Book Review

American Precariat

Parables of Exclusion

Edited by Zeke Caligiuri, Fong Lee, B. Batchelor, C. Fausto Cabrera, Will Anderson, Warren Bronson, David Janisch, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Mark “Red” Altenhofen, Ronald L. Greer II, Jeff Young, and Lavon Johnson
Coffee House Press ($19.95)

by Sara Dovre Wudali

The essay anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion works to “polish the world” into a better version of itself. The twelve editors are a team of incarcerated artists and writers from Minnesota who offer a unique perspective as culture bearers from society’s most hidden corner. Jennifer Bowen, who facilitated editorial meetings through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, explains in an introductory note that incarcerated populations feel societal changes deeply, though their perspectives on those changes are “invisible by design.” To make the people behind this curation effort visible, the book includes transcriptions of editorial conversations after each essay; these transcriptions crack open the process of building an anthology and clarify that the editors see their role as a quest. Who, after all, understands power and class better than those whose very freedom has been ruptured by it? Or, as editor Kennedy Gisege puts it, “In prison, we see precarity in a totally different way than maybe somebody [who has] gone to the University of Minnesota or Harvard. You know, we’ve survived. We’ve lived the experience, so we identify easily with other fellow human beings who have suffered.”

Each essay tells a personal story, and many function also as treatises or manifestos written from within what British economist Guy Standing identified as the fast-growing “precariat” class, defined by its shared exposure to risk. The editors have chosen to include texts about living in the United States from within positions of vulnerability and instability by a mix of well-known authors (Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Kao Kalia Yang, Steve Almond) and newer voices as well. The topics range across the most difficult issues we face as a nation: poverty, mental health, homelessness, climate change, immigration, racism, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Members of the precariat are, Michael Torres writes, “unsafe and (un)seen.” In his essay about surviving higher education as a Mexican American, Torres weaves a personal story of isolation and surveillance, and the editorial conversation that follows ranges across broader discussions of migration, citizenship, cultural identity, code-switching, shame, and assimilation. “White people,” editor Chris Cabrera says, “have the option to reject homogeny and to identify as simply human . . . White people get to choose the cultural conflicts with which to engage, whereas to be racialized as anything else, is to be drafted into a conflict by virtue of the color of your skin.”

Alice Paige also writes of isolation and surveillance, but from a transgender perspective: “The isolation feels like death,” she writes, and “everyone is watching me, judging how I perform femininity.” The hard-hitting tone of Paige’s lyric essay echoes the punk rock she uses to celebrate being alive: “I trade a violent home life for a violent homeless life. . . . I go across and beyond myself. I leave myself behind.” Tension builds as she and other trans friends navigate trauma, homelessness, and infuriating waits for medical care. When she learns that every forty-five seconds a queer youth commits suicide, every minute of survival becomes one to celebrate. The editorial discussion after this piece digs into rage and gender in punk rock, the politics of gender identity, and how language can be a tool to prevent suicide.

There’s a sense of a ticking clock in many of the works in this anthology; after all, as editor Zeke Caligiuri writes in his foreword, “Time, in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency.” Time is a resource continually in crisis, measured in long years of exile and marked by sudden uncontrollable changes in circumstances. TM “Redd” Warren plays expertly with chronology in his personal essay about life with a cellmate and the deliberate care they take with their creations: their baking, paintings, friendship. In Sarith Peou’s essay, “The Promised Land,” both the author and the subject of his story lost years to untreated mental illness; now prison holds them both. Lauren Markham’s essay “Can We Move Our Forests in Time to Save Them?” reveals a Hail Mary plan to avert one catastrophic outcome of the climate crisis. Kristen Collier relates how the debt her mother incurred on her behalf grows exponentially out of control; using masterful metaphors, Collier describes how it consumes her future.

The cumulative effect of these essays, each from a different slice of society, makes clear that the American precariat is enormous and its issues are enormously complex. The editors discuss the “American fallacy” of bootstrapping our way out of precarity, which additional rights should be included in the Constitution, and how and whether outrage can be shifted into action: “You wake up and you have a fucking knee on your neck. And you inherit that shit. Just like people inherit comfort.” They also discuss their own darknesses, rage, and despair, and question whether their paths to prison were inevitable—but camaraderie and hope shine into the discussions too. Many of these editors have known each other for years, and their discussions reflect mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s quirks and interests, such as when they good-naturedly clear the way during one discussion for editor David Janisch’s monologue on the three reasons trees should have rights.

