Book Review

Our Long Marvelous Dying

Anna DeForest
Little, Brown ($28)

by Xi Chen

In the opening pages of Anna DeForest’s sophomore novel Our Long Marvelous Dying, the nameless narrator, a first-year palliative care fellow at a hospital in Manhattan, speaks to a patient who claims to have psychic visions. The patient, bedbound and dying of pancreatic cancer, sees “disaster” and “catastrophe” in the world, but when asked about his future, he is afraid to look: “I want only one thing, he tells me, but I already know what it is. He wants to live forever.” But the narrator, with the aid of medical science, can envision the future too: “He will suffer a lot, and then he will die.”

This isn’t the first time DeForest has set fiction in the medical world. Their first novel, A History of Present Illness (Little, Brown, 2022), is a tale about the trials of medical school and residency told by a narrator “raised with a reverence for catastrophe.” That narrator makes a telling comment: “This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it.” Similarly, the narrator of Our Long Marvelous Dying trains “to be an expert in pain unto death,” surrounded at every moment by patients at the end even as the television reports pandemic deaths continuing to snowball and a cyclone hitting New York, drowning tenants in basement apartments. 

But why do some people pursue a medical subspecialty always surrounded by death? This question is often levied at people going into palliative care, which prioritizes minimizing suffering over curing disease—often but not always in patients with terminal illnesses. For many, the field of palliative care means escaping, at least to some degree, the plagues of academic medicine: elitist medical students, bigoted doctors, and detachment from the lived experiences of patients. Others may have a spiritual calling, or like DeForest’s narrator, they may be seeking spiritual enlightenment themselves. As a chaplain “from a line of monks who follow in the steps of the great Buddhist saints and meditate in the charnel grounds in India” says in the novel’s last chapter, “If you get through the morning forgetting that you will die . . . the morning has been wasted.”

While DeForest’s narrator may be looking for a deeper understanding of death, however, what they find instead is PR. During orientation, the fellows are given a lecture about “talking points, branding, an early introduction to the field’s bad rap.” The problem, the lecturer claims, “is all this talk about dying. The public does not want to hear about death. Lead with life, she says, lead with what you have to offer.” The fellows are instructed to avoid words like “Hospice,” “End-of-Life,” and “Terminal Illness,” which are “too aversively death-oriented and therefore unattractive” to patients and their families.

Medical bureaucracy’s penchant for sanitizing language and “burying the lede, elevating the plus side so patients will be willing to talk to us” is the villain of DeForest’s fiction, and it rears its ugly head throughout the book. Providers shield themselves with clinical lingo; for instance, the palliative nephrologist who observes the narrator question a patient about his metaphysical visions asks, “What was the therapeutic intent?” Many characters use gallows humor; after declaring a patient dead, a nurse practitioner laughs. “I used to have nightmares that my patients would die, she says. But now I have nightmares that they will not!”

Author Danielle Spencer, a scholar of narrative medicine, has written that the medical training tale is typically a quest narrative in which new trainees lose their idealism during the demanding rite of passage to becoming a doctor, until a “humbling and epiphanic experience about the essential humanity of doctors and patients” changes them and allows them to “practice medicine with greater empathy and caring.” DeForest’s novels are unique in the world of medical fiction in that they leave out this final redemptive step. Many patient encounters are described in Our Long Marvelous Dying, but not once does the narrator perform an action that substantially helps patients in any way. If they grow, it is not in clinical acumen but rather in helplessness and vulnerability, since patient encounters are frequently used as springboards for unearthing fragments of the narrator’s past traumas. 

Perhaps that is the point: the all-knowing physician only exists in the imagination. DeForest has no interest in showing their narrator being a healthcare hero, a figure whose illusory omnipotence comes from the assumption that clinical work is unambiguously empirical rather than interpretative. The narrator muses that if a doctor’s role is to save lives, then every life-saving act by a doctor is necessarily a failure because we all die. Medical crises frustrate patients and their families because seeing doctors appear powerless to help them can indeed feel like being abandoned by an uncaring god. 

Existential despair about this absence of authority under the weight of the medical sublime suffuses DeForest’s work. In A History of Present Illness, the narrator contemplates theodicies in the hospital and has long conversations about early Christianity with a seminarian. In Our Long Marvelous Dying, the narrator continuously ruminates on the missing male figures in their personal life: the sudden death of their bigoted father, the disappearance of their brother into drug rehab, and their increasing distance from their possibly cheating husband Eli, who is also a pastor. Where DeForest’s debut explored academic medicine’s obsession with absolution as an analog to Christianity, however, Our Long Marvelous Dying finds a religious parallel to palliative care in Buddhism and its interest in the worldly attachments responsible for human suffering.

After witnessing a series of deaths near the start of their fellowship, the narrator escapes upstate for several weekend trips to a monastery—one where nuns and monks have names like Sister Empathy and Brother Emptiness and speak only in Vietnamese. It immediately feels like home, the narrator says. Among strangers all traumatized by recent losses, the narrator can shake the role of doctor and become an anonymous listener in communion with others. One visitor has lost his son to suicide; another reveals that she’s been diagnosed with cancer and is awaiting surgery. When it’s the narrator’s turn to unload, they simply state, “I am taking a break from work.”

In an essay titled “Narrative Medicine and Negative Capability,” physician-writer Terence Holt argues that the dominant mode of public medical writing has been confessional: Atul Gawande admitting he botched a procedure in The New Yorker in 2011, for example, or Jerome Groopman atoning for missing a fatal diagnosis in her 2007 book How Doctors Think. Here, DeForest’s narrator refuses to confess. One could read this as evidence that the narrator has been rendered apathetic by their work, or worse, that they’re a parasite, only interested in collecting other people’s stories. Even when seeing a therapist, the narrator admits that they “avoided any self-disclosures; I turned all of our talks onto him . . . his time in finance, brief work as a Baptist pastor.”  But the reader has a different relationship with the narrator, who is constantly revealing aspects of their personal lives to us, including the “same tearing pain in the chest” that comes with every patient’s death. So, why doesn’t the doctor weep?

