Book Review

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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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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Emerald Wounds

Selected Poems

Joyce Mansour
Translated by Emilie Moorhouse
City Lights ($22.95)

emeraldwounds

by Allan Graubard

Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant are just some of the words that come to mind when considering the poetry of Joyce Mansour. Certainly there are other words that readers will conjure. Have I left out odorous and sweaty, given Mansour’s embrace of the body as a ground her poems take root in and burst from? And what about her body, the female body, in a world run by men? Add in the complexities of passion, love, marriage, family, and exile, and readers will find that Mansour creates a rich and spicy gumbo in these Selected Poems.

From her first book, 1953’s Cris/Screams, to her last, Trous Noirs/Black Holes, published in France in 1986, the year of her death, Mansour will delight those with her, or those willing to be touched by her, while scandalizing others for whom custom and behavior are sacrosanct. Throughout her body of work, Mansour’s titular “emerald wounds” blossom and ensnare, even as they live and die, because they sing—this is a world ripe with magic, the kind that exalts and transforms by the power of words.

Long associated with the Paris surrealist group, Mansour in this new translation lives with a currency that is as striking as it is needed, especially when women’s free expression of desire, sex, and autonomy still militate against the enduring pivots of misogyny, whether intimate or institutionalized. Indeed, the fifteen-year lapse between this, Emile Moorhouse’s effort, and a similarly configured translation of Mansour’s writings by Serge Gavronsky (Black Widow Press, 2008) has, it seems, done little to eviscerate men’s desire to control women, so embedded in the social fabric it is, with deadly consequence all too often.   

But a brief history.  Born in England in 1928 as Joyce Patricia Adès to a wealthy family of Jewish-Syrian descent, she is raised in Cairo; her language English. Later, with her second husband who speaks only French, she will change, adopting French as her Rosetta Stone. Her poems, as she describes them, originate as screams or cries, the aforementioned title to her first book. They rise through her as the traditional mourning wails of Egyptian women do, sibilant, yearning, and sharp. Do her poems then function as a form of “exorcism,” as Moorhouse notes, of the dual traumas Mansour suffered when young: the death of her mother when she was fifteen and the sudden death of her first husband six months after their honeymoon, both from cancer? Perhaps. But it does not end there. If exorcism is a therapeutic medium born from trauma, the metamorphic and liberating charge of Mansour’s poetry leads.

By the early 1950s she circulates among Cairo’s avant-garde where, oddly enough, French, a colonial appendage, is the literary tongue. Political change, though, forces their move to Paris where her first book, Cris/Screams, draws the praise of André Breton, who identifies Mansour as one of the three most significant poets to emerge after World War II. From then on Mansour participates in the activities of the surrealist group, publishing in their journals and collaborating with some of their major and allied artists: Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Alechinsky, and others.   

Emerald Wounds, with its 100-plus poems across ten of Mansour’s books, gives readers generous access into her world, emotional, vulnerable, and (as Alfred Jarry would say) umorous. A detailed introduction sets the stage while pointing out that, despite the potency Mansour commands, she is more often overlooked in the larger literary landscape. As for these translations, they perform well enough, beyond some awkward phrasings and word choices.

The first poem in Cris/Screams startles. From the sensitive opening, perhaps referring to the death of and funeral for her young husband—“I lift you in my arms / For the last time”—the corpse in its coffin “moving in your narrow world”—comes this implacable image that not only avoids cheap sentiment but also heightens the emotional stakes. For this corpse has its “head removed from your slit throat.” A concluding riposte to it all resonates with the bitterness of aborted passion: “It is the beginning of eternity.”

When it comes to sex, a convulsionary paradise, Mansour is ever explicit; the theme enriches throughout her work, as in the final poem from Cris/Screams:

May my breasts provoke you
I want your rage.
I want to see your eyes thicken
Your cheeks turn white as they sink.
I want your shudders.
I want you to burst between my thighs
That my desires be satiated on the fertile soil
Of your shameless body.

