Book Review

Fire-Rimmed Eden

Selected Poems

Lynn Lonidier
Edited by Julie R. Enszer
Sinister Wisdom ($25.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

A prolific poet of the San Francisco small press scene from the 1960s onwards, Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993) is virtually unknown today. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that she didn’t belong to any particular coterie. Even among lesbian poets, the crowd with whom she might most generally be associated, she always went her own way. As Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems testifies, her work is invariably unique, and all the more valuable for it, as it realizes an idiosyncratic sensibility.

Take the opening of “Sailorjig to Seapatchwoman” from A Lesbian Estate (Manroot Press, 1979):   

            Down the briny paths of rime,
            I join hands with an encrusted lion.

   Transpose a lion on a whale and have upheaval to the last
   tumescence of seadrop (water-holding speck of life) I am

Mid-Forty Woman    Deep tonnage tensor of wisdom    Weedpatch woman
with brio-bulge crop       mat       carpet island       Thicket       fishhooks
monster bites      Slew of parasites hang loose in the gold lion’s
mane      Hoar nest     Primeval catch    SeaROAR cRest sWell Woeforth
/PROMISE:       Green land grows on your bullback    wending invisible
harpoons R     uddy mantle of rush in Green Sea Contest

The jamming together of words here, along with the erratic spacing, spelling, and capitalization, achieve a dizzying yet effective presentation. There’s a clear sense that Lonidier writes the lines as she feels them arising within her, inflecting them with distinct emotive force; indeed, it reads irresistably like a performance script. While she may have had precursors from Dada to punk influencing her, her experimentation feels rooted in her own impulses.

Lonidier’s initial artistic inclination was musical in nature; she studied the cello before breaking away to poetry. Upon moving to the Bay Area, she became an early romantic partner of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, and the pair moved to San Diego in the ’60s before splitting up. They were immersed in the local arts scene, collaborating on several musical and art projects both together and with friends. Lonidier’s brother, the feted photographic artist Fred Lonidier, lived locally as well at the time (there are several terrific photos included in Fire-Rimmed Eden).

Lonidier lived elsewhere for periods of time, but she always returned to San Francisco. She was a founding member of the Women’s Building in the Mission District, where she also lived and worked as a public-school teacher, and the city’s environs continually triggered her imagination, as they have countless others over the years—as can be seen in this passage from “Bernal Hill,” originally contained in The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness (Station Hill Press, 2001):

A tree-laced road leads to radar
screens overlying the Mission,
Morning sun timbres the bay—
Oakland— Berkeley— Mt. Tam—
in by breathtaking eye.

Fire-Rimmed Eden contains the vast majority of Lonidier’s poetry. There are selections from her earliest collections, Po Tree and The Female Freeway, and the substantial A Lesbian Estate is presented in full—as is the last collection she assembled in her lifetime, Clitoris Lost, along with excerpts from her Mayan travelogue Woman Explorer. Selections from the posthumous The Rhyme Of The Ag-Ed Mariness, assembled by her friend Janine Canan, round out the rest.

Lonidier’s earliest work features an insistence upon freely, and often wildly, wielding language in an unexpected, eyebrow raising manner. Her first collection, Po Tree (Berkeley Free Press, 1967), is more artist-zine than poetry book; between saddle-stapled covers, Lonider’s poems appear intermixed and superimposed among collages and drawings by sisters Betty and Shirley Wong (while the artwork is not reproduced here, notes at the bottom of relevant pages offer descriptions); the poems themselves are Dada-like in their playful stridency. Several are list-poems of unusual word-matches given in full capitals: “CONFETTI NIPPLE / HISHERS / MIND BLINDER / VENETIAN TUBE ROOM / GONDOLA GONADS / AUTOBLOMB / POOM /MOM HARASS HEROOT / GERMAN VICTROLA HOAR CAUSE / CHARTREUSE COMB JUICE.”

Among the central concerns of Lonidier’s poetry are gender, sexuality, and power. She avoids being overtly political or banner waving, however, keeping the focus on her direct experience. She writes what she knows:

In drive-ins movie foyers men’s magazines    they comment on my body
as though they owned me    are as familiar with my buttbreastthighs
as they are with    rings on their fingers    It’s not rape that they
heighten their bodies by removing mind earsmindfeelings    tossing
away the body they’ve mass-raped Because    I’m their perogrative
to imagine their penises are    rolled-up dollar bills in my
penny vagina

(from “The Boys At The Beach”)   

In short, Lonidier doesn’t hold back. Her work has rough edges and non sequitur ruptures, which can leave readers hanging as to where she was headed; nevertheless, with every poem the impression remains that she has managed somehow to achieve her exact desired result. These are the poems as she would have them—no regrets and nothing vital left unsaid.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Growth

A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived

Karen DeBonis
Apprentice House Press ($19.99)

by Blair Glaser

In her memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis draws upon the various meanings of the word. When a mysterious set of behaviors—lack of focus, odd tics, and declining motor-skills—sprout up in her son Matthew, she must confront her people-pleasing nature and develop the assertiveness required to raise a special needs child in a broken healthcare system. As DeBonis registers the maddening helplessness of searching for what ails her firstborn, we spin with her through the revolving door of mother-shaming doctors, false diagnoses, ineffective treatment plans, and the well-meaning concern of friends and family.

