Jackqueline Frost
Pamenar Press (£14)

by Nadira Clare Wallace

Jackqueline Frost’s book-length project, Young Americans, is a good example of bildungsroman in poem form. Like Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems (Faber & Faber, 2018) and Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion (Granta Poetry, 2021), it is intense, intricate, lyrical, and lengthy, tracking the progress of a mind from young adult to not-so-young adult.

The collection is divided into two parts. The first, “YOUNG AMERICANS,” is a sequence made up of six sections varying between five and eighteen pages in length. The second part, “YOU HAVE THE EYES OF A MARTYR,” is a little shorter. Most pages display a single, justified block of text, frequently short and linked to previous and following stanzas by through lines of theme and tone. The theme, announced at the outset, is bearing the disappointment of an unreformed society. Frost’s tone is austere, elusive, and scholarly.

Young Americans is highly speculative. The point-of-view is typically zoomed out, regions or aspects of society distilled to one or two images. You won’t find much unprocessed passion in the text (at one point the word “meta-hysterics” is used) and landscapes appear theoretical rather concrete: “I walked / in the river of crises / toward the real.” There is a wonderful, vertiginous beauty about all of this, a sense of extreme induction––the mind forming general laws from particular instances which have, more often than not, not made it on to the page.

Content-wise, the first part of Frost’s poem gives us outcast (“forgettable”) teenagers selling their blood, navigating a fallen world––“passed / through sapped utopias”––hungry for freedom. There are lovely, angular paeans to anarchists who “sing / barricades in the morning” and moving salutes to youth: “We were certain of nothing except this acute / resilience, and thus were diaphanous, at times teeming, / and for a long time mystical.” The book’s second half is more solemn: People are sentenced, taken ominously away, beaten. It contains some extraordinary, aphoristic lines, such as “Let / each deliver themselves from their helical place, / with filth among love, love among machination” and “we will have survived our own mistakes.”

Readers may, at times, find themselves wanting things unpacked further. Take, for example, this intriguing passage from “YOUNG AMERICANS”:

This meritocracy keeps me
in the attention of great trusts

        since as hierophants, they
believe in a kingdom
        without limit.

So each day I go
        with the others
to the dark boundary

of the good.

The powerful ideas in this stanza strike me as stubbornly enigmatic; “the dark boundary / of the good,” for example, is a gorgeous, suggestive line, but what connects it with the preceding sentence? Are we talking about where good turns to bad? If so, is the implication that a society “without limit” goes beyond goodness or morality?

One of the most admirable things about Young Americans is Frost’s determination to deal with big topics like morality and revolution without falling into generalizing or sententiousness. In an unflinching book that is about enduring––bearing disillusionment––the poet has given us a challenging and finely-tuned sequence of clashes between the visionary gleam of youthful people and the United States’ apparent “brutality of neglect.”

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James Cushing
Cahuenga Press ($20)

by Lee Rossi

In his latest volume of poetry, enticingly titled Tangled Hologram, James Cushing sees distress all around, but he offers his readers an alternative—not nihilism, but its sunnier cousin, anti-nihilism.

Like Joyce and Ashbery before him, Cushing celebrates the ability of dreams to interrupt our conscious reveries. His images are highly specific; he sees so clearly and yet explains nothing. For example, in “The Maze of Mercy,” he tells how “I tried to find the father-trees / inside my chest and announce them in trousers and shirt.” The search for the father(s) is a recurrent concern. How are we supposed to feel after reading one of his dream poems—satisfied, perplexed, delighted, frustrated? As Cushing cryptically declares:

          Let me shape for you a sentence that balances
the sadness you have neglected to sweep up with
an overload of love.

In Tangled Hologram, human relationships operate like logic gates, oscillating between too much and not enough. Cushing also plays with ideas about destiny and expectation. In “Protracted Farewell,” a mini-epic surrealist bildungsroman, he observes:

I have only my story to tell, but it may also be yours, and so
I tell it, again and again. I tell it because we are footfalls
and our path through the world is divided into nature
and falsehood.

Near the beginning of the poem, we find the young speaker hiding behind his parents’ bedroom “where I hear / my parents talking about me as if I weren’t anywhere around.” This sense of exclusion, of adult conspiracy, haunts the poem. Elaborating on this sense of sinister forces shaping his destiny, he declares: “I felt I had been invaded by a shadow-company of slightly / embodied ideals,” which “had been written years / before any of us were born.”