On their first day working in a clinic outside the hospital, the narrator meets a patient known as a “splitter,” a person whose judgments fall into stark binaries of good and evil. “I tend to fall on splitters’ good sides,” the narrator notes, “a tendency that points to something I know is wrong with my character: I allow too much.” The splitter has been treating her lung cancer with essential oils, and at a later visit reveals that she’s an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, a chem-trail believer, and a 9/11 truther. The narrator begins to “listen with two ears, two minds, one for what is real and one for what is true.” They become afraid of the splitter, to the point of canceling upcoming appointments. “She has shown me something strange inside of me,” the narrator explains, “a wound shaped like distrust and disgust and familiarity.”

Later, when the narrator hears that the splitter has died, they hardly seem fazed at all. This negative capability, or the ability to tolerate an ego divided by uncertainty, is the true endgame for both medical training and writing: It’s a way of being that allows humans to endure the daily assault of death, be it in our families, in the news, or in the dying person who needs care if you’re a medical professional—all while thinking about one’s own life and past traumas without breaking down. DeForest aims to cultivate this negative capability in the reader through their driven, elliptical prose, which even within one paragraph can shift from the practical details of organ donation to the emotional resonance of childhood trauma and calls to family members informing them of their loved one’s death. Among the most risk-taking American physician-writers working today, DeForest nimbly toes the line between fact and fiction until we find some footing in our mortality.

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Who's Afraid of Gender?

Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30)

by John M. Fredericks

During a 2017 conference in Brazil that Judith Butler helped organize, a group of protestors burned the world-famous philosopher in effigy. They claimed that Butler’s work threatened to dissolve the meaning of gender and undercut cultural values, responding to ideas presented more than twenty-five years earlier in Butler’s career-defining book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). Amidst the constant oversimplification of the book’s arguments outside academia, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, has been maligned by many in the conservative movement, often unfairly cast as a feminist agitator out to destroy concepts like biological determinism not only at UC Berkeley where they teach, but around the world.

In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler addresses the general public as one of the leading thinkers in gender studies: They attempt to reclaim their own work, reposition themself within public discourse, and advocate for the rights of transgender and genderqueer people. Butler wants to understand how the term “gender” has come to represent all that is evil, malignant, and subversive in popular culture, as well as how national governments, political parties, and sometimes even other feminists are attempting to erase the rights of others.

For Butler, the term “gender” has become a phantasm, an emotionally charged and misdirected catch-all used to incite fears, both psychological and material, about the world around us. Butler argues that “this phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Showing how this phantasm morphs into an “anti-gender ideology movement” around the world, Butler maps how gender has become weaponized to “call for the elimination of gender education, the censorship of texts concerned with gender, and the disenfranchisement or criminalization of transgender or genderqueer people.”

Butler’s previous works on gender can be hard to understand; their poststructuralist approach leads to occasionally impenetrable prose and a style of reasoning that is, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse. Butler seems to be aware of this critique, however, and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is clearly written for a wider audience. Especially in the first half of the book, Butler tries to be as approachable as possible in discussing the phantasmatic effects of gender studies, using a vast constellation of research across disciplines to describe it in various contexts. The first four chapters take on global politics, the Vatican, attacks on gender studies in the United States, and the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County.

In each of these chapters, Butler presents arguments against gender studies, then uses their expert command of rhetoric to provide detailed counterpoints to (and contradictions in) the logic of the anti-gender movement. Readers might wish at moments for a more structured argument; while the phantasmatic interplay between the fears surrounding gender studies and the material consequences for transgender and genderqueer people around the world is important, Butler sometimes employs straw man arguments to stand in for entities trying to restrict our ideas about gender. This polemical approach leads Butler into uneven territory, appealing to a wider audience at the cost of complexity.

Nowhere is Butler’s argument more impassioned and polemical than when discussing trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and the movement’s attempt to contain gender under a narrow definition of biological sex. In their chapter on TERFs, Butler runs through the argument that biological sex is immutable and that transgender people, specifically those assigned male at birth, are a threat to society, taking advantage of the gender spectrum to visit violence upon women in bathrooms. Butler invokes author J.K. Rowling, an outspoken TERF in British cultural discourse, and weaves a fascinating argument about the symbol of the penis, patriarchal frameworks of being, and the need to disavow TERFs as anything but feminists: “Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism or, rather, should not be.” This is an important argument for Butler, because the term “alliance” is central to their argument throughout the book. According to Butler, instead of casting gender as a nightmarish phantasm that negates transgender and genderqueer people’s lived experience, feminism should be allying with everyone who investigates how gender as a framework for social, historical, and cultural discourse can help us understand our material existence.

The most interesting chapters in Who’s Afraid of Gender? come directly after Butler’s discussion of TERFs. In these chapters, Butler investigates the idea of biological sex as immutable, which forms the intellectual and ideological basis for most arguments against transgender identity and expression. Here, Butler seems to be doing a bit of rehabilitation of their arguments in Gender Trouble. They argue that biological sex and gender are not opposite ends of the spectrum, as though biology is only immutable and gender is only performative, but that both biology and the term “gender” (a troubling word that is not easily translated in every language) are products of a set of cultural processes, forever entangled. This entanglement forms the basis for how we understand both biological sex and gender in our particular social and historical moment in time; nature and culture, the environment and the body, dialectically create the processes by which we understand ourselves. As Butler writes:

The “environment” is, thus, not just “over there” at a distance from our bodies. We take in the environment as it takes us up and the environment is fundamentally altered by human interventions and extractions—and climate change is a stark testimony to how those interventions can become destructive. None of us can be formed without a set of interventions, and those external impingements become the conditions of our emergence; they become part of who we are, intrinsic to our forms of becoming, which follow no one trajectory.

Passages like this abound in the book’s later chapters; the ease with which Butler is able to present an entire field of research and apply it to another, equally complicated, field to draw conclusions about our lived experiences prompts some of the most satisfying moments in the book. Whether discussing biological sex, feminist materialism, marxist ideology, colonial power, racial theory, climate change, or the nature/culture dichotomy, Butler displays a remarkable clarity and nuance.