From the very first pages of the foreword, Caligiuri warns the reader that American Precariat is a dangerous project: Society’s decision-makers know “the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business.” In a place made to break people down, a community built by artists and writers becomes a cultural force resisting not just the disassembly of their own humanity, but that of all American society. After all, as Janisch says in the last words of the book, “when following the news, you can get really numb to it. The news doesn’t make a difference. But this essay? All these essays . . . That is one thing that’s really cool about paying attention to the world—it’s just one big story.”

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Black River

Nilanjana Roy
Pushkin Vertigo ($17.95)

by Josh Steinbauer

“What writers like Toni Morrison, and perhaps writers like me, are looking at is not who is the killer but the question of where does that rot come from?”
—Nilanjana Roy, Scroll.in Interview

The emergence of noir in the 1940s marked a particular shift of America’s outlook—the term described not only an artistic aesthetic, but the dark tone of post-war pessimism and societal nihilism toward corruption and crime. This is the tradition from which Indian author Nilanjana Roy’s new crime novel Black River flows. In Roy’s capable hands, the book transcends genre to deliver a study of grief and an affectionate portrait of friendship, but typical of noir, an undercurrent of social commentary runs deep. Roy’s decades as a columnist, journalist, editor, and cultural critic have been widely appreciated in India, and her work on religion, caste, and gender have converged to mark a particular shift of the country’s outlook.

Black River opens in a small fictional village downstream from Delhi. We spend just enough time in the tender conversations of eight-year-old Munia and her father Chand to feel the real weight of grief when the girl’s body is found dangling from a tree branch. The stage is set with the heartbroken father, the local thug, the village bigwig, and the cynical detective and his sidekick, all of whom immediately suspect the local batty homeless man. Mansoor is the first to find the child; even more incriminating, he is Muslim in a predominantly Hindu region. The rising threat of mob justice creates a ticking clock for the detective torn between easily closing the case and sensing that the half-coherent suspect is telling the truth: “His years in the police have not convinced him that there is much justice in the universe, or that it is his job to commit acts of justice. But he does not like deceit. He does not like loose ends.”

Roy leans into the hard-boiled tone and pace from the outset, but once the characters are established and the investigation has begun, the story shifts gears, rewinding the timeline to offer a portrait of Chand many years before this tragedy. As a young man, Chand eschews his father’s farm and travels to the city for a different life. Delhi would never have been called rustic, but at the very least, these are simpler times. He finds work as a butcher and lives along the Yamuna riverside with his best friend and his best friend’s wife; Khalid and Rabia are Muslim and on their own itinerant journeys, but the three of them find more common ground in the trenches of poverty than they lose over their differing religious backgrounds. We’re shown a difficult era met with friendship and communal struggle: “The music, those tunes—they bring back the old days, a time when my village did not feel the need to separate us into insiders and outsiders.”

If the flashback is played primarily for nostalgic contrast, it’s also important for showing us the origin of an enduring friendship. When we return to the present to pick up the police investigation, we return as well to Chand’s despair, and the balm for this bereavement comes in his rekindled communication with Rabia. This warmest part of the book holds space for the kind of affection and understanding that can only be traded by old friends. When Chand’s loss leads to his inability to imagine a future for himself, Rabia becomes the sage: “Maybe after some time you will know for sure if this is what you want, but at least get to the end of the first season of grieving.”

Rabia’s own story traces Muslim footprints in the shifting sands of India’s religious friction. When her son is to be married, a gang of Hindu nationalists taunt the wedding party with a banner that reads “India for True Indians.” As her family weighs options, their conversation digs at the systemic rot emboldening fundamentalists with less to gain from de-escalation or compromise. Rabia remembers the leader of this gang when he was a young reluctant student: “The thin, insecure boy who hid his uncertainties behind a screen of aggression had grown into this belligerent man.” Whether the antagonism is abated by cunning or pacification, the nationalists insist, “Some day, this side, that side won’t matter. It will all be ours.”

In general, blurbs are the hyperbole of the marketplace–especially when so bold as to proclaim a book “an elegy for India.” But in this case, the phrase points to what separates Black River from many other police procedurals out there: Roy’s commitment to cultural critique. She never lets it get in the way of a fast-paced noir whodunnit, but instead conjures a vital parallel layer. When the detective questions the town manager about the town’s wealthy patriarchs, the manager responds that the father was regarded as a man who “for every factory he built, every company he started, he also built schools, free clinics, shelters for cows, buffaloes, and retired tonga horses.” On the other hand, the son is out posting signs at the village edge declaring “No Muslims.” The legacies of father and son bely the more subtle mystery at the heart of Roy’s noir tale: What has happened to our country in a single generation? Or as Roy puts it, “If this is normal now, what will normal be for all of us tomorrow?”

Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

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Estelle Meaning Star

Sarah Rosenthal
Chax Press ($21)

by Mary Burger

The pages in Sarah Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star are dun-colored, earthen. The text is collaged, like a ransom note; individual words and letters appear cut from a manuscript and reassembled into short, irregular lines, without punctuation. A slender work, compressed to a potent distillate, the book begins with a procession of women who cradle wounded animals, “walking along / pacific rim”—a ritualized enactment of grief, but also of tender care and nurturance.

The Pacific Rim is not a single place but the nearly ten-thousand-mile perimeter of the world’s largest sea—the seismic, volcanic edge of the expanse that divides (and connects) east and west, water and land. The women’s walk along this edge resembles ancient funeral ceremonies, such as the procession across the Nile River to the temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut or the ceremonial journey down the Avon to the monumental tomb site at Stonehenge, each enacting the passage from life to death. It also brings to mind a post-apocalyptic scene from N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which finds imperiled survivors in a barren, ruined world trying to save their injured kin, or at least to honor their dead, as they flee from further cataclysm.

Rosenthal has written elsewhere that she composed Estelle Meaning Star from cut-ups of dreams she recorded while going through cancer treatment. The traces of her personal experience are sublimated and reconfigured in this work, where ritual and ceremony face down the forces of pain and grief. The origin of those forces isn’t explicitly named here; rather, we’re given hints of a post-industrial urban dystopia laden with passive consumerism, invasive surveillance, callous wealth:

         lethargic
TV-watching

…………………………………..

is a camera
catching me

…………………………………..

bulging leather wallets

Children exist here seemingly just to be disciplined:

order                  stops kids
wandering through hallways

At times, the menace in this world even betrays a resemblance to the spread of a cancer:

incision        squeeze
bitter pellets
from watery pink
tissue

Yet this isn’t a story of the irreversible passage from life to death. There are acts of resistance, pointed and defiant:

a jittery revolutionary
posting messages

More fundamentally, the suffering endured here enacts a transformation. The poem’s speaker—and by extension those she addresses, those who are with her—emerge in a new form, “another self / positioning.” The speaker gives a name to this self, which is not only her own self, but the collective selves of shared experience and survival:

my            name is Estelle I turn
on my center

…………………………………..

                               all names are
different versions of the word star

…………………………………..

try         the word star
provisionally she
who        all of us

This pivoting around the word star recurs throughout the book, an act of affirmation that connects the speaker and those around her to the primal forces of light and energy and regeneration, forces that seemingly withstand even the destruction that mars the poem’s world. This is not to say that suffering and death are erased, for the procession of women with their wounded bundles continues:

they carry mangled
animals to the far
    edge            put
the creatures to rest

But the water’s edge, the “pacific rim,” is also a place of transformation; the water accepts the dead as if reabsorbing them into the cycle of life. And the women’s attention and mourning are essential to this cycle—the dead don’t return themselves to the sea, but must be carried there. This relationship between individual lives and the collective is at the complex core of this work. In the concentrated potency of Estelle Meaning Star, Estelle survives and reconfigures her name and her self through the recognition that she is one in a vast world, not just of shared suffering, but of shared life,

twinkling with

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Worn Smooth between Devourings

Lauren Camp
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Tiffany Troy

Like the animals that follow the order of nature, humans in Lauren Camp’s latest poetry collection, Worn Smooth between Devourings, follow the order of capitalism—thus, the speaker pays the mortgage “on the trees” and bakes muffins “in the middle of a great / battle we’re having with disappointment.” Readers might identify with that disappointment, which Camp portrays as the overgrowth of weeds, an anathema to a pristine and well-trimmed Victorian garden—a conflict that mirrors the poet’s inner turmoil about needing to pay the bills while wishing for more fulfillment than is allowed service workers, whose fate has been predetermined. Drawing from her own experience, Camp conveys how an unfamiliar landscape paradoxically allows her to become familiar with herself and adopt new ways of seeing.

Throughout the collection, Camp teaches readers how to “tell time” via closeups of personified objects (the “clock at the church kept to its ticking, its bells / with their sticky, poised hope”), and asks us to consider them in the context of the institutions (the church, the workforce) to which they belong. In doing so, she compels us to take a step back and reevaluate the way in which the landscape embodies our deepest longings (“Now I gaze at this / quarrelsome desert: barren / with discipline”). These objects, like the doll in Elena Ferrente’s novel The Lost Daughter, take on a life of their own, their limbs and appendages an extension of the reader’s. Like Ferrante’s protagonist, a middle aged Neapolitan woman who travels abroad and spends the majority of the time on the beach, Camp’s speaker enjoys an environment with a backdrop for free introspection.