How, then, is one to live authentically? Are we all doomed to live lives mapped out by our family, tribe, and nation? Cushing offers the possibility of finding respite and inspiration in imagination. Consider “Dream of Women,” his canny reworking of Tennyson’s “A Dream of Fair Women” and Chaucer’s “The Legend of Good Women.” According to those earlier poets, beauty brings not happiness but tragedy. Cushing takes a different tack, celebrating all the women who have brought not just beauty but meaning and insight into his life. It is a lengthy and unabashedly humorous list, beginning with Memphis Minnie and Joan Didion and continuing with Marianne Moore, Patricia Highsmith, Bettie Page, and dozens of others before concluding with Sappho, who “takes her Martin acoustic guitar out of its case and starts tuning up.” “Is it right or wrong,” he asks, “to want to live inside this dream as long as I can?” You might have a different answer, but like Cushing I want a dreamscape that includes all these charmers, heartthrobs, and witches.

Cushing is not a strict formalist, but he likes to flirt with form, as he does most charmingly in the two pantoums included in this volume. “Falling Asleep Listening to Billie Holiday,” for instance, offers slapstick desperation:

You’d think I had grown up over the years, gotten past that fear and shame,
but watch me stumble down the stairs of years into my childhood and get up
inside that house—my mother’s perfume, her detergent, her bacon grease.

The speaker’s frustration, his awareness that he had not outgrown his childhood, invites the reader to deconstruct his own precious adulthood.

“For David Trinidad and Tiela Garnett,” the other pantoum, is a wildly erotic re-enactment of the classic film noir, “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Toward the end of the poem (and the movie) we encounter the following:

A dark pool of doom opens up around Lana and John, an ocean of lust and hate
they run into near the end of the picture, she in her tight white bathing suit.
They killed the old man because they needed a crime to relieve their tension,
and their last kiss leads with insolent ease to her violent death . . .

Not the happiest of romantic endings, but after all this is film noir, the unmarked sedan of middle-class morality. And yet, in its own lurid way, it is also a celebration of passion and youth, aspects of life which emerge from that “dark pool of doom” like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Of course, the Creature eventually retreats into the swamp, but only until the next time a couple of hot-blooded kids get a whiff of one another.

Cushing’s phantasms are uniquely his own, but we lucky readers can join them in this Tangled Hologram as we seek refuge from the humdrum, the lifeless, the oppressive, and the painful in our day-to-day existence. What a book!

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Summer Brenner
Collages by Lewis Warsh
Spuyten Duyvil ($20)

by Evan Burkin

In step with the kaleidoscopic effect of Lewis Warsh’s illustrations that muddle sex and identity each time they appear, Summer Brenner captures and releases varying emotional states in every line of The Missing Lover. Her prose is endearing, fast-paced, and unwilling to let the concept of love settle into a single qualitative experience. Love is commitment. Love is editing a resume. Love is not there, which is a critical part of the three novellas that make up The Missing Lover. Brenner consistently defines love by its absence and the interjection of feelings that run contrary to it: hate, indifference, defeat. “I tried to use one of those emotional exercises where you distance yourself from the reality of another person. In this case, you.”

Two primary threads weave the novellas of this book together: love and war. While it is impossible to take a book with those leading topics and not consider the adage that all is fair, Brenner does not deploy any tropes or engage heavily with that topic. Instead, she is concerned with how the connotations of love and war communicate under different situations. Does the passion for action, rebellious or humanitarian, spur or interfere with a relationship? Is love a type of war? The faces of war and love are always donning new masks.

One shared mask in the first two novellas, The Missing Lover and A Love Story No, War, is war as a struggle between others, a conflict between groups. Sarah and Laurie, the respective protagonists, are peripheral to the events that cause large-scale discord. While Sarah has a more complex relationship with this version of war than Laurie, it is their husbands during the time of unrest who choose to partake directly in the throes of violence. And because of their significant others’ obsession, the idea of the couple becomes unstable, if not unsustainable. The cause worth dying for is always there, permeating the relationship and effectively shutting down communication: “When their room reeked of vinegar and ammonia and she asked . . . he told her to stop pestering him.”

Brenner’s depictions of love are not so one-dimensional as to say that a breakdown in communication will dissolve a relationship, nor do the similarities in the plot create redundancy. Starting with The Missing Lover’s Sarah, who “looks tucked inside [Nash] like an origami dove,” Brenner consistently delivers dynamic characters capable of navigating and determining their desires from the experiences crashing into them. Her characters are not mere instruments to compound misfortune upon to make a point. They react to their environments; they act upon their wants; they have a voice. The characters give each novella a distinct impression that is enhanced by Brenner’s ability to nurture the tone of each novella with subtle stylistic choices.