While the reader gets the sense throughout Who’s Afraid of Gender? that one of Butler’s main objectives is to encourage feminists to seek alliances with anyone fighting for social justice, this plea to open up the tent and encompass multiple lived experiences is also what complicates the book. Butler’s ability to tackle so many topics—some of which seem only tacitly connected to the gender debate—can make this volume both challenging and rewarding. An important work within Butler’s own canon and the field of gender studies as a whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on cultural discourse.

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Until August

Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Anne McLean
Knopf ($22)

by Emil Siekkinen

Until August, a book often described as Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost novel,” was published this past March, an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The novel was never lost, however; it was abandoned by the author. The quality of the text has thus been debated—as it should be—but its mere presence in a career that includes international fame for the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 surely calls readers to ponder both its story and its backstory. 

García Márquez (1927-2014) was afflicted by dementia during his final years, and eventually he couldn’t recognize what he himself had written. The author’s last major effort turned out to be the 2002 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, which he had intended to be the first in a trilogy, as it didn’t even reach the middle of his life. The last book of fiction he saw to publication in his lifetime was the 2005 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

Work on that novella led García Márquez to shelve a longer, more ambitious novel he had begun; already feeling the effects of dementia, he felt it wasn’t cohering. He stated that the unfinished text should never be published, and actually that it should be destroyed. His sons, however, went against their father’s wishes in the name of posterity; drafts, notes, and chapter fragments, spread over 769 pages, ended up in an archive—the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—where the material was given the name “We’ll see each other in August.”

Nearly ten years later, the author’s sons decided to betray their father once again: Believing the unfinished text contained some noteworthy literary achievements, they tasked editor Cristóbal Pera, who had worked on Living to Tell the Tale, with compiling a publishable narrative from the archived material. Until August was released on what would have been the author’s 97th birthday, March 6, 2024, nearly ten years after his passing.

Until August is certainly recognizable to those who know the Colombian author’s works. The narrative bears resemblance to the stories in Strange Pilgrims (1992), written in the 1970s and 1980s, and to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But while these fictions were authored by a master in complete control of his craft, Until August is uneven. At times, the book offers outstanding sentences and surroundings that live and breathe:

The tumultuous market bazaars, which she’d claimed as her own since she was a little girl and where just the previous week she had been shopping with her daughter without the slightest fear, made her shudder as if she were in the streets of Calcutta, where gangs of garbage collectors used sticks to hit the bodies lying on the sidewalks at dawn, to find out which ones were sleeping and which were dead.

Likewise, the protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, is filled with the contradictions of being human; as one example, she yearns for yearly one-night stands on the island where her mother is buried, yet these encounters bring not only pleasure, but also anger, grief, and confusion. Elsewhere, however, the text is thinner and unpolished, and the abrupt ending confirms that Until August is definitely an unfinished piece of fiction. The theme might be love—something his sons argue is his main subject—or it might be solitude, which García Márquez himself claimed was his writing’s main preoccupation.

So is the book worth the betrayal? Until August doesn’t display a master in his prime, but it does offer a master class in how a narrative is composed: We watch as García Márquez gives up and continues, fails and succeeds. Here he struggles with a murky passage; there he writes a sentence as bright as the sun. These are moments in a writer’s life that the reading public rarely sees.

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A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje
Knopf ($28)

by Bill Tremblay

T.S. Eliot famously said: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” One of the many pleasures in reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection, A Year of Last Things, is discovering how he fictionalizes his. One senses a real first person in the poems, and not merely because he uses “I” in some poems and in the prose near the end of the book. But the voice here is largely a special third person capable of being intimate and objective at once. These poems are by Ondaatje but not about him in any limited autobiographical sense, except perhaps when he’s writing about writing; thus they evoke a poetics of the transpersonal, leaving a wake reminiscent of Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.”

This poetics takes shape thanks to Ondaatje’s ability to reach for emotional connections through objects cherished for their talismanic power to evoke the beloved. Take the volume’s opening poem, “Lock”:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities.

The lines carry us forward until we “reach that horizon . . . where you might see your friends.” The poem continues:

How I loved that lock when I saw it
all those summers ago,
                  when we arrived
out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine
in a tin cup

Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story.

“Lock” establishes not only the book’s jump-cut cinematic style but also its romantic sensibility. Ondaatje is all about asking what’s important in life—friendships, encounters, flirtations, intimacies. His feeling for language is set out in “Definition,” which begins “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred/pages of a Sanskrit dictionary”; as he wanders down this path, he brings words, vowels, and accents to

                                      light
from that distant village
reflected in a cloud,
or your lover’s face lit
by the moonlight on a stage

Landscapes nudge the dialect.
In far places travellers know
a faint gesture can mean
desire or scorn,
                                   just as

a sliver of a phrase thrown away
hides charms within its grammar

Throughout A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje montages stories from biographies of artists, composers, philosophers, songs, films, and paintings into “that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.” “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE” fuses the idea of “last things” with the patient work of restoring ancient frescos and mosaics buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius whose “fragments / wrested away from lava / to remember the end of a world / how it had all been.” “Nothing else lasted,” the poem tells us, “as if these might be the only memory / of ourselves when we are gone.” One might ponder this poem as an archeology of the present, with its endless talk of the end times; again, Ondaatje seems to suggest what matters is not the creation of “art” but of memorials to what one loved in life.

The book’s prose sections seem to have been waiting in the wings for their turn, especially the author’s memoir of school days in Sri Lanka entitled “Winchester House.” In it, Ondaatje writes about his writing process, including taking traits from real people to build fictional characters “during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate.” Against this backdrop, he relates how there were “years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad.” He goes on: “Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth, are nothing without some real clue or glance toward the truth.”

There is no question that A Year of Last Things is a book of major significance. In its summative penultimate piece, “Estuaries,” Ondaatje tells us,

There are places where language refuses to meet a reader, like cursive scripts that flow as if unawakened, or those lost voices of waterfalls. It can occur even where you attempt to end your story—some improbable place, as a friend once wrote, that you will walk through only after you are dead, your bare feet on an ancient mosaic in Tunis that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.

He takes us to such an improbable place in the collection’s coda-like, final poem, “Talking In A River.” Here, perhaps, a more fitting way to find completion emerges:

You journey beyond the familiar properties, find yourself
before long in anonymous water, nothing audible from shore,
only the shake of reflection like a breaking word.
Is this a different mood of the Black River?
With daylight there is the disguised location of the stars.

