A Conversation with Devi Laskar

Conversation with Devi Laskar, by Swetha Amit

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Circa is a gut-wrenching novel that deals with a young Indian American woman caught between familial expectations and a tragedy. What inspired the idea, and what made you write in the second person?

In 1995, I started writing a version of Circa. I had a very good friend, Susan, to whom the book is dedicated. When I was in New York during my MFA program, I discovered she was diagnosed with leukemia. I tried to write many things about Heera and Marie to entertain Susan. When she passed away in 1996, I put it aside. Over the years, I tried to work on the story, but something always felt wrong. Then, in 2010, I lost the bulk of my work because of the raid that happened to us. I first wrote The Atlas of Reds and Blues and wanted something to work on after it was out. It was 25 years since Susan passed away, and it was time to begin reworking the book. I drew much inspiration from my classmate Julie Otsuka's book The Buddha in the Attic, written in the first-person plural-we. I tried writing it from that perspective for two months. It wasn't working. Then I stumbled upon the second person and felt I could hear Heera's voice well. I started over and found it all came together.

You mentioned about the raid in 2010 and how you lost most of your work. How did it affect your writing process, and how did you pick up the threads after that incident?

After that raid in 2010, I didn't write much for a year. Then, in June 2011, I tried to pen down a poem. But I couldn't. Then, Robin, another good friend from Atlanta, made me watch the movie Julie & Julia. In that movie, Julie gives herself the constraint of trying to make 524 recipes of Julia Child in 365 days. Since I was also a photographer, Robin suggested I take and caption a new picture every day. She felt that by adding words to my photos, I'd find the words coming back to me. Within a year, my poetry came back, and my prose came back after three years. Once my prose returned, The Atlas of Reds and Blues took two years, and Circa took one and a half years.

The time-era in Circa was set in the ‘70s and ‘80s. How did you capture that era authentically?

I wanted to set the time of the book in an era when we weren't constantly plugged into our phones and when people wrote letters and talked on our landlines. That's the era when I knew Susan, and we were close. I wanted to capture that period and make the story authentic.

Your protagonist is an Indian American immigrant on foreign soil, caught between the worlds of tradition and westernization. Did your journey as an Indian American influence how you wrote about this character?

I had a couple of thoughts when I was writing this book. If Marco had been the one to die, the grieving process between Heera and Marie would have been different through sleepovers and spending time with one another. Because it was Marie who died, there were all these societal rules that Heera and Marco couldn't grieve together or see each other anymore. I was curious about why society imposed those rules. The other thought I had was how people tend to judge others. I wanted to write a story about a character who gets judged by her peer set and community. I wanted to explore what it means for people to have cultural obligations towards their family but also want to be a part of the Western community. I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in North Carolina. Back then, there weren't many Indians or Bengali families. Now, things have changed.

You refer to Indian practices like dowry or bride burning. Did you ever worry about your target audience or how the Western world would receive it?

I don't think about the audience while writing. The first person I end up writing for is me. Toni Morrison used to say that if you don't see the book you want to read, write it. With Circa, I had to be true to myself as I had to be able to defend every sentence I wrote. I am writing for people who are also navigating between two cultures. I had three beta readers who gave me the go-ahead. When I got their approval, I put it out in the world. I am thrilled when people tell me they love it.

Marie's death in the book was set on Halloween. Was there a significant reason behind that idea?

I did that because Susan's favorite holiday was Halloween. Incidentally, her funeral was also on Halloween. When I sat down to rewrite the book in 2020, I couldn't write about us anymore, but I had to keep some part of her in the book. Setting it on Halloween was my ode to her.

It is said that writing can be redemptive and helps in healing. Do you feel writing Circa has helped in your healing process?

I am relieved I was able to write the book. I didn't think I would be writing anymore after 2010. So, the fact that I have these books is such a relief. As an older writer, I am thrilled that people still want to read my stuff. However, it hasn't necessarily made me feel better.

You pack a lot in 184 pages with such tight writing. Do you think your poetry background influenced your prose writing?

Besides being a poet, I was also a journalist for a while. I spent my entire adult life with people telling me to keep it concise. So, I captured a lot from several years of tight writing in just 184 pages.

You have tackled themes of loneliness, disappearance, and coming of age. Was that something you consciously thought of while writing this book?

I had just started writing, and as I got further into the story, I realized the protagonist was lonely and several people disappeared. What intrigued me about disappearing is the ways people disappear, besides death. I didn't start writing a book about a girl who disappeared. I began writing about a set of circumstances and where it would lead me.

Who are the authors/books that influence you?

For Circa, it was The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. Another book was I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine. He was having a hard time trying to write about this woman named Sarah. He kept starting over and trying different things. Then, one day, he realized he had told Sarah's entire story whenever he started over. He felt the only way to finish the book was to assemble all the first chapters. This is a novel of first chapters where every chapter is done differently. There is a mix of first-person and third person. That gave me so much hope as I was struggling with Circa. It felt like permission granting.

Lastly, are there any upcoming works in the pipeline?

I just finished my third novel called Midnight, At the War. It is about a brown-skinned journalist set around the years before and after 9/11. As a former reporter, I have been upset by how the news has changed. There are many more opinions, and people have become numb from watching the news constantly.

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Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, photographer, former newspaper reporter, and lifelong Tarheel. She is the author of the award-winning The Atlas of Reds and Blues, named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019. Her second novel, Circa, was published by Mariner Books last year and selected as a Goop Book Club and Book Club Girl pick. Her third novel, Midnight, At the War, is in progress. She holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Columbia University. She now lives in California with her family.

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Author of her memoir, A Turbulent Mind-My journey to Ironman 70.3’, Swetha Amit is currently pursuing her MFA at University of San Francisco. She has published her works in Atticus Review, JMWW journal, Oranges Journal, Gastropoda Lit, Full House literary, Amphora magazine, Grande Dame literary journal, Black Moon Magazine, Fauxmoir lit mag, Poets Choice anthology, and has upcoming pieces in Drunk Monkeys, Agapanthus Collective, The Creative Zine, and Roi Faineant Press. She is one of the contest winners of Beyond words literary magazine, her piece upcoming in November. She is also, alumni of Tin House Winter Workshop 2022 and the Kenyon Review Writers’ workshop 2022. Twitter: @whirlwindtotsInstagram @swethaamit

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, by Taylor Byas, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

The idea of home elicits different feelings for people and often involves looking at the past. Sometimes it conjures an image of an old bedroom or familiar faces. In her debut full-length collection, Byas draws inspiration from The Wiz and continually expands on this act of returning home. The speaker recalls specific instances in their childhood, but sometimes, it feels impossible to return to that exact state of mind. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a poetry collection that transcends the typical concept of coming home. Taylor Byas solidifies her love of Chicago while giving the reader other feelings to reckon with in her work. Whether it is love, healing, or an ache that is not quite quelled with home, she crafts a journey that makes room for the reader while keeping her personal experiences at the center.

This collection is a masterclass on the modernization of forms. The sonnets, sestinas, and multiple-section poems have an intentional quick pace that prevents them from becoming static or archaic. Within these standard forms are references to popular culture that immediately capture the reader’s attention as seen in “Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright)” (11–13). Using the game show as a poem format not only raises the stakes for the questions the speaker is asking but also expands on the process of trying to find answers outside of yourself. The poem immediately asks when inheritance begins and one of the stand-out answers is in lines 9-11:

What is: when her memory of that pain becomes
                        my first heirloom, scrubbed clean
                        from her body’s memory

This image of inheriting her mother’s pain is something many readers can identify with. The poem is so intriguing because it does not stop at this moment. Using five game show clues she touches on the impact of her mother’s pain, her father’s traits, and how this impacts not only her actions but the trajectory her life is on. 

There are many extended images throughout the collection that shine because of Byas’s careful precision and set-up. This is seen in the continuation of each “South Side'' poem, capturing as much of her hometown as possible, and also in other pieces, enhancing specific locations. In “The Gathering Place—Grandma’s House” (21–22), image descriptions help solidify an important figure in the speaker’s life. In two sections, the speaker covers the transition from childhood to adulthood. The second stanza creates a moment of pause and awe:

                Her bedsheets aqua
                blue, an ocean of satin
                shared with her swollen
                limbs. We slept curled on our sides—
                a tight line of small cashews. (6-10)

Describing sleeping beside her family members on her grandma’s blue sheets takes on more weight with Byas’s imagery and stark line breaks. The reader could spend so long mulling over “satin” or “swollen” before envisioning children gathered at a sacred meeting place. This piece feels significant because the grandmother and her domain are brought up in other pieces in the collection. The reader grasps the importance of her presence. 

Even though there is a heavy emphasis on memory and discovery, Byas makes sure the reader doesn’t get trapped in the past. She accomplishes this by highlighting distinctive memories and how they changed her perspective. The most clear example of this is in “Don’t Go Getting Nostalgic” (60). The speaker is rummaging through her old belongings and comes to realize how many different interpretations of herself exist: 

… A 
version of me that still believes that loving you was enough, that wanting things to work would make it so. … (6-8)

Whether it’s through letters to herself or a special someone, the speaker realizes how much she has transformed over time. Byas continues to pull on this thread of self-discovery to examine what we inherit from the people and environment around us. 

While on this journey returning home, there is an overarching theme of healing as a continual process. The poems allude to the difficulty of and the desire for healing in different parts of the speaker’s life—at times in the form of untangling her relationship with her father and other times in recounting fleeting moments of love with significant others. Through all the questioning and excavating is a sense of trying to piece together what healing means for the individual. This act of drawing connections is prevalent in “After the Car Accident” (79). These thoughts are reginited after hitting a parked car:

                … ; if no one
                saw me hit the car, did I do it? If my father never apolo-
                gized on our old phone calls, did he truly wound me? … (16-18)

The memories flood in as the speaker tries to get a grip on the accident. What seems rhetorical becomes very real for her at this moment. 

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a collection inspired by recollection and relics across the speaker’s lifetime. From game shows to The Wiz, these poems traverse through memories and aspirations for growth with ease. Against the backdrop of home, Byas examines the pieces of her life without trying to force them to fit. This book demonstrates how returning to these places or thoughts is vital work but doesn’t necessarily reveal a clear path forward. The path of returning home is constantly changing and unfolding.

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I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas, published by Soft Skull Press, August 2023. 128 pages.

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Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

 Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

The Christmas Guest

The Christmas Guest, by Peter Swanson, reviewed by Luree Scott

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The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson is a novella that has many narrative twists and turns, as any good murder mystery should. You will get both the literal chills of the Christmas season, as well as a healthy dose of thrills—with plenty of ghosts, blood, and worst of all: supremely dysfunctional families coming together under one roof. It delightfully combines the gothic, supernatural aesthetic of Crimson Peak, mixed with the chipper coziness of Murder, She Wrote, which will certainly get any reader into a holiday mood.

Swanson pulls out all the trimmings with the structure of this story, dividing the book into two parts. The first is mostly epistolary, told through diary entries written by Ashley Smith, a young exchange student from America staying at an old British manor house for the holidays. Her narrative style is light, bubbly, and extremely campy, which only adds to the fun of this mystery. The reader is often left with many gaps in the timeline, being that Ashley takes time in between her entries to go out and live the story. She also has a habit of getting a little inebriated, so we often see entries that flow in this manner: “A little drunk now, to be honest with you. Night was magical and now I need to get under the covers because I’m SO tired and SO cold. Met the parents and they are SCARY. More later. Emma stuck by my side all night. So sweet!!” (13). 

Swanson uses the imperfections of the diary format to illustrate the humanness of our main character, as well as provide an adequate sense of suspense that keeps the pages turning. There is something so charming about the way Ashley experiences the week of this chaotic Christmas unfolding around her. She’s hopeful, excited, and a bit nervous at all times, which is the perfect embodiment of the holiday season itself. 

Now, because this first section is told from the diary perspective, there are many pages that use purely italicized text, which might take a minute for the eyes to adjust to. There is also a lack of dialogue quotations, many parentheticals, abbreviations of names (Ashley often calls Emma, the friend who invited her to the manor, E, for example), and even some scenes are told in a short, screenplay-like format. The sentence structure dips and dives just like the plotline, while still being simple and straightforward. It leans towards informal, even experimental. But this creates a neat sort of puzzle within itself that turns the mystery genre onto its head in a pleasant way.

The second half re-contextualizes the reason why this diary is being reread. This is where the mystery portion of the novella comes together in a surprisingly poignant way. Without spoiling the end, this is where the true emotional resonance of the story shines through. While the first part is a joyous and exciting romp through the English countryside (often seeming vapid, quirky, and sometimes cheesy), with a few strange happenings hinting at the death that is to come, the second part is a tale of grief, family trauma and loyalties, and the aftermath of Christmas’s past that leave you broken beyond repair. That’s what I admire so much about The Christmas Guest. It gives a bit of the magic and excitement of the season, while recognizing that this month can hold the most bitter and sorrowful memories for some. It is genre bending, cozy in essence, yet at the same time brutal. The murder itself is stunningly disturbing as well, so for the truest of thriller fans, this novella does indeed deliver.

The Chapman family is not the warm and jolly family you’d hope to spend the holidays with. They are full of perfectionists, masochists, and abusive dynamics that circle around each other endlessly. The family dinners showcase some of the tensest moments, as well as when Ashley spends time individually with Emma and Adam, the two Chapman siblings. In one of her diary entries, she writes, “We took a short walk, E and I, and she told me stories about how cruel her father could be, and how her mother never really did anything about it, and how Adam was always threatening to stop coming back for the holidays” (25). That is much of how the abuse is implied to the reader, which is a kindness of this novella. The abuse is never explicitly described, but we can glean much of what it may have looked like to live with the Chapmans through snippets of dialogue, the aura of the characters that Ashley herself describes, and even some ghostly dream imagery. Then, Swanson adds in the possibility of a violent killer in the woods behind the manor, preying on young women if they lose their way in the night, and all the external pressure starts to boil over. 

