Tag Archives: Winter 2024

I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books ($24.95)

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems’ speaker dreams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness.

The collection is inwardly panoramic. As the speaker, “a light in the form of a girl,” travels through courthouses, airports, and a menswear outlet in Hollywood, we are beamed into the neglected—and sometimes purposefully avoided—corners of her mind.

The opening poem, “Airport Ritual,” offers a science fiction twist on the anxiety-riddled experience of going through airport security while transgender. An epigraph stating “The following is a true story” conjures the paradox of security scans: Your body is intimately scrutinized while you’re told it’s not personal. “An anomaly is spotted. A woman is taken aside.” Then a TSA agent informs the traveler that she will need to touch her. When the traveler shares that she is transgender—“unsure if she means this an a warning or an apology”—the poem shifts register into absurdism: “the thing in her pants that set the sensors off suddenly expands” and keeps expanding to fill the terminal, the airport, the city of Irvine, until the military is called in.

By invoking facticity before bursting into the mythic, Espinoza teases and subverts cisgender expectations of what a trans narrative should do. The poem’s epigraph signals a common complaint made by trans people about trans literature: As transgender writers gain relative prominence, often the books that sell the best are the ones that cater to a cisgender audience. Whether that means work that flattens transition into an “it gets better” narrative or work that is overly expository to the point of redundancy, it is a reality of the publishing industry: Sometimes the only way to achieve a modicum of financial success is to fit one’s work into a preexisting box, one constructed by the institutions of cisness.

Reading “Airport Ritual” as a trans person, I feel deeply the truthfulness of this story—the dread and anxiety that arise from this kind of interface with the state. In the poem, while pundits discuss the benefits of forcing trans people into detention facilities,

            The woman at the center of the plasma or whatever-the-fuck-it-is
            just wants someone to say one thing to her
            that doesn’t feel like kite string wrapped around an open wound
            in a warm, strong wind. But it doesn’t happen.

Through this play between literalness and absurdism, Espinoza flips the cultural script that says trans people are delusional and transition is science fiction, instead casting the cisgender state as the true site of hysteria. While cis society turns up the dial on fascism, the woman at the center of the poem is simply trying to live.

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it portrays transition as transcendently positive at the same time as it is traumatizing. A common trope of trans cultural production is the idea of transition as linear. In this formation, one’s life before transition is rife with confusion and anguish but through transitioning the pain of daily existence is relieved; one becomes stronger, life becomes better. This is not untrue, and Espinoza’s work highlights how transitioning is a way of getting off autopilot and pursuing embodiment on one’s own terms. In “The Present,” Espinoza describes the dissociation of closeted life:

For a lifetime, sensation was
a single thread
in my wardrobe of pain.

It is a metaphor more easily grasped in the reverse: pain as a single thread in the wardrobe of sensation. Through this inversion Espinoza deftly shows how dysphoria can warp and narrow experience and lead to self-alienation. As the poems in this collection express, to transition is to leap into feeling more.

Yet as Espinoza’s speaker becomes more connected to herself and to her life, she also registers the pain that has surrounded her—she can no longer dissociate through it. Espinoza’s attention to the family as a site of violence is particularly affecting. In “To My Parents,” she writes, “I was the mantle above the fireplace, the one that held our portrait. // I was the frame around the photograph, but not the photograph.” Being a closeted trans person can feel like being the one holding it all together while living as a background fixture in your own life. The speaker’s religiously inflected childhood trauma, her youth spent hiding and self-numbing, shape the psychic landscape years after she has left home, come out, and her mother’s gotten a “trans ally tattoo.” In this way, transition can make life feel harder when you are experiencing the pain your mind has protected you from—as Espinoza writes in the resplendent “Return to Light,” trauma “reminds you to forget its presence.” I Don’t Want to Be Understood posits that through this remembering and daily survival, we can do more than find ourselves: If we are lucky, we can create ourselves.

