By some stroke of luck, I had Philip Sterling’s new book with me as I laid in bed, sick from the change in altitude after arriving in Bogota, Colombia. As I choked down saltines and felt sorry for myself, these self-effacing, wise, and often revelatory poems delivered me from myself for a few hours. Continue reading “And Then Snow”
NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews
Check out book reviews of titles from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Blog.
Record of Regret
Dong Xi, author of the novel Record of Regret, began submitting writing to Chinese magazines when he was fifteen, according to the novel’s translator Dylan Levi King. Since then, Dong Xi, the pen name of Tian Dailin, has written four novels and is a writer in residence at Guangxi University for Nationalities, China.
These Are Our Demands
The twelve stories in These Are Our Demands dip their toes into potential futures and alternate realities. The characters in Matthew Pitt’s stories are vivid and sassy, and the writing is otherworldly. This collection lures you in with the promise of comfort, and then pulls down the straps and sends you on an unexpected wild ride. The stories have an unrivaled originality that is bound to keep you reading till the las page.
The Church in the Plains
Rachel Rinehart’s new collection The Church in the Plains is a historical, cultural, and religious journey, as Rinehart explores her German Lutheran roots in a richly reflective and imaginative book of poetry. With a knack for rendering human peculiarities and foibles, Rinehart writes poetry with echoes of Robert Lowell and the confessional poets, but with a streak of heritage and flair all her own.
Bright Raft in the Afterweather
Jennifer Elise Foerster’s brand-new poetry collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather is an elegant, lyrical journey across lands near and far and times past, present, and future. A very gifted poet with an NEA Creative Writing Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Scholarship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Foerster, a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, writes poems that are teeming with connection to the natural world, yet also aware of the dangers of human greed.
Some Beheadings
A thing is a cicada when it tends toward sexual disorientation
& I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me.
Aditi Machado’s debut collection, Some Beheadings, is a delicate meditation on the origin of thought. Somewhere between Wittgenstein and Rilke, with splatterings of Gertrude Stein, each page is a flower opening to reflect spring. “A wind blows, the desert unfolds.” “The desert melts, the sky’s glass.” Some Beheadings reads like bits of a shattered rainbow.
Tina Goes to Heaven
If I told you the quick plot summary of Tina Goes to Heaven, by Lois Ann Abraham, you might visualize a familiar movie reel of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stories, and then you might yawn and ask me what else I was reading. But you’d have it wrong, and I’d have done you a grave disservice. Continue reading “Tina Goes to Heaven”
Like a Champion
Have you ever taken homemade food to a picnic just to have it ignored? Then you might recognize yourself in Vincent Chu’s story called “Ambrosia,” which appears in his first book of short fictions, Like a Champion. In it, our narrator’s girlfriend brings the sweet dessert to a barbecue with this result: “In the middle of the table sits the uneaten ambrosia, cubes of strange fruit drowning slow deaths in white glob, wincing under the summer sun.” But in this case, a simple sentence will turn the embarrassing situation around with unexpected results.
Mud Song
Terry Ann Thaxton approaches her third book of poetry, Mud Song, with a native Floridian’s familiarity. We know about Florida oranges, alligators, and hurricanes, and she doesn’t ignore these attributes, but there’s a lot more of Florida in her book that won the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Peluda
Okay, ready? Would you rather be completely covered in fur, like, head-to-toe, monster type of shit or, stay with me, stay with me, be completely smoothie-smooth in all of the right places: thighs, crotch, armpit, upper lip, neck?
— from “We Play Would You Rather at the Galentine’s Day Party”
The Real Life of the Parthenon
Patricia Vigderman’s book, The Real Life of the Parthenon, appealed to me because, like her, I’d walked up to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. My walk was during a honeymoon, hers—for the most part—were more empirical.
The Amazing Mr. Morality
The Amazing Mr. Morality is a collection that dives head first into the shallow end of a pool full of ethical dilemmas. Jacob M. Appel creates wild worlds just inches beyond reality, but still close enough to the real deal that you can absolutely imagine them coming true. The writing is sharp, the characters are witty, and the stories are original.
The Stargazer’s Embassy
Eleanor Lerman began her writing career at twenty-one as a poet, branching out over the years into short stories and novels while winning prizes along the way. Her latest book is a suspense-filled science fiction novel called The Stargazer’s Embassy.
