Book Review

Tuesdays in Jail

What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates

Tina Welling
New World Library ($17.95)

by George Longenecker

When she volunteered to teach weekly writing workshops at the Teton County Jail in Jackson, Wyoming, Tina Welling had little idea what she was getting into. She had never been in jail or visited anyone in jail. As metal doors clanked open and shut, guards escorted her to her first class and watched her every move. Yet, before long, she found that a rewarding experience was in store for both her new students and herself.

Welling’s memoir is introspective and practical. A novelist and the author of Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature (New World Library, 2014), Welling brings her writing talent to Tuesdays in Jail, which is beautifully descriptive and fast-paced. She looks at reasons the men there are incarcerated and guides them in self-reflection. She also offers practical advice for others who might want to tutor incarcerated people.

It's not easy for a nature writer to adapt to being inside a bleak prison—the Teton County Jail offers a stark contrast to the natural beauty of Wyoming. Usually, Welling’s meetings are held in a group circle, overseen by a guard. Occasionally, though, she is locked on one side of a glass partition, with her student confined on the other side:

Each of the five doors needed keys or a code in order to pass through; each was made of thick metal and slammed closed with a deep clang that echoed off the cement block walls. My stomach tightened with discomfort as each door shut with finality behind me. I couldn’t find my way out of this place even if I held the ring of keys and the memory of codes.

Though she never feels comfortable in the sterile jail, Welling finds solace in helping her students access hope through writing. She assigns them philosophical and pragmatic prompts: “Choose three . . . characteristics that you’d like to strengthen within yourself, and write them down.”

While Welling knows she can’t fix her students’ pasts, she sees how her classes can affect their wellbeing and mental health—and even their chances of ending up in state prison. She ends up fighting to get the Teton County Sherriff’s Department to make policy changes so that those about to conclude their jail term are not cut off from the communities they’ll soon reenter.

Tuesdays in Jail includes a workbook of fifteen journaling lessons that a prospective volunteer could use for a class with incarcerated people, and throughout the book, Welling reflects on her own life and self-confidence. These reflections, along with non-judgmental sketches of her students, make for a beautifully written memoir that is a must-read for anyone living, working, or thinking of volunteering in prison.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Watershed

Attending to Body and Earth in Distress

Ranae Lenor Hanson
University of Minnesota Press ($19.95)

by Elizabeth Bailey

The Danube is no longer blue, I hear as the PBS NewsHour covers the summer 2022 heatwave. Aerial shots pan along wan rivers. The voice-over catalogues the faltering crops, throttled hydroelectric power production, and impassable shipping lanes. The bridges catch my breath, their long spans straining over narrow trickles; lanky support pillars spike from exposed riverbeds dried to a pale suede. Drought makes these feats of engineering look foolishly overbuilt, even obsolete.

From the headwaters of climate change, many crises compound: economic, political, environmental, and social, but also the less newsy crisis of living in the Anthropocene. In Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, educator and climate activist Ranae Lenor Hanson explores parallels between the lived experiences of climate change and severe illness. Adult-onset diabetes sent shock waves through Hanson’s life. With her frank account of the illness—its avoidance and disruptive diagnosis, its indignities and halting integration into daily life—she offers a personal map against which readers might chart their own ways through the uneasy waters of the climate crisis.

One parallel between bodily and planetary crises is in Hanson’s response to her escalating illness. At first, her symptoms are vague and ignorable: dizziness, fatigue, growing thirst. She copes by catching hold of a signpost at the bus stop when unsteady or perching “on the edge of a stool” when she can no longer stand up while teaching. This avoidance feels familiar: We all hope that a nagging discomfort will abate unaided, and tend to sidestep reckoning with deeper systemic issues, be they interpersonal, bodily, or environmental.