The “devourings” in the book’s title refers to ecological concerns as well as the speaker’s personal struggles. Camp invites the reader to think about the body in motion, to see the way the reader must “leave the calendar” of our busy lives “to find sun familiar again,” contrasting a man’s ominous cat whistle with the coyotes “whistling about their beautiful lives.” Wildlife and the desert terrain recur as motifs throughout the book: As the speaker gets acclimated to the solitude of hearing “no one but pages,” and as “every inch / of our property dried out” in the “long stretch of knuckled nerves” of the landscape near her home, she considers the “absolutely unknown” of climate change’s effects. Camp chooses poetic forms that mimic our acculturation to the “slow mountains”; in “the river” we find “a yearning, a small seep, a lowest door” that we can step through so as to see eye to eye with “the mountains’ ashen edges / and ambition.” The powerful suggestion is that we might behold nature not as a metaphor, but in its reality of wildness.

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Embodied Unconscious

The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature

Edited by C. M. Chady
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

It is possible to train roses to grow up and over walls, evading their presence. To climb. Escape. Be unruly. Language is the same sort of plant if nurtured. Organic and ravishing.
             —from “Unto Herself,” Interlude by Stephanie Michele

C. M. Chady’s recent anthology Embodied Unconscious: The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature gathers a unique “community within a creative lineage”: experimental women writers affiliated with Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics reflecting on the fifty-year audio archive of the school’s famed Summer Writing Program. Transcriptions of lectures and panels from the program, along with introductory “interludes” written for the anthology, are presented with the aim of locating related historical and contemporary zones of women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book is divided into two parts: The first half is on language, poetics, and gender, while the second is more specific to gender and the unconscious, especially in Surrealism and Dada. Selected voices from the archive include Jane Augustine, Joanne Kyger, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker. One can listen to the audio recordings of these talks at Naropa University’s library website for a multimedia experience.

The essayists collectively gesture at shared lineages of women writers to honor their importance, address their historical underrepresentation, and highlight their potential to inspire today’s writers. If language is gendered, the contributors agree, then creative writing can reorient language so as not to be “unconsciously repeating the world to myself,” in contributor Marlie McGovern’s words. “Our realities are shaped through language,” editor Chady concurs, and women in experimental literary traditions have constructed a space outside of “language that simply didn’t work” by using “innovation out of necessity.”

Through the interlude and transcript clusters along with writing prompts, the essayists document their creative engagement with the archive. Importantly, however, the anthology’s choices and methods are guided by voices and traditions that speak to each contributor rather than by a canon or a predetermined idea of what readers want; Augustine, represented in a substantial seven of the included fourteen talks from the Summer Writing Program, must have struck a chord with many of them. The book is thus meant to be a subjectively experienced guidebook to select parts of the archive, not a cogent argument about the whole of women’s experimental writing.

Situating the archive as a thing to experience certainly embodies Naropa’s approach to creativity and lineage—this is a meditation, not a thesis. Still, core to Embodied Unconscious is an argument for re- or un-defining woman-ness by becoming in writing, to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” As the contributors each define their own woman-ness using the archive, we see how the category “woman” means multiple things to this group—and even to some essayists individually. But while defining gender and sexuality, placing texts in concert with identity, and identifying the poetic techniques and values that follow are all central to Naropa’s legacy, the tension between claiming space for women (as recompense for oppression) and un-defining spaces as supposedly for either women or men (in order to remove that gendered power dynamic) is palpable.

Fortunately, the anthology presents options for engagement with identity-based questions. Identitarian definition often precludes varieties of sexual and gender experience beyond the normative (e.g. cis and hetero), while the complete loss of categories can invalidate collective and individual experiences. The in-between of definition and un-definition, the becoming space, is the more fruitful area to explore, and Embodied Unconscious makes its home in that space, inviting the reader to wander its pathways without settling in one interlude or transcript.

One of the most compelling aspects of Embodied Unconscious is how the finer differences in poetics between the contributors and their chosen forebears hinge on what “woman” means and who carries which aspects of that label. Questions about the feminine and its presence in poetry are illuminating, inviting, and heartfelt when presented subjectively; when presented as objective truth, however, they can read as exclusive, incomplete, or even inaccurate. There are clear tensions here between waves of feminism; remaking the feminine and preserving versions of it inscribed by certain authors; using labels with different assumptions and intentions (e.g. queer and bisexual) to describe the same writers; modes of writing (some more scholarly and some more lyrical); and conflicting trends of progressive politics.

The most well-written interludes engage the lyrical identities of the writers voiced from the archive through the essayists’ own aesthetic modes, including feminist surrealism and eco-poetics. This suggests that personal connection with a poet through the archive can create a sense of discovery leading to creative innovation and an identity-based autonomous zone of community—or as contributor Stephanie Michele illustrates it in an essay on Mina Loy, “Wide open. Gold flecks clustered of imagination hanging by silk threads. Trace.”