DeBonis parents with the extreme patience of a Buddha, while peeling back the curtain on darker thoughts and feelings: her fear of making waves, her rage and its occasional outbursts, her coping mechanism of binge eating. Growth will especially speak to parents of special needs/chronically ill children, but it is, at its core, a woman’s story; many women will recognize themselves in the author’s struggle with her social programming to be “good,” underneath which—in her case—is genuine compassion. As Matthew’s illness isolates them both from friends and community, she writes, “I ached for his aloneness, knowing intimately the awfulness of it.”

Growth also holds up a mirror to the way patriarchal values operate in traditional marriages. DeBonis’s husband Michael is a loving partner and parent, but the author is often coaxing him into a greater level of concern and action on Matthew’s behalf. When they finally discover the cause of their son’s bizarre symptoms—the brain tumor of the subtitle—DeBonis criticizes herself for not working harder to find answers, but Michael wonders, “How did I not see it?” It is a question we’ve been wondering alongside him, and it validates DeBonis’s long held frustration of carrying the larger share of emotional labor.

DeBonis’s grounded perspective on personal growth helps readers see their own limitations with compassion. Directly after receiving the correct diagnoses, she experiences a seismic transformation when a new part of her she calls She-Bear emerges: “The boundaries of my body were unable to contain the force, so my legs and arms and head stretched and expanded to gigantic proportions. It wasn’t imagined. It was palpable in every cell of my growing body.” It’s one of those life-changing moments, and yet, DeBonis is honest about its fleeting nature: “My foray into assertiveness . . . turned out to be brief and subdued. My skills had not been honed for the long haul.”

In one particularly self-revealing chapter, “My Real, Messy Story,” DeBonis asks an existential question familiar to anyone who’s withstood long periods of crisis: “How does one reconcile such extremes of feeling, thinking and believing?” We find answers in the book’s main theme of self-acceptance. After what should have been life-changing surgery, Matthew’s handicaps do not vanish, and in order to thrive as an independent adult, he must finally come to terms with his disability and accept help from a government jobs program. DeBonis shares with us what she wishes she’d had the courage to say to the pediatrician who initially and repeatedly dismissed her concerns. This is the only time we lose an intimate connection with her, as she asks us to join her in self-recrimination. But at the chapter’s end, DeBonis offers forgiveness for her own—and by extension, our—shortcomings: “the baby steps I took were leaps of great distance.”

With exquisite vulnerability and awareness of interior dynamics, Growth anchors its suspense in a loving family who plays well, fights with and for each other, and ultimately grows together. Towards the end, the author’s parents exhibit polite passivity when a healthcare agency cancels an important appointment for her ailing mother. DeBonis finds their complacency—the very trait that shaped her good girl persona—unacceptable, and, in She Bear manner, swiftly and effectively advocates on their behalf. In this regard, Matthew’s tumor has spurred real change; readers would do well to conclude that though personal evolution can’t be rushed, it is entirely possible.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Thinking Root

The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy

Translated by Dan Beachy-Quick
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by John Bradley

There’s something about the writing of the ancient Greeks that calls out to the present like a mythical siren; Kenneth Rexroth, Dudley Fitts, Mary Barnard, and Anne Carson are a few of the translators who have heard this siren call. Dan Beachy-Quick is another, as shown by his recent translations of Sappho (Wind-Mountain-Oak, Tupelo Press, 2023) and sixth-century BCE Greek poets (Stone-Garland, Milkweed Editions, 2020). Now, with The Thinking Root, he offers skillful translations of some early Greek philosophers: Heraclitus, Thales, Empedocles, and five others.

Beachy-Quick’s sensitive translations use fresh language to cast new light on the words of these early thinkers. Before discussing his translations, though, it’s necessary to consider his approach to these texts, which he shares in an introduction:

The hope of this small volume of translations is to offer some experience of what it might be to think as these thinkers thought. To do so means the translation takes an unusual path. Sensing that the standard scholarly presentation that cites the sources in which the texts are found acts mostly as a scaffolding that traces a thinking while also obscuring it, I decided to see what would happen if these attributions were removed, if we had to encounter these words as one might find a broken shard in a field, and then another, and again, knowing somehow they fit together into a vessel entire, but not knowing how to assemble it, not knowing if all the parts have been found, or even if all the shards belong to the same pot.

While the translation of Greek fragments is a challenge for any translator, Beachy-Quick’s approach seeks to heighten the intensity of this challenge rather than tame it with scholarly “scaffolding.” Here are some texts by Anaxagoras that possibly gain by Beachy-Quick’s approach, where we encounter the writing as isolated shards. Note how strange and at the same time familiar they sound, as if the pre-Socratic philosopher were also a quantum physicist and Zen master rolled into one:

What you see is a vision of what cannot be seen.

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

Of the small there is no smallest, but smaller yet always exists (for what is is not not to be).

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

All other things share some inner portion, but the Mind is boundless and self-ruling and joined to no other substance, but only it is alone—alone in itself.

Many early Greek philosophers often wrote in an aphoristic style, perhaps to better express the paradoxical nature of the universe. Heraclitus in particular enjoyed the abrupt energy of the aphorism:

The road up and the road down are one road.

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

In hell souls smell.

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


Asses prefer shit mixed with straw to gold.