Marvels of the Invisible
“Another endangered syntax descends.” —from “Echolocations”
If ex-poet-laureate Billy Collins is correct in saying that poetry is “everyday moments caught in time,” then Jenny Molberg’s debut collection The Marvels of the Invisible, winner of 2014 Berkshire Prize, is exemplar. As if flipping through a family album, Molberg covers a personal history from birth to death, hospital and bible, family and landscape, hope and redemption.
This Must Be the Place
At times in life, we dive in, ready for action. At other times, often in transitional phases, we hang back and observe, browsing through possible lives and paths we might pursue.
The Whetting Stone
What do you do when the person who promised to stay with you for better and worse, sickness and health leaves? What if they leave by taking their own life? What do you do with the subsequent feelings of betrayal, sadness, and guilt? If you’re Taylor Mali, you write poetry about it. The Whetting Stone, winner of the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize, encapsulates Mali’s grief in the aftermath of his wife’s suicide in 2004.
Good Stock Strange Blood
“where time, they say, ends. Whereas for extending, whereas what you might call a leaking or a wandering. Incalculable lang, incalcable list—what’s spun down the hole. No pulling or leaping up. Blackness, only the din of our existence. Wishing-rod defunct. Hear my voice without echo, always defunct. A stone in hand. A crown in laughter.”
— from “One falls past the lip of some black unknown”
Most American
“One thing we ought not forget in this America is how our impulse to forget is so strong.” Rilla Askew, Most American
From where I sit right in Shawnee, Oklahoma, I am 41 miles from Rilla Askew, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of Most American: Notes From a Wounded Place, a collection of essays on race, violence, history, and Oklahoma. Six months ago, I would not have expected this proximity and would have read this novel from a distance out of curiosity, but disconnected from the Oklahoma Askew memorializes in these pages and connects to the larger American drama.
Thousand Star Hotel
The other day a seemingly nice older man whom I don’t know exclaimed, “I really don’t care for this hot weather—are you from Japan?” Hell yeah, I should have said. In fact, you know that movie Godzilla? That’s based on my life. It makes me want to vomit radioactively and commit zombie homicide, except in my version there is more than one Asian who survives. Our real conversation was not nearly as fun, but at least it didn’t end in violence. Our daughter overheard this and admonished me: “Don’t talk to strangers, Daddy.” – from “Greek Triptych”
Volver
Antonio C. Márquez’s Volver is a “memoir” in the truest sense of the word, as its subtitle “A Persistence of Memory” suggests. Beginning in the Pre-World War II borderlands near El Paso, Texas, and moving to Los Angeles, the Midwest, and then all over the world, Volver recounts Márquez’s life and travels, from a poor boy to an established expert in his field who is called on by the government to be a cultural representative in other countries.
The Book of Donuts
I’ve discovered that the donut is a popular topic for books, but I haven’t noticed an entire book of poems on the subject. The Book of Donuts, edited by Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham, helps fill in the gap. The editors have brought together several dozen diverse poets with equally diverse attitudes toward the confection.
The Walmart Book of the Dead
Lucy Biederman’s newest project The Walmart Book of the Dead has been called “fearsome,” “extraordinary,” and “inventive.” In a work that Biederman calls experimental, she puts together a collection of spells that are meant to remind the reader of the Egyptian Book of the Dead—but in this collection, the tomb is a Walmart.
Playing with Dynamite
Parents can be strange and dichotomous creatures, and delving into their lives doesn’t always give us answers we expect. Sharon Harrigan, who teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, discovered this when she set out to learn more about her father, Jerry. She compiled the results in her first book Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir.
Cover Stories
Writer and editor Stefan Kiesbye believes that “every story leaves a multitude of stories untold.” He acted on this idea by inviting fifteen writers to each choose a favorite story, then write a cover for it. The resulting anthology is appropriately titled Cover Stories. Most of the favorites were pulled from the past, but contemporary writer ZZ Packer also made the list.
Havana Without Makeup
If you’re locked into learning about far off locations through TV, movies, or social media, it’s time to stimulate your brain with a different interpretation. Herman Portocarero fulfills that task with his latest book, Havana Without Makeup: Inside the Soul of the City. Portocarero was born in Belgium of Spanish and Portuguese descent, and for the past 20-plus years has been ambassador to Havana from Belgium and then for the European Union, completing his post in September 2017. His take on Cuba’s capital city offers unique insights.
