Noor Hindi’s debut collection is a special prayer, Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow, that invites “those outside the door” (as she calls them) to “bear witness” (as the white woman on her thesis defense calls it) to the life of Palestinians, those who immigrated, those who stayed, and how womanhood and queerness fit into these spaces. It is also a call to action to those reading and witnessing to step forward and speak up for Palestine as well.
In four distinct sections, she tackles Palestinian life, colonialism, immigration, Arab womanhood and motherhood, and queerness throughout the process of forcefully leaving home against one’s will, and the difficulty in finding and accepting a new home in a place that has played a huge role in displacing them.
How does one find their place and identity amongst violence? Among those who are actively trying to erase it. In her poem “Confession”, she writes “My family comes from a land that does not exist on colonizers’ maps”, a point further emphasized in “USCIS Trip #1: A Revision”:
The white woman says WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE PALESTINE AS A COUNTRY TRY AGAIN And crosses out Palestine with a red pen.
Hindi’s background as a reporter lends itself brilliantly to her poetry as she marries her experience with distancing herself as a professional from the story she is telling and the intimacy of becoming the story herself. She reports on her mother and grandmother as a silent observer and we, as readers, find pieces of her as a speaker in the lyricism of her poetry.
Her “USCIS Trip” series throughout the collection is a perfect example of the balance she strikes between Noor the reporter and Noor the poet. The series follows her journey as she accompanies her grandmother through the process of becoming a US Citizen, highlighting the micro (and macro) aggressions they both face. She documents the reality of the process, the paperwork, the security checks, and within these technicalities, her rage, her fear, her worry shine through the moment she recites the answers to the tests under her breath “legislaturecommunismterroristspangled”, the moment she hears her grandmother whispering “they stripped me, they stripped me”. In these moments of both violence and vulnerability, we read about a second colonization of Palestinian history and its erasure to make room for American history, and a re-colonization and invasion of Arab women’s bodies, bodies that already face enough policing as Hindi portrays in the third section of the book.
Hindi’s father is a prominent figure in the first section of the book, his presence a stark reminder of Palestine and its history as he clings to it and reminds her of it, his constant watching of Al Jazeera a repeating motif in the book. Here again, we witness Hindi as she herself witnesses her father, reporting on his actions. In “I Once Looked in a Mirror but Couldn’t See My Body”, she writes of
[…] watching my father
alone in the night drawing and redrawing a map of Palestine, green ink.
Before 1947, he would insist, before partition, before the nation became history,
And while her father represents the love of Palestine, and her grandmother the process of immigration, Hindi uses her mother’s presence in the book to explore not only the difficulty of finding a new home, as her mother struggles to accept any house they move to, calling them “خرابة, a desolation.”, but also the complexity of mother-daughter relationships in Arab (and specifically Muslim) society.
Her poems “Poem in Which My Mother Tells Me Not to Get a Pap Smear Because It Might Tear My Nonexistent Hymen” and “Dangerous Business” show how her mother leads the conversation surrounding the virginity of young Arab and Muslim women within the context of how society treats the concept of virginity. The opening line of “Dangerous Business” is a perfect example of that relationship between the private and the social: Noor the storyteller exposes the private, and Noor the reporter uses headlines to highlight the public discourse.
My mother found a tampon wrapper THE DANGEROUS BUSINESS OF HYMEN RECONSTRUCTION SURGERIES as a child, she wouldn’t let me use tampons because she was afraid of HYMEN OBSESSIONS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW my hymen being penetrated
For such a talented poet who masterfully uses language throughout her collection to tell her story and the story of her Homeland, Hindi still asks herself, and her readers, what do we do when language fails us? which she explores in her poem “A Chaos of Semantics”.
I want to believe language matters, that words create meaning, that a person can breathe a thing into existence. But what happens when the repetition of the words beckons at the opposite?
She writes “the language isn’t enough” in her final poem “Pledging Allegiance”, and isn’t that the bane of evey writer’s existence? How to make language and storytelling, in any genre or form, convey the painful realities? How to make language meaningful enough for outsiders to listen, truly listen, and understand?
The collection published in May 2022 is even more poignant and relevant today as the world witnesses more intently the story and struggle of the Palestinian people. And while this isn’t new, Palestinians have been persecuted and displaced for 76 years as Hindi’s collection explains, for the first time in history, “those on the outside of the door” are accepting the invitation and coming in. Hindi’s prayers may be starting to get answered, but it is only the beginning. However, within her invitation, she expresses her exhaustion from having to invite, having to educate, having to pray. And isn’t it time for the world to stop sending “thoughts and prayers” and start taking action? After all, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.”
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” Agnes Varda famously remarked in her autobiographical film, The Beaches of Agnes. This moment is referenced in “My Wonderful Description of Flowers,” (a wonderful story, indeed) which rounds off the Prairie section of Danielle Dutton’s captivating new collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. The story’s nameless narrator takes a train at night to the end of the line, disembarks at a nearly-empty parking lot, and continues walking until she reaches the fields that surround her: “I’ve come to some other place,” she says, “where the grass looks like a sea. . . If you opened up my body, I think, this is what you’d find, exactly the place where I’m standing. . . All you can see is darkness now, and millions of flowers like stars.”
It’s
easy for one to assume that prairies might be the landscapes hiding inside
Dutton herself. Like prairies, Dutton’s writing feels expansive, eternal,
spreading out in all directions, far beyond you—far past any kind of vanishing
point. When immersed in both the landscape of the prairie and in Dutton’s work,
one is overcome by the sensation that they can see forever. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other offers
unobstructed views of her inimitable style.
What
does it mean to think of a text as a landscape? Both contain a variety of
features, textures, vantage points. In both, aesthetic power is achieved by the
particular way these elements blend together, by the balance of their
relationship to each other. “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read,” which comprises
the Dresses section of the book, is
one exemplary literary landscape. This innovative essay elegantly weaves
together descriptions of dresses in literature, fleeting excerpts from Jane Eyre to the stories of Leonora
Carrington and the poetry of Ocean Vuong, in an spectral collage that exhibits
dresses as both containers and radical transformers. There’s a remarkable
rhythm achieved in the carefully selected excerpts and Dutton has an excellent
ear (or perhaps, eye?) for blending these various topographies into one
sweeping terrain.
“I
have started to think through the idea of character and landscape as similar
things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent,” muses Amina Cain in her
meditative book on writing, A Horse At
Night, published by Dutton’s press, Dorothy Project. This idea feels
pertinent in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other,
where there’s not just an intimacy between Dutton’s characters and their
settings, but the very prose they all live inside—the landscape of the text
itself.
This
attentiveness is on display throughout the book, but perhaps particularly in Prairie section, whose stories evoke a
feeling of vastness, of lostness, near disappearance and ambient dread: the
energy and the syntax of the prairie, which, as Dutton points out in the Notes
and Acknowledgements, are some of the least conserved habitats on the planet
and are rapidly vanishing from Earth, like the ambiguous end to the mother and
son in “Nocturne,” driving upside down on the bottom of the planet.
Dutton
speaks directly on her interest in the relationship between syntax and subject
in her excellent essay on ekphrasis (specifically in fiction and other
narrative prose, as opposed to its usual critical connection to poetics), “A
Picture Held Us Captive,” which forms the ‘Art’ section of the book. “The idea
of being captured in an image and in language, in an image in our language—how
a story could be a story and also be a garden—is just what I want to try to
articulate about so-called ekphrasis writing, or writing in response to visual
art,” Dutton writes.
Much
of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is
composed of this type of narrative ekphrasis. As the book’s delicious Notes
& Acknowledgements will reveal, Prairie,
Dresses, Art Other is deeply inspired and enlivened by multiple art forms,
and in thoughtful conversation with other literary works. However, beyond her
obvious passion for connecting her own work to a broader world of art, it seems
that Dutton’s greatest interest is creating narratives whose language feels
like an experience, that become what they are describing. In “A Picture Held Us
Captive,” she quotes W.J.T. Mitchell saying, “When vases talk, they speak our
language.” Dutton responds, “Yet it’s exactly the vase’s language that
interests me. What is the energy or syntax of the vase?”
In
the same essay, Dutton references Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and his
remedy for habituation to the drudgery of life: the idea of enstrangement (more commonly translated
as ‘defamiliarization’): enchantment
+ estrangement. This term is the perfect sum of Dutton’s work in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, a blend of
the strange and uncanny in the mundane and familiar world—or, vice versa. Whether it be a gloriously
disorientating essay collage on fictional dresses, the story of an Ozarks
camping trip haunted with doom from both the prehistoric era and the modern
alt-right, or a musing of where, exactly, is the body when one writes, (“When
she was writing she was in her body, she couldn’t argue with that. But how to
explain that she was somewhere else as well?”), Dutton’s work is always
wonderfully enstranged.
In
Other, (perhaps my personal favorite
section of the book, for its adventurous bending and blending of fiction and
nonfiction prose) Dutton returns to Shklovsky in “Pool of Tears,” a one-act play inspired by Kiki Smith’s work Pool of Tears 2 (After Lewis Carroll).
Inside stage directions, Duttonquotes
Shklovsky’s belief that,“In order to
return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a
stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.”
The
last section of “Pool of Tears,” contains a section referencing Métis scholar
Zoe Todd. Speaking of her grandfather living in rental houses on the prairie,
Todd says, “He drew dream horses right onto the walls.” Even after his death,
“those horses keep running wild in those houses.” The play (and subsequently,
the collection) concludes with the lines, “He made houses with prairies inside
them. We make machines for remembering what we loved.” This, I believe, is a
perfect summation of enstrangement, a successful battle against habituation. It
is one answer to the question of how to capture our fascinations, how to
translate them into our world. It is a way to make a story a story, but also a
garden—or a prairie. A way to make a life a life, but also something infinitely
larger than that—the focal points of the rich, wild, and beguiling landscape of
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other.
What struck me first were the ways of exiting — via bird, via memory, via magic. Brent Ameneyro’s speakers are all knowing and all nostalgia. Producing not the sheen of romantic recall but the cleverness of reconstruction. In Ameneyro’s debut, A Face Out of Clay, there is no questioning, but lingering visitations. Portraits of loved ones, of lived in spaces, all held up in a magnificent, power-inducing light. In “As the Fog Starts Burning Away,” the speaker says, “I don’t want to think/about the people I love/dying.” So dead they shall not stay, rather, take Mayté, who, in a later poem, “turned/into a crested caracara,/blew the napkins off the table/when she opened her wings.”
