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

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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].

 

 

 

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

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
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 ...
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PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
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 ...
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THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
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 ...
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THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
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 ...
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CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
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 ...
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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
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 ...
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SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
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 ...
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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
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 ...
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SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

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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.

 

 

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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. 

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.”

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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

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

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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.”

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

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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].

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

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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

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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?”

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].

THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING, a novel by Joseph Fasano, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

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THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING
by Joseph Fasano
Platypus Press, 272 pages (forthcoming, September 1, 2020)

reviewed by Michael McCarthy 

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing cover art. A blue-green shape against a black background with white text

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In the moral universe of poet Joseph Fasano’s debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, death lurks in every corner of life. A father, bereaved of his wife, must journey through the teeming forests of British Columbia and hunt a fabled mountain lion, to him the very “mind of the wild.” Three years ago, it mauled his son, the father powerless to save him. Now, as he narrates his monomaniacal fight for survival, the hunt for the mountain lion becomes an obsession, borne of unfathomable grief, to exact revenge on a world that has stolen everything he loved.

It is a dramatic book, straddling the sentimental and the brutal. Accordingly, it divides each chapter into two sections, one to the hunt and the other to his marriage. While he recalls memories of his wife to last him through the cold and deadly wilderness, the memories end inevitably, as he fears his hunt soon will, in death. Loss is the overpowering theme of his life. When he returns to the woods to avenge his son’s death, he is chased by wolves and forced to eat snow, and he must reckon with the possibility that there are some things a man cannot save.

I use the word “man” deliberately. Despite its intentions, Dark Heart is characteristically masculine. For all the mystical poeticism layered over the hunt, it embodies a Hemingway-esque male fantasy. What’s more virile than roughing it alone in the wilderness, outfoxing ravenous beasts and still more ravenous hunters? While it strives for something nobler than its subject, its failure to address the gendered aspect of the father’s hunger for revenge chains the novel to the ground whenever it tries to soar.

Alongside his wife’s death, there is a more latent loss, another strike at his masculinity. Just as he lost his wife, he lost also his role as husband. This complicates his marital reflections in the wilderness. Is he remembering her or recreating her in his own image? Regardless, she comes across as a bland, incomplete counterpart to an obscenely masculine hero. He hunts; she dances. He shows his son how to build a house; she brings them lemonade. He gets to go on wild adventures; she tends to house chores. To his credit, he seems at least somewhat aware of this inequality. At one point, he recalls this exchange with a premarital lover:

“You are not ready.”
“For what?”
“To hold someone and not—” she searched for the words “—not make of her what you need.”

This could describe either Fasano or his protagonist.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize Dark Heart solely by its refusal to buck these misogynistic tropes. Rather, they read as something the novel struggles against. The narrative gropes for higher meaning through magisterial prose, equally concerned with philosophical abstractions as with blood-and-guts reality, and though it never fully succeeds, it reaches heights most books dare not consider. The prose alone can bring you to tears. It challenges, cleanses, saddens, lifts, pierces, and consoles, sometimes within a single paragraph. Take this passage as emblematic of the atmosphere Fasano conjures:

It was pleasant once to track in the early autumns, the chickadees and the violet-green swallow beginning always to sing their unfinished praise, the heron that always came north out of its range to cross once a season over the valley and disappear over the pines to god knows where. […] I’d loved it, too, the purring and caterwauling of the animal itself, and in the thaw of youth I’d believed in the myth that we were brothers, that if you hunger for something strongly enough in the night, strongly and without pride or malice, you become it, and whichever one of you is chosen to fall will yield itself willingly and truly in the nature of things, as a body at the high noon of its truth gathers back the vastness of its shadow.

If this language captivates you, so will the entire novel. Fasano is relentless in maintaining his narrator’s dense, hypnotic, imaginative voice. It accounts for almost all of the novel’s emotional range. Just as it details the father’s gory injuries and self-administered treatments, it gives way to moments of bracing tenderness. By now, the likeness to Moby-Dick should be obvious. (Really, just substitute a white whale for a mountain lion and a lost leg for a lost son.) When it isn’t bogged down in masculine reveries, it earns the comparison, describing universal themes with invigorating passion: mortality, grief, hope, darkness. Whether the prose succeeds in elevating the novel to the lofty existential plane it aspires to, the reader must decide.

Joseph Fasano author headshot

Joseph Fasano

If, in fact, the reader does decide. I still haven’t made heads or tails of the novel weeks after finishing it. Did I enjoy reading it? Frankly no. Has it fascinated me? More than almost any other book I can recall. It seems to me that this is how the novel was meant to be read. That is, not read but reckoned with. You must yield to its intense vision and follow the father’s voice to its last end. The novel doesn’t captivate you. It takes you prisoner.

After a story shadowed over by death, it ends on a note not devoid of hope. Fasano allows his protagonist to escape the book’s endless shadow, the darkness to lift, in a way utterly surprising yet perfectly fitting. Nevertheless, I lament the much richer novel he didn’t write. Clearly, he can write powerfully about anything he sets his mind to. I just wish he had devoted his capacious artistry to deconstructing the limiting gender roles that limit his own narrative. I find myself repeating a verse of a poem the narrator’s wife reads to him: “I wish what I wished you before, but harder.”

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.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, a novel by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by Claire Kooyman

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ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
by Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press, 256 pages
reviewed by Claire Kooyman

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous cover art. A black and white photograph of arms embracing a body

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Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong’s writing is steeped in memories, the history of which sometimes precedes him chronologically. This was true of his poetry in the collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and it is also true of his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, recently released by Penguin Press. This novel is a recursive exploration of the path memories take through a family. The narrator’s life is impacted by the traumas his mother and grandmother suffered before he was born. As a very young child, Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, learns quickly that not all authority figures can be trusted absolutely, and that even unconditional love has flaws. Throughout the novel, Vuong illustrates that we are all sharing space with the past, even as we exist in the present.

Little Dog (a nickname given to Vuong’s narrator by his grandmother as a way to make him seem less enticing to evil spirits who might steal him) writes to his mother as a way to confess and relate to her as an adult. His mother knows few words in her native Vietnamese or in English and cannot read, so she will never know what he is saying. The epistolary style of the novel, then, is ironic. Perhaps Little Dog knows that this is the only way he can explain himself to his mother, even if she will never understand; this style allows the narrator to express freely what they cannot discuss face-to-face. He brings up things his mother might not understand, like the racial heritage of American celebrities, and things too painful to discuss, even with time behind them. Even if most readers can’t directly relate to Little Dog’s Vietnamese immigrant heritage or the challenges of being gay, many children and parents feel unable to truly express themselves to the other, even without the burden of language standing in the way. This novel is like a book of secrets your mother or son might never tell you.

As a reader, one might question whether On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel at all. The writing fluidly switches from more traditional storytelling to something that resembles Vuong’s poetry. Is this a novel-length poem, or a novel written like poetry? He uses line breaks that a prose editor might assume were typos in a different work:

For summer. For your hands

were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there.

Ocean Vuong author photo

Ocean Vuong

This passage about what Trevor is to Little Dog blends the best of poetry and prose beautifully. He disregards paragraphs and narrative for strong images and emotion; faced with white space, we linger on Little Dog’s hands reaching for Trevor the way that the narrator himself does in his memory. We feel the time he spent with Trevor, without it being explained to us in longform.

Vuong’s speedy switching between topics also evokes his poetry. Much of this novel reminds me of his poem, Aubade with Burning City—not just because it deals with fallout from the Vietnam War, but because of the stylistic way Vuong approaches his material. He approaches the themes of war, identity, and belonging from many angles, shows us the individual threads, and then weaves them together until the reader sees it was always one large tapestry. From “Aubade with Burning City:

Milkflower petals on the street
……………………………………………..like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright …

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
………………Open, he says.
………………………………………..She opens.

