Book Review

The People Who Report More Stress

Alejandro Varela
Astra House ($26)

by Eric Olson                     

Writers are nothing if not people watchers, but many would confess that attentiveness is a double-edged sword. In Alejandro Varela’s blisteringly frank—and equally funny—short story collection The People Who Report More Stress, eavesdroppers and overthinkers abound. Varela is as concerned with being seen as he is with seeing others, and this dichotomy accounts for his brilliance.

Varela rose to prominence with last year’s The Town of Babylon, one of three debuts named finalists for the 2022 National Book Award. Like that novel’s main character, Andrés, most of Varela’s short story protagonists are gay Latino men living in New York City. Varela asked in a recent Lit Hub essay not to conflate his characters with himself—“The critiques will be of me and not my work”—but these characters are markedly funny, and it’s impossible that their humor springs from anywhere but the author’s wry outlook.

Motifs are compiled with delightful urgency in the opening story “An Other Man,” in which the unnamed “you” takes to opening up your predictable marriage with the help of dating apps. “Once we have kids, this’ll all get more complicated,” urges your husband. “Might as well do it now.” Of course, dating apps are a breeding ground for anxiety, in particular when men compliment your “Ricky Martin vibe” and “everyone, it seems, has been at the gym for the last decade.” To boot, “Sidestepping white men proves an onerous task on a distance-based application in a hyper-gentrified neighborhood.”

In a 2022 Apogee interview, Varela revealed that growing up, “I was often the only one of me in most of the spaces I was in. I was the queer friend in the straight group of friends in college. I was the person of color in a white group of friends.” Again, we shouldn’t mistake the author for his characters. But a stark sense of otherness resonates in this collection, an estrangement rooted in compulsive thinking and self-doubt. Thankfully, the flipside of otherness is community, and when Varela steers his characters toward greener pastures—the arms of a husband, the bed of a lover, the invectives of a thoughtful leftist—fireworks ensue.

Throughout the collection, Varela documents a period of life where things threaten to settle but remain decidedly erratic. There are racial misunderstandings involving children, sexual escapades in the elevators of UN Headquarters, and struggles catching taxis as a brown man. Regardless of the situation’s immediate physical consequence, Varela maintains high stakes—after all, self-perception is everything for a protagonist. And we’re constantly reminded that it hurts to be profiled.

This paradigm comes to fruition in matters of sex, a preoccupation so central that it percolates into nearly every other aspect of the collection, politics in particular. The People Who Report More Stress is a motherlode of social criticism, made all the more poignant by its interwoven analysis of lust. This is perhaps most evident in “Comrades,” where a 41-year-old progressive looks to move on from his ex using a dating app geared specifically for liberals. “FUN FACT,” reads his profile, “Stress of inequality is leading risk factor for top 10 causes of death.”

Among this collection’s finest numbers, “Comrades” both pokes fun at and endorses unapologetic progressivism. “Is Israel the dom or the sub?” Varela’s lead asks over a martini. “It can’t be both at once.” The first dates in “Comrades” aren’t particularly successful, but neither are they out-and-out disasters. They’re merely what happens every day, all over the world, when politics and sex rub elbows.

Varela has admitted to experiencing impostor syndrome, which seems normal after an acclaimed debut. In literary terms, the author should take a measure of comfort in how his follow-up book reaches undeniable vernacular peaks, such as when he breaks the fourth wall to end “Grand Openings”:

Moral? There is no moral, but some observations about pleasure and monotony: they are powerful. They will make one do things they promised they would never do, and they will accelerate a train already in motion. At times they work in conjunction; sometimes they’re free agents. Pleasure will disrupt monotony, sure, but only momentarily. And the effort to maintain that disruption will, in most cases, lead to irreversible effects. Life continues. Until it doesn’t.

By turns tragic, rosy, and libidinous—but always thoughtful—The People Who Report More Stress relates the way in which desire both derives from and conforms to the expectations of others. Varela’s characters might not know what exactly they want, but they do know who they are. It’s the rest of the world that has trouble connecting

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Abuela, Don't Forget Me

Rex Ogle
Norton Young Readers ($18.95) 

by George Longenecker                      

In this book-length poetic memoir, Rex Ogle takes young readers on his journey from despair to hope. His narrative poetry, which explores how he persevered through abuse and poverty, is fast-paced, compelling, and appropriate for young readers.

