The Night Parade

The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin

reviewed by Rachel Baila

What does it mean to tell a true story when memory is fluid and grief bends time? Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir (2023) embraces this question with a structure as intricate and haunting as the folklore it weaves through its pages. Blurring the line between memoir and mythology, Nakamura Lin’s work is an evocative meditation on mental illness, identity, and intergenerational connection, told through the lens of Japanese and Chinese folklore.

From the moment the book arrives, it signals something different. The cover is dreamlike, and the inclusion of illustrated chapter breaks, created in collaboration with her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, enhances the immersive quality of the text. This visual storytelling complements the book’s innovative structure: Nakamura Lin employs kishōtenketsu, a four-part narrative form from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, to shape her memoir. Rather than offering a straightforward account of her life, she integrates folklore into her personal narrative, crafting a tapestry where mythical creatures and personal demons coexist.

Each section follows the four parts of kishōtenketsu:

• Ki (Introduction): Establishes the key figures in her life—her family, her heritage, and the presence of mental illness.

• Shō (Development): Deepens these themes, revealing her struggles with bipolar disorder, addiction, and family expectations.

• Ten (Twist): A swerve in the narrative, where her father’s terminal illness and her experiences with pregnancy loss complicate the established trajectory.

• Ketsu (Conclusion): A reflection that doesn’t seek to tie up every loose end but lingers in ambiguity, embracing the complexities of grief, healing, and transformation.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is how seamlessly folklore and reality intertwine. Nakamura Lin doesn’t simply reference myth—she inhabits it, allowing creatures, like the kappa and yūrei, to become metaphors for illness, loss, and resilience. Her prose shifts between the poetic and the precise, crafting a narrative that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

What makes The Night Parade stand out in the memoir genre is its boldness in form and voice. Nakamura Lin speaks directly to the reader, acknowledging the artifice of storytelling while simultaneously making her experiences feel raw and immediate. This memoir doesn’t just recount events—it invites us into a shifting, surreal landscape where memory and myth collide.

For those who appreciate memoirs that push the boundaries of form—think Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House or Laraine Herring’s A Constellation of Ghosts—this book is essential reading. The Night Parade is not just a memoir; it is an invocation, a ritual, a reckoning. Nakamura Lin has crafted a work that is both structurally masterful and deeply moving, proving that sometimes, the best way to tell a true story is to embrace the speculative.

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The Night Parade • Mariner Books • 2023 • 318 pages

Rachel Baila is a writer, editor, holistic practitioner, and creative educator.

Her work explores the fertile crossroads of creative and therapeutic writing, somatic practices, and mindful expression, empowering others to overcome artistic blocks and nurture a balanced body, mind, and spirit.

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

Shark Heart

Shark Heart, A Love Story, by Emily Habeck

reviewed by Rachel Baila

Some novels defy easy categorization, and Shark Heart by Emily Habeck is one of them. A genre-bending fusion of magical realism and dark romance, this novel weaves a profoundly moving love story that is both wildly imaginative and deeply human. Habeck crafts a world where transformation—both literal and emotional—becomes a metaphor for the complexities of relationships, love, and self-discovery.

At the heart of the novel are Wren and Lewis, a married couple whose love is tested when Lewis begins a metamorphosis—not metaphorically, but physically—into a great white shark. What could be a surreal gimmick instead feels heartbreakingly real, thanks to Habeck’s rich character development. Through layered storytelling, we are immersed in Wren’s complicated childhood, her difficulty trusting relationships, and Lewis’s journey from aspiring actor to dedicated theater teacher. Their backstories are rendered with such emotional depth that by the time the transformation begins, it feels like an organic extension of their world rather than an implausible twist.

One of Habeck’s greatest strengths is her lyrical, yet concise, prose. The novel is structured in short, experimental chapters, some heavy with dialogue, others presented in a theatrical format, and some more traditionally narrative-driven. Each shift in style serves a purpose, reinforcing the novel’s themes of impermanence, longing, and the evolving nature of love. Her language is evocative without excess, making every word feel intentional and every scene immersive.

