HOME LEAVE by Brittani Sonnenberg Grand Central Publishing, 259 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Brittani Sonnenberg’s debut novel, Home Leave, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on loss, geographical place, expatriate experience, sibling rivalry, family, and growing up. Sonnenberg writes with clarity about the messiness of the expat Kriegstein family’s lives. To tell her story, Sonnenberg begins the opening section improbably from the point of view of the mother’s childhood home. Yes: we hear from a house. What I liked very much about the novel is that it continued in this way, rough and tumble in its narration, jumping from first person accounts in the voices of the family, third person voices, first person plural voices, and so on. Home Leave has the fitting feel of a kid landing somewhere without concern about fluency but a willingness to tell her story using the language that works. Sonnenberg captures beautifully what it’s like to grow up as an American abroad, not as a tourist but not fully as a native either. There’s bougainvillea, there’s spitting on the streets, there’s dancing in the public square. There’s always loss and longing—whether it’s for a simple box of Honey Bunches of Oats, the ...

HORSEMEN OF THE SANDS by Leonid Yuzefovich translated by Marian Schwartz Archipelago Books, 232 pages reviewed by Ryan K. Strader Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver The translation initiative Read Russia characterizes Leonid Yuzefovich as a writer whose books “gray the lines between faction and fiction,” using historical figures and settings in his work. “Faction” is for artful historians (or for historian artists, perhaps), writers who know how to be suspicious of fictionalizing, but also know that history is never just facts. This description of Yuzefovich makes sense, since he is a historian by training and taught history for many years, but has emerged as an influential contemporary fiction writer in Russia. Yuzefovich has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in Russian since 1980, but his work first appeared in English in 2013 with a series of historical detective novels, translated by the prolific Russian translator Marian Schwartz. Horsemen of the Sands is a new volume, also translated by Schwartz. The volume contains two novellas: The Storm, which takes place in an elementary school, and Horsemen of the Sands, a mystical tale about the real-life warlord R.F. Ungern-Shternberg, who fought both the Chinese and the Bolsheviks for control of Mongolia ...

HOT DOG TASTE TEST by Lisa Hanawalt  Drawn & Quarterly, 176 pages reviewed by Matthew Horowitz Purists beware: this book contains very little analysis and comparison of actual hot dogs. Perhaps best known as the designer of Bojack Horseman, Lisa Hanawalt draws the way children laugh. In Hot Dog Taste Test, she brings haphazard looking outlines to life with vivid watercolors to depict an exploration of sensory staples. Breakfast is moralized, street food is ranked and deconstructed, horses are ridden, otters are swum with, birds are everywhere—some with exaggerated human genitalia, some with understated human anxieties. This graphic narrative uses the form of a visual diary to lead the reader down the garden path of Hanawalt’s gustatory journeys via back alleys of idle thoughts and fears. The result is at once fascinating and comforting. Animal human hybrids are her known specialty, but Hanawalt demonstrates that her flair for surreal normalcy is limitless. She selects colors with boldness not seen since the end of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, contributing to the overreaching caricature of the seriousness of personhood. This theme emerges from the juxtaposition of childlike wonder and mundane struggles, creating concepts like the Menstrual Hut, Snack Realism, the Bug Train, ...

HOUSE ON FIRE by Susan Yount Blood Pudding Press, 30 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Susan Yount’s House on Fire begins with a storm, more specifically with a lightening strike that splits the “sovereign catalpa”—an intriguing symbol for the fracturing of the narrator’s self, which makes us question every “she,” “her,” “I,” and “you” we encounter in the poems. The catalpa tree is mentioned four times: twice in the first poem, once in the third poem, and then again in the final poem. In “Growing Up on a Cattle Farm,” for example, the speaker says, “Cyclops drops splatter the concrete walkway / tumbles over catalpa’s wormy roots.” These beautifully euphonious and sibilant lines hide within them deeper meaning. For instance, the image of the Cyclops—the mythic creatures who toiled in the fires of Hephaestus’s volcanic workshop—is important because it invokes the father, who later in the book is likened to a devil that burns down the house and the family that lives in it. And “wormy” is an appropriate adjective because catalpa trees are often home to the caterpillar larvae of the catalpa sphinx moth, but it also takes on another valence when we realize that its secondary purpose is ...

HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE: Stories, Institutions, Spaces by Clarissa Rile Hayward Cambridge University Press, 234 Pages reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong I attended a White Protestant church last Sunday. The question, you ask, is what makes a church White? Sure, all of the congregants, except this reviewer and his children, were White. But that fact alone does not a White space make. The church’s ethnic Whiteness is not a matter of congregation clapping to the hymns on beats one and three. Nor do I suspect that a significant number of the congregants make an effort to keep the congregation all and only White. The overriding signal that I attended a White church is that next Sunday, the Sunday of Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday, I have every reason to believe that this church in Mississippi will have a crisp, efficient service that will start promptly at 10 and let out at 10:55 with nary a reference to King, nor will the general congregation notice King’s absence. This omission will not be a matter of calculated indifference or passive-aggressive spite; rather, a characteristic feature of this White church is that it simply operates from a different historical, narrative context that does not ...

HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis Červená Barva Press, 81 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos In How to be Another, Susan Lewis explores the full range of the prose poem form. These poems read like short speculative essays in the tradition of Montaigne, which is to say they have a metaphysical or epistemological bent to them. “Most knowing goes unlicensed,” says the speaker archly in “Introduction to Appreciation.” We are not dealing in this book with the esoteric details of autobiography or memoir but with the broader experiences of humanity as a species. How to be Another isn’t concerned with the kind of surface empathy or watered-down existential day-seizing of self-help books (as the title might suggest) but is instead a work of anthropology—though, clearly, these perspectives must intersect to some extent. For example, the speaker of “Introduction to Narcissism (III)” says, the “point is, self-awareness confers little evolutionary advantage. We are not wired for objectivity.” However, later in the same poem, the speaker acknowledges that the “pain” caused by self-awareness “is relentless, staying with you longer than any friend or flattering memory.” The shift to the second-person pronoun is telling for although the “you” is largely rhetorical in ...

HOW WE CAME UPON THE COLONY by Ross White Unicorn Press, 24 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure Ross White’s first chapbook, How We Came Upon the Colony, transports us to a strange world where the contemporary and the ancient commingle, and where nothing is ever quite what we first expect. Take “Downturn,” which opens: What’s gone remains gone. When the Library at Alexandria burned, scroll lit scroll. Whole languages died there. The Colossus at Rhodes, felled by earthquake, was eventually disassembled under the orders of the caliph, carted off by camel, and smelted like scrap.... ...It’ll take decades for the foliage to find its way back, and what grows here on battered ground, ground which was fused to glass in places, will wrestle its green from gray. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, a distance Alexander might have marched in seventeen days or a comet might pass in about two-and-a-half minutes, fifty kids are sitting in a classroom, a few on the floor. The teachers’ union says it’ll take decades to unlearn what damage has harvested, likening the cuts to a crater. They sound the alarm of the burning library, full of precious things. Although at first the poem insists, “what’s gone ...

HOW WE SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER: AN ESSAY DAILY READER edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold Coffee House Press, 309 pages reviewed by David Grandouiller The oldest post on the Essay Daily blog is from Monday, January 18th, 2010, by Ander Monson, who taught at the University of Arizona and teaches there now. It’s a list of essays included in the Indiana Review 31.2: Claire Dunnington, "Green Eggs and Therapy" Joan Cusack Handler, "Beanstalk" Jen Percy, "The Usual Spots" Tom Fleischmann, "On Alticorns" The next day—Tuesday—there are six posts, all by Monson, and some of them are lists. One of them is titled, “A word about the space,” which he defines as “a collaborative space to talk about some of the better (by which I mean more interesting) essays to appear in the literary journals that publish the majority of what we like to refer to as creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction.” “If you'd like to talk,” writes Monson, “about an issue, a journal, or an essay (or a trend in essaying) that you're hot and bothered by, this would be a good space for that.” Essay Daily’s first anthology, How We Speak to One Another, is proof, seven years ...

HOW YOU WERE BORN by Kate Cayley Pedlar Press, 152 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Years ago, I was lucky enough to take a fiction writing class at Penn with the late, great cultural critic John Leonard. I was reminded recently—while reading Kate Cayley’s remarkable short story collection How You Were Born—of a story he told our class. A year earlier he met with his friend Elie Wiesel for lunch and coffee at a diner on the upper West side, and Wiesel appeared distraught. His wife was pregnant, and Wiesel felt miserable about the idea of having a child. He didn’t see how he could possibly bring a child into a world where the Holocaust is possible. A year later, shortly before our class, they met again. This time Leonard found Wiesel already there, at the same table, but his demeanor was completely changed. He stood up and greeted Leonard warmly. There wasn’t a trace of distress in his manner. When Leonard sat down, Wiesel handed him a huge photo album to look through, sharing what seemed like hundreds of photographs of the new baby. How You Were Born is an archive of anxiety. In the story “Young Hennerly,” Robert ...

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

HUMAN ACTS by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith Hogarth, 224 Pages reviewed by William Morris First published in South Korea in 2014, Han Kang’s new novel Human Acts is now available for the first time in the United States. American readers first encountered Kang in 2016, with the translation of her 2007 novel The Vegetarian. This strange, dark, poetic novel, about a woman who decides to stop eating meat after having a horrific nightmare, was met with great acclaim. Translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian went on to win the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. While Human Acts is a rich, powerful novel in its own right, and should be read independently of The Vegetarian, it is often interesting to situate a novel against the writer’s other work. As The Vegetarian progresses, we learn that the central character, Yeong-hye, is not satisfied with simply avoiding meat. In fact, she’s decided she wants to become a plant, shedding her barbaric humanity for the gentler, more beautiful life of a tree. The strangest thing about The Vegetarian, however, is that none of the novel is told from Yeong-hye’s perspective. Instead, her husband, brother-in-law, and sister narrate the three parts of the ...

I AND YOU by J. David Stevens Arc Pair Press, 64 pages reviewed by David Amadio Many of the characters in J. David Stevens’s four-story collection I and You are Chinese immigrants; the author himself is not. In the book’s introduction, Stevens confides that he might never have written about these characters if not for the relationship with his wife Janet, whose ancestors left China in 1899 and later settled in Richmond, Virginia. Reflecting on the source material for his multi-generational narratives, Stevens, whose Mexico is Missing and Other Stories won the 2006 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction, admits an apprehension of the age: “[A] part of me still wonders if such stories cross a line, if appropriating segments of our shared history—or Janet’s history alone—is more rightly suited to intimate dialogue. I worry the art is too opportunistic.” This concern is real, and the author is right to acknowledge it. But his outsider’s rendition of the Chinese immigrant experience is respectfully nuanced, and while he does not share the same cultural background as his protagonists, he deeply values their stake in the larger human dilemma that fiction is taxed to solve. The ways in which his characters ...