Some engagements embracing multiplicity shine out. Michele composes her first essay in Gertrude Stein’s “language matriculated into a science” to illustrate her debt to Stein’s work and Stein’s importance to our contemporary literary world. This is a capacious style, an embodiment of Stein’s language-altering logic rather than a description of it, that remains critical and inquisitive, integrating quotations as italicized lyrics among the author’s own. Michele’s enjambment of Stein and herself allows her arguments to blossom without precluding anything or anyone else’s multiplicity: “a sentence is restless and multiple,” she proclaims. Further, she brings Stein and Google into the same space, recognizing what this anthology, born of technology (of recordings, of ghosts speaking), has the capacity to be.

In her second essay, Michele paints a dreamscape in which Mina Loy appears to her, for what better way to honor an ancestor than in their own tongue: “moon high, glazed light over a mountain’s skin.” Kathy Tun also crafts a lyrical take on lineage, arguing that women writers speak back through the archive to hopeful “understudies” who hear echoes of themselves in their words and ask to walk in their roles. In Tun’s extended metaphor of performing a part, mere imitation in the costume of Mina Loy or Lorine Niedecker becomes difficult: “how did an experimental artist respond to the call?” she asks. It’s time for the understudy, walking on, to become their own interpretation of the role and for the stars of the lineage to light her way forward.

Tun’s metaphor is an outstanding way to imagine the passing of the torch in the experimental tradition, but also begs the question of whether nonbinary or male writers might step into these roles with the same intentions. Such moments in Embodied Unconscious pose an imaginary that has multiple genders and invite non-female readers to embrace that imaginary for the interlude’s duration. These readers aren’t disallowed from women’s experimental writing—we’re encouraged to read beyond our gendered experience, and the expansive lyrical aesthetic of some essays pushes us to shift paradigms rather than grapple with identity labels—but some essays do not quite relinquish the categorical terminology that they use to undefine gender.

Chloe Tsolakoglou, for example, argues that it seems foolish to write from within dichotomies when experience is not gendered; using Clarice Lispector as the example of a “perfect combination of feminine and masculine,” she then reverts to a “feminine imaginary” as her target creative, illustrating how even when an author’s inclination is toward becoming both, the definition of both still rests on either. This is possibly a product of theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, who were writing when these recordings were made; more recent queer and feminist scholarship dissolves the gender binary further, so it would be exciting to see Naropa’s archive reexamined with these dissolutions in mind.

Sex, gender, and other identity categories do not imply a readership or a writership; they position a poet in time in how they express themselves, but they do not dictate a static interest for later generations. This is why, of the options presented in the anthology, the selection of a poetic lineage by an energized acolyte is more exciting than the lying-in-wait of a lineage to be accessed by password; rather than gaining entry to a predetermined canon through identity, one can find kinship with the identity of a poetic ancestor queerly or even in tension, like the kinship with Robert Duncan and H. D. that Joanne Kyger mentions. The distance between these poles is a vivid subtext of Embodied Unconscious, a spectrum along which to place one’s own position in relation to poetics from all corners of the archive, to which no one roadmap or canon exists. Beyond the specific writers it engages, this book speaks to the very paths we travel to dream ourselves into a future. As Chady writes, “we contribute to the lineage as it becomes us, forever entwining us with ideas of the past, present, and future”— whichever future we can manage to embrace.

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Satellite Image

Michelle Berry
Wolsak & Wynn ($19)

by Adam McPhee

Ginny and Matt, the protagonists of Michelle Berry’s new novel Satellite Image, realize it’s time to quit the city after Ginny is robbed at knife point. They buy a house after a single showing in a small town a short drive away; the house needs some work, but it’s nice enough, and it faces a ravine. Anxious to move in, Ginny looks their new house up online and sees an image showing what seems to be a body in the yard. She calls to Matt, and he confirms her impression, but suddenly the image updates, and the body is gone. Sure of what they saw but unable to find it again, they move in.

In their new hometown of Parkville—a nondescript Canadian locale perhaps geared in its genericness toward a wider American readership—Ginny and Matt host a dinner party, and the neighbors tell them that the previous owners of the house were a bit odd. The elderly couple kept to themselves and had an absurd number of packages delivered to their doorstep. Then things start getting weird: Someone is invading their yard space, moving their Halloween decorations, and eventually entering the house. At one of Ginny’s dinner parties—now a regular occurrence—this uninvited guest sneaks into the kitchen and rearranges the chicken bones on a pile of dirty dishes to leave a threatening message.