Unlike conventional love stories, Shark Heart avoids clichés. It embraces the unpredictability of relationships, exploring how love endures and adapts through heartbreak, transformation, and even separation. It’s a novel that refuses easy resolutions, instead leaving the reader with a lingering sense of longing—one that stays well after the final page.

Habeck has created something rare: a novel that is at once magical, heartbreaking, and achingly real. If you appreciate books that push the boundaries of genre while delivering an emotionally resonant story, Shark Heart is a must-read. This is a love story unlike any other, and one that, like all great love stories, leaves you heartbroken in the best possible way.

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Shark Heart • Marysue Rucci Books • August 2023 • 405 pages

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Rachel Baila is a writer, holistic practitioner, and creative educator.

Her work explores the fertile crossroads of creative and therapeutic writing, somatic practices, and mindful expression, empowering others to overcome artistic blocks and nurture a balanced body, mind, and spirit.

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.

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

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.

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 .

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

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.

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.

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 

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

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.

Vapor

Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

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Uncovering What Remains: Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson

The impact humans have on the planet can be difficult to contemplate. Sara Eliza Johnson takes this rumination a step further by exploring the trails that individuals leave behind as environmental issues engulf society. Vapor is a collection that implores readers to consider the complexity surrounding every decision as well as the choices that people have made before our present time. 

The collection is divided into seven sections with multiple poems sharing the same title. By having more than one piece titled “vapor,” many thoughts arise. It pushes the reader to consider that existence consists of temporary moments. The cover art, which depicts physical pink vapor, produces an immediate emphasis on occupying space. Johnson reveals to the reader what this means in terms of species and phenomenon.

Science and physics play an integral role throughout the collection. In the first piece “Planktonic Foraminifera” (1), an image of alien fish becomes magnified once you understand that planktonic foraminifera are single-celled organisms found in the ocean. Concepts like these do not feel like a barrier because they directly address the reader. Johnson encourages you to think about these concepts while observing the movement taking place. The observational tone and intentional pause are set in the very first poem. 

To prevent the reader from getting weighed down by structures like amplituhedron or black holes, Johnson employs different shapes of poems. In some cases, this comes in the form of an extended prose poem, or in others it comes as varying lengths of couplets. She intentionally utilizes blank space and caesuras to emphasize specific lines. One of the clearest examples of this is in “Nebula” (26-27) where line 7 is a stark “You float” between stanzas.

She also recalls certain images across poems. There are numerous mentions of a “wound” that appears to encapsulate our experiences as human beings. At times this wound is in the form of changes in the land composition, and then it shifts to hearts beating. “Asteroseismology” (43) is the clearest example of this combination of images. The title means the study of oscillations in stars and this act of swinging back and forth is represented in the poem’s couplets. Line 1 also creates a raw image for the reader: 

                Like all derelict things, grief devours me.

Being swallowed up by grief or darkness is a concept that pervades the book. Johnson goes between light and darkness by way of stars or shadows unfurling around us. As the poem continues, lines 5–10 get to the heart of the matter:

    …But somewhere deep inside
         me still comes a light, a molten handful 

                of uranium that burns a path out,

                threatens to eat clean through my chest, 

                drain from that wound

                like an infection. 

These lines show the strength of unexpected comparisons. The reader can feel them bursting forth on the page and out of themselves. 

As the collection progresses, the reader moves through space and time. Section six has three pieces titled “Titan.” Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and you can feel its vastness through the images in “Titan” (57-58). This poem is about the lake Jingpo Lacus. Amidst images of UV light, crystals, and waves there is a feeling of familiarity wherever you are. The opening couplet captures this beautifully:

                This lake holds you as if it knows

                your form, has felt you before. (1-2)

There is a sense of unraveling into something that recognizes the reader and this becomes extremely intriguing with all of the combined images. Beginning with a lake and ending with a flood has an incredible impact. 

Once the reader reaches the final section, it feels like having engaged with an entire galaxy. There are so many intriguing images that make the reader stop and take notice. “Revelation” (65-66) captures the observational nature present throughout every poem. It shows how humans are able to ponder the connections and relationships with the world, but it still requires additional time to revisit these thoughts to achieve a breakthrough. This essence of still seeking answers is most present in lines 15–17:

                …I’d feed my heart 

                to a snake if it would show me how to change

                skins, how to survive as an unlovable thing.