The juxtaposed images found in this poem (milkflower petals, pieces of fabric, the bubbling teacup) are like the many disparate topics of Little Dog’s letters: Tiger Woods’s undiscussed Asian heritage, his grandfather’s significance in his life, his agreement with his mother about how hard it is to be different in America. In the novel, the sections are broken up by the different subject matter. But then, the themes coalesce: in both the novel and the poem, the present American influence is linked to mistrust and racism. Tiger Woods is part Asian, and a product of the Vietnam War—and Paul, Little Dog’s grandfather, is connected to him solely because of war, too. Much of the novel does this: takes disparate pieces and slowly pushes them together, until the reader can see the similarities.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous follows Little Dog as he grapples with his family’s identity, and the identity of being Vietnamese in a culture that attempted to destroy Vietnam. As if that weren’t enough, he also struggles to come to terms with being gay during the nineteen-nineties. His relationship with Trevor echoes his grandmother and grandfather’s during the Vietnam War: an interracial relationship with shame, remixed for the modern era. Like Little Dog, Trevor has pieces of himself that feel impossible to reconcile. Home is not a refuge for him; Trevor’s alcoholic father represents the popular opinion of a country and culture that do not understand either them, or gay sub-culture. Little Dog writes:

I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

In the third section of the novel, an adult Little Dog returns to where he grew up to attend a funeral. In this portion, he also discusses the death of his grandmother, and the return of her ashes to Vietnam. Again, we see Vuong approaching the same theme from a different angle: many versions of the word home are returned to in this section—literally, the physical locations of Little Dog’s own home, and Vietnam, the original home of his family, and, less tangibly, the concept of home, of memory. He repeatedly says, “I remember the table” in this third section—sometimes referring to specific tables from his memory, and sometimes just discussing the idea of constructing, or reconstructing a memory.

Little Dog reminds us that memory is an active process, like art. Neither exists in a vacuum, but both are instead little universes unto themselves that are actively created by individuals with pasts. With much effort and introspection on Vuong’s part, they flicker, alive for a moment: briefly gorgeous in the mind of the reader.

Claire Kooyman HeadshotClaire Kooyman lives in Boulder, Colorado with her cats, Tom and Finn. She graduated from University of Colorado Boulder in 2018 with a degree in creative writing. She was recently published for the first time in Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk. She enjoys the view of the mountains from her balcony, and the sound of geese flying overhead.

CLEANNESS, a novel by Garth Greenwell, reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith 

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CLEANNESS
by Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages
reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

Cleanness Book JacketThe week I read Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s sophomore novel, I didn’t go outside. This was in Brooklyn during the third week of April, 2020—at the peak of COVID-19 cases in New York. We were warned to stay inside as much as possible, a difficult feat in a small one-bedroom apartment with a partner and two cats. I found myself lying about, staring at the ceiling, or cleaning, or reading, or cleaning some more. I found myself at odds: to go outside or stay in? To release my pent-up energy or do what I was told? Of course, in a case like this, staying in was the only conscionable thing to do. But the thought remained and followed me through my reading of Cleanness.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time. With deft and expressive writing, Greenwell questions our understanding of these concepts. What does it mean to be dirty? What does it mean to be clean? To go outside or stay in. To stay in or go outside. Perhaps they are just two facets of the same thing.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Cleanness takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria, which will ring a bell for those who have read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You. Both books follow the same unnamed narrator as he navigates life in this foreign country, searching for meaning, for feeling, for something he cannot quite name. And if What Belongs to You read as a kind of looking-in (at the narrator’s life, his past and his present), Cleanness reads more like an opening up: it peels back the layers that remained hidden in Greenwell’s first novel. We get a messier and even deeper sense of who the narrator is.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time.

The novel is arranged into a lieder cycle (fitting with the narrator’s love of music and opera). Each chapter is sequenced to fit a specific pattern. The first section, comprised of three chapters, presents the narrator in three roles: as a teacher, as a sexual partner, and as a resident of Bulgaria. The second section explores his complex relationship with a Portuguese man known simply as R. The final section is set up similarly to the first, but in reverse order.

At times Cleanness feels less like a novel than a collection of short stories all concentrated on the different facets of a single man. And it’s true. Each of the nine stories in the book could stand alone, but together, they form a whole person.

The “separateness” of each chapter is no accident. It serves an important purpose: from the moment the novel begins, the reader is at the heart of the story. There is no single climax in this work, but rather climaxes throughout the ebb and flow of the narrator’s experiences. Greenwell is one of those rare authors who is not concerned with what the novel structure demands of a story, but rather how a story demands to be structured.

Garth Greenwell author photo

Garth Greenwell

And it’s not only the novel’s structure that mirrors the story it tells. Greenwell’s prose is intensely introspective, so much so that even in scenes with conversation, we still feel completely inside the narrator’s head. This is in part due to a complete lack of dialogue markers, which gives the novel a stream-of-consciousness quality and a poetic awareness that makes sense for Greenwell (who is a poet first and foremost). Greenwell’s prose elevates the narrator’s character, drawing him in sharper and sharper detail as we move along.

And here we are, back at the beginning. Back to the burning, acidic question that haunts every facet of the narrator’s life. What is cleanness? Is it wisdom that he can impart to his students? Is it connection to a country despite the fact that it doesn’t accept his queerness? Is it love? Is it the absence of shame? He struggles with desire, which looms over him, shameful and secret. Sex, for the narrator, is particularly resonant.

The sex in Cleanness is honest and explicit, sometimes violent, erotic, and brimming with meaning. And Greenwell doesn’t shy away from the messiness of sex. In reading these sections I was reminded of a long paragraph in the middle of What Belongs to You, in which the narrator recounts coping with an abusive, hateful, homophobic father in his adolescent years, absorbing his hatred and turning it inward. In Cleanness we see the grit and grime of this past displayed in sexual encounters. “I had never whipped anyone before,” the narrator explains, “but that was how my father had done it, taking the strap to us, as he said, that was how he punished us.”

He grapples with the desire to be punished and the desire to punish, feeling ashamed of both. The reader feels that pain and confusion explicitly. “Was it joy or defiance or despair, I wanted to know where one ended and the others began,” the narrator thinks. There is a constant push and pull, either a resistance or a giving in.

For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

In the middle section, the narrator finds a release, a kind of brightness, in his relationship with R. About sex with R. he says: “Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.”

But while he is grateful for the liberation from shame that R. provides him, the narrator still feels a dark longing. “I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me,” he says, “I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of…I wanted to ruin…the person he had made me.”

It is this inner war that makes Cleanness so relatable. For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

At one point the narrator touches upon something, a release of shame, perhaps temporary, but there nonetheless. A stray dog comes to him in a moment of vulnerability for them both. It is a dog he knows well, and she wants to be let in. “She was dirty,” the narrator thinks. Then, in a moment of forgiveness, for himself, for the dog, he adds, “but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry.”

Nikki Caffier Smith HeadshotNikki Caffier Smith is a writer living in Brooklyn. She received a BA in Creative Writing from The Gallatin School at New York University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Typishly and Awakened Voices Magazine, and a short story of hers will soon be featured on Kaleidocast Podcast.

 

 

 

Sources:

Jones, Alden. “The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell.” The Rumpus.net, 1 Feb. 2016, therumpus.net/2016/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-garth-greenwell/.

Kerziouk, Olga. “An Introduction to Bulgarian Literature.” European Studies Blog, 20 June 2016, blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/an-introduction-to-bulgarian-literature.html.

Wolahan, Emily. “5 Bulgarian Writers You Don’t Want to Miss: Center for the Art of Translation: Two Lines Press.” Center for the Art of Translation | Two Lines Press, 23 Feb. 2017, www.catranslation.org/blog-post/5-bulgarian-writers-you-dont-want-to-miss/.