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Writing Dust: An Interview with Summer Brenner

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

After meeting her grandfather for only the second time when she was in college, Summer Brenner thought, “Maybe connecting the pieces of my family has always been my duty.” Her new memoir, Dust (Spuyten Duyvil, $20), draws together the disparate branches of her family, which include her brilliant father, her prickly mother, and her little brother, David, ultimately delivering a troubling saga of frustrated ambitions, intra-family feuding, white privilege punctuated by anti-Semitism, and closely guarded secrets. Some secrets revolve around her father, others engulf her mother, but most of all, they separate Brenner from her brother, who comes to provide one of the most honest and affecting relationships of her life.

Brenner was raised in Georgia but has lived in the Bay Area for most of her adult life. She is the author of sixteen previous books, among them poetry collections, crime novels, and books for young adults, and her work has been included in numerous anthologies, from Rising Tides: 20th Century Women Poets (Simon & Schuster, 1973) to 2020’s Berkeley Noir (Akashic Books). In the following interview, she discusses the many strands that make up Dust.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge: Portrayals of Jewish Americans are often replete with stereotypes when it comes to mothers and fathers—the larger-than-life Jewish mother, the brilliant but ineffectual father. Did you consider the problem of stereotyping when writing Dust—and if so, did you feel a responsibility to overcome it?

Summer Brenner: I didn’t consciously try to avoid anything, but maybe it can be explained this way: Stereotypes and archetypes are typically reductive, with recognizable signs that let a reader automatically draw predictable, foregone, even formulaic conclusions. I tried to draw fully individual portraits with minimal but very precise brushstrokes.

Although my parents didn’t avoid their Jewish identity, it wasn’t foremost for either of them. I think the day after my father’s Bar Mitzvah (in a small mountain town in western North Carolina) he declared himself an atheist, and the next year at fourteen he left home for university. My mother’s father’s eventual wealth paved his daughters’ way for assimilation. Of the families started by the three sisters, mine was the least observant. Jewish holidays were celebrated at either my grandmother’s or aunt’s home. Lighting Hanukkah candles, a few words of Yiddish, membership at a Jewish country club, and Jewish summer camps were the most prominent Jewish markers of my youth.

JRL: How do reading and writing poetry influence your prose?

SB: For my first decade as a writer, I wrote only poetry; my first books were poetry collections. When I turned to prose, I thought I’d lost the poet inside me, but I’m relieved to say she has been resuscitated. Dust was very much written with poetry in mind: its rhythms and repetitions; its simple, almost childlike language; its short sentences, as if I’m reporting in real time (placing myself in the past as if I didn’t yet know what would happen). I like to say that I wrote looking forward, not back, which feels like a poetic device.

JRL: Was the childlike voice a conscious decision or something you discovered while writing Dust?

SB: Before I start a book, I usually find that I’m waiting for the particular voice of the project to emerge. I don’t know how or when it will happen. For example, for my book I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex (PM Press, 2009), which I’d call a very raw and feminist work, I had to wait four years—until I got so furious over the bombing of Iraq that I could transfer that fury into the voice of Anya, a young woman trafficked to the U. S. from Russia.

Once the voice begins to speak, that’s the beginning, and I can hold onto that voice until the book is finished. Some writers say they “found” their voice, or they can be “identified” by their voice; my writing doesn’t work like that. With Dust, the voice began to speak in the cemetery, in the first chapter. From there it wound back to my earliest memory of David: the day he came home from the hospital. And so on.

JRL: Why did you write the story of Dust as a memoir?

SB: Writing Dust as a memoir was a way to honor my brother after his death. As a fictional character, he could have appeared sensationalized, or derivative (I’m thinking of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury). A memoir allowed me to scrupulously tell his story. It also let me hold onto him and his memory without fabrication or elaboration. I consider this book more his than mine.

I have used family members as characters in my fiction, however, most notably in a collection of short stories, My Life in Clothes (Red Hen Press, 2010). My first novel (which remains unpublished) transpired over a week in the life of a Jewish family in Atlanta, each chapter recounting a day leading up to the bombing of the family’s temple. I’m not sure if it’s redeemable; the whole ended up less than the parts. In the early part of this century, I attempted a long family saga with versions of the stories in this memoir and fictional stories as well. Its working title is Leaving the Atlantic—when you’re raised on the eastern side of the continent, especially in the southern quadrant, it can feel like there’s a stranglehold on your identity.