Autopsy
i am alive by luck at this point, I wonder
often: if the gun that will unmake me
is yet made, what white birthwill bury me, how many bullets, like a
flock of blue jays, will come carry my black
to its final bed, which photo will be used“What The Dead Know By Heart”
Our Sudden Museum
The word “museum” is usually associated with velvet ropes, alarms, roving guards. As Fanning introduces the word sudden into these carefully executed spaces filled with unfamiliar objects, he invites motion into a static world, redrawing the boundaries of artifact and observation. Though Our Sudden Museum is dedicated to the memory of his father, sister, and brother, and is filled with funny and painfully wrought elegies, unforeseen death reverberates his attention into new, unexpected places. Ultimately, with a broad range of forms and tones, Fanning ushers us into an elevated, enlightened space only reached through profound grief. Fanning’s delivery is charged with urgency and grace, since at any moment, the mundane or cherished could be taken away, suspended under glass.
While objects in museums travel and assume hefty historical weight through their membership in a rigid collection, Fanning tackles the transfiguration of emotion, the kinetics of memory. The book begins with “House of Childhood,” where, in a fluttering metamorphosis, the speaker is alternately a house, a bird, and the very seams holding artifact together:
Every dream I’m in its bones. Its bones
though hollow of me now. Its walls. What holds
the hallowed dust. The joists. The moans.
Oh Ghost, Oh Lady of Sorrows, I’m old.
I’m grown and gone. I’m a bird that can’t thrash free.
“The Bird in the Room” captures a similar dynamism that is quite original in a volume exploring grief. When faced with the challenge of listening to an aging parent, how many of us would invite such action, such ambiguity, into the scene?
As she speaks I try to hear her
through another feather
falls
from her mouth
The shadow of a wavering tree
covers the wall
Does she know
it’s in the room with us
In a volume chock full of confrontations with death, this speaker copes how most of us would:
What are you doing she asks
as I open
her door trying to let
the thought of her
death escape me
And yet throughout the book, we are offered the full gamut of methods of weathering death, and Fanning isn’t afraid of delving into sometimes vulgar or vividly morbid detail.
“I’d kick your coffin over / and piss the makeup off / your face, my sister says,” begins “Love Poem,” which catalogs the ultimately ineffective threats siblings hurled to keep a suicidal brother alive:
One week ago tonight, we stood over Tom
in his box, staring at his bad
cosmetic job, rouge on the flat
cheekbones, the lips sealed
a sick pink.
And yet the magic of Fanning’s work lies in the universal. Even if the reader hasn’t experienced the death of a sibling, who hasn’t joyfully perused items that don’t belong to us? “Sister, now I can tell you this: / how I’d steal // into your room / days you were gone,” begins the relatable “Flute.” The poem contains a breathtaking turn common in Fanning’s work:
I’d stare at the disassembled parts:
each silver tube snug in red
velvet, click of fingered keys
rubbed bronze.
I lacked the adequate prayer
my lips might blow across you,
kneeling over your open casket.
While the book is not broken into sections, the sequencing of poems slowly progresses toward the birth and rearing of children by the end, which provides a perfect counterpoint to such profound loss. In “Paper Dolls,” Fanning masterfully renders the joy and fear involved in an impending birth:
Since our news, the hours
wobble like bubbles from a playground
wand, every minute drifting, oblong
and sure to burst.
And what do children do but rewrite any conception of time we might have had before them? In “Saving the Day,” Fanning’s poetic imagination turns our orderly, painful adult world on its head when he shares discoveries “Upon finding my lost day planner on the floor of my daughter Magdalena June, age 2“:
Pages of my hours’
rigid grids splashed with your unruly hues,
my walls of stacked blank days splattered
by spilled giggles and curlicues. Sweet girl,
my year’s unwound by your fluttering hands.
With my future made so bright by you,
may I ever be ready for never.
The Missing Girl
You soon may be the missing girl, you have taken the missing girl, you fantasize about the missing girl, you are the missing girl. In Jacqueline Doyle’s aptly-named The Missing Girl, we briefly take on all the roles before shucking the skin we’re in and donning a new one. Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition through Black Lawrence Press, The Missing Girl draws us into the seedy darkness of everyday life in small bursts of haunting prose as Doyle forces us to consider being both the hunter and the hunted. Regardless of which position she leads us to, none is a comfortable role to be in.