I CALLED HIM NECKTIE by Milena Michiko Flašar translated by Sheila Dickie New Vessel Press reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A novel can fly across time and space or it can burrow, it can seek out, hide from itself, emerge somewhere else, on some other plane: a surprise. Certainly, other novels set in Tokyo, as is I Called Him Necktie, sprawl across the endless city as words scratch across the page. But this one, by the 34-year-old Milena Michiko Flašar, the Viennese novelist whose mother is Japanese, is a kind of airless tunnel—the closer you are to the exit the further you’ve actually gone, lost as if in meditation, digging. Flašar’s protagonist is Taguchi Hiro, 20 years old and a hikikomori—an outcast who shuts himself in. Buried in silence, Hiro hasn’t left his room in two years. “My room was like a cave,” he says, a few days after venturing away, into public for the first time. I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling ...

I COULD SEE EVERYTHING: THE PAINTINGS OF MARGAUX WILLIAMSON by Margaux Williamson Coach House Books, 164 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan  There’s something otherworldly about the actress Scarlett Johansson. Earlier this year she played an alien in Under The Skin and, in one of the most striking paintings in the artist Margaux Williamson’s new book, I Could See Everything, she plays the universe. The painting, called I thought I saw the whole universe, is a portrait of Johansson—or more precisely the infinite landscape represented by her wearing Versace for The New York Times. The dress is hypnotic, with what seems like a galaxy in the center. The dress becomes covered in shimmering stars and triangles. Something approaching the vastness of the universe can be seen emerging in Scarlett Johansson’s absented figure and the dress, from this magazine page. This is even further eclipsed in the later painting study: universe in which the figure is entirely taken away to show only this vast space. Looking through Williamson’s book, I found myself thinking of the Canadian landscape painters in the Group Of Seven. Like the Group of Seven and more contemporary artists like Peter Doig, Williamson brings us landscapes from the Canadian ...

I FOLLOW IN THE DUST SHE RAISES by Linda Martin University of Alaska Press, 63 pages PLASH AND LEVITATION by Adam Tavel University of Alaska Press, 85 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne On finishing these two books of poetry recently published by the University of Alaska Press, I felt like a smug bigamist who can’t decide between two pretenders for his love, so chooses them both. I don’t regret this lack of choice, for each has its charms, and they can’t be reconciled. Linda Martin’s I Follow in the Dust She Raises is the kind of poetry that invites the word luminous, so impoverished by overuse it can no longer light the inside of a bulb, much less invoke noonday. Too many blurbs have been attached to a series of lesser books that make the mistake of working nature by subtraction—assuming that an endless wheat field with a tractor in it under an immense Nebraska sky—offer a limned absence that by itself could bring us to metaphysical tears. Borges came closer to the truth when he said, speaking of the pampas, that each object in them was separate and eternal. To simple but potent effect, Martin starts from ...

I REFUSE by Per Petterson translated by Don Bartlett Graywolf Press, 282 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The fact is that part of you is always fifteen, and will always be that silly, stunted age, when you had all the answers and your heart was folded as neatly as a napkin. The age when you sampled cigarettes and realized how easy it would be to run away from home, for good. The age when the drink or the drug worked, for the first time, altering the way you saw yourself and the rest of the messy, stimulating world. The fact is that everyone is this way, forever fifteen. We age in place, with our bodies getting older around the skeletons of our memories, which are fixed as the spears of a crystal. The same is true of Per Petterson, who circles the same heavy themes over and over again, as though hoping to divine their meaning. I Refuse, his latest novel, revisits familiar territory: cruel adults, absent parents, the unspoken pact between friends, and an eyeless God hanging over the whole scene like a painted canopy. Released over a month ago, I Refuse is already “selling like ...

IF YOU WERE HERE by Jennie Yabroff Merit Press, 272 pages reviewed by Caitlyn Averett Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Being normal and making it through high school unscathed can be a big deal, and, for sixteen-year-old Tess, it’s all she’s ever wanted. In Jennie Yabroff’s debut young adult novel, If You Were Here, Yabroff shows the normal struggles of growing up combined with the confusion of dealing with a parent suffering from mental illness. If You Were Here follows Tess Block, a girl who relishes summer vacations where she can hide away in her grandmother’s country cabin and not have to deal with high school or family. It means no contact with her best friend, Tabitha, because there’s no cell service, but Tess enjoys the freedom of escaping NYC for a few months, and the freedom from what’s going on at home with her mother. Tess manages high school and a difficult home life thanks to these summer breaks and weekends spent with Tabitha watching and quoting Sixteen Candles. But Tess’s semblance of ‘normal’ disappears when Tabitha decides she wants to be part of the popular group, leaving Tess behind. This abandonment marks the beginning of Tess’ life ...

IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS by Kristen Radtke Pantheon Books, 288 pages reviewed by Jenny Blair If we felt attached to and invested in the ground beneath our feet, how would the world be different? What’s the difference between feeling rooted in a place and feeling stuck there? And how is one to face the facts of geographic and human impermanence? These are among the questions Kristen Radtke explores in her lonely, restless memoir Imagine Wanting Only This. The book blends stories of abandoned ruins and disaster locations with personal memories of death in the family, inherited heart disease, and the author’s search for love and belonging. It is an attempt to come to terms with the impermanence of human works, and of humans themselves. Though the book is inviting, its wealth of detail and many digressions sometimes illustrate and sometimes crowd out larger themes. The author never fully comes to terms with her own obsessions, making the reader wish she had marinated her ideas a little longer. The drawing is skillful but flat. And the language is sometimes confusing. Despite these frustrations, Imagine Wanting Only This remains compelling and sometimes transcendent. Ruined places make up the backbone of the book. Radtke ...