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To Hell with Poets

Baqytgul Sarmekova
Translated by Mirgul Kali
Tilted Axis Press (£12.99)

by Timothy Walsh

I first encountered Baqytgul Sarmekova’s stories last spring while driving with a friend across the endless steppe in southeastern Kazakhstan. Another friend had sent me a story by Sarmekova titled “The Black Colt,” and as we sped by vast herds of sheep and horses, usually tended by a lone “cowboy” on a horse, I read the story on my phone and was utterly charmed. Sarmekova’s acid-tongued narrator, bumptious wit, dark humor, and adroit compression made me realize at once that this was something new in Kazakh literature.

As we drove through an aul (village) near the border with Kyrgyzstan, the setting perfectly evoked Sarmekova’s story: villagers on horseback or guiding donkey carts hauling loads of dried dung past the occasional gleaming Mercedes. The old mosque and the houses where horses, cows, and donkeys grazed in the yards looked like a scene from centuries past—except for the telephone poles and power lines and a smattering of satellite dishes. It is this uneasy juxtaposition of old and new, tradition and modernity, that Sarmekova dissects in her stories.

Fortunately, a collection of Sarmekova’s stories, To Hell with Poets, is now available in an adroit and nimble first English translation by Mirgul Kali. Kali foregoes footnotes or a glossary, but smartly retains a smattering of Kazakh words that are understandable in context and impart an authentic seasoning. Her translation won a 2022 Pen/ Heim Award, which paved the way for this publication by a notable UK-based small press.

Like “The Black Colt,” each of the twenty stories in To Hell with Poets is highly compressed, distilled like cask-strength Scotch, and all the stories pack a wallop far beyond their weight class. In “The Brown House with the White Zhiguli,” we witness the downfall of a once-proud man and the distinctive house that gives him status as his n’er-do-well son arrives on the scene with disastrous consequences. In “One-Day Marriage,” a mother-and-daughter pair of grifters travel from aul to aul bilking unsuspecting families by arranging sham marriages. In “Moldir,” a vain and urbanized woman recounts a visit to her rural aul for a high school reunion, determined that her friends would see “how removed I’d been from shabby aul life since I moved to the city.” In a flashback during a pause in the conversation, we learn of the tragic fate of Moldir, who was bullied and traumatized by the remorseless narrator. “Dognity” is an unforgettably powerful story narrated by a dog. It is not a comedic tale, but a harrowing four-page noir that evokes a sordid human web of lust, murder, and treachery.

Sarmekova’s prose is direct and unadorned. Her descriptions are acid-etched, her imagery often startlingly apt. She describes a bus pulling into town: “Dragging its belly across the ground, the groaning old bus had finally reached the bazaar at the edge of the city and spat out its passengers.” Elsewhere, a wedding guest’s dress is “so tight that her breasts spilled over the top like swollen, over-proofed dough.” In “Monica,” a woman returns to her native aul and the grave of her brother, which becomes an unwanted reunion with a devoted, simple-minded old woman. Sarmekova sets the scene deftly:

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen. The graveyard, which used to be nestled at the base of the hills, now sprawled out to the edge of the main road. A march of corpses, I thought to myself.

The stories in To Hell with Poets are unrelentingly bleak.  The characters usually die or experience various sorts of horrible or humiliating situations with all their hopes and dreams dashed. Yet Sarmekova’s authorial voice narrates black comedy with such verve and relish the reader can’t help but feel her pure joy in the act of storytelling, and this joy shines through, almost balancing the tragic outcomes of the characters.

Here is the description of Zharbagul in “The Black Colt,” an unlikely bride-to-be:

Before long, my grandfather returned with Zharbagul, whose bucket-shaped head bobbed up and down in his sidecar as they rode along the bumpy road. This was the first time we had ever met our aunty whose huge head, dark, rough, trowel-shaped face, and stumpy legs were a strange match with her thin pigtails, wire earrings, and lacy, ruffled dress.

Alas, on the next page, Zharbagul is jilted by death as the hapless Turar

stepped carelessly on the broken end of a downed power line and died, his body burned to a crisp. The adults who had gone to look at his body said, “He was grinning ear to ear when he passed on to the Great Beyond.” No one knew if he was beaming at the thought of his beloved Zharbagul or grimacing in pain when the fatal charge struck.

Mercifully, there are a few nostalgic tales focusing on two children growing up in a rural aul that offer some respite—Sarmekova likely sensed the need for a slow movement within her Breugelesque symphony—but mostly the stories of To Hell with Poets carry the reader like a carnival ride, evoking fear and delight simultaneously. The title story focuses on a love-sick would-be poet and a gray-haired mentor who seduces her after thundering out a “long-winded epic” at a wedding reception. In Kazakhstan, poets and poet-singers (akyn, zhirau and sal-seri) are still revered as cultural treasures, so the title To Hell with Poets is provocative—as if Sarmekova is throwing down the gauntlet with these bristling stories that careen across the landscape like tornadoes.

Sarmekova comes from Atyrau in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, far from the cultural centers of Almaty and Astana—which perhaps partly explains her originality. Atyrau also has the distinction of being where the Ural River empties into the Caspian—the Ural being the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia. The city is, in fact, bisected by the Ural, so Sarmekova is from a place that has one foot in Europe and one in Asia, which seems fitting given the between-worlds ethos of so many of her stories.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the literary world in Kazakhstan has evolved, largely jettisoning Socialist Realism and its nation-building celebratory novels in favor of forms that encompass the complexities of an ancient nomadic culture rudely wrenched against its will into the labyrinth of the modern, commercialized, mechanized world. Literature in Kazakhstan today is thriving, but so far only a handful of works have trickled out in English translation, most notably Talasbek Asemkulov’s masterpiece, A Life at Noon, Didar Amantay’s Selected Works, and a pioneering anthology, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan. One can only hope there is more on the horizon—and particularly one wonders what will come next from Sarmekova.