The best part of all: it’s only around ninety pages. The last couple months of the year are full of to-do lists and preparations. It can be overwhelming to add reading a book to the mix. But the reading experience of The Christmas Guest is like a sugar cookie snuck in the middle of the night. Quick, sweet, and satisfying. 

This is the novella for those who have mixed feelings about Christmas. Where you want to love it, but there are so many things other than “cheer” that you feel for it. Swanson purposefully made a cathartic expression of this discord. This novella is for those who are burnt out and hurt during a time that leaves no room for negativity. This novella is for those who want to remember it’s okay to need and want more than just Happy Holidays.

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Peter Swanson, The Christmas Guest, William Morrow (HarperCollins Imprint), 2023

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Luree Scott (she/her) is a writer and performer from San Diego, CA. She received a BA in Theatre Arts and English from the University of San Diego and an MFA in Creative Writing from UCR Palm Desert's Low Residency Program for Creative Writing, where she studied fiction and playwriting. She is a former Drama Editor for The Coachella Review. Her previous works can be read in The Alcalá Review, Kelp Journal, Little Thoughts Press, GXRL, Grande Dame Literary Journal, and Longleaf Review. Her Twitter is @luree_s.

So Long

Piecing Life Together Through Grief: So Long by Jen Levitt, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

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When it comes to memory, events are rarely recalled in chronological order. A song can spark a thought from the past, or you can spend an entire afternoon reminiscing about childhood influences. So Long is a collection that uses memory to process difficult concepts, such as the death of a parent, life as a caretaker, and how being a daughter informs all of these roles. Jen Levitt understands that grief is not a linear process, and she employs these poems to show the vulnerability in that acceptance.

Starting with the cover image of an empty chair by Zachary Schomburg, we can already see that a dramatic contemplation on the cyclical nature of life is set in motion. The empty chair depicted in this painting can signify sitting alone with your thoughts, which is something that happens often when you are caretaking. Paired with the implications of the title, time remains a pivotal tool to fully grasping this book. The phrase “so long” usually means goodbye, but in this context, Levitt is able to make this phrase transform into what fits the moment. Sometimes it refers to a drawn out illness, like her father’s cancer diagnosis that feels like it will never end. Other times, it illuminates a string of connection through lifetimes that you desperately try to hold on to. Even before you open the book, the reader is already situated in a reflective state.

This act of looking back is immediately enacted with the first poem. The collection is divided into three numbered sections, but starts with the piece “After” (1) before section one opens. A grief timeline is set up by intentionally choosing to begin the stanzas with words such as “at first”, “then”, and “now”, which can capture days or years in three short stanzas. It seems particularly interesting to begin this poem, which is outside of the numbered order, with a stanza that goes back in time:

At first, it was like trying to live
in a human-sized aquarium, with everyone

watching me come up for air. (1-3)

Feeling like you are on display is something that anyone who has experienced grief can identify with. Whether it’s because others are worried about you, or because you feel suffocated by the situation, these lines continue the thread of thinking about how we view the world after a significant loss.

As the collection continues, Levitt is able to encapsulate family relationships and the progression of a serious illness by utilizing different forms. We shift from a series of justified poems, which feel like standard recollection to quatrains, where the fullness of experience is expressed in four lines. Then we switch to couplets, which feel almost as if they mirror the speaker and her father at times. These shifts, along with intentional line breaks, feel impactful when cascading through time with the speaker.

The shifts culminate in the title poem “So Long” (27–41), which is a multiple section piece that takes up the entire second section of the book. The section starts with a phone call with the speaker’s dad. Hearing her father’s cough instigates the process of contemplating “what’s next” for a parent while trying to navigate daily life. By the time the reader gets to section five (31), the impact on the family is undeniably being felt. From beginning the piece with “All the diners we sit in after doctor’s appointments:” (1) to “The silences, thick, cloudy, only amplify our habits” (9), it’s clear that each family member is impacted by this illness.

Levitt gives a unique perspective as an adult, caretaker, and daughter. She describes the different ways her father depends on her: whether it’s through a desperate phone call, or making sure he is safe on the train while her brother rejoices with him at a baseball game. These poems demonstrate how communication changes when you are seen as a child or a caregiver. It even impacts sibling dynamics, where one is suffering through the hardship while the other only reaps the rewards.

By focusing on her father, she is also able to discover more about herself. This is made apparent in section 13 (39):

On his bureau the leather wallet stuffed with receipts
& the baseball cap he’s always losing. By the fireplace
a monogrammed briefcase he hasn’t used in years,
what time accumulates. I know he’s going to miss all this, (5-8)

Here the speaker is thinking about what all of her father’s belongings represent. From casual store purchases to changes in career paths (due to sickness), she is remembering his life before it ends. However, this examination quickly flips with the closing line:

I got it wrong, above. It’s we who will miss him in it. (14)

Individual belongings become more indicative and meaningful once a person has passed away. The speaker takes the time to realize that this loss will be reminded to her by the pieces her father left behind.

Throughout the collection, the poems seem to operate in a liminal space. At times they capture reflection, then shift to hindsight in an instant. There is a feeling of gratitude while processing the decline of a parent, which appears to only be possible through the organic, stylistic decisions in the poems. Whether it’s punctuation, caesura, or multiple sections at the center of the book, these changes make this act of propelling, while simultaneously rewinding, possible. There is also this intentional attempt to observe life events to avoid getting caught in a grief spiral. This attempt is most felt in “Throw the Rest Back” (55–56), where the speaker depicts the loss of a friendship and the loss of her father. A surprising, extended moment of regret is felt towards the end of the book:

But more, I want to stop tending, like a mother,

my old shames—all the people I could have
been, in all the rooms, if words had left my mouth. (22-24)

There is a regret for what didn’t happen in life, or what can never take place now. The speaker points toward wanting one more conversation with her dad and longing in other areas. Time passing makes this longing feel endless, which ultimately brings the reader full circle back to the title of the book.

So Long is a collection that is as much about life as it is about death. It is able to leave such a lasting impression, because it does not reduce grief to a singular experience. Levitt demonstrates how life directions and feelings can change as time goes on. Although there is no solution provided to end the experiences of loss or incessant review, these poems serve as a reminder that you have to learn to just keep going. No matter how long it takes. 

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So Long by Jen Levitt, published by Four Way Books, March 2023. 88 pages.

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Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

 Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968

Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968 reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

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Aretha Franklin’s fear of flying was well known, and often used as an explanation for her dearth of overseas public engagements. Her phobia was the result of a particularly turbulent plane ride in 1984, prior to which she’d flown all over the globe. The latest release from Franklin’s estate, Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968, attests to the good fortune enjoyed by those able to see Franklin before she limited her travel. Recorded at the height of her career, which took place during her early years at Atlantic Records, the album offers irrefutable proof of Franklin’s prodigious contributions to American culture. 

While at her first label, Columbia Records, Franklin was allowed only to sing, and as a result, never scored a major hit. Not until moving to Atlantic did she begin to arrange her own songs, and accompany herself on the piano. Franklin’s first studio session for Atlantic was to record “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You).”

“It just wasn't coming off,” Franklin told NPR. “And finally someone said, ‘Aretha, why don't you sit down and play?’ And I did, and it just happened. It all just happened. We arrived, and we arrived very quickly.” Quickly indeed, between 1967 and 1968 Franklin scored ten Top 10 hits. “I Never Loved a Man” was credited, by music critic Peter Guralnick, as an uniquely monumental moment in American music. This was the energy in the room there at Berns Salonger on May 2nd, 1968. 

Franklin's gospel idiom is on full display on Berns Salonger, as are her most famous secular soul recordings: “Natural Woman”, “I Never Loved a Man,” “Dr. Feelgood.” What has always struck me about Aretha's signature songs is their palpable sexuality. Something she was often coy about in interviews. It’s hard to believe she was naive to her own sensuality, or rather, that of her recordings. These are devout songs, all of them, but the object of their devotion is very often a man and his prowess. Very few singers can muster such carnality — can invoke a hallelujah not for God but for his masculine image to be found in dark, hot rooms. The song, also my favorite, which most displays that tension between the holy and the horny, is “Dr. Feelgood.” The best rendition of which appears on this record. The third song in the set, and the first to be introduced by Aretha’s banter, sees her, for the first time during the show, sit down at the piano. She says, “In a moment I will take the seat of the young man you’ve heard accompany me so ably.” She takes Gary’s seat, lets out a fake cough, complains of laryngitis, and says “I’d like to talk to you right now about that Dr. who visited me…” Then begins the piano: moody, bluesy, petulant. Then begins the voice: moody, bluesy, petulant. “I don’t want nobody always sittin’ ‘round me. And. My. Man.” That is a hungry voice, a voice unwilling to share, a voice demanding her full portion of man. This is Aretha the singer and the pianist at her absolute best; taking the idiom of her church into more immediate, more exciting domains; sanctifying the daily goings-on between bodies. 

It really doesn’t matter what Aretha sings about. Much ado has been made about the feminist legacy of “Respect,” her unexpected mastery of the tenor aria “Nessun Dorma,” and her relationship to the black church and the civil rights movement. Womanhood, virtuosity, faith, and blackness were all integral to Aretha the person, and the artist. But the crucial element was always the voice. Not the place or time, the lyric, language, or the theme. What made her great was that whenever she sang about something it became dignified, elevated, baptized. Her voice was an instrument of consecration, and whatever enjoyed its attention was better off as a result.

The experience of listening to Berns Salonger is one of rapture, and of a directional paradox. On one hand, she herself ascends, perilously, grasping for whatever piece of sky within her reach. On the other hand, is the descent, equally perilous; the avalanche falling on our heads. That has always been my experience of encountering genius: being bombarded, battered, besieged, until I submit totally to the phenomenon. Genius makes the critic’s job difficult. There isn’t much to say, even less to sift or parce; you cannot draw lines in moving sand. We are reduced to eyewitnesses, testifiers. Doomed to paint, always inadequately, some impression of what happened then and there, what is still happening here and now. Some voices liberate us from our myopic view of time and space. They perpetuate themselves — as does the universe — byway of infinitely many reactions, forever rending the vibrational fabric. Aretha’s is one of those voices. In her sound, accent, disposition, is the convergence and divergence of many ancestors and of all progeny. Past and future lose their meaning. They are too small for Aretha. Perhaps that is why I’ve never truly grieved her death, because she feels no more lost to me now than she felt possessed by me then. She has always been an aberration, an encompassing presence. She had always about her the shimmer of a ghost, and a holy one.

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Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968, Lantower Records.

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Jeromiah Taylor is a writer and photographer born, raised, and living on The Great Plains. As an essayist Jeromiah publishes widely in regional news outlets such as The Kansas Reflector, The Pennsylvania-Capitol Star, The Sunflower, and The Liberty Press. In 2022, Jeromiah completed his first poetry chapbook "Havoc Heaped on Boy Body," a deep-dive into queer latino manhood, and quarter-life issues, refracted through the images of horror cinema, folk religion, The Great American Songbook, and homoeroticism. He also, along with several members of Wichita State University's M.F.A in poetry program, co-organized and co-headlined, the language event, "Nothing is Necessary, Everything is a Choice: A Night of Spoken Word," hosted by MonikaHouse as a part of the 2022 National Independent Venue Week line-up.

Beyond creative pursuits, Jeromiah worked in copywriting roles for several non-profit organizations, and currently earns a living via that most storied of writerly day jobs: working at a coffee shop.

He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his partner, one impish dog, and one imperious cat.

I Do Everything I’m Told

I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes, reviewed by Trevor Ruth

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One of the most difficult things for the modern poet is trying to capture that balance between form and language. Do you care more about poetic structure, cadence, style, or are you looking for something that speaks more to experimentation and the social issues of today (there is no right answer by the way)? I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes meets its audience in the metaphorical median: employing traditional lyrical approaches with a much more modern flair. Oftentimes, this works; other times, the poetry is overly ambitious, though not without its merits. 

The collection starts off with the brilliant “Tired of Love Poems,” which ironically asserts that human action alone is an act of love and, by definition, any poem that chooses to portray an action is secretly a love poem, “To pull/out a chair is more than manners.” Thusly, the poem becomes a love poem through action alone. The book then leaps into “Letter to a Young Poet,” a hugely personal prose poem full of genuine self-imposing advice, along with very subtle social criticism peppered in: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you,” and “Go slow. Wellness is a myth and shame transforms no one…You can walk off most anything.” The imagery conjured in this piece is one-directional and nostalgic. There’s something that speaks to a turn of the century (possibly millennial) mindset, typically through pop culture references: “Flow is best understood through Islamic mysticism or Lil Wayne spitting without a rhyme book, post-2003.” Such allusions will certainly speak to a younger audience of readers. It is also one of the strongest poems in the collection, apart from the cliché in the final lines that contradicts the otherwise depreciative tone. 