The Doll’s Alphabet
Camilla Grudova’s first collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, is causing a literary stir. It has been compared to the writing of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Franz Kafka—one of the authorial inspirations for the collection. Grudova’s stories inhabit a time and space that is unclear to the reader, but never so far off to be unbelievable. Her writing is haunting and humorous, and the attention to gender dynamics adds a layer of truth to these dark tales.
Beautiful Flesh
The essays in Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays make up, collectively, a body, each essay on a single body part and so, moving from head to foot, the essays tell stories of the body, one that is multi-gendered, multi-ethnic, and multi-abled. The whole collection is, for me, summed up in a middle passage from Hester Kaplan’s essay “The Private Life of Skin,” a tale about her battle with psoriasis: “The heart beats faster when we’re scared, the chest clenches as we dial 911, the stomach flips with remorse, the head pounds with indecisions, the mouth waters for a kiss; we are our bodies.”
In the Language of My Captor
When I began reading Shane McCrae’s In the Language of my Captor, an 86-page book of poems and prose highlighting racial prejudice in both historical and present contexts, I was not the least familiar with the story of Jim Limber, an octoroon (1/8 African ancestry) orphan taken in by Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, from 1864 to 1865. Growing up in the American north during the 80s and 90s, I learned Civil War history from a northern grade school perspective that celebrated the greatness of leaders like Abraham Lincoln, the importance of the Union, and that highlighted the incredible progresses made toward racial justice then and since. Limber was not part of that learned history.
The Other Side of Violet
I figure most people who read book reviews are also writers. So let’s dig right into David Lawton’s interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, featured in a new anthology called The Other Side of Violet. Harding endured rejections with his first novel, Tinkers, but five years later it was published by a literary press. He was teaching at the time and happened to look online to see who won the Pulitzer. “Honestly, I sort of half fainted—‘swooned’ would not be inaccurate—onto the floor of the crummy grad student apartment I was staying in. Totally surreal,” he says.
Planet Grim
Alex Behr has a wide-ranging resume which has served her well over the years, providing a cornucopia of material to feed her writing. During the 1990s, she contributed to underground zines while performing in bands. She moved up the West Coast from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon in 2003, and published all the while as she did stints in comedy.
Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose
Picking up Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose for the first time, I was immediately surprised. The title alone is enough to catch the eye and make you wonder: What does it mean? How serious can this be? How literal?
Continue reading “Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose”
Come & Eat
I was really excited to read Bri McKoy’s Come & Eat, because as a Christian who loves to eat and feed other people, a whole book about using your table as a way to “celebrate . . . love and grace” seemed like just the sort of thing I wanted.
Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past
Years ago, a hot air balloon landed directly outside my house. I don’t remember the circumstances, but the resulting fascination with them has never left me, so I was delighted to read Kathryn Nuernberger’s opening essays in Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past about ballooning’s forgotten women.
Soviet Daughter
On August 11, Lola met Kyril, the self-professed love of her life. He proposed on the 15th, moved in on the 17th, and they married. This could be a modern love story, except it took place in the late 1930s in Eastern Europe when Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler were tossing lives into disarray. The story of Lola and Kyril is just one episode in Julia Alekseyeva’s richly-illustrated memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.
Unruly Creatures
Unruly Creatures is aptly named, and it is as unusual and wild as the title forebears. Jennifer Caloyeras colors outside the lines in in this collection. The stories are at once beautiful and tragic, comedic and full of sorrow, as well as strange and telling. Each story is wildly original, and seamlessly comments on current events. Caloyeras’s talent shines through the pages of this collection, latching on to the reader and refusing to be put down.
Liars
Are you happy? What is the source of your happiness? Would you say it’s love? Steven Gillis provides us with a few different answers to these questions in his new novel Liars. His characters find themselves either concretely sure of themselves, or questioning everything they know in this thrilling, somber story of a man trying to understand love.
Deep in the Shadows
In Hipólito Acosta’s newest book, Deep in the Shadows, each chapter is a riveting mini-mystery full of felons and malice, countered by bold law enforcement moves. Acosta, now retired, was a key figure in the US Immigration and Naturalization Service for 30 years. While undercover, he “traveled in the backs of trucks and in the trunks of cars with those seeking to enter our country. I had infiltrated human smuggling, as well as narcotics trafficking.” He writes, “I had twice taken down the most notorious counterfeiter who sold false documents to illegals and manufactured U.S. dollars in the millions.”
