Gabriel Kruis
Archway Editions ($14.95)

by David Brazil

In meteorology, a virga is a streak of precipitation that appears to be attached to the undersurface of a cloud and usually evaporates before reaching the ground. Gabe Kruis’s debut book, which moves back and forth between the author’s home of New Mexico (where virgae are frequently seen), and the mineral fact of New York City, embodies this aspect of the book’s title. But this precipitation that melts before it hits the ground takes its name from the Latin virga, meaning rod or stick and evoking the enchanted wand of the magician, associated in the medieval era with the poet Virgil. Then there’s the adjective acid: The corrosive chemical is signaled by an epigraph from George Oppen, but the psychedelic cover image of neoclassical maidens decanting liquids suggests the idea of lysergic acid as well.

I spend this time on the title because it’s the first signal of one of this book’s most noteworthy qualities: its confidence. Choosing a recondite noun in ambiguous relationship with its multivalent adjective to generate a phrase that ends up being perfectly right is characteristic of much of what will follow. It’s the first poetic move of a book whose intention is, as Keats wrote, to load every rift with ore.

This confidence is neither arrogance nor bombast, but a sure-footedness that is evident in the overall architecture of the book, which is first intimated by the typography of the table of contents. Acid Virga is composed of three poems, each of whose names are set in bold type, but “Waterfall Effect” and “Regression” are both followed by subtitles which turn out to be specific movements of the poems in which they fall. The result is a book with a brief overture, “Say,” a monumental core poem, “Waterfall Effect,” and something like a falling action, “Regression.” The decision to arrange the book in this unique way is powerful and effective.

“Say,” the one-page intro poem, is a bit of a fake-out, since its diction (which recalls the chiming tunes of Andrew Joron) will not accompany us through the rest of the book. We enter the book proper with the epigraphs to “Waterfall Effect,” from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl and poet George Oppen. The very presence of these two names on the page sets up a dialectic—metropolitan art stardom against hermetic West Coast sincerity. It’s a tension we’ll follow through the movement of the poem, which cuts vertiginously between the southwest of the poet’s upbringing and the New York of his present.

The poem opens with the narrator rereading, and working through, a decade-old poem whose text enters that of the verse we are reading via quotation marks. It’s another mark of confidence that the poet risks incorporating old, frequently purple, passages with the clear understanding that there will be a contrast between this juvenilia and the contemporary work. And there is. Kruis’s poetry is marked not only by verve but by a vivid clarity of image which has few, if any, equals among his contemporaries. Alice Notley’s blurb draws attention to the verse of Schuyler, which is absolutely right; the phanopoeia pops, and any poet could learn from it.

One moment of weakness is the author’s decision to refer to people by initial letters in the poems (as in, “this sonata- / form dub-step trance / piece J composed”). It’s an attempt to deal with the question of the proper name in poetry, but readers can’t help but long to hear what Kruis’s fine ear would do with the prosody of actual names (as in O’Hara’s “Joe is restless and so am I,” or Berrigan’s “Dear Chris, hello”). This is a very minor quibble of curiosity, however, with what is by and large an astoundingly accomplished first book.

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Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985
Edited by Andrew Nette
and Iain McIntyre
PM Press ($29.95)

by Paul Buhle

About a half century ago, my grand aspiration was to become a Science Fiction writer. It wasn’t a bad idea. The half-dozen or more SF or SF/Fantasy magazines on the newsstands published hundreds of stories each month, and the paperback market was similarly booming. Some of the 35-cent paperbacks tackled serious subjects, like the commercialization of culture; the more avant-garde writers offered literary polemics against racism and war. And although I couldn’t see it, the revolution had only begun. PM Press’s recent anthology Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985 covers the field’s early years with wonderfully sweeping essays and studies of some of the most illuminating authors and editors of the field in transformation.