JRL: Toward the end of Dust, you learn the secret of your brother’s disability—his official diagnosis. Had you known earlier—had anyone known earlier—would his situation have been any different? Would you have better understood your mother’s behavior? Or was keeping it a secret the best that could be done for him?

SB: David was born in 1949. As a boy, he went to a psychiatrist. I don’t know what happened there, but both my mother and I eventually concluded that David was probably autistic. However, in those years, autism was not a common diagnosis. Even in the medical reports from Mass General, the doctors don’t mention the possibility. From the beginning, no one was forthright about David’s actual condition—not to each other or to me. There were ongoing, dueling realities between experience and silence. I can’t be sure, but I believe that if David’s own needs and desires had been acknowledged and respected, his situation would have been different. He could have had a simple job and lived on his own. But that would have required honestly acknowledging his limitations. Our mother had fierce ambitions for him that included a kind of revenge on the world on his behalf. She never found a way to accept him for himself, which led to terrible pressures on him and delusional behavior for her. As for understanding my mother’s behavior, she sadly endured both guilt and blame, first for his developmental disabilities and then for his full-blown mental illness. It’s also true that in those years, mothers were especially blamed.

JRL: Could you write another memoir? Or perhaps I should ask, will you? You seem to have a wealth of other material.

SB: I do, and much of it exists already in manuscripts. Recently, I started a series called “Do You Ever Think of Me?”: profiles of people in my life, written in second person. I have a few dozen of them that straddle memoir and fiction. In 2022 several were published by above/ground press in Ottawa as a chapbook, Do You Ever Think of Me?

JRL: Do you feel that Dust is a decidedly Jewish memoir, a decidedly Southern memoir, or a combination of the two? Or were you trying to avoid those kinds of labels?

SB: It’s mostly a memoir about mental illness in a family that happens to be Southern and Jewish. However, those two elements are not superfluous. The combination of Southern and Jewish is still a curiosity to many. Because my family wasn’t observant, and their politics didn’t fit into the Dixie paradigm, and we were living in an apartheid state, and our synagogue was bombed, many seminal events were particular to those times in that place.

JRL: How much of Dust—or your life, if you’d like to take all of that in—do you consider a story about feminism? You don’t set out to become a caregiver, or to fulfill any feminine or feminist role, and yet where you wind up represents a kind of combination of the two.

SB: My mother was very independent—not in the least maternal or domestic. She didn’t cook or clean; she didn’t work. She loved clothes (I do, too), but she didn’t spend all her time shopping. Although she played cards (I do, too, mostly with my grandkids), she wasn’t a country club type. She didn’t participate in PTA. She didn’t even give us birthday parties. After my father died, she devoted herself to painting, and she became a truly wonderful and original artist (there’s a link on my website to her paintings). So already I had an unusual role model.

I went to my first Women’s Lib conference in the late ¢60s, and I loved listening to the brilliant, brave women I heard there. Most (all?) of my romantic relationships struggled with men’s expectations of me as cook, homemaker, sex kitten, wife. At a certain point I preferred to be a single mother, although it came with great financial hardship. I also preferred having drudge jobs rather than a career path. I was anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist. And I loved being a mother, which compensated a lot for my own childhood. I think I was an ardent caregiver.

I am married now, and I’ve been married before. And while I’m not unkind, I’m also not very wifely. My husband and I live separately on the same lot and usually see each other in the evening after dinner. I feel extremely fortunate to have been born into a feminist worldview. While this book reveals certain elements of my development as an adult, other elements—entire decades of romance, motherhood, and employment—are absent. Also, I’m extremely political, an activist, and that’s not so apparent either. If you came to visit me now, you’d see the trappings of a comfortable life, because twenty years ago, I became a homeowner: After years of tramping around with my kids, living in cheap apartments and driving broken-down cars, I have a lovely house. Again, the fortune of circumstances.

JRL: Considering what’s happening now, it might surprise some readers that Dust contains no mention of Israel. Is there a reason for this? Were your parents not that invested or interested in Israel?