As Hanson’s symptoms worsen, diabetic ketoacidosis sends her to the hospital where she must finally acknowledge a new reality: without daily, even hourly attention to her health, she risks damaging her body, or shutting it down altogether. Later, she reflects on the difficulty of stopping to address crises; there are “exams to study for, jobs to get (or get to), children to raise,” and other duties and deadlines. After Hanson finally drags herself to an urgent care clinic, she begins to see that “like a diabetic crisis, climate trauma numbs our brains. The threat is too big to conceive, so we relegate it to the background. There it sits, unsettling everything, while most of us focus with increasing intensity on whatever task or diversion is at hand.”

Hanson’s midlife diagnosis upset not only her daily routines, but also her sense of herself as a capable individual treading lightly on the earth. Type 1 diabetes, with its required test strips, glucose monitors, insulin pumps, doctor visits, dietitian sessions, diabetes nurse educators, and medical device hotlines, abruptly ropes Hanson to numerous systems and the “ecological and social and infrastructure stability” needed to maintain health. This new dependency puts Hanson in tension with herself. She anxiously, almost obsessively, counts the “five used and useless strips” wasted while learning to test her blood sugar. Even once she gets the hang of the glucometer, she is pained by how much more trash she generates to stay alive as a diabetic, and bemoans her lost dream “to canoe off into the woods and survive on my own.”

A lifelong Minnesotan, Hanson’s rugged mentality was nurtured by a childhood in the “loosely connected, fiercely independent, unaffiliated Christian network of the north.” Her memories of the Minnesota backwoods have a timeless quality. Seasons roll past, drying peppermint and rosehips on window screens, drilling for fresh spring water, winter camping in trappers’ cabins operated on the honor system, and enduring the casual sexism of a grandfather refusing to teach his granddaughter to drive the tractor. Against this backdrop, certain moments bring the reader swiftly to a particular era. “Though the mosquitoes were thick” when men came to spray the yard with DDT, Hanson’s mother “had read Silent Spring and ran out in protest. . . . Laughing, they sprayed anyway.”

At the hospital, the doctor returns with “good news”: If Hanson “can find a deep, cool lake and a waterproof container,” she’ll be able to store insulin and “live in the woods for up to three months.” Hanson smiles, but then her thoughts turn to climate change. “All I need to do . . . is keep my lake cool.”

As Hanson struggles to navigate the challenges of her new reality, she returns to teaching classes in ethics, global studies, and ecofeminism at a Twin Cities community college. Her students come from many countries, and some “from more than one country by way of relatives and refugee camps.” In one class, students from Africa debate Nile water politics. For them, the implications of a new dam aren’t abstract; all the places the dam will affect—where it is built, where it takes water from, where it floods, where the water is sent, where war will “surely” break out—are personal, filled with “the grandparents of someone” and “the farms of someone else.” Their discussion is not only knowledgeable but undergirded by the firsthand knowledge that “Water is truly life. Or death.”

To some, the climate crisis may feel distant, a problem to be solved for the benefit of future generations. But Hanson’s students are already living amid the concentric crises (drought, famine, fighting) of climate change. For these students, this isn’t a future crisis. Catastrophe is ongoing. Disruption and upheaval have become their own way of life.

Watershed operates on this human scale. By braiding stories of individual struggles with climate-based calamity, Hanson encourages readers to honor and attend to the personal side of a global catastrophe. And what then? Hanson offers some of her suggestions in chapter titles and section breaks: “Pause to Survey,” “Consider the Need to Stop,” “Feel the Grief,” “Bear Witness,” “Practice for Mourning.”

One phrase in particular seems capable of holding the others: “Rely on a Deep, Cool Lake.” Each of us, this phrase suggests, would do well to find a reservoir from which to draw calm and strength. Let it sustain and replenish you, and learn what you can do to replenish and sustain it.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

I Made an Accident

Kevin Sampsell
CLASH Books ($24.95)

by Christopher Luna

There ought to be more books like Kevin Sampsell’s I Made An Accident, a thoroughly engaging blend of poetry and visual art. Sampsell’s collages feature unsettling juxtapositions (babies covered in snakes, for example) and everyday people, places, and things layered atop landscapes, galaxies, sheet music, and more. Women on telephones emerge from mountaintops. Small children sneak up on terrorized ingenues from old movies. Sampsell also deploys great ransom note poems and images of cats that will instill fear or laughter, depending on your predispositions.