WHAT I CARRY, a YA novel by Jennifer Longo, reviewed by Aja Todd

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WHAT I CARRY
by Jennifer Longo,
Random House Books for Young Readers, 336 pages
reviewed by Aja Todd 

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

Cover art for What I CarryFrom the very first moment of her existence, Muiriel was born alone. Found abandoned at a medical center with no parents to claim her, Muiriel has lived in foster care her entire life. But blessed with a book of survival by naturalist John Muir and her experience in nearly twenty different foster homes, seventeen-year-old Muiriel knows she will not let her past dictate her future:

Aging out is terrifying.

Still…I can’t wait.

I can’t help believing I will be okay. Maybe I’m setting myself up for spectacular failure, but all this time I’ve been so lucky; if I am as perfect as I can be, I bet I can stave off the likely possibility of being homeless within a year, or pregnant, or dead. Outcomes for kids who age out with no family are mostly a nightmare, and it makes me furious. I refuse to let the stupid circumstance of my birth ruin me. I am a Muir, for Christ’s sake! Not in meaningless blood, but in what truly matters. I believe that the nurses who held me and named me could tell John Muir’s singular life force is in me and in our shared name, and I will end my childhood the way it began: alone. Finally free to live and take care of myself in the wilderness of the wide world.  

I hope.

In her latest novel, What I Carry, Jennifer Longo brings us on a heart-warming journey of independence, love, and vulnerability. While it can be difficult for anyone as a teenager to find their place in the world, Longo delicately conveys what it’s like for a girl who never had a solid foundation to start with. For Muiriel, she believes her only true home is the unchanging outdoors —the forest, the night, the stars  — and the only foundation she can ever rely on is herself.

That is, until Muiriel meets her final foster mother, Francine.

Across Seattle waters on a thirty-minute ferry, Muiriel appears to find paradise in the cozy home of Francine. Unlike past caretakers, Francine’s interests are all too similar to hers. While others enforced rigid boundaries on Muiriel, Francine gives her something she’s never experienced before: freedom. Freedom to take her time and adjust to her surroundings, to explore her new town, to meet new people. To Muiriel, it all feels too good to be true. Despite her instincts to survive and disconnect from the world, Muiriel starts to find comfort with Francine who strives to understand her; she makes friends who like her for just who she is; she even gains an opportunity for the career of her dreams. There doesn’t appear to be anything holding her back from a promising future.

But it’s difficult to trust others; it’s even more difficult to trust happiness.

Jennifer Longo

Longo’s What I Carry wonderfully explores that specific, transitional moment in one’s life. A moment that isn’t pushed forward by external events, but the struggles within oneself. Throughout the novel, readers learn why Muiriel carries herself as she does, and why being presented with this new support system is all too strange for her to accept. Too often in fiction, characters in foster care are shown as victims rather than people who, like anyone else, are just trying to survive. Muiriel represents that survival. Her strong sense of justice, independence, cautious behavior, yet love for other people show what she needed to get through the rootless life she has had so far. And while readers may find this new home an obvious solution to Muiriel’s uncertain future, her experiences have proven the danger of staying, and it all may be too much of a risk to take.

The story of Muiriel teaches us the importance of learning someone’s circumstances before judgment, the patience pain needs to dull, and the strength that is needed not only to be independent but to depend on someone. Through the beauty of that small town, the comfort of Francine’s home, and the openness of new friends, Longo shows us the power of love beyond family ties.

Aja Todd HeadshotAja Todd is a growing writer and editor from Chicago. She  earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fiction at Columbia College Chicago, where her work can be seen in Columbia’s Hair Trigger anthologies. She worked at Cleaver Magazine as an editorial intern in Spring 2020.

TO THE BONE, poems by Angela Narciso Torres, reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

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TO THE BONE
by Angela Narciso Torres
Sundress Publications
e-chapbook, 34 pages
reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

To The Bone is a book about the particular sort of remembering that accompanies losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. The poet’s mother is brought tenuously, haltingly, on the page. A sense of slippage is accomplished through layering, repetitions, and fluctuating temporality to reveal how a disease of memory appears to the mind struggling to find shore in presence.

“If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.” So begins the first line of “If You Go To Bed Hungry”, a series of adages and if-then statements, the superstitions handed along by a mother, which establish place as memory, itself, or the act of remembering.

The next poem, “Sundawning”, is dedicated directly to her mother, Carmen. Here we enter the recurring sensory themes and motifs: the piano music, the scent of “guava and rust”, the mother’s hands on the piano, her voice singing kundimans. Pacing isn’t so set so much but stanza-length or white space but through the use and repetition of certain verbs, and this sort of verbed breath-making sets Torres’ poetic voice apart.

The use of italics to offset the mother’s words renders them stable, set apart from the unreliable shifting text. There is a sense in which italics also hallow these words like a song refrain; the italics tell us what to remember:

The sweetest meat clings—
she insists. Peels a mango.
Amber rivers training her elbows.
A trail of L’Air Du Temps wafts
in her wake.

The perfume, translated as Air of Time, and various scents, act as anchors through which the mother is held in place. Scent is our most animal memory, our strongest connection, our pheromonic drive, an elemental and intimate way of knowing, and Torres returns to certain scents as if to draw more from them.

Rosaries are recurrent motifs, whether in dreams (see “Sundowning”) or in the title, the frame itself, as in “Self-Portrait With Rosary Beads”:

I am olive wood,
carmelian, plastic, black onyx. Am rosebuds
pressed into fragrant spheres. Your heat
is my mask; your worry, my fire. Pick
your mystery.

Time, space, and personhood blur; the point of view is somewhere outside the narrator, in the air between daughter and mother. We see this in “The Immigrant Visits Her Mother,” a long stanza with tiny twists after enjambments, and the emptiness that seeks the italics of the mother’s voice–the one that was real. Insofar as Alzheimer’s asks one to recreate the absent mother, to fill the vessel they’d abandoned, the poem is an act of preservation that crumbles as it proceeds.

Even when using first-person, Torres rarely inserts herself into the poems; she is there as an archivist, a witness, a keeper of memories. There are multiple I’s. “Narrow Bed” is heartbreaking in its gaps, its chunks of white space, its details–a still-damp blue robe, “a narrow bed” in a row of narrow beds, “chenille slippers”, and “why am I here“–that existential question which acquires a different valence in the context of a disremembered life. This question is worse, somehow, in the mouth of amnesia, in the unmoored self.

Torres offers piano music as a language that hasn’t been lost between mother and daughter. In “Fugue and Prelude,” music serves as a metaphysical metronome, keeping time between the then of childhood and the now. The narrator marks time as “decades of preludes ahead”. In “What I Learned This Week”, the taut tercets circle the question of time–what time is, what it means to know in time:

……..Some say music memory
is the last to go. Still, I have no windfalls

for the empty baskets of my mother’s eyes.
When I returned from Manila, the peonies I’d left

in half-blossom were stunted by spring storms.
A bud that will not bloom is called a bullet.

Pain is carried in blossoms and botanical elisions. In this way, loss is personalized without the poet claiming it.

In “Recuerdo A Mi Madre”, the narrator watches her mother sleep when she was still intensely inhabited, still herself” as recognized by others. The poet continues:

……..I dipped my pen
in father’s tears. To know

my mother requires
the patience of a miner

carving amethyst from rock.
To know my mother

is to memorize
a labyrinth of longing.

Again there is “her guava scent” accompanied by piano music, “prayer and dirge”, and the longing, named this time, as labyrinth. There is no motion forward, only a circling with no relief or reprieve. There is no kenosis, no spiritual revelation–just the slow theft which becomes part of the seam of things.

Angela Narciso Torres

Torres grapples with difficult questions by using botanical and entomological metaphors as a sort of counterpoint to carry the weight. I loved “The Abscission Layer’s form–a diptych in two-columns, one column constructed of words from an encyclopedia article on leaf layers, the other column a loose collage of words from diagnosis, folk remedies, “the jagged calligraphy of twigs”. I read it vertically and horizontally several times, and found new things in each layer of this leafing. “Some Uses of Friction” approaches the issue of assisted living and her mother’s care by using data about insects, building a metaphor from cricket wings, to inhabit, rather than resolve, insoluble tension.