SB: The Holocaust and the atomic bomb were shadows over my generation. My father, however, was anti-Zionist. He was “anti” much of the status quo and more belligerently vocal about his opinions than his peers. I participated in Sunday school and was confirmed; there were no Bar/Bat Mitzvahs at our temple. I recall collecting small change for purchasing trees in Israel. Exodus, Gentleman’s Agreement, and The Diary of Anne Frank were my literary introductions to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Israel. As my political understanding evolved, I had a vague sense that the horrors of the Holocaust had justified terrible things in the formation of the state of Israel. I think my father probably thought deeply about these things. But he died when I was only nineteen, and I never had a chance to talk with him. As I’ve aged, the shadows of the Holocaust and nuclear war have only darkened.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Tap Dancing on Everest

A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman
Falcon Guides ($22.95)

by Sandra Hager Eliason

Mimi Zieman wasn’t sure why she stuffed her dancing shoes into the bag she was packing for her trip to Mount Everest, but when the team was stuck at base camp with another delay, she pulled the shoes out to do dance routines on a flat rock, lifting everyone’s spirits. Zieman’s memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest, describes her time as a medic for a team attempting to scale the east face of Everest without oxygen or sherpa support. The book chronicles the dangerous expedition, beginning as the support teams’ binoculars search the heights for any trace of missing climbers and ending with a harrowing trip down the mountain; between, Zieman explains how her life path led her to this adventure.

Dance gave Zieman strength in her early life, and her job as a field researcher in the Rocky Mountains later drew her to continue exploring the mountains. She booked a flight to Nepal the day she was accepted to medical school. Zieman knew it normally took years to get a climbing permit—she would be a doctor by then—but when the expedition leader obtained one earlier than expected, she got permission to leave in the middle of her medical training, with the intent to conduct a research project on high altitude medicine (which she studied while also completing her regular medical school curriculum).

Nature lovers will appreciate Zieman’s vivid descriptions of scenery:

As spectators, we watched the natural elements sing and dance in a dramatic showcase. . . . Act One was the changing cones and shafts of sunrise, the lifting veil of night revealing pink and orange and yellow spotlights. Act Two was the main act of the day . . . showering us with the brightness of whites . . . until the swift fall of shadows enveloped us in the chill of twilight. . . .
Act Three, the finale, shined with the twinkle and swoosh of star and moon. . . . the waning sun spraying golden on the peaks, the white caps shimmering under a final dust of blue before black.

As the expedition encounters delay after delay, Zieman expertly conveys the climbers’ frustration and urgency. Zieman also offers detailed insight into the Everest expedition process—needed equipment, support, food, and the creation of camps set up at increasing altitudes to support the climbers.

The only woman on her trip, Zieman describes the discomfort of being around so much testosterone-fueled energy, but she does not wallow: When a mountain climber brags “I know I can make the top . . . I’m going to come back. Plan my own Everest expedition,” she blurts, “Well, if you need a doctor for your next expedition, call me.”

Overall, Tap Dancing on Everest is an enjoyable memoir with something to offer readers of travel, nature, medicine, or science writing—as well as anyone who appreciates a compelling, real-life adventure tale.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Rent Collectors

Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA

Jesse Katz
Astra House ($28)

by Nic Cavell

A phenomenal work of sociology and anthropology, Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors focuses on Giovanni Macedo, who botched a gang hit which resulted in the death of an infant and called down a hit on himself that was itself botched. Macedo, who was eighteen years old when he committed the crime, became the center of a nationwide manhunt and ultimately turned himself in, then assisted local and federal cases against the Columbia Lil Cycos. Many words in The Rent Collectors are devoted to the machinations of the gang’s higher-ups whose orders Macedo was assigned to carry out. But though Macedo’s narrative is harrowing and Katz’s presentation of it is powerfully critical, this book works its strongest magic in the evocation of the undocumented lives of immigrants in MacArthur Park, who repurpose the neighborhood into a vibrant site of street vending even as they are shaken down by both a police force empowered to levy exorbitant fines and the Columbia Lil Cycos, who charge for vending on their turf—two sets of “rent collectors.”