Ogle’s grandmother is an island of calm in his mother’s storm of instability. She emigrated from Mexico, built a life in Texas, and graduated from college; her daughter, Ogle’s mother, moves from place to place and from man to man. The author’s father has left Texas; he has a new family and only sees his son during summer visits. Abuela takes young Rex in and encourages him to read. She takes him to the library for the first time:

Inside, white walls reach toward blue skies
seen through high glass windows
resting above shelf after shelf after shelf of
book after book after book.
My eyes grow wide, whites wider, pupils dilating
to take in all these stories
begging to be known

“Can I read them all?” I ask.
Abuela smiles.
“Yes.
If you work hard, you can do anything.”

For Rex, the library and books are his redemption from abuse and neglect. The backyard of his neighbor Jason, also a magical and safe place, appears in three poems: “We’re children / so the world is still beautiful / and war / still only a game.” The child’s point of view here comes with no small irony: Abuela is a war widow; her husband, Rex’s grandfather, died in Vietnam. 

For Rex, though, the real war is one his mother wages: “At times when no one sees me, / all eyes on my mom, shouting, ranting, screaming (again) / accusing others of this and that, / I run away.” He’s small enough to hide in a small kid-size closet and wait for it to end.  As he grows older, the abuse worsens. In one episode, “Mom grabs me by the hair / lets her fist fly, coming down again and again.” It’s at these times that his room at Abuela’s is a refuge: “At home, at night, /there is always noise, that keeps me awake. / At Abuela’s / there is only a soft hush.”

At school, Rex faces racist harassment and bullying from classmates. One day on the school bus, he has had enough, “and since Chris is sitting closest to the aisle// I punch him as hard as I can in the face. // It is not the first time / I have been in the principal’s office / for fighting // and it will not be the last.”

Despite his disciplinary record, Rex is a good high school student, excelling in multiple AP classes. Abuela is his inspiration. She works multiple jobs to support Rex and help her daughter out of financial messes. It’s a fast-paced narrative with a trajectory of hope; as the author makes clear in his foreword, “Abuela is the only parent I’ve ever known who showed me truly unconditional love, kindness, and support.” Her refrain to Rex is “Te amo siempre”—I love you forever. 

In well-crafted poetry, Abuela, Don’t Forget Me shows young readers that abuse cannot be forgotten, but it can be overcome. 

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A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Joanna Biggs
Ecco ($29.99)

by Ellie Eberlee

Evening, 1857. A thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame under her pen name, George Eliot, reads Jane Austen aloud. After decades of migraines, unrequited attachments, and the loss of her parents, Eliot is beginning to write fiction, and she seeks inspiration in Austen’s wry, imaginative prose. She also hopes to entertain George Henry Lewes, her lover and a member of the burgeoning London literati to which Eliot—an anonymous magazine editor—fervently aspires to belong.

A century later in 1964, the thirty-three-year-old divorcée Toni Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) accepts a job editing textbooks in Syracuse. A single mother supporting her toddler son and newborn after a fleeting marriage to a Jamaican-born architect, Morrison found the position listed among the New York classifieds. Fending off creative depression and loneliness, Morrison writes by night, packing and smoking a tobacco pipe in her poorly heated apartment before resuming work on an old manuscript (published in 1970 as The Bluest Eye).

What links these two women separated by time, an ocean, and circumstance? Eliot and Morrison led unconventional lives, encountering gendered, racial, and socioeconomic hurdles in their careers and relationships. Like many spirited, creative women before and after them, Eliot and Morrison fought fiercely for the right to live out to the limits of their talents and desires, pursuing writing as a conduit for making meaning as they did so.

These and similar battles form the backbone of Joanna Biggs’s joint autobiography and biography A Life of One’s Own. Examining “Nine Women Writers [who] Begin Again,” the book traces the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. A senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail, 2015), Biggs casts herself as the unspoken ninth woman, starting anew following the dissolution of her marriage in her early thirties.

Initially, Biggs’s divorce spelled straightforward liberation. “I was free,” the author writes. “At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild.” Soon, though, Biggs yearned for a life she “would be proud of, that [she] could stand behind.” She wondered: how does a feminist reconcile drives toward independence and human connection? Does domesticity preclude a fulfilling writing career or intellectual life? Such questions “felt urgent as well as overwhelming. . . . I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.”