From a radical point of view, the “Futurion Club” of Manhattan, formed during the Popular Front years of the later 1930s, offered a beginning. Comprised of mostly Jewish writers, it included Isaac Asimov (the only genre writer, along with Rod Serling, to have a whole magazine eventually named after him), but also figures like Donald Wohlheim, destined to become more influential as editors of SF magazines and of their own paperback imprint series, and Judith Merrill, the feminist writer who anticipated so much to come.

One of the astounding and revealing documents in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds is a reprint of two facing pages of writers for and against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. This literal face-off is useful because it stands for so much more. The audience for magazines and books, until at least 1960, was considered either juvenile or juvenile in mind, a similar assumption to that made about comic art and similarly maddening to more mature creators and fans. Bug Eyed Monster traditions had been nibbled at the edges by writers who managed to suggest that encounters with aliens might be a lot more complicated, or that civilization after a widely anticipated nuclear war might not rebuild by the same rules, or that the State—even the U.S. State—might be dangerous for individual liberty. That last point cut across Left and Right, reaching a rapidly expanding fan base and offering promise to a relative youngster like Philip K. Dick, an anti-authoritarian who could seemingly be Left and Right at the same time.

But another issue had more potency for the Science Fiction of the 1960s and after: Sex. One much-remembered writer, Jose Farmer, had a global impact on SF authors with his daring plots and suggestive details. Meanwhile, the judicial repeal of censorship laws offered cash galore for the small-scale producer as well as for the more daring movie corporations. One of the most intriguing essays in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds reveals the creation of soft-core lines of SF books with circulations in the tens and hundreds of thousands. This was a boon to enterprising authors who could grind out lascivious wordage at record speed, including prolific gay authors such as Larry Townsend. Older readers who shunned sexual material expressed shock at even muted effects on the mainstream writers and magazines. Those older readers counted for less and less as the counterculture advanced, however.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds is unique in presenting an extended discussion, through several topical essays and extended comments in many others, of race, gender, sexuality, and ecological subjects in these works. The role of Harlan Ellison, editor of the totemic 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions and its successors, was surely crucial as he opened doors and made things possible. So did the only major figure of this volume still living and writing today, Black and gay author Samuel R. Delaney. Also mentioned for her contributions is the late Ursula Le Guin, whose feminist and antiwar breakthroughs made her internationally famous, and not only to SF readers. Similarly, Octavia Butler, whose untimely death at 62 deprived readers and the field of a Black, feminist writer who had already made large waves, is noted for her anticipation of Afro-Futurism.

But there is much, much more here. Consider the curious life and role of Alice Sheldon, married to a CIA chief but in her own mind an unrealized lesbian with a powerful imagination. She wrote as “James Tiptree, Jr” for more than thirty years and began to win awards in the 1970s for stories that mixed sex, drugs, and space exploration. Sometimes in her fiction, thanks to scientific advancements, men become entirely unnecessary—a far cry from the Space Westerns of yesteryear or Star Wars et al.

Considered also in the anthology is the changing shape of prose. Fans of the fantastic who welcomed a break from the old staidness of form drew back from literary experimentalism in the genre, which first began in the UK through the magazine New Worlds. Plots could disappear into prosy explorations of what language might do in untrammeled worlds. Old time editors complained, this time with a certain validity, that the result was fascinating, but perhaps not actually Science Fiction. Mainstream writers like Joanna Russ, a feminist notable, seemed at times closer to James Joyce than to Ursula Le Guin.

The SF field at large was transformed again a few years later by blockbuster films, as if nothing could compete with the themes of the big screen. The pulps had by that time long since dwindled, anticipating the near-total collapse to come. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds happily stays away from post-1985 developments but gives us ample hints of the better energies and directions of the field’s evolutions and a clear vision of where it came from in closely viewed literary terms.

There are many more treats to be found in this volume. The essays in this collection may lead readers to consider African American author Joseph Denis Jackson’s forgotten 1967 “insurrectionist” novel, The Black Commandos, or Hank Lopez, the leading Latino spirit in SF. Likewise, readers might be drawn to reconsider household names, such as leftwing feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy and her 1976 classic Woman on the Edge of Time.