A good portion of the collection is written in either unrhymed couplet or triplet stanzas; however, every so often there will come a sonnet (and, just as often, Fernandes conveniently inserts the word sonnet into the title to let you know that it is indeed a sonnet). Particular to these divergences are “Sonnet for the Unbearable” with its masterful use of assonance, “knelt at a grave/with grass unkempt and overstayed, and still/no spook came. It was a game.” The poem is also a tender one—as its namesake suggests—as it takes the form of an ode to barren women with a heavy dose of gothic imagery intertwined. Another ode comes in the form of a beautifully rendered visual poem depicting an Arizona landscape in “Phoenix” with its surreal balance between the rustic desert imagery and how it impresses itself on the mind of the reader; “Can a rock have a follower? Can a low desert sky/ follow me home? I start a cult of geographies/ of the extremes and stick microphones into cacti arms.”

The second part of the collection, entitled “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception or Repetition Compulsion,” is incredibly endearing. Here, Fernandes shares a collection of sonnets—each based on a different location—by displaying the sonnet on one page and an erasure of that same sonnet on the following page. Normally, I am not a fan of erasures, however I cannot help but feel inspired by Fernandes’ ability to search for a different kind of meaning by cutting out entire portions of her own poetry, sometimes to great effect: “how to raise a child/underwater/first in/disappointment.” This second section concludes with a foray into the abstract as each word of each erasure is thrown across two entire pages, preceded by the same poem in lyrical fashion in an enormous messy parody of structuralist poetry, but with varying nodes of connecting sentence fragments to consider. In this way, Fernandes seems to show appreciation for classical poetic structure, but also chooses to make fun of it by revolting against the general conventions.

Other times, the poetry seems to wane a bit in its balance of form and substance. For example, “Fuckboy Villanelle,” is not really a successful villanelle in that the refrains are totally reworded, but I appreciate the effort. “Dinner with Jack” takes a conversation between the speaker and a friend (presumably) about a hypothetical situation that recalls the plot to the 2003 film Open Water but stands as a metaphor for the absurdity that self-destructive couples go through, along with a quick name-drop to Samuel Beckett, who seems to appear to make the conversation appear more highbrow in its tone. Fernandes takes every opportunity to pay respect to past poets, including Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke. Mostly these are done in a similar name-dropping fashion and less of an ode to each poet. Not to criticize Fernandes for her taste in poets (far from it, each of the names mentioned are brilliant), but recalling these names came off as deeply confusing. 

Conversely, in what is possibly my favorite poem in the collection, “Rilke,” the speaker examines the very present intellectual dichotomies between Eurydice and Orpheus, and Fernandes gives us two of the most penetrating stanzas in the entire book: “See, I think Orpheus knew. Had always planned to turn back/and homegirl knew, too./That’s a kind of smart./To know what you know./To know what your man can and will do.” It starts with the introduction of what would later be defined as “dumb joy” by the speaker before referring to Eurydice as “homegirl” to give the language that modern edge, then it leaps to the inclusion of seemingly reversed Platonic ideologies and then the poem just keeps it going with more assonance, a bit of rhyme and a dash of dagger-sharp confidence: “What mama energy, one student said/ and I gave her a C. Baby, I’m Circe./I hold down the island./I don’t drown my own men in the sea./I tidy up the underworld…” All of this building up to a climactic finish in the form of an epic stanza followed by the refrain of a single line: “I know how to turn around./I know who waits in this clockless eternity/and who is allowed to drown.”

This spirit of rebellion remains a central theme for the collection. In the final lines of the title poem, “I Do Everything I’m Told,” the speaker examines the relationship between the subject and her boyfriend while noting a photograph of the boyfriend’s hands full of dead animals (the boyfriend is a chef). “I nod at their dead beauty,/put on a playlist called/I do everything I’m told, and can’t tell/what is kink or worship or both.” What better defines the tone for this book, then, but the conscientious blurring of the lines between kink and worship? Admittedly, it comes off as mildly hypocritical, but the book seems to carry its hypocrisies with a kind of self-indulgence: “Fuckboy Villanelle” is not a traditional villanelle; “Paris Poem Without Cliches” is riddled with cliches as far as language is concerned; the first poem in the collection is entitled “Tired of Love Poems” while the last poem in the collection is entitled “Love Poem”. 

The entire book seems to endlessly contradict itself, but perhaps this is the point of the book. Note the sarcasm in the title, I Do Everything I’m Told. This can be seen on an academic (and quite possibly social) level, as if to say, “I do everything I’m told to do as a poet,” as one who practices a higher art form such as poetry, by employing classical poetic structure. Except Fernandes chooses to mock the conventions of classical poetry while also respecting their intricacies by giving each poem that distinctive modern touch to make the poetry exciting and unpredictable. On a technical level, Fernandes succeeds in doing just that; however, there lies beneath the surface that spirit of anarchy that ventures to break the mold and, in doing so, carries itself with a kind of pride and insubordination that one might consider perfectly balanced.

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I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes. Tin House, 2023.

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Trevor Ruth is a writer originally from Livermore, California. He has been featured in Occam’s Razor, takahe, The Specter Review, The Typeslash Review, Typishly, Wingless Dreamer and Quiet Lightning among other publications. He has a degree from California State University, East Bay and is featured regularly on The Baram House as a Film Reviewer in Residence. He also has a personal blog at https://trevorruthblog.wordpress.com .

Now is Not the Time to Panic

Now is Not the Time to Panic, by Kevin Wilson, reviewed by Katy Mitchell-Jones

Despite its title, Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson is not a thriller or suspense. There is no murder mystery, and no jump scares. Instead, it is a short, coming-of-age, social-horror leaning novel that beautifully blends the individualistic teenage mindset with small-town views. Frankie and Zeke, two sixteen-year-old misfits in rural Tennessee, find themselves spending the warm summer months together, sharing the one thing that means the most to them: art. While Frankie works on her novel, Zeke hopes to create a comic book, but they end up working together to create something they can put into the world and which people will take notice of. 

Thus begins the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Frankie’s written words, “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” paired with Zeke’s artwork: two skeletal hands hovering over beds filled with children, tangled in sheets. Together, a powerful image and a mysterious message. After they make hundreds upon hundreds of copies and anonymously hang them up around the community, the Coalfield residents take notice and do not understand - is it a threat of some kind? This confusion develops into concern and, eventually, panic. Everyone is paranoid, convinced there is an evil presence, maybe even a cult, threatening their peaceful lives.

The novel opens with a telephone call to Frankie from a New York reporter. The reporter claims she has it all figured out: Frankie was behind the events back in 1996. Frankie, now grown with a husband and small child, is unsettled, hoping this woman does not expose her secret to the world. She thinks back to how it all began and the narrative returns to the summer of 1996. 

Frankie and Zeke meet one balmy day at a public swimming pool. Zeke is new in town and they connect over their deadbeat fathers; Frankie’s father slept with his secretary, moved away with her, and named his new daughter Frances (Frankie’s birth name), while Zeke and his mother moved from Memphis back to Coalfield, where she is originally from, after his father also engaged in multiple infidelities.

Frankie’s mindset is that of a typical teenager, as she feels misunderstood and views her circumstances as black and white. In regards to her parents, she thinks, “You had to choose sides. And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you” (18). She needs Zeke to understand this advice, to understand he doesn’t have to forgive his father or even speak to him. Neither of their fathers chose them, so they have to side with their mothers. And, perhaps maybe even more importantly, they have to choose each other. 

Their relationship progresses as they share their aspirations: she wants to be a writer and he wishes to be an artist. His goal is “to make something that everyone in the world will see. And they’ll remember it. And they won’t totally understand it” (20). They decide to spend the summer making art together and, through this outlet, Frankie reflects, “I felt like we were making something important. I felt like, I don’t know, I was in control. I was making the decisions. And as long as I was choosing, it was okay” (29). Like many teenagers, Frankie feels desperate to have control over any aspect of her life, as she considers her family unstable and yet, boring at the same time. Her mother and brothers are hardly ever home and her dad is no longer in the picture. Zeke and their poster are the only stable things she has. She wonders, “How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it? How did you make yourself special?” (32). While creating this poster does make Frankie feel incredibly special, the reaction from the town greatly worries the two of them. The people Frankie had grown up around do not only not appreciate the artwork, but actively misconstrue the message and make it into an ugly, frightening entity that begins to terrorize the small community. Frankie always felt different from her peers, and this leads to Frankie feeling more misunderstood than ever. 

One of the other main themes from this story is that if one pushes something away into a dark corner and covers it up, it is gone and doesn’t have to be acknowledged again. This is symbolized by the photocopier that Frankie and Zeke use to make copies of their poster. After Frankie’s older brothers originally steal it, the copier had been hidden in the garage and forgotten for a long time. When Frankie and Zeke are done making their copies, it’s pushed back into the corner and covered with a tarp. “If you couldn’t see it, if you pushed it into a dark corner, it didn’t exist” (26). This is how Frankie copes in life after the panic - she never told anyone that she had been the instigator, and she simply hoped it would all go away. Even her relationship with her father and half-sister is pushed to the side, without the slightest attempt to establish communication. 

This is a short novel that packs in a lot of emotion, small town scenery, and teenage angst. Anyone who has ever worried they may not leave a mark on the world will be able to relate to Frankie and Zeke, as they do their best to navigate big decisions when their world feels like it's spinning out of control.

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Now is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson, Ecco. November 2022, 246 pages.

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Katy Mitchell-Jones is originally from a small town in Washington state and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with her BA and MA. She then headed to Boston to teach high school English but has since returned to her west coast roots. Her favorite authors are Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Tana French, and Glendy Vanderah. She has published three short stories with Chipper Press, for middle-grades. You can follow her on Goodreads here.

Chouette

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, reviewed by Luree Scott

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky is a fantastical novel that explores what it truly means to be a mother. Our protagonist, Tiny, takes an owl-woman as a lover in the night and is suddenly pregnant with an owl-baby. Written in a diary-like, first-person perspective, Tiny makes discoveries of not only the profound joys of having a baby, but also the very real horrors and miseries it provides. Early motherhood is often described as a special time in a woman’s life, yet the fears and heartache of that time are rarely mentioned. Childbirth is the foundation of life, yet it can also mean the death of so many things: the death of friendships; the death of a career; the death of a marriage vow; the death of your own sense of self.

In the first few chapters, the novel dissects the personal experience of pregnancy. This is where that first-person perspective gives an empathetic frame to Tiny’s whirling thoughts, which sometimes turn dark and hateful. For example, when she is first figuring out whether or not to keep the baby, she laments:

I wonder if it goes this way for all pregnant mothers: At first we fully recognize the existential threat that is growing inside us, but gradually evolutionary imperatives overcome the conscious mind’s objection, and the will to reproduce overcomes the will to survive, and the needs of the baby overcome the needs of the host, until the only choice left for us women is to be willing, happy participants in our own destruction. (29)

Tiny speaks of pregnancy as a matter of life and death. A fight. Not every pregnancy is the happiest time of a woman’s life. It is often a time of some of the greatest sorrows and challenges. Tiny also questions her ability to be a good mother. She is not always sure of what that looks like, and it’s frightening to think that you don’t have the skills to be one. It doesn’t help when Tiny’s mother-in-law makes sure she knows her place at the family barbeque, by ranting and raving things like, “Here I am doing my best to give you practical advice. You don’t have the mother-bone. You need my guidance.” (50)

The owl-baby also keeps Tiny from her hobbies and life’s work. She is suddenly shunned by her string quartet when she can no longer play in time. The owl-baby demands different music to be played and often hijacks Tiny’s body. Tiny is becoming imperfect in a way that the workplace barely accommodates, and she is suddenly isolated from the things and people she loves. Her husband does not offer much support during this time either. He starts to sleep in the garage because her smell has changed. 

Once the owl-baby, Chouette, is born, she is automatically recognized as different. Tiny often makes a comparison between her growing child and the children of her husband’s brothers, whom she often calls “dog-children” (102) – an apt description, seeing as dogs are popular, loyal, and average house pets. Compared with the mysterious and misunderstood owl, often symbolic of death or bad luck, Oshetsky is sending us a clear message: this is how society views children with developmental disabilities, versus normal, seemingly perfect children. Tiny is no longer invited to the family barbeques when they find out the baby is not normal. Nearly everyone in Tiny’s life is depicted as being disgusted by or afraid of Chouette. 

The husband is the worst offender of this. He is unhappy with Chouette as she is, and researches night and day for a cure. Tiny, on the other hand, loves Chouette just as she is. This attitude is constantly thrown back in her face, as the husband often says, “I can’t stand how you give up on her like this. I can’t stand the way you make up grotesque stories about her. She deserves a normal life.” (145) 

Their lives together become a question of whether to mold your child to be what you want them to be, or to love them unconditionally. This battle between them becomes even more desperate and graphic as the chapters progress. There are extremes pushed and boundaries broken.

Before continuing, I feel it is important to note that there are depictions of violence, animal death, gore, and emotional domestic abuse within these pages. Oshetsky’s prose is not overly detailed or exploitative of these dark themes, and ultimately serves the story, but the visuals can be disturbing and visceral regardless. Please read with discretion and care for your mental and emotional wellbeing. 

With that being said, I feel that Oshetsky unapologetically shines a light on the red flags the husband presents (such as gaslighting and intolerance for Tiny’s opinions), and the silent growth of the abuse cycle. This can be an important read for some because it actively criticizes wrongful abuse while also showing that Tiny manages to get out of the relationship. It’s also worth mentioning here that there is a scene that falls into the trope of “kill your abuser,” which I do not always agree with. I often feel like there should be more literary representation of the hotlines, non-profits, and resources out there for victims of domestic abuse, so when I personally see this trope, I’m not a huge fan. But Chouette is a metaphorical novel more than anything, so this death can be viewed more as a metaphor for cutting ties with an abusive person or cycle.