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galáxias

Haroldo de Campos
Translated by Odile Cisneros
with Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, Christopher Middleton, and Norman Maurice Potter
Ugly Duckling Presse ($20)

by Elizabeth Zuba

Who can explain how these things happen, but somehow just a few short weeks after both Jerome Rothenberg and Marjorie Perloff’s passing, here comes the first full translation of galáxias, the magnum opus of Brazilian luminary Haroldo de Campos — a book that both writers spent decades sounding the bells for. Hooray for the universe for this unexpected and poignant tribute—and hooray for Odile Cisneros, whose English rendering of arguably one of the most acrobatic and multilectical literary texts since James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an absolute triumph.  

But to Rothenberg and Perloff’s point, Campos may still be one of the great literary giants of the twentieth century you’ve never heard of, so here’s a quick recap: Together with his equally brilliant brother Agosto and fellow writer Décio Pignatari, Campos led the concrete poetry revolution in the 1950s and ’60s, writing the manifesto Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry and thrusting Brazil onto the international stage. Serially publishing poems and critical pieces in journals and magazines, his influence as a poet, theorist, and translator was wide-reaching and earth-rattling in all three disciplines; Cuban writer Severo Sarduy called him a “Pound-like patriarch.”

A polymath and polyglot, Campos (sometimes in collaboration with his brother) translated scores of writers into the Portuguese, often for the first time, including Goethe, Pound, Joyce, Mayakovsky, Mallarmé, Dante, Paz, and Homer, not to mention Provençal troubadours, Russian futurists, classical Chinese poets, and the books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes. Regarding Campos’s extraordinary reach, Derrida wrote, “on the horizon of literature, and above all in the intimacy of the language of languages, each time so many languages in each language, I know that Haroldo would have access to that like me, before me, better than me.”

Suffice to say, translation was not a side-hustle for Campos; it was his world view. Also, he didn’t call it translation, but transcreation, or sometimes transillumination, translight, and transluciferation, among other monikers. Proceeding from concepts of concrete poetry, Campos saw words not simply as vehicles for meaning but as little morpheme prisms, abundant and complex in their phonemic and graphic characters, along with potential structural, sonic, and connotative relationalities. For Campos, words, like poetry, do not mean but are. And as such, no word or particular relations of words can ever be made over into another language or anything else, but rather must be born totally anew — reciprocal and parallel yes, but autonomous and equally singular.

It’s hard to give an example of Campos’s transcreation, in that he was transcreating into the Portuguese, but fortunately for us, Cisneros has skillfully adopted Campos’s practice in tackling galáxias. Though the English edition does not include the original Portuguese, here are the volume’s opening lines:

e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso
e aqui me meço quando se vive sob a espécie da viagem o que importa
não é a viagem mas o começo . . .

Now, here’s Cisneros (in collaboration with Suzanne Jill Levine— three of the cantos are collaborations with or contributions by other translators) impressively following his lead:

and here i begin i spin here the beguine i respin and grin to begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip which is
why i begin to respin . . .

And here’s a very literal translation (of my own), just to give you an idea of Levine and Cisneros’s transcreation in action:

and I begin here and I measure here this beginning and I begin again and I stir and I throw
and here I measure when you live in the form of a journey what matters
is not the journey but the beginning . . .

You can hear how rhythm and sound are imperative for Campos, and the way Levine and Cisneros sustain that sonic intoning, while also reimagining it from the lyrical, paroxytonic rhythm of Portuguese into the more monosyllabic staccato of English. Semantically, their lines deviate from the specific meanings of each word of the original, but reciprocate the overall intention: the biblical-cyclical invocation of a journey as a continual beginning. Visually, the English “in” word-endings lace together in a netlike pattern over the lines just as “eço” does in the Portuguese, as do the little sequin i’s that shimmer about them, graphically recreating the “e” (and) in the original.

There’s yet another transcreation-esque move here you might miss if you don’t know that Campos is an unabashed glutton for sliding door homonyms and wormhole cultural-lectical allusions. Brilliantly, Levine and Cisneros mutate “begin” to “beguine” to conjure both the West Indian dance and the classic Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine,” evoking concepts of lingual and cultural hegemony that will resurface throughout the text. Campos would be proud. To be clear, these first few lines are among the simplest in galáxias; a discussion of this epic poem and its transcreation would take a book-length critical work.

this is not a travel book because travel is not a book of travel
because a book is travel at best i aver it’s a baedeker of epiphanies
at worst i can swear it’s an epiphany in a baedeker for golden domes of
an orthodox russo-byzantine church set deep in geneva going downhill
on route de malagnou heading to the city center through a glimpsed
vision of the oldtown and canals you could get married whynot with the chinese
lions that some fatherfriar wayfarer returning from a journey a
pilgrimage to oriental missions learned to sculpt at the entrance of the esplanade
of convento de são francisco northern paraíba at the cobblestoned entrance
overflowing eight mouths of portalgates in contained and then scattered
steps drying racks of stone and joão pessoa in the summer rain was not
an island by gauguin bronzing away in the distance paradisiacal peace in an iamb of silks
and hair blowing in the wind plumed quill in the sultry summer and seated in a café

Widely considered his magnum opus, Campos wrote galáxias over the course of two decades, starting in 1963 and publishing the poem in its entirety for the first time in 1984; the 1992 edition was additionally accompanied by an audio recording of sixteen of the cantos, reinforcing the importance of the voco in his total verbivocovisual work. In that later edition, Campos says:

The galáxias situate themselves on the border between poetry and prose. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve . . . but it is the image that prevails, the vision or calling of the epiphanic. . . . This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, an always recurrent yet varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel (despite the fact that—and for that very reason—it is not exactly a “travel book”. . .).

A series of fifty “galactic cantos” that center loosely around different places Campos has traveled, the work charts not only the poet’s literal journeys around the world, but also the atemporal, multiverse ones he takes by way of spiraling slipstreams of language. Densely covering the right-hand side of the page—absent punctuation, capitalization, stanzas or sections—but balanced with a blank verso not unlike the empty expanse around any galaxy, each canto is in and of itself a lexical and literary cosmic ride that plummets through wormholes of languages, sounds, graphemes, time, and cultural and literary allusions, making it an extraordinary experiment in a Babel-transcendent poetry.