“Self-Portrait As Revision”, an anaphora of “I am” statements, offers the most exposed view of the narrator. The “I am” sets out a solid presence, a voice which can be held accountable, an active being rather than one who is acted upon. Since Alzheimer’s is a story of helplessness for all parties, and there is no bystander–no one who is not a victim– I value this poem’s attempt to speak for the poet, and how it shifts directly into “Sea Psalm”, which addresses a god in psalm form, both visually and lyrically. “Let me begin again, Lord.” In this revision, however, the poet returns to a reliance on something outside the self, a note of supplication.

The poet continues reaching towards her mother in “Pearl Diving”, a list poem in eight sections, through kundimans and rosaries. There is an image that haunts me in this poem–an image of the mother’s hands praying an “invisible” rosary, running her fingers along beads in the air. And “What Happens Is Neither” beginning nor ending. The loss continues in the land of remembering the mother whose memory no longer includes her husband.

There is no resolution, no revelation, no final reckoning. “Trees know best the now of things,” the poet says in the book’s final stanza. In the slight inversions of syntax, the use of botanical certainties, the absence of an inhabited, stable narrator, Torres leaves us with the mother’s words lined up like rosary beads to fondle again, again. It is difficult to write loss in Alzheimer’s without losing the integrity of the subject, and I admire Torres’ skill in keeping love entire without minimizing the cruelty of diseases which attack memory.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others.  More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.

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

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MINOR DETAIL
by Adania Shibli 
translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions Books, 144 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook
Buy this book on Bookshop.Org

Book cover for Minor Detail: Adania Shibli. Torn photograph of face over photograph of the desert.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 a challenge: how much can hinge upon one moment? How can a single moment of pain bridge the past to the present? 

Shibli, a novelist and academic, is one of the few contemporary chroniclers of the West Bank. Her writing is concise. All of her novels fall under two hundred pages, all of her sentences are pared down to the bare minimum. In describing her new novel, Shibli said that her writing philosophy boils down to, “what is written, and what should never be written.” Her careful narration is more than the iceberg strategy of implying a story beneath the surface. Instead, Shibli’s writing is in tension with what it cannot say. Information is cut out not because it’s useless, but because, like the sun, it’s too painful to look at directly. 

The novel is split into two nearly equal parts that mirror and distort each other. It begins in 1949 in the Negev Desert. Israel has just gained independence, but their military presence lingers, leaving an Israeli officer and his unit to comb the desert looking for anyone who can be deemed suspicious. The officer has no name or features. He’s given only enough detail to suggest a form from his outline. He is one man and he is fifty men, each more hostile than the last. Shibli’s narration puts him on a leash and scrutinizes his every move. After he’s brutally bitten by a vague “creature,” he sets out to kill every spider in his path. Was it a spider that gave him his wound? Probably not, but he can’t bring himself to heal without inflicting pain somewhere. It becomes a part of his routine. He lives, he eats, he breathes, he hates. 

Adania Shibli author photo

Adania Shibli

The officer’s penchant for hate becomes the fulcrum that pivots to the second act. Under the officer’s hand, the soldiers find a Bedouin camp, kill the inhabitants, and torture a young girl. Routine hate. So routine that, in the present day, a young woman is intrigued by the event because of, “the date it occurred, perhaps because there was nothing particularly unusual about the main details.” Enter a new, nameless representative: a Ramallah woman who pays more attention to outlines than the bodies that fill them. As she investigates this murder, pieces of 1949 (the desert, the officers, the spiders) bleed through time into her life. Her obsession with minor details from the past blind her from properly seeing the present. She travels from Palestine deep into Israel, retracing the Bedouin girl’s path, retracing her history, but never approaching an opportunity to rewrite it. 

The officer’s penchant for hate becomes the fulcrum that pivots to the second act. Under the officer’s hand, the soldiers find a Bedouin camp, kill the inhabitants, and torture a young girl. Routine hate. 

It’s from this repetition, this historical déjà vu, that emerges Shibli’s narrative control. The novel’s halves are linear in themselves, but their entanglement prevents them from ever being distinct. Time vacillates between the past and the present. Just as the events of the past shape the present, experiences from the present shape how we interrogate the past. A lot has changed since 1949. By land area, Palestine is a small fraction of what it used to be. But, as Shibli reminds us, the people are still there, and they are far from minor. The nations have changed shape, but the terms of war have remained the same. With them, the experiences, casualties, and memories of war continue into the present. Shibli demands that they be heard, because the present can never improve without reconciling the past. 

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail. It’s rare that a novel so subtle in its construction and sparse in its prose can cut so deeply. Shibli warps time, collapsing the past and present, to depict a Palestine that has learned to live with wartime atrocities, “in everyday life.” In the novel’s present-day half, war lives as an unwelcome, unhealthy, and unyielding presence. Like polluted water, it can be easy to ignore if you’re not the one who has to drink it. Shibli’s novel is an order to look, listen, and taste for yourself. 

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]

 

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS
by Jenn Shapland
Tin House Press, 266 pages
Reviewed by Claire Oleson

The book jacket for "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" by Jenn Shapland. A navy blue book cover with a pleasing font in green and white.

Click to purchase this title.

Jenn Shapland’s hybridized memoir and biography straddles what its seemingly-impossible title suggests: an ability to write about oneself by writing about someone else. Far from taking on a myopic or narcissistic project, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers i​s eager to talk about the self for the sake of empathy, to revive written-off lives, to question presumed heterosexualities, and to make a bodily connection with now-irrecoverable marginalized bodies. Spurred by discovering letters written between the Southern playwright and novelist Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie, Shapland dives into the paper trail of a writer she wasn’t previously researching. On the hinge that the letters she discovered while interning at the Harry Ransom Center were highly unexpected love letters between two women, Shapland opens the door into the book that follows and into her own still-forming identity simultaneously.

So much of this biography lives in flux. It jumps anachronistically between times and places, between Carson’s young adulthood, her time at Yaddo (an artist’s retreat in Saratoga, New York) and at the February house (an artistic commune in Brooklyn), and even back and forth between Carson’s narrative and Shapland’s personal life. The empathetic bridge Shapland constructs between herself and Carson McCullers is, too, incredibly watery and mobile. It’s a bridge set up largely on the word “queer,” which here can mean gay, LGBTQ, bizarre, failing at normalcy, and or can denote relationship between a myriad of these possible definitions. This bridge is crossed through mutual identities, through a longing for a lesbian history, which, as Shapland writes, “there hardly is,” and through a desire to find the language to cross a long-held lexical gap and retrieve the queer narratives that a normative history would abandon.

Consciously situated in this lexical gap that queer women have historically occupied, (particularly closeted queer women from points in history where queerness was not eagerly recorded and was often intentionallly erased,) Shapland’s experimental work of nonfition digs through muddled archives searching less for Carson’s exact life and more for the possiblility of her love. Shapland has written a speculative investigation on purpose. As she remarks “In a world built by men for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register– and is not registered, i.e. written down” she shows a sort of thesis early on: an intention to write down, to name, and in doing so, to have something which she, too, might go by. Unequipped with the word “lesbian,” McCullers calls “the women she loved her ‘imaginary friends’” and permits, even insists, that they navigate a space between the real and the covert, the actualized and the forged. The reader watches McCullers, without a vernacular for her loving, married  twice to the same man whom she narrowly escaped dying with, given something of an extension, a clear empathy in the writing and recording that Shapland offers here.