Le Guin and the best of the others elaborated the simple truth that as things go on changing drastically, present-day organized society appears in no way ready to understand them, but if they can be seen to take place on a different planet and/or in the future, they might be understood more usefully. Basic human understandings of everything from gender to economics need to change, to be seen differently, or society will surely perish.

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Lena Andersson
translated by Sarah Death
Other Press ($16.99)

by Julian Anderson

In her fiction, Swedish journalist Lena Andersson repeatedly takes on difficult love. Her first novel, Willful Disregard, (translated by Sarah Death, Other Press, 2016) charted the travails of Ester Nilsson, intellectual and poet, in the throes of sudden, irrational passion. As Esther obsessively analyzes every interaction with the man she adores, the reader grows increasingly uncomfortable, seeing clearly what Ester cannot: that she should stop hoping for any reciprocity. Ester’s next, also ill-conceived passion was then documented in Acts of Infidelity (translated by Saskia Vogel, Other Press, 2019), a novel equally unrelenting and intense. Now, with Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home, Andersson uses her powers of analysis to dissect a more systemic love gone wrong: a middle-aged Swede’s disenchantment with his country as it shifts away from the ideals of Social Democracy.

Born the same year that the Social Democratic Party came to power, Ragnar Johansson has grown up in what he and many might consider a golden age for Sweden. The government’s vision of a middle way between capitalism and socialism, a welfare state known as “folkhemet,” or “the people’s home,” succeeded in lifting the country out of poverty and achieving a smoothly run, state-managed system that provided all citizens with fair and equitable access to housing, education, healthcare, child-care, and more. The system placed a premium on honesty, utility, group effort, mass production, and egalitarianism.

All these are values firmly aligned with Ragnar Johansson’s own personal belief system. The novel begins with his adult daughter Elsa putting him forward for an academic study of folkhemet. When he is rejected as “too ordinary,” he feels pleasantly triumphant; to be a cog in a wheel that runs smoothly for the benefit of all has been his life’s goal. Yet his victory is hollow: He is already aware of being marginalized and irrelevant to the new Sweden developing around him, one that is increasingly international and individualistic in its orientation.

A highly rational man who has had a career teaching woodworking at a high school, Ragnar has always felt at one with his country, admiring its polished bureaucracy as much as his own well-made wooden drawers. As his harmony with the party and its tenets is examined, though, a tone of wistfulness emerges. We learn how Ragnar’s own acceptance of egalitarianism has negated personal ambition, and in this we feel some of the shadows that darken the narrative.

As the Social Democrats’ power erodes, we see Ragnar also confronting changes among his fellow citizens’ viewpoints. There is a breakdown, it seems to him, in the collective spirit, an unnecessary admiration of other cultures, a new, unhelpful sensitivity to the individual. With each interaction that runs counter to his rational view of Swedish social good, he experiences a disorientation and sense of betrayal. These encounters and shifts are subtle, and the dramatic stakes of the novel can seem low. Ragnar is surprised to discover that colleagues, for instance, do not share his sense that immigrants must be distributed throughout the country to avoid their culture penetrating and disturbing Sweden’s status quo. He is shocked to learn that this rational solution might be viewed as xenophobic. Similarly, he is baffled when parents at his daughter Elsa’s ski club reject his mathematically calculated schedule of fair reimbursement for car-rides, preferring their own private, un-systematized transactions.

In depicting Ragnar’s rigid, collective mindset, Andersson succeeds in striking a fine balance between sympathy and satire. While she has clearly organized the novel so that Ragnar and his family can stand in for the “People’s Home” mindset, she never loses her investment in them as real people. Ragnar may be a totem, but we still feel his hopes and sorrows. Andersson depicts his youthful reunion with his girlfriend, for instance, with a charming emphasis on the practical: “It was raining steadily in Stockholm that weekend, but he did not take an umbrella with him as he rushed off to her one-room flat with its cupboard kitchen. All his clothes were left to dry on the radiator for the remainder of the day.”