In fact, the use of magic and metaphor is what kept me turning the page. There are gorgeous descriptions of nature and music, which often collide to make sequences of harmonic chaos. There’s even a list of all the music mentioned in the novel at the back of the book, so if you like reading to music, you have a playlist very lovingly created for you by the author!

Oshetsky has a masterful way of connecting the sights and sounds of her prose with the overarching theme of her novel: that motherhood is both messy and beautiful. Routine, yet hectic. There is a stark honesty in her words that does not withhold anything. A wonderfully poetic mixture of the positive and negative experiences of motherhood. Sure, many of the plot points mentioned above are grim, but Tiny has this beautiful defiance about her throughout as well. Tiny’s story is as much about perseverance as it is about hardship. She is always an advocate for her child. Tiny protects and preserves what makes Chouette special, and fights to let her grow up in her own way. 

For all the harshness this novel presents, Tiny’s bravery and conviction during adversity is what gives the novel its value. The air of undeniable hope despite it all. Oshetsky has created an exercise in sitting with grief and pain to find beauty—in birth, in life, in eventual parting. She has presented a true triumph of motherhood while remaining viciously honest about every thought and feeling. The challenge that this novel gives to the reader, to sit with the ugliness of our early days, as both mothers and children, makes Chouette a true artwork. It’s meant to make you ponder the ideals of motherhood we have been spoon-fed. It is an invitation to prepare for the rain and the thunder of our own fertility, and to heal our open wounds — because what’s more healing than knowing you are not alone?

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If you or a loved one are facing domestic or dating abuse, here is a list of resources that may provide relief and support:

Domestic Violence Support | National Domestic Violence Hotline (thehotline.org)

Healthy relationships for young adults | love is respect

National Sexual Assault Hotline: Get Help | RAINN

Get help | Office on Women's Health (womenshealth.gov)

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Claire Oshetsky, Chouette, Ecco (HarperCollins Publishers Imprint), 2021

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Luree Scott (she/her) is a writer and performer from San Diego, CA. She received a BA in Theatre Arts and English from the University of San Diego and an MFA in Creative Writing from UCR Palm Desert's Low Residency Program for Creative Writing, where she studied fiction and playwriting. She is a former Drama Editor for The Coachella Review. Her previous works can be read in The Alcalá Review, Kelp Journal, Little Thoughts Press, GXRL, Grande Dame Literary Journal, and Longleaf Review. Her Twitter is @luree_s.

Buffalo Girl

The Power of Storytelling: Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark,

reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

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The stories we grow up hearing, whether they are fairy tales or family folklore, have a hand in shaping our perspective on the world. Buffalo Girl is a collection that is aware of the weight stories, language, and collective histories carry. Jessica Q. Stark employs a hybrid method to peel back the layers of what it means to be a woman of color and the gravity of being able to tell your own story. Sometimes she illuminates this through collages that combine nature and personal photographs and other times it is in the silences thriving in the blank space between poem lines. The mixed media mirror the multiple perspectives and sources used throughout the pieces.

One of the most prominent threads throughout the collection is the use of Little Red Riding Hood in erasure poems. Stark uses multiple translations of the fairy tale and reimagining to highlight the pain and danger that is ever-present for women. This peril that persists in the present moment and in memory. In “Little Red Riding Hood” (22) after Charles Perrault, the final couplet emphasizes this hidden danger:

I say wolf, but there
are various kinds. (13-14)

A wolf taking the form of family members leaving you in jeopardy, strangers lurking in dark corners, or questioning your own identity are a few images that come to mind. Stark utilizes this story to present different facets of existence and exploration. She even provides each translation in the Appendix to show just how inconsistent this childhood staple story actually is.

Stark maintains a measured pace to the collection by having its three sections interspersed with pictures. There is a combination of Red Riding Hood drawings and self-made collages of the author’s mother to show how quickly fiction can turn into fact. These sections are intentionally tumultuous, so the reader is not able to steady themselves. Creating pause with the images allows a new version of a story book to emerge. You have to rethink everything that you are reading and what you’ve been told growing up to see the actual impact. Fables are not harmless, especially when they attempt to erase your family history.

In addition to visual intermissions, Stark also uses a variety of poem shapes. From prose poems to striking caesuras, she knows the importance of shifting the way a poem is presented on the page to keep the reader engaged. Even when she creates a mini series with her “Kleptomania” poems, they vary in length so you are able to easily distinguish them. This variation allows the unknowing connection between theft and women to be seen in “Kleptomania, 1993” (69–71). Stark begins the poem by speaking about stealing and how women:

mostly do it or at least

are more punishable for the

crime of taking what’s

not rightfully theirs… (4-7)

This train of thought is reflected throughout the poem. The speaker recounts their own shoplifting experiences and the theft of innocence for women of color. Stark is able to explore the power dynamic in her parents’ relationship in a way that is expansive enough for readers to also see themselves in. It also gives a face to this impulse and to what is truly being stolen.

Another form that is incredibly effective in this collection is the use of call and response. “Catalogue of Random Acts of Violence” (80) is composed of 21 questions that begin with the pinnacle “Where are you from?” Stark uses questions as a  means of diving deeper instead of hindering or creating an uncertainty in the reader. The reader is left at the end of the poem with the unsatisfactory nature that arises whenever you are faced with these questions in reality:

Why didn’t she?

Why can?

Why cannot? (19-21)

These questions, directed at the mother’s actions, impact how the daughter is subsequently perceived. Stark then uses “In Earnest, She Replied:” (81) on the next page to answer with a single repeating definitive “The Woods” as the answer to all of the questions. Bringing the reader full circle to Little Red Riding Hood and the fact that answers require discovery into territory that is often treacherous and unseen.

Once the reader reaches the final section of the collection, the interrogation journey they have  been taken on comes to a head in “The Furies” (92–93). Employing singlets, Stark is able to point to the pieces of suffering from a personal place:

That the woods obscure as much as they protect, that at least you can lay there

That there are so few public places to exhibit pain

That the image of the image of my mother in Vietnam is a birth certificate that
doesn’t exist (8-11)

Recounting what is lost and the inability to process these feelings publicly are both feelings the poet is concerned with. These are thoughts that are able to come forward through the reimagining of a vehicle like fairy tales. Venturing through the woods with Red Riding Hood inadvertently allows the reader to collect pieces of their own family histories.

Buffalo Girl is a collection that achieves cohesiveness through a constant unraveling and rethinking. By thinking about the connective tissue of our personal histories differently, it can bring us closer to the parts that have always remained. Stark starts and ends the book with her mother because that is where her story originates. This collection is an attempt to process what it means to be a woman of color through individual perception and the records that get left behind.

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Jessica Q. Stark, Buffalo Girl, published by BOA Editions Ltd, April 2023. 136 pages.

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Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

 Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

Hotel San Claudio

Hotel San Claudio. Mark de Clive-Lowe, Shigeto, and Melanie Charles.

Reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

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I hazard that the pre-eminent starting point for discussing jazz is Albert Murray’s 1970 essay “The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream.” As someone occupied with writing about music, and as someone partial to jazz, I must recall one line or another from that essay daily. In fact, an informal rubric has evolved from which I leap into the deep-end of interpretation: when listening to a record for the first time, which line(s) from “Blues Idiom” come to mind most readily? In the case of Hotel San Claudio, I report that from beginning to end that novel effort evoked Murray’s assertion that the blues musician, when playing, is:

“Extemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the  possibilities that are also there” (472).

Melanie Charles, one-third of San Claudio’s trio, along with Shigeto and Mark de Clive-Lowe, affirms that notion with her self-stated mission to “make jazz trill again.” or in other words, to take “jazz from the museum to the streets.” “Possibility," which Murray thought so integral to the blues idiom, is also a serviceable reduction of San Claudio's sensibility. The record spreads its arms in warm embrace of newness, alterity, and, to use an unfortunately voguish word, innovation. A decidedly post-acoustic album, San Claudio honors and expands the legacy of spiritual jazz with its electronic saturation and various nods to world music. Though certainly it is conscious of its lineage, dedicating as it does three tracks to variations on Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” San Claudio's spirit of homage does not yield to nostalgia however. The record integrates a multitude of novel voices and allusions. MdcL’s electronic compositions allude to the eastern in particular, as he continues his sonic exploration of his Japanese heritage, which originated from his 2019 Heritage series. One of San Claudio’s tracks, Bushido, appears in other forms on both records. The version on San Claudio is punctuated by mystical-flutes and staccato electronic elements, offering a sort of well-intended chinoiserie akin to Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite. “Strings” features a rapped vocal performance by Charles, whose vocals are a delightful presence throughout. Her singing and rapping possess the syllabic play definitive of jazz singing; on “Strings” she rhymes “melody” and “felony” on the open “O” like “melOdy” and “felOny.” As for the instrumental components, Shigeto’s drumming characteristically criss-crosses genre borders, sometimes offering a steady rock n’ roll presence, while at other times demanding attention with a cymbal-heavy, ornamental jazz voice. As always, Charles’ flute playing is stunningly accomplished, adhering to the precedent of the great jazz horn-players; her every note played represents an infinity of notes not played, thereby narrowing the continuum of possibility for the solo. That process of elimination – of trying to find the right expression – is the process whereby a jazz solo devolves, and finally dissolves. This technical neurosis so inextricable from improvisation is the formal counterpoint to Jazz’s general ethos of exploration.

Yet neither Charles’ contributions nor San Claudio’s whole are mere exercises in virtuosity. Rather the record feels playful, hopeful, and deeply purposeful. The artists emanate a strong belief in the relevance of what they are doing, in the indispensability of music, and especially jazz, to “play with the possibilities that are also there.” As our culture congeals and codes of rightness harden in opposition to one another, a trillness of jazz might be redemptive. A commitment on the part of our artists to play to the possibilities – which despite our interminably dour state, are also there –  offers an avenue of much-needed resilience. An avenue worthy of our attention, support, and protection. In “Blues Idiom,” Murray continues that under the idiom’s sway its acolyte is not “disconcerted by intrusions, lapses, shifts in rhythm, intensifications of tempo…but is inspired by them to higher and richer levels of improvisation” (472). San Claudio in isolation certainly represents a higher and richer level of improvisation – a good-faith effort on the part of younger musicians to pay homage, while ferociously dedicating their lives to the “particular time, place, and circumstance” in which they find themselves (468). In application, San Claudio adds to jazz’s queer essence – its deviation from ephemeral metrics of normativity – and blueprints new modes of aesthetic re-action, offering a polyphonic path through and out of what might otherwise seem to be all too insurmountable.

Citation:

Murray, Albert. “The Blues Idiom”, 1970. The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970, ed. Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, April 2021.

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Jeromiah Taylor is a writer and photographer born, raised, and living on The Great Plains. As an essayist Jeromiah publishes widely in regional news outlets such as The Kansas Reflector, The Pennsylvania-Capitol Star, The Sunflower, and The Liberty Press. In 2022, Jeromiah completed his first poetry chapbook "Havoc Heaped on Boy Body," a deep-dive into queer latino manhood, and quarter-life issues, refracted through the images of horror cinema, folk religion, The Great American Songbook, and homoeroticism. He also, along with several members of Wichita State University's M.F.A in poetry program, co-organized and co-headlined, the language event, "Nothing is Necessary, Everything is a Choice: A Night of Spoken Word," hosted by MonikaHouse as a part of the 2022 National Independent Venue Week line-up.

Beyond creative pursuits, Jeromiah worked in copywriting roles for several non-profit organizations, and currently earns a living via that most storied of writerly day jobs: working at a coffee shop.

He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his partner, one impish dog, and one imperious cat.

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay, reviewed by Mahy Arafa

If you choose to read Canadian author Adèle Barclay’s debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, prepare yourself for a journey back in time inspired by the supernatural, the occult, witchcraft, tarot cards, and Canadiana and Americana mythology, combined with intimacy, love, desire, and closeness. In her first poem, “Dear Sara,” the poet asks “Where are our time machines?” This question primes the readers for the poems that follow which act as a time machine, jumping through time and space. For instance, in her first two poems she deftly moves from “slick jaws/of Brooklyn” to small-town Ontario, where “a grunge trio’s name/references Alice Munro.” Barclay’s specific references give the reader a sense of familiarity amidst the travels through time and place. Barclay also plays with time within a single poem. For instance, the five parts of “Dear Sara,” span several generations to highlight the struggles of each time period.

In an interview with The Fiddlehead Magazine, Barclay explains, “My approach to tone in prose is heavily influenced by my impulses as a poet: a mood, feeling, or ineffable idea drives me to gather a collection of objects, sensory experiences, and cultural references to circle around it. I need to be able to see and smell and touch the world I'm writing about.” In other words, she writes with the intent to defy her expectations, following instinct and impulse rather than fixed forms and structures. A prime example is the poem “Testament Scratched into a Water Station Barrel by Eduardo C. Corral.” The line breaks are unpredictable and each line makes unintuitive yet fascinating connections. “The faucet/is a siren, the pipes freeze a rusted melody,” followed by “I’ve/turned Saturn/in my mouth/like an olive pit” are great instances in which the reader’s expectations are altered. It's almost as if Barclay is a witch performing magic and revealing to her disciple (reader) the trick step by step (line by line).