Again, in the poem “The Overwhelming Smell of Rosemary” we are met with “A bird, mid-flight,” as it “gains human-level consciousness.” We watch as the bird watches, a man, mid-walk, reaching out towards a rosemary memory. As the poem’s title suggests, and as fact permits, smell is the strongest sense for transport; the bird hurled through time to the man’s childhood yard, and then again thrown to the future, and his rosemary scented fingertips.
This is the method by which this collection guides us. There’s a surreal suspension in his work which allows for the liminal border space that Ameneyro himself may occupy to be made tangible within these pages. The border between life and death, past and future, country and country, becomes easily traversable. Reality is just a mere suggestion for Ameneyro, and “cosmic anarchy” is just a parenthetical. Though yes, there are still truths and swelling moments of peace embedded. They can be found in every poem and tucked between the line breaks, there: “boys washing windshields,/their sisters selling bracelets at the red light,” there: “the newly appointed/middle school teacher/who was queen/of keg stands,” and there: “we were all sitting/in suspense/hanging onto his every/word.”
The images appear so properly rendered; they act as translator and as transporter. Having no personal connection to the city of Puebla, I can see now the “houses like parakeets/perched on a dirt road” or smell the scent of the
“fried pig skin peppers tortillas dirt car tires cigarette smoke”
during “A Walk in Mercado de La Merced.” This rich image system serves as an obvious boon for Ameneyro’s poems, which have no interest in teaching, in delineating what is or isn’t “yours.” Instead, these poems assert, or rather demand, that we “do not refuse what you are.” Where one comes from, where one may go.
Ameneyro’s Tectonic poems do a different sort of traversal, that of the eye, that of association. In his note section he describes the form as dealing “with rupture, bodies (both the human body and the earth’s body), and uncertainty.” The form calls for a prose block to be written, repeated, then redacted, ensuring that whatever is erased in the top half remains present in the bottom. These poems claw at completeness, showing both a whole and the sum of its parts. They trick the eye, it is almost inevitable that your sight will slip between lines, between meaning.
In as much, the meaning making is occurring over time. Of the poems, the four Tectonic iterations are among the selections I have returned to the most. Highlighting the bottom half, attempting to read the complete whole of what has been erased, only after seeking that elusive middle fissure, the center between the repeated prose block where the top erasure is then inverted; the redactions being revealed beneath themselves. The lack of capitalization and punctuation act as obscurant, blending start and end, making all associative links possible and plausible. A great equalizer of signs and language. Everything is flattened, almost unassuming, white space giving to focal points as a painting’s lighting leads the eye.
Take, for example, the second iteration of “Tectonics” — “the first american” appearing twice, center-right, with cavernous dips of white space to the left. This symbol contextualized by its surrounding, and occasionally opposing, symbols: “fast” “food” “chiles en nogada” “snow-capped volcanoes” “giant gray warehouse” — several realities plucked and isolated, as to be distilled to their valences and sent vibrating within the same space, just as tectonic plates form the uppermost mantle and form the constantly moving foundation upon which we live. In this way these new formal poems act as anchors for this collection, the tectonic plates of which Ameneyro’s poetic landscape glides over.
As such, whereas the above iteration tends to send me inward, into a more contemplative realm, the third iteration of “Tectonics” is sweeter, speaks of the earth, “about blood” “her skin” “her own hand” “her heart.” It sends me outside. Shows that all of this has already been happening, intermingling ideas and matter, connections endlessly connecting. These poems show that despite a sense of unity, schisms are inevitable. And so, if “Tectonics” serve as mantle, the hot heat center of the poetic interior, what to do with the surrounding work, the whole of the moving (poetic) earth?
Well, this collection has shown that living and the sweet gift of remembrance is impossible without movement. And as is stated in “Movement Manifesto,” here is a helpful “rule:use everything/if you have to/as long as you don’t stop.” Indeed, this stellar debut from Ameneyro does little to indicate his slowing down, rather, he has proven that he is not afraid to go outside the observable universe for his answers.
The entry points of Jane Huffman’s beautifully precise Public Abstract are two epigraphs, from Jean Valentine, “but to say I know, is there any touch in it?” and sculptor and artist Louise Bourgeois: “Pain is the ransom of formalism.” These epigraphs introduce us to some of the central concerns of this collection: pain and illness, form, both knowing and its impossibility. We begin with that quintessential impossibility to fully understand and articulate what a book is “about,” as Huffman’s first section, titled “A BOUT,” embraces and turns into structure. A poem in this section begins “I had a bout / of something / Undefined,” and many of the poems in the collection are pleasingly resistant to aboutness. The collection as a whole becomes a bout, a reckoning, with the desire to fit experience into formal shapes and the pain of that impossibility.
A bout can also refer to a period of time, and in their rhythms and meters, these poems attend to time self-consciously through their metrical patterns—we hear and feel time passing in and through them. “[I had a bout]” goes on to describe the “something / Undefined” as “a clocking from within.” While explicitly describing vertigo, the diction here also gestures to keeping time, and with their iambs, trochees and rhymes, this poem and many others move at the pace of a ticking clock. Charles Simic famously wrote that “the secret ambition of all lyric poetry is to stop time,” but Huffman’s formal pieces seem to create time, propel us through it, and hum with a daunting reminder that time will never stop. In thinking through these pieces, I recalled the final lines of Omatara James’ poem “A Flair For Language,” where her speaker describes rhyme as “the coincidence of language and time.” Language, in time, for Huffman, is constructed by forced coincidences: coincidence shaped into forms.
In “Surety,” the speaker repeats an onslaught of cumulative similes:
“I’m sure as wetness follows steam. I’m sure as cold that follows wetness follows steam…
…
I’m in the midst of sureness, sure as bricks. I’m sure as cold that follows wetness follows mist…”
As when an interlocuter repeats their argument so many times they become unconvincing, the accumulation of sureness metaphors in this poem creates an ironic weather of uncertainty. The poem admits as much at its close:
“I’m in the heat of surety. The bleat and seethe of surety. The mist that follows certainty.”
The speaker perhaps tries to be sure and fails to convince themself. Even so, the rhymes that punctuate this metrical piece create a musical confidence that complicates the anxiety. And throughout all the book, as the poems circle their questions and enact their recursive procedures, Huffman’s precise meters keep the language moving at an assuring clip, even as we encounter the abstract and the formally complex. Sound is in lockstep with the crystal logics on these pages, the tightness of their rhythms, from the titular and first poem, “Public Abstract” –“I swept / and am sweeping, / have slept / and am sleeping.”
The four sections that follow A BOUT also seek understanding and attempt to cope with the impossibility of fully knowing in their own ways. In the section REVISIONS, the poems resee, rewrite, and interrupt received forms such as the sonnet, sestina, and ode, as a form of continued desire for understanding and articulation of the world. The poem “Revision” uses shifting repetitions and brackets to add layers of meaning to a meditation on body and mind, form and formlessness – “Like a crowd, a body moves without a mind” later becomes “[The] body, like the mind, moves in crowds,” which later becomes “The body moves with [crowded lines].”
These revisions are numbered, giving a sense of their progressive making through time. All of Huffman’s poems honor the word poem’s etymology in their careful construction– they are made things. What the movements yield are original lines and beautiful ways of thinking about forms in the world: “[The wave, a solitary interaction of] the wind. [The kiln is thinking itself warm.]” later becomes “[The wave with the mind of a] kiln, thinking itself warm.”
The section LATER FRAGMENTS frames sparse poems as additions and attempts to further clarify an argument, though the argument itself shifts and changes. Later is an intriguing time marker in the story of the speaker, another reference to time and its passing, even in a book that resists a classic narrative. In one of these fragments, the speaker invokes their “causal impulse” as indulgent but unputdownable:
“If I am Indulgent tell Me how
To put this Causal Impulse down
Back in its Spring- Loaded box”
In a series of numbered prose blocks, the penultimate section, ON INVENTION, holds some of the rare personal specificities of the speaker, interspersed with meditations on Cicero’s De Inventione. The title and the analysis of Cicero’s history / fable / argument, negotiate with the invention of the self as another mode of knowing. In the final poem of the series, Huffman writes, “I invent a future version of myself who changes her mind…in the fable of my life, I was born childless. History congeals into fable, and fable argument. One side covets the past, the other the future.” Time returns here to haunt, backed by the fraught abstract and specific experiences of illness, familial addiction, anxiety, and intellectual questions these poems negotiate.
The final section turns to haibun, the traditionally Japanese form originated by Matsuo Bashō, with prose blocks followed by summative or emphatic haikus. Huffman’s haibun in this section all have declarative titles (“On moving,” “On beauty,” “On theatre,” “On breath”) that evoke the sense of aboutness other poems seem to reject, though they stay mysterious, complex, and rich in their language. In “On knowing,” the speaker says, “What I didn’t know grew over what I knew,” in a declaration of unsurety, but also of the passing of time that creates the sense of self.
Throughout the whole collection, influences and intertextualities abound. This is a book that is immediately pleasing to the ear, but also one who benefits from the close reader willing to attend to the author’s references and influences. The poems honor in form and reference luminaries such as Emily Dickinson, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Rilke, John Donne, Dionne Brand, and many others unnamed. Huffman is a poet and a thinker who understands that poetry is a collaborative act.
As Dana Levin writes in the introduction to this APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, for Huffman, “singing reveals knowing, rather than knowing sparking song.” Singing reveals something else, too—
a touch of the private feeling that is present behind all of Huffman’s public forms and rhetorical satisfactions. While specific confessions appear rarely (though importantly) in the open language in the book, rhymes drive the engines of emotional resonance, as the final haibun confesses with its moving haiku: an admission that is more emotional than rhetorical, though of course it is both: “Rhyme is so public. / Weeping openly / in a crowded latitude.”
The particular landscape of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ first collection, Ghost Pains, recalls echoes of the “New Aesthetic,” a term coined back in 2012 to describe the leakage of the digital realm into the physical world. Characters point their phones at the sky, “as if to image-search the constellations,” travel by way of reading reviews on Google Maps: “His laptop was an oyster open to the world. Escape was almost always possible.” They watch YouTube performances of classical musicians in lieu of going out to the theater, read the Wiki version of the story of John the Baptist: “It’s all too extreme in the Bible.” A couple embarks on a road trip, (“He’d autoreplied his .org inbox; she, her .edu.”), despite the fact that “millions of millennials were reluctant to leave the coasts, had never even Googled Yellowstone.” One character boasts that she can “go weeks without speaking to anyone but Ann and the cashiers at the BioMarkt. And occasionally my phone. What a stupid woman, Siri must think, who has to ask for directions all the time.” Throughout Ghost Pains, Stevens’ characters are caught not only between the physical and digital, but also one country and the next, the past and the future, between wanting to know and wanting to forget. This, as they say, is where the haunting happens—when a ghost is stuck between two worlds, unable to pass from one realm to the next. This same sense of dislocation haunts the aching, alluring stories of Ghost Pains, summoning phantoms of all kinds.
