Book Review

The Illuminated Burrow

A Sanatorium Journal

Max Blecher
Translated by Gabi Reigh
Twisted Spoon Press ($23)

by Rick Henry            

The heart of reality is so unfathomable and of such great magnitude and grandiose diversity that our imagination is only able to extract a tiny fraction, enough to glean a few lights and interpretations to weave its “thread of life.”
—Max Blecher, The Illuminated Burrow

Max Blecher was born in Moldavia, raised in Romania, and began studying medicine in Paris until, at eighteen, he developed spinal tuberculosis. For the ten years that followed, he published fiction and poetry (much of it written from various institutional beds where his condition was treated) and corresponded with writers ranging from André Breton to Martin Heidegger. His two published novels, which have been translated into English as Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, secured his international reputation.

This biographical sketch, of course, says little about the “thread of life” Blecher sorted through in his writing; to address that, we now have an English version of his sanitorium journal Vizuina luminată, here translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh as The Illuminated Burrow. The book is a meditation on the nature of significant moments, written as Blecher approached his own death in 1938 at the age of twenty-eight. In the afterword, Gabriela Glăvan suggests that this final prose work and Blecher’s two novels “comprise a vast narrative of physical suffering.” Yes—but his work covers so much more of the world as he navigates his suffering, his body, and his imagination.

In one particularly striking moment, a man is dying in the adjacent room while Blecher, post-surgery, is desperate for a sip of water that is forbidden and just out of reach. Death and thirst: “Every minute the momentous and the banal happen simultaneously,” he writes. This disconnection reappears in a moment of excruciating pain as his bandages are changed; the doctor is amazed that he didn’t “scream the whole sanatorium down.” Blecher could have, but he had been conducting an experiment based upon the observation that “while one particular nerve is assailed by pain, the rest of the body, including the brain, continues to function normally.” However excruciating it might be, pain is a highly localized “nuisance,” but ignoring it only makes the suffering worse. To attain even the semblance of control, pain must be given “unadulterated ‘attention’.”

The beauty of Blecher’s prose and the focus of his observations often pull the reader away from the depth of suffering, as does the variety of events he experiences as he grapples with the unfathomable. Some appear to be ordinary—he dines with other patients and goes to the cinema—but in the end, his experience is foreign and isolating. The dining hall is “where the patients ate their meals while lying on gurneys wheeled to the table by porters in this vast and seemingly ordinary room.” In the cinema, a row of gurneys occupied by patients lines the back wall. Amid these experiences are descriptions of hanging dogs, a “petite Parisian girl” smoking “a cork-tipped Craven A cigarette,” a gentleman checking his watch on his daily walk, and how what he sees morphs into light and shapes, colors and planes, such that “such episodes deeply shook my faith in a stable, coherent reality . . . as well as revealing the essential dreamlike quality of all our everyday actions.” Other moments examine those dream states, thoughts, reveries, and memories.

Blecher’s situation is also marked by dissociation: language, images, story, and ‘reality’ have little to which they can affix themselves. Unlike the surrealist project of making the world strange, Blecher finds the world is strange. At best, we are in a state of irreality: “we create our lives each moment through our imagination, and in that instant life makes sense, but only in that moment and only in the way our imagination contrives it.”

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Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave ($18.95)

by Ross Hair

First published in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Ronald Johnson’s third book of poetry, consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while foreshadowing his epic poem ARK, which he began writing in 1970. The book is comprised of two parts; the first, “A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,” consists of a selection of poems from Johnson’s 1964 debut volume of the same title, and the second, “The Different Musics,” collects poems Johnson wrote between 1966 and 1967. The title of Johnson’s book is taken from the Valley conjured in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Eleanora”—an idyllic place where, amidst its “thousands of forest trees” and “many millions of fragrant flowers,” the story’s narrator dwells with his cousin Eleanor and her mother.

Existing somewhere between scrupulously observed fact and visionary transmutation, the worlds evoked in “A Line of Poetry” are not only as luxuriant as Poe’s Valley, but also as utopic. “This is the Garden,” Johnson writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “where all is a poet’s / topiary. Where even the trees / shall have tongues, green aviaries, / to rustle at his will”:

Here—

both lines of poetry, rows
of trees,
shall spring all

seasons
out ‘of the lust of

the earth,
without
a formal seed’.

In “Four Orphic Poems” we find the poet evoking Thoreau—one of several Transcendentalists that inform the poems in Johnson’s Valley—as they attempt to read the Book of Nature:

& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

As well as reading nature’s “green / script,” Johnson also reads what others before him (poets, botanists, painters, composers, scientists) have written about it. Thus, throughout the book he liberally quotes the words of others, plotting his transplanted material on the page with the care of a gardener who seeks “clear space // to cultivate // the Wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate.” However, compared to the open field collage poetics of the Black Mountain poets, Johnson foregoes extemporization for a more proportioned, more serene approach to composition that circumvents the bluster his older peers could be prone to.

As much as the poems comprising “The Different Musics” continue Johnson’s fascination for the “sweet proportion / & order” of both micro- and macrocosm, they also more explicitly acknowledge the sensual, erotic forces—the “rude / & stammering / organs”—by which “NATURE CONSPIRES.” Whereas in “A Line of Poetry” we find sowers, including Johnny Appleseed, casting their seeds in dark fields, and sunflowers “heavy in the head, with / seed,” in “The Different Musics” propagation assumes more phallic proportions. This is evident in Johnson’s series of ekphrastic poems on the dream-like jungle scenes created by French painter Henri Rousseau. “The Snake Charmer,” for example, depicts Rousseau’s eponymous subject, a “flautist of the sinuous phallus,” amidst a lush amatory landscape wherein “two pale fox-gloves secretly erect themselves, // deeper within the thicket” and “soft, foliaceous / labials” suggest fellatio.