Cleverly, the generations of the Johansson family represent the very different evolutions of Sweden’s recent history. Ragnar’s mother Svea embodies the old, rural ways governed by frugality; her name itself is the traditional name for Sweden, evoking nineteenth-century flag-waving. Andersson playfully juxtaposes, for instance, Svea’s self-sufficient fruit canning against Ragnar’s preference for the country’s modern, mechanized food production and its factory bread. Ragnar’s children, Erik and Elsa, represent the new, post-folkhemet Sweden, which he disparages. He feels they take for granted the material comforts that the country offers them and follow paths that are trivial and of little value to society.

The novel’s most dramatic section involves Ragnar’s conflict with Elsa. Having supported and promoted her early talent for skiing, he is outraged when he witnesses her own commitment gradually supplanted by an interest in movies and books. Ragnar disparages this as wasteful and bourgeois. As time passes and Elsa steers toward intellectual triumphs, Ragnar comes unmoored. The people who have supported and bought in the smooth-running system that defines Ragnar, have become, Andersson suggests, sadly irrelevant.

Political satire usually works on a more dramatic canvas, and a critical post-mortem of something as close to utopia as “folkhemet” presents a tricky premise, but Son of Svea succeeds through its clarity, precision, sympathy, and charm. Examining Ragnar as he grapples with his beloved country that is slipping away, Andersson’s intellectual acuity drives this quiet narrative with both humor and heartbreak.

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Sarah Kornfeld
Integral Publishers ($22.99)

by Ekua Agha

A contemporary reading into the interconnections between post-revolution Romania and the post-Trump U.S., Sarah Kornfeld’s The True is an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world. In this ambitious book, the author explores how she gets lost in a cultural dreamscape, a nightmare we all now share.

Beautifully fusing narrative nonfiction, true crime, memoir, and autofiction, The True presents Kornfeld’s search for why her former lover, famed Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie, died suddenly; the book deftly invokes the world of theater by bringing the ghosts of theater artists into the haunting Kornfeld experiences. Yet The True also engages the complexities of a Romanian society that has lost its bearings after the revolt against communism failed to develop into a mass social revolution. Peopled by a host of ghostly/ghastly characters—Anya and Peter, for example, who lure the author to Romania with tales of foul play surrounding Darie's death—the book focuses on those who have lost their cultural identity and seem to have no choice but to reinvent themselves. Anya reveals this mindset to a bemused Kornfeld: “I mean, I can get pretty crazy, pretty serious when I need to. . . . I can make anything possible.”

While Kornfeld’s true-crime investigation leads her to discover a con that is a compelling reflection of the "great con" of our post-truth world, The True also offers readers a way to look at the normalization of post-colonial fascism, which African writers have been describing for decades—providing yet another lens through which to read this book. African philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe refers to this proximity to the oppressor as “the mutual zombification of the ruler and the ruled.” Using Mbembe’s concept of conviviality, it is possible to comprehend, for instance, the horror Kornfeld feels while being taken on a tour of the dictator Ceausescu’s house upon arriving in Bucharest. In the end we are left without closure on Darie’s death, but with a full view of global dislocation and manic identity complexes.

Employing a prismatic narrative, The True may be a new form of “post-post-truth literature,” offering a new lens by which we can explore not only our shared alienation, but our global connection.

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Riad Saleh Hussein
Translated by Saleh Razzouk and Philip Terman
Bitter Oleander Press ($21)

by John Bradley

It sounds like something from a novel: A young deaf poet, influenced by the Beats and Surrealists, creates provocative experimental work, draws the attention of governmental authorities, and dies after imprisonment and torture at the age of twenty-eight. But this brief summary accurately describes the life of Syrian poet Riad Saleh Hussein (1954-1982), a remarkable writer with an expansive spirit whose work is now available in English translation.

