↓
 
  • Quarterly LitMag
    • All Issues
    • Issue 40 December 2022
    • Issue 39 September 2022
    • Issue 38 June 2022
    • Issue 37 March 2022
    • Issue 36 December 2021
    • Issue 35 September 2021
    • Issue 34 June 2021
    • Issue 33 March 2021
    • Issue 32 December 2020
    • Issue 31 September 2020
    • Issue 30 June 2020
    • Issue 29 March 2020
    • Issue 28 December 2019
    • Issue 27 September 2019
    • Issue 26 June 2019
    • Issue 25 March 2019
    • Issue 24 December 2018
    • Issue 23 September 2018
    • Issue 22 June 2018
    • Issue 21 March 2018
    • Issue 20 December 2017
    • Issue 19 September 2017
    • Issue 18 June 2017
    • Issue 17 March 2017
    • Issue 16 December 2016
    • Issue 15 September 2016
    • Issue 14 June 2014
    • Issue 13 March 2016
    • Issue 12 December 2015
    • Issue 11 September 2015
    • Issue 10 June 2015
    • Joke Issue
    • Issue 9 March 2015
    • Issue 8 December 2014
    • Issue 7 September 2014
    • Issue 6 June 2014
    • Issue 5 March 2014
    • Issue 4 December 2013
    • Issue 3 September 2013
    • Issue 2 June 2013
    • Issue 1 March 2013
    • Preview Issue
  • Writing Workshops
    • Writing Workshops
    • Cleaver Clinics
    • Faculty
  • Bookstore
  • Archives
    • All Issues
    • FLASH ARCHIVES
    • VISUAL NARRATIVES ARCHIVE
  • Other Features
    • Book Reviews
      • Cleaver Magazine Book Reviews
      • Alphabetical Index
    • Interviews
    • Craft Essays
      • Poetry Craft Essays
      • Fiction Craft Essays
      • Nonfiction Craft Essays
    • Ask June
  • About Us
    • Masthead
    • Emerging Artists
    • Subscribe
    • Opportunities
    • Contact
    • Submit
      • Submittable Portal
      • How to Submit or Suggest Book Reviews
      • How to Submit Craft Essays

Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

1 2 3 … 11 12 >>  
 

Category Archives: reviews

Post navigation

← Older posts

SCENE OF THE CRIME, a novel by Patrick Modianom, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 24, 2023 by thwackFebruary 24, 2023

SCENE OF THE CRIME
by Patrick Modiano
translated by Mark Polizzotti
Yale University Press, 157 pages
reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

I write down all kinds of little snippets of thought because otherwise they will float away.

For example, one day in the small notebook I keep in my car, I scrawled, “I think I am losing my fingerprints.”

Sometimes I write as if in a trance. I must—otherwise it’s difficult to explain this command that I recorded one day: “Map my brain.”

You could say it’s a call for a decoder ring of sorts, or simply my secret instructions to an artist I have yet to find, one who can draw the ideas that paper the walls of my mind. Someone who can decipher the permanent mosaic of thoughts, from the moment as a child that I poured the bottle of Prell shampoo on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and my father swooped down to administer my punishment, to certain lines from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (“How would you like living in the nicest house in town?”), plus the insistent rhythm of that French song partially sung in Spanish with a looping melody that’s about an endless journey, and which cannot be evicted from my brain.

The flicker of memories and thoughts we all have, in other words, but some of us pay very close attention to it.

To wit, French novelist Patrick Modiano. The flicker of thoughts and memories fueling his latest novel, Scene of the Crime, published by Yale University Press, largely concerns an event from decades before. An event that the main character recalls in dribs and drabs, and which he tries to capture in a notebook:

He jotted down thoughts as they flitted through his mind … It took only a detail, one that might have seemed insignificant to anyone else. That was it: a detail. The word “thought” wasn’t right. Too solemn. A multitude of details gradually filled entire pages of his blue notebook, apparently having no connection with one another, and so cursory that they would have been incomprehensible to someone trying to read them.

Modiano is already mapping his brain, and the results are on display in his 30-plus novels and books. In this new novel, the main character asks at the outset, “But how could he marshal all those signals and Morse code messages that stretched over a distance of more than fifty years? What was the common thread?”

These are seminal questions in the work of Modiano, and questions that undergird nearly all of his books.

In this new slim novel, he explores a remote period in the life of a character called Jean Bosmans who stumbles upon a series of coincidences involving his childhood home and a group of shady individuals who are alarmingly interested in his past.

The plot is par for the course for this French Nobel Laureate who has dedicated his literary career to exhuming the ghosts of wartime Paris through semi-autobiographical fiction.

The plot is also beside the point—and in some ways, I love that.

Patrick Modiano

Nearly all of Modiano’s works touch on memory and childhood, as the author pieces together fictionalized episodes with his father, a shadowy figure who was on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free. Born in 1945, Modiano has trained his gaze permanently on the war years that immediately preceded his birth, and the post-war years that are often referred to as the Thirty Glorious Years. As Alice Kaplan noted in a 2017 article for the Paris Review, Modiano likes to say he “is a child of the war.” She quotes him as saying: “Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.”

Modiano has been accused of writing the same book over and over. Many writers have been the subject of such an accusation and it’s probably true, but few are as magnanimous about it. Indeed, Modiano has admitted it during interviews, perhaps because he doesn’t see it as an insult or a problem.

I don’t either—I keep reading his work searching for the same elements, and am mesmerized by the tapestry of references and questions he puts together.

In fact, when I learned Yale was publishing yet another novel by Modiano, I scrambled to get a copy, secretly hoping it would be one more attempt by him to reconfigure his childhood. As it happens, the news that a new novel of his had been translated—in this case by Mark Polizzotti who has translated many of his titles—reached me after I’d gone on a Modiano tear.

I don’t often binge on books or movies. But last fall, I read Dora Bruder (in English and an Italian translation), The Black Notebook, and Invisible Ink, all by Modiano, in the space of a month while also re-reading Suspended Sentences (like the new book, translated by Polizzotti) and So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (translated by Euan Cameron).

This last title, about a writer whose address book goes missing, was my first Modiano novel. The book of addresses is found by a mysterious man who alerts him to the discovery only after perusing its entries—and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I find his obsession with maps and addresses and half-remembered episodes from his childhood (often involving walks he took around Paris) fascinating. The new novel repeatedly references a particular street, Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. He also mentions an old phone number before Paris converted to seven-digit numbers: AUTEUIL 15-28.

In a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine for the “Talk” column, Modiano suggested people might be surprised to learn he has old directories and phone books on his shelves. But the information would come as no surprise to anyone who has read a few of his books! His slim noirish novels are packed with references to street names, addresses and statistics culled from directories, which he also often references. To tell the story of a young Jewish girl who goes missing in Dora Bruder, for example, the author consults decades-old school registers, phone directories, arrest reports, and so-called “family files,” which were used by the prefecture of police after the Nazis took over. These tools aid him as he laboriously and endlessly tries to recreate the shape-shifting world that beguiles him, and many of us: childhood. I love the way he presents childhood as a puzzle we spend the rest of our lives trying to solve.

Take the reference to Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. It is no idle detail. Glancing at Pedigree, his memoir (also translated by Polizzotti, who channels Modiano’s voice superbly), I see it’s a street where Modiano himself lived as a child. Oh, and the character named Jean? Well, that’s Modiano’s actual first name.

His obsession with perennially reconstructing his childhood mirrors my own (why can’t I forget the moment in the hallway when I poured the shampoo all over the floor? Perhaps because as memoirist Patricia Hampl says, our minds naturally hold onto memories with a heavy, emotional toll). But he is careful to point out in Pedigree that he does so without nostalgia (perhaps that’s why he writes fiction and not memoir). His father along with his mother, who performed in theater, frequently left Modiano in the care of friends. They were careless with him and his brother, who tragically died at age ten.

As Kaplan wrote for the Paris Review, Modiano’s father, Albert, traded goods on the black market, often mixing with unreputable characters, composites of whom show up in all of these novels. Albert Modiano eluded capture and Kaplan writes, “His son has spent a lifetime trying to fathom the combination of wit and accommodation that allowed his father to emerge from those years unscathed.”

A lifetime trying to fathom the mystery, and documenting his queries in semi-autobiographical novels that often feature a writer.

This constant work of excavation keeps Modiano busy, and as noted, he is quite prolific. Perhaps because of this approach, Modiano is not aware or doesn’t mind that Scene of the Crime falls short of his normally winning formula of suspense, mystery, regret and longing.

The new book is considered a kind of sequel to Suspended Sentences, which came out in 2014 in English and is the superior of the two books. What I love about Suspended Sentences is that we’re plunged into the life of one very sympathetic character, a young boy left in the care of friends of his parents (sound familiar?). Where are his parents and who are these people with whom the boy is forced to stay? It’s a natural mystery whose tension mounts as Modiano gives us pages about the boy going to various schools, and playing at an abandoned chateau with friends, including “the florist’s son.” He writes with great tenderness about this boy who is perennially watching the mysterious adults around him. Modiano also sketches in that previous novel the shaky relationship between the young boy and his often-absent father, imbuing their scenes with incredible longing.

That air of earned mystery, of longing, of remembrance is missing here. Jean Bosmans isn’t a character I find particularly sympathetic, in part because he’s not fully drawn. Indeed, Jean Bosmans turns out to be a writer—a detail that emerges somewhat late in the new novel. Modiano writes, “He had finished his book, and for the first time he had the curious sensation of getting out of prison after years of incarceration.” It’s an interesting image—to suggest he had been incarcerated by these memories, by the threat of confronting the shadowy people who wanted to know what he remembered. But Modiano hasn’t built up enough tension for this to work. It isn’t earned.

And I don’t care about Jean’s relationships—including his rapport with a character who’s nicknamed “Deathmask,” a nomenclature which rankles. Not the way I followed the boy’s meetings with his father in Suspended Sentences. And some of the key plot points emerge late. Toward the end of the book, Jean is told, “Apparently you witnessed something, fifteen years ago, in that house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.” It takes 100 pages to elicit this remark, at which point I had already stopped caring about the house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.

For Modiano obsessives like me, it doesn’t matter. I will read the next Modiano title that’s published and I am glad to have this one on my shelves. And when the next book or the one after that shows a return to form, I will be elated. The good news here is that the master is still at work. And his work may be different from what I seek as a reader—his work is the work of excavation, of putting the puzzle pieces together. This time, the solution to the puzzle wasn’t as satisfying. But he will keep trying to solve it—and I will keep reading his books to see if he does.


Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator who was a 2022 NEA literature fellow in translation. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, Longreads, The Millions, and Brevity. She blogs about writing, translation, and her reluctant exile from Italy at ciambellina.blogspot.com/.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 24, 2023 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

RIGHT THIS WAY, novel by Miriam N. Kotzin, reviewed by Lynn Levin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 15, 2023 by thwackFebruary 15, 2023

RIGHT THIS WAY
by Miriam N. Kotzin
Spuyten Duyvil, 339 pages
reviewed by Lynn Levin

They say it can be done, but it is hard, very hard, for most betrayed wives to regain trust and forge ahead in a marriage with a husband who has cheated. This may hold true even if the man has ended the affair, even if he feels remorse, even if he is not a repeat offender, even if he tries to repair the marital bond. Warranted or not, suspicion, like a persistent shadow, may stalk a woman’s thoughts. She may not be able to rid herself of the notion that somewhere out there the enticing forbidden fruit still dangles or ripens anew.

The concept of transgression without redemption goes all the way back to the myth of Adam and Eve. Miriam N. Kotzin, in this wise and heart-wrenching new novel, reimagines the foundational Genesis text and adapts it to our times. The author situates the action in early twenty-first-century Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a comfortable middle-class town in which people have steady jobs, play tennis, eat healthy, go for manicures, have social lives with friends, care very much about their homes, and where, sorry to say—at least in this Cherry Hill—everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Kotzin is both a poet and a fiction writer, and this is her second novel. The author has a profound sense of the moral and philosophical. She also has a flair for describing the detail of daily lives. Her characters are educated and thoughtful people, and Kotzin depicts their struggles, even those of the antagonistic characters, with sympathy and understanding. The protagonist of the novel, from whose perspective the story is told, is Ely Cutter, a Jewish, middle-aged, moderately successful seller of residential real estate, who having wounded his wife Lynne by his affair with Eleanor, a woman from the community, is doing his level best to hold onto his marriage. Ely, whose name means my God in Hebrew, has also taken a spiritual turn, reciting the blessings over all manner of things, from vegetables to water.

Miriam N. Kotzin

One day while tending to tomatoes and pole beans in his backyard, Ely looks up and sees a face in the sky. The face looks curiously like a garden ornament of the sun. But is this a figment of his imagination, a true spiritual presence, perhaps even the watchful countenance of the Lord? Does it matter if the sight is real or imaginary? It is real enough to Ely. Wrapped up in his guilt and fear, Ely takes this as some sort of admonition and sign from above. Amazed and confused, Ely tells his wife Lynne of the vision. Lynne coldly advises him not to tell a soul, then promptly gabs about her husband’s vision at the beauty salon. Soon it seems that everyone in their social circle knows that Ely Cutter has seen a face in the sky that looks like a garden ornament of the sun. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing confidential? Not only does the whole town know of Ely’s garden vision, it also turns out that everyone knows of Ely’s prior affair with Eleanor. Betrayals and betrayals of confidence abound in pleasant Cherry Hill.

Throughout the novel, Ely and Lynne keep trying to talk through the rift in their lives. Husband Ely tries to be affectionate and helpful around the house, yet quarrels persist. Something as small as Lynne’s gripe with Ely’s desire to use the wild green purslane in a salad will start a cranky back and forth. Lynne can’t help throwing Ely’s guilty conscience in his face, but even through the most disruptive times, Ely observes, “Who would want to be on the wrong side of 50 and looking at a life alone? He and Lynne have had their rocky moments, to be sure, but their worst of times together is better than the life he’d have without her.” The care and sympathy with which Kotzin allows Ely to examine his own feelings is most impressive.

Ely’s relationship with former lover Eleanor has been downgraded to a talking friendship, but she’s still actively reaching out to him. Just as it seems that the man’s extramarital love life is under control, in slithers seductive Grace Cooper. Beautiful, wealthy, often braless, a yoga aficionado with a thirst for vodka, Grace is going through a divorce and is actively house hunting. She is a client of Ely’s. Plenty of chances for the two to canoodle in the properties that Ely shows her. As he squires Grace from house to house, she tries repeatedly to seduce him or at least to indulge in suggestive talk.

After a pleasing discussion of her interest in a butter-yellow kitchen at one property, Grace’s conversation with Ely takes a vaguely naughty turn and the sexual tension rises.

“I don’t want to look at split levels,” Grace said. “And cathedral ceilings make me nervous. Picture windows facing the street…I could never see the point. You have to cover them up with curtains, or you’re the picture.”

“OK,” Cutter said. “We’ll keep that in mind.” Grace knows what she doesn’t want, he thought, and what she does. “This next house has a yellow kitchen, but not the yellow you want.”

“I’m not expecting to find a perfect house,” she said.

“You’re flexible.”

“Yoga,” Grace said, laughing.

“But no cathedral ceilings,” Cutter said, picturing Grace in a leotard or less, which, he assumed was her point.

Grace also has a knack for creating compromising situations, and her moods swing from flirtatious to snippy to weepy. And still Ely resists the temptation to go to bed with Grace, refusing her as politely as possible at every turn. An expert at close interior monologue, Kotzin reveals Ely’s thoughts: “He wasn’t sure what had kept him from touching Grace: loving Lynne, a shred of conscience, or a fear of discovery.” Poor hapless Ely, caught between old flame Eleanor, seductive client Grace, and mistrustful wife Lynne. Like the three Fates of Greek myth, the women seem to manipulate Ely’s life, regardless of his will and his agency.

Right This Way is a moral and philosophical novel. It is a story of trying to be good and aiming for redemption. It is also a tale of bad influences and entrapments and a reflection on causality. Kotzin’s characters find themselves embarrassed, tempted, and entrapped by surprising meetups that may be sheer coincidence, crashes on the slippery roads of chaos; they might be due the machinations of others in their lives; they might even be determined by a higher power. This philosophical conundrum, which may be beyond answering, is debated in the novel. But it is Kotzin the novelist, playing the role of the Fates, who draws the action to its final shocking unpredictable conclusion that leaves Ely in the midst of both relief and grief.

Read this gripping novel. Contend with its nuanced moral and philosophical questions.


Lynn Levin photo credit: Melina MeshakoLynn Levin is a poet, writer, and teacher. Her most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky). Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 15, 2023 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

TETHER AND FLOAT: THOUGHTS ON TWO NEW ESSAY COLLECTIONS, a book review by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 9, 2022 by thwackDecember 9, 2022

TETHER AND FLOAT: THOUGHTS ON TWO NEW ESSAY COLLECTIONS
by Beth Kephart

SOUVENIRS FROM PARADISE
Erin Langner
Zone 3 Press

HALFWAY FROM HOME
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Split/Lip Press

What would happen if, when we thought about essays (the power they might wield, the indignities they suffer), we thought about tether and float? The ways in which the essay knits itself into its own grounding facts, on the one hand. The ways in which it transcends them, on the other.

Essays erupt from the lives that we live. Our hopes, which surge and thin. Our grief, which stills and screams. Our joy, which can’t be fixed. Our desire, which we understand until it makes no sense to us, until we don’t make sense to us, until we write the essay to find out, or read the essay hoping to find both the shimmer of the world and the maybe of ourselves.

The math of an essay is not plot times words, not questions equals answers, not A plus B sums out at C. The math of an essay is disclosure and search, supposition and erasure, reassertion and pause. What happened is the essay’s tether. Why it mattered, or what it means, or the poetry it incites—all of that (and the magic of more) is the float.

This past week, I read two essay collections by two gloriously talented writers who have mastered the tether and the float. The first, Souvenirs from Paradise, is the work of Erin Langner, whose obsession with Las Vegas binds her twelve pieces with situational clarity. The second, Halfway from Home, is Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s seventeen-part exploration of the places she has left and made, the haunts she carries forward, the dust on her feet, the groundhog in her yard, and the counterweights of urgency and impermanence.

Langner’s writing about Las Vegas is also (often) Langner’s writing about the mother who died suddenly when she was nine and the incalculable life that ensued. Montgomery’s writing about her halfway places operates, equally, as a meditation on the family she left (but she never fully leaves) behind—a father who built fences, a crowd of foster siblings carrying the eruptive seeds of violence, and a mother depleted by the magnitude of so much need and strife.

In both cases, these writers might have simply written plot. This is what happened to me. Instead, they built accordion-fold worlds. Langner, for her part, binds the art of James Turrell, the architecture of the strip, the ambitions of Steve Wynn, and the tragedy of Brittney Spears, among much else, into the slippery memories she has of her mother. Returning again and again to Vegas, moving in and out of hotels, pushing against the crowds, Langner comes to understand that her Vegas obsession is not just a distraction. It is her way back to her self. From “The Art Experience”:

Maybe, at their best, our obsessions keep us honest. They convince us we have found a distraction. An escape. A window to the clouds, a sculpture against the breaking waves, a wall of light that gives us something to chase in the absence of knowing the “real thing” we are after. But instead, they suspend us, willingly, yet indefinitely, in the difficult thing we were avoiding all along. They force us to finally look.

Montgomery, for her part, counterbalances the mysterious undercurrents of her personal world—a claustrophobic childhood home continually divided to make room for more and more siblings, an adult home mercifully sheltered by surrounding conservation land but also terrifyingly pierced by the sounds of legal hunters, a stint in between in Nebraska—with the fluid particulars of cartography, timekeeping, tree communication, mining, wasp nests, and fire. Her history is a form of poetics. Her storytelling is a geometry Her exquisite first and final essays bracket her unquantifiable love for the father who taught her to dig. From “Excavation”:

He moves down the line, leaving precise holes behind. Later he fills each hole with cement, a fence post planted as if a flag. At first the flags are of discovery, of ownership, but when he builds the fence, the flags become boundaries and borders, keeping things in and out, determining where one thing ends and another begins.

Using his tools to excavate and alter the earth makes my father mapmaker, enforcer, creator. Because he shapes the soil, he shapes the world.

Shaping the soil, he shapes the world. Shaping their essays—braiding, collaging, reversing, reassessing—Langner and Montgomery shape our ideas of what it is to be tremulous and uncertain, questing and not quenched. They are writers to be reckoned with, writers to be read and taught.


Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops (now running the Story of You lecture series), and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 9, 2022 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

HERmione, a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewd by Aalia Jagwani

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 7, 2022 by thwackDecember 7, 2022

HERmione
by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
New Directions, 288 pages
reviewed by Aalia Jagwani

When I started reading HERmione, I knew nothing about Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet better known as H.D. But although intensely personal and grounded in an endlessly fascinating life, HERmione’s slow unravelling of H.D.’s psychology is arguably all the more enticing in when approached unknowingly.

Reading HERmione did not feel effortless—this is not a book that propels you forward. It instead holds you back, grappling in the realm of ambiguity that the protagonist inhabits. It is an exercise in restraint — from tending instinctively toward the straightforward, from attempting to categorize people and relationships that resist boundaries. Reading it felt like playing a game with myself — to piece together HER consciousness, I had to allow my own to dissolve.

It is precisely this dissolution of the self that H.D. details in HERmione. She adopts an alter-ego, Hermione or “Her” Gart, who is in her early twenties, having just dropped out of Bryn Mawr college after failing a class. She finds herself completely lost, suddenly defined by her inadequacy: “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” she proclaims at the very beginning of the novel.

With a feeble hold on her personal identity, Hermione finds herself entering a bisexual love triangle with George Lowndes, based on H.D.’s ex-fiancé Ezra Pound, and Fayne Rabb, based on Frances Gregg, the woman she found herself falling in love with while Pound was in Europe.

In the novel, too, she finds herself engaged to the former and undeniably attracted to the latter. Where she hoped to find sure footing, then, her self becomes even more shaky. Fayne ultimately finds herself falling for Lowndes too, completing the triangle.

For all the formal prowess of this novel, it is in this triangle of desire that its pulse lies — in H.D.’s portrayal of the intensity of desire, especially when it is borne out of a loss of self. In the absence of a definite shape and boundary, the self is opened up to a new dimension of attachment and conflation: “Fayne being me, I was her. Fayne being Her I was Fayne. Fayne being Her was HER so that Her saw Fayne.”

There is something heart-wrenchingly beautiful about watching these people grasp for each other, in desperation and passion — consolidated by the recurring, visceral images of hands reaching out throughout the novel.

Although the homoeroticism transcends traditional expectations and structures in a feminist narrative, H.D. resists all linear narratives — desire is more complicated than that, and she does not glaze over the potency of both women’s desire and need for George Lowndes as well.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Perhaps as an embodiment of this conflation and split in identity caused by her two loves, H.D. inserts the narrative “I” at certain points in the novel in addition to her alter ego referred to as “Her.” This is only one of the many ways the narrative complexity of this novel adeptly mirrors the multifacetedness of Hermione’s psychology.

If this is a book of triangles, it is also a book of concentric circles, of “parallelograms” that suddenly “come straight” — all patterns of Hermione’s thought, which is infinitely associative: “Sometimes when gull wings beat across the counterpane, I knew she loved me,” she says.

Hermione’s associative brain makes for an acute, fascinating observer — I found myself paying attention as much to her line of attention as her words and actions. “Do birds make a certain mechanical flight toward autumn?” she asks once, in the middle of an entirely unrelated conversation.

But with this associativeness there is also a strangely contrasting disassociation from her self. She imagines that “the back of her head prompt[s] the front of her head,” as though they are separate entities—“like amoeba giving birth by separation to amoeba.”

This is how we get to know HERmione—through connections that our own brains would not have made, and disjunctions that it would have been just as difficult to conceive. Any effort at linearity would have made this a less dazzlingly authentic portrayal of interiority than it is.

I was, admittedly, confused as I started to make my way through the novel, waiting for my confusion to be dispelled—this never happened. Instead, there came a moment when I stopped trying to resist the confusion altogether, and started to read inside of it. It felt transformative.

It is precisely in this lack of concern with legibility, then, that H.D. succeeds most in taking us through her hallucinatory retrospective daze—that she manages to create something wholly enticing even in this space of obscurity is nothing short of remarkable.

It makes sense, ultimately, that we do not get the luxury of decisive answers—neither does Hermione. She has no illuminating epiphanies at the end of the book; instead she accepts what is, by this point, self-evident to readers: “I have been wandering, she thought, too long in some intermediate world.”

“Oh I–I plod along,” she says a few pages later when asked what she is doing. “I mean I was—I was engaged,” she stutters. “I mean I had a—a friend.” She still scrambles for direction, grasping for an identity in her two loves, both of whom ultimately remain shrouded in uncertainty.

So, Hermione is left as directionless as she was at the start of the novel—the difference, however, is that she is no longer stagnant. She finds herself propelled forward toward home, where Fayne Robb happens to be awaiting her arrival.

HERmione not only transcends boundaries in historical terms, through its feminist exploration of queerness and desire, but also in a manner that is itself timeless, effectively pushing against conventions of literature and psychology to paint this profound, honest portrait of a lost woman.


Aalia HeadshotAalia Jagwani is a third-year student of English and Literary Arts at Brown University. She is a Section Editor for Arts & Culture at the Brown Daily Herald and an emerging writer of literary fiction. She is based in Rhode Island and is originally from Bombay, India.

HERmione, a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewd by Aalia Jagwani

HERmione, a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewd by Aalia Jagwani
December 7, 2022
HERmione by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) New Directions, 288 pages reviewed by Aalia Jagwani When I started reading HERmione, I knew nothing about Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet better known as H.D. But although intensely personal and grounded in an endlessly fascinating life, HERmione’s slow unravelling of H.D.’s psychology is arguably all the more enticing in when approached unknowingly. Reading HERmione did not feel effortless—this is not a book that propels you forward. It instead holds you back, grappling in the realm of ambiguity that the protagonist inhabits. It is an exercise in restraint — from tending instinctively toward the straightforward, from attempting to categorize people and relationships that resist boundaries. Reading it felt like playing a game with myself — to piece together HER consciousness, I had to allow my own to dissolve. It is precisely this dissolution of the self that H.D. details in HERmione. She adopts an alter-ego, Hermione or “Her” Gart, who is in her early twenties, having just dropped out of Bryn Mawr college after failing a class. She finds herself completely lost, suddenly defined by her inadequacy: “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” she proclaims at the very beginning of the novel. With a feeble ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 7, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

HERRICK’S END, a novel by T.M. Blanchet, reviewd by Jae Sutton

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 7, 2022 by thwackDecember 7, 2022

HERRICK’S END
by T.M. Blanchet
Tiny Fox Press, 299 pages
reviewed by Jae Sutton

Born and raised in Boston, mostly by his mother—who is loved by everyone she meets—Ollie Delgato has had to endure multiple hardships. But he has a plan. At nineteen, he is admitted to Bunker Hill Community College on a full scholarship and gets a job at Bonfligio’s Caffe, which comes with an apartment located just above the shop. His main goals are to lose weight and fall in love. More than anything, he wants to “become the kind of person that guys wanted to hang out with and girls wanted to date. Seven months to achieve normalcy.” Which is why the weight loss program, Lighter Tomorrows, becomes a constant on his summer schedule.

Antonella (Nell) Cascone is the only girl who has ever given Ollie the time of day. They go on walks and platonic dates every week. When Nell shows up to both Lighter Tomorrows and the pair’s hangouts with bruises—which she covers with heavy sweaters and thick scarves—Ollie knows what kind of trouble she is in. It’s not until she goes missing that he realizes he should have done something sooner.

Ollie sees this opportunity as his “frozen river moment”—a scenario his mother always posed to him: “…you see a child flailing in a frigid, running river… What do you do?”

With the help of an ominous note from Ukrainian acrobat, Laszlo, Ollie dives in head-first to save Nell. He imagines her running into his arms and thanking him profusely all the way back to Boston. What he doesn’t expect is to end up in a world both the total opposite of the one he knows and reflective of it in several ways. He isn’t prepared for the rushing tide to swallow him whole, taking him on a winding path of self-reflection through his past heartaches and struggles, from who he is to who he wants to be.

Former reporter, editor, and award-winning humor columnist T.M. Blanchet’s debut novel, Herrick’s End (Book I of The Neath Trilogy), takes its readers on an adventure. It whisks them away in boats attached to large crows, which float on water or fly depending on the circumstances. They land in a place with wormwalkers that cling to the sky of the Neath, among people who look familiar but aren’t quite. Blanchet takes us to a space beneath our world that no one knows exists. Before reading, I believed this would be some version of Hell or the equivalent, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that was not the case.

The Neath is a sanctuary for survivors, for people who have escaped abuse and torture of any kind on the Brickside (a term used to describe the land above them). They choose whether to send their abusers to Herrick’s End or stay in the Neath. Herrick’s End is a title, a metaphor, and a looming mass of an institution that sits across the expanse of a large green lake separating it from the rest of this world. “An architectural phantom,” Ollie thinks. “A lichen-covered, decrepit, fifty-story dungeon, leaning precipitously forward as though it might topple at any moment.” It is the opposite of freedom.

No one gets out of Herrick’s End once they are in it, which ironically is like Hell. They are read by an ancient woman with grooves for skin and given their sentence, which lasts a long, dragged-out lifetime. Prisoners pay for their crimes tenfold. “Only what you owe,” they are told before being tossed down a numbered shoot that sends them to their floors and cells. There is no escaping, even for those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The novel critiques real-life issues with a fantastical twist: the injustice of a black man being punished for an assault on a white girl in the next town, the fat kid who has been abused for most of his life by grown-ups and peers, the brutal living conditions of inmates—tortured to the point of brain failure and being pitted against each other for the entertainment of guards and a crooked warden.

T.M. Blanchet

Blanchet depicts the horrible beginnings and endings that occur when power is bestowed upon the wrong people. That even though this is a world where abusers pay their dues, there are flaws in the execution of justice (something Ollie is destined to right the wrongs of). The author poses the question of morality when it comes to saving those who have committed immoral acts. She presses the reader to look deep within, to know themselves with each difficult decision, just as Ollie is forced to.

After weird encounters with inanimate objects on the Brickside and a three-hundred-year-old-plus statue reciting a long riddle at him in the Neath, it is Ollie’s job to decipher these happenings to make the right decisions in moments where his life depends on it. Despite this, his journey is filled with positive discoveries. Ollie finds love, confidence, forgiveness, and family. Having spent most of his life abused and feeling alone, his purpose shines through his feats. Ollie is a natural-born leader and quick thinker, whose only opponent is essentially the voice in his head that reduces him to his weight.

Herrick’s End is not about being a hero or a victim, but surviving. Rising above or sinking beneath the tide together with the fight. Over the course of his journey, Ollie learns that the best love there is is self-love. Mottos he had used throughout his life transform from messages of self-loathing to those of hope and resilience. These sayings are so engraved in Ollie that the reader has no choice but to rejoice with each revelation that brings him closer to embracing who he is.

This ancient world provides an experience I have not found elsewhere—giving me a taste of something completely new, separate from the realms of fantasy I frequent. I often bask in succeeding in my predictions and while, in this case, my assumptions weren’t always right, the shocking events of Herrick’s End were welcome. Though the story’s messages and bigger picture are clear and concise, there is a complexity to their unfolding I have never seen that can only be explained when read. The novel follows its own path rather than the general rules of plot and device, and wields language that flutters, folds and twists off the page—leaving me pining for more.