The erotic charge of “The Different Musics,” and the new perspective it brings to Johnson’s cosmopoiesis, recalls the transfiguration that the Valley in Poe’s “Eleanora” undergoes following the sexual awakening of the story’s young protagonists. “A change fell upon all things,” Poe’s narrator writes: “And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us.” As the young lovers’ sexual awareness burgeons and grows, new strange flowers blossom on the trees in the Valley and “ruby-red asphodel” (an omen of morality) grows where before were only daisies.

In “The Different Musics” this correspondence between sexual agency and a heightened perception of “the great grassy world” is evident in “Letters to Walt Whitman,” a suite of ten poems that answer the poet’s Leaves of Grass. “But I have come O Walt,” Johnson writes in Letter III, “for the interchange, promised, of calamus, / masculine, sweet-smelling root, / between us”:

Calamus, ‘sweet flag’,
that still thrusts itself up,

that seasonally thrusts itself up for lovers.

This “interchange” often occurs via homonyms and double-entendres. In Letter II, for example, “the vast organic slough / of the earth, / the exquisite eye / —as myriad upon myriad of dandelions— // seeding itself on the air,” adumbrates the ejaculatory act implicit in the foregoing exhortation: “I have come O Whitman.” At the same time, such dissemination also speaks to “the intimate kernel,” the germinal life force, of the “ample prairie” that is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “The intimate kernel putting forth final leaf // from The Valley Of The Many-Colored Grasses.” Here, “leaf” suggests both a “stalk of grass” and the page of a book: Whitman’s, Johnson’s, and Nature’s.

Johnson writes in “Letters to Walt Whitman” of having “lain in the open night // till my shoulders felt twin roots, & the tree of my sight / swayed, / among the stars.” A similar fusion is evoked in Johnson’s earlier poem, which quotes Henry David Thoreau’s elegiac essay “Autumnal Tints”:

            ‘When Men Will Lie Down
                        as Gracefully & as Ripe—

            with such an Indian-summer serenity
            will shed their bodies
            as they do their hair & nails’.

Fall leaves, Thoreau (dying of tuberculosis at the time) writes, “teach us how to die.” For, Johnson, however, who omits a portion of Thoreau’s original text—“One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully”—this image of recumbent men shuns the hubris of immortality for the more modest grace and fecundity of seasonal time and change; the “subtler harmonies, coming of growth /  & of death.”

The reclining figures in both of Johnson’s poems are repeated on the cover of this beautiful new edition of Valley, which uses a photograph by Johnson’s friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s multiple-exposure technique makes his male subject appear to fuse with (or dissolve into) the rocky terrain about him. If this recalls the way in which the poet in “The Different Musics,” searching the dictionary, humbly finds “among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke: // ‘the earthly remains of bodies once alive— / a confusion— / a single particle, as of earth,’” it also reiterates the affirmation that Johnson expresses throughout his book for the largesse of life itself. To have this book finally back in print, and reminding us of such verities, is simply a splendid thing.

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Quarantine Highway

Millicent Borges Accardi
Flowersong Press ($16)

by Hilary Sideris

Quarantine Highway, the fourth poetry collection by the Portuguese-American poet Millicent Borges Accardi, was written in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a group of thirty Latinx poets participated in a challenge organized by the organization CantoMundo—writing, reading, and riffing on each other’s poems for thirty days. Borges Accardi captures the sheer panic and magical thinking of that time when Covid was at its most mysterious and deadly, and she shows us a community coming together to document and process the absurdity (and, at times, the strange beauty) of pandemic life, taking comfort and inspiration from each other’s raw emotions and rough drafts.        

In the poem “Yes, It’s Difficult,” Borges Accardi lapses into nostalgia for the pre-pandemic world of unfettered travel and spontaneous shows of affection: “it was how we did things then, / dirty and up close and we breathed on each other / sighing air, sipping in fine water droplets.” The poet daydreams of travel in “She Can Do What She has to Do,” finding herself “in a café that I know does not exist, / on a corner in make-believe Paris,” where she watches people pass in the plaza. “Thank you,” she tells the imaginary garçon,

I would love a piece of cheese and some
bread. The drink is cool, so I feel as if
the story of my life can go on forever.

Not surprisingly, a reckoning with fragility and the monotony of living a cautious life dominates the collection. In “All It Takes,” the poet fights off an ant infestation, while outside, bodies stack up in refrigerated trucks. Borges Accardi’s gaze falls on a line of ants carrying their dead across her kitchen floor:

You drink cod liver oil and chant
Go home go home go home as the
ants pick up their dead and march
backwards to their queen.

Even as she attempts to ward off the invaders, the poet recognizes that they, too, are members of a community facing an existential threat. But the kitchen is also a site of hope: Cooking and baking are rituals that engage Borges Accardi in a sensual world where well-being is possible. “One Season, My Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions” describes the pleasure of preparing a spicy Portuguese dish:

To be bright red is to want things to happen.
I know this and make Piri Piri, to be held
carefully, to be used later.
The nuances of honey and bitter, roll
about my tongue as I add the sauce to
our lives.                                     