Most of the collection’s stories follow Americans abroad—in locales such as Berlin, Krakow, Tuscany—and explore their inability to truly assimilate, despite even the greatest desires to shirk the place they came from. “Perhaps I owe this rootless mood to the country my passport says I’m from,” remarks the narrator of “Dispatches from Berlin”, “a nation forever staring into other people’s pantries, reaching in an arm.” The narrator of “The Party,” one particular standout of the collection, admires the beautiful ceiling of her Berlin apartment: “You could never afford a ceiling like that in America now, I thought. Not unless you were born beneath it.” She deems the empty glasses left abandoned after the titular party “little ghosts!” and remarks, “Last night the American walked around sniffing at them like a dog. He said, Who would leave all these dead soldiers behind? I couldn’t say. I am American as well, but lately I haven’t been feeling quite myself.” In “Weimar Whore,” the central character finds herself utterly enamored with Germany’s distant past and falls into an anachronistic lifestyle, stewing cabbages and darning her socks, decking herself out lace-up ankle boots and wool skirts even in eighty-seven degree weather: “The truth was she’d overdosed on the media of the inter-war period. She couldn’t keep both feet in the now.” Later, she confides to a psychiatrist: “I’m beginning to feel…like it’s everyone else who’s nuts.” In the title story, a character takes the lingering pain of a hack-job nipple piercing as a cosmic sign to leave her city, and accepts a job transfer to Poland, where she searches for “nostalgia of a type that didn’t really belong to her.” She reminisces on some of her grandfather’s last words, that “being American meant she didn’t have to dwell so much in the past.” But, she wants to know, “couldn’t they have also dwelt a little more?”
By contrast, the characters in the few U.S.-based stories long to free themselves from the past, despite its inescapable omnipresence. After viewing the specter of the eponymous battlegrounds —recalling the memory of actual dead soldiers, after the colloquial, metaphorical versions we encounter in “The Party”—the characters of “Gettysburg” reflect that, “It really was a beautiful country, as long as you had no memory.” In “Duck Duck Orange Juice,” a college student goes to interview a musician on the upcoming election at his solitary residence out in the country, and muses that “there’s no more to news, the news is old and yet cannot be thrown away.” The rural settings of the U.S. stories offer a stark contrast to the glamor of the cosmopolitan foreign locales, and evoke some of the most palpable feelings of haunting in the collection.
Throughout Ghost Pains, characters vacillate between yearning to extricate themselves from the past and to return to it, but “Honeymoon,” another crown jewel of the collection, offers one example of a narrator who relishes the in-between rather than trying to escape it. Evoking a similar sense of martial ambivalence as in Stevens’ excellent first novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, a newlywed narrator on her Tuscan honeymoon longs for her life before marriage: “What I truly missed was being engaged. Now there’s a vacation.” Stevens shines her brightest in the first-person, and “Honeymoon” is a true masterclass in narrative voice. Even in an ostensible paradise, the narrator reminisces on “those early months of courtship, when everything was still uncertain…It seems to me there is something lost to those hour-long train rides. The thrill of the ask. The space.” In Ghost Pains Stevens proves herself an expert cartographer of that space lying open wide in each story, undaunted by its ambiguous infinity.
A compelling collection that’s sure to linger, by an exquisite stylist of psychological fiction.
In her already sold-out debut poetry collection, Sarah Ghazal Ali names and renames the places where womanhood, faith, and danger collide. Theophanies, from the word meaning “visible manifestation of God to humankind,” are embodied in these poems through stunning meditations on women from the scriptures. “A name / is a condition meant to last, / to outlast,” Ali explains in her poem “Sarai.” Her collection invokes women like Mary, Hajar, and the poet’s own namesakes alongside contemporary martyrs such as Nabra Hassanen, who was assaulted and murdered in Virginia in 2017. The effect is a book of poems that reads as timeless and unflinching, drawing in readers to witness a feminine lineage of Muslim faith that is, at once, lyric and brutal, gorgeous and convicting.
The opening poem, “My Faith Gets Grime Under Its Fingernails,” sets us up for these complexities right away:
“rather than God’s pristine names
The places I’ve prayed—elevators, Victoria’s Secret fitting room, the muck-slick meadow after rain—
will testify for or against me, spilling through my Book of Deeds
in ink of blood or honeyed milk”
The contrasts here are striking as the lines dance effortlessly between the present and the past. This is accomplished particularly well due to the voice of the collection, which reverberates with a prophetic quality, lapsing from the singular “I” to a plural “we,” such as in the poem “Daughter Triptych” where “I dreamed of abortions. Some might have been mine: / oblong pink pills, a curved door handle, wire hanger, unripe papaya” suddenly shifts: “I looked out from the eyes of Maryam. A sharpened stake in ourhand…Then I was elsewhere, watching Sarah, aged and exhausted. Her fingers pressed / light against that slightest bulge.” In the span of a few lines, the triptych takes on the personas of three women, each with their own distinct experience of pregnancy and embodiment, united over time and space through the simultaneity of the poem. Similarly, the poem “Magdalene” opens, “God made laughter for the third incredulous woman. / We cover our mouths, ashamed to echo what’s hers. // We bleed as punishment for the curious first.” The plural pronoun takes on many shapes, encompassing the three women, then all women.
There is a distance to the voice of Theophanies that struck me immediately—how the speaker of the poems holds her own stories at an unflinching arm’s length while pulling scriptural figures like Maryam and Sarah close enough to touch. The balance brings the present into the lineage of faith and history in a way that feels both distant and intimate, vulnerable and profoundly wise. “Faith [is] a legacy / of echoes,” Ali expounds in the poem “Temporal.”
Perhaps this echoing is what makes the ghazal such a perfect prominent form in this collection, right next to the persona poem. The ghazal is another namesake of the poet, which she takes advantage of, playing with the doubling in “Ghazal Ghazal”: “My people must include my father, his voice lilting from baritone to bellow. / Did my god not make his mouth, aural imprint of every remembered ghazal?” Ali cements herself as a master of couplets, and this couplet form especially, building the repeated words of the form into a haunting refrain:
“Blasphemous how one begets many. Father, father, daughter. & your mother? Miraculous origin- the one safe country.
When they ask, Ghazal, if you anger, recite again: men Flee the wind for the anthem of a new country.”
—“Partition Ghazal”
The ghazals harmonize with the relational complexities that braid through the collection as the speaker looks to the more immediate lineage of her family—from childhood memories of playing with a plastic brain model with her father in “Temporal” to the more solemn account in “Motherhood 1999” where the speaker tells us, “That year my mother made herself tall / with routine, nutrifying / my body… First triumph of her spine, the only daughter— / followed by son and son.” Ali’s familial accounts are a dynamic testament to her diasporic Pakistani heritage, exploring what is received and what is passed onward with tenderness, defiance, and longing while pushing against the constraints of patriarchal tradition.
“Recite to me a single memory not manufactured.
Even a mother is myth, fabling to survive a marriage miscarriage man.”
— “Daughter”
In this way, Theophanies is a beautiful and deeply matrilineal text, a landscape splashed with the red of poppies, birth, and blood. Readers, too, are incorporated into this inheritance through the scattered, repeated commands like “recite” and experimental forms like the family tree shape of “Matrilineage [Recovered]” where we weave our way through the maze of generations to decipher the poem.
Overall, this is a book that is revelatory, solemn, and stunning, where the exquisite music of the lines and exacting, enjambed sentences peel back to reveal new layers, like “the untorn snakeskin I found / while digging for wetness in the sand” in “Epistle: Hajar.” Theophanies is a timeless poetry collection: ferocious, lyric, and resonant, and an instant classic on my bookshelf. Like its predecessors, the words of Leila Chatti, Kaveh Akbar, and Mary Szybist, Ali’s poetry shines with a gritty, ethereal faith—the kind that “gets grime under its fingernails,” the kind that brings readers to their knees.
Christine Lai grew up in Canada and lived in England for six years during graduate studies. She holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London. Landscapes was shortlisted for the inaugural Novel Prize. Christine currently lives in Vancouver.
In Lai’s interview with Nikki Barnhart of The Journal, they discuss art and memory in the age of environmental collapse.
The novel’s unique structure comprises
Penelope’s diary entries, interspersed with periodic catalog notes; essays on
art history; and occasional chapters told from the third-person perspective of
Julian, the man who committed a violent act against Penelope years before. How
did you decide on this particular structure to tell this story? Did you always
envision the story to be told in such a multifaceted way?
Thanks for the
great questions!
I’ve always
wanted a hybrid text, but I didn’t decide on this current structure until later
in the writing process. So originally the book was divided into half—the first
half was Penelope’s perspective, and the second half was Julian’s. But I ended
up cutting everything into fragments, and interspersing them. The diary form
came first. I did try a very early draft where it was a third-person narrative
for Penelope’s section, but I felt like something was missing—it didn’t feel
quite right, so I switched to the diary and the first-person voice, and that
was the right fit. I decided to keep Julian’s section in the third person in
order to juxtapose the two voices, and the sections are written in slightly
different styles to highlight the differences between these two characters. The
art essays were written separately—I wanted to add texture to the text, and
also to give Penelope a different voice, because the style she uses in the
diary entries is very different from the style she uses for the art essays, which
readers later find out, are also written by her. I kind of envisioned a
triptych, divided into three parts, and all the different parts would speak to
one another, with motifs that repeat across the different sections. I wanted a
text that was layered, as opposed to linear and straightforward.
So Julian’s perspective was always a part of the
plan? I find it so interesting that we get his point-of-view as well.
Yeah,
definitely. But the nature of their relationship was not something that was
there at the beginning—the violent aspect. That came later. I came across this
painting by Turner—which kind of leads into your next question!—The Rape of Proserpine, inspired by the
Greek myths. In the middle of the painting, you see this ruinous structure in
the background, and there is a barren tree in the foreground, and in one
corner, you see Proserpine being dragged into the underworld. But her figure is
very tiny, it’s barely visible, and what you see is mostly just the landscape
with the ruins and the tree. That image led me to think about the relationships
between different kinds of ruination, and that gave me Penelope’s backstory, as
it were. Initially, it was just her in this house, archiving items, and her
relationship with Julian did not have that violent element.