Jean Shapland Author headshot

Jean Shapland

As it embarks on an entirely unestablished form of biography, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers​ is not afraid to show itself in progress. Readers encounter Shapland contending with partial accounts, content at finding shards and glimpses rather than neat and finished stories. Carson McCullers is also shown struggling with partial stories, unsuccessful pursuits of women she adored, and an unclear conception of her own sexuality and identity amongst real “imaginary friends.” Shapland sees this struggle for identity, this existence outside of easy or clearly accessible language, as a familiar “protracted becoming.” Shapland shows that queer history is always in contention with loss, with a lack of resources, of material, of proof, and even of language with which to preserve and communicate itself. To see Carson’s queer life amidst biographers who would straight-wash it, Shapland suggests “you have to read like a queer person.” It is less an immediate sharing of language, and actually, as Shapland astutely writes, a shared “dearth of language” that most characterizes how a contemporary queer writer might connect to one locked in a time where she could not easily write herself down.

There will always be less queer history than history. It may always be called “queer history” in a need to specify itself whereas the defaulted histories, the overwhelmingly heterosexual, white, male, and colonialsit histories will be, Shapland demonstrates, “given the benefit of the doubt.” Perhaps because of its roots in this sense of incompletion, as the book unfolds, it is always showing its own process rather than presenting a finality. Shapland notes that memoir itself “is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting” and that in her work, she is “perched outside [her] own house as [she tries] to see into Carson’s.” Structured in short vignettes, some no longer than a page, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers​ arguably navigates queerly as well– maybe because it wants to, but also, more likely, because it has no other way to be. It is a queer piece of writing that teaches queer readership simply in being read. To empathize with Shapland’s work sifting through transcripts of Carson’s therapy sessions, which Carson recorded with the intention of writing her own biography, is to empathize with the longing to find longing that might look like your own. Here lies what the book might be said to be “about.” Less than any one life story, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers d​ etails a search and a want, a need for connection, and an effort to acquire language for what so much of history has deemed unspeakable.

Shapland peeks in to Carson’s life at different windows, detailing flashes of her living, her marriages and divorces with Reeves McCullers, her relationships with women, and her life’s possible relationship to Shapland’s own. In its sentences, this book opens the cupboards of Carson McCullers’ life and exhibits little-known inventories of Carson’s personal and emotional materials, down to a lost ashtray. However, as a whole, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is much less about Carson McCullers and much more about a need for queer women and queer artists to know that their lives are not alone, are not only in silences between speech, and have existed long before they were able to be spoken of.

Yes, unfailingly, the narrative is peppered with knowledge of Maggie Nelson, ​Buffy the Vampire Slayer, t​ he visual language of androgyny, Audre Lorde, and many other notes that may linger longer in a queer readers’ ears as a language that lingers behind individual words. It is fun and sad and as contemporary as it is historical, pulling from highly academic, nuanced, and difficult ways to relate to obscured literary pasts as well as punchier ways of relating. One of the latter is communicated early on in the text when Shapland writes “Like, ​same​” in response to Carson’s title ​The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. F​ rom examining Carson’s wardrobe to eating pizza in Carson’s home in Georgia to unearthing the medical aftermath of her strokes to combing through her photographs, Jenn Shapland is, as she puts it “hunting lesbians” where other writers have only found Carson’s “traveling companions, good friends, roommates, close friends, dear friends, obsessions, crushes” and “special friends.” Shapland is renaming, is making real and whole the imagined and the partial.

Backed by extensive research, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers ​closes the lexical gaps that concern its opening with belief rather than a documented citation. Shapland decides that “When Carson says she was in love, I believe she meant she was in love.” With this act of believing comes an invitation to the reader, an ingenious and vital request to join Shapland in the same language, to allow a love to be sufficient to be known and named and sustained on its own mere utterance. Shapland’s writing transcends genre and bends established modes of language. She takes a grammatical descriptivist’s approach to liberating queerness form erasure, and, in insisting it be written, allows Carson’s history to become a bridge to readers and writers now, permission to have a history in the first place.

Claire Oleson Author PhotoCleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a 2019 grad of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize. Her chapbook is forthcoming in May, 2020. Contact her by email. 

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, October 16 – Nov 20, 2021

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, October 16 - Nov 20, 2021

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, July 10 – August 14

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, July 10 - August 14

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

POETIC ANATOMIES, taught by Claire Oleson |  March 20 to April 24, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

antelope skeleton

POETIC ANATOMIES: Dissecting Form and Formlessness in Poetry, a workshop taught by Claire Oleson | January 16 to February 20, 2021 SOLD OUT

antelope skeleton

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | September 19 to October 24, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | September 19 to October 24, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Book Jacket

An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

Things From the Creek Bed jacket copy

BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST, poems by Carole Bernstein, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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99 NAMES OF EXILE, poems by Kaveh Bassiri, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Jacket cover 99 Names of Exile

PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson

PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson

TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson

TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson

BLACK GENEALOGY, poems by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson

BLACK GENEALOGY, poems by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson

FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE LOVERS’ PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE LOVERS' PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson

YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson

DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE ROYAL ABDULS
by Ramiza Shamoun Koya
Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages
Reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Cover of The Royal Abduls: Ramiza Shamoun Koya. A view across a golden lake of apartment buildings, which reflect the Taj Mahal onto the water.

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Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility?

During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express.

As it happens.

The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a toxic research lab. Omar hopes his aunt will help decode the mysteries of his family’s past and immediate present. At the very least, perhaps she’ll transport him to a local cricket game and yell spontaneous insults with him at the opposing team. After all, Amina has just left a long-term boyfriend who had hoped she’d settle down with him, and Omar is the closest thing to a son Amina will ever have, and so there should be privileges.

Ramiza Shamoun Koya author photoWith clear but never plain language, Koya allows her story to unfold—Omar’s troubles at home, Omar’s troubles at school, Amina’s challenges at the lab and challenges as the aunt she tries so hard to be. Spectacularly plausible but original, well-paced but sensuous, Koya’s plot thickens with events Amina cannot control. Omar’s plight as a young boy judged by the color of his skin and the lonely desperation of his fantasies is deeply moving. Amina, like most of us, does not have answers for the questions that he asks:

She searched her mind for the words that could soothe the hunger in his heart and the fear in hers. She understood his ache for reassurance that their family, history, the world made sense. But all she could think to tell him was that he should find a way to escape into an inner world, to fiercely guard his solitude. Because there were no guarantees, and there were always people who were disappointing and cruel, and you could go your whole life searching but never find a place where you belonged. But she couldn’t say that, not to an eleven-year-old.

Amina loves but she’s always running. She admires commitments she can’t make. She endlessly judges herself, asking herself (and so asking us) whether our passions have as much value as our actions:

Did studying insects count for anything in such a world? She doubted it and yet she had no choice; this was what she loved to do, it absorbed her. She had fought for this career, and she didn’t want it cheapened by the fact that she was a passive bystander in a world that demanded impassioned activism. If she were a better person, she would be protesting and supporting legal action and spending her money on campaigns. Or fighting for the freedom of women, Muslim  women like her mother’s mother and sisters and cousins, in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria…. But instead she would go to the Himalayas to stalk wild things and pray not to be disturbed.

Don’t read The Royal Abduls if you are hungry; scene after scene steams with a dish, a scent, a meal. Don’t read it if you prefer the kind of stories whose endings you can easily predict; the ending of this story aches and it is earned.

Do read The Royal Abduls if you are searching for hope in a complicated world—not every day hope, not the Hollywood version, but the kind that honors the nearly irresolvable dualities of ourselves. We’ll never have everything we want because we’ll never know just what we want. We’ll never be who we want to be, because our changeable world keeps reconfiguring our options. What we can do, Koya suggests, is stop protecting ourselves from love, on the one hand, and stop hoping that love won’t be messy, on the other. Because love is messy. Love is a question we can never perfectly answer.

Beth Kephart author photoBeth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

SQUARE HAUNTING, nonfiction by Francesca Wade, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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SQUARE HAUNTING
by Francesca Wade
Tim Duggan Books, 383 pages
 
reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The book jacket for "Square Hunting." Portraits of Virginia Woolf, H.D., Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Dorothy Sayers are outlined in several bright colors.