The poem “John Stezaker Talks About Collage” serves as a kind of philosophical manifesto for the book: a lament over the “lack of materiality” in a “digital world” that has “too many images.” The act of collage, which can sometimes entail making decisions as simple as “turning a picture upside down,” becomes a way of simultaneously revealing and obscuring. Finding the perfect combination of recontextualized images, paradoxically, “is the moment when I’m somehow not present.”

In “Photos of the Ocean,” the poet confesses to attempting to “live / vicariously / through your / internet presence.” “Countdown” is an alternately hilarious and poignant lament for music delivery systems such as vinyl records, jukeboxes, and CDs. The poem begins with the apocalyptic pronouncement that “music ends next week” but ends on a note of resignation:

sometimes people will try to remember
what a song was
but it will feel impossible
to shape the air like
something that could make you cry

As the book goes on, a loose narrative featuring a dialogue with a friend or loved one in California begins to form. Comparisons are drawn between the writer’s life and how he envisions California: “I imagine every bathroom in California / as being sunny and warm.” Just as collage allows one to reorder the universe, poetry uses language to forge or reconstitute personal connections that may have been lost or rendered remote.

Sampsell’s writing is understated enough that the emotional impact of a poem often comes as a surprise. “Can’t Remember How Old I Am” is a touching poem featuring funny, intimate observations about a hairdresser alongside the writer’s internal monologue while being worked on:

She saved my life, I thought.
She saved my hair’s life, I thought.

What am I pretending to be?

Even more beautiful, “Crush” examines affection and desire in which “love is never shaped like I expect”:

It is a queer tree
Waiting to be cut down
by someone I thought was a stranger
Are you boy-shaped?
No
We were never boy-shaped
You said you loved my belly.
I’ll never forget that.

In the final section of I Made An Accident, the colors in the collages burst forth from the page, ending the experience with a crescendo of women and men from another time dancing “like Nicolas Cage / if he knew how to dance.” The big finish also features heartbreaking poems like “Broke & White” and “The World”:

It should be easy to love someone.
To be in the world and to see the good parts.
I feel alive when someone talks to me
About their small things.
An open window that stays open because
It wants to.

Sampsell’s poems and collages quiver with the inescapable melancholy of earthly bliss and suffering. Readers may see themselves reflected in I Made An Accident and will want to return to its kaleidoscopic complexity again and again.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Alive at the End of the World

Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press ($16.95)

by Walter Holland

Saeed Jones’s latest book of poetry, Alive at the End of the World, is an outpouring of anguish, grief, and anger. It’s also an outward-looking commentary about racism and the performative pressures placed on the Black artist in America to meet white expectations and assumptions.

Jones’s debut came in 2011 with his chapbook When the Only Light Is Fire (Sibling Rivalry Press). It was followed in 2014 with his full-length collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), a beautifully crafted account of his boyhood in Texas and his life growing up as a young queer Black man. The rich lyricism of his work, with its mix of earthy imagery, explosive violence, and sensuous eroticism, portrayed a world of family, country life, pervasive racism, and trenchant inner conflict.

Jones is part of a generation of queer poets of color who have revitalized and reshaped American poetry. In recent years, this group has been nurtured by the efforts of progressive MFA writing programs and writers-of-color-focused organizations. One of these organizations is Cave Canem, established in 1996 by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, which seeks to counter the underrepresentation and isolation of African American poets. In like manner, Lambda Literary created its Emerging Writers program for LGBTQ+ authors; these talented poets were also embraced by the small-press publishing world, which made a concerted effort to promote more diversity. Jones joins the likes of Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Justin Phillip Reed, Taylor Johnson, and Jericho Brown—I could go on—all queer Black poets of distinction.