Penelope adores the art of English Romantic
painter J.M.W Turner, and his works figure prominently in the novel. I’m
wondering if Turner also holds particular significance to you as well—was his
work an inspiration for the novel, or did his art figure in while it was
already in progress?
I guess both!
His work is definitely an inspiration for parts of the novel, but I referred to
his works throughout. The central painting, “A View on the Seine” is actually
fictional—it doesn’t really exist but it’s based on a couple of real paintings
that he did. My Canadian editor told me she kept Googling it, and said, “This
painting doesn’t exist!” And I replied, “Yeah, I’m sorry, I should have
mentioned that!” She went on this wild goose chase trying to find this image,
but I used a fictional painting because I was worried about potential legal
issues, as I was playing with the provenance of the painting. The fictional
painting is based on a couple of paintings and sketches Turner did do of the
Seine—but I was interested in that particular spot, where the two rivers are
coming together to create this confluence, because I think the confluence as a
metaphor is very interesting, and says a lot about forces clashing and things
being irreconcilable. That’s why I wanted to use that particular geographic location.
Turner was a part of my PhD so I’ve been thinking about his works for a long
time, and I’ve always been drawn to his paintings when I saw them at the Tate.
I just thought they were really mesmerizing, and I love the fact that he almost
presaged Impressionism even though he is not as widely known as someone like
Monet, but he was painting atmosphere in a particular way years before Monet
was doing something very similar.
This novel is truly an art lover’s paradise: a
bevy of references to art throughout history are intricately woven throughout
the story. I wonder if you could speak a bit about the research process for
writing the book. Were there artworks you knew you wanted to feature into it
from the beginning, or was it a more organic process of discovering connections
as you went along?
I think a bit
of both! It was definitely research-intensive, if you look at the notes in the
back of the book. I’m so glad they allowed me to print the notes, since they do
take up a lot of space. Aside from the Turner, I wanted to look at other works
that represent women and the Turner kind of led me to a lot of these works. I
read books by feminist art historians—I’m incredibly indebted to them, I think
they’ve done such a tremendous job doing this research and starting this
conversation about the representation of women, a subject which is still not
frequently talked about. I think I mentioned in a few places that museums and
galleries do not openly acknowledge the violent subject of a lot of these
paintings. One exception is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—they have the
Titian [his painting, The Rape of Europa,
featured in the novel], and two years ago they held an exhibition on Titian,
and power and women in art, where they talked openly about the subject of this
series of paintings. I think if more museums and galleries were to educate the
public, it would enrich our experience of the artworks. I don’t think that it
diminishes the beauty of the works, it just adds this extra layer, and makes
these works more relevant to our age. But maybe that’s controversial, because
I’ve spoken to friends who love art and people who are like, “you shouldn’t
look at art through this lens, you shouldn’t ruin our experience of artworks.”
I’m not sure I agree with that viewpoint. As I was doing the research I came across
more paintings [dealing with a similar subject matter], and once I began
looking at art through that lens it became impossible to see them any other
way. Nowadays if I’m at a gallery or museum, I do still find myself seeing that
aspect of paintings. Some of the artworks included in the novel I’ve actually
seen in person, before I started thinking about these ideas—I’ve been to
Florence, I’ve seen the Giambologna [The
Rape of the Sabine Women, referenced in the novel] and the Cellini
sculptures [Perseus With the Head of
Medusa, referenced in the novel], and I don’t remember being struck by them
in that way. I remember being in awe of their beauty and the artists’ mastery
of the materials. Now that I see them in this light, it just completely changed
how I relate to these artworks. So it was kind of organic from that point on,
and there were artworks that I had cut from the manuscript just because it was
getting a bit long!
Penelope states that she has “felt possessive of
art,” in particular of Turner’s works: “I felt I possessed him in a way no one
else could.” In the eyes of her partner Aidan, her attachment to Turner is
“unjustified” because she does not have a personal relationship with
him—because he is a “stranger.” However, to me, Penelope’s deep affinity and
even possessiveness to art and a particular artist was incredibly relatable, as
I’m sure it is to most others who have ever loved any type of art. Is there an artist
you feel this attachment towards? Why do you think we respond with feelings of
possessiveness to the art that moves us most deeply?
That’s such an
interesting question. For one, because art is always entangled with ideas about
property and possession, because it is a visible form of capital. I read a lot
of John Berger’s writings in which he talks about art and property—there’s this
drive to possess and stake a claim on something that is beautiful, and I think
we see that in our relations to other things, to nature, for example. In terms
of artists I felt attached to—I did feel that attachment when I was young. I
loved van Gogh as a teenager; I was obsessed with van Gogh. Not just because of
his paintings but also because of his letters—he was a phenomenal writer. I
loved reading his letters and looking at the paintings and his use of colors,
but because van Gogh is possibly the most popular artist in history, I wanted
to know him in a way that others didn’t, which is perhaps a really silly
teenage thing to think—
But I totally get it!
Yeah! I feel
like by reading these letters, by studying his words, I understood his work on
a deeper level, and Penelope shares a bit of that with regards to Turner’s
work— through this daily interaction with a work, you develop a kind of
intimacy with it that you otherwise wouldn’t. And I definitely felt this
attachment to writers. I studied the Romantics, so Percy Bysshe Shelley and
Mary Shelley were my literary heroes and I was very obsessed with their work—I
read everything and felt like, again, that sense of possession through
knowledge, through understanding.
That is all definitely expressed so powerfully
in the book, as well as that idea of possessing beauty, even if it’s a futile
pursuit—I felt like that came through so strongly. Similarly, I’m interested in
the particular process of creating such an ekphrastic work. It is a challenge
to convey images and visuals through words—it’s almost like an act of
translation—but you render all of the references to art featured in Landscapes so vividly and clearly. Can
you talk a bit about that process? Did you have any models in helping you craft
these sections?
Definitely
Sebald, and John Berger is another one I read really early on—I think I read
his Ways of Seeing when I was
undergrad, and that really revolutionized the way I saw art. Writers like Kate
Zambreno who write a lot about art, and Teju Cole…I always refer to their
works. Also art historians and art critics—I read a lot of art criticism, and
they have this amazing way of capturing something that seems to really
challenge language. There’s this great quote from Orhan Pamuk, in The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist—he
writes about how novelists are secretly envious of visual artists.
I totally think so—I mean, I feel that.
Exactly, me
too! You know, I think if I got to start all over again, maybe I’d become a
painter. [laughs]. So yeah, [Pamuk] said that the process of writing always
begins with visualization, visualizing the space in which the character lives,
and writing is translating that into text. But because of that process of
translation, we’re removed from the visual image, whereas the visual artist is
able to capture that directly. There is this kind of directness that writing
does not allow. So I think that’s very true—I feel very envious!
One of the things I found most striking in this
novel is its particular treatment of memory, and how archives and the act of
conservation are perhaps the closest we can get to making it tangible. I’m
wondering what archives mean to you—in the broadest sense, how might you
archive your own life? Do you think of writing as a type of archive?
I definitely
think writing is a type of archive, and the archive that Penelope keeps in the
book is somehow parallel to the diary. There’s this great essay by Italo
Calvino called “Collection of Sand”where
he writes about the correspondence between diary-keeping and keeping a
collection—both are ways of imposing order on the chaos of life, putting
everything into a kind of neat series. That’s definitely part of Penelope’s
engagement with the archive items, and like you said, archives are about
preservation, but at the same time, archives are almost never complete. There’s
also something almost illogical about the way certain archives are formed—you
often find random items in archives. I’ve done some archival research when I
was in graduate school, and there’s an element of accident or chance—you come
across something that you did not expect to see, and the archive just seems
like a collection of very eclectic items. And that’s very fascinating. There’s
this great book by the British artist, Tacita Dean, called Monet Hates Me. It’s based on her research at the Getty Research
Institute—she went into the archives and found these random items, then she
photographed them and wrote text that went with each photograph. I thought it
was really fascinating; she had this concept of objective chance as a research
tool, this idea of just letting yourself encounter certain images or objects in
a very serendipitous way and letting those encounters influence you and the
projects you’re working on. So that was something that I used, both as a
composition method for the book, but also as part of Penelope as character—all
the items she encounters are linked to her memories, to particular moments in
her past.
Lastly, I’d love to wrap up by asking about what
art you’re loving right now: visual art, books, music, movies? I want to hear
about all of it!
I actually wrote down a list; there are
so many things! Visual art: so I love Tacita Dean. I’m working on a new project
that’s more to do with photography, and I’m looking at a lot of photographers,
including Dean and the Italian photographer, Luigi Ghirri—absolutely sublime
photographs. There’s this amazing Substrack called “Tender Photo,” by the
writer Emmanuel Iduma. It’s just fantastic—it pairs text with photographs by
Nigerian photographers and Iduma invites photographers to submit their work to
the Substack. He also invites other writers to respond to photographs in his
collection. I love the sculptor Ruth Asawa, and I’m going to the exhibition at
the Whitney next week. I think it’s just opening this week, and I’m really
excited—I’ve always loved her sculptures, so I’m really looking forward to
that! In terms of books—um, a lot of books! It’s really hard to choose, you
know, top books of the year or favorite books. I read Rombo by Esther Kinsky—an NYRB publication from earlier in the
year, and that was incredible. It addresses memory and catastrophe, and is
written in this kind of fragmentary form which I love. There’s a new short
story collection coming out from Two Dollar Radio, by Bennett Sims, called Other Minds and Other Stories. I don’t
read a lot of short story collections, but this was just mind-blowing, I
thought it was really, really amazing. Music…I’ve been obsessed with Max
Richter’s rendition of Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons. I listen to a lot of classical music when I write, because I don’t
like anything with lyrics—the lyrics are a bit distracting, I start to listen
to the words and the meaning…so I just prefer instrumental. And I’m trying to
think of movies…there are so many movies! I’ve been watching a lot of Taiwanese
New Cinema from the 1980s, because I’m working on an essay about Taipei, which
is where I was born, so I’ve been just watching cinema from that era, looking
at the way the cityscape is represented.
Thank you so much Christine!
Thank you so
much for the questions! It was really lovely chatting with you.