In her second book, Déschirures/Shreds, from 1955, the poems gain broader social reach and read as if written today in response to the oppressive cabal of racism and class:

Cry little man
Your boat is for sale
Your wife is sold
And the fresh milk of your cow
Red with the blood of blacks
Makes your children piss
Their hate

And then just a few pages on, pivoting to the sexual shivers that inspire her, is one of her most poignant poems. It begins this way:

I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow
Hair entwined
Genitals enlaced
With your mouth as a pillow

And ends in raked diminuendo:

Consumed by the wild inertia of bliss
Splayed on your shadow
Pounded by your tongue
And to die between the rotted teeth of a rabbit
Contented.

The third section includes twelve prose pieces and poems that Mansour published in Bief: Jonction Surrealiste, a modest Parisian journal, from 1958-1960. Satire plays deftly with an opening salvo: a comedic critique of heterosexuality that deforms the traditional meaning of its title. “The Missal of the Missus (Good Nights)” evolves in three parts, each translating the rules and rituals of the Catholic mass into something else; something they would never otherwise have been used for. The subtext of the first part, “Advice for Running on Four Wheels,” reveals the poet’s body as a car cruising at night hot with desire, and what a woman can do during sex to ensure her lover’s satisfaction. The second part, “Cold Out? A Dress Is Essential,” refers to fabric spun from flayed “moorish” skin, “two tea towels” worth, and how to appear beautiful when wearing it. Savagery is just beside the point. The third section, “Lines Around a Circle,” is a pastiche of fashion magazine dictates where you must “Straighten the silhouette without crushing the organs.”

Included as well is Mansour’s take on gossipy female advice columns with some “Practical Advice While You Wait”; that is, for your man—when in a train station, a restaurant, a city hall, or at home. No matter being worried or jealous, the commandment is clear: The woman must stay “pretty, relaxed, sharp . . .” But don’t “wait in the streets” and always wait for the heart of the conflict steaming up “amongst the reddened leaves and the caramel fumes of your discriminations.”

Husband neglecting you? “Dowsing” has a cure: “Invite his mother to sleep in your room.” Want something more? Okay: “Piss in his soup when he lies down happily next to you.” And then, “Be gentle but skillful stuffing the fat goose / With octopus messages / And mandrake roots.” In the end, however, the wife needs what she doesn’t get from him:

Motionless like a mollusk flatulent with music
Clings to the telephone
And cries
In spite of myself my carrion fanatacizes over your ousted old cock
That sleeps

These poems give a sense of the breadth of Mansour’s writing, which can shift, implicitly or explicitly, from personal to social, cultural, and political contexts with ease, and from brief to magnetic longer poems in her later collections, such as “Endlessly Midnight,” “Pandemonium,” and, the finale, “Black Holes.” Although seduction and orgasm fuel her poems, there is a parallel motif of disgust and pain that illuminates a depth of embodiment and humanity. If we are wounded by the repressions and oppressions that stalk us, Mansour indeed turns those hurts into dark and precious jewels.

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The Big Myth

How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Bloomsbury ($35)

thebigmyth1

by George Longenecker

Dislike of government and antagonism towards science, labor unions, and social programs are neither coincidental nor unplanned, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway point out in their latest book, The Big Myth; these sentiments have been part of intentional public relations campaigns for over a century. In their follow-up to Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010), the authors, both historians of science, name this the philosophy of “market absolutism or market essentialism.” As they state from the outset, “This is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of ‘the magic of the marketplace.’”

Oreskes and Conway describe market fundamentalism as “the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms.” The introduction is illustrated with a 1950s ad from a consortium operating under the name “America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies”; the freedoms listed in the ad include a Holy Bible, a door key, a pencil, and a free ballot. At that time, private utilities lobbied against electric co-ops and served only more lucrative areas, keeping millions of rural Americans in the dark: “Rural customers wanted electricity as much as their urban counterparts—and many observers argued that they needed it more—but electric utilities had neglected them.”