In each novella, Brenner skirts past clichés to drop readers into visceral moments that rely on punctuation: “The nurse offered her a sedative. Penance or pride, she chose to suffer. She lay on the exam table, her feet in the cold stirrups, under a blanket and shaking with cold. Beside her was the vacuum machine.” But Brenner is not walled in by violent scenes and curt sentences. Her words can also soothe and place us in “a perpetual garden of flowers in bloom and finches pecking at the thistle sacks outside the window.”

Back and forth between tenderness and violence, the reader is volleyed into the untenable circumstances of the female protagonists. And with most chapters manicured down to two pages, Brenner caters to the resounding impact of each page and allows the emotional draw of each novella to keep a strong pulse from start to finish.

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Jane Campbell
Grove Press ($26)

by J. Van

People rarely suspect that an older woman is capable of power, desire, and transgression, mistakenly believing her identity centers on the simple fact of her age. When perpetually reduced this way, how does a woman respond?

Jane Campbell’s Cat Brushing offers a possible answer. Instead of being relegated to the periphery of culture, the elder women characters in the story collection are rendered visible and vital, with longing made dire by its proximity to death. Isolation from themselves and others, even in company, is an undercurrent.

All thirteen stories remind the reader that pity is condescension. The women in Cat Brushing are superficially regarded or otherwise infantilized, while internally experiencing the depth they have always known: “As though with the advent of wrinkles and a certain uncertainty in their balance went an erasure of all thought, all significance, all hope, all ambition, all . . . passion.” We see that the young often oust the old under the guise of kindness, all while denying them basic recognition—maybe in an unconscious attempt to disassociate from death—and how this aversion can color attempts at connection.

Campbell also explores the murkiness or sharpness of memory. Her characters experience the way certain memories can crystallize with age, the mind’s selective retention, or the slipping away of memory into a kind of grasping that manifests as mysterious and sensory. Memory also figures in the characters’ feelings of grief: “The uselessness, the hopelessness, the blankness of the terrible nature of unyielding loss; and yet also the agonizingly indestructible hope, the raw bleeding anguish of perpetual longing.”

As the best literature does, these stories feed empathy, ask uneasy questions, and jilt the denial of mortality. Though reading about challenging topics isn’t always fun, it is immensely pleasurable to delve into the aliveness and subtle surprise of Campbell’s language and to live alongside the authenticity of her characters. And these stories go further by taking pleasure as their topic, confronting taboos of older women’s sexuality and treating eroticism as commonplace—though often accessed in unexpected ways, particularly when desire has been undiscovered or repressed.

There is beauty and desperation within the questions Cat Brushing poses (what does it look like to self-actualize at the end of one’s life? What does it mean to fail?), questions that directly confront the vulnerability of our shared humanity and what it looks like when life’s potential is thwarted. These stories do not grab hold of binary sentiments and are not seduced by the neatness of placing emotions in discreet packaging. Instead, they look carefully at the knots, the disquieting mess of resolution.

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Eva Baltasar
Translated by Julia Sanches
And Other Stories ($17.95)

by Abby Walthausen 

New arguments are always popping up these days for the dubious title of the “first globalization”—phenomena as disparate as the spice trade, the crusades, the whaling industry.  Catalan novelist Eva Baltasar (or perhaps the wry galley cook who narrates her newly translated novel) might get a kick out of extending the rebrand to boulders, which were, after all, dragged unwittingly around the globe and deposited haphazardly before the first sea shanty was ever sung. Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd—and Balthasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement across cultures and across dispositions.

The novel’s eponymous narrator, so named by her geologist girlfriend for her alien toughness, starts the book as a galley cook off the coast of Chile and winds up stunned and displaced in Iceland. “For a geologist like Samsa,” Boulder says, “Iceland is a paradise, and she shows me around as if it had come out of her own body.” Boulder is pushed across the world by love and the slow march of age, though nothing about her sharp-tongued, profanity-spouting demeanor is passive. In fact, Boulder sees herself more in the image of the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss, professing her discomfort with houses and her love of the “short term.” Like the narrator of Baltasar’s previous book, Permafrost, Boulder is repulsed by domestic life—but in this book she is faced with actually becoming a mother when Samsa insists on having children of their own.

Baltasar, a poet skilled in compression, moves swiftly from the initial heady encounters between Boulder and Samsa, first eliding five years, then another three, to arrive at the moment when Samsa decides that she needs to have a child. In this moment, Samsa is unrecognizable to Boulder, who attributes the unfamiliarity to this decision which “kicks into gear right away, without any warning. . . . razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake. You’d have to be an animal with a tiny brain and impeccable survival instincts to see it coming.”