Alive at the End of the World is a departure from Prelude to Bruise. It has the tone of a jeremiad, a long lament and outcry of informed complaint that is sharp, direct, and chilling. It harbors angry indictment and accusation. It is the work of a maturing poet, too, and perhaps a transitional work: Jones has moved from the subject of his boyhood to the volatile racist politics of the here and now, as well as his worries for the future.

These poems speak of a constantly unjust and fearful world. Jones weaves together scalding social commentary with everyday personal experiences, uncovering the tense undercurrent of racial conflict in every facet of Black life and the psychological wounds it inflicts.

The title poem, really a series of poems of the same title, offers a fitting overview of this formidable project. The first poem begins:

The end of the world was mistaken
for just another midday massacre
in America. Brain matter and broken
glass, blurred boot prints in pools
of blood. We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn’t answer.

Inequities and violence are casually understated, but their brutality is clear beneath the dismissive tone of the final dialogue:

With time the white boys
with guns will become wounds we won’t
quite remember enduring. “How did you
get that scar on your shoulder?” “Oh,
a boy I barely knew was sad once.”

And it’s not just the most tragic violences that define these end times. In “Sorry as in Pathetic,” Jones describes a white woman on a street walking “right through” him to get to “her next spike-heeled hour.” He waits for the woman to turn and apologize, but soon realizes that her violation of his personal space will not be acknowledged; she doesn’t even “see” him as being there. He closes the poem with the description of another tense encounter, and the sad fallout that adds weight to the title:

once I was lost on a late-night street
and when I asked

the woman walking just ahead of me for help, she screamed
“Oh, god!” and clutched her purse the way the night holds me.

I told her I was sorry, then felt sorry for saying sorry.
I think of that woman often; I doubt she ever thinks of me.

Jones’s language displays a wonderful musicality and a gift for metaphor. In “Date Night,” he contemplates his mother crying out in her sleep for her brother, his uncle, whom she wishes still lived near her, as though only he could give her comfort through his solid masculinity and paternal strength. The poet is hurt by his mother’s yearning—though he is perpetually available to her, he cannot be who she wants—and this suppressed inadequacy apparently gets voiced aloud while Jones sleeps with a lover. Here is how Jones transforms this pain into poetry:

When a Venus flytrap
flowers, the two white blossoms sit atop a very tall

stalk. Green teeth way down at the bottom. It’s trying
to avoid triggering its own traps. It’s trying to keep

the bees it needs for pollination away from its own traps.
I’m most dangerous when I’m hungry. I’m most hungry

when I’m hurting. Seems like I’m always hurting. Nothing
but teeth. Nothing but the same words calling out to me

in my sleep. Grief asking its ghosts not to leave. Please.
It’s not up to me when I get to stop crying. Or hurting.

Or holding memories in my mouth, gentle as bees
I promised not to eat, but oh, the hurt is so sweet.

In a way, this poem serves as an ars poetica as well as a trenchant personal narrative. Jones has tried to resist the temptation to eat of the fruit of grim knowledge—not of something as simple as good and evil but of racist hatred, of maternal rejection, of all the many slings and arrows that Black men in America face daily. But as a poet, as an artist, he is compelled to eat of this stinging truth—and equally compelled to make from it the sweet honey of verse.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Minor Secrets

Billie Chernicoff
Black Square Editions ($20)

by Joe Safdie

What does it take to write a great love poem?

We let each other be
or not, a little tea
slops over the rim

of your cup or mine
and the other
takes it personally.

We forget to kiss then kiss,
we marry for love,
agreeing to the sky also

These lines from Billie Chernicoff’s poem “As It Is in Heaven,” which is contained in her luminous new book Minor Secrets, start to give an answer: a total acceptance of otherness, the capacity to write in the first-person plural without any sort of appropriation, “Each of us the whole world, / naked and afraid” (“Next Morning in a Holy City”). Rather than provoking anxiety, however, this fear sometimes manifests as a charming awkwardness and incapacity: “I rove, arriving / at neither moon nor sonnet / nor any answer whatsoever” (“Letters from a Holy City”).