While Surrealism influenced artists around the world with its call to delve into the unconscious, it’s still surprising to see how powerful an influence it had on Hussein. In “Wishes” he writes:

I want to possess a pistol
To aim at the wolves
I want to be a wolf and swallow the shooter
I want to hide in a flower
Because I fear the killer
I want the killer dead
Whenever he sees roses

The influence of André Breton and César Vallejo can be felt here, with the poem’s exploration of hidden and paradoxical desires. Yet Hussein makes surrealism somehow personal, something only he could envision, as seen in the closing of the same poem:

I want to make every word a tree, a loaf of bread or a kiss
I wish for whoever does not love trees
Bread
And kisses
To stop talking

The poem “167 CM” displays even better Hussein’s ability to bring an earthbound specificity to his wildly imaginative lines. This poem, in fact, sounds a bit like a surrealist resume or personal ad:

I am a handsome man
I am 167 cm tall
I am a broken tractor
Searching for work for three months and three coffins
I sat in the cafe to drink tea mixed with hairpins

Playfully bragging at first about his good looks, Hussein soon moves to unusual imagery. He wants to be useful by becoming a tractor, but he’s a “broken tractor,” unable to be of use. He confesses he’s unemployed, a revelation which brings images of death: one death for each month of unemployment.

Hussein’s fearlessness to speak about social issues in his poetry frightened the authorities. Lines like these, from “War, War, War,” show his courage:

And I see beneath the cap of the general
A project of war against roses
A project of war against the river
A project of war against the poor

Arrested by the authorities, Hussein was released from prison in less than a week, but the damage was done; already in bad health, he died months later. Thanks to the flowing translations of Saleh Razzouk and Philip Terman, however, we can now witness how talented he was at such a young age.

While this selection of Hussein’s poetry amply displays his poetic skills, it’s odd that no prose poems are included, especially since the introduction and the cover copy both emphasize how Hussein “continued to revolutionize prose poetry in Arabic.” Perhaps the translators will offer a second collection that focuses on these prose poems. Until then, we have Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling, filled with transformative poems, an important window into a transformative voice.

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Paul Theroux
Mariner Books ($28)

by Daniel Picker

For readers seeking merely a tropical island paradise ripe with Aloha spirit, renowned novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux presents much more than they might expect, bringing to light what many haoles might prefer never to know, witness, or experience. Following up two recent collections of essays, Fresh Air Fiend and Figures in a Landscape, Theroux brings a different set of writing powers to bear in Under the Wave at Waimea, a fictional examination of his part-time home of Hawaii.

Echoes of Theroux’s essays, which serve as ports of both arrival and departure, offering a local’s direct experience of Hawaii and the Pacific, appear in his new novel. In Fresh Air Fiend, for example, Theroux mentions “a pueo, a Hawaiian owl, which is a subspecies of the short-eared owl”; in Under the Wave at Waimea the same owl reappears as a sign of “good luck.” In both his essays and his fiction, Theroux deftly clarifies the various microclimates of Oahu and elucidates that the Hawaii locals inhabit remains apart from the one experienced by most tourists. It’s thus a pleasure to have Joe Sharkey, Theroux’s surfer protagonist, visit many of the same locales and often express the same points of view that readers have seen in the essays.

Theroux describes Sharkey, a now-retired competitive big-wave surfer, in a thorough backstory where he, like Theroux, remains a bit of an outsider in Hawaii. Sharkey is a survivor under adverse circumstances, remarkably thriving like the flora and fauna of Christmas Island, Hawaii’s nearest island neighbor in the Pacific, which has survived over twenty-five hydrogen bomb tests. In both his fiction and nonfiction Theroux observes the detritus of the U.S. military and comments on the destructive actions of the British and American empires. Decaying World War II equipment abandoned by the U.S. military litters the island, and both Theroux and Sharkey comment on the environmental damage and criticize the empire builders.

In this book readers may also learn much about contemporary Hawaiian culture, which includes remnants of the Indigenous Polynesian culture alongside the myriad groups which have followed: British and Anglo-American missionaries and capitalists, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese emigrants, and the American military, all of which have left their footprints on the Hawaiian archipelago. At times, Sharkey expresses exasperation with the contemporary changes to his island home, bemoaning how Hawaii’s native culture has become overwhelmed and subsumed by 20th- and 21st-century tourism and consumer culture. Fortunately, Theroux’s prose in Under the Wave at Waimea eschews the tone of the essayist demonstrating erudition, and instead tells a story—one that may seem simple, but that remains a complicated tale of both age and fate.