Empedocles could sound like a doctor who writes poetry on the side:

The heart, nurtured in the blood’s echoing ocean,
is where in humans what is best called thought is—
for the blood around the human heart is thought.

Some Greek thinkers favored the question and response, that most basic form of conveying complex thought. This exchange by Thales could be a passage from one of the famous Taoist thinkers, Lao-Tzu or Chuang-Tzu:

“Death,” he said, “is no different than life.” “If so,” someone said, “why don’t you die?” “Because there is no difference,” he said.

Perhaps the most enigmatic text in The Thinking Root comes from Heraclitus and consists of only three words: “I sought myself.” In his introduction to Heraclitus, Beachy-Quick tells us that this phrase could be translated as “I searched myself. I searched for myself. I searched through myself.” What a rich and mysterious statement. Beachy-Quick goes on to note how this complexity of seeking bears on his approach to translation: “What each translation reveals isn’t a fact but a thoughtful suspicion.” No wonder he’s such a good translator—there’s humility and honesty expressed here.

One hopes that Beachy-Quick will offer more of his “thoughtful suspicions” of ancient Greek texts in future, as The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor. Here’s one last offering, this one by Empedocles: “Blessed, who gains the gold mine of a mind god-given— / wretched, who cares most for dark doctrines about the gods.” A gold mine is an apt metaphor for how Beachy-Quick treats the writing of these early Greek philosophers, and his sense of wonder and respect for it is contagious.

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The House on Via Gemito

Domenico Starnone
Translated by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions ($27)

by William Braun

Domenico Starnone’s previously translated novels are psychological studies of repressed father-figures that move at thriller-like speed. In Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), for example, Pietro plays a model father and husband, but only because an ex-girlfriend threatens to reveal an incriminating secret. Trick (Europa Editions, 2018), alternatively, is about a grandfather who is the antithesis of grandfatherly: Daniele, a self-obsessed artist who resents his grandson.

The House on Via Gemito covers similar material, though it is longer and looser than those previous books, and its structure is more triptych than thriller. Supposedly fiction, the novel focuses on a writer named Dominico who is haunted by the “energetic cascade” of his father Federico’s lies, tall tales, and misogynistic slurs. Federico works for the railroad but believes he’s an artistic genius whose “destiny” is continually sabotaged by various “shitheads” and “ball busters”; these include other painters, art critics, and, most significantly, Domenico’s mother, Rusinè. (Starnone’s real-life father, also named Federico, was a minor post-war Italian painter.)

In the first section, “The Peacock,” Domenico follows his younger self, aged four or five, as he walks down a hallway to get his father’s cigarettes. Behind him, his father abuses his mother, “accusing her about the money” and “offending [her] relatives.” This recollection, however, is far from linear; Domenico remembers other incidents at almost every step. In one, his father outsmarts railroad officials to secure company housing for his family. In another, his father boasts about the “great talents” that made him a successful set designer after World War II, praised by American GIs and Hollywood starlets. Yet Domenico keeps returning to that hallway, a memory so urgent and painful that some fifty years later, he still slips into the present tense: “I just heard [my father] yell … and it gave me a start; he’s yelling now; he’s about to yell.”

The centerpiece of Via Gemito is its second section, “The Boy Pouring Water.” Domenico—aged maybe ten—poses for his father, kneeling “in pain” and pretending to pour water into a construction worker’s cup. Meanwhile, his father continues “to paint and talk about himself.” (A detail from the author’s real-life father’s painting, “The Drinkers,” appears on the novel’s dust jacket.) Federico’s family, in other words, pays the price for Federico’s artistic narcissism. Domenico certainly does: In this memory, as in many others, he would rather suffer than “give [his father] any reasons for blaming” him. But also Rusinè: Federico makes her “live … without any great expressions of joy,” and as the novel’s third and final section shows, she downplays a major illness until it’s too late.

Bitterness and futility, not fame and glory, become Federico’s legacies. In one of his frequent asides, Domenico looks at some of his father’s paintings of Rusinè and her family and thinks:

While my memories of them may have been dull, they were still more intense than what the reliable seismograph of art had been able to register … Much more sensitive tools and sophisticated techniques are needed to capture that cluster of voices, gestures, pulsations, instance of illness and health, hiccups, belly laughs, and groans of pain that we conventionally refer to as individual.

Here Domenico doesn’t just question whether his father’s achievements are worth the damage he caused, he questions the very idea of mimetic art—that it captures the reality of physical presence. “I was trying to understand how life decays when we’re overpowered by an obsession for results,” Domenico concludes.

Of course, Starnone does not reject art or craft; anyone who has read his previous novels knows they’re a testament to plot and sentence. Still, as translated by Oonagh Stransky (who has translated Italian works by authors ranging from Eugenio Montale to Pope Francis), The House on Via Gemito serves to show his English readership how much broader his talent is. A memento mori of sorts, the book is a reminder that most of us will only be remembered by how we treated those near to us, and that “living and thinking matter [are] the only set design worth loving.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Unreal City

Mike Lala
Tupelo Press ($21.95)

by Peter Myers

“I want a holophrase,” declares Hope Mirrlees—a single word to denote a whole complex of ideas. Thus begins Paris: A Poem, a six-hundred-line eruption of avant-gardism now regarded as a modernist classic. Her holophrase could well be the title itself: “Paris,” in 1920, signified both a classicism on its deathbed and a frenetic, whiplash present, a free-fall into a future as garish and unassimilable as the city’s boulevards, street vendors, and neon lights. Mirrlees’s poem of urban flânerie was an attempt to capture centuries of history and culture (read: barbarism) piled atop each other, chaotically signifying the arrival of a new era and a new relation to time.