Berry withholds the solution to all the intrigue until in the book’s very last pages, a choice that doesn’t allow the protagonists much chance to absorb or react. Yet, as it keeps suggesting questions and refusing answers, Satellite Image maintains a steady propulsion that enlivens its mundane subject matter and linear narrative structure—an effect many thriller writers aspire to achieve.

Beyond its traditional genre elements, Satellite Image offers particular insight into the often-unsettling process of settling into a new home. The questions Ginny and Matt ask themselves aren’t so atypical: Why did the previous owners take all the lightbulbs but leave behind so many canned goods? What’s up with that window that doesn’t lock properly, that low overhang on the roof, the discrepancies between old photos and the way the place looks now? For Berry’s characters, these questions have consequences that may cause the heart to race, but for her readers they’re an opportunity to reflect on the sorts of things everyone encounters when they move somewhere new: the eerie idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

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Scaffolding - The Anthropologists

Scaffolding
Lauren Elkin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($28)

The Anthropologists
Ayşegül Savaş
Bloomsbury ($24.99)

by Sarah Moorhouse

The question of how to take up space—a question particularly relevant in the wake of the pandemic—is the common theme of Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding and Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists. Both novels follow couples working out how to build a life together, aware that such decisions will set the course for their future. For Aysa, the protagonist of The Anthropologists, creating a home is a structural process that makes things “sturdy.” Anna, the protagonist of Scaffolding, by contrast, is restless within the “official containers” of her marriage and driven to experiment with modes of habitation that offer more openness. Situated at similar transitional points in their lives, Elkin’s and Savaş’s characters behave very differently: Aysa is determined to create rules and habits that will help solidify the contours of her life with her husband Manu, whereas Anna seeks to dismantle her routine, bent on grasping a hazily-defined form of freedom.

Anna’s distrust of stability stems, it seems, from an event that exposed the fragility of it: she and her husband David have recently suffered a miscarriage. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Anna has been laid off from her work as a therapist and David has moved temporarily to London, leaving her alone in their Paris apartment where she obsesses over a kitchen renovation. The couple’s life together has been put on hold. What’s more, Anna is preoccupied by memories of Jonathan, her great love who left her with little explanation a decade prior. Unable to put the past to rest, Anna frets about the elements of her husband’s romantic history that she cannot be a part of, wondering: “was I shorter, taller, thinner, fatter, darker, lighter than the girls he’d been with?”

Anna worries that it is impossible “to come to each other new,” yet it’s that lack of newness that makes others interesting to her. She constantly speculates about the inner lives of those around her, from the previous occupant of her Paris apartment (whose life we learn about in a cleverly structured middle section of the novel) to the nameless man she sees at the bakery each morning. Alone in Paris, Anna befriends her neighbor Clementine and is immediately enraptured by her charisma and turbulent romantic history. Fiercely opposed to marriage and untied to a particular career, Clementine occupies what Anna sees as a “borderless realm.” By bringing her new friend into her apartment, Anna begins to test her own borders.

Clementine offers Anna an alternative to the strict parameters of marriage and a lifestyle defined through its rejection of that “border protecting a country of two.” But this supposedly radical way of living nonetheless requires its own dividing lines. We learn that Clementine has a boyfriend, and his identity—spoiler alert—is none other than the Jonathan whom Anna cannot move on from. When the two reunite, a love triangle ensues that threatens to upend Anna’s marriage as well as her fledging friendship with Clementine. It becomes clear that an affair, like marriage, revolves around the question of territory. Anna compartmentalises her actions, musing that “being with Jonathan doesn’t entirely feel like infidelity to David—in a way, it feels like fidelity to some younger version of myself.”

By plotting relationships in the language of physical spaces, Elkin erects a satisfying stylistic architecture for the novel. Infidelity, according to her model, unfolds as “a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts . . . you are too far gone.” Hence the novel’s title: the scaffolding stage, during which things aren’t yet set, is preferable for Anna to the finished product, with its threat of making one stuck. (We see what that stuckness might look like when the narrative briefly switches to the lives of the previous occupants of Anna’s apartment; bored and contemplating infidelity, Florence and Henry have begun to feel that their marriage, like Florence’s wedding ring, “didn’t quite fit.”) At the end of the novel, Anna walks past the Tour Saint-Jacques and remembers how it looked when it was being restored: “I loved it better with the scaffolding,” she says, “when we didn’t know what was taking shape beneath.”

If the central anxiety of Elkin’s novel is the prospect of belonging to a place, a marriage, and a way of life, this same prospect is Savaş’s characters’ central hope. Far from lamenting an inability to come to each other “new,” Aysa and Manu feel too new. Having moved together to an unspecified city in a country far away from their respective places of origin, the couple are unmoored from customs and community. Rituals are what make a life “real” for Aysa, and the couple’s quest to buy a flat—which is told through a series of property visits—is tied up with their mission to assemble “elements with which . . . to build a home.”