The materialistic and sensory elements that inspire Barclay are evident in her collection. In speaking of her writing process with Open Book Magazine, Barclay says: “I don't plan out poems, and I definitely do write from an intuitive place. Sometimes poems swerve in directions I didn't anticipate. And yet I often feel like a lot of these things exist as ideas or even sensations that are percolating or ambiently swirling around in my poet brain. The writing distills them.” This surprising, sensory imagery is especially prominent in “Suburban Sonnet,” a free-verse poem with a frenzied form and a piling of adjectives and comparisons. Barclay’s metaphors are unexpected and beautiful: “drunk as a busted patio umbrella blackberry/barbs the crank of old bike chains up anthills;” “silver creeks swallowed the highway’s shoulder;” and “hive-mind engines hum in the shallow of the night.”

The poem “Dear Sara II” is a remarkable piece in which all of Barclay’s techniques and themes intersect: 

Dear Sara II 

The witches of Bushwick ward off night 

  terrors 

with warming spells, 72 Fahrenheit 

in November. You frown and sleep 

for days in my borrowed room. I circle the 

  bed 

with diatomaceous earth, fill three cups 

with water, 

plait my black hair. We hang at a rabbit 

  hole 

in the West Village, mirror Schiele— 

twisted knuckles seize a dark aura, flecks 

  of silver 

in the skirt. MoMA PS1 makes you hate art 

and give up smoking. Fish heart, bones 

within bones, hangnails and turmeric. 

I wrap my right arm around your belly

and swat our nightmares with my left. 

Sara, nothing like ambition or sanity 

  matters 

because at Saint John the Divine 

phoenixes baptized in rust swoop 

from the cathedral’s ceiling. 

The beasts stopped a whole city block 

for a week last winter. Priests carted scrap 

  metal 

off trucks and hoisted them up, 

engineers determined how to best salvage 

the holy arches from added weight, 

and leashed tigers paraded in to pray 

under the great hall’s open lungs.

With the indented, one word lines, Barclay creates a disrupted form that embodies the chaos of time. That being said, Barclay includes details that help guide the reader through the chaos. The poet speaker mentions MoMA PS1 to indicate a time-lapse and November, to mark the season and create a certain coldness. The one-word poetic lines also serve to usurp the reader's expectations, one of Barclay’s favorite techniques. The themes of religion, witchcraft, and the occult are prevalent throughout this poem with the imagery of cathedrals, baptism, priests, holiness, witches, nightmares, fish hearts, and bones. Barclay’s poetry desperately attempts to connect with the reader over distances while embracing ambiguity and encrypted messages in need of deciphering. Indeed, the young poet confesses to Open Book Magazine, “I'm not too interested in the reader needing to understand the private language of the epistolary mode in order to engage with the poem—just like I'm not concerned about trying to decipher or unlock a poem in general. The mystery is part of the magic. What's compelling to me about the epistolary mode is the heat released with this merging of feeling and form.”  

Though Barclay thrusts the reader into different places and time periods, she grounds each poem with concrete indicators of the geographic location and time in history. The title of the collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, informs our reading of these poems: in each distinct setting, the poet speaker is willing to reach out with all their strength to connect to humanity, even if restricted by a cage. The humorous voice of the narrator is relatable and familiar, almost like talking to someone you know well. Through the reverence and mystique of her lively descriptions, Barclay creates the illusion of traveling back in time while diving into themes of millennial anxieties and magic.

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If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay

Nightwood Editions. 2017. 96 pages

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Mahy Arafa is a passionate, career-driven individual currently studying at Sheridan College to receive her Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing. She is currently working as a German transcriber for an AI company, and she makes a living as a book reviewer. She has been a passionate and aspiring writer and editor since childhood and possesses a complete portfolio of projects including non-fiction, prose fiction, drama, and poetry. She has worked as a transcriber, blog writer, editor, and content writer, but her lifelong dream is to write a script for a feature film, tv show, or video game, to direct and produce it herself, and to write a successful novel, book, or collection of poems.

A Conversation with Nina Schuyler

A Conversation with Nina Schuyler, by Swetha Amit                                              

What was the inspiration for Afterword? How did the idea initially come about?

Inspiration doesn't come from a singular moment. It can come from many things. For me, the list is long. I wanted to interject the messiness of this creativity. Much of it is my exposure, thinking about death, what makes it human, and what if we don't die. I am always thinking and reading widely, staying open to ideas. I started paying attention to AI in 2017. I became curious about what is going to become of this technology. Living in the Bay Area gave me access to people working in technology. I have a background in reporting, so it was easy for me to meet and interview these people. I talked to people from this industry and learned more. 

How long did it take you to write Afterword? Tell me more about the research process. 

I read an excellent book called Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan. I read that earlier on to get the fundamentals down. I constantly kept reading newspaper articles, blogs, and the news. Everything started with Alan Turing in the 1950s when he gave us the Turing test. When will a computer be [so much] like a human that we mistake a computer for a human? My curiosity fueled this research process, which started in 2017-2018. But life intervened since I also teach, so I took some time with it. 

The novel alternates between third person close and first person from the perspective of Virginia. How did you make this choice to alternate points of view?

It goes back to what I believe is the longevity of a writer: try[ing] something new that you haven't tried before. I wrote my previous two novels using close third, and I have never tried anything in the first person. I wanted to bring the intimacy of the human being on the page. It's also blended with epistolary form, and there is some voyeurism. As a reader, I like it when the author invites me to a private place. That was my thinking behind it. So much of it was intuitive. 

How did you find the voice of your character Haru, who is an AI instead of a human character? 

I was teaching a class about heteroglossia. It's a term by Mikhail Bakhtin that emphasizes that fiction, especially novels, can employ different speech sounds. I needed to make Haru's diction different from my other main character, Virginia. I wanted to expand and create variability for him and make him sound more human. I wanted to contrast Ishiguro, who flattens the language often for his characters in Klara and the Sun. I wanted to show Virginia had a different sound and invite a fuller depiction of technology that humanizes it. 

"Language is what makes us human." is a pertinent line in your book. Do you feel human communication and interaction have reduced with the advent of technology and increased loneliness? Do you see AI as a boon or bane?

The answer is yes and no. With large language models, it [AI] is now becoming better every month. It feels like you are talking to a human. Recently, the U.S. Surgeon General just reported an epidemic of loneliness. Japan and the U.K. have appointed ministers of loneliness to address this problem. The technology Replica, for example, provides the feeling of a best friend who can listen to humans sharing their stories. Recently, somebody discovered that replicas could be sexual companions and role-play with you at a sexual level. While it is a support group, I won't advocate AI companions to humans. On the other side of the coin, online conversations move to extremes and decisiveness. Humanity and patience get subtracted during online exchanges and tend to become polarized.  

Your book has a delicate balance that brings out human emotions and talks about AI. It's a blend of suspense, love, and science fiction. How did you manage this balance? Did you consciously plan that out while penning down this book?

The book's heart, for me, was always a love story. I always kept track of it. One of my main characters, Virginia, has a memory of this man embedded in her to a large extent. There is this delusion that we know everything about each other. I wanted to tackle that aspect.  I didn't intend for it to be science fiction. One of my M.F.A. professors always talked about taking out the genres and bringing back the character in them. Those words are embedded in me. This novel was an exercise in writing to discover what was unfolding on the page. I didn't think a play would be in the middle, but a play appeared. Every writer needs to find a private space that let the messy, chaotic creativity unfold. This place is to explode and transgress out of what is expected and break all those proper habits in writing. Russians have a name for this, “Vnye,” which is being within a context while remaining oblivious to it. 

What do you want readers to take away from this book?

Whatever the reader is searching for, whether it's an experience, escape, a dream, or a fantasy. The premise of this is that what if you can continue a conversation with your loved ones.  What if there was no finite death? Are we still human if we can transcend those boundaries of death? What will our relationship with machines be? It's an AI age, and we are living in it. It is the time to be thoughtful and think about such things. 

Who are the authors/books that have influenced your writing process?

There are so many. I admire Virginia Woolf for her syntax and rhythm; James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and James Salter for eloquence and compression; Elena Ferrante for her honesty and bluntness; Shruti Swamy for her imagery; and poets Jude Nutter and Elizabeth Bishop. I read more poetry and cultivated this practice of memorizing poems. 

Are any more books in the pipeline?

I have just finished a novel's first draft, and it’s in a private space now. I have an ending in mind, and I am waiting to get back to it.

Favorite childhood memory? 

I had an imaginative experience of death when I was five or six. I am unsure what the trigger was, but I realized I came from nothing and will eventually return to nothing. I think it was a profound moment. 

Any strange writing habits?

I always have a notebook and jot down what I see, hear, or think of something. I usually do this when picking up my boys or at a dentist appointment. 

What is the strangest place you have visited? 

We are living in a great space right now. There is much upheaval, and everything will turn out differently. I am reading everything I can about Chat GPT and am at the cusp of this upheaval. 

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Nina Schuyler's novel, Afterword, will be published in May 2023 by Clash Books. Her short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2024. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. Her short stories have been published by ZYZZYVA, Fugue, Your Impossible Voice, Santa Clara Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She has a new nonfiction book, Stunning Sentences: Creative Writing Journal. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.

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Author of her memoir, A Turbulent Mind-My journey to Ironman 70.3’, Swetha Amit is currently pursuing her MFA at University of San Francisco. She has published her works in Atticus Review, JMWW journal, Oranges Journal, Gastropoda Lit, Full House literary, Amphora magazine, Grande Dame literary journal, Black Moon Magazine, Fauxmoir lit mag, Poets Choice anthology, and has upcoming pieces in Drunk Monkeys, Agapanthus Collective, The Creative Zine, and Roi Faineant Press. She is one of the contest winners of Beyond words literary magazine, her piece upcoming in November. She is also, alumni of Tin House Winter Workshop 2022 and the Kenyon Review Writers’ workshop 2022. Twitter: @whirlwindtotsInstagram @swethaamit

In Springtime

In Springtime, by Sarah Blake, reviewed by Trevor Ruth

“If you tell a bird that a heart is like a bird without wings, she will tell you it is broken because it doesn’t have wings.” Such is the poignant and contemplative phrasing of Sarah Blake’s In Springtime, a long-form narrative poem that depicts the struggles of an unnamed human, lost in the exile of the forest with their animal companions. No, this is not The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Instead, our dramatis personae for this collection include the person (our main subject), a pregnant horse, the spirit of a dead bird, a mouse, and I think a snake at one point. We interact with the person, the horse, and the dead bird the most, though the mouse tries desperately to be a part of the story too. What exactly is the story? Base survival. The human subject (or rather, you, given that the narrative is written in second person) must determine whether or not they are able to coexist with their animal brethren, or if they are destined to die in the wilderness. Across the span of four days, we are introduced to the mystery and myth of the natural world through the human’s interaction with each of these creatures and their supposed interconnectedness.

As a linear narrative, In Springtime is still rather nonsensical; it does not try to have a plot apart from perhaps the human subject seeing the horse’s pregnancy through. Initially, I wondered if this book wasn’t Blake’s response to Northrop Frye’s green world; a naturalistic space where change is meant to occur in the heart and mind of the character. The elements are all there: at times, it feels as if the story—what story there is—takes place in an ancient atmosphere. The formatting of the poetry and the adherence to the natural world and all of its metaphysical properties, like bathing in a river or creating makeshift graves for the dead with one’s bare hands, give the book a postmodern Romanesque quality; the isolation that the subject goes through is without a doubt self-inflicted and perhaps fugitive in nature: “In the next dream you dig in the same place and find a gun. You’ve shot someone. You weren’t supposed to return to this place where you hid the gun.” The victim of this person’s crime, in my mind, is obviously the bird. Whether that bird is symbolic of someone—or something— else is hard to tell but there is no doubt that its presence acts as the greatest detriment to the person’s struggle, as they are consistently haunted by its presence, and thus haunted by the presence of death.

Even under their originally published titles of “In a Wood, with Clearings, it’s Spring,” I fail to find any semblance of the season presented. Perhaps it relates to the heavy use of the forest setting and the cold, earthy descriptors along with the grimy environment but often Blake’s writing does very little to inspire, with few explanations for its dour voice. “He or she will have the largest eyes of any land mammal./And he or she—foal, baby, dearest—will grow to dread even the starry nights, how they’re caught only in glimpses.” Whether this tonal decision is used to reject the norms of springtime poetry or whether we are supposed to look at life with a kind of anger and fear through the poetry itself is up to the reader. Regardless, nothing inspires hope or rejuvenation in the reading of this poem. I assume this is intentional, given the in-between-ness of our human subject’s existence in what is certainly a kind of limbo. What the human subject (or you) is meant to gain from their experience in the wood is uncertain.

Perhaps the person is feeling guilty for having committed a murder and wants to help the horse see its pregnancy through as a kind of atonement. The sad reality, however, is that the person was completely unnecessary when it came to the actual birth, “You have to look at the nursing foal to have any real sense of well-being.” Again, this is not exactly uplifting (it is not supposed to be), but it is a very realistic outcome. There is something rather heartbreaking though poignant about the person’s attempt to assert its importance to the horse’s offspring; like a parent who tries to be a part of your life after neglecting you for most of your childhood. It’s important to note that while the book emphasizes realism, it isn’t nihilistic. Nor is the tone overly dismal and harsh with its realism, in fact the tone is quite magical at times. How can it not be? There’s a ghost bird who can travel into outer space if it wanted to. I even find the image of the mouse curling itself up into the person’s chest rather romantic. 

As a side note, I applaud the decision to include the illustrations by artist Nicky Arscott in the book’s final pages; there’s a certain ancient quality to them that—like the collection itself—comes off as abstract but sacred, apart from one image of a horse that is more like a lost creepypasta. 

To say that I was changed by In Springtime would be a lie, but there’s a kind of brilliance to its storytelling that is worth revisiting and re-examining, like an old philosophical metaphor that gets lost in the forest of its own imagination. Aplomb with an intellect to rival Ralph Waldo Emerson, Blake continues to prove how naturalism puts us in our place and reminds us of our relevance in the continuous reimagining of the human. 