As a reader, I see the clear hypocrisy hiding behind the half-truth of what it means to serve justice through the actions of those who carry it out. I find myself questioning my own morals while cringing and contemplating the treatment of the inmates. Is anyone better when the same abuse is being carried out? Is this really what they owe? Would I save the drowning child from the freezing river?

Through Herrick’s End, Blanchet sheds the materialistic, rips into the world the reader thinks they know, and creates a dark space where forgiveness, acceptance, and growth exists. It’s perverse and contradicting; time stretches like elastic, and everything about the human body adjusts for this new world. There are still questions unanswered, places unseen, and riddles undeciphered—Herrick’s End is only the beginning of a decades-long story.


Jae Headshot Jae Sutton is an author and copyeditor at Susquehanna University. She holds an AA in Journalism and will complete her BA in Creative Writing and Publishing & Editing in December 2022. She works in Susquehanna’s Career Development Center as a front desk student assistant and at the Blough-Weis Library as a student manager. Outside of classes and work, she spends her free time stocking up on aromatherapy, drinking herbal tea, writing multiple stories at once, and binge-watching Run BTS and black 90s TV shows.

 

HERRICK’S END, a novel by T.M. Blanchet, reviewd by Jae Sutton

HERRICK’S END, a novel by T.M. Blanchet, reviewd by Jae Sutton
December 7, 2022
HERRICK’S END by T.M. Blanchet Tiny Fox Press, 299 pages reviewed by Jae Sutton Born and raised in Boston, mostly by his mother—who is loved by everyone she meets—Ollie Delgato has had to endure multiple hardships. But he has a plan. At nineteen, he is admitted to Bunker Hill Community College on a full scholarship and gets a job at Bonfligio’s Caffe, which comes with an apartment located just above the shop. His main goals are to lose weight and fall in love. More than anything, he wants to “become the kind of person that guys wanted to hang out with and girls wanted to date. Seven months to achieve normalcy.” Which is why the weight loss program, Lighter Tomorrows, becomes a constant on his summer schedule. Antonella (Nell) Cascone is the only girl who has ever given Ollie the time of day. They go on walks and platonic dates every week. When Nell shows up to both Lighter Tomorrows and the pair’s hangouts with bruises—which she covers with heavy sweaters and thick scarves—Ollie knows what kind of trouble she is in. It’s not until she goes missing that he realizes he should have done something sooner. Ollie sees this ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 7, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US, a Young Adult Novel by Joanna Ho, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 28, 2022 by thwackNovember 28, 2022

THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US
by Joanna Ho
Harper Teen/HarperCollins Publishing, 437 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Danny Chen is a basketball phenom who loves watching the Star Wars trilogy and singing, albeit off-key, Sam Smith’s song “Lay Me Down.” He enjoys eating burgers from In-N-Out and break dancing like he’s a member of the dance troupe The Jabbawockeez. At school he’s larger than life— everyone knows and admires him for his kindness and outgoing personality. To Maybelline Chen, he’s her goofy and loving big brother who cheers her up, believes in her, and always has her back no matter what. But when Danny dies by suicide, May finds herself coping with more than just her brother’s passing. Joanna Ho’s compelling new novel The Silence That Binds Us explores the impact of suicide, and how important it is to use your voice to change the narrative and stand up against racism.

News of Danny’s death soon circulates around Sequoia Park High School during May’s junior year. Between the few “I’m so sorries,” the whispers, and the downright silence, there is one voice that drowns out everyone else’s—that of Mr. Nate McIntyre, a local tech mogul, and father of her classmate Josh McIntyre. During a meeting for all the rising juniors in May’s class— a meeting where Danny’s death hangs like a dark shroud—Mr. McIntyre blames the rise of student anxiety on the presence of Asian-Americans.

“Everyone knows that the real reason our kids are more stressed is because of all the Asians moving into our schools…We all know that last year, some Asian kid got into Princeton and killed himself on the tracks…If Princeton isn’t good enough for these people, then what is?”

Nate McIntyre’s disgusting rhetoric not only sparks waves of racist comments from other White parents and students, it hurts May. Danny was more than just “Some Asian kid—” he was her friend, her confidante, her brother. With help from her Haitian-American best friends Tiya and Marc Duverne, May learns that remaining silent does nothing but allow voices like Mr. McIntyre’s to drown out and rewrite the narratives of people like her family, of people like Tiya and Marc, of people like Danny.

In The Silence That Binds Us, Joanna Ho makes May’s voice ring clear. The majority of May’s story is told through her first-person perspective, one that’s equal parts cynical and thoughtful. Ho unflinchingly taps into May’s emotions, letting her grief bleed raw through every word and line. The chapters ebb and flow according to how May feels, with some being only one sentence when May is the most vulnerable, and the others being longer when May feels strong enough to live in a world without Danny. While I enjoyed reading through May’s thoughts, I believe her personality really shines through Ho’s use of dialogue between the characters, specifically in text messages between May, her friends, and family. It’s through texts that May can be her honest self—the silly, fun-loving, passionate, and caring May that she thought was lost the night Danny didn’t come home.

Echoes of Danny reverberate throughout May’s life, his death leaving her with more questions than answers. Navigating the world without her big brother proves more difficult than she could imagine, and ultimately she blames herself for not being there for him like he was for her. Guilt-addled questions flood her mind: Why didn’t she notice that there was something off about Danny? Why didn’t she pick up on the signs, as subtle as they were? If she had been there with him the night he passed, would he…still be here with her? Ho addresses the difficult topic of suicide and what it does to the loved ones left behind. Ho doesn’t skirt around complex emotions—sadness, guilt, self-blame. Through May readers come to understand that with suicide there are no clear-cut answers as to the “why.” In the end, all one can do is move forward with memories of their loved one, as impossible as that may seem. As May says herself, “Is it possible to heal without ever really understanding what happened?”

Silence is an important theme that permeates May’s story, both before and after Danny’s passing. Before losing Danny, May’s relationship with her mother is fraught with a silence the both of them wield against each other. Her mother’s silence is like “a hippo, pregnant with disappointment,” when it comes to May’s less-than-stellar academic performance. May, in response, employs silence as a means to deal with her mother’s seemingly unending judgment. “It’s just safer to keep my mouth shut,” says May. The silence within her family, specifically between May and her mother, becomes deafening after Danny passes away, sucking them in like a vacuum. Each family member retreats within themselves, grieving quietly and becoming an island unto themselves. Even her father, usually quite talkative, hides behind a shield of silence in the wake of the crushing loss. Silence is how the Chens navigate their collective sadness, deepening the chasm that formed long before Danny.

Silence is also, as the title of the book indicates, a force that binds. In the wake of Mr. McIntyre’s vitriolic comments about Asian Americans, May chooses to use her love of writing as a way to use her voice to combat his blatant racism. Poetry becomes May’s outlet of choice, helping her to process the myriad of feelings she experiences: the grief of losing Danny, the sadness that permeates her home in his absence, and the anger at Mr. McIntyre for reducing Danny’s life to an ugly stereotype.

Some Asian boy.

            A talking point—

            not a life

            a person

            a brother

            a son

            worth honoring.

 

            The Asians.

            As if rewriting

            my family’s story

            absolves you

            of responsibility

            in this narrative.

However, May soon learns about the sinister ways silence can be used to perpetuate harmful narratives. After submitting a series of poems to her school’s newspaper in response to Mr. McIntyre’s rhetoric, she’s met with resistance from her parents who urge her, for her own safety and the safety of her family, to stop responding, to stop fighting. May is confused and angered—why should she remain silent in the face of racism? “Is silence neutrality if it protects my family?” May asks. “Is it actually protecting my family if people like Mr. McIntyre are always allowed to control our narratives and history?” But her family is adamant that she keeps quiet, believing that once she does this whole business will eventually blow over. Although both Tiya and Marc encourage May to stand up and speak out in the face of injustice, she falters. May’s struggle becomes that of two choices: to be silent and hope for the best, or to be vocal and fight the injustice that she, her family, and her community are facing.

The silence that binds May is indicative of a larger issue at hand, a concept that Ho bravely lays out for readers to reflect upon. Within her story, May comes face-to-face with the model minority myth, an insidious concept that has effectively muted and shackled members of the Asian-American community while pitting them against other minority communities—namely, African Americans. During the Civil Rights Movement, the government and media took the studious, hard-working, and compliant Asian stereotype and used it as a tool to not only further paint other minorities in a negative light, but to also put Asian Americans in a position where remaining quiet and non-confrontational earned them a higher place in the social hierarchy —something close to Whiteness, but not quite. “Why do Asians drink the ‘White Kool-Aid?’” May asks. “We know anti-Asian discrimination is real; why are so many people satisfied with White-adjacency?” The model minority myth comes at a huge cost to Asian Americans, where they sacrifice speaking out about the injustices they face for the (false) promise of safety, status, and social mobility. May learns the hard truth as she contemplates whether or not to go against her family’s wishes and continue to speak out against Mr. McIntyre. As difficult of a concept as this is to convey, Ho traverses this tense landscape by encouraging readers to learn about the experiences and plights of others, as May learns to do.

What I enjoyed the most about this book is how the genuine friendship between May, Tiya, and Marc encourages May to use her voice to fight back against racism. Tiya and Marc are active in fighting social injustice—they participate in local protests that support Black lives and rally against police brutality, and they’re proud members of Sequoia Park High’s Black Student Union (BSU). While this is May’s first time experiencing such blatant racism firsthand, Tiya and Marc are no strangers to people like Mr. McIntyre perpetuating harmful narratives about them and the Black community. It’s through talking to, interacting with, and most importantly listening to Tiya and Marc that May learns that doing nothing in the face of racism only serves to perpetuate it.

Joanna Ho’s The Silence That Binds Us is a gripping story of grief, hope, and using your voice to rewrite and reclaim your own narrative, especially in the face of racism. May’s story teaches readers that life still has meaning and purpose, even in the wake of something as tragic as suicide.


Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”


THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US, a Young Adult Novel by Joanna Ho, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US, a Young Adult Novel by Joanna Ho, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
November 28, 2022
THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US by Joanna Ho Harper Teen/HarperCollins Publishing, 437 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Danny Chen is a basketball phenom who loves watching the Star Wars trilogy and singing, albeit off-key, Sam Smith’s song “Lay Me Down.” He enjoys eating burgers from In-N-Out and break dancing like he’s a member of the dance troupe The Jabbawockeez. At school he’s larger than life— everyone knows and admires him for his kindness and outgoing personality. To Maybelline Chen, he’s her goofy and loving big brother who cheers her up, believes in her, and always has her back no matter what. But when Danny dies by suicide, May finds herself coping with more than just her brother’s passing. Joanna Ho’s compelling new novel The Silence That Binds Us explores the impact of suicide, and how important it is to use your voice to change the narrative and stand up against racism. News of Danny’s death soon circulates around Sequoia Park High School during May’s junior year. Between the few “I’m so sorries,” the whispers, and the downright silence, there is one voice that drowns out everyone else’s—that of Mr. Nate McIntyre, a local tech mogul, and father of her classmate ...
Read the full text

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
April 19, 2022
THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe Harper Voyager, 321 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world where an individual’s inner circuitry—their deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires—faces judgment from the illuminating eye of New Dawn, freedom is sought out by those who find liberation in the shadows. Monáe’s songs follow the story of Jane 57821, whose queerness made society view her as a deviant with unclean coding—a “dirty computer.” Dreaming of a better future, Jane 57821 broke free of the chains of New Dawn by daring to remember who she really was, sowing the seeds of revolution in her wake. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collaborative work with influential writers of the Afrofuturism genre, exploring the expanded mythos Monáe created through her uniquely futuristic yet funky sound. Taking place in the same universe as Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian is a collection of short stories set after Jane 57821’s daring escape. In the introduction “Breaking Dawn,” Monáe’s world unfolds like a memory uncurling itself ...
Read the full text

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS, a Young Adult Novel by Chloe Gong, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

These violent delights book jacket
March 5, 2021
THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS by Chloe Gong Simon Pulse, Simon & Schuster, 464 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a vibrant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place during the Roaring Twenties in Shanghai of 1926. Gong’s tale of two star-crossed yet ill-fated lovers begins in the middle of a fierce blood feud between two warring gangs: the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Described as “an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time,” their bitter vendetta runs deeper than the Huangpu River that cuts through the city. The weight of each gang’s future rests heavily on the shoulders of both Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlets, and Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers. The pain of betrayal burns at each heir’s core, engulfing their previous love in flames. However, when a sinister presence lurking within the depths of the Huangpu threatens all of Shanghai, Juliette and Roma must work together if they ever hope to save everyone, including each other. I thoroughly enjoyed Gong’s rendition of a timeless classic, combining Shakespearean pomp with Jazz Age flair. Her story of Juliette and Roma still rings true to the original, but what ...
Read the full text

TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS, a young adult novel by Samantha Mabry, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Tigers Not Daughters book jacket
August 21, 2020
TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS by Samantha Mabry Algonquin Young Readers 288 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Samantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds. What stood out to me while reading Tigers, Not Daughters was how colorful and tangible each of the Torres sisters is. Their characterization is well-rounded, Mabry vividly telling the story through the individual perspectives of each sister, as well as including a fourth perspective of a character that watches them from afar. Each sister is unique in ...
Read the full text

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
February 11, 2020
HOW TO BUILD A HEART by Maria Padian Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Isabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them: People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing. I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice. For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt. In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way ...
Read the full text

BLOODY SEOUL, a Young Adult Novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Bloody Seoul jacket art
August 27, 2019
BLOODY SEOUL by Sonia Patel Cinco Puntos Press, 276 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver To Rocky, the city of Seoul is truly something to behold. Sprawling skyscrapers dare to kiss the sky, thousands of lights rival the sun at night, and millions of people bustle through at any given moment, while the Han River remains a calm force through it all. And it will soon be his to rule, just like his father, the leader of the city’s most notorious gang, Three Star Pa. However, despite Rocky being the sole heir and next in line to become the big boss, his father refuses to turn the gang over to him. Frustrated, Rocky isn’t entirely surprised. It’s one of too many unanswered questions that plague him, especially since his mother’s faded memory threatens to slice the edges of his own mind like a knife. Aim. Throw. Sixteen times, one for every year of my life. Aim. Throw. Ten times, one for every year mom’s been gone. Aim. Throw. Ten times, one for every year Dad’s been the most pissed off person I’ve ever known. In Sonia Patel’s poetic, fast-paced and electrifying second novel Bloody Seoul, ...
Read the full text

WORTHY OF LOVE, a young adult novel by Andre Fenton, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Worthy of love book jacket
May 10, 2019
WORTHY OF LOVE by Andre Fenton Formac Publishing Company Limited, 199 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Two hundred and eighty pounds. For Adrian Carter that number isn’t just his weight, it is his shame. A shame he tries to hide underneath layers of black clothing but still faces every day as he is bullied for his size. Tired of the constant ridicule and feelings of inadequacy, Adrian decides enough is enough, and he vows to shed the pounds one way or the other…no matter the cost. Andre Fenton’s heartful debut novel Worthy of Love follows Adrian as he struggles not only with his weight, but with his own sense of self-worth. Candid, earnest, and full of emotion, Fenton gives us a unique yet personal story about one journey toward self-love. Desperate to drop his weight, Adrian scrounges up enough money to enroll in a few kickboxing classes. Along the way he meets Melody Woods, a skinny, quirky girl with a passion for health and fitness. Strong-willed but gentle, Mel’s confidence shines – which both intimidates and enthralls the less confident, timid Adrian. Much to Adrian’s surprise, Mel is unfazed by his size and decides to help ...
Read the full text

A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS, a young adult novel by Alyssa Sheinmel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS, a young adult novel by Alyssa Sheinmel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
January 17, 2019
A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS by Alyssa Sheinmel Sourcebooks Inc, 338 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Hannah Gold was supposed to be enjoying everything California had to offer; getting ahead on her studies at a collegiate summer program; hiking through the mountains and sunbathing on the beach; enjoying her summer with her roommate and new best friend, Agnes. That is, until Agnes falls and lapses into a coma, and Hannah finds herself institutionalized in a seven-foot by eight-foot room, where she doesn't feel she's supposed to be at all. Alyssa Sheinmel's engrossing novel A Danger to Herself and Others, is an intriguing page-turner set almost entirely within the walls of a mental institution. It delves deep into Hannah's mind as she wrestles, not only with what happened the night of Agnes’ fall, but with her own mental state. Reminiscent of Ken Kesey's classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hannah is this story’s R.P. McMurphy – the intelligent, conniving, and self-proclaimed “sane” protagonist of her own narrative. She goes about her first days studying her surroundings, taking note of certain privileges that will get her ever closer to freedom (group showers, cafeteria access, and ...
Read the full text

CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
November 2, 2017
CHEESUS WAS HERE by J.C. Davis Sky Pony Press, 242 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In the small town of Clemency, Texas Sunday morning worship is even more important than Friday night football. With a population of 1,236 and only two churches in town, everyone looks forward to putting on their Sunday best and lifting the Lord’s name on high. That is, everyone except Delaney Delgado, the main character in J.C. Davis’ debut novel, who chooses to spend her Sundays working at the local gas station. Her sanctuary lies behind the cashier’s counter where she’s free to observe the spectacle without having to engage in any of it. However, when her coworker discovers the face of baby Jesus on a wheel of Babybel cheese, Clemency goes into a frenzy of miraculous proportions. Word travels fast in a small town, and it isn’t long until news of baby Cheesus spreads like wildfire. Del watches in horror as her quiet life becomes an uproar, with classmates and citizens claiming they were healed after they gazed upon the blessed wheel of cheese. How anyone could believe in miracles—or God for that matter—is beyond her; but matters get ...
Read the full text

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
June 4, 2017
HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD edited by Kelly Jensen Algonquin Young Readers, 218 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Feminism. It’s an ideology that has long been approached with trepidation, met with both skepticism and controversy. There have been countless articles, papers, films, and books exploring and defining the concept. However, Here We Are is more than a series of essays on feminism. It’s a collection of stories, blog posts, comics, drawings, and interviews featuring an array of different voices – each more unique than the last – describing what feminism means and how it plays a role in our lives. Each page encourages readers to think about how they, as individuals, can relate to a belief that strives to unite us as a whole. “The people and the world around us shape our individual path to feminism…The journey is always changing, always shifting, and influenced by our own experiences and perspectives.” The book is structured like a scrapbook, having a combination of calligraphy, designs, and doodles drawn across the pages, accenting each chapter. Not only is this visually appealing, it creates a sense of comfort that softens the intensity of the subject matter. Through its playful design ...
Read the full text

RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
October 28, 2016
RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT by Sonia Patel Cinco Puntos Press, 314 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In her debut young adult novel Rani Patel in Full Effect, Sonia Patel takes us back to the era of faded box cuts, high-top Adidas, and gold chains as thick as your wrist; to the era where hip-hop reigned supreme and rhymes flowed out of boom boxes like water down Moaula Falls. The year is 1991, and here we meet Rani Patel, a straight-A student council president by day and an emerging rapper under the stage name MC Sutra by night. In a one-of-a-kind mixture of nineties slang, pidgin Hawaiian, and traditional Gujarati, Rani's story is told from a perspective that's undeniably fresh and unapologetically raw. From the very beginning the book ensnares you with a powerful scene of Rani shaving her head after seeing her father with another woman. As her tears fall so, too, does all of her hair, giving herself the Indian mark of a widow. Her father once meant everything to her, and she meant everything to him—or so she thought. He lovingly called her his princess, and for a time they were ...
Read the full text

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
August 16, 2016
LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY by Ellen Wittlinger Merit Press, 269 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Ellen Wittlinger's Local Girl Swept Away is a gripping story of loss, denial, and deception wrapped up in a page-turning mystery that’s hard to put down. When Lorna is pulled underwater during a storm, her death shakes the community of Providencetown, but no one is more shaken than her best friend Jackie Silva. Lorna was everything Jackie feels she isn’t: untamed, beautiful, brave, and outgoing—not to mention lucky enough to have had Jackie’s crush, their best friend Finn, as her boyfriend. Jackie is the undisputed number two and it's something she has accepted about herself. But, with Lorna gone, life becomes confusing and uncertain. Who is she now? In Lorna’s absence, Jackie slowly builds the strength to rediscover parts of herself she had forgotten. Her love of photography takes on a new fervor and, through the camera lens, she experiences the parts of her life that still hold meaning. Her increased volunteer work at the Jasper Street Arts Center opens doors that she didn’t know could be opened: a chance at getting into her dream school, the Rhode Island Institute of design, and ...
Read the full text

BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
June 3, 2016
BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA by Laura Moe Merit Press, 252 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson At some point in our lives, many of us bury parts of ourselves that we aren't ready to face. These layers can form over time; from people we've encountered, from situations we've endured, or from issues we've found lodged deep within our psyche. They can protect us, like a shield, from life's many fluctuations, and they can contribute to a great part of who we are. However, this protection can come at a cost–we can become distant, untouchable, and unreachable to those we love or resist the change we need to grow. In Laura Moe's debut novel, Breakfast with Neruda, we journey with Michael Flynn as he learns to peel back the layers that have shielded him for so long. We first meet Michael spending the summer cleaning his school, which serves as the first part of his two-part sentence after detonating his locker in an ill-conceived attempt to destroy his ex-best-friend's car. Through Moe's simple, yet, descriptive, writing, we soon realize that being condemned to custodial work and having to repeat his senior year are the least of Michael's worries. I go out to my car ...
Read the full text

A 52-HERTZ WHALE, a YA novel by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

A 52-HERTZ WHALE, a YA novel by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
February 9, 2016
A 52-HERTZ WHALE by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman Carolrhoda Lab, 197 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson When a humpback whale becomes separated from its pod, it emits a unique song in an effort to find its way back to its loved ones. When certain people experience feelings of isolation, they seek companionship through indirect social interaction. Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman's A 52-Hertz Whale explores the nature of loneliness through a series of email correspondences, all between people with little else in common other than the desire for understanding. From the conversations of these starkly different people springs a series of beautiful, if uncanny, friendships. A 52 Hertz-Whale reveals that some of the most meaningful relationships can be forged even when the only thing we have in common is the fear of being alone. Fourteen-year-old James Turner ("[email protected]") sends his first email after discovering that his adopted humpback whale, Salt, was separated from its migratory pod. Recent film graduate Darren Olmstead ("[email protected]") receives the long email detailing James' efforts to uncover the lost whale’s whereabouts, and a plea for Darren's assistance. What a kid from a middle school social skills class wants with the guy who ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on November 28, 2022 in reviews, young adult nonfiction reviews. (Click for permalink.)

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 4, 2022 by thwackNovember 4, 2022

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST
by László Krasznahorkai
translated by Ottilie Mulzet
New Directions, 144 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A Mountain to the North, but even that feels generous. The grandson of Prince Genji, as he’s referred to throughout the novella, isn’t substantial enough to have his own name. He wears a kimono and geta, he gets motion sickness, and he loves gardens. He isn’t very notable, but he isn’t lacking either. He may be the only person, but he’s a supporting player, and as such his costars of trees, rocks, water, and wind often outshine him. The grandson of Prince Genji is our tour guide, a human figure we can hang our hats on as László Krasznahorkai chips away at the real story: the relentless, unending march of time over millions and billions of years.

László Krasznahorkai

Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands. Across his career, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has proven that he’s more than capable of tackling big, thorny ideas with uniquely haunting clarity. His breakthrough novel Satantango, a harsh critique of communism, is so intricate and expansive that the film adaptation runs over seven hours long. Krasznahorkai’s later works, such as The Melancholy of Resistance or the National Book Award-winning Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, contend heavily with imminent apocalypses. They’re novels meant to unsettle, caution, and provoke. A Mountain to the North is pleasantly lighter than these other texts but still retains the same thematic grandeur. Here, Krasznahorkai is offering perspective more than politics. He has a worldview to show us, so it falls upon us to, “simply look, and be silent.”

Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands.

The grandson of Prince Genji abides by this order. Slowly, we learn that he’s looking for a garden that he’s read about but never seen. His search brings him to an unnamed monastery outside of Kyoto, which establishes itself as the centerpiece of the narrative. Like Herman Melville describing a whale, Krasznahorkai leads us through the monastery with an architect’s eye for detail. The monastery is about one thousand years old, built during the Heian Period, but feels timeless, as if it were a natural feature. In a way, it is. The location of the monastery, in between the mountain, lake, paths, and river of the novella’s title, is “perfectly designated” to harmonize with its surroundings. Further still, all the materials used to build it were carefully sourced to complement the world around it. Take, for example, the consideration that went into choosing lumber:

The heavy columns, supporting a substantial weight, the framework of the sanctuaries, would be fashioned from those trees that had grown on the mountain peak; the base of the mountain provided the timber for the long lintels, because the trees at the mountain’s base had to struggle more intensely to reach the sunlight than the trees on the mountain peak.

Every choice was full of intention, no matter how trivial the details may have seemed. The result is a monastery that’s both structurally superior (after all, most buildings don’t last a thousand years) and pays respect to its natural context. Both are important. We humans want our handiwork to endure, to leave a mark that says, “I was here” long after we’re gone, but we have to be deliberate about the marks we choose to leave. In the long run, nature will likely be kinder to us if we make more symbiotic monasteries and fewer plastics and electronics. As the band Modest Mouse perfectly put it, “If the world don’t like us / it’ll shake us just like we were a cold.”

That’s how we may fare in the long run, but what about the long, long run? Krasznahorkai answers this not by looking forward, but by tunneling further back into the past. Choosing the right hinoki trees was essential, and that process began with, “the selection of a certain mountain upon which trees had grown for at least one thousand years.” Later on, Krasznahorkai describes the ecological ballet required to put those trees on that mountain. And the mountain, too, was shaped by great geological processes. And the minerals that comprise the mountain were likewise crafted by eons of chemistry. Everything we know, everythere there has ever been, has all been made by the, “complex and immeasurably serious play of divine happenstance […], the enthralling order of ions and atoms in the universe and here on Earth.”

Krasznahorkai is a master of these humbling revelations. By and large, A Mountain to the North tries to make us feel small, both in time and space. Despite being the only real character, the grandson of Prince Genji is a marginal figure because all of humanity is marginal in the grand scheme of things. Krasznahorkai reminds us that humanity’s existence was a natural result of possibility and probability – we had and have little choice in the matter. Yet, A Mountain to the North never revels in nihilism. Meaning is something we search for, just like the grandson of Prince Genji searches for his garden. We’re small, but we’re no less important than any of the billions of years that preceded us. Krasznahorkai wants us to get comfortable with this idea, because only then can we, “begin to see that there [is] only the whole, and no details.”


Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].


A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel  by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook
November 4, 2022
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A ...
Read the full text

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook
September 26, 2022
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS by Clarice Lispector translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson New Directions, 864 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her ...
Read the full text

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook
March 5, 2022
GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori New York Review Books, 112 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the ...
Read the full text

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
October 13, 2021
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be ...
Read the full text

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
June 29, 2021
PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
Read the full text

THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
December 18, 2020
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
Read the full text

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
August 7, 2020
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
Read the full text

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
July 15, 2020
CLOTEL, or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Penguin Classics, 320 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson ...
Read the full text

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
May 29, 2020
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
Read the full text

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
January 16, 2020
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
Read the full text

MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
August 8, 2019
MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay New York Review Books, 336 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on November 4, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 26, 2022 by thwackSeptember 26, 2022

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS
by Clarice Lispector
translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
New Directions, 864 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her crônica column in 1967, she refused to give readers half-hearted, surface-level observations. Each crônica lets us see the world as Lispector saw it, and, under that microscopic magnification, even the most commonplace things become unfamiliar. Who are we when we’re asleep? Why do we lie? What’s the difference between “person” and “persona”? Or, as Lispector asks, “who am I? what am I? what will I be? who am I really? and am I really?” For our own sanity, we may choose not to question our being so closely because we’re afraid of what we may find. Lispector had no such fear.

Clarice Lispector

For Clarice Lispector, life was a never-ending process of becoming. She was born in Ukraine in 1920, but she became Brazilian when her family immigrated to escape the unrest of the Russian Civil War. She began her career writing for magazines until her successful debut Near to the Wild Heart made her a novelist. Through her fiction, she became famous, so much so that her books could be purchased from vending machines in Brazil. All the while, Lispector was a mother, a diplomat’s wife, a fire survivor, and so much more. It was relatively late in her career that she became a crônica writer too, using the gig for supplemental income. Unique to Brazilian newspapers, crônicas are simply a space for writers to put anything they want, with a strong emphasis on “anything.” In her Saturday slot, Lispector gave readers daily musings, interviews, political statements, book reviews, advice, travelogs, travel itineraries, personal ads, speeches, fiction fragments, letter responses, apologies, and countless other entries that resist clear characterization. Too Much of Life collects all of these crônicas for the first time, putting their wayward, frenetic nature on full display.

On the whole, Too Much of Life is a delightfully mixed bag. Lispector’s crônicas are short and sharp, often no more than a paragraph, which lets readers hop between them with the same carefree perusal used to swipe through TikToks. Not every entry resonates, but the ones that do are unexpected, and it’s that feeling of discovery that makes them so addictive. Take, for example, Lispector’s perspective on turtles:

No shell, no head, breathing, up, down, up down. Alive.
How do you understand a turtle? How do you understand God?
The point of departure must be: “I don’t know.” Which is a total surrender.

To Lispector, the turtle is an animal we take for granted. We may see a shell, a head, and limbs, but what does the average person know about turtles? Next to nothing. Yet, from our human perspective, we may see ourselves as better than them even though their species have walked this planet for millions of years more than us. Lispector wants us to humble ourselves and approach things like the amateurs we usually are. If we fail to look at turtles critically, we have little hope for the bigger questions.

Lispector pulls meaning out of the mundane, but she often turns her attention inward. She said that she was concerned about her crônicas “becoming excessively personal,” but, in writing from her perspective, she becomes the incidental subject. Some of her most seductive writing comes when she puts down her thoughts unfiltered. Consider the existential crisis Lispector enters when she loses a document:

I often feel so transfixed by those words “if I were me” that looking for the document becomes secondary, and I start to think. Or, rather, to feel.

And I don’t feel good. Try it: if you were you, how would you be and what would you do? […] I think if I were really me, my friends would not even greet me in the street because even my face would have changed. How? I don’t know.

Even Lispector had difficulty reconciling the many versions of Clarice. When Fernando Pessoa encountered this problem, he fractured his identity into his many “heteronyms.” Lispector was brave enough to put them all under her own name. She stated that she didn’t, “ever want to write an autobiography,” and Too Much of Life certainly isn’t one. Still, the glimpses of Clarice that spill over form an emergent portrait. Week to week, Lispector’s crônicas show a woman who is intently trying to understand the world around her and her place inside it. If her perspectives seem shifty, it’s because people change. If anything, her sincerity stems from the fact that she’s willing to show these conflicting sides of herself. Being a human is messy business, and Lispector never pretends to be clean.