IMAGO by Lindsay Lusby dancing girl press & studio (chapbook) reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke In many ways, Lindsay Lusby’s chapbook reiterates the themes of every poet—loss, recovery, the perplexity of navigating the adult world. But Imago, in the concisest of ways, defies a typically cliché approach to these matters through weird and compelling symbolism; on the surface level, the collection is about a girl and her pet eggplant. The reader enters Lusby’s work knowing, and taking as a given, that “The girl and her eggplant / would not be parted” (1), with only a brief epigraph on etymology and psychoanalysis to alert them of the deeps ahead, not to mention the strange realization that they, too, would not be parted from this anthropomorphized vegetable. In the interstices of this work (created in large part by the poet’s choice to number certain poems as “1 ½,” “3 ¾,” etc.), it becomes apparent that the eggplant is a stand-in for the girl’s lost mother, who “did not leave a note / or a casserole” (2 ½), but did leave the wise eggplant. Though the girl’s eyes “stray in the produce section / to summer squash, zucchini” (2), we come to understand that ...

IN LIEU OF FLOWERS by Rachel Slotnick Tortoise Books, 48 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Rachel Slotnick’s debut collection, In Lieu of Flowers—an eclectic combination of lyric poems, flash prose, and mixed-media paintings by the author, who is also an accomplished painter and muralist—is part in memoriam and part Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The paintings are of particular interest because they play an essential role in how we understand the poems rather than being simply decorative or extraneous as can sometimes happen when paintings and poems are paired up together in such a context. Most are essentially portraits, though not purely mimetic ones. Her paintings have a surreal quality, the edges often blurred as one image becomes another: a beard becomes a fish, a shirt melts into the coral of the sea floor, and flowers, always flowers sprouting where they desire. “I tried to paint my grandfather,” says the speaker, “and the figure devolved into flowers.” Often the paintings also include multiple perspectives of the same central figure, reminding me conceptually more of cubism than surrealism, Picasso’s figures (of Françoise Gilot, for example) often turning into flowers as well. Althought Slotnick’s paintings and poems were conceived separately, it is clear that what motivated the ...

IN OTHER WORDS by Jhumpa Lahiri translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Knopf, 233 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost In Other Words, a departure for Jhumpa Lahiri as she turns for the first time to memoir, took shape as weekly writing assignments—in Italian—that were published over six months in the Italian magazine Internazionale. Regular deadlines and the constraint of writing in a language she was still learning re-energized Lahiri. These very personal pieces are framed and contained self-portraits. They are fascinating, focused, and at times repetitive, and give the sense of a complex literary artist with a passion for language. Part of Lahiri’s accomplishment in In Other Words is her recovery of a way of working that is unspoiled by the expectations of a demanding readership. I thought of a story told to me by an early childhood educator about a child who loved to paint. An adult, looking at the child’s work asked, “Is that a flower?” Is that the sun? What a beautiful yellow.” For weeks, the child, now self-conscious, did not return to paint. Lahiri’s project is a return to a literary garden, a place where she is free to play with language and expression in a way ...

A Novel by Ruchama King Feuerman, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST (NYRBLit, e-book only) As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer, I noticed a Palestinian boy, about 15 years old, flying a kite on the corner. It was about seven and the sun had disappeared already. The light was pink. The sky in the distance was a cloudless blue, but it seemed, at dusk, to have the texture of felt. An orthodox Jewish mother, wearing a headscarf and long skirt, came across to the traffic island, where the boy in capris and a t-shirt stood watching his kite fly over the honeycomb colored wall of the old city. The woman pushed a stroller, inside of which sat a nicely dressed boy of two. He was interested in the kite. The older boy immediately noticed the little boy’s gaze; he gestured to him and the mother let him out of the stroller. She smiled with delight as the Palestinian boy held out the kite handle and the two boys held on together, the older one keeping a casual eye on the ...

IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE by Cynthia Atkins CW Books, 95 pages reviewed by Arya F. Jenkins Questions about the past, memory and legacy interlink with everyday images that haunt the reader in Cynthia Atkins’s second volume of poetry, In the Event of Full Disclosure. Atkins’s poems arch into a tree extending way beyond herself, into family, society, and community, while inviting the reader to share in her concerns. If there is wholeness and power to be achieved, the poet seems to be saying, it is recognizing one’s humanness and interconnectedness. Separated into five parts, titled Family Therapy (I), (II), and so forth, In the Event of Full Disclosure is dedicated to Atkins’ sisters. Both humble and ambitious, the poems explore a complex legacy of familial relations with sharp images behind whose façade the reader senses stress and disequilibrium, as in “Picture This” in Part I: Three sisters just from swimming, bathing caps, fresh cut bangs— sitting at the pool’s edge. This safe notch in time hailed like a taxicab in the rain, and memory makes it sedate as a lawn chair, quelled ...........and awash in Technicolor. Think picket fences. Think polka-dot sundresses. Smiles and lemonade implied for ...

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, illustrations by Andrea Ucini Europa Editions, 112 pages reviewed by David Grandouiller Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “Me” who? We’ll always know too little about ourselves.—Elena Ferrante Who is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know? What makes some readers so curious about a writer’s “real life”? Do we (because I’m one of them) want the fiction to absorb reality—to ...

INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani Tu Books, 380 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta Valynne E. Maetani’s debut novel, Ink and Ashes, begins with the narrator Claire’s eerie statement: “I stared at my pink walls, wishing away the smell of death. I imagined the wispy smoke snaking its way through the narrow spaces around my closed door, the tendrils prying at tucked away memories.” This observation cements her voice as protagonist, a mixture of sensitivity, uncertainty, and fierceness. As the smell of incense wafts up to her room – part of a ritual to honor her father since his passing ten years ago – she struggles to reconcile memories of her father with what she later discovers about him. And it’s this powerful voice that leads us through a heart-pounding narrative journey, exploring the nebulous nature of memory and trauma. At seventeen, Claire deals with the typical issues of a teenage girl: homework, relationships with boys, and overprotective parents. Still, her life is colored by the loss of her father. Looking back through his old journal, Claire discovers a mysterious letter from her father addressed to her stepdad George, whom she believed her father had never met before. Suddenly, the ...

INSEL by Mina Loy Melville House, 176 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books, are slipping through your fingers. It isn’t your fault. There’s too much to read. Every other minute, they say, a new genre is born. You can’t, certainly, keep up. The idea of it is absurd. Worse yet, there are other things to do besides reading. After all, it’s nice out, cherry blossoms are swirling in the wind, a vortex of pink feathers alighting the street corner. Maybe the best thing to do is simplify, streamline the library. Return to the classics after all these years. Read all of Dickens. Run through the American pantheon. Default to Shakespeare, or Edgar Allan Poe. No? No, of course not. Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to limit oneself. You have to keep trying. Sisyphus lives. His stack of books is growing. His tablet is pregnant with titles. But where will you start, Sisyphus, how will you choose? The first sentence, of course. The first sentence is telling. It’s the hook, ...

INSURRECTIONS by Rion Amilcar Scott University of Kentucky Press, 191 Pages reviewed by William Morris Welcome to Cross River! The stories in Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection, Insurrections, are set in Cross River, Maryland, a small East Coast city you won’t find on any map. The city itself is a work of fiction, but the lives of its inhabitants feel startlingly real. Among the Cross Riverians—or Riverbabies, depending on who you ask—included in this collection are a suicidal father, an old man known as the slapsmith, and a pair of brothers separated by the constantly flooding Cross River, which gives the city its name and divides it into the affluent Northside and impoverished Southside. North/south, eloquent/colloquial, holy/profane: these dualities are brought to life throughout Insurrections, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In their citation for awarding the collection, the judges describe Scott’s writing as: “hard, humane stories, free of grandstanding yet full of grace, that loom in the mind long after reading.” And the judges are correct. These stories are at times hard, filled with moments of violence and helplessness. But they are also humane, alive with innocence and beauty where it’s least expected. One ...

ISLAND OF POINT NEMO by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès translated from the French by Hannah Chute Open Letter Books, 450 pages reviewed by Rachel  R. Taube Island of Point Nemo is a fast-moving adventure story featuring murderers, romance, and preternatural turns. But dig further into those turns, and the novel is ultimately a eulogy to books, both as physical objects and as containers for fiction. Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès and newly translated from French by Hannah Chute, Island of Point Nemo features suspenseful plotlines that intertwine in such a way as to make the reader question the natures of fiction, reality, and history. This is Blas de Roblès’ ninth book and his second to be published in English. The philosophy-professor-turned-novelist’s prize-winning first book to appear in English, Where Tigers Are at Home, arrived relatively quietly in the U.S., but received positive reviews from Kirkus and NPR, which praised it as “a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off.” Island of Point Nemo, too, rewards patience, and despite some failings of tone, it is an unpredictable ride that successfully plays with form to develop its themes. The primary plotline is an ...

IT LOOKS LIKE THIS by Rafi Mittlefehldt Candlewick Press, 327 pages reviewed by Allison Renner Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver The teenage years are a time for young people to discover their identities and explore and push the boundaries of structured life. The lucky ones are given room to experiment as they explore. It Looks Like This is a book about what happens when someone is not given that freedom. When Mike and his family move, just before his freshman year, Mike starts high school in a new state and begins to forge some tentative friendships. But Victor, also low on the totem pole in terms of the high school hierarchy, seems to have a personal beef with him. Mike tries to lay low and mind his own business but Victor’s attention is unsettling. Mike finds himself drawn to another new student, Sean, an attractive mixed-race guy who joins Mike’s French class. Assigned to a major project, they start spending a lot of time together and Mike starts to feel the electricity between them, though he’s not sure if those feelings are reciprocated. While their relationship grows, keeping things quiet at school, Victor is always around, it ...

IVORY PEARL by Jean-Patrick Manchette translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith New York Review Books, 170 pages reviewed by Ryan K. Strader Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver The young heiress of a black market arms dealer is kidnapped, a kidnapper is decapitated, there are two fiery explosions, one man has been shot through and is still roaming around, and there is a rescue attempt. The rescue might be an inside operation, or it might be another kidnapping. The young heiress has vanished with a violent man who might be good or might be bad, and there are some other people looking for her, who might be good or might be bad. All this occurs on the first nine pages of Ivory Pearl. The bloody mayhem is dexterous and supple, perfectly choreographed and so cool. The cars are shiny and Italian, the weapons are exotic and expertly wielded. Ivory Pearl is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s final and unfinished novel, now available in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Manchette was known during his lifetime for his 1970s crime novels, noir that gained popular movie adaptations and made him a standard among French crime writers. This translation features endnotes on how Manchette envisioned the novel ...