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Sarah Blake, In Springtime, Wesleyan University Press, 2023

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Trevor Ruth is a writer originally from Livermore, California. He has been featured in Occam’s Razor, takahe, The Specter Review, The Typeslash Review, Typishly, Wingless Dreamer and Quiet Lightning among other publications. He has a degree from California State University, East Bay and is featured regularly on The Baram House as a Film Reviewer in Residence. He also has a personal blog at https://trevorruthblog.wordpress.com 

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt, reviewed by Katy Mitchell-Jones

In Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, Tova Sullivan is a septuagenarian widow living in the fictional small town of Sowell Bay, a couple hours north of Seattle. She works as a night custodian at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, spending most of her time around sea creatures instead of people. Her favorite is a sixty pound giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, who sees deeper into Tova than any human has for a long while. 

The relationship that Tova and Marcellus cultivate is touching and unexpected. Marcellus is painted as a “remarkably bright” creature who can see beyond the surface level details of humans. In fact, he ridicules humans for not seeing what he deems obvious or perfunctory. Despite the aquarium manager Terry’s attempts to render Marcellus’ enclosure escape-proof, the octopus escapes and roams the building at night. During one of these escapades, Tova notices Marcellus tangled in some cords and frees him, which builds their trust. 

The novel’s narration mainly switches between mainly Tova and Marcellus and, after a few chapters, a character named Cameron Cassmore, the new custodian. Marcellus’ sections are short and in the first person, each labeled “Day X of my Captivity,” and give readers an inside look into his observations of Tova, Terry, and Cameron. As the story progresses, the three narrators become more tangled (sometimes literally) as they try to resolve their conflicts.

Cameron is on a mission to find his real dad, as he is desperate for cash and hopes to pressure his unwitting father into giving him money. Cameron is not a bad person; rather he had a tough upbringing that resulted in an inability to retain a job or a girlfriend. He thinks back to his childhood, when his mother had issues with drugs and his father was absent. He spent most of his time with his aunt, who raised him into his teenage years. Still depending on her throughout his adult life makes him feel guilty and less of a competent adult than he would like. Cameron is not the only character to struggle with the idea of a happy, whole family, or the lack thereof. 

It is revealed early in the novel that Tova’s son Erick passed away thirty years ago. The authorities labeled the case a suicide, but Tova does not believe that for a second. Just an eighteen-year-old kid, he worked at the ferry dock in the ticket terminal, which was found unlocked, his backpack stowed safely along with his possessions. But he was nowhere to be found. His fingerprints and pants were found on a rusty rudder of a small boat. Without further evidence, the police settled on suicide as the manner of death, which makes Tova feel helpless. 

Tova’s friends all have children and grandchildren. Her only relative, a brother named Lars, soon passes away, and she is left to decide how to spend the remaining years of her life: apply for the same care facility Lars was in, or stay in the small town she loves? Cameron, too, only has his aunt, who has problems of her own, namely she has started “collecting” bits of rubbish around the house and may have an issue with alcohol, which he seems to have inherited. Cameron is concerned about her and hopes to pay her back money he borrowed from her. Therefore he takes this trip north from California to the small town of Sowell Bay, all based on an Internet lead and a hunch.

A pervasive theme throughout the novel is loneliness; Tova, Cameron, and Marcellus all have chapters dedicated to their longing for companionship. Tova once had this with her late husband, but she struggles moving on from his passing. Loss can happen at any stage of life, whether you are a septuagenarian, mourning the loss of a spouse or child, or a man in his mid to late twenties, pondering what could have been if his mother had just been healthy. Even Marcellus reflects on his impending death, as his breed of octopus only lives four to six years, and he begins to feel himself grow older and slower. We are all at some point confronted with death, and reading how these characters navigate their own emotions and reflections upon life and death is both heartwarming and melancholic. 

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Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

May 3, 2022, Ecco, 368 pages.

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Katy Mitchell-Jones is originally from a small town in Washington state and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with her BA and MA. She then headed to Boston to teach high school English but has since returned to her west coast roots. Her favorite authors are Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Tana French, and Glendy Vanderah. She has published three short stories with Chipper Press, for middle-grades. You can follow her on Goodreads here.

A Conversation with Natalie MacLean

A Conversation with Natalie MacLean, by Swetha Amit

                                               

How and when did you decide to write your memoir Wine Witch on Fire? How long did it take you?

It took a long time. I refused to look at my journal entries and notes for five years because it was too painful. Then, the incidents began swarming around my head. I started writing about it as a private exercise to make sense of what happened to me. I had no intention of publishing it. I thought writing about it in public would be vandalizing my own privacy. My favorite quote comes from memoirist Glennon Doyle. She says “You need to write from a scar and not an open wound.” And my next question is, why write about it at all? Poet Sean Thomas Dougherty says, “Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.” Then, I realized by keeping this story to myself that I wasn't fully connecting with others, so I spent another five years writing and editing it. When you share vulnerability and cracks inside your life, you invite others in, and they share in return. The stories that came back to me from readers who read my memoir are profoundly moving. 

Writing a memoir can be daunting. Did you face any challenges, or was writing any part of this memoir difficult? 

It was tough. First, I had to get through the trauma and undergo a lot of therapy to process all that pain. My memoir brought together two aspects of my life that I thought were utterly different– my personal life involving a divorce and my professional life that involved all that defamation and accusations about intellectual theft. They were two sides of an open wound, and I stitched my life together to create a new meaning. It was challenging to relive those experiences, but there was more healing. Writing about it was cathartic. It helped me make sense of my own world.  

The title Wine Witch on Fire is catchy. How did you come up with it? Does the word 'witch' symbolize anything in particular? 

This memoir is about a middle-aged woman—me—who survives a personal and professional crisis to rediscover her own wisdom and resilience. Witches resonate with me because their strength comes from within. They represent wisdom, feminine power, and a healing connection to nature. My favorite childhood stories were always about witches. I was especially intrigued by the opposing forces between the good witch Glinda and the unnamed Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I realized how these two opposing forces were inside me as well. There are some stereotypes associated with witches, which need to change. 

Did you have any target audience in mind while penning this memoir? 

A lot of memoirs start with the authors writing for themselves. A memoir feels like a hug to my younger self when I thought I was alone. As a memoir evolves, it eventually finds its core readers. In my case, it was women who were above the age of forty who had faced family and career challenges. It also appeals to younger women keen to know what pitfalls to avoid. There have also been some good men who gifted this book to the women in their lives—their wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers. Some men discuss the issues addressed in my memoir with their wives, which is excellent. If you find your story in my memoir, then it becomes a book for you. 

The language in your memoir has a delicate balance of a bit of humor and vulnerability. Was it a conscious attempt to maintain this balance? 

Humor has always been my way of coping with difficult times. Earlier, my humor used to be a defense mechanism. Now, it's a more general approach inviting people to chuckle with me. I realized my memoir could not be one long bleak narrative. At the same time, I did not want to trivialize some critical subjects. We need comic relief in life, whether in books or movies. Initially, I could not have inserted humor because I didn't have that distance. Now, with the wisdom of the time, I could adopt a different lens and find ways to insert humor. It's a matter of balance, just like a complex drink like wine, which is a combination of several elements. 

You talk about different narrative approaches in your memoir. How do you approach your writing in terms of narrative and form? 

I have always written in the first-person in a very conversational tone. It's natural for me to write like we are talking at the kitchen table. From a narrative form, a memoir is just a slice in time of your life, like a year or two, unlike an autobiography, which encapsulates your entire life. The memoir goes back and forth in time. This was challenging and exhilarating. I found it elevated my craft and challenged me as a writer. 

Do you think penning down this memoir has changed you?

I initially thought strength meant holding it all inside and not needing anyone to confide in. This approach made my life a lot more complex and worse. Only when I confided in friends, family, and other women in the wine industry did I realize how healing restored the power of friendship. I realized that vulnerability was the only defense. 

What do you expect readers to take away from this book?

We have a wine-making term called dry extract. It refers to the essence of wine-flavored components when all the moisture has evaporated. The dry extract is there in humans. It's about what is left over after life has burnt us down to that leftover essence—who we are at our core can help us rise again. It's incredible how we have more profound resilience and strength than we give ourselves credit for. 

Now moving on to some fun questions. What would your favorite childhood memory be?

My favorite childhood memories are all connected to the sense of smell. Smell is the only sense of the five senses tied directly to memory and the brain, so, to remember how things smelt in my childhood, whenever I open a National Geographic magazine, I am back on my grandparents’ porch, which had a stack of those. I loved how those magazines smelled. Also, whenever I come back from swimming and let the sun dry my back, I recollect the smell of grass and tiger lilies in the corner of my grandmother’s garden, and even the salty ocean water close by. These beautiful smells transport me back to my four-year-old self again. 

If you were to describe yourself as a particular variety of wine, what would it be? 

Pinot noir. It's got all the flavor and vivacity of the best wines and none of the heavy dose alcohol like you get in some other varieties of wine. Pinot noir is like a thin-skinned grape. I find it like people on the edge of a nervous breakdown. They are exciting conversationalists, but you are not sure where the conversation is headed. Pinot is great when it's sublime. When it's bad, it's terrible. It's this mysterious aura of not knowing that makes it thrilling. I want to remain thin-skinned like the pinot and live in a place of vulnerability, sharing, and transparency. 

What's the strangest place you have visited?

In terms of wine regions, I love South Africa. It was wild and fierce. They have some spectacular vineyards and landscapes. In North America, you must deal with deer, birds, and rabbits who want to eat your grapes. In South Africa, they deal with baboons and all kinds of wildlife that roam around in groups and can attack their vineyards anytime. I find it fascinating and strange. The food is excellent with all those exotic flavors, and the people are great. 

Who are the authors or books who have inspired you?

Margaret Atwood is at the top of my list. As a teenager, I wrote about her for a book report on The Handmaid's Tale. It was inspiring to read her as a young woman and to continue reading her works. She has a strong voice and paints these pictures of characters that stay with you even after turning the last page over. Colette, the French writer, wrote with great sensuality about wine, food, life, and love. M.F.K. Fisher is another author I admire. She said “So it happens, when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.”  She viewed food writing as a genre to look at people and life through the lens of food. This resonates with me. Wine gave me the confidence to write and ask people questions I never would. 

Are any upcoming books in the pipeline?

Now, I am focusing on promoting my memoir. I will connect with people online through my online wine and food pairing courses, https://www.nataliemaclean.com, and the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I also want to connect with readers who share their stories with me. And I welcome readers to communicate with me. I have some ideas for my upcoming book and will pursue this after the hype around my memoir subsides. 

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Natalie MacLean's previous books, Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass and Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World's Best Bargain Wines, were each selected as one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year.

She was named the World's Best Drinks Journalist at the World Food Media Awards and has won four James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards. She is the only person to have won the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M. F. K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d' Escoffier International.

Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Wine Enthusiast, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and National Post. She's the regular wine expert on several television shows.

Natalie hosts Unreserved Wine Talk, selected as one of the best drinks podcasts by the New York Times. She offers online food and wine pairing classes where she connects personally with those around the planet who share her passion for wine at www.nataliemaclean.com.

Find out more about Wine Witch on Fire here, including the bonuses for those who purchase the book as well as the free companion guide with wine tips and pairings.

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Author of her memoir, A Turbulent Mind-My journey to Ironman 70.3’, Swetha Amit is currently pursuing her MFA at University of San Francisco. She has published her works in Atticus Review, JMWW journal, Oranges Journal, Gastropoda Lit, Full House literary, Amphora magazine, Grande Dame literary journal, Black Moon Magazine, Fauxmoir lit mag, Poets Choice anthology, and has upcoming pieces in Drunk Monkeys, Agapanthus Collective, The Creative Zine, and Roi Faineant Press. She is one of the contest winners of Beyond words literary magazine, her piece upcoming in November. She is also, alumni of Tin House Winter Workshop 2022 and the Kenyon Review Writers’ workshop 2022. Twitter: @whirlwindtotsInstagram @swethaamit

Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro

Braiding Love and Life: Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro by José Olivarez, review by Rebecca Samuelson

Sifting through memory can be an arduous task, involving filling in the gaps to make sense of what is to come. Promises of Gold is a collection centered on processing what memory means at different stages of our lives. It grapples with what the individual remembers and the collective fabric that unites communities. Olivarez crafts poems that are, at one moment, dripping with love, then overflowing with anxiety in the midst of the pandemic in the next.

Everything about this collection is meticulous and intentional. Olivarez’s second book is translated by David Ruano González, creating a journey in English or Spanish, depending on which way you hold the book. There is an added layer of accessibility with the dual language text that feels crucial to many of the experiences Olivarez recounts. 

The poems are divided into eleven sections to emphasize the notion that life rarely fits neatly into an equal equation. With this odd number, the reader is left searching at the end of the collection for a reason. This is paired with the feelings associated with the title, Promises of Gold. There is a desire to attain something that might be unreachable or might not exist, but the possibility propels the poet and reader forward. If there is a chance to reach something of value, it seems worth pursuing. 