In some ways, Too Much of Life contains essays in the literal sense: they’re attempts. They’re attempts to understand people, the self, and the emotions that govern them all. “I don’t want to grasp everything,” Clarice Lispector wrote. “Sometimes I want only to touch.” She reminds us that not everything can be understood completely, but it’s still worth it to try. Each crônica is written with a cool, assured clarity, but they never actually get to the bottom of their subjects. Instead, we’re given a guided tour through Lispector’s thought process – enter at your own risk. At its worst, Too Much of Life shows the chaos that comes from giving a brilliant writer column inches and no oversight. At its best, it opens new doors of understanding, helping us see ourselves and others as fuller human beings.


Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].


A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel  by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook
November 4, 2022
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A ...
Read the full text

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook
September 26, 2022
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS by Clarice Lispector translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson New Directions, 864 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her ...
Read the full text

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook
March 5, 2022
GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori New York Review Books, 112 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the ...
Read the full text

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
October 13, 2021
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be ...
Read the full text

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
June 29, 2021
PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
Read the full text

THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
December 18, 2020
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
Read the full text

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
August 7, 2020
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
Read the full text

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
July 15, 2020
CLOTEL, or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Penguin Classics, 320 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson ...
Read the full text

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
May 29, 2020
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
Read the full text

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
January 16, 2020
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
Read the full text

MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
August 8, 2019
MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay New York Review Books, 336 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on September 26, 2022 in nonfiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY, stories by Kim Fu, reviewed by Prisha Mehta

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 18, 2022 by thwackAugust 18, 2022

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
by Kim Fu
Tin House Books, 220 pages
reviewed by Prisha Mehta

A customer seeks out advanced simulation technology to recreate a conversation with her dead mother, but is refused on the grounds that relief from grief is too addictive a product to ethically sell. A young woman moves into a house crowded with hundreds of out-of-season June bugs as she recalls the emotionally abusive relationship she has just left behind. Every person on the planet loses their ability to taste, all of a sudden, all at once, and an artist makes a new career out of recreating food with physical sensation.

These are the small worlds that populate Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st century, a short story collection containing twelve narratives that, though disparate in plot and subject, come together in a thematic and emotional symphony.

This collection is Fu’s fourth major work, following her debut novel For Today I am a Boy (winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), her poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance, and her second novel The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. Fu’s writing has often been highlighted for its precision and freshness, and her latest publication does not disappoint, offering us a novel, sharp, and insightful perspective on the concept of normalcy.

The stories in this collection span across generations, the narrators ranging from young children to adults verging on old age. But in each story, Fu is determined to take reality and twist it. Ordinary life is teased apart and then slightly altered: a technology is added, a natural process is exaggerated, a standard element of life inexplicably disappears. Despite these alterations, the twists are so seamlessly woven into the fabric of our known world that we quickly come to accept them as just another aspect of reality. Though surprised when we initially find ourselves presented with the unfamiliar or the absurd, we soon find ourselves wondering why a Time Cube is any more difficult to believe than, say, an Apple Watch or a 3D Printer.

In many ways, Fu’s collection reads as a sort of Black Mirror in prose, but where Black Mirror’s episodes feel like warnings for the future, Fu’s stories read as commentaries on the present moment, despite (or perhaps because of) their elements of science fiction. We come to accept them just as quickly and casually as we come to accept a global pandemic, discriminatory legislation, a growing political divide. Part of the reason for this distance is perhaps that her narrators are never at the center of the world-changing events but rather at their periphery, feeling their ramifications but always equally if not more concerned with the small details of their own lives.

“After I killed my wife,” Fu writes, “I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs. I thought about how to spend the time. I could clean the house, as a show of contrition, and when she returned to find me sitting at the shining kitchen island, knickknacks in place on dusted shelves, a pot of soup on the stove, we might not even need to discuss it.”

Fu’s prose is unembellished but often sparsely beautiful and, true to its title, is deeply resonant for a modern audience. Well-paced, clear, and confident, the narration navigates both the familiar and the absurd with deftness and wit. A character’s ambivalence about traditional marriage is given equal, if not greater, narrative weight than a segment about a sea monster that appears on the local news. Though strange, futuristic, and at times magical, the irrealism of these stories is not mythological or epic in nature; the worlds in which these narratives exist feel no more dramatic or heroic than our own, and the concerns of their characters feel no more grand or meaningful than our day-to-day worries. In many ways, the collection is a meditation on how irreverently time can collapse entire ways of life, how shifts that were once devastating or groundbreaking come to feel commonplace in a matter of years, how the new is, sooner or later, inevitably drowned in the growing expanse of the ordinary.

Kim Fu

My favorite story in the collection is “Liddy, First to Fly,” which follows an elementary schooler whose friend sprouts small, dark-feathered wings from her ankles but struggles to use them to fly. Despite its magic, the story avoids romanticism: the wings begin as large, unsightly blisters, and ultimately unfurl only when the girls prick them with a sewing needle. In this story, and in others in the collection, queerness is present but not central, running in the background of the characters’ emotional arcs. “We’d been told we would develop a new interest in boys,” Fu writes. “For me, that had not happened. Boys seemed yet more distant, less interesting, as the girls around me morphed in ways that were truly fascinating. As they grew wings.” With this offhand line, she offers us a new kind of queer narrative, one in which the queerness is tied into the fabric of the ordinary, allowed to be unquestioned and natural, to exist without justification or qualification–in fact, without even really being the point of the story.

There is something achingly and electrically familiar about the way that Fu characterizes the many dangers of modern life: insomnia, elementary school, climate change, intergenerational divide. While reading, I often felt as though she was taking words out of my mouth, recreating some essential aspect of experience which I could recognize but could not put into words myself. I felt, too, the echoes of pandemic and quarantine, of a world in which the absurd and unthinkable are rapidly becoming commonplace.

The familiarity of Fu’s prose is a testament to her ability to drop her readers fluidly and quickly into a fictional mind. The psychology of her characters is wonderfully immersive, and in a matter of lines, we believe them entirely as real and complex people. After the shock of the initial reading, printing a wife’s new body out in the basement comes to seem as ordinary a pastime as looking out a window or pouring a glass of orange juice. It is this combination of familiarity and strangeness, this simultaneous commitment to and deviation from normalcy, that makes Fu’s work so captivating.


Prisha Mehta HeadshotPrisha Mehta is a writer from northern New Jersey. She is a rising sophomore at Yale University and an intern at The Writers Circle of NJ. Her short stories have appeared in Mud Season Review, The Baltimore Review, and Scholastic’s Best Teen Writing of 2020. In addition to writing, she’s interested in psychology and philosophy. You can find more about her at prishamehta.com.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 18, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

WIN ME SOMETHING, a novel by Kyle Lucia Wu, reviewed by Annie Cao

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 18, 2022 by thwackAugust 18, 2022

WIN ME SOMETHING
by Kyle Lucia Wu
Tin House, 272 pages
reviewed by Annie Cao

In Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s enthralling debut novel, Willa Chen is a biracial Chinese-American girl who starts a nannying job for the Adriens, a wealthy family in Tribeca. Willa has always struggled to feel a sense of belonging when it comes to community; she’s not fully Chinese but not fully white either. She faces racial prejudice and microaggressions while living in New Jersey as a child and New York as an adult. Her parents are divorced and have started their own separate families, but she has trouble feeling connected to either one. Whether because of her racial background or family situation, Willa exists on the margins—she sticks out due to her differences and is never truly understood.

At the beginning of the novel, Willa claims that she just “[floats] silently through” the world, no one recognizing her struggles. Her life lacks defined movement; when Nathalie—her employer—asks about her future career plans, Willa indicates that she never had any. She might even want to be a nanny forever. The novel’s structure switches back and forth between Willa’s past experiences and current job with the Adriens, which demonstrates how she is still haunted by her childhood, unable to move on with her life. Her nannying duties constantly evoke memories of her family, and Wu interweaves moments in the Adriens’ apartment with reflections about Willa’s own personal history. Because Willa is always reminded of the past, she is never fully situated in the present. She doesn’t have a healthy sense of time, direction, or purpose.

Kyle Lucia Wu

Kyle Lucia Wu

Willa’s nannying job is used to explore her childhood and identity. When she interacts with Bijou—the child she nannies—and studies the Adriens’ family dynamic, Willa is not only brought back to decades-old memories of her parents and half-siblings, but also offered a model for the family she always wanted but never had. When Willa first starts nannying, Nathalie makes paella with her and Bijou. Willa marvels at Nathalie’s attentiveness, and while standing with Bijou at the kitchen counter, she pictures the two of them as sisters collectively under Nathalie’s care. She thinks, “I felt a hot kind of jealousy for how Bijou would turn out, having been raised in the arms of someone who knew what she was doing. For how she woke up in the lemon glow of Nathalie’s attention.”

Nannying reminds Willa of the past, but also gives her a sense of belonging and hope for the future. She learns to cook and take care of the household, becoming acquainted with the intimate details of not only Bijou’s routine, but also the Adriens’ family life. She begins to feel like a part of the Adrien family. As Willa is immersed in the environment of her job, her self-image also changes. When Willa and Bijou get food poisoning, Nathalie takes care of Willa alongside her own daughter, giving her cold compresses and allowing her to stay in the guest bedroom. In other words, Willa’s role as the caretaker is reversed. “Maybe I wasn’t a good nanny,” she contemplates. “I barely thought about Bijou…I had been thinking of myself…how I wanted to have a mother to return to. But Nathalie asked me to stay. And then I had thought only of her.” Nathalie meets Willa’s need for “a mother to return to,” inadvertently compensating for Willa’s neglected upbringing. As the novel progresses, Willa develops a sense of attachment to Nathalie and the Adriens as a whole, and starts to imagine a life where she belongs to their world.

Wu, like Willa, is also biracial with divorced parents. In an essay published by Catapult, she describes how she faced similar challenges to Willa, feeling out of place in both her family and racial community. However, when Wu tried to write about these experiences, her teachers, agents, and editors found the story unremarkable; they were unable to connect with it. In a workshop, she was told that Willa’s life was too “ordinary,” that there was nothing “incredible” about it.

But this is why Win Me Something is valuable to read—it illuminates difficult experiences that might otherwise be glossed over as unimportant, helping marginalized and forgotten individuals like Willa be seen. At the end of the novel, Willa explains to the reader, “I guessed what I wanted more than anything was for someone to share my view of the universe, to step inside what things were like for me, and say it was real.” Willa wants to be understood, for someone to know “what things were like for [her],” and this is exactly what the novel does—it shares her story with a wide audience, allowing others to feel her sense of disconnect, her racial and familial isolation.

Wu enables readers to understand Willa through a vivid depiction of her inner state. Willa describes all her feelings, observations, and experiences with truthfulness and vulnerability. The novel is notable for her sensitive perception of life and the emotional revelations that surround it. Aside from Willa’s remarkable interiority, her story’s authenticity is also enhanced by Wu’s realistic portrayal of the characters. Willa, for instance, feels common human emotions like embarrassment, selfishness, and frustration. She has many insecurities and is easily affected by the world around her. Wu also doesn’t oversimplify the Adriens into a flat, superficial depiction of ignorance, but gives their characters nuance and complexity—for example, despite her indirect prejudice and microaggressions, Nathalie is still considerate of and attentive to Willa. Willa also admires her, noticing how hard she works at her career and taking care of Bijou. Through Nathalie and others, Wu generates a realistic and thought-provoking discussion about the different ways racist attitudes can manifest in society. Willa’s genuine, transparent inner life and the realism of the novel’s characters not only make it easy for readers to follow and absorb the story, but also encourage them to comprehend the novel as a representation of real-life experiences rather than just fiction.

Despite the honesty and realism of the novel, Willa is sometimes less straightforward as a narrator. Her actions and memories can be metaphorical or significant in an ambiguous way, rather than explained clearly and directly. At one point, Willa and Bijou are making collages from magazine catalogs. After Bijou opens up to her about her deceased grandmother, Willa “[turns] the page to an advertisement for a horror show, and [cuts] around a dangling key.” Wu’s choice to have her do this is specific and symbolic; there is something touching, perhaps hopeful, about this act of extracting a key from the context of a horror show. The novel is filled with motifs of food and flowers, which convey themes of culture, community, and appearance that readers can interpret for themselves. When passages reflecting on her childhood are interwoven with ones about her nannying job, Willa doesn’t spell out the relationship between past and present moments—instead, the audience must read between the lines and autonomously come to a conclusion. When readers learn to understand Willa on their own terms rather than being spoon-fed every piece of information, they can build a stronger connection to her.

Wu’s storytelling is often suggestive and intriguing, perhaps even poetic—she weaves subtle details and metaphors into the narrative, which draws readers into the complexity of Willa’s story and compels them to search for deeper meanings and connections. Like its characters, many of the novel’s messages are nuanced and ambiguous, but Wu keeps the story grounded in reality by balancing abstractions with direct explanations of Willa’s inner thoughts. Whether it be through narration that is suggestive or specific, Win Me Something ensures that the reader gains an understanding of what it is like to be Willa. And beyond that, Willa’s life is relatable even to those without the same racial background or familial circumstances as her. It speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of place or forgotten in their community, capturing universal sentiments of loneliness and yearning for love, understanding, and belonging.


Annie Cao is from Colorado and studies at Princeton University. Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Hunger Mountain. She has been recognized by the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of the UK, and Columbia College Chicago, among others.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 18, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN, a novel by Coco Mellors, reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 17, 2022 by thwackAugust 17, 2022

CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN
by Coco Mellors
Bloomsbury, 384 pages
reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey

I was attracted to the novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein because the title characters and I share something in common: a short courtship followed by elopement. In Coco Mellors’s debut novel, I was curious to see what she would do with this scenario, long fabled in movies and books, but also very real to me. My elopement was born out of love, seventeen hundred miles of distance, and an international border, while Cleo’s and Frank’s marriage was born out of love and an expiring visa. Though Cleo and Frank had to bear the same accusations of a marriage of convenience, which was neither of our motivations, our stories quickly evolved into something entirely different.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is part glamor and part monster, as the name suggests. Mellors bravely tells the story of a marriage that never shies away from the uncomfortable; she tackles hard subjects without embarrassment or deflection. This story is not a warm hug on a Sunday morning; it’s a wake-up call after a long night. Sometimes we need a wake-up call.

The novel opens with a charming meet-cute, where young, beautiful artist Cleo meets confident, middle-aged advertising executive Frank while leaving a New Year’s Eve party. With their natural, witty banter—their chemistry is immediately felt—we want them to be together. They go from newly introduced to newly married in a few months. Mellors fast forwards from their meeting directly to their marriage, which is the subject she really wants to address.

Coco Mellors

Marriage is never as simple as a rom-com meet cute, and Cleo and Frank’s relationship devolves into a monster of their creation. Cleo refuses to acknowledge the true impact of family trauma in her life, while Frank soaks his memories and regrets with alcohol. Their initial frivolity and charm comes undone as their hasty marriage spirals into betrayal and loneliness. With neither of them willing to fully examine their past, they don’t find their way to each other through their pain. Their friends and family struggle equally around them, often pulling them into their painful orbit. Cleo’s best friend Quintin struggles with his sexuality, Frank’s sister Zoe lacks self-awareness and relies on her brother’s hand-outs, while his best friend Anders desires his wife. As Cleo and Frank drift from one another, their friends don’t throw them a life line but instead take them further out to sea.

The narrative is interrupted with the introduction of Eleanor in Frank’s life. Eleanor is the comedic but truthful interloper, and her point-of-view shows a kinder, funnier Frank. While Frank is drawn to Eleanor, Cleo escapes to Anders, who absorbs her into himself. Anders’s desire for her is born out of desperation and a lust for a different life, not love.

This is not just a story of a marriage in turmoil, but one of two people desperately trying to belong. This is a story of how loneliness and addiction drive people into their own dark interiors, instead of bringing them together. As Cleo desensitizes Frank’s alcoholism with infidelity, and Frank rebels against Cleo’s frustration with anger and self-aggrandizement, they both fail to meet the other’s need: connection. As their friends’ lives bump and hurdle through space, they become a mirror of Cleo and Frank’s untethering. Their relationship irreparably changes when Cleo’s desperate action severs their marriage: she sees him as the cause of all her pain, and he sees her as the death of all they had.

This may sound sad, and at times it is. It is Mellors’s deft ability to lighten a scene with humor and honesty that sees the reader through the hard moments. We cry with these characters, but we also laugh with them—they’re so human. They share deep desires and weaknesses with a vulnerability that will make any reader feel less alone. Though the ending is not a neatly tied bow, as many stories that open with a meet-cute are, Cleo and Frank do find a way back: not to each other, but to themselves.

Thankfully, my elopement took me in a different direction, but my empathy for Cleo and Frank runs deep, because they started in the same place: in love. There is no perfect love story, but unlike Cleopatra, Cleo doesn’t succumb to the viper, nor does Frank become Frankenstein’s monster. Their change, however difficult, creates something entirely new out of each of them. This is not the story of a happy marriage, but it is the story of two people who discover what it takes to find their happiness: a better understanding and acceptance of themselves.


Stephanie Fluckey HeadshotStephanie Fluckey (she/her) is a writer and artist living in the Pacific Northwest. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University and draws on her experience as an artist to visually inform her writing. Surrounded by nature and the beauty of Washington, Stephanie’s literary fiction is influenced by the natural world with a focus on characters seeking redemption, belonging, and acceptance. Her poem “Silent Night” was published in Survivor Lit.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 17, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, nonfiction by William Turner, reviewed by Jamie Tews

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 15, 2022 by thwackAugust 15, 2022

The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns
by William Turner
West Virginia University Press, 352 pages
reviewed by Jamie Tews

When I read William Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, I was living in Appalachia, commuting between Eastern Kentucky and Johnson City, Tennessee for work with the Appalachia Service Project (ASP). ASP is a home repair organization that seeks to eradicate substandard housing in central Appalachia. Working with ASP, I was introduced to Turner’s work. Before ASP’s summer volunteer season began, our content specialist, Clara Leonard, spent time in Hazard, Kentucky and Harlan County, Kentucky, talking with folks about their experience in the region. Near the end of Leonard’s first video in the two-part series, she asks Turner, a sociologist, why people don’t leave. He responds simply: home is where the heart is, and Harlan County is home.

In the summer of 2019, I traveled around central Appalachia listening to people’s stories and writing about what I heard. Despite the different towns I was in, the different families I spoke with, most stories were rooted in the same sentiment: home is the most important thing, and Appalachia is home. Appalachia is not my home, but I feel I understand the sentiment. Just the other day I was driving down a back road in Magoffin County when I was momentarily overwhelmed by the beauty of my surroundings–the various shades of green on the trees, the homes that look so loved and so lived in beside creeks, the people sitting outside in the shade of their porch roof who waved as I passed. There is an easy beauty to Eastern Kentucky, in both the people and the landscape.

William Turner

Harlan Renaissance explores the ways in which Turner has found home in Harlan County. With threads of his personal experience, his family’s history, and research about coal mining, race, education, and the arts, Turner creates rich scenes of what life was like in Harlan in the 1950’s and 1960’s. One of my favorite chapters is Chapter Two, titled “Between Alex Haley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ed Cabbell, and the Affrilachian Poets.” In this chapter, Turner explores the phrase “Affrilachian,” a term for African-American artists who live in Appalachia. Instead of joining in with praising the phrase and championing the way it has given a voice to otherwise quieted artists, Turner explains the ways in which the term Affrilachian can be misguided and misleading. Turner’s language is tight, and he is as respectful in his writing as he is well-informed, whether he came to know things through research or lived experience.  Many parts of the book are researched, and it’s obvious that the author’s desire to educate himself and his readers comes from his love of the region.

Despite the scenes of personal narrative, however, I did not read this as a memoir, but rather as a researched memoir, as something written by a sociologist. In Chapter Ten, “In a Coal Mine, Everybody is Black,” Turner poses two questions: “How does one explain the level of optimism, resiliency, and intergenerational upward mobility among working-class Blacks from these places?” and “Why do we hear so little about Black Appalachians exhibiting the desperation and depression that marks the current regional opioid addiction among many Whites?” (230). These questions seem to be what Turner wants his book to explore, but, as he notes early on, there are many directions the book almost went.

Even though the book focuses on Harlan County, Turner jumps around a lot, and the sporadic nature was the most challenging part of the book. Turner is very passionate about Harlan, about informing the reader about Black people in Appalachia, Black people working in the mines and living in mining communities, but with those passions come the opportunity for tangents, and Turner spends a lot of time in this book flushing out the tangents.

William Turner claims he is of the generation of people who lived in a coal town during the golden age–he witnessed the Harlan Renaissance. He defines the Harlan Renaissance as “an extraordinary period of enhanced lifestyles, self-esteem, and upward mobility for two generations of Blacks” (307). Through telling stories about the family camaraderie in his childhood kitchen and the Black men who shared stories about the mines at picnic tables, among many other things, Turner introduces Appalachia to readers who were previously unfamiliar with the region. For the readers who were familiar, his writing conjures a feeling of comfort and nostalgia, while informing the reader that there is more to the place than they might have thought.

When I made final edits to this review, Eastern Kentucky was in the initial aftermath of devastating floods. On July 27th, 2022, torrential rainstorms came through the region overnight, which created flash floods that washed away many homes, cars, and, in some cases, entire communities. As Turner describes, there is a lot of love and perseverance among Appalachian people in Kentucky, but in the wake of this disaster, the people in these communities need support. Here are a few ways to help: The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, United Way of Kentucky, and the Coalition for Home Repair are collecting donations for long-term recovery plans. Home is where the heart is, and unfortunately, many people have lost their homes–now is the time for people from all over to come together and help people in Eastern Kentucky.


Jamie Tews HeadshotJamie Tews just received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. You can find her work in The Racket, Chestnut Review, Jellyfish Review, and Appalachian Voices, among others. 


Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 15, 2022 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SHADE OF BLUE TREES, poems by Kelly Cressio-Moeller reviewed by Dana Kinsey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 24, 2022 by thwackMay 24, 2022

SHADE OF BLUE TREES
by Kelly Cressio-Moeller
Two Sylvias Press, 79 pages
reviewed by Dana Kinsey

In her debut collection Shade of Blue Trees, Kelly Cressio-Moeller conducts a tremendous chorus of voices that rise in a dirge so mournful and lush that all of nature harmonizes; the beauty spellbinds, making the reader feel as if we’ve been privileged to witness language as a potent kind of magic. Mary Oliver, Joni Mitchell, Virginia Woolf, Paul Gauguin, Amy Winehouse, and e.e. cummings live in her lines, chant in her forests, and drench her in spring rain. She hears each of their voices and repurposes their words, sometimes as epigraphs, other times as dazzling lines within the music of her verse.

Cressio-Moeller’s resulting symphony binds death and rebirth in the same notes, as she announces in “Threshold”: “Sometimes all that remains is rebirth. / Play me a mournful tune.” This poem, and so many others, are invitations from Cressio-Moeller to join her in a world that tosses away fearing mortality in favor of full immersion in the natural world. Even the evocative title of the collection suggests something both peaceful and dark in the same spare words.

The word “shade” in the title conjures the shelter of trees to escape a scorching sun, but it can also mean variations of the color “blue.” While we long for the tranquility and wisdom that “blue” offers, most people turn away from the emotionally cold and depressive qualities it likewise symbolizes. Blue is known to slow the metabolism and thus promote calmness like the “winter plums in a copper bowl” in “Panels from a Deepening Winter.” But sometimes blue seeps through as sadness, like in these lines from “Among Other Things”: “The tree’s arms hold her in the indigo lap of sky. / She was dead before they knew she was missing.” Cressio-Moeller’s “blue” fades and intensifies to evoke both comforting serenity and devastating despair.

Kelly Cressio-Mueller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller

The poem “Panels from a Blue Summer” echoes the blue in its title among haunting lines, such as “My mouth blooms bowls of amaranth and thistle in the melancholy shade of blue trees.” The summer described here is one of “torched moods,” of “bruised gin,” of “Car-wash / girls with yellow semaphores [that] pistol- / whip July, swallow sunlight / clockwise.” There is restlessness that erupts in violence, sex drowned in whiskey. Ordinarily, summer poems bring warmth, but once again, the poet surprises us with an entirely different vibe, employing a myriad of hard consonants to reinforce that cacophony.

Regardless of the mood in each poem, the music never fails to intoxicate. For every aching violin she writes, there is also a melodious harp. From “Panels from a Celestial Autumn”: “I tell my girl-self each time she lights a candle in this dark, You’ve made a small fire.”  The intertwining of darkness and light, of inner and outer worlds, places us firmly in a crossroad, like in the poem “Threshold,” where she writes:

……………………………The days hold their breath
………………….summoning an ancient silence, an intimacy –
………..the way the moon makes love to the ocean
or the mountain mirrors the slope
………..of my father’s shoulder
………..………..as it disappears into the sea.

Cressio-Moeller’s lines sprawl across the pages in curving patterns as she coaxes each element to engage with her as the tales unfold. They willingly bend; “I hold the sun’s hand until it falls asleep.” She writes shocking letters to the low tide and to the rain, “Come at me with guillotine sheets, / I will be happy in separation. / It’s not your fault – your window / taps tender me, the slow dance in fog.” The speaker’s gentleness tempers the verse, “Even the rain wants to be horizontal.” She finds her own deep sorrow echoed in the emotions of the elements around her and introduces them to us as if they are lonely friends in need of our comfort. Their personalities and fears become ours as we empathize, understanding now how we could desire their company on our own difficult days. In this way, the natural becomes personal. The things we usually see as distant and uncaring, such as the weather, are warped into companions by Cressio’s hand. Again, she displays an ability to at once show us nature but also twist it to bend to her own imaginative vision rather than vice versa.

The poet often immerses us in the grandeur of the natural world by using powerful personification, even as she writes of loss’s permanent effects and death’s cold grasp. From “Panels from a Deepening Winter,” she writes “The wind wears heels tonight. The stars are not made of clouds and dust but bright bones and flowers. She knows the oars of her long boat will never reach the shore.” In these lines, dream and reality stand not in contention, but cooperation. The poet inserts herself between them, taking both their hands. This is perhaps why it’s so easy to follow her on the journey she maps out for us. She is a capable guide, using the real to invite us into the mystical.

The myths, fairy tales, and paintings she re-imagines make us believe that rejuvenation is within our power if we pay homage to creation. The renewed reverence we gain for our planet through this collection factors into its richness. In “Away” she writes “Overnight earth’s hourglass turns round spilling ocean into sky, starshine against seafloor black— a radiant play of brilliants.” While the night’s landscape and mystery often evoke sadness and fear in the speaker, there is the constant promise of light, the overriding reassurance, as we can see in “Portent with Moonset and Blackbirds”:

Last night, I went to bed feeling hope-
………..less & profoundly lonely.

I left the curtains open wide.
………..Sleep plowed a ragged field of un-
………..………..even rows – but in the morning’s
………..………..………..early darkness, the fullest moon

poured its cool, bewitching light
………..into the small bowls of my room & garden.

We see here that even in isolation, even in hollowness, loneliness serves as a bowl waiting to be filled with light. Alongside this hope floats the melancholic. As life flourishes, so do ghosts. “Visitation” is a poem about the speaker’s dead parents who return to her as “nimble deer.” Living without her parents is a tragedy the speaker must endure, yet their message from the beyond provides validation and hope: “Your life is not invisible to us. / And the love we always had for you, continues —/ Even now, as we nibble on low hanging branches. Even now, as we climb higher up the hill. / Even now, as we turn our heads away — /leaving, again.” The caesuras at the ends of the lines can be read as hints that the speaker can trust that they haven’t forgotten their love for her. Her parents have been transformed in body, yet they “tapped a familiar code” that only she can decipher. The caesura is almost another bowl: a space of known absence and rupture capable of being both empty and filled. Grief and love can coexist once we realize they are permanent parts of us.

In “Visitation” and three other poems, the poet relies on form as a device to convey the idea of moving grief to the periphery without forgetting those we grieve for. Cressio-Moeller uses the right margin for alignment instead of using the left or centering the poem. For example, the right-aligned poem “Irony” explores the idea that mothers and daughters are tightly linked. It’s stated that the speaker has always called her mother first with any kind of news and now the current news, her mother’s death, makes that impossible. The poem’s location on the page, hovering at the far right edge, suggests that the speaker knows she must eventually push the grief away from her rather than succumb to its darkness.

In her final poem of the collection, “Something to Remember,” Cressio-Moeller leaves us with this: “Darkness does not hunger for anything. / It has everything it needs. The ribs / of shadows are fat with secrets of the living and the dead. It never / wallows in loneliness.” Despite its intimidation, Cressio-Moeller shows us death and darkness not as foes, but as inevitabilities. She goes on to tell us, “If you are patient / your eyes will adjust to the dark,” offering a fantastic reminder that our bodies are built for life and death in the same set of ribs, in the same eyes.

In Shade of Blue Trees, the poet paints shadows powerful enough to swallow us whole. Yet in the “quiet haunting” and “brumal embrace,” there are abundant sensual pleasures that render us jubilant like “thumbs pressed into the lungs of pomegranate halves, releasing a thousand tiny hearts.” Those who’ve ever sought shelter when grieving or hope when confronting fear will find solace and courage in the nature of these poems. This collection soothes and shimmers, offering us safety from grief so terrible it can render us powerless until we muster the courage to face it.  Reminders that the natural world exists to soften the impact will stay with readers like joyful melodies. To read Shade of Blue Trees is to witness a symphony imbued with the loneliness of blue midnights and the brightness of robin’s egg mornings, knowing that those colors keep their life in the same word.


Dana Kinsey is an actor and teacher published in Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Porcupine Literary, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, and Prose Online. Dana’s play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Greenwich Village. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press. Visit her at wordsbyDK.com.

 

 

 

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on May 24, 2022 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 19, 2022 by thwackApril 19, 2022

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER
by Janelle Monáe
Harper Voyager, 321 Pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world where an individual’s inner circuitry—their deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires—faces judgment from the illuminating eye of New Dawn, freedom is sought out by those who find liberation in the shadows. Monáe’s songs follow the story of Jane 57821, whose queerness made society view her as a deviant with unclean coding—a “dirty computer.” Dreaming of a better future, Jane 57821 broke free of the chains of New Dawn by daring to remember who she really was, sowing the seeds of revolution in her wake. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collaborative work with influential writers of the Afrofuturism genre, exploring the expanded mythos Monáe created through her uniquely futuristic yet funky sound. Taking place in the same universe as Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian is a collection of short stories set after Jane 57821’s daring escape.

In the introduction “Breaking Dawn,” Monáe’s world unfolds like a memory uncurling itself within the corners of your mind. She sets the scene for stories to come, detailing the rise of an all-seeing regime hungry to peer into the clandestine inner networks of its citizens. What Monáe does well is that she immerses you in the story through her evocative writing, utilizing a distinct voice that merges the technological with the thoughtful, the analytical with the sentimental. Through her writing you feel the underlying humanity in an age where living beings are reduced to technical components, regarded coldly as “computers.” But what I found interesting was the last line of “Breaking Dawn,” in which Monáe beautifully introduces the larger themes interwoven throughout her stories: “Beyond time and memory—where the computer cannot reach—is dreaming.” This line calls upon the reader to consider the interconnectivity of time, memory, and dreams, and the cost of a future without them.