Campos describes the forty-eight cantos that sit between the two beginning-end/end-beginning poems of galáxias as “movable,” each introducing “its ‘difference’ but contain(ing), in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire book, which can be seen from an Alephic vantagepoint.” Aleph as in A, I asked myself? I looked it up. Probably not. More likely, Alephic as in the mathematical sets that number the infinite. No, I cannot explain that mathematically. But “Alephic” makes a lot of sense as a description for this universe-expanding and yet ultimately contained book—like a subparticle is a thing you can count, but also a way to see forever.

du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben through the voice of sophocles through the voice
of hölderlin schiller laughing away goethe smiling illustrious company he must have been
crazy herr hölderlin or he pretended to be because sophocles only meant
you seem worried about something ismene to antigone through the voice of sophocles
one of the most laughable products of pedantry that red-tinted word . . .

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sketch of Buckminster Fuller’s imagined Geoscope, but I’d describe it as a human-size earth model you can stick your head into and experience the whole world happening at once from the inside out; Fuller’s hope was to expand one’s sense of an individual relationship to the world as in fact a series of connections and interrelationships. When the architect Jesse Reiser recently recreated a Geoscope of sorts for a show at Princeton University, it was a totally immersive multimedia experience complete with multiple voices, screens, sounds, cultural references, and views from and of earth. Reading galáxias is a little like that, only instead of a Geoscope, it’s a multiverse scope, and instead of a physical structure, the spaceship is language itself. To say it is an otherworldly experience doesn’t begin to cover the sheer magnitude of the joyful abundance that carries you along.

saffron yellow egg vermillion verging on pompeian lava red you could
say after seeing pompeii the amorini friezes against a ground of
giallorosso but this is rome the roman colors like flags the blue
most fine most frigid of that rarefied january morning the mild winter
that year almost springing in the first greens and reds and tawnygold
and redyellow yolkbisque and carmine and oldancient imperial walls
oldancient baroque palazzi mansionhovels alternating with
villas lei può dirmi dov’è la via del consolato i’m not italian i’m an
amurr’kan from inside a sports car and could you tell me sir where
the swiss airline office is tente de me entender professor por favor . . .

Ultimately, writing and translating were metaphysical enterprises for Campos. In his author’s note to the 1984 publication of galáxias, he writes, “today, retrospectively, I would tend to see it as an epic insinuation that resolved itself as an epiphanic one.” Spinning and colliding all that immense knowledge around in his head—particle-accelerator style—Campos saw endless and perpetual connections between words and sounds, images and ideas, that spoke to some greater truth or meaning. As Cisneros and Sergio de Bessa have written in their introduction to Novas (Northwestern University Press, 2005), a selection of Campos’s writings from poetry to theory, Campos saw, in that wild Geoscope brain of his, that “true meaning could only be glimpsed through prismatic refraction.” Lucky are we who get to strap on our space helmets and touch the multiverse through his transilluminated lens.

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Selected Poems: 1959-2022

Neeli Cherkovski
Lithic Press ($28)

by Zack Kopp

A writer of poems that fill one up like nourishing and enjoyable word-meals, Neeli Cherkovski (born in 1945) continued creating his artfully imaginative verse right until the end of his life on March 19, 2024. The posthumous publication of Cherkovski’s Selected Poems: 1959-2022 represents his long overdue recognition as one of the most essential poets of the Beat Generation. In addition to the searching, haunted poems in this beautifully printed 400-page book, an introduction by Charles Bernstein situates how their author consistently “bows head in respect to disrespect”; while photographs track a life of literary engagement, starting with a picture taken with Lawrence Ferlinghetti around the time Cherkovski’s Ferlinghetti: A Biography (Doubleday, 1979) was published, and one of an even younger version of Cherkovski sitting on a tricycle next to his friend and mentor Charles Bukowski (also on a tricycle).

Perhaps due to having caroused with Bukowski in Los Angeles during the 1960s—adventures recounted not only by Bukowski in poems, stories, and articles (where he commented more than once that Cherkovski would “make a great rabbi someday,” popularizing and belittling him in one swipe) but also in Cherkovski’s landmark biography Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)—Cherkovski’s work has often been perceived in the shadow of Bukowski’s, so proper estimation of his own poetic voice has been delayed. The pair shared a winsome dynamic, as can be seen in an early poem in Selected Poems, “THIS ONE BUKOWSKI THREW INTO THE FIREPLACE (WITHOUT READING)”:

Bukowski looks out of his window
he looks out of his Hollywood window
his forty-year window
his Hollywood Park window
Bukowski looks down from his three story window
he can see little children playing below
and he cries because someday they will die
when the fallout crosses the street they will die
and if not the bomb then age or sickness
or some holy accident
he opens the window to let in the air

But beyond Cherkovski’s teen years, the differences between the writers became more pronounced than their similarities. In contrast to Bukowski’s habitually spare voice, Cherkovski writes poetry as if to give the very letters on the page back their lives by turning them into trees again—albeit in a whole other spirit. Take “Leaves,” from 1979:

ONCE THE UNBREAKABLE LEAVES SPOKE A LANGUAGE
THAT FLOWED LIKE PURE CLEAR WATER FROM THE
BREATHLESS LAND ONTO PROSPEROUS FIELDS & SEA-
LINES STRETCHED TO ISLANDS WHERE TALL SWAYING
PALMS BECAME THATCH-ROOFED HOUSES FOR PEOPLE
WHO BELIEVED IN MANY GODS AND IN TONGUES OF
FIRE THAT CALLED FROM DEEP IN THE RESTLESS
OCEAN & THEY KNEW THE NAMES, LONG OBSCURED,
OF PALM GOD AND GRASS GOD AND GOD IN SAND
AND WATER & THE LEAVES FALL LIKE IRON PLATING
ONTO THE AWAKENING PLAIN & DAWN, INDEFINABLE
BEAST, CRAWLS UP THE COASTAL HILLS AND DOWN
TO THE SHORE & ONCE THE CANYON LEAVES DID
NOT REST LIKE TABLETS, ONE RED, ONE YELLOW,
HOLDING WORDS OF A WISDOM MORE SENTIENT, LESS
BELLICOSE, FILLED WITH GREATER UNDERSTANDING
& THOSE WHO PRESSED THEM INTO BOUND VOLUMES
RESTORED OLD ENERGIES TO THE SUN AND PASSED ON

Always seeing more books in the trees, the ocean full of individual drops of liquid, and mercy going in and out of print as time proceeds, Cherkovski offers readers the flash of living language; there is a primordial omniscience in his work, as if the sudden brightness of dinosaur-brained birds is lighting up the pitch-black darkness.

