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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Category: Book Review