The presence of New Dawn serves as a critique of modern society’s intolerance of diversity, sexuality, and gender expression. New Dawn is the amalgamation of all the prejudicial laws and ideologies that persisted unabated in the nation’s past, which the reader comes to understand is our current day. In order to enforce their idea of what is socially acceptable, New Dawn developed technology to harvest, manipulate, and erase the memories of the populace. But as Monáe warns: “Memory of who we’ve been—of who we’ve been punished for being—was always the only map into tomorrow.” It’s this overarching theme that unites the different perspectives across her narratives.

Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson challenge our understanding and perception of memory in the titular story “The Memory Librarian,” where we get the perspective from inside the ivory towers of New Dawn. Seshet serves as Director Librarian of a city called Little Delta, and her job is to collect and analyze the memories of its citizens to ensure compliance with the New Dawn ethos. Under her watch, anyone who is revealed to be a dirty computer is sent to a New Dawn facility to have their memories erased, a cruel process called “torching.”Seshet was on her way to rising the ranks, until falling in love with a mysterious woman named Alethia 56934 sets off a series of events that threaten to undermine New Dawn’s influence over Little Delta. Facing an impossible choice between love and duty, Seshet considers doing the unthinkable to maintain control. It’s through Seshet’s inner turmoil that Monáe and Johnson beg the question, who are we without our memories—those encrypted echoes of the past that make us who we are and guide us into who we will become? In a world that violates the sanctity of memory, are we not the owners of our own soul?

Janelle Monáe

“Save Changes” switches perspectives to the other end of the spectrum of New Dawn’s influence, following the life of a family under near-constant surveillance. Amber and her sister Larissa live as outcasts as a consequence of their mother’s past rebellion against New Dawn; their time is monitored throughout the day. To escape their bleak reality the girls attend an illegal party on the outskirts of town, but this adventure turns out to be more than what Amber bargained for. Armed only with a mysterious stone her late father gave her, Amber must decide how to keep her family together with the time she has left before New Dawn takes them away. In this story Monáe and Yohanca Delgado explore an important aspect of time travel: how to make the biggest impact with so little time to make a change. Time is a force we cannot fully control and can barely fathom—so how do we find a way to utilize it to change our lives and the lives of those around us? Yet the beauty of Amber’s story is that she comes to realize that there is never a right time to take action, so long as you have the courage to act in the first place.

The last (and my favorite) story is “Timebox (ALTAR)ed,” where four children discover among the remnants of the past the future they could only dream of. Bug, Olagunde, Trellis, and Artis live in the town of Freewheel, on the outskirts of New Dawn’s “cities of light.” New Dawn took something away from each child—their parents, their homes, their health, their hope. One day they stumble upon the remains of an ancient city in a nearby forest and, with Bug’s lead, they create an altar of found art out of the junk. What I enjoyed about this particular story is that Monáe and Sheree Renée Thomas created a future for the children that reflected their individual talents—Bug the artist, Ola the inventor, Trell the healer, and Artis the lover. Seeing the Freewheel children discover how their gifts can change the future encourages readers to consider how their own talents can shape the future they live in.

What I love about The Memory Librarian is that its stories convey one of the tenets of Afrofuturism: that there is no way to create tomorrow without drawing from the lessons of yesterday. African Americans, as well as other ethnic minority groups, know all too well that those who neglect the past are doomed to repeat it. Remembering our history, both the pain and the triumph, serves as a way to guide our steps into the future we’ve always dreamed—one of diversity, inclusion, and equality. The book centers around another doctrine of  Afrofuturism: hope. Despite the current circumstances there always exists the possibility of things changing for the better. And although hope can be a source of motivation to move toward brighter days ahead, it can conversely become a burden that can keep you stuck within the limitations of the present. However, as Monáe writes, to hope means to “work out that invisible balance so you don’t get crushed but also don’t float away.”

As a reader, I enjoy character-driven narratives where the protagonists’ journeys challenge their perspectives and mold them into who they’re destined to become. I also connect with diverse characters who reflect my reality as an African American woman. I love that Monáe’s stories are filled with a unique cast of characters that are unapologetically BIPOC, queer, and feminine. The Memory Librarian spans different experiences and perspectives, from a driven yet fragile Director Librarian whose love is considered “dirty” to a young, black, gender-neutral child whose art is their way of connecting to their long lost mother. I found that I was able to relate to all of the characters, in part, because of the third person personal perspective through which the stories are told. I gained insight into the backgrounds, motivations, and inner workings of the characters from a point of view that explores their individual experiences through an objective lens. However, I also related to the characters because in them I saw pieces of myself: Seshet’s journey reflected my drive to succeed in a white-dominated field, Amber’s life being profiled harkened to my own experiences with racial profiling, and the hope of the Freewheel children ignites my hope for the future as well.

Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a provocative collection of narratives that urges us to take heed of our past, take hold of the time we have, and take action toward creating a better tomorrow for all. These stories ask us to tap into the inner software of our souls to find the courage to be our most authentic selves, to love freely and openly, and to make a difference in the world around us. It’s with Monáe’s final charge that we are called to action: “You’ve got to dream a future before you can build a future. Together, let us begin this dreaming awake.”


Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on April 19, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE ORIGINAL GLITCH, a novel by Melanie Moyer, reviewed by Michael Sasso

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 12, 2022 by thwackApril 12, 2022

THE ORIGINAL GLITCH
by Melanie Moyer
Lanternfish Press, 362 pages
reviewed by Michael Sasso

“Jesus was a carpenter, King Arthur was an orphan, and Laura was a broke, lonely millennial.” This is how Laura, the artificially intelligent protagonist, is summed up in Melanie Moyer’s sophomore novel, The Original Glitch (Lanternfish Press, October 2021). Every generation envisions its savior as one of its most unassuming: so, while the Wachowskis gave us introverted, Gen-X cyberhacker Neo in The Matrix films, Moyer provides Laura, the downtrodden but culturally-aware Millennial. Unlike Neo, however, Laura cannot escape her virtual prison, and her “magical” digital powers are lackluster. It is telling of the Millennial ethos that, even though the novel is about saving the world, the universe of The Original Glitch is familiar, ordinary, prosaic.

Laura is created in reaction to a malevolent AI named Theo. When Theo’s creator, Dr. Kent, starts to believe that he’s an unhinged sociopath, she puts him in a digital prison locked inside a physical box. Then she conceives Laura: 1. to prove that an AI can be “good” and 2. as a possible weapon against Theo. (The Matrix parallels continue: Laura is Neo to Theo’s Agent Smith.) For more than half of the novel, Laura is unaware that she’s bodiless, made up of zeros and ones. Her virtual reality is based upon a small town in upstate New York, in which she believes she’s a twenty-something who works at a pizza parlor. Her existence is unremarkable, save her haunting belief that she is trapped within the town’s borders. She chalks her entrapment up to capitalist society: “She understood that everything about the way America functioned kept people in their place unless they were beautiful or brilliant (or rich).”

The narrative alternates between Laura’s perspective and that of Adler, a grad student and Dr. Kent’s protégé. He is one of only a few who knows of Theo and Laura’s existence. His (real-life) existence is depressingly like Laura’s (digital one). Each is consumed by melancholia, has little hope for the future, and is a borderline alcoholic. Adler is withdrawn from his friends but finds solace in “watching” Laura via a computer interface. In this way, Original Glitch becomes something like The Matrix meets The Truman Show. Adler’s affection for her is the only warm feeling to which he is attuned, and it remains ambiguous whether his voyeurism is stirred by platonic empathy or a creepy romantic interest.

Despite the plot’s layered complexity, readers will be disappointed that The Original Glitch never achieves its dramatic potential. The pacing is glacial. One loses count of the number of scenes in which Adler and Laura (respectively) pour themselves cheap whiskey to drown their sorrows, or the times Adler explains the grave danger everyone, supposedly, is in.

This threat of danger, which is technically the backbone of the plot, remains undefined, as Theo’s intent is obscure. Theo dismisses the idea that he will cause physical harm and he but half-heartedly gestures toward causing political chaos. He does, however, try to blackmail Adler’s closest friend. Yet, the victimized character handles it with remarkable poise; it amounts to little more than a stumbling block. Similarly, Laura—who is meant to be the novel’s messianic character—only comes to know her potential during the concluding pages, leaving her no time for significant growth or self-realization.

Melanie Moyer

The thematic focus, instead, is on Adler’s journey from a selfish loner to a more open, empathetic individual. On one hand, the friendships he fosters (with human beings) over the course of the book are charming. On the other, a reader may be frustrated by the hypocrisy he displays in treating Laura like a person while he calls Theo “not a someone…” and reduces him, and his emotions, to just “data.” When Adler responds to Theo’s coldness with outright meanness, the entire posse that aids him (including an insightful psych major) points out that maybe Theo isn’t so evil after all, that maybe he’s just cranky that he’s been locked in a box. Indeed, Dr. Kent admits that Theo “was a child who skipped important steps, that he never developed a moral code.” Yet Adler never learns to empathize with Theo. There seems to be great irony that, despite Adler’s and Laura’s growing abilities to self-reflect, Adler never considers treating Theo as an entity that needs help or care. The irony is compounded by the fact that the novel begins with an epitaph from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the words of the monster himself: “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Like Frankenstein’s monster, Theo was never loved or nurtured. Moyer, seemingly by accident, espouses the cruel concept of misunderstood Otherness that Shelly’s novel criticized.

Original Glitch, nonetheless, has its virtues. It is a telling snapshot of the Millennial plight. While all its characters feel “stuck” in life, it is Laura—whose digital world is deliberately designed to keep her from progressing (geographically, romantically, or financially)—whose insight points to the limits of human agency. She is resigned to the fact that capitalist America’s socioeconomic flexibility is not what it once was. Her worldview is drastically different from Boomers’ “by the bootstraps” ideology; it is pointedly Millennial. The novel contends that our universe, with its defined limits and boundaries, is not much different than a computer program.

Moyer also explores the generation’s anxieties regarding reproduction. While the choice to not have children is less a taboo today than it once was, it is significant that most of the novel’s central characters—including Laura—are queer, part of a community for which child-rearing has always been an explicit choice. Dr. Kent, who asexually “births” both Theo and Laura, reflects and agonizes over her decision. She posits, “What is there to be earned, to be gained, in creating [life]?” The Original Glitch speaks to the evolving nature of procreation and parenthood. It even alludes to the possibility of a posthuman future where AIs are common members of the social milieu: Charlie, Adler’s ex, consoles Laura after she discovers that she is an AI, saying, “There’s more than one way to live. Yours is just…it’s a newer way, for sure.”

Far from the save-the-world-from-catastrophe thriller that its book jacket promises, The Original Glitch is a meandering inquisition of the purpose of life. Though Adler and Laura each find some temporary satisfactions, Moyer’s book offers no concrete answers. Instead, it suggests that asking the question is what makes one human. As Dr. Kent puts it, for an AI to be truly intelligent, “they’d have to be like us, eternally pining for purpose.”


Michael Sasso HeadshotAn MA candidate in English & Media Studies at Rutgers University, Michael Sasso has spent much of his adulthood wandering (but seldom lost). Before moving to Philadelphia, he made short films in Los Angeles, tended bar, taught yoga, and was a nanny in the Midwest. His scholarly and creative interests include critical posthumanism and fiction that captures the intersection of science and spirit. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlas and Alice and The Coil. Sasso is on Instagram @MickSasso.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on April 12, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 5, 2022 by thwackMarch 5, 2022

GOLD
by Rumi
translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
New York Review Books, 112 pages

reviewed by Dylan Cook

There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the thing that brings us into this world, ties us together, and makes the days pass more pleasantly. Don’t we love to live and live to love? And aren’t all the best songs love songs? Yet, offering up love as a balm to life’s problems feels cheap. We’re often skeptical, understandably so, that love alone can save us from issues like debt, disease, and desolation. In Gold, Rumi speaks to our inner skeptics. Line by line, he tries to show us how love only helps and never hurts. “If you plunge like a fish into Love’s ocean,” he asks, “what will happen?”

Rumi

This love of love is likely familiar to anyone who’s encountered Rumi before. Born in the thirteenth century in present-day Afghanistan, he remains one of the most popular poets in the United States. He was an Islamic scholar and a well-respected preacher for decades before he ever wrote a single verse. This changed when Rumi met the poet Shams-e Tabrizi, who turned him onto Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, and opened his heart to poetry. The body of work that resulted from this seismic meeting has been read the world over and endured nearly a millennium. However, Rumi’s popularity in the English-speaking world is largely built upon translations of questionable integrity. Many of Rumi’s English-language translators (notably Coleman Barks) don’t speak a word of Farsi, instead relying on old translations to rehash the poetry again and again. In a New Yorker article, Rozina Ali describes how much of Rumi is lost in this game of literary telephone, including connections to Islam that permeate his work. By and large, translators have found it acceptable to cherry-pick Rumi’s poetry and strip away its cultural and religious contexts.

Haleh Liza Gafori

Gold, translated beautifully by Haleh Liza Gafori, fulfills the need for a careful, considerate rendition of Rumi in English. Gafori’s task was not a straightforward one. The very word “translation” feels insufficient here because of how much this poetry was edited. In her introduction, Gafori explains that this collection is sourced from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a sprawling text of over 40,000 verses. Each poem here had to be cut from this endless cloth, reshuffled, styled with modern enjambments, and, finally, translated. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Gold not as a translation, but as a collaboration between two equal poets that spans centuries.

And what music they make together. Gradually, these poems unearth a love-based philosophy for life. Rumi advocates for love in all its forms, whether it be romantic, platonic, religious, or personal. It’s in this last capacity that Rumi is particularly poignant. He has a sneaking suspicion that most of us don’t love ourselves enough, trapping us in unhappiness:

Caged in self,
you drown in anguish.
Storm clouds swallow the sun.
Your lover flees the scene

Outside yourself,
the night is moonlit.
Lovers drink Love’s wine.
It flows through you.

Rumi reminds us that there are two distinct versions of ourselves: the self that exists in our minds and the self that we show to the world. He wants us to reconcile these halves by loving the inner self, the part we hide away, until we only have one face to show. Rumi believes we can free ourselves from self-imposed restraints. Just as, “A lion leaps out of his cage. / A man leaps out of his mind.” Still, he acknowledges that being kind to ourselves isn’t always easy. Perhaps one reason we’re hesitant to accept love as a solution is that we’re not properly trained in it. Love isn’t a feeling, but an action that we must consciously make and consciously keep. Rumi describes the challenge of choosing love, and the rewards it reaps, writing:

I saw myself sharp as a thorn.
I fled to the softness of petals.

I saw myself sour as vinegar.
I mixed myself with sugar.

An aching eye seeing through pain,
a stewing pot of poison,
I was both.

Reaching for the antidote,
I touched compassion.
I touched mercy.

It’s an impressive feat that Rumi’s lessons, which can sound so heavy-handed in the abstract, land gently through Gafori’s verse. In the original Farsi, these poems were ghazals, a poetic form wherein individual couplets are linked by a common refrain. Gafori doesn’t reproduce this form exactly, but she does capture its springy, mantric effect. In one poem, Rumi and Gafori create an oasis together:

The cure is here, the cure for every ill is here.
The friend who soothes the ache is here.

The healer is here.
The healer who’s felt every shade of feeling is here.

They go on to decorate their oasis with sunlight and wine, with flowers and dance. It doesn’t matter where “here” is. “Here” is an atmosphere more than a place, but it’s real, and Rumi and Gafori lull us there. They don’t tell us why they’re bringing us there until the end, commanding us to, “Be silent now. Let silence speak.” Love can bring us to beautiful places, but we can only see their beauty if we take the time to do so. Gold is filled with these revelatory moments. Often, it’s a single line that neatly ties together a poem like the final, central cog that gets a machine running. Poems build to a pitch, release, and leave perspective in their paths.

“Every religion has Love,” Rumi writes, “but Love has no religion.” For Rumi, love is much broader than religion. To read Gold is to enter a world where love is water that drunkens the earth when it rains, or where love is a fire that we’re happy to let consume us. There’s something bittersweet in these wonderfully surreal images. They’re pretty, but they’re unfamiliar to our world. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel loved every time you got caught in the rain? Maybe Rumi’s poetry stays relevant because we still haven’t lived up to his ideals for what love can do for us. Love, paradoxically, is something larger than humanity but stems from individual humans. Rumi teaches us that love is inside all of us, and it’s our job to dig it up and show it to the world. Or, as Rumi puts it, “you are a gold mine, / not just a nugget of gold.”


Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].


A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel  by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook
November 4, 2022
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A ...
Read the full text

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook
September 26, 2022
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS by Clarice Lispector translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson New Directions, 864 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her ...
Read the full text

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook
March 5, 2022
GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori New York Review Books, 112 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the ...
Read the full text

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
October 13, 2021
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be ...
Read the full text

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
June 29, 2021
PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
Read the full text

THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
December 18, 2020
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
Read the full text

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
August 7, 2020
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
Read the full text

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
July 15, 2020
CLOTEL, or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Penguin Classics, 320 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson ...
Read the full text

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
May 29, 2020
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
Read the full text

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
January 16, 2020
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
Read the full text

MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
August 8, 2019
MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay New York Review Books, 336 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on March 5, 2022 in poetry reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia, reviewed by Jennifer Niesslein

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 25, 2022 by thwackFebruary 27, 2022

DREADFUL SORRY: Essays on an American Nostalgia
by Jennifer Niesslein
Belt Publishing, 162 pages

Reviewed by Beth Kephart

I have been reading Jennifer Niesslein’s new collection of essays—Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia—on a suddenly warm February afternoon. Outside on the deck I sit, the white stones of a fire pit glowing by my feet, the neighborhood kids riding their remarkably loud vehicles up and down and up and down the nearest driveway. Somewhere in Russia, Vladimir Putin is addressing his people with a long list of grievances. He is stamping his figurative foot, wishing for a yester-year, a yester-century, even. And because Putin wants what so long ago was, there are nearly 200,000 troops massed on the Ukrainian border.

Putin’s nostalgia is maniacal. A pretext for death, destruction, war. Putin’s nostalgia is a bullying. It’s what he wants, and how he wants it, and the fact that he wants it now.

What is this thing, nostalgia? What does the word rightly mean? What is it good for, and what good might it do? Those are the questions that set into motion the true stories at the heart of this thoughtful and thought-provoking collection.

To Niesslein, who previously authored the memoir Practically Perfect in Every Way and is the editor of Full Grown People (full disclosure: I have been a lucky writer in her pages), nostalgia is, well, complicated: “ … by definition,” she writes, “nostalgia is regressive, backward-looking. Both personally and societally, nostalgia challenges the validity of memories of those who recall events differently.” Nostalgia, she continues “has the ability to unite us on a wider scale, too—but it can also be downright dangerous, depending on what we unite for.”

Jennifer Niesslein

Niesslein is a nuanced thinker, and she honors the tremendous complexity of nostalgia in the nine essays contained within this book. “Before We Were Good White,” for example, is a reckoning with a family’s history—an ancestor’s jail time and eyebrow-raising death and the silence that has accompanied that tale across time. Having set out to make some sense of this past, Niesslein pulls up short: “What I found out was that I’m so far removed from the underclass—by my own foremothers’ design—that I took for granted that her suspicious death would warrant the kind of investigation that mine presumably would.” Nostalgia, in this essay, is a wanting to know. The reality, however, is that this particular past, at least, will buck nostalgia’s desire and refuse to reveal itself.

In the essay “Hospitality,” Niesslein finds herself at the Homestead, a Virginia resort, among those who would like to turn back time. “What is the Homestead’s nostalgic draw except as a place where human rights were abused in the name of luxury?” she asks. “Similarly, what is ‘Make America Great Again’ except nostalgia for a time when many Americans didn’t have the rights they do now?” This Homestead resonates with nostalgic trouble, and Niesslein puts us deep inside the discomfort.

“So Happy Together,” however, shimmers with that other kind of nostalgia—the kind that comforts, the kind that sustains. This is the story of Niesslein’s marriage, and it is my favorite essay in the book, animated by Niesslein’s sense of good fortune, animated by prose that sings:

We twined our lives together. We stood together outside the hospital room door and heard the first cries of our oldest nephew after his birth. We took cheap vacations to off-season Chincoteague, using our last ten in cash to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. We stayed up late waiting for the other to get off shift waiting tables or tending bar. One summer day, we skipped work to go hiking at Sugar Hollow. It was a ways out of town and we drove with the windows open and the music pouring from the speakers. We found an easy, sun-dappled trail that led through some streams, and we walked the gentle incline, bumping into each other just as an excuse to touch skin. We took pictures of each other posing on a rock that lay just beneath the surface of the water, an optical illusion of levitation.

What, Niesslein wonders, in her final essay, is she to do with her nostalgia—this woman who is warmed by the background glance, this woman who cares very much about the fate of the world in this moment. I won’t spoil the pleasure you will take in these collected essays by sharing with you her final words. Trust me that she lands in an interesting place, a place that asks us to think about the past we are creating right now.


Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, a teacher of memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com and https://www.etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 25, 2022 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS, a novel by Steven Schwartz, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 9, 2022 by thwackFebruary 9, 2022

THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS
by Steven Schwartz
Regal House Publishing, 260 pages

reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Steven Schwartz’s new novel The Tenderest of Strings is the story of a marriage and a family in trouble, an exploration of how family ties constrain and sustain, stretch and snap. Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and sons Harry and Jamie are recent transplants to Welden, Colorado. They moved from Chicago, “looking for a small-town cure and a fresh start” to Reuben’s professional struggles, Harry’s emotional and social problems, Jamie’s asthma, and increasing distance in the marriage.

But rather than providing a geographic cure, the move to this small town exacerbates the Rosenfelds’ problems. There’s no synagogue. Their Victorian house is a money pit, and so is the financially strapped local paper where Reuben is editor in chief. Jamie’s asthma is worse. Harry is sullen. Ardith and Reuben haven’t made love in months.

There’s an adage in fiction writing, “No trouble, no story.” Schwartz, author of two prior novels and four story collections, knows his way around stories, and families. The Rosenfelds’ troubles rapidly get worse. As a writer, I was interested by the efficiency with which the author introduces their predicament and prepares the ground for what follows.

The book opens at a moment of crisis, in the emergency room. The chief of police, Reuben’s “erstwhile lunch companion” in this small town where everybody knows everybody, found Harry wandering the state road, face bloody, a tooth knocked out. Reuben presses his son to say who attacked him and why he was out of school. Harry shuts down. Ardith takes off with the boy for the dentist. Later that night, Harry in his room, tooth tenuously in place, the parents argue, full of shame and blame about what they are doing to each other and their sons.

Steven Schwartz

From those first scenes, Schwartz ramps up the stakes and tension rapidly, using short chapters usually from the point of view of Reuben or Ardith. Present action and crisis are interspersed with brief revelatory memories and back story. Well-chosen small transgressions signal bigger problems. For example, the family attends a huge birthday celebration for a new friend. Ardith is wearing a too-tight red dress. She’s furious the expensive outfit she’d intended to wear is in the town dump because Reuben thought the bag of dry-cleaning on the porch was trash. The party includes competitive drinking and hot sauce shots. Everyone they know or want to know is there, including the popular “Dr. Tom,” Ardith’s tennis partner.

During this raucous, wonderfully distracting scene, Schwartz subtly lays the fuse for the explosive event that occurs after the party, rocking the family’s personal world and reverberating with serious consequences throughout the community.  No spoilers, but it’s a different surprise than the one the reader anticipates, and soon followed by another twist. As a writer, I found myself making notes in the margin, studying Schwartz’s deft and strategic technique.  The gravity of events, the occasional big coincidence, and the ripping pace of the action could approach melodrama. But here most of the drama results from individual choices, impulses, miscalculations, and mistakes. Also, and importantly, the authenticity of what happens and how it plays out, is shaped by where the story takes place. The town of Welden—its geography, economy, architecture, customs, and culture, becomes a composite character. The townspeople, their circumstances, their generosity as well as prejudices, influence the explosions and the aftershocks.  The Rosenfeld family troubles intersect with complicating community events. This impacts others, including Luisa, one of Harry’s few friends and the point of view narrator of the novel’s most significant subplot.

The American-born daughter of Mexican parents Luisa cleans houses after school with her mother. Her father works for the local dairy farmer who hosted the birthday party. Despite their hard-won security, financial precarity and the shadow of ICE threaten Luisa’s family. The Rosenfelds are in trouble but soon Luisa’s family is in peril. The two families’ predicaments intertwine. Finally, a personal decision and a public action by Ardith Rosenfeld provides an earned surprise in this character driven, well plotted novel.

For all the twists and turns and action, this novel’s greatest strength is the compassionate rendering of the challenges of family life, and of life lived in community—ordinary lives under ordinary and extraordinary pressures.

The tender strings of the title, the ties of family love and obligation, remain tangled for the Rosenfelds. Although at the end the degree of acute crisis has abated, Reuben, Ardith, and Harry remain in different kinds and degrees of trouble. Reuben cautions himself not to promise his son that “everything would be okay. It probably wouldn’t.”

Reuben doesn’t promise what he can’t deliver, but he’s determined to “rake out the muck from his own stall of pessimism every day.” Nor does Steven Schwartz disappoint with a simplistic ending. The resolution is tentative but illumined—like the entire novel—by hope.


Ellen Prentiss CampbellEllen Prentiss Campbell’s novel Frieda’s Song was published in May 2021; her story collection Known By Heart appeared in 2020. Her debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams received the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction; her story collection Contents Under Pressure was a National Book Award nominee. Ellen practiced psychotherapy for many years. A graduate of The Bennington Writing Seminars she lives in Washington, DC, and Manns Choice, PA. She is at work on a new novel

 

 

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 9, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY, a novel by Laura Stanfill, appreciation by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 3, 2022 by thwackFebruary 3, 2022

SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY
by Laura Stanfill
Lanternfish Press, 352 pages

An appreciation by Beth Kephart
On Sale: April 19, 2022

Picture a serinette: Music in a box. Notes arranged as pins. Crank it, and here it comes: the auditory sensation of someone whistling, maybe, or the chirp of cheerful birds.

Now place that serinette into a quiet, magical village—an imaginary French town called Mireville, where women work lace and men craft these intricate music boxes and the sun shines ever so persistently, thanks to an incident some time ago, when a baby stopped crying and the clouds—well, they parted.

A boy named Henri lives in the town of Mireville. His father, Georges, is the master serinette maker; serinettes are the family affair. Georges is also the long-ago baby who stopped crying, otherwise known as The Sun-Bringer. He is, additionally, not the very best father in the world, nor the very best husband, and he has a secret he likes to believe he’s good at keeping—a son on the opposite side of the world. A son named Robert who is growing up in a house that is part aviary, where singing canaries are most graciously accommodated by a seductress named Delia. Delia bedded Georges while he was on a serinette sales trip. Delia gave him a good look around. Now Georges has two sons, born months apart. The one growing up in Mireville. The other, a bonafide prodigy, growing up in the letters Delia secretly writes and secrets sends.

Laura Stanfill

Poor Henri may be the lesser son. He rather prefers lace and conversation and adventures with his best friend, a smart and so resourceful girl, to the rough and tumble nonsense of boy stuff. He also wants to believe that he has magical gifts of his own—and this delusion, as some refer to it, is about to get him into a heap of trouble. It’s that trouble that will ultimately send him first to prison and then into the steerage of a crowded boat, headed not just toward his half-brother Robert, but toward his very own definition of happiness.

But before any of this can happen in Laura Stanfill’s utterly beguiling debut novel, Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, we readers will be treated to sentences, passages, scenes, chapters steeped in a very special kind of flourish. The kind that flows seamlessly and with storytelling purpose. The kind that never tangles up in itself.

Here’s Georges, young and virile and freshly arrived, by boat, to New York. He’s in Delia’s aviary, experiencing her canaries for the first time:

Georges cupped his ears to draw the full-throated chaos close, a mash of melodies, all the chirruping and seet-seet-seeting, the sounds of wings reminding him of air being pushed in and out of a bellows. The birds were no more aware of their remarkability than a slug of the luminescence of its trail. They sang not for him, or for Delia, but for themselves.

Here’s Mireville, overly bathed in sun:

Noses peeled. Moles grew fat on necks and arms and the backs of farm boys who took their shirts off. The river shallowed despite occasional rainshowers. Everyone ate meat and bread for dinner, little else. Those who remembered told stories of how fat drops once plinked on their cheeks, plunked on their sleeves, and made sieves of their socks.

It is ravishingly easy to picture this most original place, to hitch a ride into this world of elegant magic. Stanfill’s landscapes. Stanfill’s music makers. The ingenuity of her child characters stringing lace art between the bases of forest trees. The yearnings of adolescents who hope to be the right kind of grown-up, loving the right kind of other, building the right kind of home. Inside Stanfill’s world, we inhale and then exhale, we’re aware of calmer breathing, we are away and glad to be away—from unruly world news, untruths, global worries.

I know Laura Stanfill; we are friends. She published my memoir-in-essays Wife | Daughter | Self in her role as editor/publisher of Forest Avenue Press. She has been talking to me about this novel of hers since very early on in our relationship, I have read her many published essays, and I know no one but her could ever write this book, thanks to her experiences as a preternaturally gifted child growing up around strange and beautiful music-making things.

But none of that is why I adore this book.

I adore this book because it is a sensation. Because it has lifted me in a cold, white winter. Because I lived inside its sun.


Beth Kephart is a writer, teacher, and maker of books. Her essays are widely published. Her newest book is We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. She can be found at bethkephartbooks.com. Explore her handmade books at her ETSY shop.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 3, 2022 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE NICK OF TIME, poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, reviewed by Candela Rivero

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 6, 2022 by thwackJanuary 6, 2022

THE NICK OF TIME
by Rosmarie Waldrop
New Directions, 160 pages
reviewed by Candela Rivero

The week before reading Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop, an American poet, translator, and editor, I had a conversation with one of my best friends as we drove back from the mall. “Do you believe in parallel universes?” I asked her. It has been a burning question in the back of my mind –– like a twinkling star threatening to become stardust. “Well, that depends,” she answered. “The only thing between us and that other universe is choices– and time.”

A week later, as I delved into Waldrop’s world, I felt understood. My uncertainties about the universe echoed her own philosophical questions. Nick of Time is structured in ten chapters, some composed of individual poems and others like “Velocity but No Location” being a chapter-long poem. The last chapter, “Rehearsing the Symptoms,” includes eleven poems all titled with verbs in the present continuous tense such as “Wanting,” “Thinking,” and “Doubting.” Through her poetry –– specifically her use of metaphor, imagery, and reflection —she explores the concept of time. Each poem seems to birth from a question about the role of time and existence. For instance, when she tries to understand her new present in America in contrast to her German childhood, she writes “perhaps the present is only the past gnawing its way into the future. So that our day does not exist at all,” (12). As readers, we can feel the past “gnawing its way” into her life when there are German images and traditions spilling onto the page like her comment on being bilingual, “because passing from one language to another is an operation of conversion and exchange” and “the space between two languages is not between mirrors, but curves along the great wall of error, a refined form of adventure.” Not only that, but the speaker strives to make time a tangible matter, just as she turns feelings into a concrete subject.

As a native Spanish-speaker studying Creative Writing in an American universe, I understand Waldrop’s struggle to assimilate due to her being bi-cultural; she was born and raised in Germany and later immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Utilizing her poetry as a bridge between her past and present, her sense of belonging is challenged. In “Interval and High Time,” she writes “Am I one of those immigrants who never discover America? Never truly arrive? Am I trying to reconstruct the places I left behind with French wine and books from Germany?”