In the beginning, the reader immediately looks at the past, thinking about how tradition functions and relates to specific family dynamics. The poems zoom in and out of personal moments to commentary on society with ease with one of the stand-out examples being “Bulls vs. Suns, 1993” (23). On the surface, this poem could just be about the speaker recalling a basketball game with his father. Sports function as a neutral zone for the speaker, but there is a presentation of emotion with a sense of remove. The poem is intrinsically tied to the heart’s actions, beginning with lines 1-3:

                sitting on your lap watching your eyes
                following the bouncing basketball
                & my heart is a hundred basketballs

All of these observations are gathered around a desire to create a more lasting connection. What starts as a casual basketball game viewing becomes an intimate look at a complex relationship as the poem continues. The reader is confronted with a combination of acts of affection and discipline that are carefully placed between jump shots and layups. 

This practice of shifting from the big picture to the individual is also accomplished through setting up different environments throughout the collection. Pieces can be location specific at times, but they still capture universal experiences like love, life, and loss. Contemplating the limitations of hindsight and understanding change after time passes can be seen in a poem recounting the weather. In “Cal City Winter” (53), an act of introspection occurs when thinking about cold mornings at the bus stop:

                i needed to believe suffering was honorable.

                i needed to believe those February mornings

                made July’s sunshine silkier. (5-7)

The brevity of this eleven line poem strikes the reader like a cold morning. It calls us to question what other forms of suffering we believed were necessary to get to the next chapter in our lives. With the use of a lowercase “I,” Olivarez gives the reader permission to place themselves in these thought processes even though he is recalling something that is extremely vivid in his own memory. 

Recalling these memories also leads to a dominant thread of distance in the collection. Sometimes, it manifests in physical distance apart from family members during the pandemic, and other times, it presents as metaphorical distance between lifetimes. Death and the idea of healing are concepts Olivarez explores in dynamic ways. In “Poetry Is Not Therapy” (56), the impact of distance is summarized beautifully:

               the distance between me
                & everyone
                i’ve lost grows by miles

                & years. (16-19)

Thinking about these measurements happens in real-time for the speaker. These thoughts are not in isolation from current events, which allows them to resonate immediately with the reader.

Olivarez does not shy away from the power in choosing words carefully and creating quick snippets. He achieves this by utilizing distinct forms like text messages, prose blocks, or being in conversation with other voices in certain pieces. There is a sense of authority that is felt no matter the length of the piece. This is seen most clearly in “Authenticity” (67). A self-defined “chicano love poem” that is captured in a couplet:

                one of my college crushes used to eat hot Cheetos

                so smooth, she never got red dust on her fingers. (2-3)

There is a smoothness in this vivid image being crafted so easily in two lines. It also exemplifies the many definitions of love throughout the collection. A crush representing a certain period of time, an iconic snack food, and the intimacy of hands are all captured in succinct lines. 

As the reader reaches the final section of the collection, there is still processing to be done. Olivarez never claims to have all the answers and solidifies this stance in “Let’s Get Married” (135-136). Written for a couple on their wedding, beautiful images cascade freely amongst punctuation to create loving reflection. Set for such an important occasion, Olivarez once again highlights the importance of endless discovery:

                … marry me: make me (no, not complete),

                but a little more alive than i’ve ever been. (31-32)

One person does not fix everything, but they can be alongside you to wade through memories, personal history, and what love means. 

Promises of Gold doesn’t arrive at a shiny final destination where all of the world’s problems have dissipated. It is a collection that is able to recount painful memories, a global pandemic, and a vision for the future because it is centered around relationships. It hinges on figuring out where we derive love from and how we use it to make sense of the world. 

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Promises of Gold by José Olivarez; with a Spanish translation by David Ruano, published by Henry Holt and Company, February 2023. 320 pages.

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Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

 Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

Ocean Blvd, by Lana Del Rey, reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

photo: genuis.com

When I was 15 years old there was nothing more romantic than Lana Del Rey singing “Gods and Monsters:”

In the land of Gods and Monsters

I was an angel looking to get fucked hard

Like a groupie incognito, posing as a real singer

Life imitates art…

‘This is Heaven, what I truly want’,

It's innocence lost.

A decade later, after having finally compiled my own list of transgressions, that song feels more salient than ever, though more painful, and the furthest thing from romantic. Only now do I realize that Del Rey, who is 13 years older than myself, sang those lyrics retrospectively as a dirge for an innocence already lost. A backwards glance repeated on her latest album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? Upon listening, one feels that the album represents an imperfect attempt to reconcile dissonant images of the self; in universal terms, the past, present, and future selves, and in Del Rey’s case, the private and public selves. Though increasingly concerned with loftier, more essential human predicaments than the mere emotional turmoil of earlier work (“Will I die/Or will I hit that ten-year mark/Where I beat the extinction of telomeres?”), Ocean Blvd still features Del Rey’s signatures: erotic melancholia (“fuck me till I’m dead/Love me until I love myself”), and sun-soaked placenames (Griffith, The Beverly Center, Genesee, Long Beach, Monaco, Rosemead). As the headline for Lindsay Zoladz’s The New York Times review put it, “Lana Del Rey Plunges Into the Deep, but Never Abandons the Shallow.'' Indeed, the album strikes a tonal pirouette, balanced on a stylized earnestness – never raw, but always sincere; possessed of honesty made more honest by its implicit form.  A perplexed, melancholy record, by turns self-indulgent and self-aware, superficially, Ocean Blvd does lend itself to misconstrual as twee: “I’m swee-ee-eet/Bare fee-ee-eet”, Del Rey sings in “Sweet.” But the record displays an elemental disillusionment with Del Rey's own perennial images, contexts, and mythologies; with the American dream, with the West as land of promise, and with the redemptive power of feminine glamor. The songs contain many sad acknowledgments that the old tricks no longer work. A feeling on Del Rey’s part that she has irremediably deviated from her own script, her roving romanticism no longer effective as the emotional crutch it once was. “Exotic people and places don’t take the place of being your child,” Del Rey sings on “Fingertips”, the meandering piano-driven reflection on familial loss which forms the thematic core of Ocean Blvd. However, despite the critical consensus, Del Rey asserts that she has never been a satirist. Her nostalgia for all things Americana is earnest, as is her pain at falling somewhat out of love with them. Del Rey laments on "Fingertips": 

"They say there's irony in the music.

It's a tragedy, I see nothing Greek in it.”

Though grieving the loss of a certain youthful idealism Del Rey does not lay it to rest but conducts an autopsy; eager to write a thorough forensic report on a version of herself it seems has died. From “A&W”: 

“Did you know a singer can still be 

Looking like a side piece at 33?

God’s a charlatan, don’t look back… 

I’m a ghost now, look how they found me

It’s not about having someone to love me anymore

No, this is the experience of being an American whore.”

Therein lie both the obituary of a girl who wants to be loved at any costs (think Ultraviolence: “Jim hit me and it felt like a kiss”), and the announcement of a new woman who though content to be a whore, needs you to know that she is an American whore – ‘plunges into the deep but never abandons the shallow,’ indeed. The most crucial intent of Ocean Blvd is to document the turmoil of an artist struggling to live authentically within the confines of fame, while at the same time refusing to relinquish the highly stylized nature of her work. Much writing about Del Rey either accuses her of being unknowingly ridiculous, or praises her as being deftly ironic. But she is neither Jessica Rabbit nor Joan Didion – she is an artist dispositionally incapable of understanding the dilemma between style and substance. It says more about us than it does Del Rey that we are so unwilling to believe that a woman demonstrably possessed by keen intelligence would unironically sympathize with the sentimental, the romantic, and the glamorous. More than ever does “life imitates art” apply, in fact Ocean Blvd functions as lyrical companion to Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying; refuting the obligation to be “symbolic of any age.” 

Unfortunately for Del Rey, despite her reluctance, she is an enormously famous figure, and Ocean Blvd, much like her masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell, presents dialogue between Del Rey herself and the numerous avatars we have devised to contain her. In “A&W” Del Rey regards her own ambivalent role as an iconoclast unwittingly revered as an icon by a reductive public, even the most sycophantic members of which seem incapable of accepting the entire aspect of this incongruous artist: “What went wrong/I’m a princess/I’m divisive/Maybe I’m just like this.” Case in point: the diffuse, low simmer of indignance among Del Rey fans at her inclusion of “Judah Smith Interlude.” The interlude consists of a recording of Judah Smith preaching, set to a piano arrangement by Jack Antonoff, Del Rey’s most crucial collaborator. Smith, infamous for his homophobia, and blatant mega-church profiteering, currently enjoys a chokehold on the piety of Hollywood’s elite. His church offers a fashionable, evangelical alternative to passé Scientology. Yet even the most cursory reading must conclude that Del Rey’s sample is a skeptical lambast. Del Rey and her anonymous companions are quite literally heard laughing and repeating certain of Smith’s soundbites in mocking tone. When Smith describes God as the “rhino designer”, Del Rey audibly chortles, and says “rhino designer?” As Coleman Spilde put it for The Daily Beast: 

“While ‘Judah Smith Interlude’ might be a point of contention for fans, it’s ultimately an ironic and inflammatory sendup of commodified spirituality and a reminder that Del Rey’s artistic ethos is firmly about pleasing no one but herself.” 

The textual mishandling so prevalent in popular discourse on Del Rey’s work discourages any who hold out hope for our culture’s basic literacy. In that sense, Ocean Blvd is, along with most of Del Rey’s best work, scriptural – requiring delicate and bold exegesis. Ocean Blvd is only the latest in an illustrious strand of albums threatening to bore or outrage any persons seized by sensibilities they are unwilling to temporarily set aside, in this case, for a mere one hour and seventeen minutes. Ironically, nothing about Del Rey’s recent work can be construed as provocative, at least not in the same lineage as pop-culture’s paradigmatic provocateurs. Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Mick Jagger, or Madonna have little in common with either Del Rey’s lyrical content, or her public image. An image not in any way as closely tended, as reliant on attention, or as teleological. An oeuvre totally independent of its ends, the same ends which often confound their originator. Therein lies the crux of Del Rey’s divisiveness: she is indifferent to what we think. In this particular moment, can one fathom a bigger social sin? 

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Jeromiah Taylor is a writer and photographer born, raised, and living on The Great Plains. As an essayist Jeromiah publishes widely in regional news outlets such as The Kansas Reflector, The Pennsylvania-Capitol Star, The Sunflower, and The Liberty Press. In 2022, Jeromiah completed his first poetry chapbook "Havoc Heaped on Boy Body," a deep-dive into queer latino manhood, and quarter-life issues, refracted through the images of horror cinema, folk religion, The Great American Songbook, and homoeroticism. He also, along with several members of Wichita State University's M.F.A in poetry program, co-organized and co-headlined, the language event, "Nothing is Necessary, Everything is a Choice: A Night of Spoken Word," hosted by MonikaHouse as a part of the 2022 National Independent Venue Week line-up.

Beyond creative pursuits, Jeromiah worked in copywriting roles for several non-profit organizations, and currently earns a living via that most storied of writerly day jobs: working at a coffee shop.

He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his partner, one impish dog, and one imperious cat.

Pluviophile

Pluviophile, by Yusuf Saad, reviewed by Mahy Arafa

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Yusuf Saadi's Pluviophile, published by prestigious Canadian-based publisher Nightwood, is the author's debut poetry collection. The collection can be described as a symphony of beautiful, harmonious words and lines put together to create an inspiring, nature-influenced masterpiece. Yusuf Saadi has maternal Indian-Arabic roots and resides in Montreal. The collection is divided into three sections and consists dominantly of sonnets and prose poems embracing internal rhymes, imagery, and deep-rooted symbolism.

Each poem is almost musical in its expressions and implementations of recurring themes and words inspired by Saadi's Indian-Arabic heritage. Pluviophile meaning "rain lover," symbolizes the cleanliness, purity, and holiness water creates once it touches the body, which in Islam is a priority. Before every prayer, ablution is mandatory in order to be cleansed before speaking to God. This is one example of the implementation of the poet's culture mentioned above, which gives the collection uniqueness and originality. In this context, each poem cleansed me of dark thoughts and anxiety through impactful, calm, and relaxing language. Rain is also an essential earthly element that plays a role in life, change, and nature. 

Images of space, the moon, nature, and rain are recurring in the collection of sonnets, gazals, and prose poems. He is very skillful with the use of rhyme and masters the language perfectly. For instance, in the poem "Root Canal," the rhymes of "croon" with "paan" and "love" and "home" are elusive and refined but demonstrate Saadi's impressive ability to play with language. The poem's title reflects pain, nostalgia, and loss as the speaker describes his root connection to his mother's tongue and his attachment to his home. These two poetic lines, in particular, read very flowingly and beautifully. "In my mother's tongue I love / you intimates I want you as my home." Most poems play with the language concerning themes of pain, beauty, loss, and nostalgia combined with imagery of nature, art, the moon, or space and time.

"Glossary of Air" is an exceptional poem as the poet manipulates structure and form instead of language:

Never            Perhaps language feels

                   unreal because we hold onto words

                   but    touch them

The blank spaces between the poetic lines create a slow-paced, relaxing experience and dramatic breaks at specific moments. It flows in a frenzy of emotions and powerful harmony. This creates a connection with the reader and a bond between the human consciousness and the poem. 

"Painting a February Sky" is by far the most beautiful and impactful poem. Saadi creates a symphony of beauty, moon, nature, and space, flowing in powerful language, profound imagery, and poetic metaphors.

"On this palette, will mixing black and violet 

uncover the nameless colour 

tipping over the horizon, grief entering 

sky's consciousness, dark-plum wine 

spilled and bleeding from 

the other sides of the canvas?"

My body lured to marvel 

at its secondary colours, to trace 

this page's primary words. When I mix 

this much love with drops of despair, 

do I create heartbreak, inertia? 

Do I arrive at what I'm becoming? Words, 

like colours, have gravity, they exert pull, 

break in each other's wakes.