The Unreal City, Mike Lala’s second poetry collection, reprises Mirrlees’s method but swaps 1920’s Paris for present-day New York City. While The Unreal City remains entangled with the modernist era—the title alludes to The Waste Land, a poem published, it’s worth noting, three years after Paris—its preoccupations are decidedly contemporary. For Lala, the city is ground zero for both the violence of history’s erasure and the deluge of its return; it’s where social antagonisms stare each other down in “the maculate, moth-riddled / sodium-vapor street-lamp light.”

Lala’s poetic method is primarily one of depiction. The collection’s opening poem, “My Nudes,” is ekphrastic, a montage of art-historical bodies. But Lala tweaks the formula by adjoining multiple subjects to a single first-person pronoun; the boundaries between the nudes, and between art and audience, are blurred from the start. Thus we’re introduced to one of the book’s central preoccupations: the challenge of separating our own outlines from the historical forces that shape them.

In subsequent poems, the speaker adopts a posture akin to Mirrlees’s urban flaneur, bearing witness to a world-destroying appetite for wealth as they wander a maze of asphalt and blue-grey glass. “Elizabeth Street” is a catalogue of storefronts that doubles as lifestyle porn, a litany of all that’s found “on Liz / street of my patron-funded dreams.” A sampling: “Unis, Café Habana, Kit 228 and Steven Alan / Le Labo, Aesop, Clare V, Shott NYC, Me&Ro, / Albanese Rudolph, Emmett / McCarthy, Thomas Sires, then Todd Snyder.” Here Lala deftly navigates a tricky tonal strait. The fact that his speaker simultaneously craves everything his “patron-funded dreams” would grant him—the $50 soap, the $400 shirts—and finds those same “patrons” despicable registers not as a contradiction so much as a necessary resentment; the would-be patrons, after all, are the ones who made the world this way, engineered it to contort our desires into such monstrous shapes. Many of the storefronts Lala’s flaneur strolls past have long been closed, a testament to how these high-end stores and boutiques—a living index of the city’s transformation from a place where people live to a publicly-subsidized warehouse for excess capital—are no less safe from the market’s predations than the people who can barely afford to window-shop.

“Work,” a long poem of urban wandering and rumination, takes up the majority of The Unreal City’s pages. The poem pays explicit homage to Paris: Lala borrows Mirrlees’s opening line and recycles many of her formal experiments, including typographical jump cuts, unconventional text alignment, and the incorporation of found text. But whereas Mirrlees generally restricts her scavenging to her poem’s urban environs—storefronts and advertisements, overheard gossip—Lala quotes and interpolates from a litany of written sources, documented in the book’s copious endnotes. The poem’s most prominent source text, other than Paris, is Vergil’s Georgics, the Roman poet’s treatise on farm work and apiculture. Lala thus turns our attention toward a different relation to work, one which, from the approximate hell of our present, seems prudent, even virtuous. Here, the word work functions as Lala’s own holophrase, referring not just to labor, but to what comes of it—the work of art, say, shaped no less by the hands of the artist than by the forces which act on those hands.

Like The Unreal City’s shorter poems, the opening gesture of “Work” is to strafe the urban environment. Our flaneur-speaker notes rooftop cops, overhead jets, and, like Prufrock, his own footfalls on “certain half- / deserted streets.” But unlike Prufrock (or Eliot, for that matter), Lala’s speaker has a decidedly historical-materialist sensibility: “View down Wycoff; mist over spires. / The workmanship of these, of everything, is empire— / bodies, labor, and theft—a way of making money / in the blue alarm clock light, a holophrase.” Later, “Work” swerves from the metropole to the periphery, copping to the predatory extraction of land and labor that keeps the urban enterprise running:

You KNOW how it STARTS.

MONEY taught

human beings

to wrench up the SOIL with iron,

            to hunt, fund, kill, till, drill, develop, and steal land from others.

NOW in resources EARTH is DEFICIENT

SWEAT & GREED

became

products
BREATH
of HISTORY.

“Work,” however, is far more than agitprop that pays mind to prosody (not that that would be so unwelcome). The elements of its composition—the formal debt to Mirrlees’s Paris; the interpolations of Eliot, Vergil, and others—become, as the poem unfolds, an elaboration of its argument. Lala takes as his epigraph a quote from Andreas Malm, noting that our current climate crisis isn’t the revenge of nature so much as “the revenge of historicity dressed in nature.” We are helpless against the past’s irruption into the present, even if the unreal city’s burnished surfaces, visual metaphors for the frictionless flow of capital, would lead us to think otherwise. Our present world cannot be disentangled from the regimes of violence and dispossession that built and sustain it. “Work,” in its own way, drags the past into plain sight; it’s the revenge of historicity dressed in language.