The poem’s title, like quite a few other titles in this collection, is a line written by a fellow poet—in this case, Juan Luis Guzmán—during the month-long exchange that produced Quarantine Highway. This is a book that shows how poetry matters during a time of crisis, how we can keep writing and remember to breathe through a shared sense of culture and community.

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Old Love Skin

Voices from Contemporary Africa

Edited by Nyashadzashe Chikumbu
Mukana Press ($15.95)

by Mbizo Chirasha

Old Love Skin, a collection edited by the energetic griotic Zimbabwean poet Nyashadzashe Chikumbu, is a rainbow of vibrant African voices, a rainbow that rises Mandela from the royal caves of Qunu. It is renaissance that sings to the bones of Nkrumah waKwame sleeping saliently in the lush meadows of heavenly bliss; it is real poetry smoked by ancient ghosts and love angels upon the zenith of Kilimanjaro and fontanelles of Chimanimani mountains, real poetry of Chimurenga grandchildren watering the literary pastures with the rain of organic allegory. It is real poetry strangling ghosts of warlords in Nzere. It is real poetry floating with the gigantic spirit of Nefertiti in White and Blue Nile and Nzinga walking onto the beauty of pyramid rubbles, with Nyamhita Nyanda Nehanda strutting onto the spiritual podium of chimurenga gods. It is real poetry smacking the yellow-orange hypocritical faces of colonial mood and smashing the spiking python tails of post-independence African dictatorships wearing the sheep’s fair coat. It is the love of love and hate of love. And it is the hate of hate and the love of hate. Old Love Skin is a cousin of dramatic irony, satire maybe, or the grandchild of African paradox.

Alvin Kathemb’s poem “Contingencies” well represents the body politic of the collection:

She carries a condom in her purse in case of rape.
When I saw it, I asked, teasing?
expecting some joke or frisky comment—
“You never know when the craving will strike”—
something in that vein.

“Contingencies” depicts the modern trends of sex, population control, and the nausea of recolonization/mental slavery in the name of civilization and modernism. The poem is a graphic presentation of the erosion of ancient African morals that decried sex before the performance of matrimonial rites as exercised by the generations of the past in real Africa. Kathemb takes aim at today’s moral decadence and social rot in comparison to past cultural values and traditional rites, and by prologuing with three of his poems, the anthology sets up a discussion between modern problems and the puzzles of old Africa.

In the nerve-raving verses of “Gaana” by Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, the memory and psyche of the poet are twinned with the reader’s poetic ear. In this political/revolutionary volley presented as a Christmas/valentine present—what a dramatic irony—we see the reincarnation of old literary revolutionary voices such as Léopold Senghor, Jack Mapanje, and Christopher Okgibo, with their ironic/satiric yearnings for freedom during days of colonial madness when Africa was grinding under crude Anglo-Euro colonial iron fist rule. Yes, the African griot on the Old Love Skin podium sings to the current pseudo- revolutionary-tyrranical-autocratic African leadership that never repented from shenanigans of self-hate, greed, killing, war, and decadence. Kwaku, the young muse, recites raw resistance to the machinations of neocolonialism that has reared its unfriendly double heads unto Africa, sliding Africa into dire impoverishment, cultural adultery, and political discord:

I want to get a pet one day—a cat, maybe or a dog—& name it after my country, so each poem I write for it, is also for my country. I want a messy pet—a beautiful pet a pet that’s a metaphor for my country. That when I say my pet tore my life apart today, I also mean—my country tore my life apart. When I say my pet is beautiful, I also am saying—my country is beautiful. When it steals my fish, I say what I say. When it brings me fish, I know there’s a bargain—something taken, something I won’t know of. When it breaks my heart, I know it is my country & I cannot unlove it—when it kills me, I won’t know

Kwaku Dade’s “To Aluah I” is a powerful, painful, and erotic, but so lovely, love-nostalgic epistle. The poet is writing a memory, a long-ago letter to someone she/he knows, a love lost. Sometimes the lover is enjoying afterlife in heaven’s chambers or burning already in the merciless red-hot charcoal chalices of hell; otherwise the poet speaks to his mother who was swallowed by the untamed legends of the world on the day of his birth. Maybe the poet is speaking to a country lost in the decadence of war or the discord of political greed, a country with slums as its wounds and poverty as its boils, a country with a name but no longer living, a dead/lost country. And again, the poem is an elegy, a heart-thumping epitaph, an epistle of memories, a sad love story:

In my mind, you lurk about the house. You splash in the bathtub, tap on the ceramic, you are in the hall, in the kitchen, in the hallways. But the walls whisper to me that I am lying. I step into these your motions, and I find only a brush of cold under my skin. In our backyard, your hand touches mine, pegging clothes on the drying lines, and longings inside you transfer into me. But the passing breeze screams into my face that you are not here. In the sky, asperatus clouds form you, naked, in a bed of bubbles. You stare back at me with famished eyes with a hint of detestation. And sunlight pours through it all. And it rains. I remember us sleeping on our Tamale bed. Our son sleeps between us, and when the void of dreams takes him, I climb over to you; I brush my cheeks against the silk of your stomach

This anthology is also a display of bravery and resurrection of lost hopes. The verses within it are in sync with “old love skin”—how deep and broad the title is, though it is anchored by rims of precision and grids of literary simplicity. Pusetso Lame, the versatile genius of the land of Batswana, comes out with guns blazing; the crudity and the bravery in her verse is a portrayal of Africa believed, Africa disbelieved, Africa loved and hated, Africa hopeful and hopeless. Pusetso’s militant-but-logical verse is optimistic and thus reminds us that Old Love Skin is a revolution to replace the old with the new—or swap the rotten new with the sane/fresh old. Lame speaks to women’s fear of seeing their graves. She stands with/for the victims of violence, victims of fear, and victims of hate, and she wants them to rise. As usual, poets are dynamic perception-changers and life-savers, and Lame’s words offer a rebirth, a renewal, a rekindle, a resurrection, and an uprising:

When all you can see is a worthless being Trying to resurrect from a grave that keeps digging itself deeper and deeper Like rain droplets, I’d slowly but surely wipe away all the pains from yesterday’s rejections When all the doors before you have been closed even before your existence

Old Love Skin can be read as symbolizing a rebirth of the old wine skin adage, or maybe its replacement: the reincarnation, the memory, the rise of ancestors of letters or another literary revolution, a non-violent resistance with fistfights dressed in cloves of mushroom, bullets loaded in petals of roses or petals of blood—and iconic literary prowess.

Zimbabwean poet Energy Mavaza was born and bred in that land of contradiction, the land of embrace and bruises, the land of scenic beauty and political ugliness, the land that requires today’s corruption sanitizers as it needed yesterday’s colonial fumigators before the shrill of the cockerel in 1980. Mavaza, the new of the old Shimmer Chinodya (author of the award-winning novel Harvest of Thorns, a novel that predicted the colonial present of the country under siege and the future of a republic that was to greedily drink its own eggs of economic and political freedom), brings back to this poetic podium a searing verse :

That winters’ sun shone so bright, Thawed hearts in melanin delight. Hope swallowed in ballot box, Hope in Africa? What a paradox. For nature nurtures its own well. It adorns wild peppermints with green, Climbers scale up rocks and boughs Embracing the bush to keep the axe at bay. Landscape painted in scattered thistles in gloom-bloom as they shudder To the August gust. The firm rooted tastes November dew. Thistles appease in summer breeze, Whispering dry rumours to the prickly leaves. Roots ferret beneath for moisture but the ancestors stare licks our hope up. Zealous ploughers did much about nothing Silos awaited nocuous for stores but Dust, the response to what we sowed, Shrubs and thorns too. No one knows what they fed on We will reap what we did not sow Bountiful harvest of thorns We didn’t toil for

Old Love Skin is a theme-based display of poetic gems equalized by the sweet/slow/fresh/smooth flow of a young river pouring into the tired/sober/ harsh but motherly pigeon-infested old river. It is a unique African story told by brave-militant wordsmiths who divorced their play with androids and stereos and got initiated by poignant metaphor, crude pliers of irony, and sharp, double-edged razor blades of satire.

Some of these word-soldiers were trained in the style of Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka; others are great-grandchildren of Senghor and Mapanje; many of them copy the lyricism of Dambudzo Marechera; and still others drank Victorian and metaphysical poetics, maybe some African Canterbury Tales. Old Love Skin is a yearn for freedom, a rebirth, a resurrection, a revolution, a resistance of the bad old, and an embrace of the good new—as well as a chant against the rotten new and an embrace of the good old.

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The People Who Report More Stress

Alejandro Varela
Astra House ($26)

by Eric Olson                     

Writers are nothing if not people watchers, but many would confess that attentiveness is a double-edged sword. In Alejandro Varela’s blisteringly frank—and equally funny—short story collection The People Who Report More Stress, eavesdroppers and overthinkers abound. Varela is as concerned with being seen as he is with seeing others, and this dichotomy accounts for his brilliance.

Varela rose to prominence with last year’s The Town of Babylon, one of three debuts named finalists for the 2022 National Book Award. Like that novel’s main character, Andrés, most of Varela’s short story protagonists are gay Latino men living in New York City. Varela asked in a recent Lit Hub essay not to conflate his characters with himself—“The critiques will be of me and not my work”—but these characters are markedly funny, and it’s impossible that their humor springs from anywhere but the author’s wry outlook.

Motifs are compiled with delightful urgency in the opening story “An Other Man,” in which the unnamed “you” takes to opening up your predictable marriage with the help of dating apps. “Once we have kids, this’ll all get more complicated,” urges your husband. “Might as well do it now.” Of course, dating apps are a breeding ground for anxiety, in particular when men compliment your “Ricky Martin vibe” and “everyone, it seems, has been at the gym for the last decade.” To boot, “Sidestepping white men proves an onerous task on a distance-based application in a hyper-gentrified neighborhood.”

In a 2022 Apogee interview, Varela revealed that growing up, “I was often the only one of me in most of the spaces I was in. I was the queer friend in the straight group of friends in college. I was the person of color in a white group of friends.” Again, we shouldn’t mistake the author for his characters. But a stark sense of otherness resonates in this collection, an estrangement rooted in compulsive thinking and self-doubt. Thankfully, the flipside of otherness is community, and when Varela steers his characters toward greener pastures—the arms of a husband, the bed of a lover, the invectives of a thoughtful leftist—fireworks ensue.

Throughout the collection, Varela documents a period of life where things threaten to settle but remain decidedly erratic. There are racial misunderstandings involving children, sexual escapades in the elevators of UN Headquarters, and struggles catching taxis as a brown man. Regardless of the situation’s immediate physical consequence, Varela maintains high stakes—after all, self-perception is everything for a protagonist. And we’re constantly reminded that it hurts to be profiled.