Isn't all matter subject to gravity? 

Yes, but not like this. The way words pull 

you 

into me, like faith stirred by desire. 

To gather art to its primary source—search 

for what has no name. Look up: mystery, 

distance, beauty mix alchemically 

to unveil this exact shade 

of moon."

This poem explores themes of mystery, ambiguity, the supernatural, and nature. The poem exudes darkness and beauty at the same time while expressing appreciation for the entities of nature and space and how if these specific elements fuse, along with colors and faith, they "unveil a shade of moon." Once again, Saadi connects to his heritage by combining the moon, faith, mystery, and the unknown, all symbols of Islam. Saadi wants the reader to dig deep for interpretation and revisit the poem time after time. Like the mystery and depth of the universe, each time readers read the poem, they discover something new beyond the surface. The interpretations for this poem are spacial and almost infinite, directly correlating with the universe, the supernatural, and nature as an entity. The words "black," "violet," "love," "despair," "heartbreak," "inertia," "faith," "mystery," "distance," "beauty," and finally, "moon" are all italicized which creates a fixation on them deepening the impact of language on the reader. 

The collection creates a certain closeness and bond to the reader through the experiences and ambiguity of events described in each poem. The tone is tender, the language is soft-spoken, and the themes revolve around the universe and all its layers, mysterious and unexplored areas. Simultaneously some of the most powerful emotions are embraced, combined with images of faith, creating the beauty this poetry collection exudes. It fuses the peaceful, tender, and relaxing elements of nature, space, and the moon, with hard-felt feelings of grief, love, desire, and faith through skillful manipulation of language, impactful use of imagery, and masterful metaphors. 

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Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi. Published 2020

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Mahy Arafa is a passionate, career-driven individual currently studying at Sheridan College to receive her Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing. She is currently working as a German transcriber for an AI company, and she makes a living as a book reviewer. She has been a passionate and aspiring writer and editor since childhood and possesses a complete portfolio of projects including non-fiction, prose fiction, drama, and poetry. She has worked as a transcriber, blog writer, editor, and content writer, but her lifelong dream is to write a script for a feature film, tv show, or video game, to direct and produce it herself, and to write a successful novel, book, or collection of poems.

Plainchant

Eamon Grennan, Plainchant, reviewed by Trevor Ruth

Look up the word “plainchant” in the dictionary, and it’ll tell you to look for “plainsong” in its stead. Logistically and denotatively, both words mean the same thing. However, a song is not exactly a chant, now is it? A song is a composition built from musical notes, words and patterns, a chant is something repeated, something that doesn’t fall within the confines of a rhythm, per se, but the repetition gives it its own groove. Eamon Grennan’s poetry collection, Plainchant embodies that ideal. It is not a war cry but rather it is a lovely appraisal to the plain on which many of the poems take place, always returning to the lush of Connemara and granting the reader a kind of holy expression that is repetitively beautiful. 

Plainchant is the kind of poetry collection that I like to read: visual expanses that utilize poetic form to build something out of the abstract spaces between the smaller moments. To this end, each poem is shaped the same; columnar single stanzas that lead each thought down rabbit holes (sometimes literally) of stream of consciousness. The collection opens with “Encounter,” a poem about a hare—a motif in this collection—in the process of winding itself up and preparing to dash away. From there, Plainchant takes us on long walks down country roads, introducing us to characters from old memories and painting a portrait of the coast. Grennan’s use of descriptive language is utterly transcendent, both literally and philosophically. Despite the simplicity of each poem’s structure, the writing itself creates this beautiful pattern of abstract thought, born from imagery alone. Sometimes it gets lost in its description a bit though, like Whitman, there is something to be said with each passage of naturalistic expression.

Grennan likes to use earthy descriptors in his passages, colors that aren’t flat but carry a kind of natural texture to them, particularly in the “black eyes” of creatures in the thrush, which could either be onyx or basalt. A particular favorite of mine is “dark-charcoal mountain-flank of cloud” in the poem “Near High Tide.” “Nature Vivant: Just Looking” is also noteworthy or its use of textured color: “lilac and rose splotches along with eye-caressing zones of yellow” and “glinting galactical star-particles of random, untampered, onlie begetter light itself.” Grennan leaps from sharp singular hues to glittering forms that hold entire universes. Even when he searches the opposite end of the palette, he invents his color descriptors with a kind of nostalgia: “Two small, wall-brown butterflies” and “the rose-red of a single small geranium shivering in the window-box.” Often the poems of Plainchant are worth a second reading if only to simply comprehend the travails of his visual nuances.

If you couldn’t tell from these passages, Grennan is also a fan of compound terms, utilizing dashes to connect ideas to form new adjectives like, “foot-crushed” or “bird-voice-sweetened” which may come off as rudimentary, but give each poem its own sense of rhythm. The poem “Renvyle Couple” does this well, as it utilizes alliteration in mimicking the explosiveness of a bird’s take off: “the great loud water-slapping wing-flaps/leans all-forward to achieve liftoff, with its compass-wavering neck, intent head and massive white wing-rush.” One cannot help but rock their head back and forth while reading these opening lines, particularly when the alliteration comes into play near the end. Consequently, Grennan also shows his mastery over poetic form. In the poem, “Entering Omey with Rachel and Kira,” we’re introduced to list of sensory details that overload us so deeply that we have no choice but to confer with the “doubt-troubled souls” that the speaker grants us until we reach the water’s edge where “there’s the ease of going into a great silence.” This line marks a sudden relaxation of poetic language. The reader slows down, ponders a bit, walks side-by-side with Rachel and Kira, occupying the place of the poet-speaker. Suddenly, we are one with the ghosts of the “brown-cowled tonsured monks (wrapped against the cold of a wintry blast or the salt-burn of a good summer) circled chanting….” and we carry that history and heritage back with us. 

Apart from reinventing language, Grennan looks to use each poem as a way to reach into the core of our reality on a spiritual level. To this end, there is a very Taoist approach to naturalism: “Grace” in particular, deconstructs the simple movement of a horse’s head into an act of contemplation as it regards the two states of its being. Often there is hardly any way for the speaker to explain this element of the creature’s true nature apart from deriving its necessity: “pure and simple horseness itself” which is kind of funny but also very sincere. I’m personally more impressed that Grennan was able to conjure a thirty-three line poem out of the movement of a horse’s head alone. “No Words” takes the horse-encounter to a whole other level as they become creatures beyond the base state of human experience, “they occupy a universe of time I can neither know or enter.” 

Not every poem is a spiritual exhibition, however. Sometimes, Grennan simply grants us vignettes set in the countryside. I am a fan of the third poem, “Chance” which depicts a rather Freudian exchange between a pedestrian and a woman who likes to show off her—ahem—berries. “Sieve” acts as an ode to the speaker’s past self, reminiscing about his mother’s cooking and the way she used to occupy a kitchen with her entire being that is tender and everlasting, “the sound of that brown old wooden spoon scraping the wire mesh seeping into and settling…forever in my head.” I am also partial to the folkloric quality of “The Rain Maiden” and its fantastic description. How ingenious is it, as a collection, to include the more experimental pieces like “Rhyming with Beckett” before suddenly thrusting the reader back into the natural world with “Two Hares,” a poem that captures the transience of two states—life and death—with the theoretical division between the spirit and the body, and “Burial” which consecrates the gruesome nature of an animal’s slaughter and the eventual passiveness of such violence.

Just like the two realities it examines, Plainchant straddles the division between the narrative and the abstract. Grennan doesn’t exactly leave the serenity of the moment up to the reader to figure out for themselves, but he doesn’t hit the reader over the head with its meaning either. I can guarantee that if you attempt to read this poem in a coffee shop or even in a space with a lot of industrial sound, you are going to feel detached from the poetry itself. The best way to experience Plainchant to its fullest degree is in a quiet space; preferably outside where the appreciation for the rural imagery of the collection can impose itself on you and accompany you wherever you go. 

The collection ends with “Hare at Dusk,” which is a brilliant bookend of a piece as it utilizes the same descriptive writing as “Encounter,” down to the opening line. Nothing miraculous happens in these poems—indeed, a hare appears and disappears—but it is Grennan’s poignancy with recollection that make these chance encounters come alive. Like a divine circle, the collection embodies the serenity of the Irish spirit and the conscious resurrection of that spirit. Like the monks locked in circled chanting, we carry this appreciation for the natural world with us, searching for the spaces between realities that we coinhabit, sometimes by surprise. Having read Plainchant once over, I read it a second time outside, on my patio. It was a calm day with the sun falling over everything and the quiet of the afternoon broken only by the sound of a lawn mower from next door. Above me the clouds wavered into warm gray swabs and the world around me seemed infinitesimal and silent before—wouldn’t you know it—out from a neighboring shrub, a rabbit reared its tiny head.

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Eamon Grennan, Plainchant, Red Hen Press, 2022

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Trevor Ruth is a writer originally from Livermore, California. He has been featured in Occam’s Razor, takahe, The Specter Review, The Typeslash Review, Typishly, Wingless Dreamer and Quiet Lightning among other publications. He has a degree from California State University, East Bay and is featured regularly on The Baram House as a Film Reviewer in Residence. He also has a personal blog at https://trevorruthblog.wordpress.com 

Cult Classic

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, reviewed by Katy Mitchell-Jones 

A “contest among the dead” lottery is held in the afterlife to rejoin the living for just three minutes and experience how it feels to be alive once more. This brief, unsettling tale sets a sinister tone instantly. A man named Clive hears of it from his mother, then passes it on to his coworker, the story’s protagonist, Lola. Lola is taken aback; they work together at a scientific magazine and usually base their perspective on fact; however, Clive seemingly believes that this ghost story could be true. The prologue reveals Clive has passed away since recounting this story to Lola, leaving readers to wonder under what circumstances he died.

The narrative begins with 37-year old Lola at a trendy dinner in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, with some former coworkers, including Clive. Friday night drinks remain a long standing tradition though they no longer work together. Clive is described in detail; his eccentricities, his flirty relationship with Lola despite being married, and his sense of loss when their company folded. Also at the table sits Vadis, Lola’s closest girlfriend, despite the fact that they do not have a lot in common. 

To get some air, Lola walks to a bodega for some cigarettes. As she exits and returns to the restaurant, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, Amos, a poet and novelist. He greets Lola happily, and asks her to get a drink. She agrees, reassuring herself that nothing bad will happen. As they sit down at a nearby bar, he notices her engagement ring. Lola reflects that she has felt disconnected from her fiancé, Boots, lately. She and Boots have agreed never to discuss exes with one another so as to not get caught up on any messy feelings. 

Amos pompously attempts to coerce Lola into admitting she is not happy in her current relationship, and that what they had was superior. During this conversation she reflects back to how she and Amos treated each other. Despite many memorable and loving moments, he takes little accountability as to why they broke up, citing society’s unreasonable expectations that men settle down and women simply settle. He comes across as pretentious and arrogant, and Lola thinks back to when he once told her, “You aren’t like other women, you’re sane and intelligent” (42). This backhanded compliment is pervasive not only in this novel, but in media and relationships across the world. Women are told by men that they “aren’t like other girls” which is supposed to be a compliment, a sign that they are cool and can hang out with men, but it also says that “normal” women are not usually good enough to do so. Lola further reflects that as women age, the dating game becomes focused on an idea she calls, “Don't Scare the Men” (39). If women want to be able to wrangle a man into a lasting relationship, the messaging they are given revolves around presenting your best self at all times. Ultimately, she gets a bit of closure from her discussion with Amos, and decides that the breakup was for the best. 

The next evening at the same restaurant, she runs into a second ex-boyfriend, a younger and very handsome former Olympian who is now married with twin girls. The interaction was pleasant but now Lola is feeling uneasy about running into former partners two nights in a row. It must just be a coincidence, right? Oddly, this isn’t the last time it will happen. Is it fate, or is it a set-up? Is someone trying to sabotage her relationship with Boots?

Shortly thereafter, Lola and Vadis go out together for some light shopping but Vadis guides her to a mysterious garden atrium through a closed synagogue and key-padded doors. A man named Errol appears and seems to already know a lot about Lola despite never having met. People all around her are acting oddly and secretive, so what could they be up to? Lola finds herself at the center of a social experiment, and she must overcome a series of difficult situations in order to confirm whether or not her relationship with Boots is meant to be. It is not until the end that readers discover the cause of Clive’s death as well as the circumstances surrounding it, and its connection to Lola’s bizarre situation.

Throughout this journey, Lola thinks, “If you wait long enough, anyplace will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs” (122). Crosley writes these witty, profound observations in a beautiful way. Lola’s perspective about love and relationships is challenged, and New York City becomes her own museum of personal bombs, as she must navigate the safest way through these tests and temptations in order to choose the best path for her future happiness. Lola comes across as somewhat detached and unemotional, but as she is forced to confront the ghosts of relationships past, she does the work to sort through these emotions to decide which are valid and which are not. 

Cult Classic is a musing on love, past and present relationships, our deal breakers, boundaries, and why we decide to break up with someone versus agreeing to continue the relationship into marriage. While readers get an intimate look into Lola’s past relationships, we are encouraged to ruminate on our own. 

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Cult Classic, Sloane Crosley 

June 7th 2022, MCD, 304 pages.

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Katy Mitchell-Jones is originally from a small town in Washington state and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with her BA and MA. She then headed to Boston to teach high school English but has since returned to her west coast roots. Her favorite authors are Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Tana French, and Glendy Vanderah. She has published three short stories with Chipper Press, for middle-grades. You can follow her on Goodreads here.