Like many recent joint biographies of female creatives—for example, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women (2018) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020)—Biggs splits her exploration of women’s literary and personal re-beginnings into distinct, individually focussed chapters. The book observes a broad chronology, beginning in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft, whose landmark political treatises and epistolary travelogues Biggs admired as an undergraduate at Oxford. It ends with Ferrante, whose resilient energies drove Biggs’s brief venture into small press publishing, and whose Neapolitan novels continue to inform many of Biggs’s longstanding female friendships. Each section supplies a thoughtful tessellation of personal memoir, vividly recounted biography, and joyful analysis of the various writers’ major works. A prime example is the chapter titled “Zora,” which relates Biggs’s initial reading of the first professional Black woman author while undergoing a depressive episode; tracks Hurston’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, among other national movements; and offers a keenly observed, self-reflexive reading of Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Occasionally, the sheer celebrity of many of Biggs’s chosen biographical subjects threatens to detract from the immediacy and inventiveness of her narrative (Woolf and Plath’s extensively speculated-upon struggles with mental illness pluck especially familiar strings). Still, Biggs’s deeply felt connection to each writer revitalizes established literary lore, reframing each woman’s trajectory through personally resonant lenses of resurgence and rebirth. Her literary analyses, too, exhibit tender yet considered admiration. She avoids the detached, properly critical attitudes championed at Oxford while emphasizing the exquisite literary quality of each woman’s labors; it’s from their words, as much their lives, that Biggs draws solidarity and a sense of possibility.

If any lasting complaint might be lodged against A Life of One’s Own, it’s that the author’s considerable wealth of source material often obscures her own engrossing autobiography. At its end, readers may be taken aback to learn that seven years have passed since Biggs’s separation. What happened in the intervening period? Biggs offers glimpses: a brief stint on antidepressants, Ferrante-themed parties, apartment hunts, hot baths reading Hurston, relocation to New York, rediscovery of Woolf’s novels on the train from Brooklyn. But our sense of the author remains patchy at best, a partial sketch in a gallery of otherwise polished, skillful portraiture.

Ultimately, the book’s central thread holds tight. It’s gratifying, albeit slightly unsurprising, to arrive at Biggs’s conclusion that “there are many ways of doing good work and living a happy life, and that is more unusual for that to happen within the conventional set-up than you might imagine.” Of course, her reading of these eight women writers proves fundamental to that takeaway: “I never thought I could be Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes, “but I’ve always known she existed.” Put another way, Biggs finds anchorage in the drift of her literary mothers. Through revisiting their words—the complex, hard-won languages of hope, loss, and love each woman developed and left behind—she locates the confidence to carry her own messy liberation forward. By the book’s end, she lives and writes from a position figuratively analogous to the one Mrs. Ramsay temporarily occupies in Woolf’s masterwork To the Lighthouse—looking out over a sea of female creative inheritance, observing how her chosen women’s lives and literature have “silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,” and feeling, above all, that “It is enough! It is enough!”

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Two Poets of the American Now

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Franny Choi
Ecco ($27.99)

Concentrate

Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press ($17)

by Walter Holland

Franny Choi and Courtney Faye Taylor are two compelling poets of our fraught political moment who succeed in capturing the pulse of the American now. The two poets take different paths; in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi offers an expansive meditation on our troubled society and its dystopian state, while Taylor, in Concentrate, channels heartrending research about one forgotten victim of racial injustice into a larger indictment of American institutional racism.

“Good Morning America” provides a sense of Choi’s provocative and well-crafted political verse:

Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath
of another bad massacre, and I’ve got
plenty of seats. Come in, I whisper

to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder,
to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.
Dispatches from Kenosha,

Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive
like a steady kickdrum of sparrows
spatchcocked by gravity, little nevers,

little couldn’ts; too late to stop the video,

too late, too late.

Choi deftly captures here the tumult of our American moment; in this, she joins poets such as Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, and Justin Phillip Reed. The image of sparrows “spatchcocked”—literally split open at the spine to lay flat—evokes images of police brutality, mass murder, and other events that have indeed become a  “steady kickdrum” of injustice. We’ve seen the smartphone videos surface with endless evidence of American racism at work.

The poems in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On are spare in language and brutally direct; Choi’s honest style of attack gives her poetry stinging irony. However, Choi doesn’t preach. Her instinct is to avoid commentary and instead to use her keen eye and ear to lay out the facts. In an age during which the very nature of truth and fact have been contested, Choi captures the moral conundrum implicit in Hans Christen Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Andersen does in his parable, Choi challenges the reader to see the truth behind our delusions, spin, and split seams of absurd reasoning. She reveals the truth hidden under the imaginary cloth of our showy malfeasance.

Choi’s list poem “Things That Already Go Past Borders” is a perfect example. The title immediately undermines our simplistic belief that building a physical border wall will prevent all future threats. “Things That Already Go Past Borders” begins:

trade deals; pathogens; specific
passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car
parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some
insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music
at the right volume; headlights; human
remains; wireless signals; all manner
of money; of memory; people

This mix of abstract and concrete nouns suggests the insoluble paradox of trying to keep out of the country “trade deals” and “vegetables,” or “religion” and “human remains.” The irony is heightened when we consider how ubiquitous American culture has already become, spreading globally despite the efforts of the most advanced of nations.   