This paradigm comes to fruition in matters of sex, a preoccupation so central that it percolates into nearly every other aspect of the collection, politics in particular. The People Who Report More Stress is a motherlode of social criticism, made all the more poignant by its interwoven analysis of lust. This is perhaps most evident in “Comrades,” where a 41-year-old progressive looks to move on from his ex using a dating app geared specifically for liberals. “FUN FACT,” reads his profile, “Stress of inequality is leading risk factor for top 10 causes of death.”

Among this collection’s finest numbers, “Comrades” both pokes fun at and endorses unapologetic progressivism. “Is Israel the dom or the sub?” Varela’s lead asks over a martini. “It can’t be both at once.” The first dates in “Comrades” aren’t particularly successful, but neither are they out-and-out disasters. They’re merely what happens every day, all over the world, when politics and sex rub elbows.

Varela has admitted to experiencing impostor syndrome, which seems normal after an acclaimed debut. In literary terms, the author should take a measure of comfort in how his follow-up book reaches undeniable vernacular peaks, such as when he breaks the fourth wall to end “Grand Openings”:

Moral? There is no moral, but some observations about pleasure and monotony: they are powerful. They will make one do things they promised they would never do, and they will accelerate a train already in motion. At times they work in conjunction; sometimes they’re free agents. Pleasure will disrupt monotony, sure, but only momentarily. And the effort to maintain that disruption will, in most cases, lead to irreversible effects. Life continues. Until it doesn’t.

By turns tragic, rosy, and libidinous—but always thoughtful—The People Who Report More Stress relates the way in which desire both derives from and conforms to the expectations of others. Varela’s characters might not know what exactly they want, but they do know who they are. It’s the rest of the world that has trouble connecting

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Abuela, Don't Forget Me

Rex Ogle
Norton Young Readers ($18.95) 

by George Longenecker                      

In this book-length poetic memoir, Rex Ogle takes young readers on his journey from despair to hope. His narrative poetry, which explores how he persevered through abuse and poverty, is fast-paced, compelling, and appropriate for young readers.

Ogle’s grandmother is an island of calm in his mother’s storm of instability. She emigrated from Mexico, built a life in Texas, and graduated from college; her daughter, Ogle’s mother, moves from place to place and from man to man. The author’s father has left Texas; he has a new family and only sees his son during summer visits. Abuela takes young Rex in and encourages him to read. She takes him to the library for the first time:

Inside, white walls reach toward blue skies
seen through high glass windows
resting above shelf after shelf after shelf of
book after book after book.
My eyes grow wide, whites wider, pupils dilating
to take in all these stories
begging to be known

“Can I read them all?” I ask.
Abuela smiles.
“Yes.
If you work hard, you can do anything.”

For Rex, the library and books are his redemption from abuse and neglect. The backyard of his neighbor Jason, also a magical and safe place, appears in three poems: “We’re children / so the world is still beautiful / and war / still only a game.” The child’s point of view here comes with no small irony: Abuela is a war widow; her husband, Rex’s grandfather, died in Vietnam. 

For Rex, though, the real war is one his mother wages: “At times when no one sees me, / all eyes on my mom, shouting, ranting, screaming (again) / accusing others of this and that, / I run away.” He’s small enough to hide in a small kid-size closet and wait for it to end.  As he grows older, the abuse worsens. In one episode, “Mom grabs me by the hair / lets her fist fly, coming down again and again.” It’s at these times that his room at Abuela’s is a refuge: “At home, at night, /there is always noise, that keeps me awake. / At Abuela’s / there is only a soft hush.”

At school, Rex faces racist harassment and bullying from classmates. One day on the school bus, he has had enough, “and since Chris is sitting closest to the aisle// I punch him as hard as I can in the face. // It is not the first time / I have been in the principal’s office / for fighting // and it will not be the last.”

Despite his disciplinary record, Rex is a good high school student, excelling in multiple AP classes. Abuela is his inspiration. She works multiple jobs to support Rex and help her daughter out of financial messes. It’s a fast-paced narrative with a trajectory of hope; as the author makes clear in his foreword, “Abuela is the only parent I’ve ever known who showed me truly unconditional love, kindness, and support.” Her refrain to Rex is “Te amo siempre”—I love you forever. 

In well-crafted poetry, Abuela, Don’t Forget Me shows young readers that abuse cannot be forgotten, but it can be overcome. 

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A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Joanna Biggs
Ecco ($29.99)

by Ellie Eberlee

Evening, 1857. A thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame under her pen name, George Eliot, reads Jane Austen aloud. After decades of migraines, unrequited attachments, and the loss of her parents, Eliot is beginning to write fiction, and she seeks inspiration in Austen’s wry, imaginative prose. She also hopes to entertain George Henry Lewes, her lover and a member of the burgeoning London literati to which Eliot—an anonymous magazine editor—fervently aspires to belong.

A century later in 1964, the thirty-three-year-old divorcée Toni Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) accepts a job editing textbooks in Syracuse. A single mother supporting her toddler son and newborn after a fleeting marriage to a Jamaican-born architect, Morrison found the position listed among the New York classifieds. Fending off creative depression and loneliness, Morrison writes by night, packing and smoking a tobacco pipe in her poorly heated apartment before resuming work on an old manuscript (published in 1970 as The Bluest Eye).

What links these two women separated by time, an ocean, and circumstance? Eliot and Morrison led unconventional lives, encountering gendered, racial, and socioeconomic hurdles in their careers and relationships. Like many spirited, creative women before and after them, Eliot and Morrison fought fiercely for the right to live out to the limits of their talents and desires, pursuing writing as a conduit for making meaning as they did so.