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In a short piece of writing on “London Under Siege,” written during World War II, Virginia Woolf wrote that “everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.” Reading these words now, as we live through a different collective social crisis, I am reminded of the significance of individual intellectual and emotional life as a key form of sustenance and even political action.

I came across this quote in Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, an examination of the intellectual and personal lives of five furiously independent women living in Mecklenburgh Square, at the far edge of Bloomsbury, between the two world wars. In her introduction, Wade expressly notes that “these women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected through shared interests, friends, even lovers.” All five women were searching for ways to find fulfilling and engaged public lives in times of emergency, yet their views on how to do this often radically differ.

The emphasis in Wade’s book is on individuality, these women’s rooms of their own, rather than a monolithic view of a ‘feminist life.’ Besides Woolf, Square Haunting introduces us to the poet H.D., the classicist Jane Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the detective novelist Dorothy Sayers. The vision of gender itself presented throughout the book is complex. H.D., once called the “perfect bisexual” by Freud in their analysis, wrote, “I have tried to be man or woman but I have to be both.” Sayers enjoyed wearing men’s clothing, writing “if the trousers do not attract you…for the moment I do not want to attract you, I want to enjoy myself as a human being.” These women are ambitious, not simply as women, but within their respective fields.

So how does Wade show this? She brings us through the peculiar turning points in which all these women lived in Mecklenburgh Square. These moments of transformations range from H.D.’s youthful tumult and unhappy first marriage to the late years of Harrison in which she turned abruptly from classics to Russian literature. Square Haunting is an episodic book, though one full of reverberations across different times. In the space of this review, I can’t hope to cover the full range of stories in the book. The two final sections, on Power and Woolf, had a surprising urgency as I sat reading during our current state of emergency.

Power was trained as a Medieval Historian at Cambridge and started her career as a lecturer there until 1920, a time when women were still not granted full membership of the university. She moved to teaching at the London School of Economics, an incubator for the developing Labour Party and a home of progressive ideas. Power was invested, both in her historical work and political engagements, in internationalism. She was an enthusiastic proponent of the League of Nations, the aspirational united global front set up after the First World War. Her major 1939 lectures on the wool trade in English medieval history, meanwhile, writes Wade, viewed it not as a time of small self contained communities but rather of

‘large scale international trade.’…For Eileen Power, the greatest horror of war lay in its negation of personal bonds: its infringement on private freedoms and its disdain for the human values of empathy and tolerance. As a historian, she wanted to mobilize against fascism and nationalism, and to affirm, through her writing, the value of a cultural tradition that transcends borders and rejects parochialism.

Francesca Wade headshot

Francesca Wade

Reading Power’s passionate arguments for what she called “world citizenship” is striking now, as we find ourselves on a precipice between global solidarity and parochial isolationism. Power, notes Wade, was “always determined to define herself in opposition to what she thought of as stereotypical ‘Bloomsbury,’” focusing her gatherings in Mecklenburgh Square on “action, not aesthetics.” Woolf moved to Mecklenburgh Square as World War II raged and London lived in fear of bombings. The question which would occupy her was “how to go on, through war.” She moved through it writing through a complex tangle of the past and the present. She began writing her biography of the art critic Roger Fry, finding the current crisis “not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing . . . how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains—in this welter of unreality.” She also began writing about her own memories, finding them “‘more real than the present moment,’ and…she was able to ‘spin a kind of gauze over the war’ by retreating into a world that existed only in her mind.” Slowly, this extended to the present as Woolf “decided to interweave vignettes of the past with diary-like entries on the present.” In Woolf’s section, a commitment to creativity and individuality become what Wade terms “a form of resistance” amidst crisis.

Visiting Mecklenburgh Square through this book allows for a useful escape from our current moment to understand it better. Jane Harrison wrote, inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, that “each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.” Wade’s book is the ideal type of biography for the moment with layers of enjoyable historical detail of all kinds as well as an argument for the independent life. By going into the past and particularly past moments of crisis, it is possible to start imagining a future.

Author Photo of Gabriel ChazanGabriel Chazan is an art historian and writer. Gabriel completed an MA at University College London and BA at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes a newsletter on art and books on The Expanded Field.

POLITICS IS FOR POWER, nonfiction by Eitan Hersh, reviewed by Brian Colker

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POLITICS IS FOR POWER
by Eitan Hersh
Scribner, 288 pages
reviewed by Brian Colker

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Book jacket for "Politics is for Power." Male and female figures with speech bubbles outlined in the American flag. Motif in colors are red, white, blue, black.On a recent Sunday under quarantine, my spouse Susan Sheu and I donned costume wigs for our Zoom meeting. Twelve volunteers from the Los Angeles area sat at our respective kitchen tables, couches, and easy chairs and wrote postcards for California 38th District assembly member Christy Smith, who is running for Congress via a special election on May 12. Susan came up with the concept “wigging out for Democracy”; she thought that wearing wigs would be a festive and interesting way to make the Zoom meeting less tedious. It worked well: despite the quarantine and general malaise, wearing the wigs did add levity and made the afternoon go by faster.

Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, believes that Zoom meetings like this are critical for progressives. In his new book, Politics is for Power, he contrasts volunteer activity with posting rants on Facebook or watching the news, which he brands “hobbyism”. For decades, organizers from Saul Alinsky, infamous ‘radical’ and author of the classic Rules for Radicals,  and Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz, the intellectual godfather of Obama For America, have pondered how to get liberals off their couches (and off social media) to take meaningful action.

Hersh wants to know why so many educated white Americans consume a tremendous amount of news but rarely volunteer or perform any type of political activity. One-third of Americans spend two hours a day on politics, and 80% of this group are hobbyists. Most hobbyists are men, and they tend to be white. Hersh’s theory and worry is that hobbyism masquerades as activism, leaving a vacuum that bad actors or extremists are filling. He gives the ominous example of the North Carolina KKK helping get opioid addicts off the street and then recruiting them. The Klan is pursuing political power.

Author Photo of Eitan Hersh

Eitan Hersh

Prior to 2016, I was one of the hobbyists that irritate Hersh; after 2016, I became an activist (he uses the word ‘volunteer’). Hersh has had a similar journey: he and I both have the fanaticism of the newly converted. Hersh’s analysis veers off track in places, but I support his general thesis: partisan news consumption is rampant, and bad for democracy, and is hurting the volunteer actions that would strength the country. We need to rebuild the state parties from the ground up, and to do so means engaging face-to-face with neighbors in a way that delivers service to them.

Hersh traces hobbyism to the decline of party control over the nominating process (i.e., the popular primary model—which started in 1972) and the rise of cable news in the 1990s. Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the advent of cable, news has become written for outrage and to entertain partisans. This combination of populism and an unrestrained political media business model has created political news consumers.

This has caused partisanship to explode. As one would expect, the most partisan people tend to be the best informed. However, despite the popular cliché of uninformed rubes consuming Russian propaganda, the best informed are the biggest consumers of fake news:

The researchers found that participants who were most interested in and most knowledgeable about politics consumed fake news the most. Those people weren’t easily duped by the lies of fake news stories. They were sophisticated consumers who sought the fake stories because they are junkies.

Hersh’s conclusion is that hardcore partisans are literally addicted to the highly partisan rivalry, identical to a rabid sports fan. They are also less likely to interact with those on the other side (or, presumably, to volunteer).

The make-up of the most engaged donors and primary voters have become sharply ideological on both sides, so that moderate politicians are disincentivized from running for office, and those in office are punished for compromise and rewarded for starkly partisan positions. The media environment is amplifying this—conflict is more entertaining than long, technical debates that grind towards legislative compromise:

On cable and social media, ideologues call out politicians who veer toward compromise. They one-up each other in taking more extreme positions. A politician presents a proposal, and a news network can instantly find someone who is outraged that the proposal doesn’t go far enough to please her or her side. To an audience, the outraged hot takes are more interesting that the commentators praising compromise or deals that cede an inch to the opposition.