I’M FINE. HOW ARE YOU? by Catherine Pikula Newfound, 46 Pages reviewed by Robert Sorrell A few days after I finished Catherine Pikula’s chapbook I’m Fine. How are You? I read the following sentence: “I would like to make a book out of crumpled-up pieces of paper: you start a sentence, it doesn’t work and you throw the page away. I’m collecting a few … maybe this is, in fact, the only literature possible today.” The sentence came in the last hundred pages of The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. And while the “today” referenced above was Italy in the 1960s, the description was oddly reminiscent of the small, thread-bound chapbook published in 2018 that I’d recently put down, I’m Fine. How Are You? Composed in a fine but digressive and fragmented prose, with short sections ranging from a few paragraphs to a few lines, I’m Fine. How Are You? is a work that doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. “‘Is it a Lyric Essay? Is it a Long Poem? Is it Meditations?’” wonders poet Matthew Rohrer in a blurb for the book, but Pikula doesn’t seem interested in parsing genre ...

I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY by Andrea Jarrell She Writes Press, 153 pages reviewed by Helen Armstrong Do you catch yourself peering into other people’s windows at night? Perhaps you were driving by in the dark and wanted to catch a glimpse of how other people live. Do they sit down to eat together? What are they watching on the TV? The drive-by look is a quick wondering that’s satiated by seeing that they, too, are watching the football game, which you’re going home to watch. You must be normal, because they’re normal, because you don’t know about their dysfunctions. Reading Andrea Jarrell’s memoir felt like I was squatting in the bushes outside of her house, fingers perched on the windowsill, watching and listening as her life unfolded, taking comfort in her family’s dysfunctions which mirrored my own in asymmetric ways. Being from a dysfunctional family myself, I take some sick comfort from seeing crying children in grocery stores, their mothers looking like they’ve reached their wits’ end. I thrive on overhearing family fights in restaurants, because for so long, it was my family who were making heads turn. Once, at a rest stop in Delaware, my younger brother ...

JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT by Antal Szerb translated by Len Rix New York Review Books, 296 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin I don’t mind observing that as a child I reveled in erotic games, secret afternoons and evenings of play at sex and death. The child’s world stretches infinitely and yet is all encompassing. The ceaseless hours end—usually forcibly, by parents—inevitably leaving a taste of unfulfilled desire. Oh, to be so fully awake, so charged again. Those earliest encounters with desire—yet unnamed, unformed—set on us, mark us, until, at some point the feelings fade. Not desire itself, but the skin’s memory of it fresh, smothered by age and responsibilities. But for some of us, perhaps because the experience is so acute, the process of forming relationships to others cements in those early rooms. Then adulthood presses, like a train conductor telling you, in a foreign language you don’t understand, that you’re sitting in the wrong class. You shrug, he keeps demanding, and the seconds freeze in confusion until at last someone pushes you along. It is in this state that we find Mihály, the 30-something protagonist of Antal Szerb’s scintillating 1937 novel Journey By Moonlight, published this week—in the ...

KALEIDOSCOPE by Tina Barr Iris Press, 90 pages reviewed by Jeff Klebauskas With the slightest rotation of its cylinder, a kaleidoscope provides altered views of the loose bits of glass that make up its interior. Tina Barr’s latest collection, the aptly titled Kaleidoscope, applies these slight rotations to the entire world, focusing on human experience—beauty marks, blemishes, and all. From the first line, “As I turn the chambered end,” the reader is sucked into a realm of time and tone-shifting fantasy that manages to stay grounded by direct, no-nonsense accounts of the author’s surroundings. Barr constantly changes directions, as the nominal theme suggests. She takes us to a jewelry shop on the corner of Al Muezz in Egypt, to the Golden Moon Casino in Mississippi, and to a nightclub where a jazz band, “hunts music that weaves itself through air.” This is just a small example of how far the reader mentally travels when reading Kaleidoscope.                      Barr has an uncanny ability to balance beauty and despair with consistent precision. Although natural beauty gets the lion’s share of attention in her poems, all it takes for her to bring the reader back down to the cold, hard ground is ...

Kanley Stubrick by Mike Kleine We Heard You Like Books, 103 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman When you check out the latest novel by Michael Kleine, Kanley Stubrick, on Goodreads, you’ll find that an anonymous reader asked the author if  “this book is going to house the Mystery of the 17 Pilot Fish play.” Kleine answered rather grandly, referring to this play set to be released at the end of August, and the rest of his oeuvre: “Kanley Stubrick and The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish are all part of the same universe, yes, but also, so is Mastodon Farm and Arafat Mountain. Everything--the characters, locales, events, situations, demises, dreams--everything is linked.” But Kleine doesn’t address by what means and to what end “everything is linked,” nor if this is a benefit to anyone involved. Kanley Stubrick doesn’t elaborate on it much. Rather, the experimental novel turns out to be a display of the picturesque absurdity of Samuel Beckett and David Lynch without the uncomfortable laughter; Klein borrows sitcom’s episodic format, lack of continuum, and commercial approachability for ends that forcefully lack those very same traits. Such is Kanley Stubrick’s impressive and precarious balance. Mike Kleine was ...