These and similar battles form the backbone of Joanna Biggs’s joint autobiography and biography A Life of One’s Own. Examining “Nine Women Writers [who] Begin Again,” the book traces the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. A senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail, 2015), Biggs casts herself as the unspoken ninth woman, starting anew following the dissolution of her marriage in her early thirties.

Initially, Biggs’s divorce spelled straightforward liberation. “I was free,” the author writes. “At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild.” Soon, though, Biggs yearned for a life she “would be proud of, that [she] could stand behind.” She wondered: how does a feminist reconcile drives toward independence and human connection? Does domesticity preclude a fulfilling writing career or intellectual life? Such questions “felt urgent as well as overwhelming. . . . I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.”

Like many recent joint biographies of female creatives—for example, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women (2018) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020)—Biggs splits her exploration of women’s literary and personal re-beginnings into distinct, individually focussed chapters. The book observes a broad chronology, beginning in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft, whose landmark political treatises and epistolary travelogues Biggs admired as an undergraduate at Oxford. It ends with Ferrante, whose resilient energies drove Biggs’s brief venture into small press publishing, and whose Neapolitan novels continue to inform many of Biggs’s longstanding female friendships. Each section supplies a thoughtful tessellation of personal memoir, vividly recounted biography, and joyful analysis of the various writers’ major works. A prime example is the chapter titled “Zora,” which relates Biggs’s initial reading of the first professional Black woman author while undergoing a depressive episode; tracks Hurston’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, among other national movements; and offers a keenly observed, self-reflexive reading of Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Occasionally, the sheer celebrity of many of Biggs’s chosen biographical subjects threatens to detract from the immediacy and inventiveness of her narrative (Woolf and Plath’s extensively speculated-upon struggles with mental illness pluck especially familiar strings). Still, Biggs’s deeply felt connection to each writer revitalizes established literary lore, reframing each woman’s trajectory through personally resonant lenses of resurgence and rebirth. Her literary analyses, too, exhibit tender yet considered admiration. She avoids the detached, properly critical attitudes championed at Oxford while emphasizing the exquisite literary quality of each woman’s labors; it’s from their words, as much their lives, that Biggs draws solidarity and a sense of possibility.

If any lasting complaint might be lodged against A Life of One’s Own, it’s that the author’s considerable wealth of source material often obscures her own engrossing autobiography. At its end, readers may be taken aback to learn that seven years have passed since Biggs’s separation. What happened in the intervening period? Biggs offers glimpses: a brief stint on antidepressants, Ferrante-themed parties, apartment hunts, hot baths reading Hurston, relocation to New York, rediscovery of Woolf’s novels on the train from Brooklyn. But our sense of the author remains patchy at best, a partial sketch in a gallery of otherwise polished, skillful portraiture.

Ultimately, the book’s central thread holds tight. It’s gratifying, albeit slightly unsurprising, to arrive at Biggs’s conclusion that “there are many ways of doing good work and living a happy life, and that is more unusual for that to happen within the conventional set-up than you might imagine.” Of course, her reading of these eight women writers proves fundamental to that takeaway: “I never thought I could be Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes, “but I’ve always known she existed.” Put another way, Biggs finds anchorage in the drift of her literary mothers. Through revisiting their words—the complex, hard-won languages of hope, loss, and love each woman developed and left behind—she locates the confidence to carry her own messy liberation forward. By the book’s end, she lives and writes from a position figuratively analogous to the one Mrs. Ramsay temporarily occupies in Woolf’s masterwork To the Lighthouse—looking out over a sea of female creative inheritance, observing how her chosen women’s lives and literature have “silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,” and feeling, above all, that “It is enough! It is enough!”

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Two Poets of the American Now

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Franny Choi
Ecco ($27.99)

Concentrate

Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press ($17)

by Walter Holland

Franny Choi and Courtney Faye Taylor are two compelling poets of our fraught political moment who succeed in capturing the pulse of the American now. The two poets take different paths; in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi offers an expansive meditation on our troubled society and its dystopian state, while Taylor, in Concentrate, channels heartrending research about one forgotten victim of racial injustice into a larger indictment of American institutional racism.

“Good Morning America” provides a sense of Choi’s provocative and well-crafted political verse:

Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath
of another bad massacre, and I’ve got
plenty of seats. Come in, I whisper

to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder,
to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.
Dispatches from Kenosha,

Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive
like a steady kickdrum of sparrows
spatchcocked by gravity, little nevers,

little couldn’ts; too late to stop the video,

too late, too late.

Choi deftly captures here the tumult of our American moment; in this, she joins poets such as Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, and Justin Phillip Reed. The image of sparrows “spatchcocked”—literally split open at the spine to lay flat—evokes images of police brutality, mass murder, and other events that have indeed become a  “steady kickdrum” of injustice. We’ve seen the smartphone videos surface with endless evidence of American racism at work.

The poems in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On are spare in language and brutally direct; Choi’s honest style of attack gives her poetry stinging irony. However, Choi doesn’t preach. Her instinct is to avoid commentary and instead to use her keen eye and ear to lay out the facts. In an age during which the very nature of truth and fact have been contested, Choi captures the moral conundrum implicit in Hans Christen Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Andersen does in his parable, Choi challenges the reader to see the truth behind our delusions, spin, and split seams of absurd reasoning. She reveals the truth hidden under the imaginary cloth of our showy malfeasance.