The fact that media broadcasts conflict, and partisans share these clips on social media, make politicians focus on their media presence and image, to the detriment of their relationships across the political spectrum.

woman in long purple wig; man in shaggy black wig; political attire

The author Brian Colker and spouse Susan Sheu hosting a “wig” party on Zoom in April 2020.

Hobbyists are drawn to national politics almost exclusively—Hersh likens it to casual football fans watching the Super Bowl. They ignore statewide contests (other than voting down ticket) and have a dismal record voting in local political races, in which less than 1 in 5 voters participate. Local news is boring and for wealthier hobbyists, it doesn’t really matter much. Working class, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups have a much greater stake in local elections because those policies impact their daily lives. Hobbyists focus on emotional issues —think puppy mills—and on charismatic leaders and gossipy races. It’s the theater, not the power, that excites the hobbyist.

Hersh has a test for those who believe they are doing something more than news consumption: he asks if anyone would notice if you stopped your activity. For those volunteering, there tends to be a commitment and a network that expects the volunteer to show up for events and actions. Dropping out would lead to questions about what happened and why. Passive news consumers have no such expectations or relationships. Rachel Maddow doesn’t call viewers when they skip her news hour.

Hersh’s evidence of hobbyism is stark—less than 5% of the general population did any volunteering at all—a single action—for the 2016 elections:

Among daily news consumers in 2016, less than 4% reported doing any work whatsoever on behalf of a campaign or party that election year. Even among those who reported they were afraid of Donald Trump, only 5 percent reported that they did any work to support their side.

And even that number is largely exaggerated. It is not for lack of leisure time—Americans average 5 hours a day of it, which is largely spent watching something. African Americans and Latinos are three times likelier to volunteer than whites, due to a collective sense of threat and bound fate. More affluent whites lack this fear and can afford to treat politics like sports —something to be passionate about, but ultimately entertainment that has little bearing on their lives.

Hersh offers several explanations as to why this is: local party organizations are very weak (by design, as a reaction to the corruption and racism of local leaders in the 1940s-1960s) and the actions they ask volunteers to take don’t feel very meaningful—using a canned script to call, text, or door knock with—and they tend to be very top down.

Interestingly, sociologist Theda Skocpol notes that Tea Party Republicans are much more comfortable with this top-down model than liberals, which explains why the Tea Party was very effective during the Obama years. However, it is unclear why this is the case: other than resorting to gross generalizations, like Republicans are more authoritarian and follow orders unthinkingly, what would explain their willingness to volunteer more? I would want to know if they are more motivated to action by fear, for example.

Throughout the book, Hersh interviews people who have become political organizers and describes how they learned this activity and what they’ve done with their power. The thread through all the cases is that political organization is all about local, face-to-face networks and providing something the community needs—helping neighbors with their immigration issues, helping neighbors get someone onto a local school board, helping neighbors solve a problem. By providing basic services like babysitting, disaster relief, and elder services, Democrats can rebuild political power at the grassroots level. Providing services could be the secret sauce to building networks—especially across partisan divides.

Where I take issue with Hersh is his approach the book as both a neutral analyst and as a burgeoning democratic activist. His analysis of political partisanship and the media are framed as a ‘both sides’ argument. This ignores major differences in the two camps. The Democratic party, and progressives, have moved leftward since the 1990s, but the Republican party and Conservatism has become so ideologically extreme as to be unrecognizable as a mainstream political party. According to the Manifesto Project, which analyzes political platforms across the globe, the American Republican Party has grown more akin to a European far-right party. Per the New York Times’ analysis in June of 2019:

According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

Tea party Republicans denying Obama was a US citizen, stoked by their version of ‘mainstream’ news, is hardly equivalent to liberals protesting a ban on Muslim immigrants, an outright xenophobic and illegal policy. Since Trump’s election, his party has embraced anti-democratic attacks on the rule of law, the separation of powers, the media, and on voting itself. Opposition to this administration is not just liberal partisanship equivalent to the Tea Party movement. Resistance groups like Indivisible rose in 2016 as a desperate attempt to rescue American government itself, in addition to advancing a liberal policy agenda.

The book would have been stronger had Hersh not attempted to generalize his argument across the political spectrum. He is clearly not a Republican of the Trump era, nor does his analysis touch on why they have embraced radical anti-democratic values which would have been unthinkable as recently as the early 2000s.

Hersh describes on a key element of volunteerism that is highly problematic—the boring and robotic nature of volunteer engagement. Scripted calls, texts, hand-writing writing postcards and door knocks are not exciting ways to pass the time. This may explain a fundamental reason why people choose passive consumption over volunteerism—the former is effortless. Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals, discusses a principle of organizing—it must be creative and have an element of fun. Hersh misses an opportunity to go deeper on this subject, because it is crucial for understanding the disconnect between the hobbyist and the volunteer. The local leader who rules the small organization recruit for foot soldiers to do the tedious work. For many affluent whites, this work is uninspiring and beneath their perceived skill level. Mid-career professionals do not relish tedious work, but more to the point—they don’t like following directions.

Volunteers need to feel better after an event. It is not JUST about servicing their needs—their emotional need for connection and efficacy must be harnessed. The same rules for talking to voters apply to volunteers—they need to be offered a genuine ability to contribute in a way THEY find meaningful. If a hobbyist is induced to make phone calls for a campaign, she or he will need to be recruited and managed with care to ensure it is a positive experience and it will be repeated.

One reason the Obama campaign was so successful in recruiting huge numbers of volunteers is that it encouraged small local groups (five to ten people) to work together. People were able to work with their friends and feel like they had a lot of autonomy. It also allowed the groups to be nimble and change strategy as the campaign went on.

Hersh’s book is an important one for Democrats and those who oppose Trump and Trumpism in 2020—we will need an army of volunteers to take back power at the local, state, and federal level, and hopefully the book will motivate some hobbyists to turn off the news and get off twitter.

Author Photo of Brian ColkerBrian Colker is a management consultant for benefit organizations and a grassroots organizer in Los Angeles. He is CFO of the Grassroots Democrats HQ.

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket

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Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure):

To be precise and precisely patient.

To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing.

To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story.

To make of language something vital.

There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing.

While every piece in this collection is mesmerizing in its way, I wish to highlight the two bookends. “Polymorphous,” which opens the book, is launched by a first paragraph that contains a thousand seeds but remains rooted in a single patch of earth. Everything that is to come is augured here: Joan’s relationship with herself, Joan’s relationship with her neighbor, Joan’s relationship with her world, Joan’s relationship with time. It’s worth quoting in full, for what it teaches us about Hinnefeld’s method, which is to say her artfulness with encapsulation and the care she takes to be thorough but not didactic :

By the time she was 20, with a little baby and a household to run, Joan had already started to seem like some sort of local exotic to her friends from high school, home from college on their breaks. All because she canned her own vegetables and sewed her own clothes and breastfed her son, at a time and in a place where those things wouldn’t come back into fashion for a good while. Now, forty years later, she still gardened and canned and sewed. She’d even gone back to school and finished her own degree eventually, with a nice and useless and exotic major in English. But by now the things that made her colorful in the eyes of her friends and neighbors was her weekly outing with her eighty-year-old neighbor, a gay man named Richard Meredith.

Richard and Joan are prickly friends. Richard’s own exotic past contains complicated secrets. A pool of desire in that Bucks County land percolates with still-unanswered questions. History wields power over both these characters and they wield power over each other, the ebbing and flowing of which provides the tension in the story.

joyce hinnefeld author photo

Joyce Hinnefeld

In “The Beauty of Their Youth,” a mother and her 20-year-old daughter travel to Greece and Italy—the mother with hopes both of strengthening the bond with her daughter and of revisiting the people and places she remembers from an abroad summer years before. Fran, the mother, is both claiming and reclaiming, in other words, whereas Miranda, the daughter, is determined to see this new-old world through her own eyes. When the two meet up with Fran’s long-ago lover (in Greece) and long-ago friend (in Rome), Fran is confronted with a new and unwelcome version of the mythology she’d webbed around her youthful adventures. She is forced, as Hinnefeld writes, to reckon with some of the ways she’d not been trusted, some of the ways the world hides the most human parts of us from view:

There were things you didn’t post, Fran thought now, wide awake at three AM. Often the most important things, the things that had indelibly shaped your life. Your family’s secret history. Your marriage to a junkie. Your daughter’s slow, sure drift away from you. Your husband’s thoughtless and fleeting affair all those years ago. And your chronic thoughts of leaving him.

