Category: Reviews

Review The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

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

Review by Alex Ramirez-Amaya

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Review: Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins

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

Review by Dani Sarta

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Review: My Infinity by Didi Jackson

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Review: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

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

Review by Brian Alessandro

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Review: All The World Beside by Garrard Conley

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

Review by Brian Alessandro

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Flatiron. 276 pp. $29.99 

Review by Samuel Zammit

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Review: All Bird: Brandi George’s The Nameless

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

                          so now when we
completely forget      it Happened

the Thing forms      a fairy ring
inside our body     Now Death

lives inside us

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

will we ever be beautiful?

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

 

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

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Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson

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

Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson Cover

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Review: Marble Orchard by Emily Corwin

University of Akron Press, May 2023

68 pages

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

Slither with me to the Lazarus machine, primordial muck.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“there may be            change in mood, behavior,

actions, thoughts, or feelings, especially severe.

acting on dangerous impulses”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Viking Books, May 9, 2023
240 pages

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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