Landscapes is set in a future of environmental collapse that, while fictional, feels grimly easy to imagine. “A nature diary composed over the past decade would read like a catalogue of losses. There was a time when catastrophe seemed far away…then change became visible,” the novel’s protagonist, Penelope, tells us in the opening chapter. Penelope is the archivist of Mornington Hall, a formerly grand estate that has succumbed to decay along with the world around it. But as the novel begins, most of Mornington’s prestigious holdings have been either destroyed, damaged, or sold to finance repairs. The estate’s house, gallery, conservatory, and library are set to be demolished seven months from the book’s onset. The novel is a record of that time, partially composed of Penelope’s diary entries and catalog notes as she archives what remains of Mornington, which has also been her home for the past twenty-two years. Penelope’s archival notes are just as personal as they are professional—perhaps more so: “I also wish to keep a record of the objects that I find evocative, with a description of their physical states as they exist now, in my hands,” she writes. Indeed, Landscapes is ever-conscious of the ephemeral nature of art, and our particular experiences of it, often belied by the facade of conservation: if art can be preserved, restored, contained, can we protect it from time? Can we make it eternal or does it too have a life-span just as we do—as the Earth does? “Do you think art endures?” asks another character later on. Penelope answers, “I don’t know. Individual artworks, no. They require a lot of conservation. Art, with a capital A, I have no idea.”
Reading Landscapes is truly an art lover’s dream—the novel is brimming with references to artworks both real and fictional. The challenge such ekphrastic writings face is rendering visuals into words, an often difficult and imprecise act of translation. But Landscapes succeeds because the art that informs its foundation is not only described, it is woven into the landscape of the novel itself.
“Mornington Hall was famed for its seamless transition between interior and exterior,” Penelope tells us. The same could be said for the book as a whole—Landscapes moves deftly across multiple other dichotomous divides. Penelope’s intimate diary entries (as meticulous and as closely observed as one would expect from an archivist) submerge the reader firmly into her interiority, but Lai’s richly drawn details of Mornington, awash in contradictions of opulence and atrophy—tattered trompe l’oeil wallpaper, flowers blooming in cracks on the walls—also ground us firmly in a setting outside the narrator’s mind; we understand Penelope more deeply because we can envision the world she writes from. Penelope herself is a passionate art lover, especially of the works of English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. Penelope’s love for art is so intense that it transcends her exterior world into her own interior. At times, the lines between the realms begin to blur. “At a certain point, I wanted to spend my life in that painting,” Penelope says of Turner’s Norham Castle, Sunrise, the first painting she fell in love with. She admires the way “the painting’s radiance belies its dark core…This is what I love in Turner—the way violence is embedded in a gleaming landscape.” This is true both of the landscape of Mornington Hall, with its fractured past and seemingly doomed future, and of Penelope’s own inner state, as an act of sexual violence from the past continues to invade and haunt her present.
As Penelope sits for a portrait by an artist friend, she finds her mind wandering more and more frequently into painful memories of her past. She attempts to stay present by mentally reciting “as a mantra” a Louise Bourgeois quote: “My memory is moth-eaten full of holes.” Penelope writes, “The more I recited, the more I resisted the images from the past that sought to latch on to me.” When she finally witnesses her completed portrait towards the end of the novel, Penelope thinks, “It was unmistakably me, but me as I exist in different times. Even though the image is static, it in fact records in its many layers the dynamic subject that dwells both past and present.”
What tense does art exist in? This is a question I found myself asking as I read Landscapes. Is art past, or is it present? Or is it more accurate to say that it contains both at once, moves through dimensions, just as we do? Is this what makes art human—maybe even mortal?
Another question I found myself pondering: is art a form of memory—or is memory a kind of art? Penelope recounts a conversation she once overheard on the London Tube in which two men debate the merits of painting from memory: “If you try to reconstruct something over the span of years, or if you try to reconstruct an event that happened a long time ago, how accurate can it be?” one asks. But Landscapes suggests that the reason why art moves us so deeply has little to do with allegiance to detail—maybe to love an artwork, to truly absorb it and let it pervade the exterior world to our own interiors, means that we make it our own, create something new in our minds. When a beloved Turner painting is stolen from Mornington (a commissioned reproduction of an original that was among those sold for repairs), Penelope mourns its loss before realizing “the Turnerian colors and the luminous core at the center of the darkness are lodged in my mind. These details have taken root in my imagination . . . so often that I find myself picturing A View on the Seine as if I had painted it.”
In her diary, Penelope remembers another incident in which she describes a beautiful view from the train that her partner sleeps through: “He said my description was as good as the view itself,” she writes. Something new formed, something beautiful persisting, in the wake of a loss—even if only in our minds: this, Landscapes tells us, is how art endures.
Paige
Quiñones’ “The Best Prey” is a bestiary of desire. Animals abound in Quiñones’
debut collection: spiders, foxes, whales, and sparrows, enacting primal wants and
violence, relationships and intimacies. With her precise imagery and steady
gaze, Quiñones makes of her animals a story of the body, of love, of mental
health and gender, and family heritage.
From
the start, we are ensnared in Quiñones’ web, like the bee caught in the
spider’s web in the opening poem. “But imagine, pretend he is you: / beauty is
the cold bind.” Quiñones does not mince words. The reader has come here
looking, perhaps, for beauty, and beauty is abundant in Quiñones’ poetry, but no
line is innocent or simple. Even as we admire the vividness of Quiñones’
language Quiñones turns her gaze, and we become prey. “I am complicit,” Quiñones
ends the poem, complicit in the act of writing, in desire, in the hunt. Thus, Quiñones
establishes the drama of the whole collection, the sway from predator to prey,
object to subject, writer to written thing. All the while implicating the
reader, as voyeur, or as some more active player in the game of predation and
desire that Quiñones lays out.
Quiñones is an adept tour guide through this jungle. We soon return to a spider in the poem “Luna de Miel,” living, dying, and consuming its children in a goblet of water between two lovers. In “Love Poem: Fox,” Quiñones plays with the imagery of the hunt: a rich man on a horse, his gloves and hunting dogs. “To dress myself in woman / would be a finer sport,” Quiñones writes. The speaker becomes fox, becomes woman, measuring its predator and the chances of its survival. It’s a radical and frightening kind of love poem, and in seven short couplets Quiñones flips the familiar form.
The speaker is never only prey. Again and again, Quiñones refuses a singular narrative, or a single form. In the prose poem “That Which I consider Untamable,” Quiñones conjures something like a fairy tale. An animal leaves dead birds at the speaker’s doorstep, the birds “splayed open like a / gentleman’s waiting hand.” Here is death, the gifts of courtship. The speaker catches a fistful of the animal’s fur and Quiñones writes, “it is not / enough. I would like his entire pelt. I would like to lie in it.” The voice claims agency and power, even if it is a complicated power. Love and violence are always intertwined, and the poem asks: can there be want without consumption? Love without ownership?
There
are human animals, too, family histories across language and time. In “Dueña
del Bosque,” Quiñones writes, “You think you can return to that place / where
your feral tía / climbed down from the mountain.” Natural imagery and the
familiar are linked through language, and Quiñones explores the impossibility
of return and gendered intergenerational trauma. In “La Operación,” the speaker
imagines the voice of her abuela in Spanish Harlem: “duerme duerme duerme,”
says the grandmother. With long lines and single-sentence stanzas, Quiñones
conjures a vision of family origins, and the violence of men and medicine
against women’s bodies.
And there is longing, as in the poem “Alternate Realities.” Each line begins with the conditional “if,” and with each “if” Quiñones conjures a question about love, health, and home, about what might life look like if something were different. Quiñones offers no answers; the reader must imagine what these other timelines might look like. Placed in the third and final section of the book, the poem draws on everything before to fill in the blanks. Quiñones employs the magic of what’s not there, what’s absent from the page, to fully activate the reader’s participation in the poem.
In
some ways, the collection is a darkly honest choose-your-own adventure of love
and its counterparts. Roleplay is encouraged. In the final lines of the final
poem, Quiñones’ writes, “You are the quetzal I’ve snared / & I’ve stolen a
feather & / you expect to be released.” We are haunted by the expectation
of release, and the floating ampersands that bookend her line, like twisting
snakes. “Maybe our roles are reversed,” Quiñones ends the poem. Start over, Quiñones
seems to invite, read the collection again and play all the roles, the messy
but alive human and nonhuman animals that populate this landscape of desire.
More than simple metaphor or archetype, there are real bodies in Quiñones’
lines, bursting with pain and passion.
“The
Best Prey” won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Paige
Quiñones earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and is currently a PhD
student in poetry at the University of Houston.
Rina Ayuyang’s The Man in the McIntosh Suit eschews the pursuit of prosperity typically associated with the American Dream, and instead centers one man’s search for intimacy and home. Bobot is a Filipino law school graduate turned migrant farmworker who spends his free time writing love letters to the wife he left behind in the Philippines, even after he’s stopped receiving a response. When he hears a rumor that his wife was seen in America, he sets out on an adventure that carries us from the farms of rural California to the seedy speakeasies of San Francisco, desperate to find his lost love.
Set at the onset of the Great Depression, Ayuyang paints a picture of the national unrest looming over Bobot with precision. Farmworkers whisper about distant protests, and discuss the measures they’d have to take to organize. The book itself opens with a true-to-life opinion piece written by Paul Scharrenberg, a representative of the American Federation of Labor. “There are enough Filipinos in this country at this time to create a problem,” it begins. “They are very lazy, and very vain. They are very quarrelsome… They have no idea of honor, or honesty, or fairness… I believe they should be excluded from this country.” This sentiment manifests within the story on a few striking occasions, most notably in a beating that takes place after a farmworker dances with a white woman in a pool hall. While characters move through immigrant communities for the majority of the book, these instances are more than enough to remind the reader of the racial hostility that awaits them when they stray too far.
Those coming from Ayuyang’s kaleidoscopic memoir, Blame This on the Boogie, may be surprised by the book’s simple color scheme. But just as the story of The Man in the McIntosh Suit draws on the noir genre, so does its aesthetic. Large segments are rendered monochromatically in blue, or green, or rosy golds and reds. These shades intrude on each other at key moments of transition or deep feeling, dazzling the reader as Bobot delves into the mystery of his lost wife. Ayuyang’s love of music also makes a welcome return in this volume, with lyrics of Depression-era songs floating across panels, and playlists of said songs shared on the final pages. When combined, all amounts to a gorgeous love letter to Hollywood’s romantic, black-and-white era, without Ayuyang losing sight of her own distinct flair.
Courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly
And in The Man in the McIntosh Suit, love is in the heart of things. It drives Bobot’s journey, and as the story unfurls, we learn how it’s driven the lives of the characters in his orbit. There could be a version of this story that centers the economic and racial inequities Bobot and his friends face. It is crucial that many versions of that story have been and continue to be told. But, while Ayuyang doesn’t lose sight of those injustices (just as love drives each character’s journey, a lack of money reliably inhibits it), prosperity and social acceptance isn’t the object of Bobot’s pursuit. Romantic love, platonic love, familial love, and queer love are at the forefront of this story, yearned for and celebrated. In the face of human relationships, country and what it promises you becomes circumstantial. This is a story about how loved ones are home. “But let me ask you,” Bobot says to his wife, “if you could be anywhere, then tell me where I would be?”