Under the Wave at Waimea begins with an unfortunate accident which results in the death of an unknown, houseless man, a man riding the wrong way on a dark road in a rainstorm while under the influence. Sharkey, too, though less obviously, is under the influence when the accident occurs, but with his fame he sidesteps the negative legal repercussions from the accident. After the accident, however, his life begins to spiral downward into a serious funk—he suffers under a “curse,” it appears, and begins losing vitality and youthfulness. Olive, Sharkey’s girlfriend, challenges him with a sort of face-the-music temperament, which grates at times. But Olive also serves as a spur, and her voice seems not unlike Theroux’s hectoring voice in some of his travel essays. She, as an English nurse, remains an outsider too, like both Sharkey and Theroux. The author presents her well, though he delineates Joe Sharkey more fully.

Shortly after this opening, Theroux moves to the long journey through Sharkey’s backstory, beginning with his early years as the son of a U.S. military hero. Sharkey is kicked out of the prestigious Punahou School for partaking in the ubiquitous pakololo, landing in the public Roosevelt High School where his outsider status helps fuel unrelenting taunts. The descriptions of Sharkey’s youth reveal one of the strengths of Under the Wave at Waimea: a vividly rendered cast of minor characters, including Sharkey’s high school tormentors. These characters, who hold resentments toward haoles, also inspire young Sharkey, as an adolescent, to find solace on the waves. Theroux’s novel is rife with Hawaiian language and slang, successfully fleshing out the characters and society; Theroux, with his linguistic gifts, never sounds false or gratuitous.

As Sharkey’s backstory nears completeness, he remains the heart of the novel, and his journey elucidates not only the culture of Hawaii and of surfing, but also the dichotomy between Polynesian and Anglo-American cultures. Theroux presents criticism of American culture in extended glimpses, while the novel also brings to light a bitter view of the displaced and the left behind, as Olive and Sharkey search for the identity of the man who died. “Kapu,” a community of people without housing, paint on a sign at the entrance to their camp: “Go away!”

Sharkey may appear immature to some readers, and Olive even calls him a “misanthrope” as he continues to reject American culture and values. When Hunter S. Thompson makes an extended cameo in the book, however, he appears even more immature than Sharkey; he acts childish and needy and is addled by health and drug issues, though he holds to his penchant for firearms. He serves as a friend to Sharkey, an admirer of his surfing prowess whose books Sharkey has never read. Like Thompson, Sharkey expresses apprehension with the society within which he resides yet remains apart from, and for both Theroux and for Sharkey, it appears American culture has gone awry.

Theroux, in his eighth decade, remains most eloquent and most subtle in those small moments when he describes the bewitching natural beauty of his adopted home:

The rain had stopped; the land had swelled with sunlight, alive now, limpid, dripping in the soft, late-afternoon glow, a fattening rainbow arched in the cloudless sky over Hale’iwa, its luminous stripes textured like tissue, or threadbare cloth spun across the town. Olive was at the wheel, Sharkey fixed in one of his silences, as they drove along the soaked and blackened bypass road, the big trees sparkling, their boughs still wet, the tall grass sodden, glistening from the purification of the downpour, the day washed clean.

Yet it appears to some that Theroux pulls off the overall journey of Under the Wave at Waimea as well, just as a surfer might emerge from a tube into clear daylight on the shore. Slipping out from under the wave brings a moment of clarity, exhilaration, and triumph for the surfer, perhaps even relief and awe to the observer too. Though some might find the conclusion too neatly wrapped up, the character growth too perfectly tied in, this emergence melds with Sharkey’s character, as the story’s surfer hero finds a modicum of healing near the close. Sharkey's greatest rides are unobserved, but not all readers will accept or be convinced by Theroux's late turns. Nevertheless, the ride is surely remarkable.

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