Choi’s list poem “Things That Already Go Past Borders” is a perfect example. The title immediately undermines our simplistic belief that building a physical border wall will prevent all future threats. “Things That Already Go Past Borders” begins:

trade deals; pathogens; specific
passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car
parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some
insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music
at the right volume; headlights; human
remains; wireless signals; all manner
of money; of memory; people

This mix of abstract and concrete nouns suggests the insoluble paradox of trying to keep out of the country “trade deals” and “vegetables,” or “religion” and “human remains.” The irony is heightened when we consider how ubiquitous American culture has already become, spreading globally despite the efforts of the most advanced of nations.   

In “Science Fiction Poetry,” Choi is again ironic. The tag at the start of each line is “Dystopia of,” and by repeating the word, Choi plays with hyperbole and understatement to undermine the term’s grim prophecy. The Oxford Englsh Dictionary defines “dystopia” as an “imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Choi contrasts this “imagined state” of “great suffering or injustice” with what we see today in plain sight—for example, the contrast between the discomfort of sitting “all day in an air-conditioned conference hall with no sweater” and the suffering of “houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block.” She continues: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live” and “Dystopia very lonely on Mother’s Day.”  

In the end, Choi points out how, historically, this dystopian self-delusion has been cyclical and generational. She draws on the struggles of her Korean grandmother and great-grandmother and her own childhood memories of discrimination in the U.S. Like Andersen, Choi points to the bizarre paradox between what truth tells us and what American society would have us imagine, and reveals how we equivocate between our claims to morality and our already existing semi-totalitarian injustice. Through poetry that is stunningly well-crafted and fresh, Choi bares the naked realities under our thinnest of ethical pretensions.

• • • 

In 1973, the author Alice Walker searched through the overgrowth of a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida, before stumbling upon the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, a literary star of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was rescued from her anonymity and recognized as a victim of cultural and economic racism. In a like manner, poet Courtney Faye Taylor, in her new book Concentrate, searches the impoverished cemetery of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, California. She is looking for the grave of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot to death in Los Angeles for supposedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, the fifty-one-year-old woman who shot Harlins in the back of the head, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison, but her sentence was suspended to five years of probation and community service with a restitution of $500. Du’s light sentencing was one of the events that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Taylor never finds Harlins’s grave—her remains were allegedly exhumed in a cemetery scheme to dispose of minorities in mass unmarked “piles” while burying lucrative customers in traditional graves.        

The title of Taylor’s book, Concentrate, is a provocative one: It refers partly to the fact that the bottle of orange juice Harlins was accused of stealing was the cheap concentrate variety, not the tonier kind that is a staple of middle-class suburbanites far beyond America’s food deserts. Concentrate has several definitions, according to Merriam-Webster: “to bring or direct toward a common center or objective, i.e., focus”; “to gather into one body, mass, or force”; and “to focus one’s powers, efforts, or attentions.” Indeed, Taylor has sharply focused on a singular objective: to concentrate on the undiluted truth and formidable outrage that Harlins’s death provokes to this day.

Through prose poems, found poems, essayistic freeform, and visual imagery from leaflets and in collages, Taylor seeks to restore Harlins’s dignity and bring the injustice of her death back to national attention. As with the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new effort is being made to preserve the memory of victims of injustice such as Treyvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to draw the focus of a nation too often distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer number of episodes of racist violence which play out and disappear in our daily news cycles.

In the poem “Arizona?” we are introduced to Taylor’s beloved Aunt Notrie. As a young adolescent girl, Taylor listens to her aunt give her “The Talk”: that discomforting lecture about how Black boys and girls in America must navigate a racist society to ensure their survival. While Notrie does Taylor’s hair, she implores the child “<*keep still now*” as Taylor replies “>I’m trying to.” Notrie tells Taylor to “concentrate” on the story of Latasha Harlins and her death in order to drive home the dangers Black people face on a daily basis should they not practice passive and deferential behavior around whites.  Taylor says she is “trying to” keep still when her aunt says:

<Ain’t about trying, it’s about doing. How
else you plan to survive? Live a life of
trying and you just end up tried . . .
All that child was tryna buy
was a drink.

                                                <Arizona?

<South Central.

Aunt Notrie mentions the death of Trayvon Martin to point out that this threat is real to all Black children regardless of gender:

<Boys ain’t the only cause of chalk-
ines. You got that allergy to sixteenth
birthdays too, understand?—*sit up
straight*—This was OJ.

Taylor’s language is concise, and her tone is direct—her messages are sobering but poignant. Harlins died at fifteen. Trayvon Martin died at seventeen carrying Skittles in his pocket. Taylor is told she may never reach sixteen just for being a target of white suspicion.

In “A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set,” the racist assumptions behind surveys of both white and Black women, in the magazines Country Living and Ebony/Jet respectively, are revealed. The women must identify their three greatest fears: The white women list “1. Nuclear war in US / 2. Child dying of terminal illness / 3. Terminal illness of self,” while the Black women list “1. Dogs / 2. Ghosts / 3. CCTV.” Taylor’s take on this is nothing short of dazzling:             

Stereotypes are centipedes at ease
in bowls of bleach. Or liberation lit

with wicks, and then Katrina—that’s
a stereotype. When company’s mixed. I’ll pet

king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my
teeth in corner store camcorders, although

privately—under nouveau R&B and the tutelage of
quick weaves—the Chesimard in me counts horror on

a matte black abacus. There is no fear on
earth that has ever gone unhad or

unbereaved, but the Diaspora won’t have it be
known that dogs, ghosts, and CCTV are

a melody defining out costs, copywriting our loss.