Waldrop forces her audience to re-envision the world around them. We are encouraged to consider the role of time, emotions, identity, and even language by the questions she poses to readers. One of them is “but where then do we locate feeling?” (10). In this poem titled “The Almost Audible Passing of Time,” she tries to close the gap between emotions and the tangible.

Rosmarie Waldrop

One of Waldrop’s most astounding poetic techniques is the use of metaphors and simile to ground some of the more abstract terms such as time and love. Specifically, the poet builds an extended metaphor implying that language is love. Several of her pieces are categorically titled, such as the poem “Nouns,” which says, “Your refusal, when you talk about winter. To use figurative language. it helps, even if it distracts, to go with nouns. To have a choice. Even bold ones like ‘love.’” Another similar example would be “commas.” Another interesting aspect is the way Waldrop punctuates her sentences to create a fast-paced rhythm. Her sentences are often broken into fragments like seen in the examples above. She often breaks sentences with periods where periods aren’t needed. In “Any Single Thing,” she writes, “Is so complicated we can only give it a little shove with the knee. The cry of the gulls. The line between water and grammar.” However, there are times where periods are used correctly like in “My grammar falls short of these horizons. And I don’t know if I should tell you. I am that German wife.” The interesting aspect is that Waldrop consciously mentions grammar while discovering new ways in which it can show her fragmented thoughts.

The last poem, which effectively captures the passing of time, is titled “Aging.” She seems to be watching as people vanish from her life, “distant galaxies are moving away from us. Friends, lovers, family.” Waldrop moves from a place of wondering in the first few pages— “There is no evidence that we have a special sense. Of time. You don’t think it’s pressing as you sit on a sidewalk in Providence”—to finally understanding herself. The book ends with two very encapsulating sentences referring to the “dark” that lives within every self. “And though you are not well suited to the perspectives it opens it is an awesome thing to see. Once you can see it.” While she began not understanding the universe, or even herself, towards the end, she achieves a new perspective.


Candela Rivero is an Argentinian poet from South Florida. She is a senior English Creative Writing student at the University of Central Florida, where she worked as the managing editor of Cypress Dome Literary Magazine. Last year, she self-published her first poetry collection, Metamorphosis. Her preferred genres include poetry and historical fiction.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on January 6, 2022 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 5, 2021 by thwackDecember 5, 2021


AUTOPSY OF A FALL
by Eric Morales-Franceschini
Newfound Press, 48 pages
reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Autopsy of a Fall by Eric Morales-Franceschini is many things at once: nostalgic and bitter, analytical and volatile, epic and intimate. It is a masterful reckoning of Puerto Rico’s present, both as, “this little isla and its debts,” the magical, eden-like place that Morales-Franceshini mythologies in his early recollections of his home island, and the utopian island that it could be should it gain independence. The form this book takes is that of a personal history that is intertwined with the legacy of western (specifically American) colonization of Puerto Rico and, inversely, the legacy of resistance and decolonization movements of Puerto Rico.

Because this book is entrenched in the relationship between nostalgia and colonialism, it is filled with cultural iconographies of Puerto Rican life, often dissecting them and showing how the nuances of their meanings speak to colonization of Puerto Rico and the effect it has on the author. For example, the book begins with the poem titled, “The Flamboyán,” the name of a species of trees in Puerto Rico, known for its clusters of red and gold blooms, so vibrant that the tree looks like it is on fire. Hence, the English name, “The Flame Tree.”  Here, Morales-Franceschini reimagines the imagery of the tree, changing its red from symbolizing fire to blood. Opening the readers up to the idea of seeing this tree as the open wounds in an autopsy, calling us back to the way the audience is being asked to read this text.

Eric Morales-Franceshini utilizes this concept of dissection most notably in his poem titled, “circa 1898 (with apologies to Kipling)” which is an erasure poem of Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem, “The White Man’s Burden.” Unlike the author’s other poems that often blend somber language with a tongue-in-cheek tone, the language here is foreboding, abstract, and haunting. The poem ends, “the White / comes now / thankless / cold-edged / dear-bought.” Though such an introduction to an erasure poem would be distractingly jarring in another book, the author leans into that jarring quality to direct our attention to the unsettling way colonialism wedges into his life. It is not his voice, but the voice of a colonizer that shaped Puerto Rico’s identity. A voice he must retrieve to complete this story, though “not a story but an autopsy,” (The Flamboyán) as he would put it.

While not as tongue-in-cheek as, “circa 1898 (with apologies to Kipling)” is with its use of an autopsy, every other poem is an autopsy in its own way. While the poem is an autopsy of another writer’s work, others are an autopsy of language itself, such as in the poem, “Necrophilia”. Such a dissection not only balances the personal with the academic rhetoric utilized as a tool for these dissections but puts them into direct conversation with each other. For example, in the poem titled, “Necrophilia,” Morales-Franceshini directly confronts the meaning of the word, “Black” within the context of Puerto Rican culture. At one point in the poem, he cites, Fanon, “Like it meant evil, since, wretchedness, death, war, and famine” and then, in the next stanza, her retorts,

And I don’t know anything about necromancy, the dead brought back to life, except that the reverend said, “Aqui to be called negrito/means to be called LOVE,” and that’s how my abuela said it to my abuelo,

There is a necessary chaos that comes with the author comparing the relationship between anti-colonial, academic rhetoric to his own narrative. By taking apart prior order, undoing borders between these, often separate ways of reading the world, Morales-Franceschini gives us a new way to engage with our history that legitimizes our own personal narrative against the academic.

However, the book isn’t solely about pain in its reconciliation of these two ways of reading life under white imperialism. As seen in the above quote, there is joy within the experience of being Puerto Rican. It is not joy coexisting with imperialism, but a joy that rises up in its direct contrast. The rhetorical flip of take the etymological conception of Black/Negrito from its negative colonial conceptions to that a term of endearment as seen in his relationship between his grandmother and grandfather, is an act of resistance against the hold that white imperialism / anti-blackness has in shaping language. It is in this conception that Morales-Franceshini’s acts of resistance are love letters, moments of intimacy of joy captured in obsessive detail. While a first read can see the moments of Puerto Rican life as tone-deaf or even a “fetishism of the tropics,” the writer writes beauty and utopia as an act of resistance, of a Puerto Rico that is and could be.

One of the final poems of the Autopsy of a Fall, is titled “Jurakán” after the taino zemi (deity) of chaos and disorder. The poem title feels fitting in the chaos that this book holds, but the poem itself feels like a sigh, a letting go of all these emotions and laying them on the table. The poem itself lays out options for writing with imperialism, some already done in this book, some done by other authors. Returning to the autopsy metaphor, this is the point in which we’ve discovered the cause of death and we figure out what to do next. What closure will be had?  The writer concedes in the final stanza of Jurakan,

having learned that jubilees don’t abide by hope, they abide by bodies assembled– overjoyed and spellbound, like oracles writhing in the temple, upending, at last, the mythology of our mortality, the lie of their promises

It is here where it is most important to harken back to the title of the book, Autopsy of a Fall, with the fall not being that of Puerto Rico as a whole but Puerto Rico as a colonized nation of America. This entire book examines the fall of imperialism, how we wrap our entire identities around it, and how we live our lives to overthrow it. This is a book entrenched in a brutal and bloody hope, like examining the body of a tyrant, like looking at an island cut out a pound of cancer, and seeing it, Puerto Rico as, “not yet an abyss” (Isla: an anti-epic).


Juniper Jordan Cruz is a writer and body artist from Hartford, Connecticut. She is a 2019 graduate from Kenyon College, where she studied creative writing. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic. Her works have also been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Academy of American Poetry Prize at Kenyon College. Email to query Juniper about poetry book reviews.

 

 


AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

DEAR BEAR, poems by Ae Hee Lee Platypus Press, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Dear Bear

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 5, 2021 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 13, 2021 by thwackOctober 13, 2021

PHOTOTAXIS
by Olivia Tapiero
translated by Kit Schluter
Nightboat Books, 128 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be our downfall. Perhaps even more grating, they go through the trouble of explaining exactly how it will end, as if we can be certain of that from our pre-apocalyptic world. Tapiero looks at these conventions and casually walks past them. In Phototaxis, the end of the world makes very little sense. The streets are drowned in rotten meat, suicides spread like they’re contagious, and the only thing that might hold everyone together is a one-man piano performance. She embraces the one idea about the apocalypse we can reasonably be sure of: when it happens, we won’t have any idea how to deal with it.

Given that the novel revels in uncertainty, it’s unsurprising that its plot is difficult to pin down. There are three main characters, Théo, Narr, and Zev, who, for the most part, meander through their lives while trapped in the “levity that precedes catastrophe.” In some unspecific past, the trio was joined by Zev, who served as a kind of cultural and political leader in their community. After Zev disappears suddenly, the friends become estranged. Only when Théo, a concert pianist, announces a long-awaited return to the stage does Narr come out of the woodwork to reconnect with him. But Théo is too busy for friendship since he devotes most of his time to practice. After all, with the future looking so grim, wouldn’t it be nice to give the people something to look forward to?

Apocalypses are never something we wish for—they’re hands we’re dealt. Phototaxis shows us how we might play them.

The novel inches towards this magical moment when a deftly played concerto might lift the veil of suffering off the masses, but we never get there. Théo commits suicide just before his performance, and it hardly comes as a shock. Death forces itself into each character’s thoughts, whether it’s due to the deluge of rotten meat or constant reminders of the famous “Falling Man” photograph. From here on, the novel practically becomes a character study of Narr. She considers what she should do next, whether or not she should also commit suicide, whether or not she should futilely work for a relative. Locked onto her thoughts, we watch her become overwhelmed with the world she’s stuck in:

All I’d need is a tank of gas to work up the courage to immolate myself for no apparent reason. An incandescent, combustible acceleration.

The action will only be possible on the condition of its being seen. The horror I’ve caused in other people is all I’ll have to help me endure a pain that will only go away, according to my research, once the fire breaches my nervous system.

Just as the narrative gives the reader little to hold onto, the structure of Phototaxis is likewise strange and defamiliarizing. This is Tapiero’s first novel to be published in English (a native of Québec, she writes in French) but her third overall novel, and that confidence shows in the risks she takes here. Between the prose, the novel is cut with theatrical monologues and bouts of poetry. The constant play with form makes the term “novel” fit this book like a mismatched Tupperware lid. About half the time, this experimentation feels like a justified complement to its text. The monologues in particular offer the reader a chance to peek behind the curtains of each character, rounding them out slowly. The other half of the time, the whirlwind of seemingly random details produces a head-scratching effect. Why are everyday citizens flagellating themselves? Why are the streets haunted by the ghosts of bison?

Olivia Tapiero

The punky answer to these questions is that they don’t need to be answered. Tapiero’s novel is much more impressionistic than it is concrete. The what, when, why, and how are less important than the sense of disgust, fear, and nihilism that pervades this world on the brink of collapse. In his monograph On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald wrote that a city under siege, “decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened.” This novel shows people carrying on because there is nothing else to do. Phototaxis is filled with absurdities and theatrics, but the emotional response to tragedy that it captures rings true. The COVID-19 pandemic gave us our own apocalyptic scenario, and the sheer scale of its upheaval made it difficult to imagine a world after COVID. Now, nearly two years into this reality, the pandemic has become something we live alongside, and the world “after COVID” may never come. It becomes easier, then, to imagine how Narr might step over puddles of meat so apathetically and avoid looking the future in the eye. Apocalypses are never something we wish for—they’re hands we’re dealt. Phototaxis shows us how we might play them.


Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

 

 

 


A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST, a novel  by László Krasznahorkai, reviewed by Dylan Cook
November 4, 2022
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A ...
Read the full text

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook

TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook
September 26, 2022
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS by Clarice Lispector translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson New Directions, 864 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her ...
Read the full text

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook

GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook
March 5, 2022
GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori New York Review Books, 112 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the ...
Read the full text

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
October 13, 2021
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be ...
Read the full text

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
June 29, 2021
PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
Read the full text

THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
December 18, 2020
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
Read the full text

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
August 7, 2020
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
Read the full text

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
July 15, 2020
CLOTEL, or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Penguin Classics, 320 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson ...
Read the full text

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
May 29, 2020
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
Read the full text

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
January 16, 2020
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
Read the full text

MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
August 8, 2019
MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay New York Review Books, 336 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue ...
Read the full text

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on October 13, 2021 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 3, 2021 by thwackOctober 3, 2021

SHE
Theadora Siranian
Seven Kitchen Press, 35 pages
reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Theadora’s Siranian’s chapbook, She, is violently intoxicating and sobering at the same time. In investigating loss and trauma, she chooses to present the messy over the meditative. Siranian invites her readers into proximity and distance simultaneously: showcasing the immediate and visceral in the body of her poems, but nesting them under titles that take a step back. She begins with pseudo-abstract poem titles such as “Origin Myth,” “Her,” and “Erytheia,” and when the poem nears its end, she twists our necks to a visceral image: a man’s forearm sliced open by a trapped rabbit, a family attempting to watch tv after their child burned alive, her mother’s skin peeling off her body.

The book is separated into three sections, each beginning with a poem titled, “Origin Myth.” It is important to note that this isn’t the only instance in which a poem title is repeated. There are six poems titled “Her,” not including the poem titled, “Killing HerEach origin myth differs in tone, they are tethered together in a collective project. When Siranian writes:

What was always fresh and unknown
was perhaps not the moment, but it’s a recollection. (origin myth pt.2)

Here Siranian teaches us how to read her chapbook: not as a narrative piece but a recollection of the same tragedy. In her repetition of titles, the reader is asked to look again and the nearly-unbearable and made proximate to Siranian’s position as a witness to her mother’s terminal illness. With that being said, the book is not redundant. Each poem brings us along the journey of the speaker processing this event while simultaneously processing the fact that her mother has caused her pain. What makes the poems so captivating is that Siranian unflinchingly deals with “taboo” emotions to feel towards a dying parent that one is tending to. Anger and resentment are forced into cohabitation with grief and love.

One of the greatest examples of this type of vulnerability is in Killing Her,” here the speaker wakes up early in the morning to examine a bump. Fearing she has breast cancer, she believes that she will die before her mother, who is already sick with cancer.  The poem gets rawer from there until its brutal climax:

I know only this:
There was always me, watching her scream into the void,
this act of witness the only thing I’ve ever truly hated,
this awful, necessary love. In the shower then next morning
I discover it’s only a scratch made during sleep. Wonder:
how can one call it devotion and ascribe meaning to
another’s existence. My heart: this bloody fucking stump,
my first: an open palm, begging.

This access into Siranian’s deepest, most volatile feelings acts as a sense of catharsis for the reader. Describing her witness of her mother’s dying as an “awful, necessary love,” is a moment of brutal, yet freeing honesty. Siranian’s voice is heartbreaking and sometimes humorous. Her recollection of this tragedy pulls out emotions one wouldn’t expect to find here. But her intermixing of blunt language with the lyrical makes her sincere. Her humor is best seen in a poem like, “My Unconscious Contemplates My Mother’s Disease, where she dreams of splitting the orderly head open in a cartoonish way while the doctors sing, “radiation, radiation, radiation.”

Theadora Siranian

Formally, the poems are comprised of either large, unyielding stanzas or a series of couplets and single lines. There are many moments in her poems where her line breaks at an action. At its best, it creates tension and defies our expectations of what we may believe the speaker would be doing. A great example is the first couplet in the quote above. Though we are given hints of bitterness in a few poems before this, it is here where we are truly shown that the speaker believes the mother should be guilty. It changes the ways we should read the prior poems. Still, one of my only critiques is that this kind of line break happens many times throughout the book. And when it works like the aforementioned example, it’s compelling. However, it’s washed out by the times it does not work.

The final section of this book offers a shift in her voice from the rest of the book. Aside from containing two poems that draw a lineage between the Siranian and the Ancient Greek goddesses, Hecate and Persephone, each poem is more steeped in the lyrical, none truly brings us to the tangible moments of her life to ground us. There is no gazing at her mom’s thin and crimson skin and no watching a frightened rabbit tear open a man’s forearm. Though not every poem possesses some sort of tangible event, each section had those poems that grounded the reader in some sort of space and time. An anchor to tether ourselves to as we descend into what Siranian may call her madness.

The penultimate poem is titled, “Anosogosia,” which is defined as the inability to interpret sensations and hence recognize things. Though all three sections return to the same event, this time, the anchor of physical stimulus is lost for us and her. She announces, “Now you can see the edges of it,” (Agnosogosia). One of the poem’s epigraphs states, “[Psychology] revolves around a paradox: an early sign of insanity is to recognize that you’ve been insane.” Theadora Siranian’s chapbook settles in those early moments. The final poems are not a celebration of being healed; instead, they are a somber submission of the state the reader is in. An acceptance of “Pain, so prevalent here, almost begins to lose its magnitude.” (Erythia). Yet, even after multiple rereads, the pain never loses its magnitude. And that is a testament to Siranian’s ability to make each poem feel like we are gazing at a fresh, open wound, that is, at the same time being tended to with great care.


Juniper Jordan Cruz is a writer and body artist from Hartford, Connecticut. She is a 2019 graduate from Kenyon College, where she studied creative writing. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic. Her works have also been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Academy of American Poetry Prize at Kenyon College. Email to query Juniper about poetry book reviews.

 

 

AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

DEAR BEAR, poems by Ae Hee Lee Platypus Press, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Dear Bear

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on October 3, 2021 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES, poems by Andrew Levy, reviewed by Johnny Payne

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 12, 2021 by thwackAugust 12, 2021

ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES
by Andrew Levy
Chax, 176 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne

The traditional identification of poet and prophet is acceptable only in the sense that the poet is about as slow in reflecting his epoch as the prophet. If there are prophets and poets who can be said to have been ‘ahead of their time’, it is because they have expressed certain demands of social evolution not quite as slowly as the rest of their kind.

Trotsky said it best: “All through history, the mind limps after reality.”  The aloof intelligentsia continues to believe in the power of reason alone to move the world.  No amount of revolution has yet changed this fact.  As a recent electoral outcome pretends to remedy the hyper-capitalistic state of siege in which we all currently exist, neoliberalism, a name which in itself has become insufficient to describe the evolving phenomenon, applies an over-the-counter balm to a suppurating gangrenous wound.

Into this hyperkinetic stasis comes Artifice in the Calm Damages by Andrew Levy.  It is a series of meditations on the self as written repeatedly onto a historical palimpsest in an attempt to describe a personal politics adequate to the age of dread in which we exist.  This act requires a pilfering through of the self, though not in the conventional manner in which a poet might revisit his childhood, or love affairs.  It is, at bottom, a history of mind.

Levy, in his poetry, is both in time and out of time, fast and slow, that his method of composition stages the flux of a disconcerting, cognitive-ideological fugue state of existence.  It is a state of shock, like experiencing the shocks of a car with a shot engine. You drive, not like the Angel of History flying, head backward, body forward, beleaguered yet elegant in pushing against the wind of the future-past, but jolted on a rutted dirt road, with your hands on the wheel, feeling yourself stupid and jerky, gunning the engine but not quite in control.

Detected and corrected,
The resting places within the poem are allographically
Indistinguishable.
—From “Destroying Exculpatory Evidence”

Andrew Levy

All the way down to the fonts, the cursive or blocking handwriting, the poem’s unique stamp can easily get effaced in the complexity of the political age.  The demand for instant meaning, declaration, relevance, doesn’t easily allow for the “resting places” of personal meditation on the self and on the act of writing.  Levy’s very style of writing, while theatrical, often feels like a fertile prelude, rather than the grand gesture of meaning.  He is constantly hedging his bets, inviting us into long lulls of cognition, ones that require patience. The poet exists as an enlightened copyist, as a scribe, a witness to devastation, issuing warnings of the now and trying to awaken historical consciousness.  That is the artifice in the calm damages.  There is found text, and quotations with or without attribution, as the voices of wisdom speak in turn within each poem.At its height, we are given excerpts like the following:

“Get your breath,” Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn said:
“When you utter a word before God, then enter
into that word with every one of your limbs.”
One of his listeners asked: “How can a big human
being possibly enter into a little word?” “Anyone who
thinks himself bigger than the word,” said the zaddik,
“is not the kind of person we are talking about.”
—From “Nothing is Free of Presence

Here, sacred knowledge, while ultimately usable, runs counter to applied knowledge.  The enjoinder to dwell in such questions and riddles suggests that any philosophy, ultimately, gets evaluated as a wisdom tradition.  Sacred and secular (materialism vs. kabbalah) are not seen as being in opposition.  They are streams of thought that issue into the same big river. Reading these pages, one thinks of the great parable makers, entirely comfortable with living inside indeterminacy, not as a “language experiment,” but existentially—as though one might say, “Speak a combination of sentiment, sense and nonsense, because we might be here a long time.”  The sentimental satirist Isaac Babel comes to mind, eye sharp yet deeply committed emotionally.  Economics may lie at the heart of our malaise, and Levy fully explores that reality in his poems, yet the playful qualities and the beating heart of the book belie either mere pragmatic dogmatism or head-scratching flight into language in itself.  Significant value resides in this dialectical gesture of inward gathering, whether abstruse or simply shy of declaration, and the outward thrust of praxis.  The latter is repeatedly arrived at, but all in good time, and as a continuous process rather than a thunderous blast of insight.

The enigma of existence censors and remakes, as
well as mission control, is ridiculed by another group at
the nearest borders of heaven.  Such consumption
of anthropomorphic thinking splatters in the blink
of an eye.We do not see the beginning—one can’t help it—
or the end.  No promises are made.
—From  “Nothing is Free of Presence”

That is the genius of this volume, to eschew the prophetic, teleology, and to focus on that blank slate, that refusal to promise, and to present a ‘clear enigma.’  The book is path-breaking in that regard, when the language poetry phase has exhausted whatever modest value it possessed in shaking up sensibility and has passed into sheer commodity.

Real things become garbage.
Your request for information and its corresponding
Rhetorical analysis is caught forever in the structure
Of words.  The garden as a heterogeneous site
Is a collage of the real?
—From, “Gender-specific Headfuckery”

It is that “real” as alpha and omega that keeps these poems grounded in a discourse of action, rather than fetishizing the “aloof intelligentsia” of which Trotsky so long ago complained.  Gramsci said it clearly: “Given the principle that one should look only to the artistic character of the work of art, this does not in the least prevent one from investigating the mass of feelings and the attitude towards life present in the work of art itself.”  Such a statement, which should now be obvious among even those of us who believe that form precedes content, has gotten muddied by Anglo experimentation of the late 20th century, the winds of which blew their crumpled paper into verbal arroyos, skipping its way toward an ideological landfill, without them ever considering words as an actual form of material reality—rather, they were supposedly only ‘signifiers without referents,’ which is ultimately skewed Platonism masquerading as radical displacement.  For once, in Artifices, the overworn term “reification,” so abused by post-structuralists, lands. Hearken below to Levy’s tender marriage of high concept to image.  Reminding us he is first and last a poet, he uses here, as in many places, a striking and mysterious image to situate us within his thoughts.

The smoky and sline heart can be forgiven or withdrawn,
And that may help us understand something about who
is being deceived and who no longer has anything to
Unveil. There may be a serious flaw in our delirium,
A series of traps for the capture of objects.
—From “Destroying Exculpatory Evidence”

Again, the calm damages are patiently, steadfastly cataloged by Levy with subjective objectivity, emphasis on the “object.”  Damage happens to humans as beings, their physical suffering going beyond idealism toward dialectical nominalism.  It is a conjectural version of W.C. Williams’s “No ideas but in things,” half-destroyed detritus that is charged with illumination.  That’s what we have to work with.

Let us imagine as far as we please; a limited number of phenomena,
may decompose the act which divides an impalpable but probable
body of metaphor, fathers and mothers never to be restored
except as lovers in the abyss.
—From “Lovers in the Abyss”

Trotsky spoke true when he observed that Futurism’s violent oppositional character did not absolve it from reckoning with the past.  Its advanced-guard nature didn’t necessarily speak to the objective needs of the working class (into which we can now add an eroded middle class, turned virtual working-class unable to afford property, and for whom participation in consumer culture no longer satisfies, or masks the ideological contradictions in which they exist).  He speaks true in declaring: “it is not necessary to make a universal law of development out of the act of pushing away.”

That is the dilemma that the forward-looking writer faces, yet Levy’s grounding in the affective, such as sincere, non-ironic contemplation of rabbinical wisdom, effaces secularism as a goal in itself.  In the calm damages, knowledge is wherever you find it.  In the verses below, language in fact finds you, and in that resides its power.  You don’t just use language to form thoughts.  Language breaks you open, it pushes against you, insinuating respect for its nature as language in itself.  It disturbs, and out of that disturbance, consciousness evolves.

Only a debased
Class believes one owns words.  But the meaning of words
Continues to be contested, to be built upon.  Sometimes you
Don’t have to invite them, they just come up into your living
Room. You can get used to them being there in the basic
Atomic structure of matter.  A petro-melancholia made to fit
Until you have to throw yourself out.
—From “Beauty in this Digital Eden”

It is there, in the intersection between petro-melancholia and absolute knowledge of one’s “deer-like self,” that this transcendent collection resides.  Beckett’s characters resided in trash bins.  Gorky’s The Lower Depths drew pessimistic, if insightful, conclusions, setting up a limited situation regarding human endeavor and the possibility of self-understanding.  Levy’s message is, if deliberately and necessarily inconclusive, more redemptive.  It fucks with our heads, offering no permanent or secure location, taking away with one hand what it has given with the other.  In the end, there is no single authoritative set of playful-serious declarations, rather the artifice of the real.  There might be a benign “master narrative” that would guide political action, but we don’t know what it is. Meanwhile, we make sallies into the immediate sphere, doing what work we can.

I believe the best times are still ahead for our species.
At this time, I prefer a small to a medium-sized platform.
And yes I like to swing straight ahead sometimes.  I write
Explicitly circular.  The social comprehension is perceived
At once.  Abandoned by my brother, ice cubes become
A giant rumbling. The goal is to take them hostage.
—From the poem, “Because you’re a Socially Aware Person”


Johnny Payne author photoJohnny Payne is a poet, playwright, director, and novelist.  His recent books include his book of essays on French and Latin American poetry, under his alter ego Étienne D’Abattoir; the novel Confessions of a Gentleman Killer; and the plays Death by Zephyr and Cannibals.  He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 12, 2021 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE: FINDING LIFE WHERE LAND AND WATER MEET, nonfiction by Patricia Hanlon, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 7, 2021 by thwackAugust 7, 2021

SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE:
Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet
by Patricia Hanlon
Bellevue Literary Press
224 pages
reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Six Ways to Look at a Marsh 

Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Patricia’s Hanlon’s delightful debut book, follows her through New England’s Great Marsh as she swims its creeks and channels every day for an entire year. It is a captivating, adroit climate dispatch from Gloucester, Mass. that views the crisis of global warming through a local lens. In grappling with the potential destruction of her beloved home ecosystem, there emerge six ways of looking at the Great Marsh.

1. As a painter

Hanlon puts pen to paper as beautifully as she puts brush to canvas. Before turning to the written word, she painted the Great Marsh in her free time, savoring its nuances of color, play of light, and dance of winds. Her paintings, available here, reveal the intricate palette of the landscape, which can be easily mistaken for a massive green blob. By bringing a painter’s eye to her prose, she deftly captures “the action of this mass, its verbs.” It is a living, breathing ecosystem, and around it dwell living, breathing humans who leave indelible impacts. Whether it’s houses overlooking the marsh or rising tides creeping up the grass, Hanlon’s eye catches all.

2. As a mother

Unlike many in Gloucester, Hanlon is a local. Most homes sit vacant in winter, waiting for humid New England summers to drive their owners to the area’s beaches. Hanlon stays year-round—indeed, swims year-round as well, even during blizzards—in a house she and her husband built when they first moved there. A new mother at twenty-five, she took her infant child on hikes through the new terrain, an image which becomes a fit metaphor for the book. She describes having felt like “a two-headed being, with two sets of eyes and ears.” The book, too, looks with two sets of eyes in two different directions.

Hanlon concerns herself as much with the future as with the past and brings an emotional sensitivity to otherwise abstract issues. Scouring the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, she ponders whether her children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the same ecosystem. “We who live here,” she writes, “are privileged to have this unusually intact marsh to enjoy, to study, to restore where needed, and to plan on behalf of.” Little real planning takes place on a global scale, however, so local communities suffer. Hanlon worries that by the year 2100, when her grandchildren may visit their ancestral home, rising sea levels may have rendered her home and the Great Marsh a flooded ruin.

3. As a creature

The Great Marsh is home for Hanlon. She sees herself as a representative of the “brilliant and rapacious species Homo sapiens” amid a community of other organisms. Her neighbors range from cormorants to crabs, seagulls to snails, grass to germs, and she layers lyrical prose over each one. A staring contest with a snail demonstrates the intimate bond she develops with her fellow animals—and her near-perfect choice of words. They recognize in each other “a sober-minded acknowledgement of fellow creatureliness across a chasm of scale.” Mutual recognition leads to compassion. The snail’s loss of habitat is Hanlon’s, and vice versa.

Her daily excursions into the marsh’s waterways foster a relationship that borders on love. Throughout, she attempts to locate the titular “top of the tide” when high tide turns and subsides, a moment she calls “the height of an inhalation. A pause, a holding of breath, and then the beginning of the long six-and-a-half-hour exhalation.” She keeps a tide log after her swims to chart the zenith and nadir of the tide, its inhalations and exhalations, and trace the “human events intersecting with celestial ones.” In her meticulous note-taking and empathic prose, the Great Marsh itself becomes a living creature, a fellow organism with which she shares the earth.

4. As a scientist

The Great Marsh is “an ecosystem researcher’s Shangri-la,” so Hanlon meets local scientists who made the marsh their research subject as Hanlon made it her artistic muse. Their perspectives remind Hanlon that the marsh’s beauty is under constant threat. She guides the reader through her studies of the marsh’s carbon cycling process, which sequesters carbon dioxide and prevents it from leaking into the atmosphere. When Hanlon dives into the science of the Great Marsh, she writes with contagious vigor, recognizing it as but “one fractal bit of the worldwide system of coastal estuaries.” She wants to understand its inner mechanisms so that her reader can feel both the intimacy of her locale and the magnitude of global biomes. Placing the marsh in a scientific context expands the book from the local to the global.

She and her husband travel far from Gloucester more than once. Their plane flights to Nassau and New Orleans reveal both scientific curiosity and childlike wonder as they watch the continent’s geological history “scroll by down below like a story.” Increasingly, the story is a tragedy. From New Orleans, Hanlon travels to the southernmost point of Louisiana, the “Gateway to the Gulf,” and inspects the region’s salt marshes. Here, her scientific awareness disturbs her admiration. Due to global warming, the state loses every few years “the equivalent of one Great Marsh.”

5. As a concerned citizen

Patricia Hanlon

Hanlon meticulously catalogs the carbon dioxide her car trips and plane rides belch into the atmosphere. (Jet-skis receive a particularly scathing denunciation when she calls them “perhaps the most flagrantly frivolous use of the internal combustion engine.”) Her documentation comes at an important time as the rich world accounts—or tries to—for its copious carbon emissions. Hanlon offers an alternative vision to environmental preservation that emphasizes communal responsibility over the pervasive doom and gloom of climate activism.