Let’s therefore remember this wizened Bohemian bard who so passionately wrote from his neighborhood of living letters “near San Francisco but not San Francisco but part of San Francisco, frozen in time somewhere in the sixties or maybe the sixty-eight-seventies,” as he once described it in a Facebook post. Besides being a gifted inimitable West Coast poet and a pioneering proselytizer for the writers he dubbed “Whitman’s Wild Children,” he was a lovely person who invited all who met him into the warm embrace of lyric poetry. Let’s remember him, in fact, by heeding the instructions offered in one of the last poems in this volume, “Don’t Forget Me”:

when I am gone
think of me
as you tinker in
the technological forest
find time to draw
my words on your cloud
think of me as
a strip of bark
on an ash tree
as you lead the bees
on a country path

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

learn my odes by heart
remember the timbre
of my voice,
don’t forget me,
I was a poet

come listen
when my spirit rises
on branches
of the last redwood tree
wipe my tears
tell me I’m remembered
lie if you must

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Women on the Moon

Debora Kuan
The Word Works ($19)

by Julia Klahr

In Women on the Moon, Debora Kuan’s vulnerable new poetry collection, the author draws on her Asian-American heritage to explore the gravity rooting a woman’s life in an “imaginary firmament” by invoking the ethereal figure of Chang-e, the Chinese moon goddess. Divided into five “lunar phases” examining the place of women (particularly women of color) in contemporary American society, the book is a refreshing take on modern femininity that finds magic in the banal domesticity of the everyday.

Kuan’s free verse seems to signal the liberty of expansive contemplation, especially in the book’s “Gibbous” section. In recalling the myth of Chang-e’s path to immortality, the author casts a mystical light on her heritage:

Say a woman leaves you for the moon.
Say you discover after turning over the quilted

page, she’s drunken the elixir,
she’s gone—ghost of indented slippers, pulse

thumping beneath your birdless ribcage.

However, Kuan has no less praise for the corporeal, as in the pithy “Magic Lesson”:

. . . every woman
has been sawed in half
at least a dozen times
before sunset.

The book’s opening phase, “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering,” features “Having a Baby at 43,” a poem that portrays the speaker as apprehensive and vulnerable as she grapples with older motherhood. Following recent egregious displays of anti-Asian sentiment, “One Day in America” subtly evokes an Asian American mother’s fears while watching her child:

         when you catch sight of me,
you practice your wave, opening and shutting

your fist in the weighted air. Your nose and chin
and eyes are splattered with dark red

berry purée, as you kick your feet
in your highchair.

Here, Kuan tries to make sense of a horror-filled day in which the Asian-American spa workers to whom her book is dedicated were brutally killed. Kuan reinforces the devastating impact through enjambment, using meaningful line breaks to help carry the movement of thought. Her language, however, remains informal, with a natural cadence that makes it readable despite the difficult content.

The book’s next phase, “Full Moon: Coupling,” includes a foray into end-stopped and end-rhymed verse, where the interlaced quatrains of “Man & Wife” emphasize a sense of burdensome mundanity and exhaustion:

By dinner, we tear our bread with both hands,
forget candles, eat straight from the pan.
We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands,
so we can reach them as quick as we can.

Images of married life’s predictability and dull routine, where “the complaints go on dripping, / stalactites in a dolomite cave,” continue in wry poems like “How to Live with Your Husband,” but in the book’s final section, Kuan’s speaker seems to embrace the joy of the ordinary in a series of still lifes. The brief tercets of “Still Life With Mushroom” feature deft use of alliteration (“cloud of cartilage”), internal rhymes (“the unsteady / shed”), and other poetic devices that suggest a sense of order and acceptance, one summarized in the poem’s poignant final lines:

I have married my life
to lowliness, and I want
to cry aloud with happiness.

Kuan deploys cultural icons as varied as Anna May Wong and Freddie Mercury as she contemplates subjects ranging from female invisibility to racial stereotyping, and  throughout, her singular lens highlights the inequities of American life. In “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” for instance, Kuan’s characterization of a newly unemployed mother embodies an implicit call for greater recognition of society’s overlooked caregivers.

Lyrical, vulnerable and astute, Women on the Moon is a wide-ranging contemporary ode to womanhood. Shedding light on romance and realism while celebrating the contributions of marginalized women, Kuan’s voice advocates for their honest representation with an acuity that speaks volumes.

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Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle and One Impossible Step

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle
Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases
Roque Dalton
Translated by Jack Hirschman and Barbara Paschke
Seven Stories Press ($18.95)

One Impossible Step: Selected Poems
Orides Fontela
Translated by Chris Daniels
Nightboat Books ($17.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

At first glance, not much connects the work of poets Roque Dalton (1935–1975) from El Salvador and Orides Fontela (1940–1998) from Brazil. Dalton, a committed revolutionary in the armed struggle leading up to his country’s civil war, writes poems in the direct, colloquial expression of everyday people—they are not didactic, yet they do wear their political and social concerns on their sleeves. Fontela’s poems, on the other hand, are far more hermetic; elusive, abstract, and philosophical. And of course, Fontela writes in Portuguese, Dalton in Spanish. Yet the two are contemporaries whose work responds to social conditions during turbulent times. 

Looking at these two disparate poets together—that is, reading them through each other’s lenses—enhances the parameters with which the work of each might be framed. Dalton becomes more philosophical, while Fontela gains in political gravity. Take a short poem by each. Here is one of Fontela’s “Seven Bird Poems”:

We’ll never know
such purity:
bird devouring us
while we sing it.

And this is Dalton’s “Poetic Art 1974”:

Poetry
Forgive me for having helped you understand
you’re not made of words alone.