In “Science Fiction Poetry,” Choi is again ironic. The tag at the start of each line is “Dystopia of,” and by repeating the word, Choi plays with hyperbole and understatement to undermine the term’s grim prophecy. The Oxford Englsh Dictionary defines “dystopia” as an “imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Choi contrasts this “imagined state” of “great suffering or injustice” with what we see today in plain sight—for example, the contrast between the discomfort of sitting “all day in an air-conditioned conference hall with no sweater” and the suffering of “houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block.” She continues: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live” and “Dystopia very lonely on Mother’s Day.”  

In the end, Choi points out how, historically, this dystopian self-delusion has been cyclical and generational. She draws on the struggles of her Korean grandmother and great-grandmother and her own childhood memories of discrimination in the U.S. Like Andersen, Choi points to the bizarre paradox between what truth tells us and what American society would have us imagine, and reveals how we equivocate between our claims to morality and our already existing semi-totalitarian injustice. Through poetry that is stunningly well-crafted and fresh, Choi bares the naked realities under our thinnest of ethical pretensions.

• • • 

In 1973, the author Alice Walker searched through the overgrowth of a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida, before stumbling upon the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, a literary star of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was rescued from her anonymity and recognized as a victim of cultural and economic racism. In a like manner, poet Courtney Faye Taylor, in her new book Concentrate, searches the impoverished cemetery of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, California. She is looking for the grave of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot to death in Los Angeles for supposedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, the fifty-one-year-old woman who shot Harlins in the back of the head, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison, but her sentence was suspended to five years of probation and community service with a restitution of $500. Du’s light sentencing was one of the events that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Taylor never finds Harlins’s grave—her remains were allegedly exhumed in a cemetery scheme to dispose of minorities in mass unmarked “piles” while burying lucrative customers in traditional graves.        

The title of Taylor’s book, Concentrate, is a provocative one: It refers partly to the fact that the bottle of orange juice Harlins was accused of stealing was the cheap concentrate variety, not the tonier kind that is a staple of middle-class suburbanites far beyond America’s food deserts. Concentrate has several definitions, according to Merriam-Webster: “to bring or direct toward a common center or objective, i.e., focus”; “to gather into one body, mass, or force”; and “to focus one’s powers, efforts, or attentions.” Indeed, Taylor has sharply focused on a singular objective: to concentrate on the undiluted truth and formidable outrage that Harlins’s death provokes to this day.

Through prose poems, found poems, essayistic freeform, and visual imagery from leaflets and in collages, Taylor seeks to restore Harlins’s dignity and bring the injustice of her death back to national attention. As with the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new effort is being made to preserve the memory of victims of injustice such as Treyvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to draw the focus of a nation too often distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer number of episodes of racist violence which play out and disappear in our daily news cycles.

In the poem “Arizona?” we are introduced to Taylor’s beloved Aunt Notrie. As a young adolescent girl, Taylor listens to her aunt give her “The Talk”: that discomforting lecture about how Black boys and girls in America must navigate a racist society to ensure their survival. While Notrie does Taylor’s hair, she implores the child “<*keep still now*” as Taylor replies “>I’m trying to.” Notrie tells Taylor to “concentrate” on the story of Latasha Harlins and her death in order to drive home the dangers Black people face on a daily basis should they not practice passive and deferential behavior around whites.  Taylor says she is “trying to” keep still when her aunt says:

<Ain’t about trying, it’s about doing. How
else you plan to survive? Live a life of
trying and you just end up tried . . .
All that child was tryna buy
was a drink.

                                                <Arizona?

<South Central.

Aunt Notrie mentions the death of Trayvon Martin to point out that this threat is real to all Black children regardless of gender:

<Boys ain’t the only cause of chalk-
ines. You got that allergy to sixteenth
birthdays too, understand?—*sit up
straight*—This was OJ.

Taylor’s language is concise, and her tone is direct—her messages are sobering but poignant. Harlins died at fifteen. Trayvon Martin died at seventeen carrying Skittles in his pocket. Taylor is told she may never reach sixteen just for being a target of white suspicion.