The Man in the McIntosh Suit is an ode to Depression-era noir that insists on romance, on hope. All this, without sacrificing the genre’s trademark thrills. We get our heists, our thrilling chases. Mystery begets mystery. As all good adventures do, The Man in the McIntosh Suit left me equal parts hungry and fulfilled. I set down the book longing for these characters, and looking forward to Bobot’s next chapter. Not unlike its characters, I felt nostalgic for a world I was uprooted from far too soon.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His newest collection, Witness, is forthcoming in August 2023. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
During his visit to OSU as the Spring 2023 Visiting Writer, The Journal spoke to him about the freedom to wander in short fiction, getting the rain into your story, and the constant present of the past in writing and in life.
The Journal: I’m taking a visual arts class this semester, and in it, we had a discussion about our “first works”—not necessarily the first work we ever made, but the first one that felt true to who they are as an artist—based on the book, No. 1: First Works of 362 Artists. I’d be curious to hear about what you might consider your “first work,” and what about it felt different than work you had created previously, or how it may have influenced the work that came after.
JB: I feel like there’s a few ways I could answer that question, but the response that’s coming to me now is there’s a story called “Infinite Happiness” in the first collection, which I believe is the first story I wrote from that collection, and which kind of feels like a first work in a way. Because it felt like a first person voice I was comfortable with—it felt like it was doing a lot of the things I wanted that kind of story to do, which was to have a first person narrator who was opinionated and had an attitude and was kind of casting aspersions outward, but in fact was revealing himself to be not very much better than the people he was criticizing. And that’s one of the things I think about a lot in first person stories, because when you write in first person, that character, who is also the narrator, has so much power in a story—you’re giving that character these god-like powers of narration. So for me it’s important to find ways to cut against that power, and to allow that character to reveal themselves without violating their point-of-view. That was a story where I felt like I was able to do that and also capture a certain era of Brooklyn that I knew. So a lot of things that were in that story were important to me, so it feels like a first work to me.
The Journal: As someone who came to an MFA with full intent to write a novel but has fallen in love with the short form, I’d love to know what attracts you to short stories—especially for a short form writer whose work has often been described as “novelistic.” What do you think it means for a fiction to “feel” like a novel versus a short story?
JB: There are a few questions embedded in there, good questions, and I’ll try to touch on all of them. What attracts me to the short story? I think I like the constraint. Other writers have said that short stories are the form, the written form, that are closest to poetry, and that feels kind of true to me, because they are these intricate little machines when you come down to it, and they kind of have to work if not perfectly, pretty close to perfectly. So I like that constraint, because I think it provides a useful sort of pressure on your creativity. It makes you be creative. It’s more impressive if you do a back-flip off a tightrope than if you do a back-flip on solid ground, you know? So it’s that kind of thing.
The other thing is that I feel like short stories are close to the way I would narrate my life, like a collection of short stories, or a number of collections of short stories—I don’t know if my life has anything resembling the seamless unity of a novel. It sort of feels like these little pieces that I could narrate in terms of their small arcs, and sometimes they cross over each other and sometimes they’re distant from each other, but when you put them together, you can get a sense of a life. They feel close to memory to me, I guess I would say.
Technically, you can have a slack part of a novel and the novel can still be wonderful. Some of my favorite novels have sections that I don’t love, necessarily. But this doesn’t mean that novels aren’t highly formal, and if the form isn’t right, the novel’s not going to be right. I guess I would say I do like that in a novel it feels like you have more room, even within that formalness, you have more room to digress. And that’s the thing that I try to cart in from a novel to a short story—the freedom to sort of wander a little bit, to go off-track, to stare at a minor character. They might not be very important but there’s something compelling or beautiful about that character that you want to keep in the story. Then you can kind of release them—they can go off and you can imagine them having their own story somewhere. I do like that quality. That’s why I love a writer like Edward P. Jones. Think about his second collection, which was published after The Known World, his novel. Those stories are big. And it feels like they just digress and move and the shapes are odd, but they still hold together in these wonderful ways. They still feel like stories. So it’s a little bit of trying to have it both ways—but why not try to have it both ways?
The Journal: The Chicago Review of Books said about A Lucky Man: “A lot of short stories exist in a snow globe, but the nine stories presented here are each a big bang.” Speaking of that novelistic scope, how do you know what to add in a story to make the world of your characters feel as vivid and alive as it does, and what to subtract, to ensure the narrative remains refined? Can you talk a bit about that balancing act?
It is a balancing act! Well, the first thing I would say is that I think it helps to have models that give you permission to do those things. That’s why Jones is important to me; writers like Alice Munro, or Deborah Eisbenberg are important because it feels like they have this sensibility that can’t be contained in the boniest form of a short story. Once you have these models, of people not only doing it, but doing it brilliantly, it feels like you can do this kind of thing too. I had a teacher once who said of Edward P. Jones’ work that it feels like as the story moves, he’s going from the soul of the story, to the soul of the story, to the soul of the story . . . That’s the form. If you think of a story as having a soul—it’s probably not very helpful, but I think it’s inspiring, and it feels like you can kind of shake off some of the rigid movements of a more tightly constructed short story. Just sort of follow where a story wants to go, because a character wants to go there, because you respect your characters. Oftentimes that’s enough. If it feels like you’re following or honoring your characters just enough to sit with them for a while, even if their thoughts, their actions, don’t necessarily go along with your plan for the story, just honoring that character feels like something that’s important. This kind of goes back to Chekhov, honestly, you know the way his characters just sort of do what they want. The critic James Wood has this phrase about Chekhov’s characters. He says that they “mislay their scripts” for a moment. He feels that they stop being characters per se, they just become people. I guess those moments are worth it; I guess that’s what I’m saying. Those moments when a character has a surprising or random thought or action, even if it doesn’t drive the story forward, that feels worth it to me because it adds to the texture that you need. And I think the balancing act that you’re asking about is all about revision and instinct. There’s only so much wandering you can do before you just wander completely away from the story. You have to remember what the spine of the story is, and constantly remind yourself of that. But I think once you have a firm sense of what the story is, it permits you to wander. When you digress, you have to digress from something, right? And when you know what that something is, you can come back to it. So there’s no surefire craft trick that tells you how to do it, but I think that if you respect your characters you can get those magical moments. And if you really know through revision what the story is, you know where you have to return. So it’s that sense of digression and return that you have to cultivate draft by draft.
The Journal: I’d love to hear about how your collections have come together. At what point do you start seeing connections between multiple works? How conscious might those links be? How do you know when a work belongs in a collection and when it just doesn’t?
JB: I should try to talk about this as specifically as possible, so I’ll talk about it with A Lucky Man and then with Witness, because I think they’re a little different.
So I wrote most of the stories that are in A Lucky Man during my MFA program—or I should say that I drafted them at that point, and then took a couple of years to revise them all. I sort of relentlessly wrote stories in those two years, and I wrote more stories than the number of stories that ended up in A Lucky Man. There are nine stories in that collection, and I think I wrote twelve or thirteen stories, somehow. And there are two things—at least two things—I should mention: one, when I was writing those stories, for a long time, I had no sense or aspiration that I was writing a collection. I vividly remember other folks in the program talking to each other like, “Oh, how’s your novel?” And they’d ask me, “How’s your collection?” and I’d be like, “What are you talking about? I don’t have a collection.” And they’d be like, “Okay…seems like you do!” So it took me a long time to see it. And the second thing I should say is that once I did see it, the connections were surprisingly apparent to me, but only among those nine stories. So the other three or four just didn’t belong, whereas these stories spoke to each other. I felt there were these subliminal connections that made them bind. I think when you sequence a collection, it helps to bring those connections out: figuring out what goes first, how the stories fall from each other in sequence, and what story closes. And I think what that showed me is that there’s a way with a collection that you can kind of trust parts of your mind that you don’t always have conscious access to. Of course, certain things were on my mind, explicitly, when I was writing those stories. But I think a lot of the things that bound them together were things that I wasn’t necessarily explicitly thinking of, but of course my mind was. And it took standing back from those stories to figure out, oh, these are a collection—those others are just some stories. So that was really useful.
With Witness, it was maybe a little different. I think I realized sooner in the process what the collection seemed to be, what was binding the stories. And so, I think with the last story or two that ended up in the collection, I knew I was writing something for a collection, whereas that was not the case with A Lucky Man. I wrote all those stories thinking of them as just individual stories. So with this book, there’s a story I added really late in the game, but I knew where I wanted that story to sit. I knew the company I wanted that story to keep, which was different for me, because I typically don’t write with that much foreknowledge. I’m very much a “mystery writer,” trying to figure things out as I go. And with this one, the process of writing the story was still figuring a lot of stuff out, but I kind of knew more things about the main character and what he was wrestling with when I wrote this story, because I knew what the collection was. The last thing I’ll say about Witness that became a sort of guiding idea for me . . . a quote from James Baldwin became really important to me, and in this line, he basically says that there’s a very thin line between a witness and an actor, but the line is absolutely real. And that quote to me was powerful enough but also suggestive enough that it could guide me without making me feel too restricted. This idea of witnessing what you see out in the world, how you act in response to what you see: those are loose enough but also compelling enough that I felt I could write to that. And I felt like I needed both, that guidance and that freedom.
The Journal: Earlier this year, I read Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, and ever since, I’ve been fascinated with thinking about the different shapes and structures narratives follow other than the traditional “arc.” In consideration to those ideas, are there any shapes you feel compelled by? How do you set out structuring your stories—and does that ever change in revision?
That’s a good question. I like how that book is scrutinizing the idea of the story arc as the necessary story shape. That feels useful to me because I think every story has its own shape. One thing I’m compelled by is Alice Munro’s idea of experiencing a story like experiencing a house—that is super fascinating to me. I’m not sure I entirely understand it but she talks about when she reads stories, she can start reading the story anywhere, and just kind of move around in it. And it is like a house, right? You don’t necessarily follow a certain path through someone’s house or your own house, so that seems really compelling to me. I’ve been really interested in stories where the shape comes in the form of fragments. A lot of my students have been writing or wrestling with the idea of narrating trauma, for instance, and how do you do that? And the fragment or fragmentation seems to be one story shape that a lot of them are considering or thinking about. It’s interesting because you have a narrative form of fragmentation that actually is, at the same time, resisting narration. So all these things are on the page, but the typical way we would move through a story, with natural connections of a linear sequence—all that stuff is taken out if you have a bunch of fragments. And it calls on the reader to do a lot of work, and it honors the trauma, in a way. It sort of honors the presence of the trauma, and the challenge that trauma exerts on the ability to narrate anything. You can’t assimilate the traumatic experience so how can you narrate it? So I think fragmentation is one thing I’m thinking about, and this house metaphor is another thing I’m thinking about. I’m not sure in my own stories if I actively think about shapes beyond the arc—maybe they play with the arc shape in some way, but you can probably put a narrative arc on most of my stories. But in my reading life and in my teaching life, I’m certainly compelled by other shapes.