The Sunrise Movement and the likes of Greta Thunberg have defined the language of climate change as a language of catastrophe. Of course, climate change is a catastrophe, but fear does not always compel action as much as a gentle invitation. This gentle invitation is Hanlon’s book. Her prose does not shock the reader with its bluntness. It neither shames the reader for their presumed inaction nor prods world leaders with demands for change. She emphasizes local “miniscule act[s] or stewardships” that mean little to the world but mean the world to the community. “Every place, really,” she reasons, “should be an area of critical environmental concern.” Perhaps this means everyone should be a steward of the earth.

6. As a swimmer

Swimming to the Top of the Tide moves at a relaxed pace, like a body wading through water. It meanders so leisurely that the reader may be duped into thinking they hold in their hands a book of little importance. Such a thought couldn’t be farther from the truth. Hanlon’s approach offers unique venues for environmental justice that a global perspective is too macroscopic to provide. The saying goes, “Think global, act local.” Hanlon asks what it would mean to think locally, too.

I live not too far from the channels Hanlon swam, so I drove to Gloucester to see the beauty of the Great Marsh for myself. Its undulating green hues and thick layers of mud truly do capture the eye, surpassing description and often belief. After a short walk, I ate at Farnham’s, a clam shack beside Ebben Creek, through which Hanlon swam countless times. As I ate fish and chips with a cup of clam chowder, a seagull loitered to the side, eyeing my food. I considered all I had taken from its environment through my casual wastefulness. Its environment . . . my environment. I finished my fish and chips but left the chowder unattended. The seagull feasted. I headed home.


Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 7, 2021 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SCORPIONFISH, a novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, reviewed by Aleksia Silverman

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 2, 2021 by thwackAugust 2, 2021

SCORPIONFISH
by Natalie Bakopoulos
Tin House, 256 pages
reviewed by Aleksia Mira Silverman

Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos begins with a return. Mira, a Greek-born academic in her late thirties, arrives in Athens after her parents’ funeral. She must sort out the remainder of her parents’ affairs—Mira’s childhood home in Athens and another apartment on an island referred to only as N. While Mira is stranded outside her apartment building without a key, she has a chance encounter with her next-door neighbor, a sea captain. Later, the pair spend night after night on their adjoining balconies. While they are unable to see each other clearly, they share cigarettes, beer, and conversation. Both characters are grappling with grief, of sorts: Mira has lost her parents; the Captain has lost his position as a sea captain and is about to divorce his estranged wife.

Bakopoulos splits the novel between Mira and the Captain’s perspective, their two stories spinning out alongside each other like “a double helix”—often occupying parallel tracks, but enjoying brief points of intense connection as they navigate loss.

Guided by Bakopoulos’ observant prose, the reader enmeshes themselves in a dynamic social scene. We meet Nefeli, an acclaimed artist in her sixties; Aris, Mira’s ex-lover and a rising political star who is currently engaged and expecting a child with a Greek movie star; and Dimitra, Fady, and Leila, a family hosting Rami, a teenager who fled alone from Damascus.

However, the cast of Scorpionfish includes more than just the living. We also meet those who have recently passed: Haroula, Mira’s aunt and Nefeli’s lover; Mira’s father, and Mira’s mother, a life-long alcoholic who struggled to acclimate after the family left Athens for Chicago. And, while Aris is still alive, there is a distinct split between the current Aris, and the Aris with whom Mira shared an on-and-off relationship for many years.

These ghosts mingle with the living, creating an environment that cannot be easily categorized by descriptions of past and present. As Mira considers her childhood apartment, she thinks it is “as though I could walk through walls, my past and present, and future selves all negotiating the same space, bumping shoulders, tripping over feet.” In another moment, while Mira is listening to musicians play, she catches a glimpse of “my mother [dancing] a hawk-like zeibekiko in a yellow dress.”

Mira’s perspective is, perhaps, more compelling than the Captain’s. Yet, often her voice feels detached, nearly clinical. She refers to some friends by their titles (the Captain, the novelist) rather than their full names, and her emotions, too, feel somewhat suppressed: while the death of her parents begins the novel, we learn about the manner of their death only in the final pages. We may understand her cadence as a product of her career—Mira is an ethnographer and an archaeologist. Yet the physical presence of ones she lost hints at the depths of her grief, a roiling turmoil below Mira’s academic cool.

We plunge into the streets of Athens. Mira and the Captain spend much of their time exploring the city, and eating at tavernas, reconnecting with current lovers, former lovers, and family members. Athens is constructed with delicacy, streets mapped with close detail. The light, in particular, receives special treatment. Sunlight “[shimmers] through olive trees, like an invitation to a new world,” Mira considers how morning light shines off of the Captain’s hair, and “the flush of sunset.”

In these passages, I am reminded of how I once heard a photography professor describe successful photos: “every place has a certain type of light, and great photos capture it.”

When we move through Athens, we linger, observing the light or the outfits of diners at a restaurant. However, there is also a familiarity to the characters’ movements. This is perhaps what makes Mira’s perspective so successful: Bakopoulos deftly conveys the experience of returning to a beloved place, the experience of re-seeing.

Natalie Bakopoulos

Yet, despite this tenderness, Bakopoulos’ descriptions of Athens never rely on nostalgia-driven sweetness. Athens is struggling through an economic crisis and a charged political climate. Strikes and protests fill the streets. Bakopoulos writes, “one [home] seemed like it had been burned in a fire, and the next was fit for a magazine photoshoot.” Mira eats at trendy restaurants-cum-vintage Airstream trailers and gives English lessons at abandoned schools now hosting refugees; sunburnt tourists walk the same streets as violent nationalists who attack Mira after hearing Mira, Dimitra, and Rami speak in English and Arabic.

As the ghosts of lost loved ones intermingle with the living, the experience of past Greeks never feels distant. We see “large concrete apartment blocks built during the junta transitioned to old neoclassical homes” and streets named after key figures during the Ottoman rule of Greece. Athens’ identity refuses to be delineated—into impoverished or prosperous, monocultural or multicultural, contemporary or historical.

In one particularly striking moment, Mira attends a retrospective of Nefeli’s work. One work of art shows a video of Dimitra, Leila, Fady, and Rami. In the background, scenes of conflict play on a loop, including—”a scene of South African apartheid, footage of hundreds of Bosnian refugees walking a dirt road.” Perhaps these juxtapositions serve to illuminate the interconnectedness and cyclical natures of traumatic displacement. However, the implicit voyeurism in this exhibition also seems to ask: to whom do these stories belong? What is something that we live, and what is just a backdrop—something to watch, but not experience firsthand?

In Part II of Scorpionfish, Mira travels to N island. Here, her parents kept a vacation home where her mother dreamed of spending retirement—another place where Mira cleans, sorts, and confronts ghosts. On this island, Mira turns inward, scrutinizing her relationship with her parents, Aris, and Nefeli.

Bakopoulos approaches both family tensions and Greece’s social, political, and economic issues with extreme nuance. Scenes of family tension are particularly striking in their tenderness. One night on the island Mira drinks a glass of whisky and dresses in her dead parents’ clothing.  At another point, the Captain returns from a run to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Katerina, and their children:

I walked to the massive refrigerator and filled my glass with ice, making a clownish show of it, acting surprised as all the ice tumbled to the floor.

Katerina looked up absentmindedly, and Ifigenia asked, ‘What is wrong with you?’ before they realized I was trying to make them laugh.

There is a deep yearning here; it is a heartbreaking scene of intimacy left unfulfilled.

At the close of the novel, Mira and the Captain consummate their relationship. Yet, as with their correspondences on their adjoining balconies, the reader sees little of this interaction: “a shift of the body, a look on Mira’s face, her bare shoulder.” Indeed, this intimate scene directs the reader to consider how bodies are considered throughout—always veiled, hidden beneath clothing, or behind glass. The final description of intimacy also recalls an earlier description Mira gave of the boundary between her and the Captain’s apartment: “If the light was right, you could see the shadow of a person behind the cloudy glass partition.”

In Scorpionfish, we see characters in tantalizing glimpses. At times, they seem to be jockeying for the reader’s attention. Sometimes I couldn’t help but want to dig deeper! But why would we be entitled to see more, to learn more?

I recall a moment from early in the novel, where Mira considers the barrier between herself and the Captain: “separated by a wall of opaque thick glass, an architectural veil behind which I heard him now moving from one side of the balcony to the other. I could not see him but felt his presence.” Scorpionfish offers no complete or comprehensive views of Athens or its inhabitants. Instead, we must confront the limits of our viewpoints and expectations. We must consider the stories left untold.


Aleksia Silverman HeadshotAleksia Mira Silverman lives and writes in South Florida. She holds a BA in English from Bowdoin College, where she served as founding editor of The Foundationalist and currently serves as contributing fiction editor for Barren Magazine. In Fall 2021, she will begin her graduate studies as an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of California, Davis.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 2, 2021 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS , short stories by Nana Nkweti, reviewed by Juliana Lamy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 31, 2021 by thwackJuly 31, 2021

WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS
by Nana Nkweti
Graywolf Press, 200 pages
reviewed by Juliana Lamy

The ten stories in Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells offer tableaus of Blackness that are as varied as they are vivid. From tale to tale, Nkweti’s genres shift as surely as a living body does, limbs never at a single angle for long. The same assortment of stories that renders a realistic portrait of race and romance within New York City’s Black literary scene delves, with the same intrepid narration, into a crime drama’s layered violence and moral contemplation. Though varied, what anchors these stories within one another’s vicinity is a relentless inquisition of human connectivity, a tour that proceeds whether such connection hues grotesque and brutal or beautiful and palliative. Black girls navigate personal and cultural identity as the collection arcs through fandom space in “Rain Check at MomoCon.” Readers alight in a Lagos beleaguered by a zombie apocalypse in “It Just Kills You Inside,” where racial capitalism and white condescension commodify African people unto apparent death. In “The Living Infinite,” our transatlantic vault to Louisiana reveals Nala, a 202-year-old Mami Wata (a female water spirit and seducer of men) mourning her late husband. Nkweti’s commitment to sensory imagery traces trauma as it ricochets between generations, cultures, and families, as it glints in gendered violence, racism (as well as its internalized iterations), and neocolonialism.

The Salikis of “It Takes a Village,” a Cameroonian-American couple whose lives have become tabloid fodder in recent months, herd us into the first of many technicolor locales in Nwketi’s collection. Theirs is a grasping, desperate suburbia whose ache for commodity and appearance ripens it to their adopted daughter’s advantage, allowing her to refit its obsessions to her own ends. The financially well-off Salikis strive to fashion a quintessential nuclear family for themselves, adopting a young Cameroonian girl who, in their view, has been “imported straight from the motherland.” The Salikis are the vessels for a particular brand of States-based hubris: they immediately affix the American Dream to the daughter they have adopted once they learn from her handler that she has been separated from her biological family in Cameroon, insisting that they are a simple extension of her existing relations and will operate as a conduit for the social elevation of her African relatives, assuming all the while that this method of social mobility is what their daughter wants. It is a psychological commandeering, their own self-centered assumption of what she craves or desires. This bloodless violence is clever, though the Salikis themselves are not. Additionally, the girl’s handler insists to the Salikis that her name is not important, that they may rename her in any way they wish, giving the Salikis free rein to prune and reshape the girl’s identity. The treatment of the girl’s name by her adoptive parents and her handler borrows the infantilizing erasure of both African colonialism and Atlantic slavery, deprecating the personal history of the targeted to make way for the self-serving material or authoritarian growth of the privileged. The story’s point of view then switches to the daughter, who wields her sexual exoticization at the hands of her white male classmates, as well as her parents’ myopic obsession with her, to secure a stable financial future for herself. She is the one who tells readers her name, Zola, as she reveals that her own agency has always been a point of fact for her, regardless of whether any of the adults in her life were aware of its presence.

“Rain Check at MomoCon” carries forth Nkweti’s investigation of identity for young Cameroonian girls. The story’s protagonist, Astrid, is a Black nerd (a term I use endearingly) who feels dislocated in both her cultural identity and her plans for her future post-high school. She cosplays as a katana-wielding avenger at Comic Con, along with her cousin and friend (who are also dressed as fictional warriors), and finds kinship among the costumed crowd:

She is surrounded by mild-mannered accountants, data entry specialists, computer analysts—assorted neckbeards. All shedding their daytime skins, thrilling to their secret identities in a dreamscape free from the mundanities of rumored downsizings, late mortgage payments, and vacant relationships. For a brief time, they all are heroes. Her too.

Nana Nkweti

Nkewti’s quick, decisive characterizations of the nameless Comic Con attendants grafts personality onto setting in a way that fleshes physical location and imbues it with stakes of its own, granting it the capacity to be protagonistic, antagonistic, or any compelling combination therein. The reference to “shedding” renders a starkly visual and visceral return to a truer identity, tying heroism, in its fantastical dimension, to a more grounded honesty with oneself. This passage, as well as the rest of Astrid’s narrative, recognizes identity as it often exists: a cocoon of personal truths likely invisible to an onlooker’s naked eye, whose location is only known and accessible to the person to whom it belongs.

In “Night Becomes Her,” Zeinab is a bathroom attendant in the women’s restroom of a New York City nightclub. It is there that she observes that each of the women she meets at her post is “their own Scheherazade,” stopgap storytellers who portion out their anecdotes to her as they wash their hands or fix their lashes. Zeinab received asylum in the U.S. on the heels of a suicide bombing in her native Cameroon that killed her mother and several others. Though the attendant position that she finds once she enters the U.S. allows her to survive financially, her love of dance is what functions as her emotional scaffolding, as well as the source of her more positive feelings. This piece momentarily toggles between Zeinab’s perspective and that of the young woman, Hanifa, who set off the bomb. We learn that Hanifa was kidnapped from a schoolyard by jihadis eleven months prior to the bombing; she was forcefully married to and impregnated by the group’s commander. She seeks recourse and peace from her abuse through an act that tragically articulates the cross-stitch of trauma, announcing it as a serrated thing that catches and snags. This piece portraits how one of the elements with the greatest capacity for nurture and safety, motherhood, can be barbed and warped by darker macro forces. Nothing, it seems, escapes the purview of tragedy. This makes Zeinab’s attachment of freedom and joy to dance all the more triumphant, as it is dancing that mothers her in her mother’s absence, this thing that tends and nourishes.

But Nkweti’s nuanced portrayals of African Blackness have Black American casualties. In “Rain Check at MomoCon,” Astrid’s friend Mboya, though Cameroonian, is the character that is most closely aligned with American Blackness. Mbola criticizes Astrid for “talking white,” attends a “crowded high school with metal detectors and girls named after luxury cars and liqueurs like Alizé and Lexus,” and is a hypersexual aggressor who pursues Astrid’s romantic love interest, Young, despite his unreciprocated feelings. It is difficult to read past these facets of caricature in Mbola’s rendering, particularly because so many of the elements specific to her are exaggerations that serve as narrative opportunities for further complexifying Astrid’s character. The lean towards caricature becomes a wholesale plunge with the introduction of La—a (pronounced “La-dash-a”) in “The Devil is a Liar,” a low-income attendant of the mommyhood classes taught by the protagonist, Cameroonian law school professor Temperance. La—a is generally aggressive, illiterate, and levels her fertility against Temperance (who has had trouble becoming pregnant) as a means of recouping their difference in financial and social privilege. Even her name stands in stark, eyebrow-raising distinction, as the story collection in general is populated by African characters with gorgeous, varied names that speak to a thoughtfulness and careful networking to intricate personal and familial backgrounds. La––a’s name feels pulled from the punchline of a Def Jam comedy special; it palpably lacks that same attentiveness. Additionally, the fixation on La—a’s fertility, in contrast with Temperance’s fertility troubles, is particularly painful to read, as it breezily and biologically essentializes Black American femininity in service of a distinct textual sympathy for Temperance.

Many of these stories prove unique even in their formatting: “Schoolyard Cannibal” is a collection of scenes almost vignette-like in their arrangement and is interspersed with images. “Dance the Fiyah Dance” is pockmarked by the main character’s diary entries. “Kinks” is split according to its protagonist’s different hairstyles, and, in so doing, contours her relationship to her Cameroonian Blackness around these culturally-specific elements. The prose itself twins the measured, attention-sustaining adventurism of the worlds it births. The text abounds with colorful metaphor, colloquialism, and a linguistic veering to French, pidgin, and Arabic. Ultimately, each life that Nkweti shapes out for us carries the dents and impressions of the other lives it encounters, brandishing a proof of collision that speaks to a fragile, vicious, irrepressible mortality.


Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University, where she won their 2018 Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Pidgeonholes, The Conium Review, and elsewhere. She is an incoming MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on July 31, 2021 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY by Myriam Steinberg, reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 14, 2021 by thwackJune 14, 2021

CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY
by Myriam Steinberg; illustrations by Christache
Page Two, 304 pages
reviewed by Brian Burmeister

The graphic memoir Catalogue Baby shares the deeply personal fertility journey of Myriam Steinberg. Compelled to leave her career, passion, and life as a festival organizer to pursue motherhood as a single 40-year-old, Steinberg’s immensely honest memoir chronicles the intense challenges she faced getting pregnant and carrying to term.

Throughout the five years of her life covered in the book, Steinberg skillfully navigates shame, guilt, and loss in ways that help us understand the pain and frustration she was experiencing while balancing those brutal realities with humor. Among other amusements, we are welcomed to the literal “Carnival of Dreams Brought to You by I.V.F” where at the egg-shot carnival game you are given “10 shots for the price of your dignity and patience.”

Myriam Steinberg

One of Steinberg’s many strengths is making her journey accessible through playfulness. In addition, her narrative is clear and relatable—even though her story is very much uniquely her own. Her desire for a baby and the difficulties she faced along the way are shared by many, and she welcomes us into her life through carefully and regularly integrating humor and hope along the way.

Illustrator Cristache’s wonderfully expressive art perfectly complements the mood of the narrative—from the ten-gallon hat-wearing, shot-gun toting biological clock that stalks Steinberg throughout the memoir to the 8-bit video game depictions of the ups and downs of her health journey. Steinberg’s powerful and compelling saga is wonderfully brought to life through Cristache’s gift of visual storytelling. He helps us feel Steinberg’s highs and lows as she holds firm to her dream of motherhood and struggles through cycle after cycle of in vitro fertilization and weighs her shrinking options.

Within the Preface, Steinberg makes clear her hope is the memoir “will help de-stigmatize a terribly lonely experience and address a void in materials that cover not only these issues but also the devastating decision-making process around fetal genetic anomalies.” Steinberg’s tale is an important reminder for those on similar paths to her own that they are not alone. She stands—and stands tall—with them in solidarity. And it is the hope of this reviewer that those who read Catalogue Baby come away from the experience knowing that community and compassion exist.


Brian Burmeister is a writer, educator, and cat cuddler. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on June 14, 2021 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

DEAR BEAR, poems by Ae Hee Lee Platypus Press, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 1, 2021 by thwackJune 12, 2021

DEAR BEAR
by Ae Hee Lee
Platypus Press, 42 pages
Reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Dear BearDear Bear begins with the gripping dedication, “For Daniel, to the end,” and from there, takes its readers to the end of the world it introduces. This is author Ae Hee Lee’s world that exists in a collection of letters addressed to the titular Bear—who is both a real and parabolic bear.

The book is set in a forest, “at the border of every ruin, of every past home.” The forest is also both real and parabolic as a form of borderland, acting as a Romantic landscape: sublime and shaped around the speaker’s psyche. Because of this, the forest becomes a vessel for the speaker’s exploration of the relationship between her and Bear. Ae Hee Lee establishes the forest as a post-apocalyptic setting to navigate both the relief and anxiety that comes from surviving an old world and entering a new one. In this case, Lee’s ‘Dear Bear’ speaks on the annihilation of an old life that comes with falling into new love. The “crossover from one to two” simultaneously contends with its own borderland: the end of two singular people and the beginning of a couple, the end of a world into the beginning of the next.

Lee does not shy away from the paradox of a relationship showing the self in the other, rather, she uses her epistolary poems to show clashing identities and clashing tones at play in the same moments. In the book’s first poem titled [Dear bear,] we see this example,

Dear bear,

I’m writing these letters in the innermost layer of your heart. You’ll never escape them. Having written them myself, I won’t survive them either.

Sincerely,

The poem’s tone moves from sentimental to dangerous. This is a technique well-utilized by Ae Hee Lee, giving the reader no sense of peace, no room for settling, and, like Bear, for the reader, there is no way to escape.

Ah He Lee

Ae Hee Lee

Lee strays away from the normal valedictions found in letters, moving from typical “sincerely,” to “with longing,” “whole,” “untaking,” and “open.” Considering valedictions as displays of the relation between the sender and receiver of a message, the reader can begin to recognize that Lee embraces them as a new form, another border for her poetry to balance on. Using these sign-offs in unexpected ways with atypical phrasing allows Ae Hee Lee to signal the fluctuations and endurance of the larger relationship ‘Dear Bear’ details.

At its height, the use of letters as form for each poem in this collection provides a sense of voyeurism, giving the sensation that we as readers are becoming intimate with information clearly not addressed to us. As if we, as the readers, are not meant to be reading these letters. Because of this, the speaker can be vulnerable and divulge secrets only known between her and Bear such as his “fetish for small feet,” and intense moments of vulnerability such as,

How is it you say you prefer me naked after all I’ve done, after all everyone has taught me to do? I stop my twirling, my twisting. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh.

Still, when Lee is not letting us into a brief, yet potent moment of intimacy that fits incredibly well these letter-poem hybrids, the poems loosely invoke the epistolary tradition’s religious roots. Still, they are less didactic and more meditative– more constructing of the self than of a larger narrative, musing on the ecology of the forest to explore and explain Lee’s feelings of partnership. There is a loose motif of religious imagery that is weaved throughout this book that seems out of place until we find its origin in the narrator’s first-ever meeting with Bear where she

Used to go to church wearing heels, I would hide those little leather cages in the garbage can the moment I got back into the house– I would trace the arch of my foot with my pinky, paint dandelions on my soles. Then, I met you, remember?

This moment, which is one of the most grounded in reality throughout the entire book, roots the speaker in her origin: being from outside the forest. She is a stranger of this curious land. Using the form of the epistle throughout each poem, she gives us insight into the borders of her own language in which this new world and new self-being constructed throughout this book, can only be explained through the lens of the speaker’s old self.

These limits shape the tension of this book: the speaker’s somewhat inevitable annihilation into the forest. It also serves as a reason why this book exists. The speaker complains that the forest does not have ears for her to, “nibble, hiss– drip my words into the hollow.” She goes on to compare the writing of the forest as making a diorama of it as “pretending to leave.” She does this “To keep myself [The speaker] away from the forest, to practice separation. Independence. I would lose myself otherwise.” This looming end carries the reader through each pungent poem, admiring the gorgeous piece of the forest’s ecology while watching it slowly consume Lee; as each flora that Lee admires in one poem devours her body in the next.

Ae Hee Lee takes great care in circling back to some of the most emotionally charged images within the book. Or rather, the images come back to overwhelm her. For example, the camellia who, “Whirls with the voiceless music of planets,” returns to be an agent in the dissolving of her body. Even when so many parts of the forest have contributed to some form of annihilation of the speaker, she still begs for more annihilation from one of the forest’s inhabitants: Bear. She becomes a fish and begs for Bear to chase her down the river. This moment harkens back to our first introduction to Bear in the book where the speaker claims that Bear was looking at as if she were a fish in a river.

Like the flora and fauna of the forest, the metaphors Lee makes of them overwhelm you, only to return to their roots when you are completely consumed by them later in the book. Because of this, Dear Bear becomes a collection of forty short poems that is best read twice: once to let yourself be consumed by the indulgent and palpable imagery of the forest until you find itself at its roots, and after you know the roots of the forest (and the speaker), again to witness how Lee constructs the self through her own annihilation.


Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Juniper Jordan Cruz is a writer and body artist from Hartford, Connecticut. She is a 2019 graduate from Kenyon College, where she studied creative writing. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic. Her works have also been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Academy of American Poetry Prize at Kenyon College. Email to query Juniper about poetry book reviews.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on June 1, 2021 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 1, 2021 by thwackJune 1, 2021

THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD
Krys Malcolm Belc
Counterpoint Press
304 pages

Reviewed by Beth Kephart

Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the bang of hard shoes on the floor.” He is young and the music permeates, and now, he writes, “I try to remember what it was like then, when I was four and five and six, if I was unhappy. I am supposed to remember being unhappy, but mostly what I remember is what it’s like to stand there knowing the dance is about to start.”

Supposed to remember. Supposed to be. Supposed to become. But suppose does not fit the life Belc will live. Competitive, just like his father. Prone to moments of rage. Enrolled in an all-girls’ Catholic school, dressed in the costumery of girlhood. A girlfriend who becomes a boyfriend who becomes a partner, a parent, a “natural mother of the child,” according to legal documents, and then, at last, following the birth of his child and testosterone treatments, a human being who, with his beard, shaved head, and Cross-Fit body, is assessed by perfect strangers as an awesome dad.

In six long essays, most adorned by fuzzy photographs and court material, ultrasounds and birth certificates, plays on and with margin settings (think W.G. Sebald, think Susanna Kaysen), Belc tells the story of being who he has become, of who he is still becoming. He is neither prescriptive nor defensive; rather, he is at work on understanding himself. Not just the trajectory that his life has taken, but the complicated feelings that still arise in him, the yearnings he sometimes has not just to birth another child, but to speak more openly of his own funny, playful, endearing Samson, who is one of three children Belc is raising with his partner, Anna:

Krys Malcolm Belc

When I am around another pregnant person, I feel an emptiness where Samson used to be. A professor I respect deeply tells me she is pregnant and I know it’s irrational, I know it isn’t fair, but the surprise on her face when I tell her about Samson hurts me. She doesn’t seem repulsed, just surprised. Who would think.

Who would think.

Belc handles fragments and confoundment with ease. His work—which reaches deeply into childhood, speaks honestly of anger, acknowledges intense interior battles, ponders Anna’s place as a woman who loved a woman who now is married to a man—coheres. Artfully. If Belc still has questions about his body and what it carries, if he wonders how the world sees him, if he wishes the past could be both more present and somehow more distant, no one will wonder, in reading this book, if Belc is an authentically gifted writer.


Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a widely published essayist. Her new memoir in essays is Wife | Daughter | Self, from Forest Avenue Press. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on June 1, 2021 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

A GHOST IN THE THROAT, a novel by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 21, 2021 by thwackMarch 21, 2021

A GHOST IN THE THROAT
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Biblioasis [North American edition forthcoming in June]
reviewed by Beth Kephart

“This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband.

A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed:

This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.

Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography is thin, vanished, vanquished, even, within histories written mostly about men, by men.

Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography is thin, vanished, vanquished, even, within histories written mostly about men, by men. She wants us to understand what it is to be driven to exhaustion by the exhilarating desire to find out, to learn more, to exhale the ether of an obsession. She wants us to hear the mewl of her babies in the background as she thinks, the mechanical sigh of the breast pump, the sounds of others sleeping while she lays awake at night, dreaming her way toward Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Imagination runs thick in Ní Ghríofa, who, even as a child, was scolded for weaving her dreams into history, her fantasies into facts. She’ll plunk rain into an evening, wash mud through a ditch, instigate a flirtation as she builds her theories about the great Irish noblewoman who, when alerted by an empty-saddle horse that her husband was in danger, leapt upon that horse’s back and rode and rode until she found the man she loved in a pool of his own blood and knelt and drank that blood in her great grief. Ní Ghríofa will haunt city streets and a graveyard for proof of what was—conjuring what is not there, intuiting what must have been. During crowded domestic days, in crowded spaces, over many years, Ní Ghríofa will chase this ghost of the past, and have I said yet how much I love this book, how I clung to it as proof that there is still something new in the literary world, still something worth shouting about?

I wish to shout about this. About a book with chapter titles like “cold lips to cold lips” and “blot. blot.” and “wild bees and their fizzy curiosities.” With lines like: “To work this soil is to sift the archeology of a stranger’s thoughts.” With confessions like: “I have held her and held her, only to find that she holds me too, close as ink on paper and steady as a pulse.” With passages like:

Back at my own clothesline, I think of those women. I arrange my body as they did: I look up. The clouds seem a flood, suspended far overhead. Our pasts are deep underwater. Our pasts are submerged in elsewheres.

I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields.

It has given us the genuine miracle of A Ghost in the Throat.


Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely-published essayist. Wife | Daughter | Self: a memoir in essays is her new book. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on March 21, 2021 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS, a Young Adult Novel by Chloe Gong, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 5, 2021 by thwackMarch 5, 2021

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS
by Chloe Gong
Simon Pulse, Simon & Schuster, 464 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

These violent delights book jacketChloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a vibrant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place during the Roaring Twenties in Shanghai of 1926. Gong’s tale of two star-crossed yet ill-fated lovers begins in the middle of a fierce blood feud between two warring gangs: the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Described as “an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time,” their bitter vendetta runs deeper than the Huangpu River that cuts through the city. The weight of each gang’s future rests heavily on the shoulders of both Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlets, and Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers. The pain of betrayal burns at each heir’s core, engulfing their previous love in flames. However, when a sinister presence lurking within the depths of the Huangpu threatens all of Shanghai, Juliette and Roma must work together if they ever hope to save everyone, including each other.

I thoroughly enjoyed Gong’s rendition of a timeless classic, combining Shakespearean pomp with Jazz Age flair. Her story of Juliette and Roma still rings true to the original, but what makes her tale different is that Gong adds historical, sociopolitical, and supernatural elements that give her tale a new level of context and depth. These elements put our two titular characters in a situation that’s more than simply rekindling a love once lost—the fates of the Scarlets, the White Flowers, and all of Shanghai hang in the balance. Told through the perspectives of Juliette, Roma, and a few secondary characters, These Violent Delights explores the struggles of two former lovers not only fighting to define who they are, but also fighting hard to protect those they love.

I appreciate Gong’s choice to subvert the gendered character roles of Juliette and Roma. The dainty, demure Juliette we’ve seen before is now, as Gong writes, a “Killer. Violent. Ruthless. All those and more­—that’s who [Juliette] was now.” As the female heir to the Scarlets, Juliette has to prove herself tenfold because a demure girl has no place leading the gang, but a dangerous woman can.

I appreciate Gong’s choice to subvert the gendered character roles of Juliette and Roma. The dainty, demure Juliette we’ve seen before is now, as Gong writes, a “Killer. Violent. Ruthless. All those and more­—that’s who [Juliette] was now.” As the female heir to the Scarlets, Juliette has to prove herself tenfold because a demure girl has no place leading the gang, but a dangerous woman can. Roma, on the other hand, is written as an heir who is loyal to the White Flowers, but sees things as a means to an end. Driven by emotion, Roma was once favored among his gang, but Gong writes that “…one day Roma had been trusted by his father as closely as one should expect from a son and the next, regarded suspiciously as if Roma were the enemy.” Now Roma makes sure to tread lightly—for his own protection, the protection of what’s still rightfully his, and the power that comes with it.