In “A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set,” the racist assumptions behind surveys of both white and Black women, in the magazines Country Living and Ebony/Jet respectively, are revealed. The women must identify their three greatest fears: The white women list “1. Nuclear war in US / 2. Child dying of terminal illness / 3. Terminal illness of self,” while the Black women list “1. Dogs / 2. Ghosts / 3. CCTV.” Taylor’s take on this is nothing short of dazzling:             

Stereotypes are centipedes at ease
in bowls of bleach. Or liberation lit

with wicks, and then Katrina—that’s
a stereotype. When company’s mixed. I’ll pet

king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my
teeth in corner store camcorders, although

privately—under nouveau R&B and the tutelage of
quick weaves—the Chesimard in me counts horror on

a matte black abacus. There is no fear on
earth that has ever gone unhad or

unbereaved, but the Diaspora won’t have it be
known that dogs, ghosts, and CCTV are

a melody defining out costs, copywriting our loss.

The lethal music of Taylor’s language, with its internal rhymes and unfettered consonance, is evident: “lit” joins with “wicks,” “R&B” with “quick weaves,” and “unbereaved” with “CCTV.” We hear the speaker’s sharp sarcasm as she points out the angry undercurrent of her thoughts, which must be suppressed in mixed company; we hear too how she silently counts the many racist horrors through history on her “black abacus.” Concentrate inventively inserts edgy, caustic observation under the veneer of a complicit understanding. In language that festers as though buried alive, Taylor succeeds in disturbing even the most silent of cemeteries and in resurrecting the desecrated dead.

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Participation

Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press

by Joseph Houlihan

Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her translation, from the French, of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. Her latest novel, Participation, also has a lot of “French” in it; possibly written as an echo of her previous novel, Eleanor, or the Rejection of Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), this new work offers a probing meditation on love. Fortunately, the book’s framing device cuts through any risk of it being overly sentimental.

Participation follows a narrator, E, as she vacillates between the gravity of two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love. E explains: “Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.”

Following the Oulipo tradition of expanding through constraint, Moschovakis employs various experiments, letting the novel unspool through thoughts, fantasies, anecdotes, dialogues, and more. Moschovakis gives her characters from the reading groups letter-names without genders, as well: “This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.” The desire that expressed without gendered language ripples in interesting ways, energizing the description of a prelude to a kiss and dispatches from a live blog in the wake of a disaster. As the book accelerates towards its finish, there is increasing entropy and beautiful irresolution.

Throughout, Participation remains smart, frank, and sexy about its subject: “There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.” This arch sexiness has the appeal of Marguerite Duras in The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein.

As a poet, Moschovakis has effectively employed and interrogated axioms. She does the same in her fiction, animating the ideas in Participation with language. There is the notion of bodies constituted through exchange—“We absorb such unverifiable facts from conversation, and they become a part of us, they become us”—and she

describes mathematical intuitionism as a metaphor for communication: “Intuitionism is based on the idea that mathematics is a creation of the mind. The truth of a mathematical statement can only be conceived via a mental construction that proves it to be true, and the communication between mathematicians only serves as a means to create the same mental process in different minds.”

Of course, everybody does not occupy the same reality, and even as we describe the world, we can never describe the whole world. This tension, and the tension between love and anti-love, participation or non-participation, or how to live whenthere is no good way to live, is the central theme of the novel. This tension as it relates to love and desire is enunciated in ways that lead the reader to ponder what might be a “good enough” love.

Participation does not have quotes in the title, but one might well imagine them there. E is a material girl in a material world; she burns, she desires, and she dreams. Her fragmented transmissions ring a warning bell, and the result is affecting.

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I Need to Tell You

Cathryn Vogeley
WiDo Publishing ($17.95)

Cathryn Vogeley uses three hallmarks of effective storytelling in her memoir, I Need to Tell You: vulnerability, uncertainty, and vivid scenes. Consider the opening paragraphs:

My eyes squeezed shut while the ting of metal instruments broke the silence. As if my chest had lost its elastic, I breathed in short, tight spurts. The ceiling tiles with their tiny holes looked down on me as my chin tilted upward.
Exam gloves snapped; metal wheels moaned across the cold floor.
Dr. Franklin stood from behind the sheet.
“No doubt about it. You’re pregnant.”

Vogeley, unmarried in 1968, discovers she is pregnant after her first year of nursing school. Her boyfriend, Gavin, says he can’t get married—this pregnancy must be kept secret.  Vogeley’s Catholic mother arranges for her to see her priest cousin Edward, to talk about "the problem,” and the pair arrange for her to be admitted to Roselia, a home for unwed mothers.

When Vogeley goes two weeks past her due date, she suggests to another Roselia resident that they jog in the winter courtyard to induce labor. Her description of the gunmetal sky and the thin layer of snow on the ground pull the reader into the frigid scene. We can see her “gripping both edges of my navy wool coat . . . schlumping along the sidewalk, hands under my belly, a bushel basket with a floating watermelon.”