Hinnefeld writes empathetically. She writes, too, with lacerating emotional economy. In between she layers in the world—its reflective surfaces, its values, its artistic traditions, its gators, the secrets that are suppressed until they aren’t.

Beth Kephart author photoBeth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp, a craft essay by Beth Kephart

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp, a craft essay by Beth Kephart
THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp A Craft Essay by Beth Kephart A few years ago, a friend who had first come to know me through my books and was slowly coming to know me through myself—our emails, our occasional actual conversations, our letters, our back-and-forth gifts—sent a note my way that included (I’m paraphrasing here; none of my friends speak as strangely as I write) this question: How is it that I’ve known you for all these years and I’m only now learning that you are funny? Why have you hidden your funny? I wondered then, I wonder now, what frees me to precipitate the giggle. And why I so rarely feel so free. And why funny isn’t in most of the books I write, why I tend, on the page, toward the not-hilarious me. Writing funny, especially in memoir, is a surprisingly recherché talent. Every spring semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach memoir, the ratio of funny submissions to not-funny submissions is, on average, one: everything else. This semester our funny was the work of Jonathan, who had me choking on my chortles at 4 a.m., as I read ...
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THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart
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 ...
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A GHOST IN THE THROAT, a novel by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart

A GHOST IN THE THROAT, a novel by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart
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 ...
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A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart

A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart
A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart A former student (now a writer and a teacher) finds himself in his once-teacher’s memoir. A conversation ensues about mirrors, facsimiles, and blankness. Hello, friend. Before we get into the thick of this, I’d like to thank you for having this conversation with me. I’d been anticipating Wife | Daughter | Self for a while now. I must admit though that one of the reasons I was excited was that in a few places throughout the book I show up and rear my head. Just last night, I read one of these sections—“The Four Times I Became a Teacher”, which originally appeared in LitHub—to my partner just before bed. My reading started as a joke, some faux bravado: I'm in a book. But that section so moves me, and it did last night. I hear your voice in those words, and, boy, does your writing insist on being read aloud. It became an intervention almost, my reading: That's who I was then, and that's where I came into now. Reading it aloud, then, closed a distance for me. I know you’ve recorded yourself reading the book, a days-long marathon session. What was that experience like for you? ...
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THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE ROYAL ABDULS by Ramiza Shamoun Koya Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility? During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express. As it happens. The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a ...
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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket
The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure): To be precise and precisely patient. To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing. To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story. To make of language something vital. There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket
SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder. Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” ...
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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Degrees of Difficulty jacket cover
DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY by Julie E. Justicz Fomite, 300 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Many years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted. I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has ...
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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Ruby and Roland Book Jacket
RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan Milkweed Editions, 256 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind. When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills. Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she ...
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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cover art for The Way Through the Woods
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING by Long Litt Woon translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver  When I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me. I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her ...
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ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Art Can Help Book Jacket
ART CAN HELP by Robert Adams Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart  Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real. The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe. “I am asked with ...
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THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO by Carlo Collodi illustrated by Attilio Mussino translated by Carol Della Chi MacMillan (1926), 401 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart The Oldest, The Newer, and the Four Pinocchios The Pinocchio in the book on my lap is not the persistently gullible feather-in-his-cap Disney version with the Jimmy Cricket conscience and the wish-upon-a-star existence. My Pinocchio—La storia di un burattino—comes from the mastermind himself, the Italian serialist Carlo Collodi, born Carlo Lorenzimi, who didn’t start writing for children until late in life. He’d been in the seminary as a young man. He’d volunteered in the Tuscan army. He’d written satire, translated fairytales, and by the 1880s, it would seem, he was primed for his most memorable creation. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago.  If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a ...
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THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and Bill Sulit Interview Each Other

juncture03
THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW by Beth Kephart For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts. As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production. ◊ STORY: They would need a teleprompter. They would need a script. They would need umbrella lights, an iPhone mic, a steady camera, an army of tripods. They would call this thing that they had made their Juncture memoir shorts (and here those things are: www.udemy.com/the-stories-of-our-lives/learn/v4/overview). Lessons on writer’s block. Lessons on illness. Lessons on time, or nature writing, or the kitchen. They would twine Mary-Louise Parker and James Baldwin, Abigail ...
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THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague

THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague
THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU by Beth Kephart Chronicle Books, 256 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end. Mira Banul is “medium everything—blond, built, smart.” She lives on Haven, where “We were six miles long by one-half mile…We were The Isolates. We were one bridge and a few good rules away from normal. We were causal bohemians, expert scavengers, cool.” Haven, a tiny island on the East coast, is a vacation destination in the summer. At the end of the season, the year-rounders return to their school in a refurbished bank and rule the island after-hours. Mira’s best friends, Eva and Deni, have done everything together for as long as they can remember. They work together, study together, compete together, and ...
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott
HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ...
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DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost

DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost
DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart illustrated by William Sulit New City Community Press, 190 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting ...
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WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance

WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance
CHICKEN DANCE by William Sulit & Beth Kephart Digital 3-D Design A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D "art," I wasn't going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very ...
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SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart

SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart
SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire whipped and cruel:  you couldn’t be touched; you wouldn’t stir; you. I broke and I climbed out and I climbed through and I climbed down into the blue black red threads and sat until a fat clack cracked the hollow between the walls and I knew that it was the long-nailed scrabble of a squirrel or the procrastination of the fox or the wolf that is my thoughts. That was the first night after. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of fourteen books, most recently Small Damages, named to many best-of-year lists.  Three new books are set to be ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN
by Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket

Click here to purchase this book

In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder.

Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” (“Music Making”), the bark of a neighbor’s dog, that aforementioned cat, who also sings. The world buzzes and the poet heeds, his poems derived from hub-bub, his language caught up with the sounds.

Section 2 finds the poet this side of aggravated—privately annoyed by the poor conversationalist, a little superior to a neighbor named Grace, irritated by the stranger who sits beside him at a concert. From “And Another Thing:”

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats ….

By the time Djanikian’s narrator is, toward the end of section 2, officially unnerved, we are too, “… pacing the afternoon/like a high-wire walker/from room to room/counting the steps.” (“Loose Ends”) What is one to do with all that noise? Where is one to file the irritants?

Gregory-Djanikian

Gregory Djanikian

Now something tilts. Now, in the final three sections of the collection, Djanikian turns his focus toward the things that fall away and the things that will remain, without us. The poems see beyond the irritants toward the bats from which we keep our distance, the loosestrife in the garden, the touch of a wife’s hand to the “soft lips” of a cow, the material accumulations of our lives. The poems here are clear-eyed and life-besotted, they are quieter, unafraid of (but not lethal with) uncertainty. The poet has time to think. He has time to stand. He has time to wait, but what is he waiting for? For a letter to arrive? For a cat to sing? For an answer from a person no longer with him? Djanikian’s mother imagines her own passing in one poem. Djanikian imagines his own heaven in another. There is too much of everything. There is too little. From the poem “An Uneven Dozen”:

Antinomies
The paradox of time, giving me too much time
and sometimes not enough at the same time.
Morning, evening. Seconds, years.
When I’m late for everything.
I’m early for everything else.

In the final glorious poems of the In-Between, it is always about time—about time and how we live it. Searingly unpretentious, the closest thing to authentic I can imagine, Djanikian’s lines provide a kind of shelter, as, with him, we watch and wait and wonder.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.