Katz first documented MacArthur Park and its vendors for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. When his son left for college in 2011, Katz moved to the neighborhood and became further fascinated by the local economy. In this book, he has excavated the lineage of the park, describing changes in storefront businesses and the make-up of the mostly undocumented vendors who have used the public space across generations. Here is USA Donuts, with its “La Vida Loca” mural by 18th Streeters artfully and ominously announcing their territory with paintings of sub-machine guns and a “snake-wrapped woman”; there is the Video Mania, where Macedo and his handlers stopped to gather their wits just before embarking on their crime. We meet old stalwarts of the neighborhood such as the Matiases, whose daughter Shorty walks the line between friendship and informant with both police and gang members, eventually becoming a key witness for the District Attorney’s office; we also meet newcomers like Francisco Clemente, an undocumented worker who began vending in the evenings as a side hustle from his day job operating an auto repair shop. Clemente arrived in 2007 after the Columbia Lil Cycos had instituted a tax on all vendors on their turf, but he chafed against their authority and fought a mostly solitary battle against the extortion along with two women: Jessica Guzman, a fellow vendor he began a relationship with, and Daniela Garcia, Jessica’s friend who was pregnant by another man and for whom Clemente felt responsible.

And of course there is Macedo, who we learn is a miracle—he survived being throttled with a rope and tossed off a cliff along a hazardous roadway in Mexico. Despite his cooperation with authorities after the fact, he acted for the Columbia Lil Cycos, and on September 15, 2007, he was given a weapon and asked to gun down Clemente for his obstinance. Clemente took four bullets—one is still embedded in his jaw and another lodged near his spine—but survived. Garcia, whose baby had only been born twenty-three days prior, grabbed the infant as soon as the shots rang out, only to discover that he was foaming blood at the mouth; there was little doubt in her mind that whoever killed him was a monster.

Macedo, who didn’t know Clemente, the two women, or the infant before he pulled the trigger, was immediately hit with remorse, although in prison he had an uphill battle imagining the full scale of his crime, knowing so little about the lives of those most closely affected. When he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to fifty-one years and four months for voluntary manslaughter and three counts of attempted murder, plus gang and gun enhancements. But in the years since the sentencing a new view of justice embracing second chances has taken hold in California: It has been shown that in offenders under the age of twenty-five, the brain and its impulse control centers are not yet fully formed. As such, Macedo, who committed his crime at age eighteen, may have the opportunity to take decades off his sentence, along with around 16,000 other California inmates.

For most of MacArthur Park’s history street vending has been illegal, and with or without the gangs, sellers have been hassled by the police. When Trump was elected in 2016 and the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants turned especially venomous, there was finally political will to make immigrants’ lives easier by decriminalizing their vending. But what began as goodwill toward the undocumented community quickly became onerous; rules about how far off the street, how far away from storefronts, and how far away from streetlights and other vendors didn’t take into account crowded MacArthur Park realities. Fines were again instituted for vending in any way that deviated from the new rules, and just like before, they were of a size that would negate a significant chunk of profits, crippling the immigrants’ enterprise. Despite a wave of new Latino politicians in the city’s firmament, the undocumented community continued to be treated as a blemish on the urban landscape.

Clemente and Guzman got a break when one of the LAPD detectives who worked their case decided to sponsor Clemente for a green card, navigating the channels of an opaque legal system; the couple now have four children. Garcia slipped through the cracks and into the criminal justice system for theft and drug offenses. The shot-callers Macedo helped put behind bars are serving lengthy sentences. After surviving two RICO cases, the Columbia Lil Cycos are as strong as ever in MacArthur Park, with new personnel earning the chance to work for the Mexican Mafia, the godfathers of Latino gangs who operate from within facilities like the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. And the immigrant vendors continue to suffer slings and arrows in the shadow of government neglect and reprisal. In The Rent Collectors, Katz tells all their stories with aplomb.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Jonah and His Daughter

Ioana Pârvulescu
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Istrosbooks ($16.99)

by Rick Henry

Ioana Pârvulescu’s Jonah and His Daughter is the latest in what might be considered a genre of its own: reimagined versions of works featuring women in the Old Testament. Pârvulescu delivers a new spin on this, taking as her starting point one of the shortest books in the Old Testament: the fable that recounts how the prophet Jonah comes to understand that God’s compassion extends to all. Pârvulescu builds a novel from that Biblical fable, adding characters, expanding dramatic events, and humanizing the main character by exploring his faults as he works through the conflicts that build to his ultimate crisis.