The girls of Roselia are warned not to look at or hold their infants for fear they will want to keep them. But when Vogeley is handed her baby in the taxi back to Roselia, she can’t help but look at her daughter. “Those moments in the cab, less than the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, were our entire lifetime together.”

As time passes and Vogeley begins to tell her story, she discovers the people in her life are accepting. Her sister shows compassion and love, and her next boyfriend, Jimmy, doesn’t seem to care. The couple are mismatched, but Vogeley’s urge to be married overwhelms her doubts. “Just the designation of ‘Mrs.’ before my name would give me status, announce that someone wanted me, and allow me the right to have a legitimate child,” she states.

Vogeley has two more girls, and she throws herself into being a wife, mother, and homemaker while working as a nurse. But she knows there is something missing in her life. She tells herself she cannot think of her first baby ever again, but the haunting guilt remains. As her children get older and begin separating from her, she feels increasingly alienated from her life, and after hitting a low point, she starts college classes and convinces Jimmy to go to counseling with her. He doesn’t engage, and they divorce.

Vogeley begins to build a new life, first achieving certification as an ostomy nurse, then a master’s degree in nursing. She meets her future husband, Charlie, through a dating service. With him, she finds real love and acceptance of her past, and when she realizes she exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she begins counseling anew. The therapist suggests she look for her baby, a search that proves long and frustrating. As she moves from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Vogeley’s account of the process and her examination of the changing laws on secret adoptions are enlightening.

Throughout I Need to Tell You, questions build: Will she have the baby, will she keep her? Will she look for her daughter, and will she find her? How will she leave the past behind and finally accept herself? While a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, this moving memoir makes all these questions resonate.

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Blaine for the Win

Robbie Couch
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers ($12.99)

by Nick Havey

For children of the 1990s, the 2001 movie Legally Blonde is a runaway favorite. It’s also a great model for a rom com, which YA author Robbie Couch knows—though, in his eyes, the plot could use a little reinvention for young LGBTQ readers. Following the success of his debut, 2021’s The Sky Blues, Couch’s second novel, Blaine for the Win, transports Elle Woods to Chicago, but in this world, she’s a gay teen boy named Blaine Bowers; while Elle followed her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law, Blaine follows his into their high school election.

On the surface, Blaine seems to be thriving. He’s got a great boyfriend, he lives with his favorite aunt, his friends are stellar, and he’s got the best side hustle he could hope for: painting murals. That is, until his boyfriend—a golden child archetype who would be a nightmare to date in real life—dumps him on their anniversary; according to Joey, Blaine is not serious enough for him. Joey is going to be their future president, after all, and he needs a Jackie O on his arm, not a whimsical muralist who showed up to the fanciest restaurant in Chicago covered in paint specks from his latest project.

In a bid to win Joey back, Blaine decides to run for class president. He’s never participated in student government before, but that’s not going to stop him, and his friends are more than happy to help. His best friend Trish launches the campaign with an insightful listening tour, realizing that past student governments have been too focused on themselves and their positions to accomplish much. Blaine (meaning Trish) is going to change that with a brilliant plan to address mental health at their school, a topic in desperate need of attention.

Between Blaine, Trish, and the rest of their friend group, the underdog story becomes the heart of the novel. Blaine flames out after the debate—public speaking isn’t for everyone—but his campaign still has a shot, though when cunning fellow teens throw a wrench in his plans, it looks like the election might be lost after all. Just when Blaine is ready to throw in the towel, Couch does what he does best: writes lovable companion characters who turn everything around for the better.

Teenagers, including the protagonist of this novel, are selfish, fickle creatures. Blaine makes mistakes and does things that should imperil, if not completely cost him, his relationships—but he’s real. And real teenagers aren’t perfect, but when they’re written by Robbie Couch, they are compelling and relatable. As depictions of queer characters become increasingly nuanced in YA fiction, Blaine for the Win will garner readers’ votes.

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

Water Has Many Colors

Kiriti Sengupta
Illustrated by Rochishnu Sanyal
Hawakal Publishers

by Malashri Lal

Water, that formless, colorless, life-sustaining essence that pervades our being—how does one inscribe it in poetry? In his new collection, Kiriti Sengupta answers in a series of meditations that flow with an enchanting fluidity. The poems dwell on eternal themes such as home, belonging, relationships, and community, but these appear in ephemeral light as though transcending the ordinary and enticing the reader to follow paths of self-discovery.  

Reading Water Has Many Colors, I was reminded of these evocative lines in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.” Here too, the surface calm of controlled structures rests over a subliminal, surging angst, enlivening a crisp duality in which emotions and experiences are transformative, yet the speaker yearns for more change.