After spending most of the collection directly addressing the reader, it seems important to note that the “I” makes its presence known in the last section of the book. 

Johnson’s second book attempts to see through the different vapor that surrounds us. Whether that’s through thinking about migration or combustion, she provides many stops for readers to reflect on what they see. The collection ends with shivering which echoes the importance of continual movement. We have to keep going even when the vapor dissipates.

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Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson, published by Milkweed Editions, August 2022. 96 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

What Moves the Dead

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, reviewed by Katy Mitchell-Jones

Retired soldier Alex Easton is summoned to a childhood friend’s dilapidated mansion after receiving a letter from Madeline Usher that she is dying. Once Alex arrives, it is apparent that something very grim has taken hold of the estate, and not all is what it seems. 

The eerie tone is set immediately as Alex rides on horseback toward the House of Usher. The forest path is lined with mushrooms described as “flesh-like” and “clammy”, which grow “out of the gaps in the stones of the tarn like tumors growing from diseased skin” (1). The surrounding lake also “lay dark and very still,” and does not encourage the idea to drink from it, even after a long ride. Just around the corner from the house, Alex meets an illustrator named Eugenia Potter, painting the mushrooms, with whom Alex engages in conversation. Miss Potter informs Alex of certain histories and scientific names of the species, which segues into a brief explanation of Alex’s fictional home country of Gallacia, and the idiosyncratic intricacies of its language. 

The language from Alex’s home country of Gallacia differs, in that it utilizes seven sets of pronouns, and Alex uses a genderless pronoun that soldiers adopt once they are sworn into the army. When Denton, an American doctor, meets Alex for the first time, he “stared,” and Alex “recognized the look” (17). Alex muses internally that Denton, “was likely not expecting a short, stout person in a dusty greatcoat and a military haircut. I no longer bother to bind my breasts, but I never had a great deal to worry about in that direction, and my batman sees that my clothing is cut in proper military style” (16). During their conversation, Alex observes, “the wheels working in his head, trying to determine my relationship to his friend’s sister. It was vaguely amusing and vaguely offensive all at once” (18). Non Gallacians often try to categorize Alex into the gender binary when they first meet, not knowing their pronouns ka/kan, which are used to refer to anyone serving in the Gallacian military.

In this retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Kingfisher modernizes some aspects, like including non-binary characters, while still keeping some of the historical components. For one, the time period is still set in the late-1800s and modern medicine and technology have not yet been developed. Characters rely on old modes of transit like horses and carriages, as well as antiquated means of communication, like letter writing. As far as the more modern components, the voice and perspectives of the protagonist, Alex, are more updated. Alex is told that, “Hysterical epilepsy is probably the diagnosis she’d be given in Paris, for all the good it does…a useless damn diagnosis” (31). Historically, women who showed signs of distress that were not obviously due to a known medical cause, were often labeled hysterical and were subject to hysterectomies – the removal of one’s uterus – as a treatment. It is refreshing to read a conversation about an ailing woman in which a doctor agrees that hysteria is a “useless” term to describe her symptoms.

When Alex arrives at the house of Usher, the twin siblings Madeline and Roderic have outwardly aged many more years than expected. Alex describes Roderick as “unrecognizable” due to his skin being, “the color of bone, white with a sallow undertone, a nasty color, like a man going into shock. His eyes had sunk into deep hollows tinged with blue…” (13). Madeline too, “had become so thin that [Alex] could nearly see the bones under the skin. Her lips were tinged with violet, like a drowning woman’s… then she stretched out a hand like a bird’s claw… and [Alex] saw that her fingernails were the same deep cyanotic violet” (16). Alex is alarmed by the siblings' deterioration, and attempts to sway them to leave their home, to seek healthcare in Paris, but they refuse.

