Cassandra Lane
The Feminist Press ($17.95)

by Dustin Michael

Cassandra Lane’s debut memoir, We Are Bridges, is a powerful and intimate exploration of personal identity and family history. Spanning the chasms of what cannot be known, what has been lost, and what has been stolen, the book underscores how often information goes missing and proposes what must be done to reconnect with what remains.

The story begins with a pregnancy test and the narrator contemplating the uncertainties of bringing a Black child into a hostile and hateful world. This turns out to be an echo of an earlier episode from Lane’s family history, a gruesome and unforgettable scene that finds her great-grandmother Mary, pregnant and alone, standing in the shadow of the body of her lynched husband. It is Mary’s story that forms the first pier of the bridge that links Lane’s past and future, her ancestry and her descent, the childhood she remembers and the child she ultimately bears.

The memoir is composed of an interlocking series of vignettes (Lane calls it a “hybrid” in her prologue), beginning in 1904 and spanning roughly a century in the leadup to Lane’s own impending motherhood. Lane leans into the wordplay of her family’s last name, “Bridges,” and adopts the symbol as an organizing conceit for her narrative, but the fluid elegance of her prose more closely evokes the form of a dancer leaping into empty air, reaching out for an unseen hand, a connection drawn through motion.

A creative writer by nature and a journalist by training, Lane’s curiosity propels each chapter. She is a confident storyteller with a style both lyrical and luminous. Her years of experience conducting interviews and chasing leads are evident in the questions she asks of her subjects, the way she draws information out of relatives and strangers alike, but it is her piercing interrogation of her own memories that truly captivates. As Lane trains her investigative arsenal on her own past, the work achieves the kind of translucence familiar only to great memoirists, as the unbearable brilliance of the author's intellect shines through the tissue of her memories like sunlight through leaves.

As Lane tells this tale and searches for her place in it, she finds that so much is speculative, despite her best attempts at factual reconstruction. She brings her journalistic skills to the project of telling her family’s history accurately, but sometimes, the information is not forthcoming; other times, it is simply gone. In a situation all-too familiar to African American genealogists and memoirists across the country, Lane discovers that many of even the most fundamental documents, like the birth certificates of her ancestors, have been lost to time.

Given this difficulty, the title of We Are Bridges resounds even more. Lane has set herself an essential task by doing what she can as a writer—verifying and validating the lives of those who came before her, confirming their existence, drawing from them strength and inspiration, and locating herself within their lineage.

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Katie Peterson
Photographs by Young Suh
Omnidawn ($19.95)

by Rachel Slotnick

To call Katie Peterson’s Life in a Field unsettling is an understatement. The collection eludes narrative and logic, insisting on hybridity. Readers must remind themselves to embrace confusion and linger in the discomfort. The point is to get lost in the field.

“Follow me,” Peterson seems to say in her opening lines, initiating a fable involving a girl, a donkey, and a secret. Almost immediately, we are confronted with maternal separation, followed by a gruesome breeding pattern. In these words about a farm animal, the reader discerns a thinly veiled critique of our society’s obsession with control over women and uteruses. Alongside the donkey, there’s the girl growing into puberty: her “hips widened, her breasts began to require confinement.”

There is an urgency to these poems. The aforementioned girl swims downstream, paired with a photograph of a child in her baptismal pool. “Do you want to know if she swims naked?” Peterson teases. My eyes travel the rigid face of the girl in the photograph, a stranger to her body. I think of the donkey, failing to recognize his mother. “When you work with animals,” Peterson writes, “they are always moving out of the picture.” But there is this girl, trapped in the frame.

In the poem, “HEARD IN CHURCH,” we read of the “Man who rode the donkey / Greatest cowboy of them all.” Donkeys are adorned with a dorsal stripe, a bisecting pattern beneath their fur, said in liturgy to be the shadow of the cross. “They call them Jerusalem donkeys,” Peterson writes, “and they are prized.” With this revelation, the poems take on an accusatory tone. What are we to make of human behavior, tearing this holy creature from his mother and putting him to work in the field? Peterson’s poetry makes one uneasy, but the disease is beyond the page.

Without flinching, the narrative returns to maternal separation. “If you lose something, for example if you lose a baby, you might wish for another. But if you lose another baby after that, and this time you are farther along, there are two different paths the mind might take.” Peterson debates the logic of wishing for one healthy baby as opposed to wishing for two. She enumerates the second path, “well, it’s not a path, it’s a person—the second person wishes for two babies, because now two are owed him or her.” The mathematical intonation is heart-wrenching here, reducing miscarriage to a word problem in which two trains are leaving the station at different times.

We can’t ever quite return to the fable with which the book opened; everything has been transformed through the lens of what we now know. Of donkeys, Peterson writes: “Most families can only afford one,” and now the donkey has shapeshifted to an unborn child. Thematic words seep through, refusing to submit to the child’s realm in which Peterson originally attempted to contain them: “the afterbirth of his nervousness,” jolts our attention, while “our second try has given birth to something small” sits unnervingly in our mind’s eye.

The story then splinters into metafiction, addressing the reader’s discomfort directly. “This story is not your story. You are not meant to relate to it,” Peterson writes, and there it is: She absolves our distress, in much the same way as a confession might absolve sin, allowing for a bit of confusion. “You are meant to pitch a tent inside this page like a down and out person might do by the American River . . . You are meant to believe you can live here.” But we don’t want to live in this story. It is uncomfortable, it is lonely, it is provocative, and it is familiar.

“What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for?” In the closing pages of Life in a Field, the girl and the donkey are faced with the tragedy of the climate: falling skies, droughts, brushfires, and floods. “This story intends to refute the creation of the world,” Peterson writes. “As it says in the Bible, I appeal to you on the basis of faith in things not seen.” Does poetry require faith? Are words things unseen? What if the field in which we linger is merely a paragraph, a collection of nouns and overgrowth? Poetry, Peterson warns, is not meant to be a palliative. In the final photograph, a woman wears a donkey mask. Or perhaps, a donkey wears a woman mask, braying for help.

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Gabriel Weisz Carrington
Manchester University Press ($26.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Gabriel Weisz Carrington’s The Invisible Painting: My Memoir of Leonora Carrington shares the author’s memories of growing up in the Mexico City household his remarkable mother, surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, created with his father, photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. The book gives an intimate, at times albeit fleeting, glimpse into the real world of his mother and her work.

Raised in Cockerham, England, where she was ensconced in her well-to-do family’s “Victorian mansion,” Carrington fled to Paris as soon as she possibly could, where she quickly met up with the Surrealists. Possessing a profoundly strange beauty—in many photographs a disquieting, haunted aura envelops her face as if she has just been shocked into recognition of consciousness—she wound up living with artist Max Ernst in a rather idyllic small town in the southeast of France until Ernst was jailed by the Vichy government. After this, “locals, who both hated and envied the life she led with Max, turned their backs on her,” and Carrington ended up in Spain before being institutionalized for a time. When her father attempted to send her to South Africa for further institutionalization, she married the sympathetic artist and diplomat Renato Leduc in a burst of desperation, then fled to New York City and on to Mexico City.

Ernst also ended up in New York City, marrying the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Weisz Carrington includes here a group photo of expatriate artists. Ernst sits in the second row with his adult son Jimmy (from his first marriage) and Guggenheim standing behind him. Carrington sits on the ground in front of him to his left. Friedrich Kiesler, casually lounging beside her, stares at her rather than facing the camera like everyone else, while Stanley William Hayter sits on her other side with his face partially still turned towards hers, as if he had looked towards the camera just in time. Between the two men, Carrington stares intently forward, ever steadfast in her “refusal to be treated like a sexual object.” Notably, Guggenheim and photographer Berenice Abbot are the only other women in the photograph of fourteen “artists in exile.”

After arriving in Mexico City, Carrington’s marriage with Leduc naturally faded away. As Weisz Carrington nonchalantly describes, “As the years went by, she met my father, Chiki, and they decided to live together.” Each of them had had their own near fatal dalliances with the Vichy government; coming together no doubt gave them opportunity to benefit from the mutual support and understanding of each other’s difficult personal past. Living in Mexico City, they joined the many fellow artists, writers, and thinkers who had fled Europe as the Nazis advanced during World War II.

Having now raised a family of his own, Weisz Carrington still lives in the same home, which creates interesting opportunities for reflection:

The table where I now sit was a meeting ground where we discussed politics and art as well as the more trivial details of our day-to-day existence, all the while sharing food, each of us serving ourselves from the kitchen. It was a place where we could establish our identities and share the challenges life brought us. During these meals, we would choose whichever words best expressed what we wanted to say; sometimes, those words would be in Spanish, sometimes in English or French, as each language carried its emotional substance. We referred to this mixture as ‘volapük’, a term coined in the nineteenth century by Johann Martin Schleyer to describe a mixture of English, German, and French. If only I could go back and be a fly on the wall during those long-ago conversations between Edward James, Luis Buñuel, Aldous Huxley, Octavio Paz, Remedios Varo, Wilfrerdo Lam, Alice Rahon, and all the others who at one point or other sat around this very same table, enjoying themselves, gossiping and laughing.

We do become privy to how Carrington’s behavior could mirror the real yet unreal appearance of many of the creatures that populate her paintings; Weisz Carrington shares how, “she often behaved as though our whole lives were an ongoing conversation briefly interrupted by the practicalities of day-to-day existence.” he was providing a typical home life, yet one filled with extraordinary and unusual emphasis upon esoteric and arcane occult knowledge. Occasionally, there was discussion of her work: “She spent hours learning about and practicing meditation, and she kept a sketchpad next to her bed that she filled with drawings and notes. ‘My paintings don’t come exclusively from dreams,’ she once declared. ‘Some scenes emerge from altered states of consciousness. Others—who knows where they come from.’”

For those readers already invested in Carrington’s art, it’s difficult not to desire something more from this memoir—foremost a bit of that “fly on the wall” perspective the author himself yearns for. Weisz Carrington offers some notable reflections upon works by his mother and a few books of hers in his possession, and succeeds in conveying the atmospheric qualities of growing up in her presence, yet in the end the son’s writing is, perhaps inevitably, only a pale reflection of the mother’s accomplished art.

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Lenard D. Moore
Wet Cement Press ($16)

by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)

Long Rain, the tenth book from micro-press Wet Cement, merges Japanese and Western poetic sensibilities. Lauded poet Lenard D. Moore infuses the tanka form with vivid personal memory, modern motifs, and Black Southern geography and history. The result is a beautiful collection conveying the contemporary and the traditional, the transitory and the timeless.

These five-line poems—well suited to the book’s small, almost pocket-sized format—sometimes depart from the 31-syllable tanka form, but their seeming simplicity reflects Moore's deep engagement with the genre as a poet, an anthologist, and someone long active in haiku literary organizations.

The poems in Long Rain use juxtaposition in subtle and surprising ways. The first is the layering of observations of nature with personal and historical detail grounded in the Carolinas, Moore’s home. The book is organized according to the four elements (earth, wind, fire, and water), and each section begins with a brief prose introduction on a specific memory. The first is of Great-Grandma Fannie: “She stood ironing board-straight, as if she had a basket on her head, born twenty-four years after the Civil War.” This distinctly Black American frame then opens onto brushstrokes of contemporary nature: “in an instant / blue jays switch places / on the powerline.”

The presence of elders and the human figure in nature is persistent: “red summer sunrise – / a lone old woman sniffing / the wind-tipped roses . . ./ thin white clouds floating / over the distant mountains.” This musical example shows Moore combining the traditional Japanese contemplation of nature with the insistent figure of the lone old woman. He juxtaposes human appreciation of what is rooted—the fierce immediacy of the roses and their lure of pleasure—with a distant background of something floating out of reach.

Many poems convey the culture of the Black South: “Funeral Parlor: / a black man rolls the casket / down the crowded aisle, / little by little his shoes / shadow / shine in the white light.” The poems also often pay attention to work, labor’s depiction embedded in rapidly rendered images of beauty: “washing pink sheets / she bends over the washtub / this sunsplashed morning / and how warm wind scatters / the scent of her perfume.” These poems on human labor are placed near poems on the labor of the animal world, such as one on the guinea hen “searching for new eggs/in the increasing dimness.”

Along with the specific portrayal of Black labor is the motif of blackness as an aesthetic element: “the aged panhandler / in black alligator shoes”; “a trail of black exhaust / coming toward my windshield”; “a swoop of flies / blackening the dead dog / in the hayfield.” This motif of blackness is often merged with human sensuality and sexuality: “the salty wind slipping / into the cottage / her black panties drift backwards / on the rusty hanger.” Here Moore transforms the modest suggestiveness of Japanese tanka into American cinematic vividness.

Reading them, one doesn't feel that the beauty in these poems is a place to rest or hide; Moore gives us interplay rather than an ideal. The refrain of the human presence, whether soothing, stimulating, or simply persisting, is like a bass note amid the treble of dynamic natural elements, and one that implies a larger social web. Yet, the motto of the poems might be “stick to savoring.” Moore foregrounds human pleasure while indicating the constraints of history, and, beyond it, an ephemeral reality that transcends the human.

These layered elements rapidly yield, as in a magician’s trick, a complex sense of time: the quick, precise image from direct observation, memory, or Carolinian history is juxtaposed with the fleeting, distant movement of birds, wind, or clouds, showing a world that is both intensely personal and profoundly impersonal. Time is at once local, historical, and eternal—all in a seemingly simple five-line tanka.

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