The Journal: In reading A Lucky Man, I’m struck by the particular way each story traverses time—it feels like every narrator is on a precipice between past and present, and similarly haunted by both, visions of who they were and who they should be. Like how in “J’ouvert 1996”, the father tells the narrator to stop sending pictures of himself, because he can only see him as the boy he used to be, or in “A Lucky Man,” Lincoln remarks about the divide between him and his wife in thinking that “time had not treated them equally.” In Joan Silber’s The Art of Fiction, she writes that “Time is always in some way the subject of fiction . . . Storytelling is always the contemplation of time.” How much might you agree with this idea? What does time mean to you when writing? What does it mean to your characters?
JB: I totally agree. I think the subject is always time, in a way, you know? It kind of goes back to your last question—maybe the arc isn’t the best way to represent the way a character is experiencing time. Maybe it is fragmentation, maybe it is a kind of wandering progression through a structure, like a house. I think in my stories, I’m always trying to erode or make porous the boundary between what we sort of clumsily call “frontstory” and “backstory.” Because I think that that division isn’t always so neat—it’s probably rarely that neat, or maybe never that neat. There’s that famous Faulkner quote about the past not being past—I actually prefer what he goes on to say in that quote, because he talks about the experience of living in the present is like laboring through webs of the past. And I love that idea, that you’re just constantly walking through this gossamer sensation of what is past. And that’s the way I aim to write in most of my stories—it’s not like here’s what happening now, here’s what happened twenty years ago, and now let’s go back to—you know, like the past neatly explains why the character is doing something in the present. I don’t think that’s what’s happening; I think that the past is always mysterious, constructed—it’s always kind of a question. You’re always kind of reliving it. And so as you move through life, as you move through your present story, you’re always moving through your past story as well. And I kind of want to capture that feeling of a character laboring through these webs, and that nothing you do is discretely set off from what we call “backstory.” The backstory is always there, it’s in the air, even when you’re not aware of it, you’re walking right through it all the time.
The Journal: “Everything the Mouth Eats” begins with the line, “I’ve started this story many times and deleted the page many times.” I was wondering how do stories begin for you? What does it take for a story to feel true, and start a life of its own?
JB: I think they begin in different ways—for instance, that story began as an attempt on my part to talk back to another story that I love. One of my favorite writers does this: Yiyun Li does it a lot. A lot of her stories are talking back to William Trevor stories, or Elizabeth Bowen, or other writers that she loves. And so with that story, I was trying to talk back to “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin. Although that beginning, that first line that you quoted is actually an allusion to The Fire Next Time, I believe, when he’s writing to his nephew [“My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”]. So that’s one way that stories begin for me, I’m just caught up with something in a story that I love and I want to try to write back to it. Having that story there as a starting point is really useful, but inevitably your story is just going to go in a different direction and become its own thing, and I love when that happens. It’s like, oh yeah, I’m not talking only to you anymore, I have something to say now.
Otherwise, it’s often something you were just talking about, not letting things go. Stories will begin because something won’t let go of me, or will just stay with me. Often it’s a place, or a voice, that just stays in my head, and I feel like I have to write about it. For instance, there’s a story in my new collection that’s set in Brooklyn—it’s set at a location that’s essentially the Brooklyn Museum. I was thinking about the Brooklyn Museum because when I lived in New York, I would go to this monthly event called First Saturdays, and it was always a fascinating event because this huge cross-section of people from Brooklyn and other boroughs would come, a huge diversity of people. It was a mix of music, visual art, and sometimes film, so various arts were represented. And people of all ages. And what I remember about going was that you never knew who you were going to encounter. It just felt like it was inevitable that you were going to see someone that you didn’t expect to see. And that stayed with me, that sense of completely unpredictable encounters. The story I ended up writing was this completely unpredictable encounter that becomes very troublesome for the main character. But I love that feeling, so I wanted to capture that feeling of being in that place, because it just stayed with me, it felt like this doesn’t happen everywhere. Of course it happens, especially in a place like New York, but there it felt really intense and more likely to happen. So either I’m talking back to other stories, or a place or a voice just has this grip on me. What was the last part of your question?
The Journal: What does it take for a story to feel true, and take form—you know, when you start something and it’s not quite the way you have it in your head and you have to kind of recombobulate a few times?
JB: My sense of it is similar to what a lot of writers have talked about—I feel a story starts to feel true when it starts pushing you around a little bit. One of my old teachers would talk about the feeling of when you’ve put down a couple of good sentences, or a couple of good details, or a couple of good scenes in a story, then you have the sensation of losing options, and that sensation of losing options should actually be a good one. It can be scary, but it should be a good sensation, because it means the story is exerting a discipline on you, and exerting its own rules on you. So you know these beautiful details that you’ve set down on a page are actually making certain bad decisions not possible anymore, or they’re sort of suggesting to you, no, don’t do that, follow this path. So for me, when I get that feeling of this is becoming difficult, like this story is kind of fighting me—it’s awful, of course, but it also makes me feel like this story is true, this story is becoming its own thing, it’s not necessarily bound to what my conscious mind wants it to be. I have to respect a lot of what it wants to be. The other thing I would say is that I think a story feels true when any change you try to make to it makes it worse. It’s like, no, no, no, this is it, this is its form, this is its essential form, so I have to respect that, I have to stop messing around with it.
The Journal: What most commonly stumps you in writing? What have been some challenges you’ve faced in bringing your beginnings to their rightful resting place?
JB: That’s a good question . . . I feel like every story has its own seemingly impossible challenges, but I’m trying to think of what recurs. . . I think one of the hardest things to do in stories is to—I see this in my own work, I see this in my students’ work—one of the hardest things to do is to honor all of the characters in a given story. And it’s hard because one of the things you want to do, if you’re writing character-based fiction, one of the things you often want to do is to be true to a certain point-of-view, to a certain perspective on the world. So you’re kind of pledging allegiance to one character in a way, but the difficult task is to do that, but at the same time, not allow that allegiance to one character to diminish the autonomy and the complexity of other characters. So the thing that I always end up wrestling with is how do I write a story that’s deeply embedded in a character’s point-of-view, that feels true to the character’s point-of-view, while also looking at the other players, and making sure they’re not just becoming functions of the plot, sort of adjuncts of the main character, and getting pushed around by the sensibility and the desires of the main character. So how do you render a world in which the subjectivity of your main character is really richly rendered, but you’re also true to what’s external to that subjectivity—which to be honest doesn’t really care about that subjectivity. As we know from our lives. Neither of us wanted it to rain today, right, but it’s raining! If we had our choice, it wouldn’t be raining. But how do you get the rain, metaphorically speaking, into your story? Even if your character doesn’t want it to be there. So for me, a thing that recurs is that how do I make sure that the things that external to my privileged character, the things and people external to my privileged character, how do I make sure those things are autonomous and true and complex, at the same time that this character is rich and true and complex. It’s very difficult!
Yona Harvey’s second poetry collection, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, offers a dazzling lyric journey through time and space that spans both the celestial and the personal. This is a book that bursts with energy and defies attempts at simple summary or categorization. Echoing TheOdyssey it references, the poems create a winding voyage that touches on districts (The Dream District, The Frog District, The Sonnet District), elegies, and songs. Although heartbreak and grief weave in and out of its pages, the lingering emotion in my reading of this collection was wonder. Through Harvey’s eyes, we see a narrative rooted in the Black female experience that examines the limitations of relationships, language, and even our own imagination. At the same time, the poet invites us to marvel as she introduces us to whimsical Afro-futuristic possibilities, both utilizing and shattering familiar poetic forms, and teaching us to see “the most beautiful/ dark that hosts the most private sorrows/ and feeds the hungriest ghosts” (9).
Harvey’s poetry is fierce, noting that “An Apology—/ is not an eraser” (14-15) and “we who believe in freedom cannot rest” (5). In addition to social critique, it is haunted by a nearly apocalyptic understanding of climate change, glancing at “the unmistakable absence of the Great Barrier Reef” (65) and envisioning “when the glaciers get to melting” (68). But these poems are also comforting in their glittering beauty, their willingness to leap in form across the page, managing to surprise with each repetition. New meaning is created out of familiar words such as, “okay,” “&,” “yo,” and even “that.” Wordplay, and a deep attention to sound, permeate the poems, such as in the conclusion of “Subject of Retreat”:
Then what? The snow on the other side. The sound of what I know & your, no, inside it.
The use of form here is playful and endlessly inventive, becoming more experimental as the book progresses and taking on a flexibility and musical quality reminiscent of the blues. The poem “The Dream District/ Origins” comes to mind, where three columns can be read independently or intertwined to create multiple interpretations. Where “Sonnet for a Tall Flower Blooming at Dinnertime” is composed as a haunting ode-like American sonnet, a later poem in the manuscript, “The Sonnet District,” challenges our understanding of this poetic structure. Through the use of subversive couplets that maneuver through humorous turns from an ex’s careless words to Shakespeare—the bard himself—the poem overflows what might have been fourteen stanzas into a fragmented and defiant conclusion: “I peeped the conveniently placed escape hatch in the shape of a narrow couplet/ from where I sat.// It didn’t take a telescope to find that.”
“Cutthroat/ The Rising Cost of Fuel” experiments further with em dashes positioned before and after words, making the appearance that the poem is “glitching” on the page as if the words were slashes or pixels. Even the paper feels the wounds of loss.
you—
—dead—
—sister—
Cumulatively, Harvey manages to balance a kind of Afro-futuristic surrealism that feels mythic, sci-fi, and slippery. But it is grounded by strong emotions of siblinghood, marriage, and parenthood that encompass an expansive capacity for feelings of love, grief, and betrayal. The poet is not alone on this journey; the collection builds upon a chorus of new and reoccurring voices and invokes such muses as Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Erykah Badu, Madonna, Denzel Washington, and even fantastical frogs to name only a few.
In the same chiaroscuro way that stars shine more brightly against a dark sky, humor and beauty illuminate even the most solemn sections. Nowhere is this felt as strongly as in her unforgettable twenty-eight-part title poem, which reads like a transmission with frequent punctuation and travels the stars as a marriage collapses:
Any launch. changes. everything. The ultimate outcome. is love. or hate. Is success. or failure. Is life. or death.