The house itself is initially described by Alex as “a depressing scene,” as “the windows of the house stared down like eye sockets in a row of skulls” (9). Despite the grim exterior, Alex’s determination is not hampered. Inside the entrance, “wallpaper had peeled back from the walls, hanging in rages, leaving the exposed flesh of the building behind. Mold crept up the pale boards, tiny spots of black that joined together like constellations.” Roderick claims to “hear things… Other people’s breathing sounds like thunder…worms in the rafters” (30). Alex worries that Roderick is going mad. After Madeline passes away, Alex is devastated but Roderick behaves oddly. He is skittish and paranoid, thinking he hears whispers from the walls. Alex begins to wonder if Madeline’s death was due to natural causes. Perhaps Roderick’s paranoia is truly a result of grief, but maybe it is more sinister? 

The novel is packed with atmospheric imagery, from the description of the house, to the deterioration of the characters appearances, to the odd-behaving, orange-eyed hares that surround the estate. It is up to Alex to figure out the cause of the Usher siblings’ poor health, alongside Denton. 

It is not necessary to have read Poe’s original story before enjoying this one, though it is interesting to compare the two. Poe is known for extremely dark, ethereal writing, and T. Kingfisher does not disappoint in this retelling; the creepy mood is apparent on every page, through characterization and imagery. She adds a few more characters and traits than the original, as well as a subplot or two to add to the chilling conspiracy. It is a quick, gripping story to read leading up to Halloween, or just on a cold, rainy day.

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What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

July 12, 2022

Tor Nightfire

165 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.

Roses in the Mouth of a Lion

Roses in the Mouth of a Lion, by Bushra Rehman, reviewed by Mica Corson

Bushra Rehman calls herself a vagabond poet. She has traveled the world with only her poems as company but always returns to her birthplace: Corona, Queens. Her words are imbued with cultural resonance and feminist themes that make every piece she writes stand out with its complexity. Rehman’s most recent novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, extends these themes in a captivating coming-of-age story set in her hometown. 

Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Rehman’s novel explores community, family, and queer love. In it, our main character is Razia Mirza, a girl raised in a tight-knit Pakistani-American community. In the mid-eighties, Razia is a quiet, awkward child relishing her moments of freedom with her best friend, Saima. The girls do their best to be good daughters and good Muslims, often pushing away people and ideas that conflict with her family’s views, even as it begins to weigh down on them. 

When a family rift means she is no longer allowed to be friends with Saima, Razia is heartbroken and finds a new confidant in Taslima. Together they rebel, if only a little, by listening to secular music, thrifting for the latest fashions, and exploring New York beyond Corona. With confidence from her new friendships, Razia attends a prestigious high school, a long train ride away from her parents’ eyes. There she meets Angela. Angela seems to be everything that Razia is not. She cuts classes, wears what she wants, and is surrounded by her group of goth butterflies. But Angela chooses to cut class with Razia. Together they go to museums and explore Manhattan, though never traveling back to Corona. 

As Razia’s and Angela’s relationship blossoms into something more, girls her age in her community are getting engaged and even married. With each passing day, Razia gets more frustrated with the expectations her family and Aunties place on her to abandon her education in favor of marriage. To the women in Razia’s life, anything else makes a failure of a woman. With each conversation she has with these older women, Razia steps back, focusing on her friendships with the younger girls in her community, Taslima and Shahnaaz, who also find themselves at odds with their family traditions. 

When Razia’s parents discover evidence of her relationship, she is forced to take drastic action. Her parents are forcing her to go to Pakistan, and Razia knows there will be no way back to the U.S. without a husband. Razia ultimately has to make a choice between her family and her future.

The novel, as a whole, reminds me of Ocean Vuong’s fiction novel. Besides the similar themes, it also reads in a series of vignettes: brief glimpses at Razia’s life from the summer of 1985 to the summer of 1989. Rehman shows a cultural bubble, exploring the lives taking place in this specific time and place. It is not until more than halfway through the book that one can pick out a more substantial narrative thread. Before that, and until the end of the book, it is more of a character study focusing on the lives and roles of women in Razia’s community. Rehman shows us many different ways the women live; in their adolescence, in marriages, with their children, as widows and aunties, and how they have accepted or changed their roles over time. 