Cities, like poems, are at once bastions of unreality and a means to survive it; in its final pages, The Unreal City takes the shape of a directive to tip the balance of urban life toward the latter. It’s didactic, but in a way that rings true, animated by the conviction that it would be worthless to say it otherwise: “Death to the god of our owners. / Death of the shares of our holders. Death / to the futures that lead us toward death.” For Lala, our new futures must be built where it is we stand, “beneath the shade / of monoliths.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

One Bent Twig

Tricia Knoll
FutureCycle Press ($15.95)

by George Longenecker

Tricia Knoll’s newest collection One Bent Twig is all about trees, the natural world, regrowth, and contemplation. Images fall one after the other like leaves in autumn. These are skillfully crafted poems, interwoven so each one speaks to the others. 

Knoll has connected with trees since she was a child: “I was a baby who grew up next to an elm tree / my father planted to shade my bedroom window.” In “Funeral in the Forest,” she eulogizes ancient maples “with tapping scars, stumps of lost limbs, and brown ridges”:

You stood here through Abenaki’s land claims,
cholera epidemics, Jim Crow, Hurricane Irene.
World wars. Women and the vote. Sap flowed . . .

Knoll writes with the best of poet-naturalists. Her personification of trees is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Tree at my Window.”  Her poems use various voices; in “You Never Forget the First Trees You Love,” she speaks to her younger self: “You used branches to climb higher / than authorities said you could / for the silence of the ash confessional.” And many poems are rich in metaphor: “At their feet, cast-off blouses, skirts and veils—crumpled / summer, last landings of a headband of leaves // . . . // turbans of snow under a horned moon.”

In “Faith,” Knoll speaks of a deeply rooted spirituality with humor and irony:

I am not the rib-bone
of an apple-chomping Adam.

The smell of apple blossom
promises pies and peels

I do not fear snakes.
I wear no sackcloth

bindings, white robes,
or a cross on a bronze chain.

One Bent Twig is a worthy addition to the poetry of trees. Not only does Knoll sow words; she also plants actual seeds: “I have planted forty-five trees, with hope / that each wears its crown in a grace.”

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

The Dog Years of Reeducation

Jianqing Zheng
Madville Publishing ($19.95)

by Michael Antonucci

To mark the hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune in the People’s Republic of China, writers from People’s Daily, Red Flag, and Liberation Army Daily collaborated to produce a thirty-two-page pamphlet entitled Long Live the Victory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! In Commemoration of the Centenary of the Paris Commune (1971). Their slim volume celebrates the working-class revolutionaries who briefly seized power at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. Published during the fifth year of the Cultural Revolution, the study discusses the Paris Commune in terms of social and political experiments conducted in China between 1966 and 1976. In the pamphlet’s final chapter, for example, the writers proclaim, “In China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Tsetung (sic) Thought and Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line are being integrated more and more deeply with revolutionary practice of the people in the hundreds of millions to become the greatest force in consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Shortly after this commemorative work appeared, poet Jianqing Zheng became a participant in this process. Having completed his high school level course in foreign language studies, Zheng was dispatched to the Chinese countryside to become a “zhinquing” or “educated youth.” In the introduction to his new volume of verse, The Dog Years of Reeducation, Zheng discusses his poetic reflections on the Cultural Revolution. Recognizing that his situation was by no means unique, he writes, “millions of middle school and high school graduates . . . were sent to the mountains and the countryside to receive reeducation from poor peasants.” Zheng explains that he arrived in his village with “a deep conviction that the zhiquing [he and other educated youth] would play some role in the transformation of rural China.” He continues, declaring that “this collection of poetry relives those reeducation years in the fields.”

To fulfill the poet’s project, Dog Years delivers a firsthand account of the Cultural Revolution’s later stages. Reflecting on this charged moment in twentieth-century Chinese history, Zheng’s verse animates expectant uncertainties that accompanied its varied and profound personal and political transitions. Throughout the volume, the poet assembles collective and individual events imprinting and informing his reeducation process. History and memory swirl and converge as Zheng’s poems trace these moments and movements; this dynamic becomes evident, for example, in “Star Watching,” a poem in the opening section. Illustrating Zheng’s ability to layer and combine his terse prose poetry with short, imagistic three-line bursts, “Star Watching” identifies the undercurrent of “static change” that informs the poet’s time in the provinces:

After graduating from a foreign language school in the Cultural Revolution, we have no choice but to go to the countryside . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            roosters crowing
            another day of life
            in the village

At night, our life is as flat as our farm work, tasteless as rice and pickled turnips we eat each day. No books to read, no chess to play . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
           
            autumn night
            lying on rice stacks
            counting stars

As the poet comes to terms with the monotonous simplicity that he faced along with the other zhinquing, “Star Watching” offers readers a perspective on everyday life in rural China during the mid-1970s. Like other poems from the opening section of Dog Years, such as “Lunchtime,” “Transplanting Seedlings,” and “Cutting,” the poet uses “Star Watching” to stare down the stern conditions that informed what he calls “my farm life.”

This cycle of back-breaking labor—punctuated with heat, dust, sweat, cold, rain, insects, and animals—shapes Zheng’s verse; Dog Years thereby constructs a collage of memory that charts the poet’s pathway along his journey of return. Some points of return are embraced; others are not. Yet, these returns—even those that are distasteful and unwelcoming—provide both the poet and his readers with a measure of perspective on events relating to the Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, this past and its enduring imprint allows Zheng to consider his circumstances in full measure. For example, reflecting on village life in the poem “Life in the Fields,” he writes, “Those years are like /a yellowed book,” before going on to deepen the metaphor:

Turning each page
is like unwrapping
an unearthed mummy,
dried but well preserved.