The irony, of course, is that they already have one, for where Scaffolding puts monogamy to the test, The Anthropologists offers an ode to it. The couple’s relationship anchors the narrative; though Aysa does worry about the “smallness” of her life, fretting about far-away relatives and lamenting that she only has one “native friend” in the city, she and Manu occupy not only a “country of two” (to recall Clementine’s derisive assessment) but their own expansive world. Aysa remembers how, when they got together, “the world . . . stretched large enough for the two of us—a whole universe—and it left everything else behind a curtain.” Savaş maps out this “universe” with understated grace: the couple’s shared nicknames and ways of comforting one another, their liking for pastries and detective shows, their few but rich friendships.

As the novel progresses, Aysa builds a mental list of her rituals with Manu, acting as anthropologist of their two-person society. At the same time, as part of her research for a documentary she is making, she conducts a series of interviews with strangers in the park, seeking to identify and record the invisible habits that anchor people to this public space. Some come to run laps, others to play music, still others simply to breathe. As she makes progress with these two projects of filming and house-hunting, Aysa’s anxiety about her and Manu’s rootlessness begins to lessen. Beyond the eccentricities of individual routine, she realizes, “there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day.”

Both Elkin and Savaş suggest that we leave traces of ourselves in the spaces we inhabit—we can’t help but put down roots. The longer Anna stays in Paris while David is in London, the harder it becomes for the two to understand one another. Meanwhile, Aysa’s increasing cultural belonging is bittersweet because it takes her further from her family; wearing a trench coat to greet her father when he comes to visit, she cringes when he exclaims, “you fit right in.” In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Savaş reflected on this theme of cultural belonging in the novel: the narrator of The Anthropologists, she explains, “feels torn between various ideas of home; she does not know which one she should commit to.”

While this is true, The Anthropologists is not a novel of anguish because, as the couple forge new connections, they discover a source of continual, calm joy. With Ravi, their closest friend, they bond over a shared disdain of therapy and what they see as its “decadence” (an amusing contrast with Elkin’s cast of therapists). This “was a binding element of our friendship, a way to set ourselves apart,” recalls Aysa; “we stuck to it like a motto, an animating spirit of our group.” Such in-jokes and shared tastes, rather than a place’s physical features or landmarks, create the feeling of home. And so, the couple’s search for a new place to live becomes a process of attempting to divine what the intangible details of their future lives might look like. With each visit, they try to pin down the atmosphere of the space: is it a place where they might have children? Will they argue there?

Wrapped up in this process is guesswork about the lives of the current or previous inhabitants. Entering one flat, the couple immediately sense that something is off: “Some misconfiguration, as if the rooms had been joined the wrong way.” They feel justified in this intuition when they learn that the couple who own the property have just separated. Aysa relates the incident to her grandmother, who pronounces that the place “must be teeming with them” but advises: “Let them be and get on with your own life.” This way of acknowledging the private lives of others, which overlap with us in space but remain always at a remove, emerges in Scaffolding too: Anna detects traces of her predecessors everywhere in her flat, from the wallpaper to the ancient dishwasher. With her renovation finally complete, Anna hopes for a clean slate: “there are no more ghosts here,” she decides.

If these uncanny absent presences have a particular significance in both novels, it’s that they remind us that home, our inhabitancy of a given space, is ever temporary. Steadiness ebbs and flows—we seek it, we resist it. Ultimately, it’s clear in both Scaffolding and The Anthropologists that no real equivalence exists between the brick and mortar of a house and the constant flux of human emotion. Propelled by the invisible relationships and customs that shape our days, we are all to become “ghosts”—and that’s fine.

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Into the Good World Again

Max Garland
Holy Cow! Press ($16.95)

by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

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1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Robyn Hitchcock
Akashic Books ($26.95)

by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.

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Diary of a String

Mark Francis Johnson
Spiral Editions ($18)

by Eric Tyler Benick

“Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously suggesting the writer’s inherent split as well as the larger aporia of selfhood-as-construct. It’s a split that is reflected in the literary reader: “Many readings are perverse,” Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text, “implying a split, a cleavage.” Barthes continues to explain that this cleavage rests in the paradox of literacy to know and unknow simultaneously, to both familiarize and estrange. Yet if reader and writer are doubles, and if both are cleaved not only in their solitary interaction with the material but in their spectral engagement with an other through the material, the bodies of literacy begin to fractal quickly.