The lethal music of Taylor’s language, with its internal rhymes and unfettered consonance, is evident: “lit” joins with “wicks,” “R&B” with “quick weaves,” and “unbereaved” with “CCTV.” We hear the speaker’s sharp sarcasm as she points out the angry undercurrent of her thoughts, which must be suppressed in mixed company; we hear too how she silently counts the many racist horrors through history on her “black abacus.” Concentrate inventively inserts edgy, caustic observation under the veneer of a complicit understanding. In language that festers as though buried alive, Taylor succeeds in disturbing even the most silent of cemeteries and in resurrecting the desecrated dead.

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Participation

Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press

by Joseph Houlihan

Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her translation, from the French, of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. Her latest novel, Participation, also has a lot of “French” in it; possibly written as an echo of her previous novel, Eleanor, or the Rejection of Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), this new work offers a probing meditation on love. Fortunately, the book’s framing device cuts through any risk of it being overly sentimental.

Participation follows a narrator, E, as she vacillates between the gravity of two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love. E explains: “Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.”

Following the Oulipo tradition of expanding through constraint, Moschovakis employs various experiments, letting the novel unspool through thoughts, fantasies, anecdotes, dialogues, and more. Moschovakis gives her characters from the reading groups letter-names without genders, as well: “This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.” The desire that expressed without gendered language ripples in interesting ways, energizing the description of a prelude to a kiss and dispatches from a live blog in the wake of a disaster. As the book accelerates towards its finish, there is increasing entropy and beautiful irresolution.

Throughout, Participation remains smart, frank, and sexy about its subject: “There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.” This arch sexiness has the appeal of Marguerite Duras in The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein.

As a poet, Moschovakis has effectively employed and interrogated axioms. She does the same in her fiction, animating the ideas in Participation with language. There is the notion of bodies constituted through exchange—“We absorb such unverifiable facts from conversation, and they become a part of us, they become us”—and she

describes mathematical intuitionism as a metaphor for communication: “Intuitionism is based on the idea that mathematics is a creation of the mind. The truth of a mathematical statement can only be conceived via a mental construction that proves it to be true, and the communication between mathematicians only serves as a means to create the same mental process in different minds.”

Of course, everybody does not occupy the same reality, and even as we describe the world, we can never describe the whole world. This tension, and the tension between love and anti-love, participation or non-participation, or how to live whenthere is no good way to live, is the central theme of the novel. This tension as it relates to love and desire is enunciated in ways that lead the reader to ponder what might be a “good enough” love.

Participation does not have quotes in the title, but one might well imagine them there. E is a material girl in a material world; she burns, she desires, and she dreams. Her fragmented transmissions ring a warning bell, and the result is affecting.

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I Need to Tell You

Cathryn Vogeley
WiDo Publishing ($17.95)

Cathryn Vogeley uses three hallmarks of effective storytelling in her memoir, I Need to Tell You: vulnerability, uncertainty, and vivid scenes. Consider the opening paragraphs:

My eyes squeezed shut while the ting of metal instruments broke the silence. As if my chest had lost its elastic, I breathed in short, tight spurts. The ceiling tiles with their tiny holes looked down on me as my chin tilted upward.
Exam gloves snapped; metal wheels moaned across the cold floor.
Dr. Franklin stood from behind the sheet.
“No doubt about it. You’re pregnant.”

Vogeley, unmarried in 1968, discovers she is pregnant after her first year of nursing school. Her boyfriend, Gavin, says he can’t get married—this pregnancy must be kept secret.  Vogeley’s Catholic mother arranges for her to see her priest cousin Edward, to talk about "the problem,” and the pair arrange for her to be admitted to Roselia, a home for unwed mothers.

When Vogeley goes two weeks past her due date, she suggests to another Roselia resident that they jog in the winter courtyard to induce labor. Her description of the gunmetal sky and the thin layer of snow on the ground pull the reader into the frigid scene. We can see her “gripping both edges of my navy wool coat . . . schlumping along the sidewalk, hands under my belly, a bushel basket with a floating watermelon.”

The girls of Roselia are warned not to look at or hold their infants for fear they will want to keep them. But when Vogeley is handed her baby in the taxi back to Roselia, she can’t help but look at her daughter. “Those moments in the cab, less than the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, were our entire lifetime together.”

As time passes and Vogeley begins to tell her story, she discovers the people in her life are accepting. Her sister shows compassion and love, and her next boyfriend, Jimmy, doesn’t seem to care. The couple are mismatched, but Vogeley’s urge to be married overwhelms her doubts. “Just the designation of ‘Mrs.’ before my name would give me status, announce that someone wanted me, and allow me the right to have a legitimate child,” she states.

Vogeley has two more girls, and she throws herself into being a wife, mother, and homemaker while working as a nurse. But she knows there is something missing in her life. She tells herself she cannot think of her first baby ever again, but the haunting guilt remains. As her children get older and begin separating from her, she feels increasingly alienated from her life, and after hitting a low point, she starts college classes and convinces Jimmy to go to counseling with her. He doesn’t engage, and they divorce.

Vogeley begins to build a new life, first achieving certification as an ostomy nurse, then a master’s degree in nursing. She meets her future husband, Charlie, through a dating service. With him, she finds real love and acceptance of her past, and when she realizes she exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she begins counseling anew. The therapist suggests she look for her baby, a search that proves long and frustrating. As she moves from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Vogeley’s account of the process and her examination of the changing laws on secret adoptions are enlightening.

Throughout I Need to Tell You, questions build: Will she have the baby, will she keep her? Will she look for her daughter, and will she find her? How will she leave the past behind and finally accept herself? While a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, this moving memoir makes all these questions resonate.

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