Chernicoff’s use of the almost archaic word “rove” suggests that she doesn’t ignore the playfulness of love either; it sometimes seems as if she’s engaging her readers in a game of language—“Bring me your ruse, a rose, / your news, / a more charismatic water”—which, if we don’t play along, can doom us to separation or isolation. But she welcomes us into the dance, giving us confidence we can participate: “I pray you too catch a wave.”

These are unabashedly lyric poems; indeed, they constitute new discoveries in that mode. The work of Charles Olson would seem to have little to do with lyric, yet Chernicoff, in a final section of the book called “Luminous Failures” that explores and distills some of her working principles, cites Olson as one of her poetic vectors: “I would place my work in the context of Olson’s compositional field, where I place myself out in the Open and breathe whatever comes into being.” Yet even in these reflections on her work, a playfulness is ever present: “I would like to confess poetry, though nothing I can confess or propose would be as true as a poem itself. And for sure a poem is a better liar.” On occasion, these poetics echo the effect of Chernicoff’s poems: “A good poem does not make you feel virtuous, it makes you feel terribly human—tender, doubtful, sometimes fearful and sometimes brave, sorrowful or mirthful, maybe prayerful, in love, full of longing, or just being—lost in the wild, an ecstatic nobody.”

Among their many virtues, Chernicoff’s poems never let us forget the joys and fascinations of living in the physical world:

Let me start again.
I want you the way the sea
wants herself, returns to herself
the way rivers find their way through marshes
the way one rows through marshes
and tires, and drifts, and dreams of the lover
while hours go by between her thighs
and books write themselves

That’s just one section from a longer poem called “Letters from a Holy City,” and it takes my breath away. What’s finally to say about this book, these poems? Perhaps these lines from “Next Morning”: “They lingered here as long as they could. / Now the whole world sways a little.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Hollow

Matthew Cole Levine
Unsolicited Press ($18)

by Joseph Houlihan

Hollow, the new horror novel by Matthew Cole Levine, lives in the tenuous space between the safety of the hearth and the darkest parts of the Wisconsin woods, where the wind screams like a howl. It tells the story of a small town, Grange, where all is not well. When Ben, a punch-drunk cop from Milwaukee, encounters a woman sprinting through a clearing across a forest highway, he is brought into a mystery that spans a century and crosses between this life and the next.

Quick and smart. Hollow draws on the traditions of tough cop noir and American folk horror, thereby setting up a classic trope: There is something in the woods, and it preys on the innocent. The novel contains spooky descriptions of cursed places:

He was drifting over a barren terrain, an endless canyon with towering cliffs of red sand, its basin littered with jagged rocks and a narrow, bubbling river. The light here was different, specked with clouds of dust and ash, and the sun did not emit warmth.

And hardboiled action as well:

The second devastating swing of the bat came a moment later, plummeting into the pit of Ben’s stomach as he collapsed. His gut lunged upward into his throat. A flood of water washed over him, turning everything into a liquid blur.

Levine follows that simple dictum from Raymond Chandler—“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean”—to produce a genre novel with literary flair. As Ben interrogates small town characters (a shifty sheriff, a hotel clerk, the local minister) in a race against time, Levine does a great job of moving through other kinds of heartbreak: the disappointment of moving away from loved ones, the resentments that smother our lives of best intention, the suffering through grief and addiction.

One of the most compelling scenes involves an improbable small-town library. Amid a vast, uncatalogued archive of pioneer materials in the basement, Ben finds old diaries and geological surveys, revealing a horror hidden in plain sight. Levine nods towards the possibility of ancient horror and devils on unceded lands, giving the novel a tenor that’s tongue in cheek enough to be scary and fun at the same time.