She could have left it at that, and have given us a perfectly fine novel. Pârvulescu, however, gives contemporary readers a second story—that of the story itself as it evolves in its passing from grandmother and mother to daughter (each daughter hears the story twice) through nearly one hundred generations. While names and property are passed father to son, storytelling becomes the province of mothers and daughters; free to interrupt Jonah’s story at will, Pârvulescu’s women offer their revisions, comment on the function of fiction, and rehearse the matriarchal line that undermines the dominant narrative of the patriarchy. With its explicit argument for the power of storytelling, Jonah and His Daughter invites us to read this Old Testament fable as something that deepens through time.

The story of Jonah begins as Jonah suffers the charge from God: Save the city of Ninevah from its depravity; let them know how bad they are and give them forty days to repent. But in Pârvulescu’s telling, we quickly find ourselves with Jonah’s daughter, Esther. Her grandfather, who has recently died, was everything to her, and her mother, who died giving birth to her, is long gone. She is left with Jonah, who “didn’t trouble himself at all about me.”

While the story builds to the storm and Jonah’s famed encounter with the whale, and eventually details how he overcomes the world view that only the anointed can be saved by getting depraved Ninevah to repent, it is important to note that it’s Esther who initiates the enduring story of her father—despite her difficulties with him, she feels compelled to ensure his legacy. Over the succeeding centuries, and despite being officially written down for the Bible, Jonah’s story maintains its oral foundation and susceptibility to change as the women continue its telling.

Pârvulescu’s hermeneutic transformations of the tale are impressive. Dalila relates the story of Jonah to her granddaughter Phoebe, but casts doubt on details, including the actual swallowing of Jonah by the monster. This, she argues, was embroidered by storytellers over the years “so that they could fill their children with awe and see their mouths agape”; Jonah might have been in a giant fish’s mouth or under its fin, but the point of the encounter, says Dalila, is to mark the moment when Jonah “regained his power of speech.” By the time Phoebe’s great-great-granddaughter hears the story, the purpose of storytelling has changed: now it is to bring joy and use the imagination to help find clarity in the world (a form of Aristotle’s “edify and delight”).

By the time of Cervantes, the story has become a fairy tale; should there be a “gap or something unbelievable, I’ll fill it in from my imagination, because otherwise, if everything has to be given a rational explanation, what’s the good of telling stories?” By the time of De Sade, the ability to describe debaucheries with abandon perhaps suggests why God directed Jonah to go to Ninevah in the first place. Science enters the story with detailed descriptions of childbirth and anatomy. And so it goes, to the Parisian art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of Hollywood, and the age of Internet.

At that point the story of Jonah is completed, but Pârvulescu offers one final transformation in an Epilogue, situated in the twenty-first century. Here the storyteller assumes prominence and Jonah’s story becomes her story, the book we now hold: Jonah and His Daughter. Embedded in that is yet another manifesto of sorts, one ultimately resting in literature as play.

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Fiction Reviews

American Precariat

Parables of Exclusion

Edited by Zeke Caligiuri, Fong Lee, B. Batchelor, C. Fausto Cabrera, Will Anderson, Warren Bronson, David Janisch, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Mark “Red” Altenhofen, Ronald L. Greer II, Jeff Young, and Lavon Johnson
Coffee House Press ($19.95)

by Sara Dovre Wudali

The essay anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion works to “polish the world” into a better version of itself. The twelve editors are a team of incarcerated artists and writers from Minnesota who offer a unique perspective as culture bearers from society’s most hidden corner. Jennifer Bowen, who facilitated editorial meetings through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, explains in an introductory note that incarcerated populations feel societal changes deeply, though their perspectives on those changes are “invisible by design.” To make the people behind this curation effort visible, the book includes transcriptions of editorial conversations after each essay; these transcriptions crack open the process of building an anthology and clarify that the editors see their role as a quest. Who, after all, understands power and class better than those whose very freedom has been ruptured by it? Or, as editor Kennedy Gisege puts it, “In prison, we see precarity in a totally different way than maybe somebody [who has] gone to the University of Minnesota or Harvard. You know, we’ve survived. We’ve lived the experience, so we identify easily with other fellow human beings who have suffered.”