This tenuous hold of troubling dualities appears in various ways under Sengupta’s scrutiny. Understandably, the notion of home is questioned: “Dwelling is a slingshot: more it / draws me in, further I fling it way.” While this suggests a perennial odyssey of sorts, Sengupta offers domestic details with roots in cultural practice: “Ma’s healing touch” and a “tiepin from a fiancée” defy the resolution to unhouse oneself from tethers. Who will pay the cost of losing a sense of belonging? Embedded in these poems are complex discourses on location and dislocation, diaspora and homeland, partitions and fragmentations.  These mega-events are condensed into haunting lines on memory and forgetting. The brief poem “Ma” is stark—“In the kitchen / her bangles / play a carillon”—yet the sound of that music will echo in the parallel memories of readers.

Sometimes memory travels to a collective space, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919—a space marked by bullet holes on a brick wall and the darkness of a well that engulfed hapless women. Revisiting this traumatic event, Sengupta pins his sight on the incongruous item left by a tourist in “The Bottle,” a pensive commentary on a tragic past now pigeonholed into history. The poems “Hibiscus” and “Nostalgia invoke, respectively, the Marxist writer Sukanta Bhattacharya and the educationist Samantak Das, but here, too, disjunctions creep in that elevate historical observation into a poetry of elegiac force. 

Mythology also gets examined in the pages of Water Has Many Colors, as in the poem “When a Woman Conquers God,” a riff on the Bengali Manasamangal Kavya. In the original story, Manasa, the snake goddess, is both challenged and propitiated by Behula, who wants her dead husband revived after the goddess has destroyed him. Behula succeeds and is upheld as the epitome of wifely devotion, whereas Manasa remains a deity to be feared and propitiated with “the left hand.” Sengupta places this story in the realm of alternative power structures, contrasting ideas of divinity and hierarchies, thereby couching the legend in modern political discourse. Sengupta’s poem “Urvashi” similarly recasts the image of a siren (apsara) figure; Tagore also wrote a lyrical poem about Urvashi, yet in presenting female desire, the famed Nobel Laureate looked towards the domestic ideal, whereas Sengupta’s Behula and Urvashi challenge this, bringing his poems closer to the contemporary idiom of feminist choice. 

From myth to the cinema is not such a long journey, especially when one reads about the film diva Rekha and her makeover from the simple “Bhanurekha”; the poet seems quite spellbound in describing her “mystique” and “luminescence.” The actor, director, and talk show host Simi Grewal, clad in white, is another aspect of Bollywood glamour Sengupta engages; it’s a tale of light, image, sound, and “cut” that poetry can mimic in words.  

From epics and movies to succinct one-liners, Sengupta suits his poetic form to the subject, just as the folk idiom reminds us that water takes shape from the container in which it is held. The series “Bucolic Bengal” picks out contrasts in nature while hinting that the pastoral idyll is merely spectral; lines such as “kites are born of chimeras” and “mien limns the reality” deliberately pitch elusive, expandable images, stretching the reader’s imagination. On the other hand, the series “Monostich” uses the terse one-line stanza to invoke an inwardness. For example: “What if I am mute or loud?” This poem, “Prayer,” gestures towards multiple meanings; the line may suggest the silent intimacy of grace, but could also allude to mass religiosity.

Water Has Many Colors leaves the reader dazzled by the variety of styles and subjects, an effect reinforced by the captivating art of Rochishnu Sanyal. No line is out of place in the poems or the drawings, and an amazing synergy joins each pairing. The book captures the frenzied pace of modernity yet urges a philosophic acceptance through the enduring image of water. Chronology rolls into timelessness, fragments blend into periodic wholeness, and images float like waves washing up on the shores. This is a celebration of life’s plenitude.

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

How to Communicate

John Lee Clark
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.95)

by Stephanie Burt                          

If you’re a poet—and if you work hard and make attentive, patient discoveries—you can expand the range of what a poem can do by finding new forms, new sets of moves that your language can make. If you’ve had unusual experience—lived an unusual, lucky, or difficult life, say—you can expand the range of what a poem can show and say by building that experience into your poems. If there’s a group of people like you whose experience isn’t represented in poems—or if it’s not represented often, or particularly well—you can do important political work by representing it. And if you’ve got access to an unusual conjunction of languages, ways to use words and to make yourself understood—say, Thai and Croatian, or Spanish, Catalan, and Cantonese, or the special talk of the Parisian underworld—you might be able to expand the range of what poems can do by translating, adapting, or making truly new work in a target language using what you learned from your source.