Boulder is an engaging narrator—funny, tough, and as sympathetic as a line cook out of Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen—but the accumulation of her personality creeps up. About halfway through the book, when arguing against attending a prenatal water aerobics class, Boulder complains, “Samsa spat out her special brand of poison—the kind that doesn’t kill but leaves you blind, that erases your best memories and replaces them with a chasm for you to trip into and leave behind the skin of your knuckles and knees.” At first it feels a blessed reprieve to hear these venomous words described rather than repeated. A moment later, it sinks in that neither Samsa nor any other character had ever uttered any actual dialogue. The Samsa that the narrator’s voice has brought to vivid life has been muted by the same precise and knowing language.

Boulder’s carefully knapped facade is sometimes sharp and self-sufficient, sometimes blunt and desperate, but it engages from every angle. Again drawing on her skills as a poet, Baltasar has her narrator rarely utter an observation, whether cynical or mystical, that isn’t grounded hard in the physical world: “When I undress in the evening, the turtleneck snags at my head and reminds me that birth is nothing at all—the danger lies in being reborn.” She is a poet of the body, telling us, when postpartum Samsa loses interest in sex, that “Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep.” The link that she draws between physicality and the deep need for love echoes the attention she lavishes on food, which is prepared and described with the nuance she seems unable to deliver to her relationships.

“Blood respects nothing,” Boulder says when reflecting on the testing Samsa receives early in her pregnancy. “It creeps around like a shrewd domestic who has access to every room and knows everything there is to know about you.” On one level, she feels surveilled by medical intervention. On another, these lines hint at the latent anxiety of the gay family unit, in which one party is written out of the bloodline. Blood is indeed unfaithful—or at least, it tends to omit part of the story. The quiet, visceral joys of being are what Boulder discovers in the child, and they are what keep her tethered to her—and in the end, tethered to the long term. Still, she retains an absurd but steadfast resistance against time, trade winds, and small talk that is “more reckless than adopting a pet rat during a plague.” Boulder may have sailed across the world, but something deep in her rails against a life that can be reduced to vector.

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How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday ($32.50)

by Scott F. Parker

Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, puts Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch at the center of a story of friendship and of analytic philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals.

Cumhaill and Wiseman came to their subject thanks to a letter Midgley published “in the Guardian, under the heading ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’” in 2013. Soon after, they visited Midgley to learn the story their book would eventually tell.

Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch converged at Oxford during tumultuous times. Many of the men—professors as well as students—were summoned to World War II; among them was A. J. Ayer, the influential logical positivist and Metaphysical Animals’ bête noire. In his absence, philosophy’s preoccupation with linguistics and its rejection of metaphysics loosened. During the war, the women found themselves at the center of the philosophical scene: “Had it not been for the interruption of war, Mary, Iris, Elizabeth and Philippa may well have joined the men in the effort to usher in the brave new world of a philosophy divested of poetry, mystery, spirit and metaphysics. Or, more likely, they would have finished their degrees and left philosophy behind them, convinced . . . that the subject was not for them.” These were, in other words, bleak philosophical times.

Taking advantage of the opportunity only accidentally available to them, the four were able to pursue philosophy with a more person-centric approach than had been prominent at Oxford. But what the four philosophers had in common beyond their circumstances is where Metaphysical Animals begins to break down. Cumhaill and Wiseman present Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as members of a movement grounded in gender. Yet, by giving short shrift to the philosophical work in question and opting instead to focus on the day-to-day lives of the philosophers, they fail to draw connections in any but the most general terms—those terms being their opposition to Ayer and logical positivism, which scores of other philosophers shared.

This substantive lightness is only emphasized by the book’s historical frame, which concludes with Anscombe’s opposition to the honorary doctorate Oxford would bestow upon Harry Truman in 1956, thereby relegating all four women’s greatest professional achievements to a brief afterword. This is a missed opportunity to affirm the legacies of four great philosophers, who deserve greater prominence. Consider that the famous Trolley Problem was originated by Philippa Foot. Besides making serious contributions to the philosophy of animals, in her nineties Mary Midgley wrote a defense of philosophy, What Is Philosophy For?, the culmination of a lifetime of thought, that became a surprise mainstream hit. Cumhaill and Wiseman are most thorough in their disquisition of Elizabeth Anscombe, probably the most influential philosopher of the four. They write that “it is thanks to her translation that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is recognised as a literary, as well as a philosophical, masterpiece” and call her book Intention “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” Murdoch is the best known of the four, though primarily for her novels and for having been portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the film Iris, an impression Metaphysical Animals is unlikely to alter.