Each essay tells a personal story, and many function also as treatises or manifestos written from within what British economist Guy Standing identified as the fast-growing “precariat” class, defined by its shared exposure to risk. The editors have chosen to include texts about living in the United States from within positions of vulnerability and instability by a mix of well-known authors (Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Kao Kalia Yang, Steve Almond) and newer voices as well. The topics range across the most difficult issues we face as a nation: poverty, mental health, homelessness, climate change, immigration, racism, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Members of the precariat are, Michael Torres writes, “unsafe and (un)seen.” In his essay about surviving higher education as a Mexican American, Torres weaves a personal story of isolation and surveillance, and the editorial conversation that follows ranges across broader discussions of migration, citizenship, cultural identity, code-switching, shame, and assimilation. “White people,” editor Chris Cabrera says, “have the option to reject homogeny and to identify as simply human . . . White people get to choose the cultural conflicts with which to engage, whereas to be racialized as anything else, is to be drafted into a conflict by virtue of the color of your skin.”

Alice Paige also writes of isolation and surveillance, but from a transgender perspective: “The isolation feels like death,” she writes, and “everyone is watching me, judging how I perform femininity.” The hard-hitting tone of Paige’s lyric essay echoes the punk rock she uses to celebrate being alive: “I trade a violent home life for a violent homeless life. . . . I go across and beyond myself. I leave myself behind.” Tension builds as she and other trans friends navigate trauma, homelessness, and infuriating waits for medical care. When she learns that every forty-five seconds a queer youth commits suicide, every minute of survival becomes one to celebrate. The editorial discussion after this piece digs into rage and gender in punk rock, the politics of gender identity, and how language can be a tool to prevent suicide.

There’s a sense of a ticking clock in many of the works in this anthology; after all, as editor Zeke Caligiuri writes in his foreword, “Time, in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency.” Time is a resource continually in crisis, measured in long years of exile and marked by sudden uncontrollable changes in circumstances. TM “Redd” Warren plays expertly with chronology in his personal essay about life with a cellmate and the deliberate care they take with their creations: their baking, paintings, friendship. In Sarith Peou’s essay, “The Promised Land,” both the author and the subject of his story lost years to untreated mental illness; now prison holds them both. Lauren Markham’s essay “Can We Move Our Forests in Time to Save Them?” reveals a Hail Mary plan to avert one catastrophic outcome of the climate crisis. Kristen Collier relates how the debt her mother incurred on her behalf grows exponentially out of control; using masterful metaphors, Collier describes how it consumes her future.

The cumulative effect of these essays, each from a different slice of society, makes clear that the American precariat is enormous and its issues are enormously complex. The editors discuss the “American fallacy” of bootstrapping our way out of precarity, which additional rights should be included in the Constitution, and how and whether outrage can be shifted into action: “You wake up and you have a fucking knee on your neck. And you inherit that shit. Just like people inherit comfort.” They also discuss their own darknesses, rage, and despair, and question whether their paths to prison were inevitable—but camaraderie and hope shine into the discussions too. Many of these editors have known each other for years, and their discussions reflect mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s quirks and interests, such as when they good-naturedly clear the way during one discussion for editor David Janisch’s monologue on the three reasons trees should have rights.

From the very first pages of the foreword, Caligiuri warns the reader that American Precariat is a dangerous project: Society’s decision-makers know “the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business.” In a place made to break people down, a community built by artists and writers becomes a cultural force resisting not just the disassembly of their own humanity, but that of all American society. After all, as Janisch says in the last words of the book, “when following the news, you can get really numb to it. The news doesn’t make a difference. But this essay? All these essays . . . That is one thing that’s really cool about paying attention to the world—it’s just one big story.”

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Nonfiction Reviews

Black River

Nilanjana Roy
Pushkin Vertigo ($17.95)

by Josh Steinbauer

“What writers like Toni Morrison, and perhaps writers like me, are looking at is not who is the killer but the question of where does that rot come from?”
—Nilanjana Roy, Scroll.in Interview

The emergence of noir in the 1940s marked a particular shift of America’s outlook—the term described not only an artistic aesthetic, but the dark tone of post-war pessimism and societal nihilism toward corruption and crime. This is the tradition from which Indian author Nilanjana Roy’s new crime novel Black River flows. In Roy’s capable hands, the book transcends genre to deliver a study of grief and an affectionate portrait of friendship, but typical of noir, an undercurrent of social commentary runs deep. Roy’s decades as a columnist, journalist, editor, and cultural critic have been widely appreciated in India, and her work on religion, caste, and gender have converged to mark a particular shift of the country’s outlook.

Black River opens in a small fictional village downstream from Delhi. We spend just enough time in the tender conversations of eight-year-old Munia and her father Chand to feel the real weight of grief when the girl’s body is found dangling from a tree branch. The stage is set with the heartbroken father, the local thug, the village bigwig, and the cynical detective and his sidekick, all of whom immediately suspect the local batty homeless man. Mansoor is the first to find the child; even more incriminating, he is Muslim in a predominantly Hindu region. The rising threat of mob justice creates a ticking clock for the detective torn between easily closing the case and sensing that the half-coherent suspect is telling the truth: “His years in the police have not convinced him that there is much justice in the universe, or that it is his job to commit acts of justice. But he does not like deceit. He does not like loose ends.”

Roy leans into the hard-boiled tone and pace from the outset, but once the characters are established and the investigation has begun, the story shifts gears, rewinding the timeline to offer a portrait of Chand many years before this tragedy. As a young man, Chand eschews his father’s farm and travels to the city for a different life. Delhi would never have been called rustic, but at the very least, these are simpler times. He finds work as a butcher and lives along the Yamuna riverside with his best friend and his best friend’s wife; Khalid and Rabia are Muslim and on their own itinerant journeys, but the three of them find more common ground in the trenches of poverty than they lose over their differing religious backgrounds. We’re shown a difficult era met with friendship and communal struggle: “The music, those tunes—they bring back the old days, a time when my village did not feel the need to separate us into insiders and outsiders.”

If the flashback is played primarily for nostalgic contrast, it’s also important for showing us the origin of an enduring friendship. When we return to the present to pick up the police investigation, we return as well to Chand’s despair, and the balm for this bereavement comes in his rekindled communication with Rabia. This warmest part of the book holds space for the kind of affection and understanding that can only be traded by old friends. When Chand’s loss leads to his inability to imagine a future for himself, Rabia becomes the sage: “Maybe after some time you will know for sure if this is what you want, but at least get to the end of the first season of grieving.”

Rabia’s own story traces Muslim footprints in the shifting sands of India’s religious friction. When her son is to be married, a gang of Hindu nationalists taunt the wedding party with a banner that reads “India for True Indians.” As her family weighs options, their conversation digs at the systemic rot emboldening fundamentalists with less to gain from de-escalation or compromise. Rabia remembers the leader of this gang when he was a young reluctant student: “The thin, insecure boy who hid his uncertainties behind a screen of aggression had grown into this belligerent man.” Whether the antagonism is abated by cunning or pacification, the nationalists insist, “Some day, this side, that side won’t matter. It will all be ours.”

In general, blurbs are the hyperbole of the marketplace–especially when so bold as to proclaim a book “an elegy for India.” But in this case, the phrase points to what separates Black River from many other police procedurals out there: Roy’s commitment to cultural critique. She never lets it get in the way of a fast-paced noir whodunnit, but instead conjures a vital parallel layer. When the detective questions the town manager about the town’s wealthy patriarchs, the manager responds that the father was regarded as a man who “for every factory he built, every company he started, he also built schools, free clinics, shelters for cows, buffaloes, and retired tonga horses.” On the other hand, the son is out posting signs at the village edge declaring “No Muslims.” The legacies of father and son bely the more subtle mystery at the heart of Roy’s noir tale: What has happened to our country in a single generation? Or as Roy puts it, “If this is normal now, what will normal be for all of us tomorrow?”

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Fiction Reviews