John Lee Clark is all four kinds of poet at once. This first book of Clark’s own poems (he edited the anthology Deaf American Poetry, published by Gallaudet University Press in 2009) does not just reflect (whatever that means) his experience as a DeafBlind creator, moving in Deaf and DeafBlind cultures as well as in other literary circles. It also shows new forms, new ways to use English, as in Clark’s slateku, dependent on puns generated by the two-sided slate used in pre-electronic Braille. Clark’s work imports into English new kinds of intimacy, sarcasm, and communal defense, from American Sign Language and from the less common language Protactile, used (as the name implies) by DeafBlind people who communicate via touch.

These kinds of translation reflect Clark’s life in between languages. He considers how to frame his tactile, translated, uncommonly embodied and uncommonly mediated day-to-day so that people like me (nondisabled, non-Deaf) can dive in.  And I want to dive in. He’s writing at once for people like me and to bolster like-minded figures, and he’s funny, angry, inviting, tender, genuine: “I have been filmed and photographed for free,” he writes in a prose poem with pointers to John Clare. “It costs so much to smile…. I would that I were a dragonfly curled up between your finger and your thumb.”

That’s a Clark original. Here’s a sample translation, from the Protactile of Oscar Chacon: “At the base of your forearm, the lumberjack is surprised. Still standing! What’s going on? Rubbing chin.” And here are lines sliced from an elegy in monostichs for the DeafBlind creator Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739): “He made a calculating machine with strings and pins and called it Palpable Arithmetic…. Go on feel what it says.” This caustically titled volume also covers the near-dissolution of a marriage, Clark’s life as a son and a father, and his early education—it’s got range. It’s got centuries of history. It’s got portraits, too: the teacher “Mrs. Schultz,” for example, who tried and failed to understand “the Clark boy,” and “The Politician,” whose signed faux pas puts John F. Kennedy’s famous jelly-doughnut remark in the shade (I won’t spoil the joke: read the book).

Is it okay to say, of a DeafBlind writer, that his work sounds like nothing else? Because, to this hearing reader, it’s true. Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English—in print, to the ear, on the fingertip—can do. He’s got puns, euphonies, wordplays, cleverly arranged syllabics, as in those slateku: “Hollywood / Smoothly wraps / Hollywood / Soothingly warps.” And he’s also funny, sometimes exhausted, and more often exasperated in a way that you might recognize if anyone has ever called you “brave” for attempting to live your daily life: “Let go of my arm. I will not wait / until I’m the last person on the plane.” Or: “Can’t I pick my nose / without it being a miracle?”

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

Because I Loved You

Donnaldson Brown
She Writes Press ($18.95)

by Eleanor J. Bader               

Conventional romantic plots constantly tell us that love is the only thing we need to be happy and secure, but reality rarely measures up to that promise. This painful truth is central to Donnaldson Brown’s emotionally resonant first novel, Because I Loved You.

The story opens in Tyler, Texas at the beginning of the 1970s. Leni O’Hare is sixteen when she rescues seventeen-year-old Caleb McGrath’s injured horse, and in short order, the two become inseparable. Both have big dreams: Leni hopes to pursue an art career, and Caleb hopes to study physics at an Ivy League college. But almost from the start, there are conflicts and obstacles, with ever-present reminders of death and war hovering over their union.

For Caleb, there’s a palpable fear of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, something that is hammered home whenever he interacts with his volatile, just-returned older brother. For Leni, raised by a French mom who lost most of her relatives during World War II, the family mantra has always been: “Life is loss. . . . And you go on.” This once-abstract concept becomes real for Leni when her older brother dies while playing football, a sudden tragedy that threatens to upend the O’Hare family’s already-tenuous bonds.    

It also mars Leni and Caleb’s romance. In fact, as they cling to one another, lies, secrets, and silences cast a menacing shadow over their relationship. Several months later, when Leni leaves Tyler without telling anyone where she is going or why, Caleb is left to unravel the mystery of her disappearance. 

Caleb ends up attending Princeton University, but rather than study physics, he is seduced by the world of finance and eventually joins a successful real estate firm in New York City. Fast forward to 1984: Caleb and his fiancée have been invited to a Manhattan art opening where, unbeknownst to Caleb, Leni is exhibiting. Suffice it to say that theirs is a bittersweet reunion. 

The unfolding interpersonal drama takes unpredictable turns, and Brown offers no easy resolutions. Instead, Because I Loved You presents an adult assessment of the limits of love alongside a potent acknowledgment of the power of shared history. The result is an unusual mix of a sweeping, decades-spanning saga and an intimate glimpse into the ways two people sustain platonic love when romantic love becomes untenable.

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