The Haunting of Memory and History

Hard Damage by Aria Aber

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Paperback, 126 pp., $17.95

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

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

Family, to me,

Is only the sweat of female secrecy

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

. . . How much

of my yearly tax is spent to bomb

the dirt that birthed me?. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

In English the body is both dead

And alive, but I know the blight of grief

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

Learn to hate—

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

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

cousin with no empathy. But family

is family; the awkward shell

I harbor, crack—avian eyelids,

hospital, yolk—

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

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

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

It is a terrible time

To be alive.

I say this with the privilege

Of being alive

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

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Visiting Eight Little Universes

Quantum Convention, by Eric Schlich

University of North Texas Press, 2018

Paperback, 192 pages, $14.95

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jam Session in Poems

Cross Country, by Jeff Newberry and Justin Evans

WordTech Editions, 2019

Paperback, 110 pages, $19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Voices That Listen Behind Closed Doors

Up in the Main House & Other Stories by Nadeem Zaman

Unnamed Press, 2019

Paperback, 176 pages, $17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Thing That Has Caged Them

Bloomland, by John Englehardt

Dzanc Books, 2019

Hardcover, 192 pages, $26.95

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nuanced Performances of Perfected Women

The Bird Catcher and Other Stories, by Fayeza Hasanat

Jaded Ibis Press, 2018

163 pages, paper, $17.99

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Artifact

View from True North by Sara Henning

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barely legals standing akimbo, underwear cupping their scrotums. Entries

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

aroused. The positions in which he fucked them.

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

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

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

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

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One House Back from One House Down

One House Down by Gianna Russo

Madville Publishing, 2019

Paperback, 96 pages, $17.00

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

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

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

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

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

She’s standing there like a ghost, but really

it was her house first. Those cabbage palms,

bougainvillea, white gardenia, beauty bush.

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

sandspurs, boarded up windows, a locked door.

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

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

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

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

Magnolia perfume is the gist of it.

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

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

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

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Voicing Ghosts

MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello

zimZalla Press, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to say two more things.

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

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

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Pushing against the Familiar

Termination Shocks by Janice Margolis

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Paperback, 258 pages, $13

Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton

FC2, 2019

Paperback, 160 pages, $13

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

Small Beer Press, 2019

Paperback, 288 pages, $17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Category: Book Review