Chloe Gong

As riveting as Juliette and Roma are, the secondary characters are rife with personalities befitting their namesakes. Juliette’s cousin Rosalind is as Shakespeare writes: “The all-seeing sun / ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.” Stunning, cunning, and beautiful, Rosalind and her sister Kathleen are sisters with a deep bond and affection for one another. Gong brings Shakespeare’s comedic heroines from As You Like It and makes them prominent and capable women worthy of one day running the Scarlets beside Juliette. In contrast, Juliette’s quick-tempered cousin Tyler is the next male in line to rule the Scarlets—posing a direct threat to Juliette. Gong writes, “[Juliette’s] cousin was a boy with steel skin and a heart of glass.”

In Roma’s court we have Benedikt and Marshall, two of my favorite pairs in this story and in the original tale as Benvolio and Mercutio. Gong writes that Benedikt “always seemed to be simmering over something right below the surface, but nothing ever came through, no matter how close he came to it.” A calm, collected peacekeeper, he ensures that Roma and Marshall don’t get into trouble. Marshall is the opposite. Impatient and impulsive, Marshall moves, as Gong writes, “like the world was on the verge of ending and he needed to jam as many movements in as possible.” Then we have the old, wise, and intelligent Lourens reminiscent of Friar Lawrence, offering advice and aid to Roma during his investigation of life and death. Gong’s choice to tell the story from these varied perspectives made me invested in how Juliette and Roma’s actions directly influence their lives as well. The lives of the secondary characters further raise the stakes for Juliette and Roma, as their rekindling love further puts their friends in harm’s way.

What I admire about Gong’s writing is that she uses descriptive language akin to Shakespeare, but modernizes it to the slang and flair of the twenties. She also incorporates Russian, Korean, and Chinese language throughout the story to strengthen her characters’ cultural backgrounds. Though the language is reminiscent of lofty Shakespearean, her imagery and attention to detail create such a gritty yet colorful world that I could clearly visualize.

When members of both the Scarlets and White Flowers fall victim to the maddening demise of the Huangpu beast, Juliette and Roma set off to discover the cause. Although a deep-seated vendetta keeps Juliette from trusting Roma, and Roma has to prove his loyalty to his father, they are both bound by their duties as heirs to protect the members of their respective gangs. Their investigation points to clues of the monster’s origin, but the truth is one that moves beyond the petty feud of the Scarlets and White Flowers­—the monster’s wrath threatens everyone who encounters it, putting all of Shanghai in danger.

Gong weaves Chinese history throughout Juliette and Roma’s story, having Shanghai’s socioeconomic and economic status in the Roaring Twenties influence the operations and allegiances of the Scarlets and White Flowers. Eastern culture finds itself shrinking at the expense of a Western culture seeking to become more prominent.

Gong weaves Chinese history throughout Juliette and Roma’s story, having Shanghai’s socioeconomic and economic status in the Roaring Twenties influence the operations and allegiances of the Scarlets and White Flowers. Eastern culture finds itself shrinking at the expense of a Western culture seeking to become more prominent. Communists are gaining prominence and power within the city through workers strikes and backdoor dealings, threatening the Nationalists who want Shanghai to remain as it was. Juliette notices this, which strikes a sour chord with her pride in being Shanghainese. Roma is the descendant of Russian immigrants who claim parts of Shanghai as their official territory, and he doesn’t want any more competition with other foreigners, especially Communists. French and British influences were taking hold of the city, the integration forming less of a melting pot and more like crabs fighting in a barrel. Gong describes Shanghai as “[a] place that rumbles on Western idealism and Eastern labor, hateful of its split and unable to function without it, multiple facets fighting and grappling in ever-constant quarrel.” This historical context grounds the story, making it more tangible and real for me as a reader.

Gong’s horrifyingly symbolic creature of the Huangpu, described from different points of view spread via rumors throughout the city, is a creature that only terrorizes Shanghai at night, and anyone caught in its wake kills themselves in madness. Rarely seen, the creature takes a form of its own in my mind as a reader, as well as the minds of the characters. What I enjoyed most about the beast was that as foreboding as it was, it was also vulnerable, in a way like the city of Shanghai. One account of the monster describes it “panting, as if in pain, as if struggling against itself, half cast in shadow but doubtlessly an unnatural, strange thing.” As I read further I realized that Shanghai was the same way, a formidable creature that no longer recognizes itself.

As the first book in a series, Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a captivating, sharp and suspenseful retelling of an age-old classic. Original and reminiscent of Shakespeare’s story, this work feels entirely new and leaves me excited to see how it continues.


Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on March 5, 2021 in reviews, young adult fiction reviews. (Click for permalink.)

COME ON UP, short stories by Jordi Nopca, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 22, 2021 by thwackFebruary 22, 2021

COME ON UP
by Jordi Nopca
translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Bellevue Literary Press, 224 pages
reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Come on up cover artAt first, it’s a promise. Come on up!

It’s a pledge made to every up-and-comer in Barcelona. The city provides a backdrop for Jordi Nopca’s short story collection Come On Up, translated from Catalan to English by Mara Faye Lethem. His stories skillfully traverse decadence and depravity, splendor and squalor, the tragic and the comic, the boring and the absurd. They will resonate with anyone who has a decent job, a decent home, and decent career prospects but is still somehow broke.

Take it from Nopca. The city and its denizens are in rough shape:

Barcelona is a tourist favorite, but it’s going through a delicate moment. Some of the most expensive boutiques in the world have opened up shop on the Passeig de Gràcia. The Old Quarter gleams with the urine of British, Swedish, Italian, and Russian visitors, which unabashedly blends in with the indigenous liquid evacuations. In Sarrià-Sant Gervasi and Les Corts, there are some neighbors whose only activity is walking their little dogs and holding on to their family inheritances. […] The Eixample is full of old people and the odd young heir who still can’t decide whether to continue his education, try his luck abroad, or hang himself from the chandelier in the dining room. The district of Gràcia hopes to remain a neighborhood of designers, artists, and students obsessed with watching subtitled films and TV shows. They were lucky folks until they started to lose their jobs; soon they won’t have enough to pay their rents, which are too high, and they’ll have to settle for some shabby corner of Sants, Not Barris, or Sant Antoni, where one can still live for a more or less affordable price.

Nopca deftly evokes the city’s wealth, luxury, and romance and points out that its gravest ills emerge from the allocation of these three resources. College graduates can’t pay rent. Jobless parents move in with their children. Relationships, newly sprung or decades-old, collapse under the stress. By all measures, Nopca’s characters are trapped, and there doesn’t seem to be a way out of the economic purgatory that is modern-day Barcelona.

Then, it becomes a taunt. Come on up!

Jordi Nopca

Nopca’s breezy prose disguises his characters’ despair. The never-ending job search becomes just another part of growing up, not the product of a deeply dysfunctional economic order. If his characters don’t believe this, they go insane, which many do. Nopca’s stories portray this progression—ambitious job-seeker to unemployed bum to raving lunatic—as just as much a part of Barcelona’s culture as paella or Gaudi’s architecture. The question overshadowing the book is one the characters can’t bear to answer: Is financial desperation part and parcel of life in modern Spain?

Such misfortune afflicts the titular characters of “Angels Quintana and Felix Palme Have Problems.” The title perfectly captures Nopca’s understated, bone-dry wit. When Felix loses his job as a bartender, he gets drunk all day and stuffs fruit in the exhaust pipes of parked cars and motorbikes. For him, it’s a desperate attack against boredom; for others, it’s “another silent way of saying ‘We’ve had enough,’ from a highly qualified generation of those who still haven’t found their place in a job market that’s turned its back on them.” If it was an act of protest, Felix Palme didn’t know it, but that hardly seems to matter. The “banana battalion” as it is termed in the media represented another outburst against an intolerable economy. If that isn’t a protest, what is?

Even those with gainful employment suffer the casual cruelty of global capitalism. In “An Intersectional Conversationist at Heart,” Victoria, a promising journalist, witnesses an author she hardly knows ruin her career on a whim. Everyone who’s worked with Biel Auzina, the titular “Intersectional Conversationist,” attests to his hellish personality and literary ineptitude, but still, he reached a status in the Spanish literati that Victoria dared not dream of. The story would be Kafkaesque if it didn’t feel so true. In detached yet engaging prose, Nopca shows that the recipe for success is part industry, part luck, and mostly pure chance. Even that might not be enough.

By turns, however, it becomes an invitation. Come on up . . .

To a lover’s flat, that is. In “Don’t Leave,” Nopca follows romance’s sinuous course through shopping mall courtship to foiled late-night intimacy. Miriam is an art history major, but any ambition she has beyond working at a clothing outlet is left unspoken. A man, whom she dubs Robin Hood rather than learning his name, begins chatting her up on his way home from work, their longing for intimacy hidden behind their stunted small talk and “funny” stories. Soon, Robin Hood becomes her only hope for moving forward with her life.

But Nopca never allows his characters a happy ending. Rarely, though, does he subject them to undue suffering. His characters begin and end at the same point. The break-ups, job losses, arguments, demotions, financial sacrifices, and romantic humiliations sum up to zero. In a society that prides itself on upward mobility, stagnation is more frustrating than outright failure. This is Nopca’s most piercing insight.

Robin Hood washes up drunk at a bar by the story’s end, feeling worthless. “Every once in a while, one of the men glanced at him to make sure he still hadn’t collapsed,” Nopca writes. “It was as if he were a silent, invisible ghost. The visitor’s presence didn’t affect them in the slightest. They didn’t even seem to think he had a soul.” Barcelona will do that to a young man looking for love.

All that’s left is a sigh. Come on up.

Francoist Spain rarely comes up in this book. Some older characters briefly recall their lives in those decades, but Nopca never expounds on it at length. “Candles and Robes” discusses it most openly. Once a week, the teenage narrator visits his grandparents for lunch and hears stories of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. To his disappointment, they “increasingly focused on seemingly unimportant details. The day Franco’s troops entered Barcelona was remembered for the textbooks that were left in the empty closets by the classroom.” The dramatic mixes with the dull, and the two become inexorably conjoined, a theme in Nopca’s work.

Simultaneously, the narrator’s dad tries to learn the saxophone. He watches countless YouTube videos of virtuoso players but can hardly eke out a note. Nopca finds a surprising parallel between futile saxophone lessons and Catalonia’s economic plight. In his nuanced telling, the dad’s efforts come to embody the struggle of a generation of Catalans, for they have the same chance at escaping Franco’s baneful legacy as the dad does at learning the saxophone. The fight for economic well-being is waged in every apartment in the city, but day by day, it becomes a lost cause.

An entire nation was promised there would be nowhere to go but up. When moving up becomes impossible, what is there left to do but try?


Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on February 22, 2021 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

WHITE MAGIC, essays by Elissa Washuta, reviewed by Eric Buechel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 28, 2020 by thwackDecember 28, 2020

WHITE MAGIC
by Elissa Washuta
Tin House, 432 pages
reviewed by Eric Buechel

White Magic Book CoverIn Elissa Washuta’s book of linked essays, ​White Magic​, she writes about her substance abuse candidly, describing getting high with cough syrup as a teenager in her school’s bathroom between classes. In a later scene, a doctor pleads with her to stop drinking—there’s something wrong with her insides, and she’s been urinating blood. As these essays progress, Washuta retraces the reasons for her self-destructiveness in a culture that treats her, a Native woman, as an expendable object. To understand her experience, she uses ideas from witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and even Twitter discourse as resources. With this, she creates a beautifully-rendered piece of art that isn’t easily labeled.

Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz tribe of southern Washington. I grew up not far from their reservation. I also lived in Seattle during the time that she did, frequenting many of the places described in this book. As a child, I had no conception of ancestral land or colonization. These things were deemed too uncomfortable to be discussed. Displacement and environmental racism were facts I only came to be aware of later in life. To read about the Seattle that Washuta lived in for a decade as it grew into the tech ogre it is, and inhabit those same spaces through her writing, is a gift for any reader interested in the real history of the United States.

In the essay “Centerless Universe,” the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture selects Washuta as writer-in-residence at the Fremont Bridge. The guidelines are vague, stating “that the writing shall illuminate some aspect of the bridge and the bridge’s history, be it real or metaphorical.” Washuta needed the money, even if she was skeptical of the project and its benefactors, so she took the position. She writes:

“Before Seattle, there were steep hills, bent rivers, tideflats, lakes, bogs, spirit powers, forests, people, longhouses, and prairies forming a system of fluctuation and movement of time and land. Then the bostons– the word people up and down this coast used for white men– turned places into property: terminals, shipyards, mills, railroad beds, dumps, cesspools, homesteads, parks, streets, wharves, trestles, bridges, canals.”

This place was important to indigenous peoples long before white culture descended upon it. From her perch atop the busiest drawbridge in the United States, Washuta struggles with her presence and the concept of development and progress. She lists the series of displacements of the Native population one after another alongside the construction of the city’s infrastructure. “Assembling the above history…” she says, “felt like pulling out bones through pores.”

Seattle is a character throughout these essays, and Washuta examines it without nostalgia. It is a predominantly white city, with the indigenous population making up a disproportionate amount of the houseless. Washuta speaks of herself as “white-passing,” but she argues that in a culture that seeks to assimilate difference, this labeling is an act of aggression against sovereignty. Her time in Seattle was difficult and characterized by alcoholism, self-loathing, and a feeling of alienation. Rather than turn away from these memories, Washuta is intellectually attentive to them. She examines what they signify to her spiritual recovery and what reverberative effects she may still carry. She is interested in ways we tell our stories, both individually and collectively, and what these mean to those they don’t benefit.

In the essay “The Spirit Cabinet,” she reflects on her process of remembering by keeping index cards of events as they come back to her and listening to these cards intuitively to learn how they should be arranged—thereby forming her work. She writes: “I’ve begun noticing dates, the time loops are tightening, trying to show me something, and I’m doing my best to obey.”

Elissa Washuta

Washuta intertwines her own experience alongside history’s violence. This serves to place the reader into Washuta’s creative process while also highlighting the reverberative effects of occupation. With this mirroring technique, she explores how the personal and political are inescapably linked. She explores Native American myths of the Northwest, but she also finds purpose in places where we are told it isn’t kept. For example, Washuta treats the pop culture of her childhood as symbols. The things that she remembers, even if seemingly innocuous, have significance for her still; even if that significance is not apparent to her at first, she mines these memories for an explanation. The reader is shown the intricacies of the origins of Phil Collins’ motivations behind “​In the Air Tonight”​ and its subsequent Snopes article, put directly into a reframed frontier in the classic early computer game ​Oregon Trail,​ and is made aware of the hidden significance of the surreal children’s movie The Adventures of Mark Twain.

She writes of colonization but is quick to dismiss the violence inflicted on her body, such as rape and ensuing trauma, as a metaphor for it. She is colonized, yes—which helped perpetuate this violence as a central facet of the American experience—but that is only some of the story. Washuta utilizes this approach skillfully. At one point, she likens her post-traumatic stress disorder to a tyrannical rule, furthering our understanding of what it means to be actors in a society that requires abuse and power to function. Comparisons like these, which create a continuous sense of empathy and connection with the author, are repeatedly built on throughout the essays.

Washuta speaks of wanting to “ungrow” back to a child that still believes fully in magic. This notion permeates much of the book. As the author engages with the history of the land she inhabits, she attempts a form of unlearning on her intellectual path, to find a knowledge more resonant than the prescribed teachings that indoctrinate us from an early age. This method helps her view the past for clues of understanding while taking steps towards the release of painful feelings that no longer suit her. In this, her writing shows the nonlinearity of healing.


Eric Buechel, Fall 2020 InternEric Buechel is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He has a BA in Psychology from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the fiction editor for Lumina and taught in the Right to Write program through Westchester County Corrections. He works as an editor and English tutor.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 28, 2020 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK: THE SEARCH FOR A SISTER GONE MISSING, a memoir by Betsy Bonner, reviewed by Laura Smith

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 2, 2020 by thwackDecember 2, 2020

THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK: THE SEARCH FOR A SISTER GONE MISSING
by Betsy Bonner
Tin House, 272 pages
reviewed by Laura Smith

Atlantis Black book jacket“Remove toxic people from your life” is one of today’s modern mantras. It’s easy advice to give, but it can be impossible to follow. Author Betsy Bonner can vouch for this. Her personal history is steeped in family toxicity: an environment of abuse, uncertainty, and guilt from which she just can’t shake free. Bonner knows this. She also considers herself the lucky one.

In her memoir, The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing, Bonner writes, “My own life has been shaped by what I inherited; most of all, my sister’s story.” Her sister, Atlantis Black, the self-named alias of a volatile rock musician from Pennsylvania, was found dead in a hotel room in Tijuana on June 25, 2008. The cause of death was listed as pancreatic hemorrhage brought on by a drug overdose. There was a lot that didn’t add up about her death, but there was also plenty that did.

The Book of Atlantis Black isn’t an episode of 60 Minutes stapled together into a neat pile of text. It’s a messy, confusing tale of a free-spirited woman plagued by demons who strung along her close-knit group of friends and family so tightly that she is still a commanding presence even in death…if she really even is dead.

The word “if” is the fulcrum on which this story rests. There is as much evidence in the book to support the idea that Atlantis is alive as there is to prove that she’s dead. She had a past history of drug abuse, a criminal record related to an equally sketchy prescription drug fraud case, previous suicide attempts, and a woman Bonner names “Gretchen” who suspiciously lingered behind the scenes long after the ink on Atlantis’ death certificate had dried.  Any one of Atlantis’ flaws or her trust in shady characters could have contributed to an accidental overdose, murder, and subsequent cover up.

The most helpful evidence for the reader, though, is not in the timeline of known facts but in the deep dive into Atlantis’ past, told in out-of-order segments by Bonner who pieces together the exciting, frustrating, self-harming, and attention-seeking behavior that Atlantis exhibited. Some credit for this behavior can be attributed to unsolicited childhood trauma and mental illness. The rest of her actions are simply Atlantis being Atlantis.

Betsy Bonner author photo

Betsy Bonner

Bonner lets the story do the talking, rarely sharing her emotional response or opinion about her damaged family or the mystery surrounding her sister. But the memories she’s chosen to share and the proactive way in which she investigated Atlantis’ death demonstrate her devotion as Atlantis’ protector. The memories, both good and bad, speak for themselves and help to pack in all of the complicated emotions that are wrapped up in their family dynamic. As the sole voice of that dynamic along with her added role as detective, she flattens her voice while keeping her emotional intent apparent.

Few writers would devote their memoir to someone else’s life, but so much of Bonner’s life was dictated by her sister. Atlantis’ latest escapade is always at the forefront, whether it was a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt, a break in her music career, her latest girlfriend, or her scheming search for a platonic husband to save her from prison. And when things went south, she knew who to call.

The part of the family safety net is a thankless role, but it’s one that Bonner willingly played. Begging her parents for money, setting Atlantis up with housing, or sending her to rehab shows how Bonner stood in for parents who were equally damaged, abusive, and neglectful. But she understood that helping Atlantis wasn’t about fixing her. It was about pulling her back to shore knowing full well that she would walk out to sea again. Now that she’s gone, Bonner is still throwing out her net, in case there’s something at the other end to pull back.

Often with a missing person’s case, there is a desire for outsiders to want to aid in the search. But it’s difficult to play detective with Betsy. This book has the page-turning quality of a mystery but is lacking in a satisfying resolution. What’s left to grasp onto is spectacle, reading on to witness Atlantis’ next train wreck, parental blow up, or juicy post-mortem detail. This feels a bit exploitive, but it also feels like a book that would have met Atlantis’ attention-seeking approval, warts and all.

Whether this book unlocks some crucial detail that leads to a definitive answer to Atlantis’ death, only time will tell. I highly doubt it. The subtitle says it all. This is “the search for a sister gone missing.” It’s about the obsessiveness that comes in tracking down a resolution for a story that will likely never have one.

Atlantis and Betsy once agreed to meet at the Louvre in front of The Mona Lisa on the Fourth of July of any year, should Atlantis ever have to disappear for good. Bonner has never gone to see if she’s there. Perhaps this lack of action tells the reader everything they need to know about the author’s mindset. She’s content to continue searching for clues in the past rather than pursuing resolution in the present. After all she has been through, however, Bonner has earned the right to grieve, research, and write her own way. For the reader, they have the privilege of deciding whether or not to invest in an unconventional, unsolved mystery.


Laura SmithLaura Smith is an office worker, middle grade author, and blogger from Pittsburgh. She has self-published three novels and writes reviews for Horrorscreams Videovault and LitPick. Her writing has also appeared on List25, Listosaur, Ok to Retire, Ok Whatever, Support for Indie Authors, and ProWritingAid. You can find her work and more at www.laurasbooksandblogs.com.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on December 2, 2020 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MORE MIRACLE THAN BIRD, a novel by Alice Miller reviewed by Jozie Konczal

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 23, 2020 by thwackNovember 23, 2020

MORE MIRACLE THAN BIRD
by Alice Miller
Tin House Books, 352 pages
reviewed by Jozie Konczal

I approached More Miracle than Bird, Alice Miller’s debut novel about W.B. Yeats and his erstwhile muse, Georgie Hyde-White, as a poet interested in learning about Yeats and the woman who influenced his work. Although we get insights about the poet and his work, the novel is more about the journey of his muse, a naïve but determined rebel attempting to thwart the traditional roles that have been carved out for her. We see her youthful struggles and missteps, but by the novel’s close, we see a woman who has learned that holding onto the philandering Yeats means reshaping herself into someone who can contribute to his work.

Initially, Georgie, a translator of poetry with an interest in the occult, is attracted to the poet, who she meets at a society party, because of his involvement with seances and the Order: a “secret” society to which she hopes to gain access. Although her interest quickly turns romantic and she becomes as obsessed with the poet as she is with the “other” world of spirits and prophecy, Georgie is able to see through Yeats’s celebrity facade. When she approaches him to question him about the Order, she realizes, “[s]he was speaking to a man, not a famous figure.” Georgie’s ability to put Yeats’s notoriety aside and view him as a complicated and often confused man are what allows their relationship to develop.

Pike, a patient at the military hospital where Georgie works, is the novel’s other central figure and the third point in the novel’s love triangle. In some ways, Pike is the novel’s most likable character and a foil to Yeats. He is more transparent than the guarded Georgie and the withholding Yeats, and he cares for her consistently throughout the novel while Yeats does not.  Pike does not approve of Georgie’s infatuation with Yeats, who is twenty years her senior, pointing out on more than one occasion that Georgie, his “swan duckling, this nurse creature,” deserves better. We can’t help sympathizing with him as learn about Yeats’ unrequited love affair with Maude Gonne and his dubious involvement in the Irish struggle, a dark character more devoted to his work than to Georgie. But Georgie does not see Yeats as undeserving of her devotion and is unaware of her feelings for Pike until it is too late.

Alice Miller

Writing historical fiction presents a challenge in developing compelling characters that are also true to actual history. For example, while the novel gives insight into Georgie and her experiences, the novel is less effective in capturing the historical significance of characters like Ezra Pound. We see some of his flaws, but much of his problematic personhood, like his well-known fascism and anti-Semitism, goes unacknowledged. Perhaps this is an attempt not to divert the focus away from Georgie’s trajectory but one wonders why the author leaves us with the impression that Pound, a supporter of Mussolini and Hitler, is nothing more than a narcissistic philanderer.

This novel does many things, but perhaps one of the most important of those is the attention it draws to the woman behind the curtain. History forgets many women like Georgie, women who support great writers and artists while maintaining their own lives and literary fascinations. More Miracle than Bird does justice to that woman, in presenting her as the equal to the man she marries, while at the same time, giving up pieces of herself to help Yeats in his writing.

More Miracle than Bird is not a novel about W.B Yeats, although it is, in part, a novel about writing. We learn, for example, that writing does not always come easily to Yeats. We see that other components of his life were overshadowed at times by his devotion to his work. In this, the author may be suggesting that Yeats, and perhaps poets, in general, in order to achieve the gravity that he did, have to be willing to place work above other loves, such as one’s love for their country or a romantic partner.

Perhaps, in light of Yeats’ struggle with writing, it is Georgie’s gift of “automatic” writing, (the miracle, alluded to in the title, and referenced in Yeats’ poems entitled “Byzantium” and “Sailing to Byzantium”) that cements the relationship. The title itself refers to Georgie’s spiritual connection, a “miracle” so to speak, that inspires her automatic writing. We see the connection play out in a scene in which the excitement engendered when Georgie accesses a spirit seeps into Yeats’s writing: “[I]t seemed the air was alive, that so many stories were within their reach … it seemed they were surrounded by voices, neither dead nor alive … all straining to be heard.” Georgie’s communication with these voices through automatic writing in turn allows Yeats to access a depth within his work that would have otherwise remained cloaked.

 At first glance, More Miracle than Bird is a work about poetry, romance and spiritual exploration, but I think this novel really comes alive in examining female agency and drive. For better or worse, the author seems to keep whatever intimacy existed between the characters as distant from the reader as Georgie and Yeats often seem to be from each other. Although Georgie has high aspirations to complete her work as a translator of poetry and climb the ranks within London’s literary society, she appears to subjugate her ambition as Yeats strings her along, pursuing other romantic relationships, even remaining aloof into their marriage. This unfailing desire to hold him contrasts with her dismissal of the Order when she learns of its fraudulent foundations. Perhaps her refusal to dismiss Yeats even when he ignores her or betrays her, is a result of conflating Yeats with a connection to the spiritual world that she craves so desperately. It is only after he accepts her, and she discovers automatic writing that she is able to access that world in the way she wants. In this way, More Miracle than Bird feels less like a love story, and more like a book about the relationship of the artist and his muse with art, about a woman’s agency within that relationship, than it does about a story of a miraculous romance.


Jozie Konczal is a poet from South Carolina. She graduated in 2019 with an MFA from Hollins University and in 2017 with a BA from the College of Charleston. Her work has been featured in The Northern Virginia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Concho River Review, and elsewhere.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on November 23, 2020 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

A WORLD BETWEEN, a novel by Emily Hashimoto, reviewed by Ashira Shirali

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 17, 2020 by thwackSeptember 17, 2020

A WORLD BETWEEN
by Emily Hashimoto
Feminist Press, 440 pages
reviewed by Ashira Shirali

A World Between book jacket

Let’s be honest—the chances of walking into a bookstore and finding a literary lesbian romance are low. You’re more likely to find an entire cookbook consisting of sourdough recipes. If you want the book to feature characters of color, your odds sink even lower. Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel promises to fill this lacuna. A World Between (Feminist Press, September 2020) follows the relationship between two women of color, Leena and Eleanor, through college and adulthood. The novel alternates between Leena’s and Eleanor’s perspectives, revealing the yearnings and anxieties of each as they grow apart and together.

There is much to marvel at in this debut. Hashimoto is adept at plotting. She pulls Leena and Eleanor apart with narrative developments that are both unexpected and believable. The novel heightens tension as we long for the two’s reunion despite circumstances, family expectations, and their own struggles. Eleanor and Leena’s conflicts are heartbreakingly realistic. Their fights remind us that in real life there are no villains or heroes, just two people whose earnest feelings clash. Hashimoto deploys details masterfully. She can bring characters to life with just a handful of words. When Leena cries in her mother’s car, she turns away because her mother “couldn’t stomach emotions of this magnitude.” The novel’s dialogue captures the rhythms of young people’s conversations, both the beat and the crescendos.

A World Between’s greatest triumph is capturing the shape, color, and texture of attraction between two women.

Despite these strengths, Leena and Eleanor’s honest, multi-stranded story is let down by the novel’s prose. Hashimoto’s similes fall flat as often as they succeed, and she pushes metaphors too hard. After describing how Leena responds to Eleanor’s body as if calculating an equation, Hashimoto writes, “If two trains were headed to Boston at one hundred miles per hour, how fast would Eleanor come?” There are awkward phrases which aspire to the literary (“she took a bite of her tongue”), and sometimes the writing elicits pure confusion. The novel could easily lose a hundred pages. In other places, however, the words delight—“It was quiet for a long time, dust settling on the ellipses of the moment.”

A World Between’s greatest triumph is capturing the shape, color, and texture of attraction between two women. Before Leena and Eleanor’s first kiss, Hashimoto writes, “Eleanor applied one hand to the bed between them.” ‘Applied’ beautifully conveys the trembling excitement of reaching for a first kiss. When Leena sees Eleanor on the street years after college, she thinks, “Her sweet face, her genuine smile. Invading her today.” The diction reveals Leena’s apprehension at seeing Eleanor while out with her boyfriend, and the powerful effect Eleanor still has on her. Distilling the intimacy between women in all its rawness and tenderness is Hashimoto’s strength.

Emily Hashimoto author photo

Emily Hashimoto

The novel’s attempts to reflect America’s diversity and the characters’ progressivism feel as heavy-handed as its metaphors. Although the novel does the crucial literary (and, indeed, human) work of telling the stories of people of color, immigrants, Jews, and other marginalized groups, by the end of the novel, this diversity feels contrived and unrealistic. Even the few straight White characters are ‘diversified’ by being in interracial relationships. Leena and Eleanor have identical political beliefs. Without specific and meaningful reasons behind these beliefs, they strike hollow and simplistic. Both Leena and Eleanor’s ambition in college is the platitude “[to] make a difference.” The two protagonists experience similar disillusionment when they realize their jobs will involve listening to bosses, not heroic acts of justice. Eleanor quits her job at a non-profit, telling her boss that she’s “sick of being told what to do and on your timeline.” These epiphanies would be trite by themselves, but they also seem unrealistic as they occur in the characters’ late twenties.

Eleanor and Leena’s intellectual myopia produces an immaturity that tests the believability of their characters. When Leena’s grandmother praises the education she received at a British school in India, Eleanor thinks Leena’s grandmother “seemed to be praising British colonialism.” She looks around for “someone to explain what the fuck is happening.” This reaction is better suited to a teenager who just learned about British colonialism in India, not an adult used to living in a complex world. When Leena finds out that a friend’s parents were deported, she thinks, “He seemed…okay. How was that possible?”

A World Between is importantly frank about sex between women. Their sex life is neither pornographized nor obscured, the two poles of how sex between women is depicted in mainstream media and culture.

Although Hashimoto’s diversity efforts feel manufactured, like a wooden puppet, her depictions of sex have the fluidity and heat of human bodies. The desire Eleanor and Leena feel for each other is tangible and all-consuming. A World Between is importantly frank about sex between women. Their sex life is neither pornographized nor obscured, the two poles of how sex between women is depicted in mainstream media and culture. When Eleanor and Leena dance together early in the novel, Hashimoto writes, “Up until this second, her interest in Leena was physical, no doubt, but she had been fascinated by the whole of her…With their bodies intertwined, all of that faded into the background…She wanted to fuck her.”

In A World Between, Hashimoto delivers a love story that portrays the depth of romantic attraction that can exist between women while escaping the trappings of cliché. Leena and Eleanor share moments suffused with love, but their relationship faces real-life challenges. There’s no neat ending in a shiny bow. Though hindered by uneven prose, A World Between is a moving portrait of the tensions, joys, and warmth that characterize a relationship between two women.