The authors smartly refocus some themes from their previous book within their new framework; for example, they label climate change “a market failure, because markets, acting illegally, failed to provide what people need and created a problem that markets have proven unable to solve.” The National Electric Light Association (NELA) was founded in 1885 as the industry expanded, and by the 1930s, it lobbied not only against electric co-ops, but also against government projects such as the Hoover Dam. Its campaign, the authors explain, “was based on dubious and historically misleading assertions, misrepresentations, half-truths, and in some cases outright lies.” NELA claimed that “Government involvement in electricity generation or distribution would be inappropriate, socialistic, even tyrannical.”

Drawing from many primary sources, Oreskes and Conway show that by the 1920s, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) “already had a long history of working to prevent business regulation by state or federal governments and, above all, fighting unions.” NAM funded a massive campaign to convince Americans that big business’s interests were their interests.  They made a rhetorical shift from “private enterprise” to “free enterprise,” a term still used a century later. They named this campaign the “Fight for Freedom!” To reach a broader audience, NAM used a series of sixteen posters, with captions such as “The real threat to workers’ interests is taxation,” a theme that resonates in political outcomes today. Knowing that many workers would be unlikely to read commentary in The New York Times, they used comic strips like Uncle Abner Says to reach a mass audience. The authors contend that such propaganda had long-lasting effects on Americans’ beliefs:

NAM members didn’t just manufacture cars and carpets; they manufactured a myth. They would spend the ensuing decades bolstering its intellectual credentials and embedding it in the bedrock of American culture, to the point where myth would be mistaken for age-old truth.

Oreskes and Conway document that NELA, NAM, and the American Liberty League all claimed “that government ‘intervention’ in the marketplace was a radical departure from American history” and cite numerous examples to show that this claim was false. With canals, roads and railroads, governments supported infrastructure development, including New York State’s Erie Canal Corporation. Slavery was regulated and abolished by state and federal government intervention. Furthermore, they point out, NAM “also had to skate over its own history. NAM was created in the late nineteenth century to advocate for federal imposition of protective tariffs, and to encourage the U.S. government to build the Panama Canal.”

The chapter “A Questionable Gospel” details efforts to reconcile laissez-faire business practices with Christian arguments for social justice. For instance, Los Angeles Congregational minister James W. Fifield built “an influential conservative movement, known as Spiritual Mobilization, whose goal was to convert mainline Protestant leaders and their parishioners into market fundamentalists.” The authors likewise document the ongoing influence of business on religion: “captains of American industry had found a way to turn Protestant theology on its head, from embracing the poor to celebrating the rich.”

American antagonism towards science and government regulations has hindered action on global climate change, the authors maintain—an argument they developed thoroughly in their first book. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilianization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver.”

In concluding, Oreskes and Conway cite the Covid-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis. As they put it: “Overreliance on markets and underreliance on government have cost the American people dearly. And this has been the case during both Democratic and Republican administrations since Bill Clinton.” Government, they argue, is the solution to many of our biggest problems—and it always has been.  

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The Nightmare Man

J.H. Markert
Crooked Lane Books ($19.99)

nightmareman

by Ryan Tan

In J.H. Markert’s The Nightmare Man, a serial killer called The Scarecrow terrorizes the fictional town of Crooked Tree. He is so called because of his habit of posing as a scarecrow in his victims’ cornfields. When they approach to investigate, he runs away. This continues for the next two days, until he catches them as they approach. His modus operandi derives entirely from a horror novel written by the protagonist, Ben Bookman, a citizen of Crooked Tree. The lead police investigator, Detective Mills, suspects Ben of being The Scarecrow; his distrust of Ben is strengthened by the disappearance of Ben’s brother thirteen years ago, which Mills also investigated. It remains an unsolved case.

Engaging vignettes end each chapter; each one is narrated from the point-of-view of one character, giving us a glimpse into their life. Compared to the main story, the vignettes contain less dialogue and more exposition; without conversations to break up description, the writing flows more smoothly, and Markert’s talent for character building shines.

Markert also successfully imbues each character with a distinctive manner of speech. We become so familiar with each of the character’s voices that if their names were omitted from a conversation, we would still be able to identify them by their unique diction. One character who shines in dialogue is Ben’s nine-year-old daughter, Bri, who expresses innocence and astuteness at the same time. When she converses with another character, she defines herself against them, developing not only her own individuality, but also theirs. And since dialogue dominates The Nightmare Man, this refinement of their personalities occurs over and over, such that by the end of the novel, each character is fully fleshed out.

With powerful characterization surrounding a central mystery, The Nightmare Man is an entertaining read for horror and suspense fans.

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The Bomb

The Weapon That Changed the World

Didier Alcante and Laurent-Frédéric Bollée
Illustrated by Denis Rodier
Translated by Ivanka T. Hahenberger
Abrams ComicArts ($29.99)

bomb

by John Bradley

“In the beginning, there was nothing. But in this nothing . . . was everything!” So begins this graphic book on the development of the first atomic bombs. Not only is the Biblical opening a surprise, but the speaker here is the element uranium, who offers other such chilling comments in this well-researched (with a selected bibliography) and expansive (459 pages) volume, which concludes with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Although a history of the bomb might sound like an odd fit for a graphic book, the three authors—with Alcante and Bollée providing the research and writing and Rodier the artwork—make the medium seem ideal. The book feels like a storyboard for a film, given its use of varied locations (Africa, Norway, Japan, Germany, and the U.S.), a vast cast (short biographies of the central figures are included at the back of the book), and intrigue, complete with a scientist-spy. The authors must be commended for their extensive research into the development of the bomb, especially as regards the story of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, the first scientist to see the potential of splitting the atom—it was he who pushed the U.S. to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis did, though once the weapon neared completion, Szilard did everything he could to stop its use. He foresaw a nuclear arms race, as well as the moral stain of the U.S. being the first nation to rain such hell on cities filled with civilians. On many occasions in the book, Szilard and General Leslie Grove, in charge of the Manhattan Project, argue passionately. By foregrounding the story of Szilard, the authors weave into the narrative a moral dimension sometimes missing in historical accounts of the bomb that view it more as a scientific breakthrough.

Another thread in the saga that is often missing in much of U.S. nuclear history is the secret testing done on civilians. One such individual was Ebb Cade, an African-American worker at the Oak Ridge facility. Driving to work one morning, on March 24, 1945, Cade accidentally drove off the road. When he woke, he found himself in a hospital with a host of injuries. “We’re going to take good care of you, Mr. Cade,” an anonymous doctor tells him. “You can trust us.” Later, this same doctor injects Cade with an unknown shot. The reader soon discovers that this “human product,” as the officials call Mr. Cade, was injected with plutonium, though he was never asked if he consented to be involved in an experiment to learn about the effect of plutonium on the human body, nor was he informed later. The officials casually discuss how Cade lost fifteen teeth due to the shot, but this is quickly rationalized—“He suffers from acute gum inflammation anyway”—before they offer the ultimate excuse: “But it was in the interest of science!” The book includes one other “human product” who is injected with plutonium, but there were many others. Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press) broke this story for the first time in 1999, and Alcante and Dodier make effective use of Welsome’s research.

Not only is the text of The Bomb engaging—and translated so well by Ivanka T. Hahenberger it feels as if it was written in English—but the illustrations keep the eye engaged as well. Bollée, who has published dozens of graphic novels in his native France, provides the expected “BOOOM” and “SCHBAM!!,” but the artwork shows great variety and versatility in technique. At one point we see a nightmare had by Klaus Fuchs, who spied on the Manhattan Project for the Russians; the hallucinatory style of the art here deftly conveys the terror of Fuchs’s dream. The depictions of bodies in Hiroshima set aflame by the atomic bomb are also vividly disturbing—as they should be.

While a graphic book might not be the first choice of a reader who wants a detailed history of the creation of the atomic bomb, The Bomb would be a good place to start for those who want a stirring and factually accurate (except for the creation of a Japanese family in Hiroshima) account. And should anyone think that our atomic history no longer concerns us, consider the words of uranium that close the book: “And so, you think this is the end of my story? What if it’s only the beginning?”

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Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva
Translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib 
Deep Vellum ($18.95)

motherfield

by Jessica Johnson

The first collection available in English by Belarusian poet, translator, and editor Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield begins with approximately thirty pages of the author’s year-long protest diary, composed in English during a mass uprising around the 2020 presidential election in Belarus; authoritarian leader Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, retained it in elections the E.U. deemed illegitimate. Cimafiejeva’s poems, translated from Belarusian by the impressive team of Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, follow the diary, concluding with a single poem composed in English.

The diary feels written for the gaze of readers outside the events, possibly as a record in case something happens to the author. For some American readers, it will hold flashes of recognition—particularly the difficult feelings that come from continuing literary life and experiencing respites of comfort and safety during a political crisis—as well as an abundance of chilling occurrences that don’t (yet) happen here (for example, widespread internet outages as a government tactic).

Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements. Of the dubious polling station where she will cast her vote, Cimafiejeva writes, “Every election day in Lukashenka’s Belarus has turned into a demonstration of the cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power.” Her description settles on a

teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume with a wreath on her head . . . singing about her love for the Motherland, passionately clenching a microphone. Her Russian song checks off the golden wheat fields, the big blue lakes, and the slender white storks flying over our heads. She sings that we all live safely and peacefully in our beloved Belarus.

Here Cimafiejeva shows the propagandist’s Russian-language vision of the Motherland, one that the poems will meaningfully subvert to include ecological disaster, disconnection, and stifled expression. Cimafiejeva was born in 1981 in a region of Belarus that became part of the Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry develops, often through extended metaphor, a concept of bleak, devastated embodiment with disrupted relationships between past and future, land and people, people and language.

In the opening poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the speaker’s inheritance is “a trust fund / of fear” in the form of a stone. The stone is mute and without memory, “an eternally slow-growing / embryo.” To nurse it, its inheritors must “unlearn” how to breathe, “how to say what needs to be said.” In place of nurture and natural cycles of rebirth, Cimafiejeva finds intergenerational reproduction of something wrong.

While ecological devastation, absence of language, and reproductive bodies feature in the metaphors that drive many of these poems, references to Chernobyl also appear more literally. In “Rocking the Devil,” children swing their feet at a bus stop bench; it begins to rain and the girls stick out their tongues, but no one knows the raindrops are “disastrous,” that they’ve already permeated the scene’s vibrant flora. When the bus takes the girls away, the trees wave goodbye. Similarly, “1986” is written from the perspective of a “we” who had to leave houses, crops, and graves. Strangers dismantle their homes and what remains of their lives in the ancestral village; when they come back to visit, the land does not forgive them.

If the diary operates in one register of documentary, the poems work in others, but several moments in the poems call back to the diary. “My First City, Zhlobin” portrays a steel-producing town as a body that nurtures ruin:

I fear your children, Zhlobin,
the steel-cast children
of Zhlobin
nursed by the factory’s
smoggy tits.

The speaker here, fed on the factory’s black milk, emits rust, whereas the body in Cimafiejeva’s diary observation “I feel safe inside the body of a crowd”—the body of people gathered in protest, sharing water and food and generally looking after each other—can be read as a counterpoint to the blighted bodies of the poems.

Also thought-provoking is the diary entry for October 17-18, when Cimafiejeva and her husband, a novelist, are at a literary festival launching their books. He draws a crowd, but she doesn’t. She writes, “My new poetry book was published a few days before the election. It was the worst time: no one is interested in a tiny poetry book when the main news is deaths, beatings, and detentions. But there is no other time.” This moment highlights the question of poetry’s connection to lived and recorded history, a question enacted again by the arrangement of the book itself.

That arrangement comes to a crescendo with “My European Poem,” which closes the book. It speaks to the possibility of being read by an international audience and being placed among writers working in less challenging political conditions. Of Belarusian history, Cimafiejeva writes,

When I tell it in English,
I want to pretend that I am you,
That I don’t have that painful experience
Of constant protesting and constant failing,
That nasty feeling of frustration and dismay.

In the end the speaker keeps a “beaten hope” that “builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.” This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names.

Yet if Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.

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