In each case, the poet addresses their art, Dalton directly and Fontela through the archetypal image of a bird. While Fontela uses the universal “we”—as translator Chris Daniels notes, “Fontela almost never wrote the word ‘eu,’ the subjective form of the Portuguese first-person singular pronoun”—Dalton maintains an intimate “I-Thou” relationship, asking forgiveness for expanding poetry’s knowledge of itself. In both cases, the power of poetry to reach beyond language’s supposed meaning is stressed, albeit from opposing perspectives. Dalton implies the revolutionary context of his poem by including the year in the title, suggesting that poetry has a role to play in a time of cultural unrest and armed struggle, but Fontela also rejects the supposed rarification of poetry—“such purity”—in favor of the more active, even violent, “devouring us” that is within the art form’s transformative power. And while different in tone, both poems extol how poetry can elevate our ability to conceive the world anew.     

Drawing from all of Fontela’s collections of poetry, One Impossible Step represents not only the broadest translation of her corpus into English, but, at only 130 pages, it also operates as a compact overview of her biography and poetics. Daniels (who has also translated Pessoa among other Lusophone authors) ingeniously includes some twenty pages of excerpts from three interviews with Fontela, and Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck contributes a succinct afterword that assesses the trajectory of her life and work. Domeneck describes Fontela as

A person who owned no property, who felt neither the need nor the desire for a love relationship, perhaps [she] was uninterested in praising anything but oxygen. Perhaps her poverty led her to abandon adornment and poetic beautification. . . . demonstrat[ing] the linguistic attention of a post-war poet living a historical moment that demanded, in the use of symbols, an awareness of their being signs.

Dalton is much better known to U.S. readers; an earlier edition of this very book, published in the early 1980s under the title Poemas Clandestinos/Clandestine Poems, went through multiple printings. Now released as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle as the first of a several Dalton translations to be issued over the coming years, it is actually the last, likely unfinished, work of Dalton’s; it comprises five sets of poems by distinct “authors” invented by the poet (though these pseudo-pseudonymous characters are nothing on the scale of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms). It’s unclear quite what Dalton had in mind by casting his voice into different personas, yet perhaps it is more important to draw attention to what these figures have in common: a belief in the necessity of cultural revolution and the use of poetry as a means towards that end. An opening “Declaration of Principles” signed by “the authors” closes by stating that the “enemy poet” (as opposed to the “servant poet” or “clown poet”) must have “a lucid and invincible confidence in the working class” and engage in “direct participation in its struggle.”

Fontela came from the working class, went to school to study philosophy on a scholarship, scraped by as a teacher, then “died in a public hospital in 1998, without a close family, destitute as a poet.” Dalton’s father was an American who financially provided for his education; he traveled internationally, spent time in Cuba honing his belief in communism and guerilla skills, and was tragically murdered in 1975 at the hands of his fellow revolutionaries in El Salvador , a victim of political infighting. Despite the vast differences in their lives, however, both poets created a body of literature hinged upon life—and because of this, these new translations of their work into English are vital.

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American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson

Edited by Philip Brookman and Casey Riley
Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/Minneapolis Institute of Art ($65)

by Chris Barsanti

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century.

American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, the catalog to an exhibition of the same name at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, lays out what Parks found. In the museum show, the roughly sixty images are presented in four different categories (“Care,” “Community,” “Faith,” and “Labor”); these distinctions aren’t used in the catalog but regardless, the portraits comprise a very specific slice of life. Watson, a teenage mother whose husband was killed just before the birth of their second child, was raising two grandchildren on her own when she met Parks. A slim, upright woman with a narrow face and watchful eyes, Watson has a stoic quality in these images that suggests timelessness and stubborn dignity.

Parks’s best work is marked by his empathy. No matter how many portraits he made or awards he received, the artist who once earned his keep by playing piano in a Minneapolis brothel maintained a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God connection to his subjects. That bond is clear in American Gothic, which is less a high-flying artist’s hierarchical view of a laborer than it is a wordless conversation between two Black government workers in an environment where each had to continually prove their worth.

Parks might have been expected to bring to this series the lightning-in-a-bottle quality that characterizes his best street photography—but with Watson, he takes his time. She is carefully framed in every shot, often lit as well as the women in his fashion work. The compositions are not dashed-off but complex and layered, especially in those pictures which document the church that Watson, who was very religious, attended.

Not surprisingly, the keynote image is the iconic and initially controversial photograph that gives the exhibition and catalog their title. Multiple images show Watson sweeping the FSA hallways and offices, a poised figure in a white dress with her head down—whether from shyness, focus on her work, or both—getting on with things in a darkened institution where she was likely rarely noticed. In “Ella Watson Sweeping,” Parks seems to have placed a lamp on the floor behind a desk, creating a pool of upward-casting light that throws dramatic shadows. Watson looks heroic and unbowed yet human to a fault, without the distancing of attempted iconography.  

“American Gothic” itself remains a wonder. In what could be considered our nation’s Mona Lisa, Watson looks just off to the side of the camera with a steady, just shy of exhausted look. There is an upside-down broom in one hand, a mop visible to the right, and behind her an American flag, casting its complicated aura of high ideals and promises unkept over everything. Taken just twelve years after Grant Wood’s instantly famous Flemish-inspired painting of two similarly stoic Midwestern farmers, Parks’s photograph is similarly open-ended—it grabs the eye but doesn’t insist; you are compelled to look but are not sure what you see. Despite this ambiguity, Parks’s juxtaposition of Watson in front of the flag, with its unspoken critique of a government fighting authoritarianism abroad and maintaining inequality at home, was something of a bombshell: “You’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired!” Stryker supposedly told Parks.

Interestingly, there is little in the exhibition that specifically addresses the class and racial disparities Parks found in Washington, D.C. (though one picture of two Black children playing with a white doll seems to prefigure his infamous “Doll Test” photo taken five years later). Although he grew up attending segregated schools, Parks was still shocked by just how institutionalized Jim Crow bigotry was in our nation’s capital, where he could not shop for clothes or get lunch where he chose because he was Black. Did he and Watson talk about this? Did they have to?

Tellingly, the book’s spine and cover credit the work to “Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.” He had the camera and the eye that produced these photographs. But her life, and everything that constituted it, was her own.

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