Unravelings
Sarah Cheshire’s Unravelings is exactly the kind of book you never want to read again. As fiction based on facts, there’s a fine line between being able to accept the story as not true, and being wholly disturbed by what parts of it may very well be true. Sadly, the premise is one that has been around since I was in college, and since generations before mine: female student is enamored by male professor, engages in flirtations, perhaps falls in love, all while others—including professional colleagues of said professor—see what is happening and do nothing. Could they have? Should they have? I can’t help but wonder where responsibility lies in these situations, and Cheshire offers no answer either.
By the River
By the River: Seven Contemporary Chinese Novellas provides a view of life in China today. The time is the emerging economy of the last few decades. Many people from the countryside have been forced into becoming factory workers, street venders, pedicab operators, schoolteachers, taxicab drivers, any job they can get to survive. The context is economic and political, but the stories are about the personal decisions of individuals to make their own destiny. The drama of human connection is up close with violence as overt as rape and as hidden as gossip, love both lust and of the heart, political resistance by way of satire, internal noncompliance and humor, and the sheer chaos of living in changing times forcing actions that new, uncharted, economic and political situations entail.
The Best American Newspaper Narratives
There are some books that exist to make their audience walk away feeling good about life and the world around them, and then there are books like The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 4, which makes readers face gritty truths, some harder to process than others. Each year, the anthology “collects the ten winners of the 2016 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.” This year’s edition, edited by award-winning Gayle Reaves, features first place winner Stephanie McCrummen with “An American Void,” second place Christopher Goffard with “Fleeing Syria: The Choice,” and third place Sarah Schweitzer with “The Life and Times of Strider Wolf,” plus, the contest’s seven runners-up.
My House Gathers Desires
Adam McOmber drags each and every reader into a thick, mysterious fog in his latest collection, My House Gathers Desires. McOmber’s stories quite literally have a life of their own, and the subject matter is relevant and important. This collection takes sexual identity and gender and gives them life in the stories and fables of old, while ultimately showing that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel.
Landslide
Minna Zallman Proctor’s Landslide is a collection of “true stories” (essays, really) that focus on matters of family, familiar dysfunction, and/or love gone awry. The essays cover a wide swatch of time, with stories from Proctor’s childhood, her young adult years, and her present, and though each essay can be read separately, together they ask a question that comes up several times: Is Proctor fated to repeat her mother’s life?
Cities at Dawn
In his recent essay at the Poetry Foundation blog, “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, and the Political,” David Trinidad makes a case for concrete imagery in poetry: “Without image I am bereft. I’m reading a poem by Contemporary Poet X and it’s nothing but abstractions, like ‘truth’ and ‘memory,’ like ‘despair’ and ‘joy.'” In audacious lushness, Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn delivers layers upon layers of detail that are refreshing in the face of contemporary poetic trends.
Nutter’s luxuriance in description brings to mind neoclassical novels, where the exposition of the plot depends on, say, the roving depiction of a bedroom. And this is precisely why Cities of Dawn delivers more than a message or concept. If one is reading with a metacognition, or awareness of one’s own reaction, the book—with its unfolding, seemingly endless worlds of objects and people—reflects our current cultural preference for a point, as we mine texts and rush toward abstraction.
In fact, in “The Radiant Manifest,” the speaker is faced with many objects: “plenty of tiny structures built into the waterless / pond” and “The probabilities, the double-sided / panels that turn toward one another.” At the turn in the poem, Nutter acknowledges our preference for thinking rather than experiencing:
And we were trying to “think it through” in the
way we knew how.
But it’s not something you can think your way through—
You think your way in and stay there.
From the very beginning of Cities at Dawn, the reader’s expectations are delightfully toyed with. The title for the first poem, “A Small Victorian Object,” sets up the ornamental preciousness of the Victorian world, and yet the poem ends by juxtaposing disparate objects:
Buttons; bottle caps; small bits of Styrofoam
that look like shells or coral; a few dead crabs;
a cracked porcelain vessel from the Victorian era
for containing the tears of those
who have survived the death of loved ones.