Ashira Shirali is from Gurgaon, India. Her stories have been shortlisted for the HG Wells Short Story Competition’s junior prize, The Adroit Prize for Prose, and other contests. Her work has been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart online, and elsewhere. She is a sophomore at Princeton University, where she studies English and Creative Writing.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on September 17, 2020 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

GARDEN BY THE SEA, a novel by Mercè Rodoreda, reviewed by Anthony Cardellini

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 4, 2020 by thwackSeptember 4, 2020

GARDEN BY THE SEA
by Mercè Rodoreda
translated by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño
Open Letter Books, 203 pages
reviewed by Anthony Cardellini

Garden by the Sea book jacketWhen I began my part-time job at a botanical garden in the fall of 2017, I had next to zero gardening experience, and I knew little about the different flowers and trees that grow in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. I showed up that first day completely unprepared, without so much as a pair of gloves. But I was lucky enough to be mentored by David, a man in his early thirties from Maine, who’d been gardening for several years. David explained to me the paradoxical nature of caring for gardens: gardens need constant attention, but they bear their beautiful fruits ever so slowly. At the heart of David’s message was that gardeners are transitory, but gardens remain. Our decades are their hours.

The unnamed narrator of Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea is, like David, the consummate gardener. The years spent caring for his garden have imparted upon this narrator a unique understanding of time’s most closely-guarded secret: that it will always pass, without regard for the humans that attempt to confine it. He explains early in the novel the nature of a tree: “This tree has witnessed much grief and much joy. And it does not change. It has taught me to be what I am.” Rodoreda’s novel is a study of the way time passes, granting characters joyful years and grievous ones. She divides the novel into six sections, each of which describes one year that the narrator spends caring for the garden attached to a seaside villa owned by rich Catalans from Barcelona. Rodoreda uses the narrator’s gardening role to illustrate the ways in which time expands and contracts. There are no dates in the novel—only the slow passing of seasons, marked by changes in the garden. “They stayed later than usual that year,” writes the narrator of the villa owners at the end of the second chapter. “The leaves had already turned and many of the trees were bare … The sea was gradually leached of color and grew rough in the afternoon.” In this way, years pass—flowers bloom, die back, and then bloom again. The ocean intrudes and recedes.

Rodoreda uses the narrator’s gardening role to illustrate the ways in which time expands and contracts. There are no dates in the novel—only the slow passing of seasons, marked by changes in the garden.

In many ways, Rodoreda herself lived a life full of patience with time. Exiled from Spain because of her work for the Catalan government before the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began her writing career in France. After settling in Paris, she was forced again to flee when the Germans occupied France at the start of the Second World War. In Switzerland, she continued to grow in prominence as a writer. For many years, she waited for the wounds created by Franco and the war to heal. She finally moved home to Catalonia in 1972, when she was in her sixties. She died in Girona in 1983.

Mercè Rodoreda author photo

Mercè Rodoreda

Like Rodoreda, the narrator in Garden by the Sea navigates through times of darkness and times of light as he tends to his flowers and trees. But while his own emotional state remains mostly steady, Rodoreda deftly employs him as a nucleus around which other characters’ sufferings revolve. Most of the novel exists as conversations between the narrator and the villa’s residents, who seek him out to air their problems, frustrations, and personal tragedies. An elderly couple visits and asks if he knows anything about their missing son. The stable manager vents about his unruly teenager. The neighbor wants advice for his own garden. And the narrator hears not just gossip but confessions of affairs, lost relatives, loveless marriages. Of one visitor he writes, “His eyes were beleaguered with a sadness I had never seen in anyone else’s eyes. It was almost imperceptible, but I sensed a perennial sorrow.”

But while Rodoreda’s narrator is frequently privy to the sufferings of other characters in the novel, he rarely offers them advice or tries to intervene and help their situations. In many cases, upon hearing about a character’s difficulties, the narrator doesn’t know what to say. A few times he even grows frustrated and wonders why he is so often sought out. And yet, his small house in the garden is a constant place of refuge and solace for many of the people at the villa, who talk through their sufferings with the narrator in a place free from judgment; a neutral ground. And the narrator’s belief that time heals all wounds is infectious—not just for the other characters in the novel, but also for the reader.

Rodoreda’s crowning achievement in Garden by the Sea is this character of the narrator. He takes advice from the plants he cultivates, loosening time’s grip on his life. But his is not an understanding that was arrived at easily; the final piece of his puzzle is achieved brilliantly through flashback—he has been deeply, indelibly marked by tragedy. Running underneath the surface of the novel is the tragic story of the narrator’s wife, Cecilia, whom the narrator describes as “tenderness itself.” His memories of her are powerfully evocative. In the first chapter, the narrator says, “Her loveliest feature was her hair: sun-golden, waterfall long. When I came back from the cemetery I pounded the eucalyptus until I bled … And at the moment of her death … the whole of me shattered.” These flashbacks emerge rarely and from otherwise ordinary conversations and descriptions, catching both the narrator and reader by surprise. Rodoreda’s stirring flashbacks demonstrate for us that the narrator is not the man he once was. Decades ago, he lived through the great tragedy of his life. Slowly, he has learned from his garden how to accept it. Now, in his own reserved and unique way, he imparts that knowledge onto the people around him. This is the essence of Garden by the Sea.

On one of my first days at the botanical garden, David pointed out to me the garden’s tallest tree: a southern red oak around 200 years old. “It’s at the end of its life now,” he admitted. “Doesn’t have much longer left.” I was still new at the time—I’d forgotten the way time works in gardens. I asked how much longer the tree had to live, expecting it to be a few months at most, but David told me it had somewhere between ten and fifteen years. When it died, a group of workers would come to remove it and then David would plant a new red oak, to watch over the gardens for another couple of centuries.

This image—a watchful, ancient tree—is the enduring image from Rodoreda’s work. At the end of the novel, the narrator and a neighbor walk for one last time through the garden. The neighbor says, “When these cypress trees are tall, you and I will have been beneath the earth for many years.” Our narrator’s response affirms what we’ve learned over the course of the novel: that it is not grief or joy that wins in the end, but time and its garden. As the narrator writes, “You know that my Cecilia died. Such is life. But while I’m here she won’t be gone, not completely … look at the garden now, this is the best hour, the best time to sense its vigor and capture its scent. One day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says…”


Anthony Cardellini is from Phoenix, Arizona. He studies creative writing at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he is the design editor for The Archive. His fiction has been published in Silk Road Review, Columbia Journal, The Drabble, and others. Connect with him on Twitter @a_cardellini.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on September 4, 2020 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

LITTLE ENVELOPE OF EARTH CONDITIONS, poems by Cori A. Winrock, reviewed by Charlotte Hughes

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 28, 2020 by thwackAugust 28, 2020

LITTLE ENVELOPE OF EARTH CONDITIONS
by Cori A. Winrock
Alice James Books, 85 pages
reviewed by Charlotte Hughes

Little Envelope Cover Art.jpgI read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions in late June, when COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in the world and the nation—and at home. The May 24th New York Times front page, which listed the names of the 100,000 American coronavirus victims—a very public display of mourning and grief—was at the forefront of my memory, as were the more personal ways that I was mourning the loss of traditions, previous ways of life, time spent with grandparents and my fellow high school students alike.

Throughout her second collection of lyric poems, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, Cori A. Winrock explores the experience of mourning: specifically, the idea that grief is an ongoing, recurring experience that never truly goes away. It is simultaneously universal and intensely personal. She tells a compelling narrative about the loss of a mother and child, spanning from the vast emptiness of space to an ambulance in a parking lot to a placid meadow on the edge of a lake. The incalculable physical distance this book of poetry travels mirrors the incalculable distance a grieving person must travel to get back to earth.

I admire the cohesion of theme throughout Little Envelope of Earth Conditions. The very first poem in the collection, “What Would Happen to Your Body in Space Without a Spacesuit,” is set in outer space, a lonely place of physical isolation:

                             We learn to sleep
with our hands in the dark

of strangers’ mouths, keep our heads singing
in hopes of bringing our lost

helmets back. How warmblooded
the moon must still seem when seen from the earth.

The speaker grieves for a “lost helmet” that cannot be recaptured in space, just like a lost life cannot be recaptured on earth. Not only does this poem discuss celestial bodies, such as “the moon,” but it also discusses physical bodies. The physical bodies in this poem are referred to by the third person, a collective, to show that there is company in grief.

Later in the collection, Winrock moves to another place of grief—this time on earth—with the strong, surreal images of “Love Poem in a Time of Ambulances.” There is confusion in the core narrative of this poem, to reflect the disorientation of grief:

……….O altar of resuscitation… the ambulance as ablaze as the virgin
……….mary’s heart. And so what if these are my marys
burning? Or that I meant to say
……….my mothers.”

And O to be the curve of the ambulance’s bones,
……….its frame picked to glittering
in the parking lot

This poem’s speaker takes on different perspectives when talking about the ambulance—on one hand, the ambulance is a religious object filled with live-saving importance, described as an “altar” burning “ablaze as the virgin Mary’s heart.” But on the other hand, the ambulance is an animalistic object, described as a monster with “bones” and a “picked … frame”. The confusion in this poem continues with confusion about bodies. The speaker is not sure to whom some of the bodies mentioned in this poem belong—are “marys” burning, or “mothers”?

In the collection’s last poem, “How to Preserve a Spacesuit,” Winrock has moved locations once more, not to an ambulance or the depths of outer space, but to a meadow at the edge of a lake.

………….+
The birds are whistling better stitches

……….+
into the wind—fastening us

+
to the meadow… where we kneel

+
to fill each spacesuit

……….+
with flowers then light

……….+
them on fire”

Cori A Winrock author photo

Cori A. Winrock

The + sign is used to explore the many alternate possibilities, or what-ifs in grief. Emily Dickinson used this sign in her poetry as well, to signal and explore alternate words, lines, or phrases. It’s interesting, too, that + resembles a sewing stitch; imagery and diction of sewing, of mending, of fixing the bond between mother and child are present throughout this poem. In it, the mother and child have reached the end of their journey; they are not in outer space anymore, but are connected, or stitched, to the earth. They even go to “fill each spacesuit / with flowers then light / them on fire,” indicating that they are at the end of their journey—spacesuits aren’t needed back on earth. Like the title mentions, the spacesuit is preserved—its use is pretty much over, but it’s not buried or thrown away. It’s still present—much like grief.

Winrock leaves the reader at this placid, earthly pond, at the end of an extensive journey. Her intricate narrative incorporates quotes, unusual punctuation, and facts about sewing, outer space and moon landings. I admire her skill in bringing specificity and lyricism to grief, an overwhelming emotion that might at first seem insurmountable, but little by little, stitch by stitch, can be mended.


Charlotte Hughes is a high school junior from Columbia, South Carolina. She has attended the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and is a reader for PANK. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Waxwing, PANK, and The UK Poetry Society, and has been honored by The Kenyon Review, Third Coast Magazine, Princeton University, and the Scholastic Writing Awards.

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 28, 2020 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

Cockfight, stories by María Fernanda Ampuero, reviewed by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 24, 2020 by thwackAugust 24, 2020

Cockfight
by María Fernanda Ampuero
translated by Frances Riddle
Feminist Press, 128 pages
reviewed by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

cockfight book jacketIn her debut short story collection, Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero takes an unflinching and intimate look into the turbulent homes and lives of Latin American women. By placing her powerful, moving stories in settings like violent domestic households or lower income neighborhoods, the characters in Ampuero’s Cockfight combat their situations with acts of bravery, loss, and love. As the characters seem to suffocate in their environments, there are acts of bravery, loss, and love. The idea of a happy family is a myth and men are depicted as lecherous, terrifying creatures of the night. The narrators often are maids, young girls, and women wrenched into horrifying situations such as forced incest, rape, and human trafficking.

The thirteen stories in this collection feature a myriad of women: some brave, many abused, and others fearful of all the men in their lives. From the beginning, readers are faced with the tragedy of what it means to be a woman in contemporary Ecuadorian society. One in four women in Ecuador face sexual violence, while the rape of young adolescent girls remains a large problem. In Cockfight, the first story, “Auction,” features a main character who is kidnapped while in a taxi and is about to be sold on the black market.  In another story, “Coro,” a black maid’s room is broken into by wealthy, light-skinned women and shows the racial and societal inequalities in Ecuador. In a third story, “Mourning,” a mother celebrates her husband’s death and her newfound freedom. In each of these stories, Ampuero unveils a hard truth: behind closed doors, even people in the highest levels of society are not immune to suffering. Her stories are constructed from a feminist lens by creating realistic depictions of women. These women aren’t helpless and blameless victims in need of a savior; they are flawed and completely capable of inflicting pain on others, whether it’s through belittling their maid, acts of defiance in order to survive, or wishing death upon someone.

“Monsters,” the second story in Cockfight, follows the narrator, her sister Mercedes, and the maid Narcisa, where they live a upper middle-class lifestyle attending a religious private school, but their parents are often absent in their lives. The story takes place over the course of six months, while they’re still preteens. Mercedes and the narrator watch horror movies every night, despite their parents disapproving of their hobby. These movies are often grotesque, depicting beatings and torture of women, or, in some cases, young girls, like the sisters, being brutally murdered.

In “Monsters,” Ampuero strips the three girls of their youth by showing them how cruel the world really is. For Mercedes and the narrator, they learn of the abuse of women through film, but they initially see it as fiction. Because they’re watching horror films, it doesn’t seem like anything similar could happen to them. They are two preteen girls who lack any real problems up the events of the story; the extent of their biggest woes tend to be against the nuns running their school. As the story begins to unfold, they learn that reality is harsh, just like a horror film. The maid, Narcisa, who is fourteen and not much older, gives them a grave warning:

“[Their] arms burned as [Narcisa] repeated that now [they] had to beware of the living more than the dead—that now [they] really had to be more afraid of the living than of the dead.”

It is then that the films they watched before, the ones that gave Mercedes nightmares, start to seep into reality.

María Fernanda Ampuero

The story immediately following “Monsters” is called “Griselda.” Set in a poor neighborhood, it is narrated by an unnamed little girl with an unforgiving and blunt way of seeing the world. The narrator tells the story of Miss Griselda, the local baker who makes amazing cakes, who is found one night in her home covered in blood. As the neighborhood ladies gossip about what could’ve gone down, the narrator is unassuming, seeing the world for the way it is: full of pain. While everyone calls Miss Griselda an alcoholic, the narrator notices how Miss Griselda’s daughter, Griseldita, tries to dismiss the incident and perpetuates rumors by screaming at the neighborhood women to “mind their own business.”

Cockfight is an investigation of domestic spaces, women’s bodies, and the meaning of a coming-of-age story, one that strips the male gaze and sees the world for how it is: ugly, grotesque, brutal.

In “Monsters,” the conflict directly appears in the domestic space of the narrator, while in “Griselda” the violence is only seen from a distance and from an outsider’s perspective. Those who are from a lower class lack the privilege of being naïve about how the world truly is; this is shown through the narrator’s blunt, almost uncaring, style about what happened to Miss Griselda. Upon the loss of Miss Griselda’s cakes to the neighborhood, the narrator only says, “I didn’t give a damn about cakes anymore.” She watches the scene of the crime calmly, taking note of the growing bloodstained sheet and Griselda’s pushed aside panties. However, in “Monsters,” the narrator and her sister, Mercedes, are unable to describe their trauma. There is an absence of detail–it is only written that Mercedes screams upon seeing what’s happening. The lack of information about what’s truly going on in this story shows the disconnect between the narrator and reality, because what they witness is something they’ve only seen in movies.

Ampuero is unafraid in this stunning debut collection. She takes the language of suffering and abuse and turns it into a memorial for the living. While these are stories of tragedy, they offer an insight to the various issues plaguing Ecuadorian women. Cockfight is an investigation of domestic spaces, women’s bodies, and the meaning of a coming-of-age story, one that strips the male gaze and sees the world for how it is: ugly, grotesque, brutal.


Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Corvid Queen, and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. You can find her at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.squarespace.com

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 24, 2020 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS, a young adult novel by Samantha Mabry, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 21, 2020 by thwackAugust 21, 2020

TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS
by Samantha Mabry
Algonquin Young Readers
288 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Tigers Not Daughters book jacketSamantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds.

What stood out to me while reading Tigers, Not Daughters was how colorful and tangible each of the Torres sisters is. Their characterization is well-rounded, Mabry vividly telling the story through the individual perspectives of each sister, as well as including a fourth perspective of a character that watches them from afar. Each sister is unique in not just who they are, but in how they grieve over the loss of Ana.

Jessica, the oldest of the newly-rendered trio, bears the weight of the entire Torres family on her shoulders, a weight that used to be Ana’s to carry. Jessica deeply admires her sister, so in her absence she willingly assumes the role of the head of the household: taking care of their good-for-nothing father, Rafe, looking out for her younger sisters, and working at the local pharmacy to help put food on the table and keep the roof over their heads. But grief warps Jessica’s admiration of Ana into an unhealthy emulation of her. To mourn the loss of her sister Jessica tries to become her sister. As Mabry writes, “She was wearing Ana’s lipstick, a dangerous shade of near-hot pink, as well as a bluebonnet blue sundress that used to belong to her older sister. It was several sizes too big and swallowed her up.” I love Mabry’s description of Ana’s clothes “swallowing” Jessica up because it serves more than to show what she looks like, it describes how Jessica feels. Jessica is stifled by Ana’s absence, and mimicking her sister leaves her empty with no identity to claim for herself. This lack of personhood results in Jessica’s second tell-tale trait: her anger. The author writes that “Jessica was mean because she was so full of life that it chafed her from the inside out.”

Samantha Mabry

Iridian is the second-oldest of the sisters, a quiet girl who Mabry describes as someone who “never went anywhere without three things: a worn-out paperback copy of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, a black-and-white composition notebook, and a peacock blue ink pen.” Ana’s death causes her to seek refuge in the books Ana left behind, and she tries to process her emotions through writing stories in her notebook. What I find interesting about Iridian is how Mabry describes so much of her character through her name alone: she’s observant to a fault but her pain allows her to only see what she wants to see, shutting out everything else and using her imagination to fill in the rest. Iridian internalizes her grief, coming across as cold, unfeeling, and stoic; but in reading the book further I realized that the opposite of this was true. To quote the book, “She felt everything—too much.” Iridian hides so much of herself within the pages of books because, without Ana, Mabry writes, “the world seemed so hard for her to live in.”

Rosa is the youngest of the three, an adventurous spirit who finds solace in nature among the animals. It was Ana who discovered that Rosa’s love of animals is something more, something akin to magic, and she continues to be in the company of creatures after Ana’s death. To honor Ana’s memory Rosa communicates with animals, particularly fireflies. She’s described as “[wanting] the creatures of this world to know they were being heard.” I find Rosa’s character special in that, despite being the youngest, she’s actually the most level-headed of her sisters. I believe Rosa’s maturity comes from channeling her grief to build upon her unique gift. Ana taught Rosa to love her abilities, thus she spends her time doing what she enjoys. Through Ana’s past encouragement, Rosa gains a unique piece of herself in Ana’s absence, while her sisters lose parts of themselves.

Mabry spins this modern ghost story with a fierce yet subtle magic that courses through her words, each sentence coming together like an incantation—filled with intent, purpose, and emotion.

Mabry spins this modern ghost story with a fierce yet subtle magic that courses through her words, each sentence coming together like an incantation—filled with intent, purpose, and emotion. Mabry is no stranger to the fundamental tenet of writing: “show, don’t tell,” which makes the story so riveting. Ana’s haunting spurs a series of events that are all connected, and the author reveals the true reason behind Ana’s return by employing classic storytelling techniques.

Rosa is the first of the sisters who learns of Ana’s return—noticing an abundance of fireflies in the evening, symbolic of her sisterly bond with Ana. Iridian’s copy of The Witching Hour foreshadows the haunting of the Torres sisters nicely, Mabry even hinting at the book’s ending: “at the end of The Witching Hour, the ghost wins.” Between the perspectives of Rosa, Iridian, and Jessica lies a fourth narrative—a quiet observer in the Torres sisters’ tale, reminiscent of the chorus of a Greek tragedy. The narrator is privy to the lives of the sisters, offering a near-omniscient perspective that adds a refreshing depth to the story. The author teases the identity of the fourth narrator with contextual clues, such as “We were the first people to witness Ana come back as a ghost, and we considered ourselves lucky.” Mabry sprinkles the tiniest details that help move the story along like breadcrumbs to follow, and near the end of the book I was delighted to discover who the mysterious narrator was.

In their pain each Torres sister holds onto a piece of Ana for themselves, each one believing that they love Ana more than the others. Grief is a personal, individualized struggle that Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa know all too well, so much so that their own pain cleaves them apart. Ana is supposed to be the glue that holds them all together, so who are they without her? But the beauty of the Torres sisters’ bond is that it’s forged in this loss. Ana’s death and the return of her ghost forces them to lean on each other, to cleave back to one another in order to protect themselves from the wrath of their older sister.

I particularly enjoyed how Mabry conveys the story’s overarching theme: the power of sisterhood. She explores this topic both through the loss of Ana and through the lens of toxic masculinity. With Ana gone the sisters try to find comfort, solace, and healing in the men that surround them, but to no avail. The men in their lives are self-serving, twisting Ana’s death to fuel their own desires and stroke their own egos. Their father is so crippled by the loss of his oldest daughter that he neglects the needs of Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa. Mabry writes that “the weight of [his] neediness was heavy enough to crush all of the Torres sisters.” The boys that hang out in the house across the street always watch the sisters from afar but would hardly intervene to help them in their time of need. Somehow they think of themselves as the sisters’ “protectors,” the author quips, “which was a silly thing all boys thought.”

I loved how the strength of sisterhood is reinforced through the symbolism of the spotted hyena that escapes from the zoo as a result of Ana’s haunting. Spotted hyenas live in matriarchal communities where the females are bigger than the males, stronger than the males, and all rank higher than the highest-ranking male. Female hyenas are also vicious killers who will hunt together and do whatever it takes to protect the other females in their cackle. Mabry is very intentional in her symbolism, as the hyena’s presence is Ana’s way of sending a message to her sisters that they must always stick together.

Tigers, Not Daughters is more than a modern ghost tale. The triumph of this story lies in the rawness in which the tale of the Torres sisters is told. The sisters’ loss is delicate yet ferocious, at times whispering through the pages, other times roaring to be heard. Mabry explores the depths and tenderness of grief and longing through her wonderful characterization of the Torres sisters. And her story shows us that there is something to be learned from both the literal and figurative ghosts of the past, so long as you take the time to listen.


Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 21, 2020 in reviews, young adult fiction reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 7, 2020 by thwackAugust 7, 2020

THE SPORT OF THE GODS
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Signet Classics, 176 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacketFor the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy to forget that you’re at nature’s mercy. Let the clouds decide whether or not you get to read uninterrupted. Subject to this force, you may more easily understand what the Hamilton family endures in this novel. As deceits and misfortunes pile on top of each other, the Hamiltons decide that nature can’t help but rain down upon them. Their breakdown is more than plain bad luck can explain, so they know that they are fighting, “against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.”

Even if you haven’t heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, you’ve likely read lines of his poetry. Maya Angelou immortalized his poem “Sympathy” when she borrowed a line for the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Discussing her influences, Angelou lauded Dunbar in the same breath as Shakespeare. Dunbar was born to former slaves in Ohio in 1872, right in the middle of the Reconstruction era. He began writing seriously as a teenager, the only Black student in his high school. He had some early publishing help from his friends Wilbur and Orville Wright (yes, those Wright Brothers) before publishing his first poetry collection, Oak and Ivy. From this collection’s success, Dunbar launched a prolific career that spanned over a dozen poetry collections, three short story collections, and a handful of novels. In nearly all of his work, he seamlessly transitioned between standard and vernacular English, a feat that earned him both praise and criticism. Perhaps most miraculously, he produced all of this work amid recurring bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism. Dying at the age of 33, Dunbar left behind a sprawling body of work that’s yet to be properly explored.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar

At the height of his literary power, Dunbar wrote The Sport of the Gods over the course of a month in 1901. The narrative centers on the Hamilton family, with parents Berry and Fannie and their children Joe and Kitty. Berry, a former slave, works as a butler for Maurice Oakley, a man who believes that, “there must be some good in every system, and it was the duty of the citizen to find out that good and make it pay.” Despite many years of loyal work, Berry Hamilton is expendable to Maurice. This tenuous relationship comes to a head when Maurice’s brother claims his money has been stolen. After years of saving, Berry happens to have amassed a fortune roughly equal to the amount that was stolen. For Maurice, this circumstantial evidence is enough to ensure that Berry is sentenced to ten years of hard labor.

With Berry’s good name defaced, the Hamilton family is ostracized from their community. They regroup and head north:

They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world. New York. It had an alluring sound.

The Hamiltons’ move to New York represents an overlooked moment in American history: the southern diaspora before the one we now consider the Great Migration. Before World War I and the Red Summer drove African Americans north, and before the Harlem Renaissance redefined literature, music, and art, there was a thriving Black population in New York City laying the groundwork. Dunbar’s novel introduces us to a turn of the century New York that contemporary authors like Edith Wharton never touched. Joe and Kitty, being young and ambitious, both make connections and find success working in music clubs. For the first time in a long time, the Hamiltons seem to be on the rise.

Even if you haven’t heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, you’ve likely read lines of his poetry. Maya Angelou immortalized his poem “Sympathy” when she borrowed a line for the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Only Fannie, the matriarch, can see the shadow still looming over the family. She comes the closest to forming a theory for the Hamiltons’ suffering. Fannie can’t bring herself to be happy for Kitty or Joe because she sees them being corrupted, commodified, and used by their friends and employers. From the moment she lays eyes on a music club, she sees it as, “a social cesspool generating a poisonous miasma and reeking with the stench of decayed and rotten  moralities.” The life they’ve built in New York, successful as it may seem, is built on the same shaky foundation that crumbled under Berry. No matter where they are, north or south, they can never let themselves get too comfortable. At any moment, the people whom they trust may turn on them, just like Maurice turned on Berry, and the Hamilton family will collapse again.

Reducing The Sport of the Gods down to its key themes may give the impression that the novel is overwhelmingly pessimistic, perhaps even nihilistic. This is a dangerous assumption. The novel does carry the weight of the Hamiltons’ grief, but it’s not hopeless. After all, both Berry and his children are able to find precarious levels of success. Dunbar balances two nearly opposing ideas. On one hand, he shows that success for African Americans is possible in spite of the racist systems that hinder it; on the other, he claims that this success isn’t success at all if others can take it away so easily. In this way, The Sport of the Gods vacillates between comedy and tragedy so frequently that the dividing line becomes useless. The overall effect may appear pessimistic, but it’s the productive kind of pessimism that mobilizes action. Joe eventually notices this, realizing that, “his horizon had been very narrow, and he was angry that it was so.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar died more than a hundred years ago, but one must still mourn a brilliant writer whose career was cut short. It would be decades before authors like Richard Wright and Ann Petry would take up the mantle and raise Dunbar’s questions with the same kind of intensity.

Still, it’s difficult to read The Sport of the Gods and not wish for more. More, not because the novel is incomplete, but because it raises the kind of high-stakes questions that linger and nag long after it’s finished. Paul Laurence Dunbar died more than a hundred years ago, but one must still mourn a brilliant writer whose career was cut short. It would be decades before authors like Richard Wright and Ann Petry would take up the mantle and raise Dunbar’s questions with the same kind of intensity. Had he lived longer, maybe his subsequent novels would have shepherded us towards a satisfying answer, but we can only speculate. As it stands, Dunbar’s work is an important literary bridge between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance, bringing the whole picture into much clearer focus.


Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

Thwack this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Published on August 7, 2020 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 15, 2020 by thwackAugust 5, 2020

CLOTEL, or, The President’s Daughter
by William Wells Brown
Penguin Classics, 320 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Clotel book jacket

Click here to purchase this book

In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. But plenty of people already knew that. William Wells Brown knew this beyond a reasonable doubt when he published Clotel in 1853, a novel that imagines the lives and tribulations of Jefferson’s slave-born daughters. The characters are all fictional, but Brown’s creative liberties stray little from reality. Masters frequently made concubines of their slaves, so why would Jefferson be any exception? Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” were a farce in Brown’s eyes, because only in antebellum America could a president’s daughter be born in chains.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity. Within its pages, Clotel mingles some of the best elements of each of these authors. Brown has Hawthorne’s critical eye for religion, Melville’s encyclopedic dedication to facts, and Whitman and Dickinson’s curiosity for human lives. At the same time, Brown writes with an authoritative talent for social commentary that places him in a category all his own.

William Wells Brown portrait, courtesy of WikipediaBrown was already an established name by the time he wrote Clotel. His memoir, the Narrative of William W. Brown, was one of the best selling ex-slave narratives of the 1840s, second only to that of Frederick Douglass. He wrote his debut novel while living in exile in England to escape the grasp of the Fugitive Slave Act. He returned to the United States to lecture on abolition across the country, all while continuing to write plays, memoirs, and other nonfiction. Clotel’s influence can be seen scattered throughout the American canon. Brown’s depictions of passing, “tragic mulatto” characters, and other racial themes would be further developed by contemporaries like Frank J. Webb, later writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, and much later figures of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

The novel may be titled for Clotel, but it divides its attention equally between Clotel, her mother Currer, and her sister Althesa. After Jefferson’s death, his daughters and Currer are sold to the highest bidders, by which point their relation to the former president has been ignored. The family is separated and spread out across the South. Clotel and Althesa are sold to men who intend to take them as illegitimate wives, while Currer has been sold to a tyrannical plantation owner. As each navigates the unique circumstances of their enslavement, each woman swims against the current to try to reunite the family.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy. Clotel and Althesa’s “husbands” pretend that their marriages are genuine and loving, but they quickly relegate their “wives” to servants the moment the opportunity to marry a white woman arises. Masters turn to religion to justify the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but conveniently ignore scriptures that decry it. Brown dismantles the idea that the United States was a free nation for anyone besides white men, writing,

They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for “poor Ireland;” they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of the brave.” They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death.

As much as Brown rebukes white Americans, he also provides a valuable model for allyship. When Currer is sold to Reverend Peck, we are introduced to his abolitionist daughter Georgiana. She, unlike her father, sees slavery for the moral and religious atrocity that it is. Adhering to her principles, she badgers her father as he stubbornly ignores her. Her father’s death comes as a relief to her because she then gains the authority to free his slaves. Yet, Brown tactfully dodges portraying Georgiana as a white savior. Far from it, Brown is precise in noting that the slaves, through their own grit, saved themselves. Georgiana is an example of how whites could be helpful to that end, but are by no means the primary actors.

After Clotel is sold by her “husband,” she escapes and traverses the country while passing for a white man. She remains intent on finding her mother and sister, but she is obstructed along the way. The people she meets give the novel room to digress to describe the systems and circumstances that added to slaves’ oppression. Brown does not shy away from incorporating real examples of lynchings or slave captures to paint a grim portrait of the South, often citing newspaper clippings to ground his point. At one turn, Brown even describes how an epidemic of yellow fever in 1831 New Orleans disproportionately impacted slaves as they were forced to fill in for whites who had fallen ill. Soon, once tensions rose, protests caught fire, prompting Brown to ask,

Did not the American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots—we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels. Had we succeeded, we would have been patriots too. Success makes all the difference.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure. Brown is always clear and concise in his demands. Even today, as oppressive systems have evolved into new forms, Brown’s words remain enduring directives for equality. In a philosophical moment, he describes how the first slaves were brought to Virginia only a few months before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. The passengers of each charted two halves of America that would run parallel to each other for centuries. Four hundred years later, the question Brown raises in Clotel still remains unanswered: “When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end?”