Cumhaill and Wiseman say they were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men” when they set out on their book. Fair enough. But shoehorning four women who happened to be friends into an ill-defined school only serves to obscure each woman’s unique contributions to philosophy.

Still, though, seeing their early shared lives is not without its pleasures. Metaphysical Animals is a period piece, replete with dress codes, cigarettes, and ubiquitous casual misogyny. It is a portrait of four philosophers as young women. Here they are, for example, sitting down together for conversation: “Philippa explained her idea over the clatter of the busy café, the Nippy serving up a pot of hot tea for Mary and Philippa, black coffee for Iris and Elizabeth.” And so, rather than learning what they thought in their maturity, we will settle for what they drank in their youth.

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An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Zone Books ($35)

by W. C. Bamberger

In the first sentence of Transfixed by Prehistory, Maria Stavrinaki declares that prehistory is an invention of the nineteenth century; the subtitle of the book refers to her assertion that early moderns were "transfixed by prehistory, initially in the sense of being petrified by shock." Throughout, she demonstrates how the revelation of the existence of prehistory drastically changed the science, the art, the metaphors, and even the concept of time in the modern world. The invention of prehistory moved outward from geology and paleontology to the arts and sciences that have humankind as their objects, including linguistics, ethnology, psychology, and literature. New metaphors arose; geological erosion came to represent human mortality.

Stavrinaki considers a wide range of prehistory's effects. She looks at the extent of the influence of discoveries by Lascaux on modern art, of geology on Cezanne and Max Ernst, and of prehistory's philosophical implications for Paul Klee, among others. Klee, for example, thought these discoveries revealed "the present state of outward appearances in his own world as accidentally fixed in time and space," "a simple stage in an evolution . . ." Stavrinaki points out prehistory’s influence in more recent art as well, looking at the work of Robert Morris and at Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example. While some of these attempts to identify parallels between more recent artists' works and the prehistorical can seem less than convincing, she offers insights from a great variety of sources, ranging from historical records to the science fiction of J. G. Ballard; especially interesting is an excerpt from a letter written by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Georges Bataille, disagreeing with Bataille's view of Lascaux.

As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Stavrinaki's points could be supported by looking at nearly everything around us—we are, in many ways, a continuation of prehistory. The invention of prehistory affected not only our views of the past and understanding of the present, but also, for some, the conception of the future. That is, "the tendency to improvement" over such spans of time suggested that the process would continue indefinitely: "Assurances about the future were thus to be found, quite simply, in the past: time formed an uninterrupted line." To some, however, the same discoveries suggested the opposite—that there might come an end to human time. The invention of prehistory introduced the idea of that we might one day have successors.

Stavrinaki's reasoning proceeds speedily, and there are places where slow, careful reading is required to follow what is being said. This is partly due to some unfamiliar terms: "mobilary art" for small objects that can be moved from place to place, and "parietal art” for what we usually call cave art—though technical terms are usually introduced smoothly. The larger reason for the need for slow reading is the serious and sober approach Stavrinaki takes to her subject. This flies in the face of the recent leaning of many scholarly books toward popularization; rather than taking time to reassure readers that she likes some of the same rock bands she assumes we must like, Stavrinaki takes up detailed analysis of her subject from page one.

There are metaphysical speculations here, but there are simple human anecdotes, too. Stavrinaki includes the well-known story of the explorer who was so fixated on a cave's floor that he didn't notice the drawings above; his eight-year-old daughter looked up, saw them, and pointed them out to him. Another discoverer she cites wrote that he couldn't really "see" engravings that were visible on the wall until he also traced them with his fingers.

Stavrinaki employs some rhetorical flourishes in the interest of making interesting points; for example, she asserts that explorers' and researchers' presentations of the facts of prehistory meant that "science now ranked alongside fiction, because it proved the reality of the impossible." At another point, she posits that because there are no written records, nor any named individual creators, prehistory can't be "done," can't be tied up neatly, can't be consolidated in the past. Rather, she argues, it remains to be done, inexhaustibly so—it remains "as an enigma from the past to be interpreted in terms of the present's needs." In her concluding paragraph, she writes, "Prehistory is no doubt the only land that remains for us to discover." This thoughtful, no-nonsense book would be a useful guide for anyone setting out on such an ambitious expedition.

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