KATALIN STREET by Magda Szabó translated by Len Rix New York Review Books Classics, 248 Pages reviewed by William Morris Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Four children play together in a quiet neighborhood. The children are Henriette Held, the young daughter of a Jewish dentist; the Elekes sisters, Irén and Blanka; and Bálint Temes, the handsome son of the Major. Their game is Cherry Tree, in which they all sing and spin in circles, and one of the children “chooses” another, the one they love. In this innocent game, the girls invariably choose Bálint, and each girl develops her own particular feelings for the boy; when it is his turn to choose, though, Bálint always prefers Irén, the oldest and most serious of the three. This is one of the earliest memories shared by the Elekes, Temes, and Held families, who form a lifelong, tragic bond in Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street. The bond between these families is cemented when, later in life, Bálint and Irén are married. Their eventual marriage seems a given from childhood, but is stalled by other relationships, the tumult of life in postwar Hungary, and the death of their friend Henriette. During the German occupation, ...

KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern Red Hen Press, 146 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster—or at least over the edge of a sand dune. The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like playing 52 Pickup with all your people and things. When you try to collect them and put them back together, you can’t, because they are somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.” Fairhaven was different from the General’s grammar school back in Oregon where little John and Marnie “could kiss just like Hollywood stars at the end of a movie,” and Hugh Taylor did not get in trouble for yanking the new Egyptian student off his swing by the ankle. The Fairhaven school had nutrition and physical education instead of morning and afternoon recess, the first through third graders were ...

KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa translated by Wiesiek Powaga New Vessel Press, 107 pages reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis on “Socialist Realism,” but was cut short at the emergence of an era of national sovereignty that prompted an explosion of avant-garde art, performance, literature, and music. Bursa’s only novel, Killing Auntie, was not published during his lifetime. The novel takes place over the course of a week, during which a young man named Jurek whacks his aunt in the head with a hammer and then attempts to rid himself of her corpse, a more difficult task than he imagines. While it doesn’t ever do anything, or say anything, everything Jurek does is in reaction to the corpse. This is the black ...

KONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Franz Kafka translated by Peter Wortsman Archipelago Books, 384 pages reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s first three major publications having passed just a few years ago, a plethora of new translations of Kafka’s stories have recently been released. Among them is Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, with works chosen and translated by Peter Wortsman, a writer known for his own micro fiction. Wortsman’s selection of what he considers to be the very best of Kafka’s short prose, whether it’s a story, a letter, a journal entry, a parable, or an aphorism distinguishes Konundrum from the other new translations. This approach contrasts with the single book-length work of Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis” and Michael Hofmann’s new translation of all of Kafka’s unpublished stories in Investigations of a Dog. In the acknowledgements, Wortsman states that his only criterion for inclusion in the book is the ability of a piece to amaze him. In this way, his selections are more personal than a collection of Kafka’s most important works, or works that were published while he was alive, or works that went unpublished in his lifetime ...

LABYRINTH LOST    by Zoraida Córdova Sourcebooks Fire, 321 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Alejandra Mortiz is a bruja. She lives her life in the presence of death. She comes from a long line of brujas, each with their own unique manifestation of power. But Alex, as her family and friends know her, does not revere the magical legacy of her family; she fears it. After seeing her Aunt Rosaria rise from the dead as a child, Alex is burdened by the sense that magic is not a gift, as her sisters Rose and Lula believe, but a curse. Her fear grows more acute as her Death Day approaches. This is a bruja’s coming of age celebration when the manifestation of her power is blessed by her ancestors. To add to Alex’s worries, strange things are happening. She crosses paths with a young brujo, named Nova, who is a charming and suspicious element in her already tense life. She hears mysterious voices in her head, and her magic power begins to appear in frightening ways, alienating her from her family and her best friend Rishi. When the family is attacked, Alex has to take ...

LATE FAME by Arthur Schnitzler translated by Alexander Starritt New York Review Books, 136 Pages reviewed by Robert Sorrell Herr Eduard Saxberger lives in a pleasant apartment overlooking the Vienna Woods. Each night after spending the day in his civil service office, he eats at his usual restaurant where he interacts little with his companions beyond small talk and basic requests, and goes for a walk. His life is stable, if a bit empty. But one day a young man named Wolfgang Meier appears at the door, clutching a copy of the Wanderings, poems by Eduard Saxberger, and the somewhat bumbling, bourgeois civil servant is thrown back into a past he hardly remembers. “You’ve read my Wanderings?” Saxberger exclaims, “People still read my Wanderings?” “People might not read them any more,” rejoins Meier, “but we read them.” And so begins, Late Fame, Arthur Schnitzler’s satire of Fin de Siecle Vienna, published in the U.S. for the first time more than a century after it was written. Just barely hitting the hundred page mark, Late Fame is short, even for a novella, but Schnitzler’s writing is powerful in its simplicity. Characters and images are pinned up like butterflies on a ...

LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać Dalkey Archive, 189 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting. Albahari and Kafka, while an interesting comparison to note—given the author’s geographic proximities and proclivity for parable—seem to hold little in common, apart from a partiality towards general weirdness. Unlike Kafka’s bleak meanderings of an isolated protagonist, trapped inside an indecipherable system—Albahari’s stories often feature two or more people conversing ...

LEAVETAKING by Peter Weiss translated by Christopher Levenson with an introduction by Sven Birkerts Melville House Publishing, 125 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The late years of adolescence are the torch on the sugar of the artist's will to create. Forgive the metaphor; I won't extend it. But as I was reading Peter Weiss' novella-slash-memoir Leavetaking, I couldn't help but think of my father, cracking into a crème brûlée with the backside of a spoon. I do not recall the restaurant, the rest of the meal, or the occasion, but I can remember clearly the strong, decided crack of the spoon against the caramelized crust and my father's white shirt cuffs and the satisfied look on his face as the dessert shattered, fragments piercing like shrapnel the smooth, sweet cream. My father has always done things with precision; I know him as someone who deliberates, and is a model of patience although he does not enjoy waiting. When he left home, it was time. We knew our exits just as we acknowledged the brief silence between courses, the arrival of a new dish on its small, white plate. Leavetaking is about the last, painful years prior to a young artist's ...