In Mark Francis Johnson’s new poetry collection Diary of a String, the lyrical I is obfuscated not only by the relational estrangement housed in the act of writing but also in the quotidian estrangements of labor. In “Woody Excrescences,” Johnson writes, “What all is missing // and I have forgotten my life, / it.” Here, the poet explores a double loss (both missing and forgetting) as well as the inaccessible subsistence of this “it.”

As the Johnson lines quoted above might suggest, the pronouns used in Diary of a String are rhizomatic and irresolute. Just as Rimbaud’s I is an other, the poet’s selves show up in the conglomerate experiences of the outer: “‘They’ is clearly the voice of self-love,” he writes in “Also and Too.” By inverting the impressions of the pronoun, Johnson shows that the “inner life” is actually a breezy dialectic of further estrangements. He closes this section with an attentive apostrophe: “O sensitive parrot aware you / never encountered language.”

It’s a key point: Ecological wonders, subject to destruction by the Anthropocene, are spared its logocentric tragedies. In contrast, we know at this very moment there are microplastics in our oceans, intestines, and genitals, yet the shock of this knowledge is readily absorbed by language rather than by our actions. Johnson’s inverted pronouns and attention to the outer unfold this order of things; the aforementioned parrot is both “aware” and saved by its own illiteracy—not from death, because death is certain, but from suffering the slow termination of value we are daily subjected to, which we render and materialize through language.

Diary of a String is wrought by these questions. In “Date of Last Attack,” Johnson writes that “every hemorrhoid was first an idea,” which brilliantly takes the material effect of stress and strain and dematerializes it. We are no longer talking about the hard facts of the body but about the imperious design of language to impersonate experience. If Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose” tautology works to unify word and object, Johnson’s ideated hemorrhoid exploits a more painful aspect to the realization that reality inheres in naming: Language is neither empirical nor consistent, and yet our understanding depends on it. The section ends with another shift to the exterior: “Take new little // fishes, destitute upon arrival no / recollection of offense. O fishes! // your use is to teach us / a fish is better off never / encountering its troubles.”

Interestingly, in this context “destitution” would appear to be more of an asset than a lack. The fish’s instructive value is expressed by its freedom from language, which constitutes a paradox: The fish is illiterate yet elocutes a model existence through that illiteracy. Note also how the notion of “encounter” is rooted in logocentric failure. Would many of us even notice the hemorrhoid without its semiotics, or does their very creation offer us access to an interiority that the hemorrhoid itself is entirely estranged from (leaving aside the question of whether the hemorrhoid is separate from “us”)?

Poet Ted Rees says that Johnson’s collection contains “the palpable sickness of the plaintive.” Yes, and worse, this sickness resists clear diagnosis. It would be easy to launch a polemic against the sickness of global capitalism in light of its demands on the body, its egregious contributions to war, genocide, and climate change, its molecular infections of commodity, etc.—but we would also be fabulizing a convenient bogeyman. Still, no part of the “world” is untouched by this illness, which at times feels moribund. If Édouard Glissant is correct to say that “every poetics is a palliative for eternity,” then might we see Johnson’s poems as addressing these miasmic illnesses of modernity, a mode by which to make sense of subjugation, exploitation, and destruction? Aren’t we who reject the frameworks of capitalism forced into some kind of palliative care against the terminal diagnosis of its forces? If the Industrial Revolution marked the decline of the sublime, how might we subvert the mechanized and colonized systems of our era to nurture all that it has taken from us?

Diary of a String offers constructive ways to consider these questions. Take the poem “One Hot Afternoon”:  

Very far from
day and night

due to wind? And the next “morning” I
-a spontaneous production of the earth

;no memory
disputes this-

am requesting a transfer. It’s given,
I speedily perish,

the
spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer.

Even while shattering the spatiotemporal, Johnson still cannot shed the language of labor, a language that continuously haunts his poems. His speaker is fully uprooted as a “spontaneous production of the earth” forced into the nihilism of commerce, where even the permission to die must be sought from some arbitrary superior. This final line—one of the most affecting in the book—is our diagnostic moment, our chance to reckon with the forced obsolescence of the sublime. One might recall William Carlos Williams’s observation “The pure products of America go crazy”; they certainly have, and they are no longer pure but beaten to shit by we who are also daily beaten to shit, who in order to be beaten slightly less must beat others to shit, until absolutely no part of us (and by us, I mean everything) resembles its natural state. There is no option of return, which anyway would present its own ethical problems.

So yes, “the / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer,” and they will continue to do so until our collective illness is no longer tenable, our palliative efforts futile—until, as Williams’s “To Elsie” portends, there is “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Meanwhile, books like Diary of a String make a laudable effort to focus our attention and our will on this dilemma.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024