Through lines such as these, the known, the predictable, and the inevitable coalesce, forming the foundation of Zheng’s reeducation process. By doing so, the poet situates himself and other members of his zhinquing cohort—Pigsy, Yi, Pearl—among the farmers, fields, and fixed chore lists that inform the certainties of daybreak and sunset, planting and harvest. Similarly, in “The Lesson Learned,” the poet extends his exploration of these binary constants:

When day and night
revolve like the duality
of yin and yang
way and no way
exertion and relaxation
positivity and negativity
earth and heaven
man and woman
dream and daydream

we begin to see
reeducation as a coat
altered to wear,
a fate to face and
a life to live.

Across four sections, Dog Years of Reeducation collects and arranges Zheng’s “lessons learned.” Unfolding with the measured successions of seasons, his poetry grapples with the idea of return, tracing its halting, bounded limits. This pattern is made fully evident in the volume’s third section; after opening with the three-line epigraph, “homesick / a seesaw creeks / up and down,” Zheng continues his poetic meditations on space, time, distance, and the reeducation process in the verse that follows. For example, in “The Gradation of Our Being,” he proclaims, “We no longer look like a group / of urban youths,” and in “Question,” he asks:

Is this expansive flatland
where the flower drum song

roots deep and spreads wide,
where the sunset

promises a new dawn,
where cotton is handpicked

and rice is hand planted,
where rain is the source of life

also a dreamland studded
with starry wishes?

At the same time, throughout the third section of Dog Years, Zheng’s poetic examination of personal experience intersects with conversations relating to Chinese history and politics. These connections emerge most significantly through the course of poems that explore the death of Mao Zedong.

Mao died while Zheng was working in the fields, late in the summer of 1976. The poet recalls the moment he learned of Mao’s passing: “we were picking cotton when a farmer // came over announcing, ‘Mao died.’ / His voice was a cool autumn breeze.” Zheng redoubles his reflections on his life and Mao’s death in “Maostalgia,” the second part of this loosely constructed tryptic; its opening line reads, “I lost my voice in the Cultural Revolution.” He continues: “I answered Mao’s call and went to the countryside to rebuild my body for strong bones and muscles.” In the second stanza, he writes: “I heard of Mao’s death while picking cotton. I was hungry that afternoon; I cursed the sun for not sinking faster.” The poem concludes as Zheng balances these two prose blocks on three imagistic lines that project both poet and reader into a future moment:

Great Wall tour—
each souvenir stall sells
Chairman Mao badges

The Mao study concludes with “Shouting”; identifying the waning energies of the Cultural Revolution, this poem recalls the “village chief” leading a meeting “in October 1976, a month after / Chairman Mao’s death.” Having gathered the villagers and zhiquing “on the threshing floor,” the chief delivers “a long editorial that / endorsed the new leader.” The poet writes that his uninspiring words “sounded as flat / as an unsalted dish,” leading the villagers “to chat,” with their voices “buzzing // like a swarm of mosquitos.” The chief, in turn, is desperate to regain the villagers’ attention:

                                    . . . he thundered

“Long Live Chairman Mao!”
            into the microphone. As if

awakened, we all stretched our arms
            to yawn the slogan after him.

Throughout the volume’s fourth and closing section, Zheng delivers a set of equivocal summary reflections on his time in the Chinese countryside. However, it is in “Looking Back” that the poet—who has lived in Mississippi since 1991, teaching in the English Department of Mississippi Valley State University—provides his audience with some of his deepest insights into his reeducation process. After making use of variations on the phrase “If I / never” in four of the poem’s five stanzas, “Looking Back” concludes with a proclamation:

if all this
never was a part of reeducation, I could
never relate grains to drops of sweat and           
never imagine the oil lamp as the light of hope.

Five decades have long gone.
My body has become a rusty plow.
Some nights I dream of tilling at sunrise or
reading in the deep night with a desire
to turn to a new page of life.

In this way, having arrived at a point of deep reflection, the poet speaks back to his “dog years”—an era that is, at once, lost and found— with images and “memories tempered / hard and sharp with pains.”

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The Lyric Essay as Resistance

Truth from the Margins

Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold
Wayne State University Press ($24.99)

by Garin Cycholl

The personal essay continues to assume new ranges of shapes and impulses.  “Essay” turns as both verb and noun—a point of departure that ultimately takes as its subject that most fictional of all creations, an “I.”  Over recent decades, the hybrid that John D’Agata originally tabbed as “lyric essay” has offered writers new means of inhabiting that “I.”  As D’Agata put it in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay (Seneca Review Books, 2015), this genre’s “beautiful, gangly breadth” recenters or disrupts our place in the world. This dislocation is the starting point of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, a recent anthology edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold.