This poem is an example of how Nutter brilliantly performs a complex act of meaning so simply: as if in a museum, Styrofoam is displayed next to an antique porcelain vessel, and the contemporary viewer is forced to rethink the legacy of our familiar world. Time, too, is masterfully explored throughout the book, such as in “A Lapidary Crystal,” where Nutter’s arcane diction documents strange and fanciful things such as, “caustic potash,” “smoked eel and lemongrass,” and a “subterranean food court.” In the end, he uncannily conjures an obsolete world so similar to our own:
And its citizens are sleeping
but many are awake, and those
who are awake are turning in their beds,
as others lay their heads upon the cold
night pillows stuffed with ash and jasmine
for the calming of insomniacs [ . . . ]
Just as our forefathers couldn’t sleep, the speaker in “My Name Is Dustin Hemp” castigates the bookshelf of a seemingly invented ancestor in a manner reminiscent of an all-knowing hipster. After rattling off all the important books Hemp has not read, (including, hilariously, “the New Selected Wallace Stevens,” Derrida, and six bibles, such as “The Vinegar Bible” and “The Idle Bible,”) the speaker scourges cryptically, “Mr. Hemp, Your library is panoply / of iridescent darkness [ . . . ].” Speaking of hipster, the poem becomes self-referential when an admission appears halfway through: “The anachronisms in the poem are most marvelous.”
At The Kenyon Review John Ebersole adroitly observes, “Geoffrey Nutter’s poetry recalls the charm of a Wes Anderson film: so full of sculpted artifice that it manages to achieve authenticity.” A small minority might quibble with the word “authenticity” when it comes to Anderson’s films—some might argue that obscure aesthetics and emotional restraint become stilted and ultimately predictable. And like Anderson’s work, because Nutter’s pieces favor arcane encyclopedic knowledge and fanciful travels, at times it can be difficult to ascertain what emotion brought the speaker to share. Yet in poems like “These Are Cliffs of Wonder,” it becomes clearer where his art proclaims allegiances. Beginning self-reflexively, the poem could make any poet blush at their crummy metaphors:
When we moved to the wilderness
(of our feelings), past the granite quarry
and the salt works and the winding
towers (of our feelings)
Then, after cataloging the setting in a very simple manner, as in, “The houses / stand along the town” or “the wind is blowing,” the poem declares the epic: “These are the Cliffs of Wonder. / They rise from the Sea of Astonishment.” Suddenly, his rhetoric erects a cosmology, and in effect, Everything Ordinary stands in caps and possesses a mythical back story. The concrete is holy. And like E. E. Cummings, Nutter renders us so rudimentary, we look realer than ever:
The Person of Day-To-Day
Living lived day in, day out, among
the Big Geraniums of Guesses and the Waves,
in the Shadow of the Rickety
Lighthouse of Conjecturing.
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
A collection of essays has never been so utterly tragic and full of truth. James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well is overflowing with vulnerability, and it is the vulnerability that makes the reading experience worth it. Hall’s essays demonstrate his ability to marry poetry and prose in a relationship that I hope will only continue to blossom.
Continue reading “I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well”
Massive Cleansing Fire
In recent headline news: 14,000 inhabitants of British Colombia were evacuated as wild fires approached; 8,000 Southern Californians dashed for safety; 62 victims died in a forest fire in Northern Portugal; London’s Grenfell Tower fire took the lives of “around 80 people.” The threat of infernal combustion is the leitmotif that ties Dave Housley’s latest collection of short stories Massive Cleansing Fire together. Although it is unknown whether the fires that bridge the stories are started by folly or malice or divine lightning rod, what remains clear is the horror, destruction and often mundane reactions to our inevitable demise. As the flames approach, an insurance salesman commits double suicide, a clown and a monkey die together, a writer hiding in the Museum of Modern Art attempts to save some Rothkos, a bible thumper prays away, and a lab worker at a New Mexican cryonics lab follows final instructions. Suspenseful, dense, and unpredictable, Housley keeps the pages turning.
Guesswork
Martha Cooley’s first book-length collection of essays, Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss, is premised on the fact that eight of Cooley’s friends died within 10 years. I’m not sure that’s unusual for anyone who’s eased past a 50th birthday. Nevertheless, Cooley and her husband Antonio Romani spend 14 months in Italy’s Castiglione del Terziere where she reflects on life, friends, and her mother. She surveys the effects of losing loved ones and her means of adapting to those losses in this blend of travelogue and memoir.
Nicotine
Are you a smoker? When did you start smoking? How many cigarettes have you smoked in your lifetime, and what were the brands? Did they have filters? Have these questions ever crossed your mind before? Maybe you’re not a smoker, so these questions are useless to you, but maybe you used to be a smoker and now you’re trying to recall some of these answers. Or, maybe, you are a smoker, and some of these questions are on your mind every single day. That is exactly the case for Gregor Hens.