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a beautiful, poetic novel about family, community, and individuality. As a coming-of-age story, it excels at demonstrating the intersection of identity and how Razia reconciles her heritage and faith with her growing love and need for free expression.

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Bushra Rehman, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, Flatiron Books, 2022.

Mica Corson is an avid reader and aspiring writer residing in the Pacific Northwest. She recently graduated from Central Washington University with a Professional and Creative Writing degree.

The Hurting Kind

Adjusting Your Vision: The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

Ada Limón could teach a masterclass on crafting a deliberate cascading between life and death. In her latest collection, remnants of searching through grief with memory topple over every corner. The Hurting Kind deciphers meaning by documenting ways we survive, memorialize, and recount to shape our perspectives of the world.

The collection is divided into four sections named after the seasons. It seems no coincidence that the text begins with “Spring.” Images and thoughts spring forth to put the reader in a reflective trance. Whether the speaker is observing birds while on vacation or thinking about a fox’s steps, there is always layered meaning. An example of this duplicity of meaning is seen in “In the Shadow” (9):

                It is what we do in order to care for things, make them
                ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. (9-10)

These lines allude to the act of making things “our own” to understand their role in our lives. This complex thought arises in a poem that begins with describing a wild pansy. The longer the speaker discusses the flower, the deeper meaning is created. She shifts from taking note of the flower’s colors to questioning why she can’t just enjoy the flower for what it is.

As the collection continues, the content shifts in a way that remains consistent with Limón’s poetics. Just when you get into a groove of watching the trees blowing in the wind, specific street names are thrown in to alter your geography. Between these ruminations on natural life unfolding around her, she includes capsules of family memories. This documentation never becomes listless due to the variations in form. Limón shifts from prose poems to contained left-justified pieces, which creates different textures. Not only can you separate each family member, but you can visually see their differences on the page. In “Joint Custody” (40), the line breaks help the reader recognize the limitations of hindsight in lines 7-9:

                …I cannot reverse it, the record

                scratched and stopping to that original
                chaotic track…

The speaker develops an appreciation for the two family dynamics without erasing the difficulty that accompanies those memories. She arrives at her own level of understanding that isn’t quite reverent. Her family situation is something many readers can identify with. There is time and space to reflect but these memories shouldn’t prevent you from moving forward. You have to move beyond the record scratches. 

Along with shifts in form, Limón also employs alliteration and repetition throughout the collection. This forces you to slow down, which makes the trail of questioning easier to follow. It also heightens specific details and the power of naming. This is made most apparent in “Calling Things What They Are” (47). Even with such a definitive title, the piece still moves throughout multiple memories alluding to the fact that a memory can pop up at any time. The piece starts with observing a bird feeder and how birds were not that interesting to her before. It then shifts into recalling a past relationship and how that relationship left the speaker deflated. The ultimate moment of clarity is achieved at the end of the poem (16-17):

                …I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny
                that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

The drawn out lines moving between images in this prose poem allow this revelation to have tremendous power. 

A sense of stillness and introspection is created by the final section “Winter.” By the time you reach the title poem, a genuine connection to society has been created. While taking you on a journey through her memories and grief, Limón arrives at a collective grief. What has unfolded the past few years is apparent in the haziness that covers nearly every single piece. “The Hurting Kind” (78-85) recounts memory and myth in a way that often intertwines when recalling family history. These sections move quickly because of the purposeful use of blank space amidst shifting line lengths. This allows spotlights on strong sections like lines 108-110:

                I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
                        from a long line of weepers.

                I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

The “I” has the most strength in this section because it becomes a mirror for everyone. Whether you physically express your grief or can recognize it in loved ones who have passed away, this act of searching amongst the pain is a common practice. 

The book closes with a piece aptly titled “The End of Poetry” (95). There is an emphasis, almost a responsibility, to have altered ways of seeing by the end. Limón points out this combination of hope and exasperation in lines 7-8:

                enough of the will to go on and not go on or how

                a certain light does a certain thing, enough…

The Hurting Kind as a whole represents a category that we have all seeped into. It demonstrates that we have the power to determine how memory and grief will shape our vision for the future.

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The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, published by Milkweed Editions, May 2022. 120 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