vast, relentless water rising all around at once. It is loving the person beside us as much as the people still in our dreams. It is standing in the shallows every chance we get. It is our feet finding sand dollars in the water while we still can.

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The Shrapnel of Being

Reading Life by Chris Arthur
Negative Capability Press, 2017
Paperback, 202 pages, $15.95

Chris Arthur, a native of Ulster, Ireland and a long-time resident of Wales and Scotland, happens to be one of the prominent authors of long-form, meditative essays published in America. All but one of his books have appeared with a US publisher, and he makes frequent appearances in Best American Essays as well as a variety of US literary journals. Reading Life, his sixth collection, declares again a kind of trans-border citizenship through his lifelong residence in texts and the literary imagination. It offers his most direct commentary on the form of the essay itself.

“Perhaps no essayist,” he muses, “is worthy of that name unless he or she succeeds in creating objects which do not resemble their usual descriptors but are instead depicted in that elemental rawness which shows how little, in the ordinary run of things, we allow them to resemble what they in fact appear to be.” The sequence of negatives and reversals in the sentence indicate the complexity of the task: truth is, of course, elusive; evidence is illusive; the essay, with its epigrammatic etymology of provisionality and its seventeenth-century pedigree, must somehow get beyond these matters and uncover the bones.

Writing instructors often coach students in the practices that lead to a “writing life,” and Arthur’s title hints at a kind of companion practice, how to establish a life as a reader. In this vein, he re-examines texts acquired in his youth, such as novelist Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, “a piece of literary flotsam picked up on one of the many occasions when I was beachcombing in bookshops in my late teens.” On the occasion of his ten-year-old daughter being assigned to read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, he wonders whether the novel’s gruesomeness might be at best a “curious choice” or “unsuitable” for children that age and decides to re-read the novel alongside her to consider the question carefully.

But these sorts of reflections—living with and re-living familiar texts—are just one of Arthur’s intentions in Reading Life. In “reading” the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist’s purpose. “Essays deal in the shrapnel of being,” he writes, “turning over now one piece, now another, carefully running the fingers of their prose along the edges, testing for sharpness, looking for hints of connection, feeling for the cut-off remnants of joins, trying to reconstruct a sense of setting, context, contiguity, extrapolating from the minuscule moments and objects that create a life reminders of the massive milieu in which they and it are embedded.” The extended metaphor—stunning in its disruptive mashup of violence and contemplation—exemplifies Arthur’s method. He favors complex and suspended syntax; he crafts intricate details that subtly interconnect.

Arthur’s essays have always worked by way of fragments, assembling mosaics or braiding multiple narratives. His style lies in the scope of these assemblages and the patient, measured pacing with which he brings the pieces together and an unseen pattern emerges. Sometimes those fragments are literally objects—a whale’s tooth, for example, that Arthur subjects to close examination and free association, linking the memory of his childhood visits to the dentist who gave him the small artifact to consideration of the unbroken texts of DNA, “a paired line of antecedents going back some 60 million years to the land animals whales once were … [leading] finally to the same destination: that moment of naked singularity, the great beginning, the point at which there was something rather than nothing.” (This was one of my favorites in the book, recalling in some ways “Miracles” from his 2005 Irish Haiku, in which the fossilized bone from a whale’s ear resonates with connection to cosmic unity and the disunity of religiopolitical violence in Northern Ireland.)

Arthur’s omnivorous attention “reads” moments from literary history—a passage in the Goncourt brothers’ Journal containing an image of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France; a few degrees of separation regarding Seamus Heaney and his famous Bog Bodies poems—and from personal experience—leading a group of writing students out into the snow on a quest for found objects as writing prompts; “listening” to the histories associated with three walking sticks Arthur inherited. Through these readings, the richness he gleans includes delight in language itself (acquiring new words like “sett” and “clough”), companionship in shared meaning (“one of the things I’ve always liked about second-hand books is the way they hold the spoor of other readers and how, following their tracks, a sense of almost tribal complicity can be kindled”), the sudden shock or surprise of entering an alternate point of view (“why did this glimpse of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France strike me so forcefully that it felt—still feels—as if it left a splinter?”). Such “splinters” stay a long while with the reader, too—that’s part of Arthur’s power as prose writer, to deliver images, or facts, or anecdotes that work their barbed way more deeply in.

Reading Life is distinguished from his previous books in its deliberate commentary on form and theory. Essayists often like to comment on the meandering, fragmentary, organic approach that seems fundamental to the form, and Arthur has done so before. But here he devotes more direct consideration to such matters. Instead of losing himself in the unfolding energy of the essays, more often Arthur remains a self-conscious, authoritative as well as authorial presence. It’s sometimes as if he’s holding a subject before his own and the reader’s gaze, while simultaneously commenting upon what gazing feels like and explaining how sight casts an upside-down image of the world on an imaginary screen on the back of the eye.

And so “Sonatina for Oboe and Bayonet (Reading All Quiet on the Western Front),” the piece in which Arthur and his daughter read two distinct editions (his a 1963 edition with a cover depicting the dead and dying, hers with “only…an artful image of a poppy”), the story of their reading widens to recount their discussion of what a bayonet actually is (a knife the size of an oboe, he explains at first) and to examine one from the World War I theater purchased long ago from a junk shop. Soon the essay also provides a close reading of its own movement, Arthur explicating for the reader the image he’s just drawn, laying out the layers of symbolism he perceives there, making what moments before were implicit, explicit. The prospect of his own daughter on the floor between the musical instrument she plays at school and the authentic German bayonet her father has brought for her to look at “makes a powerful cameo … freezing into a kind of icon of incongruity that’s at once symbolic and interrogative,” Arthur muses. “It symbolizes vividly the way in which our world is riven by the coexistence of opposites: gentleness and brutality; compassion and cruelty; beauty and ugliness; creativity and destruction; peace and war. These polarities can pull apart any equilibrium of meaning we try to lay between them. Their sudden alternations act like military rounds, pounding the semblance of order on which we build our lives.”

This, too, is vintage Chris Arthur. Calm and articulate, while pointing to the firing guns.

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Ghosts in the Trees

Day of All Saints by Patricia Grace King
Miami University Press, 2017
Paperback, 96 pages, $15.00

Winner of the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize

Patricia Grace King begins her novella Day of All Saints with an image of ghosts: “Ghosts in the trees. Martín wants to rip them all down. If he could, he’d bury them deep in the flowerbed that he’s uprooting, or stomp them into the grass.” These ghosts, Halloween decorations that adorn a yard in Chicago’s affluent north side, are anything but playful; rather, they represent the suppressed memory of trauma, specifically the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, which haunts Martín Silva de Choc, and, indeed, the pages of this stunning short novel. It follows King’s two previous fiction chapbooks, The Death of Carrie Bradshaw (Kore Press, 2011), and Rubia (winner of our very first Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Prize here at The Florida Review, 2012). Her work is growing in power, and here she draws on her three years spent in Guatemala working with refugees of that country’s civil war.

Although the primary narrative, set in Chicago in the 1990s, unfolds over the course of a single day, King skillfully weaves in flashbacks that take place in Guatemala City. There, Martín, a young language instructor, lives with his grandmother, Doña Ana, and his aunt, Rosa, in the El Incienso barrio, to which he moved when he was four, as “civil war ripped through the rest of the country.” In the first of these flashbacks, Martín falls in love with a US foreign exchange student, Abby, even as her social, economic, and national privilege cause her to fetishize, to romanticize through a Eurocentric lens, the very neighborhood in which Martín lives. “This feels Mediterranean, somehow,” says Abby, “‘If you just nearly shut your eyes … If you look through your lashes.’” Indeed, the crux of the work hinges on how Martín and Abby, though in love with one another, cannot communicate in a meaningful way due to their different cultural identities and experiences. Doña Ana, in telling of her former life in the Ixcán in the 1970s, echoes this difference when she juxtaposes Guatemalan culture with US culture. Of her own culture, she says,

And I had my own small diversions: nights I sang with the neighbors, down at the Pérezes’ house—the Pérezes had a marimba—and the priests’ visits on weekends. They came regularly then, to say Mass on Saturday and to hold Spanish classes for us women, since back in the highlands we’d mainly spoken K’iché.

She follows this observation with one of US culture during the same era: “In America, what were they doing—roller-skating? Donna Summer? Don’t look so surprised; I know who she is. Electing Señor Ronald Reagan, too, weren’t they? Who sent our Army so many guns.” This cultural difference, and its underlying significance, permeates the work and is ever-present in Martín and Abby’s relationship. When they move to Chicago, their bond becomes tenuous, and their different social positions and histories more starkly defined. As Abby attends art classes at a university, Martín works as a day laborer. And while Abby has her own past trauma related to her mother, she ultimately has the privilege of security. When she leaves Martín, haunted as he is by the brutal deaths of his parents and extended family members, she finds safe haven in the home of her mother on the north side. Martín, however, bewildered and alone in a new country, finds himself without such material and emotional sanctuary.

King writes a story within a story within a story, and she does so in lyrical language with details so vivid that the reader cannot help but enter the picture she paints. In the primary narrative, Martín searches for and then finds Abby at her mother’s home, and in the secondary narrative, Martín and Abby fall in love in Guatemala. In the tertiary narrative, Doña Ana, over a dinner prepared for Abby at home in El Incienso, begins the story that is the heart of the text—the traumatic events that occurred in the Ixcán and that haunt Martín and his remaining family members.

This narrative, begun in a flashback sequence, ultimately enters the primary narrative as Martín faces the ghosts of his past, who appear before him in a memory long suppressed. He can no longer banish these ghosts, nor can the reader, who encounters them, and the world they inhabit, at every turn. They are “[t]he heat [of the Ixcán, which] was this thing that sat down on your skin and would never let you up. And the mud—you would sink in it up to your knees. You could lose your own shoes in that mud.” They are “‘[t]he fog on those mountains … something you miss when you’ve left them—how it flies from the peaks like white laundry.’” These ghosts drift through the text, hovering on the periphery of the psyche in both Martín and the reader.

In Day of All Saints, King makes a thoughtful social statement about cultural difference and First World privilege: as Martín observes, “Halloween: a day of no real significance in Guatemala. What matters, instead, is El Dia de Todos los Santos, Day of All Saints, one day afterward.” However, she does so without ever allowing that statement to overwhelm the true focus of the story: Martín’s strength and fortitude, indeed the strength and fortitude of his family, the other residents of El Incienso, and the citizens of Guatemala, which shine throughout the course of the text. King’s characterization of Doña Ana; Aunt Rosa; Don Gustavo, Aunt Rosa’s romantic companion; and Ernestina, the young woman of Ixcán who chooses to leave behind her village and her birth name in order to fight for the resistance, is honest, nuanced, and deeply affecting, largely because of how King understates their sacrifices.

Ultimately, though, Martín is the character who most affects the reader, not, solely, because the narrative is focused through him, but because of the complexity of his character. He is a man in love with a foreign woman, a woman who wishes to heal the wounds of his past in the same way that she wishes to heal a wound on his hand, but he is also a man deeply connected to his place of origin, his remaining family members, and his fragmented history. He haunts us, as does the ending in which, hunched against the trunk of a tree in the Palm Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, he confronts the ghosts of his past that have now entered his present. It is closing time at the conservatory, but this room is the ever-present Ixcán, where the guerillas, dressed in “camo-green,” await to aid survivors of the army’s ruthless actions, and he is trapped there “[a]mong the wet trees.” He knows that “soon the people in green will come for him too,” with a green-aproned conservatory attendant poised to tell him, “‘Sir, it’s time to go now.’” Where will he go when he leaves the Palm Room? One hopes to a sanctuary of his own creation.

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What’s It Like to Be a Feminist?

Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2017
Paperback, 299 pages, $26.95

Start with the assumption that feminists are angry, pushy, unhappy, irritating, willful, stubborn, insistent, loud, shrill, disruptive, hypersensitive, and humorless spoilsports, policing others’ words and making unreasonable demands.

It isn’t a pretty picture.

Go one step further and call feminists ugly. Pretty women are cheerful not angry, agreeable not pushy, happy not unhappy, accommodating not willful, acquiescent not stubborn, deferential not insistent, modulated not loud, soft not shrill, socially inconspicuous not disruptive, sensitive but not hypersensitive, good-natured not humorless—they are cheerleaders who go along and get along.

Accept these assumptions.

Notice that resistance will simply reinforce them. Say, “No, I’m not,” and you are, once again, being willful, shrill. Calmly and patiently explain what’s not funny about a sexist joke, and you are, once again, an irritation. Demonstrate that your feminist demands are not unreasonable, and you are manifestly pushy. Modulate your voice and try to be socially inconspicuous; when your ideas are ignored and your work overlooked, you will speak a little louder, draw a bit more attention, and confirm that you are, as everyone already knew you to be, stubborn, a disruptive presence. Assert yourself, proudly rebuking prettiness as a bland and artificial mixture of complacency and conformity, and you will appear all the more garish and difficult to countenance. The more forcefully you resist, the more alienated and alienating you become.

Feminists live trapped by these perceptions—that we are angry, unreasonable, ugly.

In her new book Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sarah Ahmed offers a compelling view of what it is like to live inside this trap. By looking from within the subject position of the feminist (who may be known as the nasty woman, the uppity bitch, the difficult colleague, the crazy aunt, the unruly girl, the mad woman), she reveals why it is so hard to be a feminist. That is, she reveals why the interpersonal, emotional, and epistemic position of the feminist is so challenging to occupy. Ahmed’s phenomenological exploration of the life of the feminist will undoubtedly offer solidarity to feminist readers, who will nod, wince, and exclaim in full recognition of the situations Ahmed describes.

The title might suggest that the book is a primer for feminist ideas, history, or analysis; it is not. If anything, the book takes for granted a reader who is already educated or experienced in feminism. But it is also not a book whose goal is to redirect feminist attention to particular cultural and political ills in need of feminist analysis or activism. Neither an introduction to feminist thought, nor a contribution to more traditional feminist scholarship, the book is, by design, difficult to characterize. Stylistically, Ahmed combines academic reference and literary analysis with personal anecdote in prose that wanders and loops, sometimes repetitively, over concepts and associations. The effect is that of having caught the author in the act of creation, of watching how she unwinds an idea or observation. The text is interrupted at intervals with bold-faced fragments; not sub-headings or section markers, these bits of language appear like echoes of speech (e.g., “poor him”), physical gestures (e.g., “rolling eyes”), or affective signposts (e.g., “flinch”). Their presence signifies a poetic impulse to imbue the text with a lived and living presence, not standard in academic writing. Reading this book is more like tracing a butterfly’s meandering course through the air than like watching a jet plane’s trajectory. But this is one fierce, unflinching butterfly.

In a sense, the book is an intellectual autobiography: It explores how Ahmed, an influential and highly successful author who has published nine books, navigated her way through a career in academia and developed theoretical tools out of her own experiences as a woman of color, a feminist, and a lesbian. The book showcases several ideas Ahmed first presented in other texts, including the “feminist killjoy,” “sweaty concepts,” the “willful subject,” and “stranger danger.” Revisiting them here, in the context of sharing her personal experience, she demonstrates that “the personal is theoretical.”

By parallel to the more familiar slogan, “the personal is political,” Ahmed suggests that personal experiences are felt in the particular ways that they are because of the theoretical frameworks that give them shape and that theory is constructed in the way that it is because of the personal experience of the theoretician.

Consider first an example that is not directly feminist. If you live in a capitalist society, you may experience shopping at a mall as pleasurable. You may look forward to it, enjoy perusing the fashions, looking for deals on sale racks, or splurging on an item that beckons with its sparkly new-ness and promises to define or improve your image. Your experience includes positive feelings of anticipation, reward, and affirmation. Your excitement about purchasing is a function of several key concepts—money, disposable income, competitive pricing, bargain-hunting, credit, debt, and worth—which arise from an economic system shaped by capitalist economic theory. If your credit is bad and you have no disposable income, you may have negative feelings associated with shopping at the mall—disappointment, embarrassment, envy, stress—which, of themselves, can be understood as reinforcing the positive shopping experience as the normative ideal to which you aspire. Theory shapes experience.

But experience also shapes theory. And it is from this angle that Ahmed’s book offers its most arresting and crisply articulated insights. She describes how being perceived as stubborn and difficult in conversations at the family dinner table enabled her to develop the idea of the feminist killjoy, the person whose feelings and aspirations are out of line with patriarchal norms and expectations. The feminist killjoy doesn’t laugh at sexist jokes and doesn’t want to partake in patriarchal rituals, heteronormative practices, or norms of femininity. She doesn’t have the same affective inclinations as those who are not feminists, and her difference is experienced by others as disruptive, sour, disagreeable. (To return to the earlier example: It’s like being the person who complains bitterly about the vulgar greed, banal aesthetics, shallow consumerism, unthinking conformity, and sweatshop labor that are represented at the shopping mall. . . capitalist killjoy!) By giving name to the figure of the feminist killjoy and articulating the dynamic in which she becomes trapped, Ahmed constructs a theoretically useful tool.

Similarly, by considering her experience as a brown woman stopped by the police while she was walking in a white neighborhood, Ahmed exposes how the cautionary tale of “stranger danger” relies upon assumptions about race and color that have nothing to do with being a stranger or an outsider, let alone an actual danger. If she is perceived as a sun-tanned white woman, she is not deemed a stranger, not a potential danger; whereas, if she were deemed non-white, a person of color, her presence would signal caution, fear, anxiety, interrogation. The link between “stranger” and “danger” is a construct that disguises forms of racism, colorism, and xenophobia. From personal experience, she seizes an insight that has theoretical utility.

It must be remarked here that the kind of theory Ahmed has in mind is that which appears in certain styles of academic discourse. It is the sense of “theory” that may guide work in English literature and cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, humanities, history, classics, and other areas where academic writers develop sophisticated means of describing and making meaning out of human life. Acknowledging the way in which personal experience may become a resource for the construction of such theoretical work defies the purported objectivity and neutrality of such discourses.

This defiance shows up in Ahmed’s book in two further, significant ways. One concerns her use of pronouns. She employs the first-personal “I,” indicating the subjective perspective of the author. If there are truths to be communicated by the author (and there are), they will be presented without the protective cover of typical academic style, which minimizes the first-person. For example, the preceding paragraph began with the phrase “it must be remarked,” which obscures my presence as the writer, replacing “I must remark” with a phrase that makes it seem as if the decision to remark comes from the ether and is beyond accountability, rather than coming from me. (Here I am, for the first time in this essay. Did you notice my absence?)

But Ahmed also alternates with the second-person “you,” where the “you” affords her the “distance” to discuss certain personal experiences, for example of sexual violence. The effect of this “you” is not only to shield the author in some of the most vulnerable passages, but to invite the reader to recognize her own similar situatedness, her own experience of being doubted or distrusted or of being, as a feminist, trapped in an interpersonally and rhetorically pressurized position. You know the feeling of the quicksand: The more you struggle to free yourself, the more forcefully it threatens to pull you under. (You.)

If the theoretical and the personal are interlocked, and if the personal is political, then the practice of academic citation—which authors and texts are adduced as supporting evidence, as worthy of dispute, or as valuable predecessors and truth-bearers—is itself implicated in the construction of our worlds: a world of personal experience, a world of theoretical interest and influence, a world of political action. Ahmed is explicit: “In this book, I adopt a strict citation policy: I do not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution [. . .] Instead, I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism.” It is a good thing Ahmed is not up for tenure! Here, her defiance of academic tradition and institutional authority, and their claims to objectivity, is plain. As so many women academics know, failure to engage with “seminal” and canonical (white male) literature is indeed deemed failure; to succeed is to follow in the path of those who have gone before you, and those who have gone before were, by and large, not feminists or anti-racists. (We might even go further to say that insofar as those who went before were feminists or anti-racists, they thereby disqualified themselves from participation in the institution of white men; that’s just what it means to say that “white men” can be understood as an institution, rather than a set of persons who were, merely incidentally, white and male.)

I would like to think that we can strike a middle-ground, that we can continue to engage with the writings of white men, who are among our literary and academic forebears, even if the aim is to critique their work, while at the same time learning to read, discuss, take seriously, and cite works by women, people of color, and others who have been excluded or marginalized. (Did you notice? Now that I am here, in my own essay, I am not going away.) But at the same time, I laud Ahmed’s decision about whom to cite in Living a Feminist Life: Her decision enacts a possibility; it performs the title’s task and the book’s subject in a way that may not be imitable for many women in academia today but sets an important precedent. Brava!

Yet for something to count as a precedent, there must be subsequent instances, which raises the problem of how to alter not just academic citational practices but the larger arenas in which “white men” is the name of hegemonic cultural and political power. In this book, Ahmed returns to a discussion of “diversity work” begun in her 2012 book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press). Diversity work, for Ahmed, has two, related meanings. In one sense, diversity work is “the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution.” The work involves, for women, people of color, and the disabled, negotiating expectations and “passing” as “something you are assumed not to be,” such as knowledgeable, competent, informed, reliable, intelligent, authoritative, or scholarly. Once again, Ahmed articulates the difficulty of “being” for those whose “legitimacy is in question” in the context of an institution, like a university, where women or people of color are not only minorities, but bring life experiences, interests, and literatures that have not been built into institutional practice. Like being trapped as a feminist, the diversity worker is trapped by the fact of her being anomalous, by the simultaneous demand that she assimilate to institutional culture and that she be the public face of diversity, and hence of divergence from institutional culture. Ahmed brilliantly describes the experience of being worn down by the effort (emotional, interpersonal, epistemic) required simply to exist when you are not, by virtue of your embodiment or identity, proximate to the norms of white male culture.

The second meaning of “diversity work” is the work that institutions hire people to do (usually women and persons of color) to try to transform the institution, to make it more diverse, and to redress problems of sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. In a book replete with incisive observations, it is Ahmed’s discussion of diversity work in this second sense that I found most necessary. I have encountered no other text that illuminates so well the fact of institutional resistance to the diversity work that institutions themselves initiate.

Ahmed details how decisions are made via committees, but never meaningfully implemented; how recommendations for policy are made, then ignored; how the actions taken to measure the extent of the problems (how many faculty of color? how many allegations of campus sexual assault? how many grievances filed?) are perversely repurposed as evidence that the institution is resolving the problems. The diversity work that is done, in good faith and with great effort, by designated diversity workers is co-opted to represent the institution in a good light: Look at all we are doing! The mechanisms and procedures used for assessing the diversity problem seem to replace confrontation with the root causes of the diversity problem. The rubber never hits the road. Ahmed calls the phenomenon “non-performativity: when naming something does not bring something into effect or (more strongly) when something is named in order not to bring it into effect.” For those of us that have done diversity work, cynicism is an occupational hazard, not a temperamental proclivity. Notably, Ahmed resigned from her faculty position at the University of London in 2016 to protest the university’s failure to respond adequately to the problem of sexual harassment on campus.

Is it any wonder, then, that feminists are unhappy? If being subject to gender oppression didn’t make us unhappy to start with, being perceived as unreasonable, humorless, and unattractive when we speak up against gender-based injustice will almost certainly make us unhappy. Finding that our sustained efforts to transform institutions are futile (even institutions that have hired or appointed us to do this very work) will make us unhappy.

As Ahmed argued in her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, we are guided by social norms toward activities, practices, and relationships that do not necessarily yield happiness, but offer a socially agreed-upon vision of where you are supposed to find it. The important thing is not that you achieve happiness, but that you feel that you are approaching it by following the proper route. For example: college, job, marriage, kids, retirement, grandkids, travel. Deviate and you will be unhappy.

Even if, by some marvel of personal fortitude, meditative achievement, or luck, a feminist manages to live happily—brimming with cheer and optimism, surrounded by warm friends and loving family, peaceful in the pursuit of meaningful projects—she will nonetheless be cast as unhappy, for she will fail to inhabit at least some of the cultural locations in which happiness is believed to reside: She may be unmarried (unhappy in love!), childless (the sorrowful deprivation barely requires comment), showing her age (if only she would keep herself up, sigh), working in a male-dominated profession (why does she want to do that?) or otherwise living outside of the mainstream norms of femininity that offer the promise of female happiness.

The feminist will be moving through institutional spaces and organizations that do not welcome her or share her values. And if she manages to do this affably and with equanimity, she will nonetheless be cast as an unhappy figure insofar as she asserts her feminist ideas and ideals; she will be pitied, excoriated, or ostracized on account of having willfully ceded her own best chance at success. If happiness is promised to reside in participation in these institutions, it will be said, the feminist has only herself to blame if she obstructs her own chance at fitting in by criticizing or seeking to reform the institution. Cast by others as an unhappy person, the feminist becomes a source of unhappiness for others; her presence is felt as negative charge.

Smile.

Many feminists have explained the sources of their anger and unhappiness: We are agitated about being underpaid, undervalued, disrespected, ignored, politically disenfranchised and under-represented, economically exploited, culturally oppressed, sexually assaulted and harassed, sidelined, disbelieved, silenced, demeaned, abused, and, so often, slain.

Read through that line-up again, slowly. Let the last word fall into place as the logical conclusion of all that precede it.

Much feminist work has been done, by activists, journalists, writers, and academic scholars, to expose the patriarchal institutions, sexist culture, and misogynistic social norms that pervade society. Feminists have documented the situation of women through historical study, literary analysis, anthropological research, economic data, empirical psychology, biological and neurobiological scrutiny, review of legal systems, even philosophical argument. Armed with expertise and facts, feminists assert their claims and suffer the backlash. Ahmed’s thoughtful and bold book explains what it is like to live as a feminist, what it is like to occupy a position that is, in a patriarchal world, intrinsically oppositional. As a feminist, one is always out of tune with mainstream society, always coming up against walls.

In what strikes me as a sad irony, the book could serve as an explanation for why so many women are not feminists and don’t want to be called feminists. Acknowledging feminist claims is by itself an emotionally harrowing experience. Remember the line-up: underpaid, undervalued, disrespected, ignored, politically disenfranchised and under-represented, economically exploited, culturally oppressed, sexually assaulted and harassed, sidelined, disbelieved, silenced, demeaned, abused, slain. Once those claims are acknowledged, the work of living a feminist life adds more emotional and interpersonal demands. Every day. All the time.

Breathe.

Ahmed closes Living a Feminist Life with two sections titled “Conclusion 1” and “Conclusion 2,” no doubt to avoid the potential trivializing that would come from calling them Appendices. Conclusion 1 comprises a “Killjoy Survival Kit,” offering comments on how feminists can find strength and comfort in feminist community, feminist books, feminist humor, and more. This “kit,” more an invitation than a conclusion, is a good resource, especially for young feminists.

Conclusion 2 is a “Killjoy Manifesto,” another great resource for young feminists or feminists feeling isolated, lost, or ambivalent as they deviate from the path of femininity and heteronormativity, and its false promise of happiness. Here, Ahmed enunciates a number of “principles,” each of which begins with either I am willing or I am not willing. For example, principle five is, “I am not willing to get over histories that are not over.” I especially appreciate the brevity and distillation of this Manifesto, and the way these principles are not presented as unyielding rules. Ahmed’s focus on willingness, the ability to recognize the existence of one’s own will and to assert it in resistance to whatever is antifeminist, leaves wide latitude with respect to exactly what, how, and when a feminist summons her will. Principles of willingness afford the flexibility that allows individual women and men to enact their feminist commitment in their own ways. Yet the Manifesto provides a common language for conceptualizing and justifying one’s feminist acts and bolsters feminist courage.

The Killjoy Manifesto may be just what the contemporary moment needs. The #MeToo movement, which was galvanized following Trump’s election, inspired women to give personal testament to their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. This uprising of women’s voices incited thousands of uncomfortable conversations—for the women who spoke up, for their husbands and friends, for their employers and co-workers. The willingness to be the cause of social discomfort is no small achievement for so many women who have been socialized to smooth things over, to deny their own pain, and to sacrifice their own well-being in order to keep the peace at home or at work.

Among the charges that women face when they bring forward allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of classmates, colleagues, employers or others is that they are being selfish, careless, or malicious. They are asked, Why do you want to destroy his life? Set aside the fact that for some women (not all), their experience of sexual harassment or assault has effectively destroyed their lives, causing lasting damage to their emotional well-being, professional reputation, career prospects, vocational or educational opportunities, or family relationships. Set that aside. The question gets its unnerving force largely because women are not supposed to be agents of destruction. To destroy is to exert power and influence, a masculine prerogative. Women are supposed to create and nurture, not destroy. Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto encourages women to be willing to destroy systems of white male privilege and the violence they produce. No, feminists are not encouraged to engage in literal, physical violence or killing. But they are encouraged to kill the patriarchal practices and institutions that have been held up as the route to happiness; when this route protects men who assault and harass women, it must be denounced. If taking down a powerful man on account of his sexual misconduct (crime, violence, cruelty, misogyny) makes people unhappy, so be it. Better to kill that foul joy, founded on corrupt behavior, deception, and systems of dominance, than to sustain the silence that perpetuates the misery of women, individually and collectively.

Ahmed sees more clearly than most, I think, that feminism is essentially radical. Her writing offers creative and incisive tools by which to understand and respond to the demands of feminist living. To free ourselves from the trap, we must be willing to. Feminists have explained why they persist, why they insist: We won’t accept anything short of full and equal regard for our fundamental humanity. Almost is not good enough. Better than it used to be is not as good as it should be.

Raise your arm, raise your voice.

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Opening the Door

At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations by Robert Hedlin
Copper Canyon, 2017
Paperback, 220 pages, $18.00

Of all the books of poetry I’ve read this year—and I’ve read quite a large number—Robert Hedin’s At The Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations has pulled me most deeply into the depths of feeling, seeing, and being that I hope to discover in poetry. Each poem is a genuine experience, a small moment of grace, and the book as a whole is a series of revelations. Once I started reading At the Great Door, I couldn’t put the book down—and yet it is a book to savor. Its pleasures have renewed and reinvigorated my own faith in the power of poetry to matter deeply to us, to help us live by restoring us to wonder in this clamorous, narcissistic, cliché-ridden time. It is a book to be kept on that short shelf of favorites.

At the Great Door of Morning is divided into six sections, the first and last two comprised of Hedin’s own poems and the middle three of his translations of the Norwegian poets Rolf Jacobsen, Olav Hauge, and Dag Straumsvag. As masterful as the translations are, it is Hedin’s own poems that really sing. He is a master of clarity and of the kind of image that revitalizes the actual world—makes us look at an ordinary object or action with fresh eyes—as when, in a poem about teaching his sons to row, he shows the act of rowing as “keeping/the river moving,” making suddenly vivid what would otherwise be a common action barely worthy of our attention. In another poem he shows us owls that “glide off the thin/Wrists of the night.” These perfectly-observed/masterfully created moments of imagistic transformation achieve Pound’s goal of “making it new,” but they don’t just revitalize the art of poetry; in fact, they make new the actual world, showing us ordinary things in authentically fresh ways. And this is what Hedin does over and over here: makes the mundane miraculous again, refreshing our perceptions and thus our lives. We might even say that Hedin is a visionary poet, though a quiet and personally modest one. Reading these poems, we respond not to the poet’s brilliance (which is manifest) but to the world he shows us: This book shows little of Hedin’s autobiography or personal life. What it does show, in deep and trembling ways, is a vision and an immersion in the world of things and mind, the world of being and contemplation. One leaves Hedin’s poems with reinvigorated eyes. I was reminded of the experience of leaving an art museum after a particularly strong show of paintings—of walking around seeing the world through the lens of those paintings for a while. Hedin’s best poems have that effect on my sensibility: they refresh and reawaken my everyday world.

There is an ancient quality of folk-tale magic in many of Hedin’s best poems, a charmed and dreamlike quality of “seeing into the life of things,” which results from careful, lifelong craft and attention to clarity of detail. These poems remind us of how ancient the art of poetry is, how deeply a good poem can plumb:

This must be where the ravens turn to geese,

The weasels to wolves, where the rabbits turn to owls…

Where hunters have forgotten their trails and sunk out of sight…

Glistening with the bones of animals and trappers,

Eggs that are cold and turning to stones…

(“The Snow Country”)

It seems to me that the great majority of contemporary poems, even the best of them, are filled with clamor and self-regard. These qualities may be reflective of our time and thus fitting attitudes for our poetry. Sometimes it seems though that idiosyncrasy is a stand-in for originality, mere oddness a stand-in for genuine freshness. This observation is not meant to bemoan the state of our poetry, which is vibrant and challenging and forging new ground. But it is to point out one of Robert Hedin’s greatest strengths, and perhaps what moves and refreshes me most deeply in his work: the modesty that infuses every aspect of his art, a modesty informed of deep craft, genuine feeling, and transformative seeing. This is a modesty born of respect for the millennia-long art of poetry and the poets who have practiced before him. It is equally a modesty born of respect for the world of living creatures and energies with whom we live our lives, and a respect for the clarity of language. It is the grounded and self-assured modesty of a master:

Goddard Hot Springs

When you lie in these sweating streams

You are lying in the breath of your ancestors,

The old pioneers who sat here in these pools

Mapping trails to the mother lode.

You feel a fog drift through your body,

A voice that is strangely familiar

And still has stories to tell.

A poem like this, with its understated, carefully-modulated revelations, reminds us again that poetry, true poetry, needs to be savored—read slowly, listened to—then read again. Without such reading, the depths this poem plumbs might be missed or skated over. Hedin trusts his reader to breathe with his poem, to listen carefully for its news and subtle revelation.

Hedin’s best poems remind us that to read a poem, we must breathe with the breath of the poet who made it, thus reanimating it with our own breath-stuff.

Hedin’s book ends with a final “chapter” he calls “Field Notes,” a compendium of insights and assertions about the art of poetry, all of them wise, useful, and memorably written. Among them, this statement, which might stand as a kind of motto for all of Hedin’s work:

A good poem breaks through the numbing, stultifying voice of our mass

culture to successfully articulate, in all its breadth and meaning, a land-

scape of conviction, a deeper circuitry that helps give life its necessary

shape and substance.

and another:

Poetry is, in many ways, a sustained longing for home and reconciliation,

the inseparability of self and object, self and other.

Or, better yet, turning again to one of Hedin’s poems:

The Tlingit on this island tell a story about fog.

They say in its belly

The spirits of the drowned are turned into otters,

That on cold nights when the lowlands

Smolder with steam

The loon builds its nest in their voices.

(“Ancestors”)

As deeply as I admire this book, I do wish that Hedin’s modesty had not prevented him from including a greater number of his own poems and (perhaps) fewer of his translations. As strong as they are, the translations do not strike me as quite as linguistically or imigistically fresh as Hedin’s own work. Though the three poets translated here are themselves masters of imagery and concision, and though it is clear that they all have influenced him, still I yearned for Hedin’s own language, his singular vision. Perhaps I am merely quibbling. Perhaps it is simply that I would have liked a longer book. What’s here is a treasure, a genuine contribution to American poetry and a gift to all who read it.

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The Failure of the Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Quest for Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Singular Songs

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

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

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

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

Rumors from the capital: the caliph lowered

his fork of larks’ tongues in dreamy hollandaise

and ordered all of black-draped Constantinople

to turn its mournful eye to the Emperor-

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

sniffing father, Stefan the Garrulous,

dredged from the carp-pond, leaving us ruleless

at last, our village decking its huts with flowered

wreaths and dancing the long-repressed Balinksnov—

Yanka Hoy! Yanka Ruiz!—three days

and nights, slitting the goat to make for purer

days ahead while I, a baby at nipple…

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

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

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

All of this too taking on the stilted look

of childhood photographs:

my brother and I on a couch, a small box

unwrapped in his lap, both of us gray,

couch and carpet gray, the day beyond the open window

gray and its curtain pulled outside for the moment

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

to the photographer, Mom or Dad,

your first watch, hanging from your hand

like a caught fish, its darting eye grown dull

in a blink.

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

No one from our family

had ever left to play baseball.

Go ahead, said my mother,

strike out on your own.

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

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Revelation and Resistance

The Light of What Comes After by Jen Town

Bauhan Publishing, 2018

96 pages, paperback, $16.00

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

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

Okay, maybe I am oversimplifying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe myself to be

a sympathetic character

but formed to what

purpose, I’m not sure.

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

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

It was a world of décolletage,

the diaphanous thrills

of forgetting—lily skin

draped in spring and sugar

sifting through fingers—pollen’s

golden settling on footstool

and ottoman, pie rack

and ice box. A world of garden

walls aflame with bloom.

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

and yet: inside we drifted like

smoked bees in a silence

through which clocks

ticked, sound of silver needles

piercing cloth.

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

… She gathers flowers by

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, the irony!

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Looking Both Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Category: Book Review