Category: Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really Serious Literature, Sept. 9, 2021

Paperback. $14.95.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Iowa Press, April 15, 2021

Paperback, $20.00, 68 pages.

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

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

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

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

Suppose the worst does happen—

by sunrise the web wrecked, glittering

With snowfall, and where has she gone

the queen of this realm?

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

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

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

I’d be lost

without my own bright footpath: tilled snow:

cloud cover: moonglow refracted: the shotgun crack

of a bough unburdened.

Could I walk off the hours

I’ve spent ashamed, attempting a life

that would make the dead proud?

What would it look like,

how much would it weigh?

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

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

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

Translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong

Action Books, Oct. 1, 2020.

Paperback, $18, 102 pages.

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

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

. . . lay their eggs

inside the earth of the Philippine jungles,

and spread syphilis or deliver stillborn babies

. . . Now and then,

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

a revolution always destined to misfire.

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

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

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

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

Beaten to death.

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

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

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

Press 53, 2021

Paperback, 64 pages, $17.95

I feel tape break against my chest

But there is no finish line, no

Not knowing. When can I say,

It’s better now? It’s taken years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Heather Cleary

Coffee House Press, 2021

Paperback, 136 pages

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

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

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

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

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