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY by Kim Fu Tin House Books, 220 pages reviewed by Prisha Mehta A customer seeks out advanced simulation technology to recreate a conversation with her dead mother, but is refused on the grounds that relief from grief is too addictive a product to ethically sell. A young woman moves into a house crowded with hundreds of out-of-season June bugs as she recalls the emotionally abusive relationship she has just left behind. Every person on the planet loses their ability to taste, all of a sudden, all at once, and an artist makes a new career out of recreating food with physical sensation. These are the small worlds that populate Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st century, a short story collection containing twelve narratives that, though disparate in plot and subject, come together in a thematic and emotional symphony. This collection is Fu’s fourth major work, following her debut novel For Today I am a Boy (winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), her poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance, and her second novel The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. Fu’s ...

LIFE DURING WARTIME
by Katie Rogin
Mastodon Publishing, 216 pages reviewed by Isabelle Mongeau Katie Rogin’s debut novel, Life During Wartime, presents the struggle that soldiers, and their families, face adjusting back to civilian life. The story begins when 21-year-old Nina Wicklow, home from duty in Iraq, goes missing in a small town outside of Los Angeles. Her disappearance sparks a ragtag group of family and friends to search for her, and during that journey, face their own trauma. The novel unfolds through the perspective of multiple characters, the predominant two being Jim Wicklow and Lise Sheridan. Jim is the brother to Nina’s father, Ryan, who died in the Twin Towers during 9/11, seven years prior to the events of the story. Jim’s perspective acts as a bridge between the two worlds of civilian and solider—worlds that rub together harshly in the novel and leave the characters behind as collateral damage. He assumes the role of a liminal character as he witnessed Ryan’s death on “that day,” as he often calls 9/11, and can empathize with the soldiers he encounters in the search for Nina. Through Jim, the book presents 9/11 as war on U.S. territory, since it produced similar psychological ...

LIGHT INTO BODIES by Nancy Chen Long The University of Tampa Press, 99 pages reviewed by Trish Hopkinson The poetry of Light into Bodies begins and ends with a theme of identity while its pages flutter with the imagery of egrets, pigeons, swans, and starlings. Nancy Chen Long presents the complexity of exploring identity from multiple perspectives—from the viewpoint of a mathematician, from a child whose mother repeatedly becomes the property of other men by the “generosity” of her own father, to a daughter’s experiences growing up in a multi-cultural home and discovering the nuances of relationships in adulthood. The poems stitch together an intricate lace of childhood memories, family stories, myth, and Asian-American experience with a thread of women’s issues intertwined throughout, each conflict woven within the next to create the speaker’s complicated identity. Light into Bodies was published by University of Tampa Press as the winner of their 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. The press was founded in 1952 and launched its literary journal UT Poetry Review in 1964, which evolved into Tampa Review in 1988. The book’s perfect-bound, matte cover features a beautiful photograph also taken by Chen Long, who collaborated with the press for the ...

LIKE DEATH by Guy de Maupassant translated by Richard Howard NYRB, 240 pages reviewed by Derek M. Brown When the modern short story is subjected to the ivory tower equivalent of a paternity test, Maupassant’s culpability is often presumed to be as great as Chekhov’s. Their works featured extensive observations and detailed characterizations that emboldened their literary progeny to think more in terms of character than plot—thus facilitating the bridge from realism and naturalism to modernism. Yet Maupassant’s contributions have been increasingly obscured by Chekhov’s. Among English speakers, Maupassant—Flaubert’s onetime protégé—is most widely known for “The Necklace.” Noted for its social commentary and characteristic dénouement, “The Necklace” has long been available to audiences outside of France. His novels, however, have escaped such treatment and failed to reach a substantial English readership. Recent translations commissioned by New York Review Books may prompt a shift. With Like Death, Richard Howard—poet, critic, essayist, and professor at Columbia University—offers a rendering of Maupassant’s Fort comme la mort that, I can only presume, retains all of the lyrical richness of the original, published in 1889. It also offers startling insight into the extent of Maupassant’s influence, which can be found in some of the ...

LILLI DE JONG by Janet Benton Nan A. Talese, 352 pages reviewed by Joanne Green “When I write, I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” So observes Lilli de Jong, whose journal entries narrate Janet Benton’s impressive debut novel, set in the 1880s. Lilli is as spirited and determined as Jane Eyre, as sensible as Elinor Dashwood, and as downtrodden as Little Nell. Yet on the subjects of reproductive rights, affordable day care, and the cost of motherhood for women the book speaks directly to readers, today. Pregnant, abandoned by her fiancé, and dismissed from her Quaker home and teaching position, Lilli finds shelter in the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants. Benton picks up where Dickens left off, and, in the form of entries in Lilli’s diary, describes both the multitude of these unwed mothers and the lack of assistance or sympathy for them. These unfortunates include a maid taken advantage of by her master, a daughter raped by her father, and those like Lilli, “female and unlucky…and a near idiot in the ways of amorous men.” The well-meaning Haven offers these women a chance to “return from disgrace by giving up her offspring and denying its existence ...

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

A Graphic Novel by Ramsey Beyer, reviewed by Stephanie Trott LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR (Zest Books) It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college. Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part ...