Rhetorically at play, the lyric essay offers a space between “telling” and “being told.”  As Bossiere views it, “To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.” Somewhere between these spaces, an “I” emerges, as Trabold finds it, in “the road blocks and potholes and detours—those gaps, the words left unspoken on the page . . . as important as the essay’s destination.” These powerful essays recognize the fragmented subjectivities that develop within the fits and starts of language itself, stories caught in media res, and words truncated in speech and memory. On these pages, voices develop within a range of subjects—personal maelstrom and adopted celibacy, bodies redefined in the sharp barbs of racism or the ambiguities of gendered experience.  “I’s” stranded in time and memory, written into life via lyric essays, accrue towards “voice.”

The writers follow phantoms and rumors, hints of selves that have inhabited or passed through the world. They negotiate pages written across time. Molly McCully Brown addresses a series of fragments to “Dear Frances, Dear Franny, Dear F, Dear Sister, Dear Ghost.” In “Whens,” Chloe Garcia Roberts narrates her “own birth story . . . one that is not [her] mother’s to tell.” Jennifer Cheng writes, “I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me. . . . the strange ambiguous homesickness I have known in the hollow cavity of my stomach every now and then since childhood.” Lyric offers a means of approaching what can be described or named amidst that “ambiguity.” Within this split, Melissa Febos recognizes, “I have not only strayed from the self I was before, but been changed. . . . My past self is a stranger, an imposter who inhabited my life for two years.” The challenge is to give that self a “voice.” 

In a core essay, Danielle Geller engages Navajo words through a series of footnotes and recollections, attempting to find a way of speaking and writing a subjectivity shaped by language’s loss. Responding to a Navajo word for “Is it true?”, Geller writes, “The answer is, in many ways, unknowable. For our mothers, the surest protection from the past was to spin truths and falsehoods into one story, one thread, impossible to distinguish in the weave.” An “I” emerges from narrative’s warp and woof here, the threads left dangling or tugged into speaking.  In this piece’s exploration, sometimes the lyric is more attendant to silence than any “I” speaking in place. The lyric essay offers a space to explore these entangled truths. Shook loose, this collection’s voices haunt, know, and speak in their persistence.

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Shy

Max Porter
Graywolf Press ($25)

by Sam Downs

As the teenage protagonist of Max Porter’s latest novel sneaks out of his boarding school and into the night, he recalls an admissions official’s admonishment. “Is this you? The whole of you?” the administrator remarks, presumably brandishing a stiff finger to the eponymous Shy’s impressive juvenile record: “Failed 11+. Expelled from two schools. First caution in 1992 aged thirteen. First arrest aged fifteen.” By sixteen, he has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger” and, as consequence, been sent for amendment at the Last Chance home for “very disturbed young men.” Recognizable to those who have suffered under the yoke of misdirected adults in administrative positions, the educator’s ironic advice is that Shy ought not to let his past offenses define him—while emphasizing the very idea that they do.

A teenager in mid-nineties England dealing with issues the adults in his life are unable to define, Shy doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. Not having wanted to attend the school in the first place, and not seeming to agree with descriptions of him as a “ghost,” mad, and a “Jekyll and Hyde,” he has nonetheless taken to heart the message of Last Chance—that is, it’s his, and he’d better not screw it up. On his midnight mission, Shy heads in the direction of a nearby pond carrying a backpack heavy with rocks.

As reviews have noted, Porter’s work often attempts to fill the silences that characterize male hardship. In Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Graywolf, 2016), a widower and his sons reckon with woe transfigured into a clever, protective crow; in The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2021), the final fuses of a painter’s intellect ignite as he lays dying; and in 2019’s Booker Prize Long-Listed Lanny (Faber & Faber), the anthropomorphic socioenvironmental history of a village bears down on an uncannily talented young boy. All three novels are like fifteen-minute funerals: communal, convention-busting, and packing far more emotional weight than their brevity suggests. With its tender and big-hearted story, Shy marks another development in Porter’s singular, polyphonic style, distinguishing itself as his most urgent book yet.

The late aughts saw social and political discussions about men begin to reflect scholarship about the relationship between long-celebrated masculine tenets (hyper-independence, emotional invulnerability) and violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. If the laundry list is still being written, the major garments are worth airing out: worldwide, boys fight more frequently than girls at school; men commit virtually all sexual violence; and teenage boys are between two and four times as likely as their female peers to die by suicide—a statistic made darkly ironic by the American Right’s eagerness to foist liability for gun violence upon the mentally-ill, since the actual demographic uniting some 98% of mass shooters of gun violence is their maleness. Meanwhile, anti-intellectual opposition seems to have stalled the necessary turn from diagnosis to remedy, as can be seen in how useful terms like “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining” have been hollowed of their original intent by offhand, uncritical usage.

A 2023 New Yorker article title emphasizes the extraordinary breadth of The Problem: “What’s the Matter with Men?” This could rightly serve as the slogan for Last Chance, but as well-meaning as the staff may be, their laser focus on obliquely diagnosing the boys’ troubles without providing sensible solutions leaves the likes of Shy unmoored. Faulting him for that would be like faulting a lost hiker whose guide had only shouted, “Don’t get lost!” As Porter portrays Shy’s vast, dynamic individuality in stark contrast to the reductive thinking that persists to this day, the conclusion settles in that neither Shy the book nor Shy the boy are so strange after all, however much they may defy our initial expectations. Who, after all, hasn’t spent a few youthful hours feeling lost, searching, considering escape? Who hasn’t thought, graspingly, “the night is huge and it hurts”?