Smart, sad, and genuinely scary—as well as lyrical and heartbreakingly familiar—Hollow will make for dangerous company on long nights in the Upper Midwest.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

Shigeru Mizuki
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
Drawn & Quarterly ($29.95)

by Nicholas Burman

“We’re prob’ly going for a reason,” a private depicted in Shigeru Mizuki’s legendary war manga Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths says as his platoon is transferred from one part of New Britain (an island in Papua New Guinea) to another. Earlier, the lieutenant-colonel tries to inspire the troops by reminding them of Dai-Nanko, a 14th-century samurai who sacrificed his life on behalf of the Emperor. Such nationalist overtures, however, don’t quell the fear and hopelessness of the rank and file. This is during Japan’s New Guinea campaign in 1943, which in real life took the lives of over 200,000 Japanese soldiers by the end of World War II.

Throughout Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, “a reason” is always out of reach. The concerns of Japan’s political establishment are never discussed, and the “clash of civilizations” discourse that dominates documentaries on the war are non-existent. Hunger, malaria, and dying a virgin are the topics that preoccupy these men—boys, really. Throughout the book, they sing lines from a song called the “Prostitute’s Lament” popular among Japanese troops at the time: “Why am I stuck working this shitty job/no way out/all for my parents.”

This is a 50th-anniversary reprint of a work only first translated into English in 2011. Mizuki was one of the first manga artists—really one of the first contemporary comics artists worldwide—to use the medium to discuss “adult” topics on this scale. Long before Maus made comics serious business in the U.S., this book and Showa, Mizuki’s four-part history of Japan covering 1926-1989, demonstrated the power and potential of the medium.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths isn’t interesting solely because of its historical significance, though; it remains an emotionally impactful and heartbreaking work. More Paths of Glory than Saving Private Ryan, the book draws on Mizuki’s own experiences in the War—he lost an arm in combat and was one of the few survivors of a campaign similar to the one depicted here—and his pacifist leanings are evident. The book draws plenty of attention to the inhumanity of Japan's military culture, including one devastating sequence in which soldiers, having survived an attack by Allied troops, are punished to the extreme by their own compatriots.

From the presence of “comfort women” (enslaved sex workers) to the repeated physical and verbal abuses the privates suffer at the hands of lieutenants, Mizuki includes various elements that demonstrate the absurdity, evil, and meanness of the military life he experienced, though these elements are often infused with a dark sense of humor as well. There’s also the tropical weather, which keeps the men warm and often very wet. Malaria makes people crazy, and they’re reduced to scavenging food from the forest. The privates often talk about rumors of Japan being bombed, and try to figure out ways for their families to be told they died heroic deaths.

Mizuki’s landscapes are gorgeous. Papua New Guinea’s lush vegetation and intense skies are rendered in expressionistic and nearly photorealistic detail. Many shadows and silhouettes appear in the panels; they haunt the men in the same way the enemy does. As is typical in much Japanese cartooning, the people themselves are more cartoonish than their surroundings, allowing the artist to lean on cartooning’s shorthand to depict emotions effectively. The looseness of Mizuki’s lines can sometimes make it hard to recognize characters, but this doesn’t create a barrier to enjoying the story overall.

There are times when people are depicted more realistically: This tends to happen whenever dead bodies appear. The change in visual tone befits the somberness of these moments. Mizuki also employs this technique when the men approach their “noble deaths.” In one famous half-page panel toward the end of the book, as what remains of the platoon embarks on its ultimate suicide mission, the men morph from their cartoon selves to more realistic ones; their clothes gain weight and texture, and their naturalistic faces become engulfed by darkness.

Much of the violence Mizuki portrays would be too much to endure if this book were a film. The emotional distance in a drawn image allows Mizuki to depict horror without it feeling exploitative. He returns to the photorealist aesthetic for the very final pages, where we are presented with piles of bones and corpses left amongst the undergrowth. These pages are drawn with great precision and humanity, a necessary salve for a situation that is so thoroughly inhumane.

The title Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths suggests a tragic inevitability. Since the events depicted here, it has remained a tragic inevitability that the young have continued to be sent to fight wars for reasons they don’t understand by people who don’t care for their well-being. This book, like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and other anti-war literature written by those who have experienced combat, will stay relevant for as long as that sad fact remains a part of our reality.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Young Americans

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.”

Tangled Hologram

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!

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

The Missing Lover

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.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore: