With special guests Douglas Kearney, Miré Regulus, and Sayge Carroll
Wednesday, June 8, 7:00pm Open Book, Target Performance Hall 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis
FREE in-person event! Proof of Covid-19 vaccination (or negative PCR test taken within the prior 72 hours) required for entry; mask wearing is strongly encouraged while in the performance hall.
Reception to follow, courtesy of Coffee House Press!
Join us as we celebrate the release of the deja vu: black dreams and black time (Coffee House Press) with an evening of performance and poetry by the amazing California-based writer Gabrielle Civil and a handful of her creative comrades from the Twin Cities! Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into a performance memoir that considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, Black feminist legacies, and more. With intimacy, humor, and verve, Gabrielle Civil blurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future. Don’t miss this!
"With this work, Gabrielle Civil continues to model generosity, bravery, and vulnerability as core principles of black feminist performance, creativity, and living. Read it for the beauty, the black feminist references. Read it for a particular herstory of this time. Look for what you might be unknowing right now and what you need urgently to remember.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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Can’t make it to the event? We can ship you a SIGNED copy! Shipping is for US Media Mail only — if you wish to have this book shipped internationally, please contact orders [at] raintaxi [dot] com for pricing.
Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance art works around the world, most recently Jupiter for the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival (2021) and Vigil for Northern Spark (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022). A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Douglas Kearney has published seven books ranging from poetry to essays to libretti. His most recent collection, Sho (Wave Books), is a Minnesota Book Award winner and a National Book Award, Griffin Poetry Prize, and Pen America finalist. He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Miré Regulus is a writer, performance artist, public artist, community builder and parent. She works the ‘transformative intersection’ through where her work is sited; through poetry and non-linear, rich, poetical prose; through community participation; and by exploring how body+movement+gesture hold what we know. She works at how we form engaged community and the unique ways we figure out how to take care of each other. One of the Artistic Directors of Poetry for People, she lives and works at the intersection of the BIPOC, queer, political, food-focused and artistic communities seeking to build a more equitable and embodied world.
Sayge Carroll has been tending the soil of community through art and advocacy for more than 20 years. Carroll is a recent graduate of University of Minnesota MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Social Practice and holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and is currently enrolled in the Master Gardener program at the University of Minnesota.Through visual art, sound design, and civic engagement, Carroll has devoted their career and life work to connecting ancestral wisdom, lineage and knowledge of natural resources to the present. In their public art and events, Carroll works outside traditional art spaces to reach people in the context of their lives and communities.
Niels Hav’s poetry is characterized by both a joie de vivre and a desire for justice, all tendered with a playful and humane sense of humor. Moments of Happiness, his most recent collection, is no exception. The poems teem with life; they are peopled by green grocers, cyclists, and pedestrians alongside recognizable figures like Tintin, Genghis Khan, Charlie Chaplin, and Li Bai. Even though the shadow of death stretches over the poems, they tell us that the point is to live. Like Sisyphus, it is necessary for us to put shoulder to boulder and push upward and onward.
For the Danish Hav, his boulder is poetry. As he tells us in the “Afterword,” “poetry’s first duty is to be an intimate talk with the single reader about the deepest mysteries of existence.” In the face of mind-numbing chores, injustice and idiocy, and the grim realization that no one gets out of here alive, Moments of Happiness is an affirmation of life and a celebratory denunciation of the negative forces listed in “Assumptions,” which include “The unreasonable / The irresponsible / The indecent // The unreflected / The unshaven. The uncontrolled / The unsmooth / The unconditioned // The unthought through.”
Divided into three parts, Moments of Happiness contains uncountable instants of delight. The first part deals with the world of foibles and fools, the jumble of humanity in which Hav counts himself. The second part serves as an incantatory drumbeat that calls forth the specter of mortality: It starts with a sock to the jaw in a poem titled, “Of Course We Are All Going to Die,” and the bleak reality of that fundamental sentiment cannot be tempered even with the image of God wearing shorts. In “A Little Encouragement,” the speaker, feeling poorly, reads the obituaries and is cheered up when he discovers he apparently “hadn’t died recently.” In the last poem of the section, faced with furniture “falling apart,” clothes that “unravel,” and shoes that “wobble,” the speaker takes a walk with his significant other surrounded by “the dead / standing in the shadows” and “dead leaves from last year” that “have blown together / under bushes, on their way into the earth.” Yet they “confidently” dispel the despair by taking hands and acknowledging that “a happiness / flows through the universe.”
The final part of the collection celebrates that realization. In “A Party,” the speaker is again out for a walk, this time solo in the coastal Chinese city of Wenling, when he comes upon a group of card players. They welcome him into their midst, offer him tea and a place to sit. It is in this simplicity and ordinariness, Hav says to us, that we find the real meaning of existence, the holy thread that holds it all together.
Moments of Happiness is sure to provide the reader with just what the title promises, and what more can we ask for as we continue to strive to be, as Joseph Campbell advised us, “joyful participants in the sufferings of the world.” The existential musings gathered here offer comfort and solace in the face of the great abyss.
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“The Cole sisters were poor girls from the countryside, the kind who up until second or third grade had said fanger for finger,” Steve Yarbrough writes in his sweeping and emotionally resonant eighth novel, Stay Gone Days. Ella, the older sibling, is the story’s good girl: good grades, good manners, and a go-along-to-get-along personality. Caroline is the opposite: feisty and rebellious, she prefers the self-directed learning available in the public library to the classroom.
People in Ella and Caroline’s hometown of Loring, Mississippi, took notice of the pair, and Yarbrough’s evocation of the gender, class, and race dynamics of their all-white enclave crackles. Yarbrough’s portrayal of friendships between girls and sexually pushy boys presents the sordid reality of the 1970s, before terms like acquaintance rape and sexual misconduct entered mainstream parlance, and before feminist activists pushed for consequences against the men who perpetrate these acts.
Ella, a talented singer, flees Loring when she gets a scholarship to Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. She never finishes her degree, however, feeling that her skill and drive are insufficient to make the cut and succeed. Instead, she spends several years waitressing until a chance meeting with Martin, another Berklee dropout, turns into a love affair and then marriage and life as a stay-at-home mother of two. Economic security follows as the fledgling record label that Martin co-owns takes off and thrives.
Caroline, on the other hand, remains in Loring after Ella leaves, and she opts for what she calls Stay Gone Days, skipping classes and doing whatever she can to find adventure. Like Ella, Caroline eventually leaves Mississippi, but once gone, she maintains only sporadic contact with her sister and their newly remarried mom, a trickle of communication that quickly sputters out. Her life is something of a blur as she moves from state to state, taking low level jobs and entering and exiting relationships that, for the most part, mean nothing to her. For a while, this lifestyle satisfies her.
Although Yarbrough writes without overt judgment, the unfolding story is a showcase for the ways bad luck can intersect with bad choices. In this case, when Caroline is in her mid-twenties, she finds herself scrambling for safety after hooking up with a wannabe actor turned violent grifter. After she heads to Europe to evade criminal prosecution for her unwitting role in a theft that left a store clerk dead, Caroline’s terror and desperation are palpable. But this wily heroine is a survivor. Using a forged college transcript, she finds work as an off-the-books English teacher, moving from Brno to Bratislava to Budapest to Prague before finding a higher-paying and more permanent position in Warsaw. Stability follows. So does fame as she begins writing in her spare time and is soon highly lauded for her skill with words.
Years go by, and while the sisters frequently think of one another, there is absolutely no contact between them. Yarbrough is masterful at creating a milieu that allows their estrangement to fester and flourish. Indeed, his ability to describe emotional complexity is astonishing and extends beyond the sisters’ relationship. For example, the minute annoyances that bubble up in most long-term romantic relationships are presented so matter-of-factly that they are simultaneously heartbreaking, riveting, and wholly recognizable. Silences replace easy banter, despite the fact that Martin loved Ella “more than anybody or anything. Why had it become so hard to show it? He’d die for her if need be. He sometimes felt as if he already had.”
In addition, Stay Gone Days covers territory that goes beyond sibling and marital conflict. By zeroing in on the necessity to forgive oneself for trespasses large and small, it posits a cogent moral reckoning. What’s more, a vast number of human foibles and failings, such as regret, atonement, and reconciliation, are rendered in prose that is breathtakingly beautiful and tremendously moving. Ella and Caroline have a brief reunion that temporarily returns them to Loring, but it becomes clear that the many omissions—the many missed moments of joy and sorrow in each of their lives—cannot be recovered, giving the novel lasting gravitas.
Wise, tender, and honest, Stay Gone Days forces readers to confront the inevitability of aging and the choices we make to maintain or sever family ties. It also forces us to consider the long-term residue that remains long after we leave our childhood homes. Stay Gone Days brings Ella and Caroline home again, but it is a home that neither of them recognizes. Whether they can construct something new in its stead remains an open question.
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A girl grows feathers along her legs. A swarm of out-of-season June bugs overwhelms a rental house. A sand creature tugs an insomniac into sleep. A giant blob of “brainless multicellular organisms” is spotted off the coast of Hawaii. Signs of the monstrous surface throughout Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, but it’s unmet human need, lurking in the subconscious like unexploded ordnance, that unleashes the true monsters in these twelve shape-shifting tales.
Fu’s opening story, “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” sketches a near future where technology has become a mediator for human emotions. In a stripped-down chat transcript, a nameless client and operator of a holographic simulator debate whether the operator can bend the rules to grant the client’s sole wish: a day in a botanical garden with their now-dead mother. As they tangle over the platform’s fine print, the operator reveals a world where those who can afford it, “the whales,” visit the simulator again and again to live out dreams of having superpowers or wild sex, of completing a creative work or acting out violent racist fantasies. The platform is just a machine, the operator says, “Your brain creates the majority of the content.”
Those words foreshadow many of the stories in the collection, where Fu combines unexpected creatures and awkward social interactions to build a sense of unease. One of her sharpest stories, “#ClimbingNation,” raises questions about social media, celebrity culture, and how both become proxies for our emotional lives. The story opens as April arrives at the memorial of a climber, Travis, who lived in her dorm in college, but who she’d never encountered until his posts exploded on social media. Though April has no interest in mountaineering, she’s fascinated to realize that “someone she’d plausibly known had five hundred thousand followers on Instagram, the population of a midsize city.” She watches hundreds of Travis’s short videos, the freeze-frame intimacy of the small screen allowing her to zero in on “his view of the world from above, geographic and breathtaking,” as she hides in her dark bathroom, eating chips alone.
But that illusion of intimacy is shattered when she intrudes on the private space of his family’s grief. As April makes her way through the room at Travis’ memorial, she worries that his sister, Miki, and his climbing partner, Zach, will catch her in the lie. When the room empties out, April lingers, hiding behind helpful tasks, cleaning up after guests, washing dishes. Then Miki makes a chilling confession, and April is suddenly complicit, burdened with emotions no longer mediated through a screen.
If the gothic stories of Carmen Maria Machado use the monstrous to reveal hidden desires, ones we’ve forced into the subterranean spaces in our subconscious, Fu’s stories serve to recreate the shock of feeling in a landscape of disconnection. A thread of emotional disconnection runs through many of the stories in this collection. Characters are unable to ask for what they want, whether it’s a traditional wedding (“Bridezilla”), sexual release (“Scissors”), or a good night’s sleep (“Sandman.”) In “June Bugs,” need becomes monstrous as a woman flees an abusive partner. In “Twenty Hours,” a couple kill each other violently to give a jolt to their relationship.
The collection’s final story echoes the opening, in a near future where a creator-technician tries to reconstruct what has been lost. A highly transmissible virus has hit everyone on the planet, erasing the pleasure of taste and “the push-pull addition” of food. [200] Allie, a web designer, starts a side hustle building elaborate sensory experiences for those who can’t let go. Word spreads of her abilities, and soon she has a furtive list of clients, each hoping to reexperience the shiver of delight they had found in their favorite meal. When one client challenges Allie, accusing her of being a con artist, she retorts that she doesn’t consider herself an artist at all. But then she realizes that isn’t true:
When she submerges a client in bouncy balls, when she carefully sets their leg hair on fire, when she contrives a thousand ways to make twitch this now-insensate limb, she feels like a poet, making concrete something that no longer has concrete manifestation in the world.
Fu ends her tales of the monstrous on a hopeful note: We can know joy even in a world that is failing all around us. Our spirit sparks in the ruins.
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Jordan Salama was born in the Bronx and raised in the New York City suburbs. His family hails from Latin America and the Middle East, providing Salama with a background of mixed Syrian, Jewish, Iraqi, and Argentinian culture. He received his BA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, graduating in 2019. He is now an established nonfiction writer, journalist, and producer whose work appears regularly in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He also co-created The Lulus TV, which is a digital video series for children on YouTube with a companion channel, Los Lulus, for Spanish-language viewers.
Salama first traveled to Colombia for an internship after his freshman year at Princeton, which was when he became aware of the Magdalena River. For his junior paper he retraced the trade route of his Syrian-Jewish great-grandfather, who was a traveling salesman in the Andes, by exploring the mountain range from Argentina to Bolivia. During his journey down the Magdalena, Jordan learned much about the people he met and their stories. Some of these characters include: the Mohan, a mythical creature who guards the riches of the Magdalena; the hippopotamuses of Pablo Escobar; an eighty-nine-year-old jeweler who continues an ancient tradition of making silver jewelry known as filigree; and a fifty-year-old man who has dedicated his life to delivering books to children in the remote farmlands of the jungle on a burro. The culmination of these stories is Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult, $26).
Allan Vorda: You’re from Argentina, the home of the great Jorge Luis Borges. What was your exposure to literature growing up?
Jordan Salama: I wasn’t born in Argentina, I was born in New York, but having grandparents from Argentina and other relatives from all over the Middle East, I grew up around storytellers. I remember, as a kid, sitting beside older family members as they told me stories of our family migrations around the world, from Iraq to New York, Syria to Latin America and beyond. As a result, today I love reading literature that crosses cultures and features stories of these unique blends. Gabriel García Márquez, John Steinbeck, and Andre Aciman are a few of the writers whom I avidly read growing up and who still deeply influence me today.
AV: You covered Lionel Messi and the Argentina national soccer team during the 2016 Copa América tournament. How did you get this assignment at such a young age?
JS: This is one of my favorite stories to tell. In the summer of 2016, Argentina was to play the Copa América in the United States, and I wanted to go see as many games as I could (how could I pass up the opportunity to watch Messi, the best player in history!).
But the tickets and the travel were too expensive. I was a freshman in college at the time and had no journalism experience at all, so I applied for FIFA press credentials, and was shocked when I was accepted. Then I took those credentials to a local Spanish-language newspaper a few towns over from mine and told them, “I have this press pass and can enter all the games and press conferences, I’ll write about the tournament for free if you cover my travel to all these places.” And they said yes! That’s how I ended up in the basement of Soldier Field in Chicago one evening, after Argentina vs. Panama, and got to ask Messi (and Mascherano and others) some questions. Right next to me were commentators and crews from TyC Sports, the Argentine broadcaster I’d watched all throughout my childhood, and ESPN and FOX and others. It was incredible.
AV: What was the genesis of your journey to travel the entire thousand-mile length of the Magdalena River in Colombia?
JS: A coincidence, really. The same summer that I spent time with Messi and co. during the Copa América (which, for Argentina, ended in tragic defeat in the final), I had the opportunity to travel to Colombia for the first time. I spent three weeks there in August of 2016, working as an informal “intern” on a grant for an international wildlife conservation organization. I was based out of their office in Cali, but got to travel throughout the country. I visited communities in the rural northern wetlands, the Pacific coast, the jungle-clad Darien Gap. And I learned that Colombia was a tremendously diverse country (in both people and landscapes). It’s also very misunderstood by the world, known not mainly for its beauty, but for its conflict. Right away I knew I wanted to write about it in a longer form. So when it came time, a few years later, for me to choose a subject for my senior thesis in school, I remembered that many people in Colombia had mentioned the storied Magdalena River as a great way to understand a very misunderstood place. I decided to go back.
AV: You mention Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a “young man in his twenties who set off wide-eyed on an anxious journey that would give him a new lens with which to view the world.” As a nineteen-year-old Princeton freshman making a similar journey, did you feel any kinship with Che Guevara? Did your journey open a new lens for you as well?
JS: I’m not sure if “kinship” is the right word. Of course, Che Guevara is now a very charged figure. When I reference him in the book, I’m speaking more about his famous motorcycle journey through South America while he was still a medical student (studying in the same class as my grandfather, in fact, at the University of Buenos Aires). Reading his journals and watching the excellent film that was since made retracing his trip, I can’t help but see a person who, regardless of what you think of him now, was deeply impacted by the kinds of injustices he observed across the American continent. I think journeys like these have an important power to illuminate, to make connections between seemingly disparate people and cultures and places, and making those connections so that they might inspire change is one of the main purposes of this book and much of my work.
AV: The old woman in Ladrilleros said, “To understand the river is to understand the country.” Did you find this to be true and to what extent?
JS: Colombia’s global reputation has greatly suffered because of its long-running armed conflict. When many people in the United States think about Colombia, they think of narco traffickers and guerrillas and paramilitaries. But traveling the Magdalena, I got a glimpse of a very different country, of everyday life—flying kites, fishing, playing soccer, singing—and its people, centering local voices. The river cuts a cross-section through the heart of Colombia, many nations within one nation, and gives a glimpse into the lives of the many kinds of people who live there. There are Indigenous Colombians and Afro-Colombians and Arab Colombians and more. In many ways, the fate of these communities has mirrored that of the river itself. As someone who didn’t know very much about Colombia prior to these journeys, the river was a great connecting thread through disparate peoples and cultures and a great vehicle for learning. I hope the same goes for my readers.
AV: You write about the FARC guerillas and “’La Violencia,’ “a vicious civil war fought in the countryside between liberals and conservatives, claimed more than two hundred thousand lives between 1948 and 1958.” Were you concerned for your safety even though a peace agreement had been signed a few years before you went to Colombia?
JS: People were definitely concerned for me, but I took steps before I left to ensure that everywhere I went I would be received by someone I trusted, who would then show me around. Once I was in Colombia, I hardly ever felt that I was in danger—erratic bus and boat drivers were the only exceptions! Sadly, violence is still pervasive in the Colombian countryside. But it rarely affects outsiders anymore.
AV: What were your impressions and thoughts of the statues of La Gaitana and its lost civilization?
JS: They were stunning vestiges of the past, immortalized in stone. They are a testament to Colombia’s rich pre-Hispanic heritage, as well as the country’s very important and populous present-day Indigenous groups (whose land and other human rights are threatened on a daily basis).
AV: It must have been a shock to hear that your guide to La Gaitana, Luis Manuel Salamanca, was murdered one year after your visit.
JS: I received the tragic news the day before I was to defend my senior thesis, the seed manuscript for this book, in front of a panel of professors. Right away I knew that the whole project had changed. We had only spent a few days together, but Salamanca left a deep impression on me. His case was yet another example of how nearly every day in Colombia another “social leader”—environmentalists, human rights defenders, cultural preservationists—is killed by armed groups vying for control of the resource-rich countryside. I was saddened and infuriated.
AV: A man named Salchi runs the boat from Girardot and says, “This river . . . there’s something special about it. It teaches you things, every day it teaches you. Every day the river changes. You can never say you know the Magdalena.” Did you find this to be true and in what ways did the river change and teach you?
JS: Of course, this is where the title of the book comes from. It works on many different levels. There are the physical changes to the river, mostly environmental degradation, which help narrate the course of recent Colombian history. There are changes in the sociopolitical context, mostly with regards to the conflict, which lasted for more than half a century. And then there are the micro-level changes, the personal changes, in the lives of the people I met all along the way. I like the idea that every book written about the same river is likely to be vastly different, because, as the adage goes, you can never step in the same river twice. And as for myself, well, this journey cemented the idea for me (a student at the time) that I wanted to become a nonfiction writer, to tell stories of the world, as a profession. That is a pretty big change.
AV: Alejandra Mayorca accompanied you on the six-hour chalupa boat ride from Barrancabermeja. You also noted that she was carrying a camping tent strapped to her backpack where you said: “This alone made me nervous.” Why?
JS: I was nervous that she thought the boat wouldn’t make it in six hours’ time! We were not planning to camp overnight. But this is a good example of what makes Alejandra someone I, and many readers, have come to deeply admire: she seems unfazed by what the world throws at her. She is strong-willed and takes life day by day. And she is an incredible, captivating storyteller.
AV: Boat captain Alvaro Gulloso says, “This river is dying.” Can anything be done to save it?
JS: In this book I met many people who are working to “save” the river and all of its riches, from endangered/endemic species to age-old traditions and cultures along its banks. In the end, it is these community/environmental leaders everywhere who push our world towards a more sustainable and inclusive future, but only so much can be done locally. As with any natural resource, macro-level change is needed too.
AV: Tell us about Simón Villanueva and his craft of filigree.
JS: Simón Villanueva was an incredible person; when I met him, he had spent seventy-seven of his eighty-nine years on his front stoop in a town called Mompox crafting silver and gold pendants in the ancient style of filigree. He doesn’t have many customers, so the jewels pile up in a glass cabinet beside him, but he keeps going. He “lives in love with his work,” as he put it. Filigree is thought to have originated in India or Mesopotamia, and has followed human migrations as old as time across the world. The art came to Latin America with the Spanish conquests, and in Mompox and a few other places, it has stuck.
It is just one of many examples of the Arab-Spanish blend that is pervasive in the Americas. Simón Villanueva sadly passed away in April 2020. I hope this book helps to honor his memory.
AV: The chapter titled “Biblioburro,” which details the story of Luis Soriano, is pretty amazing. I doubt there is anyone else like him in the world.
JS: Another amazing person, yes. I believe there are a few roving libraries in the world, but I haven’t heard of many others that use donkeys. I was lucky to spend a significant amount of time with Luis Soriano and his students, and I’ve come away extremely inspired by everything he does.
AV: Can you discuss the importance of storytelling, both for the natives and yourself, as you travelled along the Magdalena?
JS: The Magdalena is a river filled with stories in every way. It is marked by folktales and legends all along its banks. The Magdalena was deeply cherished by the great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and features prominently (even, I would argue, as a character) in many of his works. And its history in many ways mirrors the history of those who live by its banks. I have always turned to storytelling in order to understand my own life, so I was very moved to find so many people along the Magdalena who rely on storytelling to make sense of their own lived experiences and histories, too.
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For those artists drawn to both the visual arts and poetry, there must come a moment when one wonders, what format now? How is this particular idea calling to be expressed in the world of tangible expression? This dilemma animates the central dichotomy of Leslie Moore’s book of poetry and prints, What Rough Beasts.
As an epigraph to What Rough Beasts, Moore offers an excerpt from Maxine Kumin’s poem “Nurture”: “Think of the language we two, same and not-same, / might have constructed from sign, / scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: // Laughter our first noun, and our long verb howl.” Moore creates her own version of this language, a synthesis of word and art, word and animal. The first poem in the book, “Dichotomy,” begins, “I don’t have a poem today, but I’ve got the first blush / of color on two relief prints.” And so Moore is off and running with her theme of poem vs. print, and the energy that arises from this frisson:
Instead of putting one balky word after the other,
I’m in my studio, sharpening tools, carving
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . anticipating the denouement
when loose strands come together and my birds resolve,
without a word.
In this example, words are “balky,” and the creative flow necessary to work on a poem is far away. The speaker has deferred writing a poem in favor of working on relief prints. There’s a touch of feistiness at this choice, almost as if the speaker imagines defending the choice to a group tapping their fingers in expectation of a poem. Presumably in the moment there was only print as poem and the obvious relief, at the end of this poem, that the “birds resolve, without a word.” Birds, in this example, are more elegant than words, as they often are. But anyone who may be thinking that a book of poetry about birds wouldn’t be politically charged and relevant will be happily mistaken.
A tip of the cap must be given to Littoral Books and their designer Lori Harley. Moore’s prints jump off the page in rich, full color plates. So often images are relegated to the middle of a book where a few color plates require a reader to return to them again and again throughout the reading of the book. Not so with What Rough Beasts. A reader can nearly feel the texture of the prints with their fingers.
In closing, we must return to the animating dichotomy of the book, which arises in another poem, “On Presenting to My Poetry Group the Barn Owl Linocut I Finished This Week Instead of Writing a Poem.” Once again, the print is a stolen pleasure against the obligation of the poem. The poet hopes that the group will “admire / the structure of the print” and she imbues the print with the language of a poem: “They may feel a rhythm / in spilling pine, sense meter / in wingbeat, catch their breath / at the tonality of moonglow.” The poem doesn’t reveal if the group felt these sensations, but readers certainly will. The poem and print cascade down the page as one’s eye jumps back and forth from poem to adjoining image. It’s a very pleasurable rhythm indeed. It’s almost like flying.
In every Yorgos Lanthimos film, the characters are always simultaneously in translation and untranslatable. Their bodies, their identities are in flux, but it is in their routines of just being that their beingness becomes differentiated, emergent. In the poetry collection Instructions for an Animal Body, Kelly Gray explores these same themes of illimitability in stasis, with each poem, each line, each turn of the page an exploration toward a better, broader understanding of how a self is constructed.
Instructions for an Animal Body is syllabus, it is conspectus, but it is inconclusive disquisition, too. At every turn, it is in process, on process, the process. From the very start we find the speaker of each poem dreaming and shapeshifting, excavating the actual and virtual realms. In the poem “The Fox as Form,” the speaker is donning a fox skin; in “The Fish as Healer,” the speaker can no longer tell where they end and a fish begins. In “The Places Inside Me,” they are “so fucking dead it makes [them] alive,” until the borders between self and other have also become part of the speaker’s emerging beingness.
In the poem “I-395,” Gray’s exploration of actuality and virtuality continues. The poem opens, as every creation myth does, by attempting to name the unnamable:
In the beginning, there was only you
and your knife. You start by carving out a landscape,
a place to hang your words. Chip by chip you design a desert floor
and then, the inverse dome of black sky.
Also like any good creation myth, the story is really about the “landscape” of the speaker’s self, the process of “carving” a being out of clay (or in this case, sand). The “you” is both other and self, “You, the original Storyteller,” who “drive[s] your truck across this world / that she has mistaken for yours.” The difference between translational and untranslatable bodies becomes clearer as this journey progresses.
By the time we reach the poem “Crack Me Electric” (a nod to the Greek figure of Electra), it is clear that the speaker is aware of the emerging, transformative self. We see this awareness right away in the first stanza:
In morning dark, my eyes open to the sound of frothing
sky beasts dragging their tic-bitten bellies
across rooftops and canyons, blast cracking their cloven
hooves against the forest canopy, all wet
snout and bellow.
The speaker has woken from the dream state, and this “awakening” is further illuminated later in the poem, when they claim, “This is how I learn that my internal etymology has shaped my / adaptations / from insect to monster.” Here the speaker acknowledges the articulating, emergent, differentiated being and how poetry/poetics are a necessary dialectical tool through which to sense this experience. They may, in fact, be the only tool.
Gray exhibits exploration, excavation, and adaptation throughout Instructions for an Animal Body, but it is perhaps never more apparent than in the poem “Home of Seamstress.” At this point in the text, near the end, the speaker has reached a state of transformation, because they are fully aware of their transformative, ever-constructing identity:
I am lungs of house, a glass-spanned wall hung chandelier of larynx and trachea . . .
I am hollow of house, needlewoman, double crossed on floor, spilled eyes and fabric scraps . . .
The voice is declarative, effusive. Here, the “seamstress” threads together the disparate, each stitch an adaptation and an enumeration, an assemblage of territories and the practice of deterritorialization. As we bear witness to “home of seamstress” and “seamstress as home,” the untranslatable becomes translation.
Instructions for an Animal Body is itself an animal body; the seams, the cover, the binding that holds the pages together are a construct of an emergent identity. This would be a difficult task by any measure, and it is excellently executed by the author in this engaging, rich collection.
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In his new novella, Ariel Dorfman draws the conclusion that despite everything the angels of mercy can do for us, the human condition seems doomed. The Compensation Bureau is a parable in which the universe needs tender care, like a garden of unearthly delights. Angelic creatures calling themselves Actuaries work the terrains on the Lazarus Project, keeping things in balance between light and dark forces: “Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others, and attempts to make up for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death.” That’s right, Earth is the problem child of the universe. We just can’t quit the violence. The unnamed narrator Actuary tells us, “I have been gradually worn down by so much malignancy.”
For Dorfman, exposure to such malignancy has been a mainstay of his life. Born in Argentina, the author spent some of his boyhood in the U.S. but left when his parents were threatened by the pressure of the McCarthy trials. They moved to Chile, where Dorfman grew up; he eventually befriended and advised Salvador Allende but felt forced to leave when Allende was driven out with the CIA’s assistance and replaced by the Pinochet regime. He then moved back to the U.S., where he continued his writing career.
Like his good friend the late Harold Pinter, Dorfman’s major concern in his work is the power and destructiveness of unbridled tyrannical and fascist forces that degrade popular politics and make representative democracies problematic, if not impossible, to achieve or maintain. Pinter hated imperialism, and with his Nobel Prize speech laid into U.S. hegemonic aggression, which he saw as catastrophic in its neo-fascist requirements. Dorfman, like Pinter, is a playwright, and his most famous work, Death and the Maiden, is a study in the roles developed between the “interrogator” and the victim during torture. Dorfman turns the tables, however, and the play becomes a kind of radical interpretation of human empathy.
It’s just such radical caring that carries the spirit of Dorfman’s parable of angels in The Compensation Bureau to the rescue. The Actuary has witnessed it all and at a conference reports to fellow Actuaries:
I saw children scorched in ritual fires. I saw women being stoned for the crime of love and I saw women being murdered because they refused to love the lords who had bought them. I saw men decapitated and men thrown from cliffs and men whose hearts were carved out and men who were blown to pieces and men impaled with their entrails bleeding into the soil and men and women and children and the old and the new and all ages in-between suffering.
On and on she goes, and the others have similar findings. But in Dorfman’s story the narrating Actuary falls in love with a victim of horrific violence named Alba Jannah. Jannah deeply moves the Actuary with her commitment to love at all costs despite the horror meted out to her. Our narrator discovers that Jannah’s modus vivendi is, “They can kill me but they cannot kill my love.” For a worn-down Actuary, this is tonic for the soul.
Listening “at some point in time, from some point in the Universe,” the Actuary hears the dying brutalized woman’s last thoughts, and barely believes what she hears:
Nothing ever really dies. She thinks: they will cast me into the ocean and I will baffle them by becoming food for fish and swim into some child’s mouth and fuel her as she skips and learns and laughs. She thinks: they will throw me into some ditch and I will escape their rage by welcoming the worms as they churn me into mud.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The garden, the garden, it does not abandon her in her hour of need.
Finally, it seems one of these creatures can love unconditionally, at least one of them knows amor fati.
The Compensation Bureau, like Dorfman’s other recent short novel, Cautivos (OR Books, 2020), is tangled up in blue, as the Bard from Duluth would put it. There seems no end to our torment of each other, and words seem often to amplify the problems we face together rather becoming the avenue down which we move toward our common enlightenment. The Compensation Bureau is no easy remedy for our blues, but it qualifies as a warning to look up and see the stars and know our place before it’s too late.
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Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country may be a young adult novel in verse, but it could just as well be shelved with poetry or fiction for older audiences. No label would change its triumph of addressing cultural identity and belonging while being relatable to those a similar age to Nima, the book’s 14-year-old narrator.
Self-conscious of her accent in English that she “cannot manage to make charming,” Nima also struggles with Arabic, which she and her best friend, Haitham, learn in Sunday school: “we mispronounce the language how it wilts / on our american tongues.” Accented in both worlds, Nima feels she doesn’t fully belong to either. Through the eyes of Nima, Elhillo stares at the gaps of a personal and collective history, challenging silences. There is the silence of what Nima does not know but desperately wants to, and there is xenophobia and the silent witnesses that allow it, when Nima and her mom are denied boarding into a plane or when Nima is called a terrorist and suspended from school for fighting back against four bullies. Haitham seems at first to fit in better, but then becomes a victim of post-9/11 racist violence, driving Nima further into her quest for what’s missing from her life.
Formally, the text of this book speaks strongly to Nima’s uncertainty and sense of loss. Elhillo avoids capitalization (i, nima, haitham are always in lowercase) as well as punctuation (pauses are indicated by spaces and line breaks, as in open-field poetry). One glaring absence is Nima’s father, whom she never met. She only knows he died in their homeland and that his death is connected to why Nima is not called Yasmeen, the name she wishes she had:
my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower
its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
instead i got this name & i don’t even know why
maybe named for some unknown dead relative
some dreary ghost
Feeling inadequate in her own name (which means grace), Nima summons Yasmeen, the ghost of her alternative Self. Nima is called many things, some affectionate, some not, and throughout the novel she weighs how fitting they seem as ways to name her Self. Haitham fondly calls her “nostalgia monster,” laughing, as Nima explains,
at the dream-brain that takes over mine when i hear
the old songs & run my fingers
over the old photographs i know the words
to the old films & imagine myself gliding in
to join the dance (14)
For Nima, these cultural fragments reveal “a country i’ve never seen / outside a photograph // & i miss it too”—the country that both her and Haitham’s mothers left. Readers can assume the country to be Sudan (Elhillo is Sudanese-American); but because it goes unnamed, it stands for any of the places evoked by “the old songs” Nima loves: Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and Sudan. Through a magical portal, she enters the old photographs with the help of Yasmeen—running the risk of becoming a ghost herself. Nima must then choose between either accepting who she is or erasing part of herself. Thus, the book becomes a story about agency and the choices that make us who we are.
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Despite belonging to an illustrious family of art connoisseurs and actors, Pauline Baer de Perignon felt she had never really tapped into her own artistic potential. A journalist, screen writer, and teacher of creative writing, she had never personally completed a book or found a writing project exciting enough to galvanize her energies. Then a casual remark by a cousin proved to be life-changing, leading her on a treasure hunt during which she made some startling discoveries about her family and recovered priceless heirlooms that everyone thought were lost forever. This search comes together in The Vanished Collection, a work of nonfiction which entwines a disquieting family memoir with a true tale of mystery and intrigue.
De Perignon’s great-grandfather was Jules Strauss, a celebrated Jewish art collector in Paris whose magnificent collection of Impressionist paintings had supposedly been auctioned off in 1932. That sad date marked the end of the family fortunes, but the author knew very little about her great-grandfather, certainly not why he had parted with the collection he had so passionately built. Her family had never talked about that chapter of their history—nor had they ever spoken much about their Jewish origins; de Perignon’s father had converted to Christianity at the beginning of the war, and she had been raised Catholic. Jules Strauss was a faraway figure she had never thought much about.
Then, out of the blue, her cousin Andrew, an art expert, suggested that their great-grandfather’s collection had not been auctioned in 1932, but was stolen by the Nazis. “Andrew’s words,” she writes, “sent my mind tumbling down a rabbit hole: I couldn’t tell if the effect was pleasant, bizarre, or anxiety-inducing. . . . The fragments of family history Andrew evoked were profoundly unsettling.”
Andrew provided her with a list of masterpieces by Sisley, Monet, Degas, and Renoir for which their grandmother had unsuccessfully filed claims from 1958-1974. Originally in the Strauss collection and then confiscated by Nazis, some of these works had been returned to France in the aftermath of the war, but not to their rightful owners. Some were still being held in storage in French museums. Others were elsewhere in Europe.
De Perignon soon became obsessed with investigating Jules’s life. She was puzzled by the reticence she initially ran up against: Why had no one in her family ever mentioned this story before? Jules and his wife had remained in Paris during the Occupation, while other family members and friends fled or were deported. When forced to move from their home, they were stripped of nearly everything they owned, including all objects of value. Their apartment at 60 Avenue Foch, requisitioned by the regime, became the headquarters of the SS’s black-market operations. But the Strausses were never deported. How had they managed to stay alive in occupied Paris?
All this pointed to yet another mystery. Where were the paintings now, and could anything still be salvaged? To find the answers, de Perignon quickly gained highly specialized research skills, and assisted by curators, art historians, and archivists, combed through museums across Europe to retrace the scattered pieces of Jules’s collection and to make new claims for their restitution. She also pestered her older relatives with questions, scrutinized Jules’s personal papers, and even consulted a medium who channeled his spirit.
The results were impressive: Not only did the author succeed in recovering two artworks for the family, but she uncovered forgotten angles to Jules Strauss’s contribution to the history of French art and reconnected to her Jewish heritage. In the process she discovered much about herself, noting that “the women in my family have always remained in the shadows, their qualities often ignored. But here, in this Paris suburb, in this archive where no relative of mine has ever been, and where no one was expecting me, and where I would never have imagined setting foot, I could finally be myself. . . . This was where I belonged.”
The restitution process was both painstaking and painful, but de Perignon’s efforts were rewarded with the return of a painting, “The Portrait of a Lady as Pomona” by Largillière. Previously in possession of a museum in Dresden, it now hangs in the author’s living room: “When the house is empty, the children at school, the cat purring on the couch, I pause in front of the portrait. We look knowingly at each other. Only I understand the journey she has taken, only she understands my quest.”
Having made that quest with her, readers must agree with an insight offered by “Jules” through the medium: “Truth is only possible when history is acknowledged.” In The Vanished Collection, de Perignon pierces through the silence of family and bureaucrats, unpeeling layer after layer of amnesia and deception to retrieve not just a painting, but a deeper portrait of her life.
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