Like Porter’s previous work, Shy offers a message about the human risk of minimizing the unknown by viewing it through the lens of the known. As Carmen Maria Machado states in her masterful memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf, 2019), “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” Perhaps the same can be said of putting language to something, or someone, for which you have too much language, and too much of it inexact.

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The Liar

Martin A. Hansen
Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen
Translated by Paul Larkin
New York Review Books ($16.95)

theliar

by Poul Houe

In his introduction to the newest English translation of The Liar, Morten Høi Jensen notes that Martin A. Hansen’s short novel, originally published in 1950, was “routinely ranked as one of the greatest Danish novels of the twentieth century,” and that “regrettably, it was also the last novel Hansen lived to publish” before “he died in 1955 from chronic kidney failure at the age of just forty-six.” To these factual epithets let me add a more subjective one: It is a book that will lead readers to marvel at how intricate storytelling and human life can be, and how subtly their intricacies can be linked.

The novel is composed of notes by Johannes Lye, a schoolteacher and parish clerk—and also, as his name suggests, the narrative’s Liar—who interacts with Nathan, an honest Biblical Nathanael. By the introduction’s account, Johannes is a torn character who “lives at a distance from other people and just as much from himself,” and who responds to life’s constant battle between conflicting forces by “telling tall tales and blurring truth and fiction” while not “getting too close to anyone, thereby failing to live.” Sort of a nihilist, he considers death a relief and homelessness his home.

Minor characters and the harsh environment play roles too: The ice breaking up around Sand Island compels Harry, Annemari’s new lover, to leave and Olaf, her son’s father, to return. Spring troubles are in the air and minds are mixed-up. Isolated from all but his dog Pigro and “forgotten by all he once knew,” Johannes, the itinerant incarnate, questions his own identity, his gift for tall tales, and the nature of humanity. Yet life’s secrets are “sometimes hidden until wonder is aroused.” Immune to fame and fortune, Johannes remains vain, he confesses to Nathan, while admitting that Harry’s secular religiosity is “stealing into him.” While Johannes is practicing the next day’s hymns in a cold and damp church, Pigro makes him sob “heavily . . . without shame.”

Although a non-believer, Johannes believes in a kind of uncompromising youth that demands “purity and truth.” Part of his duplicity involves indulgence in “passionate certainties,” while also being “death’s great confidant,” “flung from deeply enriching, coruscating moments to dark meaninglessness and despair. Only to be flung back again.” Conversely, an older person is “blind to life’s greatest contradictions,” full of “small deceits and minor untruths,” yet of “good conscience because he has become blind to the fact he’s a liar.” Embracing the role of street performer, Johannes faces a congregation of doubters and believers to whom he is a stranger; as this community gathers, he senses himself as “nothing,” “a divided self,” “a double”—all the while trolling his “ghostly pale specters” to lure them into his traps. Feigning to serve the Divine, he instead helps The Devil bewitch the faithful.

Later, he truthfully tells Nathan that his performance was but one aspect of tackling old-world values—another being his controlled scheme of ambushing himself, either because he was less detached from his deceit than he thought, or because the faith he tried to deceive was not entirely outside him but rather a part of his makeup that he could only realize after seeking to undercut it. 

Going back and forth, Johannes needs Nathan’s help. Rarely is his duplicity more obvious than when he hesitantly decides to attend a ball with “many trolls, dwarves, elves, and fairies assembled.” Facing both the self-deprecating hostess Rigmor and her antagonist Annemari, he admits to being a liar, while later telling Annemari of his wish to elope with her. Realizing it’s a lost cause, he gives her a necklace as a “parting gift” instead, with this verbal kiss of death: “Hang it around your neck, Annemari.”

When Rigmor, who feels Johannes might alleviate her despair, suspects he was never “really serious” about love, she is puzzled by what became of the uplifting experience he once aroused in her. He now says it was a “cooked up . . . theory” about how to live life with a troubled heart, or “a fool’s folly,” suited “to cause wrack and ruin”; he further opines that “life is one huge battleground in which two powers are locked in eternal combat. No-man’s-land doesn’t exist.” Only by taking ownership of one’s life does it come to fruition, and since a fruitful life rests on nature, Johannes begs Rigmor join him outdoors to observe and reflect—and to share the experience of meaning and community they both hoped for, or at least a less troubling world than often imagined.

By “mid-April,” Pigro is no longer. Actually, his ‘departure’ was a year earlier, but like the rest of this narrative’s notes, the event was recorded “only very recently” to stress the Liar’s truth-telling. On their walk the day after Rigmor’s ball, Johannes discovers a “sacrificial stone” that puts his existential experiences in context. As an outsider, “words, events, and feelings have a liberating effect” upon him. Strangers don’t conquer or pass their legacy by default, for their part of human history and memory is but a speck against endless island time. As loneliness engulfs him “like some latter-day Job,” Johannes recalls the day he and Rigmor parted ways. Remembering her potentials while acknowledging his own failures, our Liar embraces his wounded self, ready to resign but also to move on: “And now we won’t speak of that anymore, Nathan.” 

Far from timeless, less so from timely, The Liar puts a late, rather than light, twist on the traditional Bildungsroman. Paul Larkin’s translation, though slightly overwrought and not always factually correct, reads well, making this new edition of a Danish classic a welcome publication overall.

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