This is an easy poem to obsess over: it manages to hold freedom and playfulness in the same stanzas that traverse the stages of grief, wielding transmission-like punctuation to emphasize the fragmentation of emotions. The culmination overlaps with the title, offering generously, “You don’t have to go. to Mars for love. / For you to be willing. is more than enough.”You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love achieves inspiring emotional breadth: it devastated me and made me laugh out loud, often on the same page. Harvey reminds us that our journey is not linear. As the penultimate poem declares again and again, “there is no center of the universe” (66). Like the vastness of space, this repetition is simultaneously comforting and frightening. These works urge us not to flinch away from experiences of loss, anger, and sorrow as a sense of freedom and the awe of discovery await on the other side. This is a rich, sparkling collection that you will want to explore more than once.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO TO MARS FOR LOVE can be purchased from Four Way Books for $16.95.
October 30, 2022 | Alex Borden | nonfiction special
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“It hurts just as much as it is worth.” – Julian Barnes
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The story goes that my maternal grandmother, Po Po, had her feet bound when she was a young girl in Beijing. The process was halted when they realized she would have to flee to America during the Communist Revolution.
But no, that doesn’t make sense. Her feet would’ve been visibly disfigured; she would’ve had trouble walking. Perhaps she was just a natural size four?
•
My mom had me when she was 42 years old, which is to say that she was preparing me for her death since the day I was born. It was less about her actual age than the fact that she seemed to always feel death’s looming presence. She knew she would leave us one day, sooner than she’d liked.
Because of this, I never imagined her crying at my wedding. I never imagined that my future kids would call her a deranged name like Mee Maw or Gam Gam. I always knew that by the time these things happened, she would be gone.
•
Foot binding is done in private by mother to daughter. Even though she knows the pain well, the mother still pulls and pulls the cloth strips tighter. She remembers the pain, the agony of it, the way it twists her toes under the soles of her feet, breaking the bones into inhumane shapes. The mother does not know any other way.
•
I woke up at 7am to a text from my dad. Mom died around 2:30am in her sleep. Hospice confirmed and funeral services came to pick her up. Glad you both visited. I didn’t answer because I had nothing to say.
She died, I texted my three best friends. One of them stayed on the phone with me last night as I cried my way back from New York. I told her I couldn’t do it anymore, the waiting. We hung up at 1:30am, 2:30am New York time. The moment she died.
I tried to fall back asleep, putting it all off for a few more hours.
•
I had nightmares as a child. They varied in plot, but always came to the same end: I would be kidnapped and taken from my mom, never to see her again. I’d wake up in tears and run into my parents’ bedroom, back when they still shared one, shaking my mom awake. Without hesitation or complaint, she’d walk me back to my room, tuck me in, and kiss my forehead. Then she’d curl up on the foot of my bed like a dog, tossing my SpongeBob blanket over herself. My mom was the person I feared most in the world and yet, she was the only person who I was sure could protect me from the dark.
•
Whenever my mom was late to pick me up from elementary school, Chinese class, or gymnastics, she would find me crying, waiting by the side of the road. Each time, I was sure she wasn’t late—she was dead, just like she always told me she would be.
•
Two weeks before she died, when my dad told me it was time, I flew home to Long Island. I’d had four years since her initial diagnosis to prepare me for the goodbye. I made sure to pack a lot of black just in case the visit took a turn.
I sat on her bed in our guest room and wondered how you’re supposed to have last words with someone who doesn’t know you’re there. It had been about a year since we’d had a conversation and even then, she was just a shell of herself.
My mom was always on a quest to lose just five more pounds even though she teetered around 95 for most of her life. I looked down at her small frame. My dad told me she couldn’t keep on weight anymore. 74 pounds. I put my hand on her leg above the old SpongeBob blanket and then jolted it back, shocked by the sharpness of bone.
“I’m sure this isn’t how it works,” I said “but if you’ve been waiting to see me, please go. It’s okay to go now.”
Nothing happened. Her mouth remained agape in a horrifying circleof pain. How stupid I was to think she was waiting for me.
•
That night, my older sister, Lynna, and I went to a Beyonce vs. Drake dance night in Brooklyn. She was dancing, but I was preoccupied with my phone, hoping for a text from a guy I’d been talking to from a dating app. Our first date was set for tomorrow night when I’d be back home in Austin.
We were in purgatory. Our mom was dying, had been for years, but she wasn’t dead yet. All we could do was wait. What we didn’t know was that our wait was about to end. She’d die just 24 hours after we left the bar to eat greasy bodega fries.
•
I’m overwhelmed with the how are you <3 text messages that flood my phone when people hear the news. Kindness can be so unbearable. I see one that starts with I know you weren’t close with her, but— and decide not to open it. I’d said it plenty of times before. I was an adult. I had no need for something as childish as parents.
But was that true, or just an easy way for me to explain away their absence in my life? What is closeness if not hours spent in the car, if not tears shed, if not the desire, no, the need, for me to be better than she was?
She made me inside of her. Was it possible to be any closer?
•
At my house in Austin, flowers showed up in a continuous rotation. The first arrangement was nice, but by the eighth I was enraged. I left them all on our coffee table until one of my roommates texted a photo in our group chat saying, These are starting to smell. Are you gonna throw them out?
I dumped the decay in our compost and smashed two of the vases in our carport, but immediately regretted it when I thought about glass getting stuck in my dog’s paws. It took an hour to meticulously clean up all the pieces. Sometimes grief feels like performance art that no one is watching.
•
My mom hated flowers. She’d say, “Why would I want something that will just die anyway?”
•
I exercise the morning of the funeral because I think my mom would’ve liked that.
I grew up thinking 100 pounds was too heavy, too much. I’d stand on a scale every night alongside my mom and sister and we’d record our numbers in a notebook. The game stopped being fun when I began to outweigh them at 12 years old.
•
In the year after she dies, I will gain 25 pounds and keep it on. It surprises me how natural it feels to wear the extra weight. People ascribe it to finding comfort while grieving, or perhaps my new relationship, but I think it’s something different—a release, binds loosening. Why did my mom want me so small?
•
My sister texts me a picture of herself in a black dress with rainbow polka dots. Do you think it’s okay to wear this? she asks.
Of course, I text back. This is our thing. Who’s gonna tell us it’s wrong? Maybe we can even wear red since that was her favorite color. And it’s a lucky Chinese color too.
No, that’s weird, Lynna says. And red looks bad on me. I tell her I’ll wear my pink pom pom earrings and a black pleated skirt with woven threads of silver so she won’t feel like she sticks out.
•
My mom’s aides are helping my dad get dressed for the funeral. I guess they’re my dad’s aides now that she’s gone. I wonder if they feel the grief thick in the house or if it’s overpowered by the stench of pee and vomit that’s deep within the upstairs carpets. Did they feel death when it came to take her? Do they know how soon it will come to take my dad?
•
I get ready in my childhood bathroom, caked with mildew from disuse. I draw a bath even though I’m sure sitting in this tub might make me dirtier. I find a bar of soap crusted to the bottom of a dish and wrestle it free.
I lay in the water, submerging my ears even though my mom always told me that would lead to an infection. I have always taken baths, something she assumed I would grow out of. This is a trait of mine that baffled many old roommates who would find me in the bathtub even at 6:30am before a work day.
A tarot reader once told me that baths mimic the womb space, making you feel held and comforted. Safe. Loved.
•
My dad doesn’t want to ride with me to the funeral home; he’d prefer to go with the aides. All three of us— my dad, my sister, and me— will arrive separately. Grieve separately.
The BMW is the only remaining car that hasn’t been impounded by the state after his countless DUIs. I find the keys in their old spot—on our dining room table in one of those weird catchall bowls that has somehow held keys, Halloween candy, throw up, and microwave popcorn over the last twenty years.
My mom’s wool Pendleton bag is still there. She hadn’t left the house for more than a walk around the block supported by her aide’s strong arms in over three years, but her purse sat there like she’d just returned from a quick errand.
All three of us had a version of that bag. My sister’s earth tones. Mine cool tones. My mom’s, some strange combination of the two. She was the mess of color we both came from.
•
“I never want you to have to do this for me,”she told me. I’m nine and we’re outside her parents’ house. “I don’t want you to see me like this. I don’t want you to take care of me. It’s too much. You should be able to go anywhere, do anything.”
Po Po had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years prior and we’d visit frequently to check in on her and Gung Gung. Her decline was sharp and fast and painful to watch.
My mom grabbed me by my wrists and stared deeply into my eyes. “Promise me something, Alex. Promise me you’ll kill me before I get like this.”
“I promise,” I heard myself say.
•
She asked my dad to kill her for the first time two years ago and every day after that until she couldn’t speak anymore.“There’s nothing I can do,” my dad said. “At least not without going to jail.” I wanted him to say that he’d risk it for her so I didn’t have to think about my own broken promise.
My mom was trapped in a prison of her own mind and the walls closed in on her more and more each day. Why didn’t we do more to set her free?
•
I hope I won’t suffer when my inevitable diagnosis comes. But I know I will, like her and Po Po and my paternal grandmother before me. This is the legacy of the women in my family— to lose our minds.
I feel the binds pull tighter and tighter, knowing I can’t break them. Knowing that everyone else who felt them tug on their skin before me is dead.
•
My parents were going to buy an apartment somewhere in Paris’ 6th arrondissement after I graduated college. That was their fantasy at least when they were still in love and in good health and life had so much possibility.
•
My dad wants to give the eulogy but doesn’t want to stand in front of the room with his walker. I try to arrange an armchair for him to sit in and he gets frustrated with me. It would be hard, I imagine, to go from being a VP at a big company with speaking engagements all over the world to this. When is the last time anyone has seen him? They don’t know what 19 years of alcoholism does to a body, a mind.
•
My sister meets us at the funeral home with E, her new boyfriend. They’d been dating for a year, but to me he’s still new because I haven’t met him yet. Once, we planned to meet for brunch, but he bailed 30 minutes before, texting my sister that he had a “tummy ache.” I think he’s afraid of me and I like that.
Now, I can tell he’s nervous when he shakes my hand. To be fair, it’s probably not easy to meet your girlfriend’s family for the first time at her mom’s funeral. But also, to be fair, I wish he hadn’t come at all.
•
People arrive slowly: old neighbors, Lynna’s childhood nanny, my friends, Lynna’s friends, a few Chinese people who I can never remember our relation to. This funeral is more for my dad than my mom. It’s pageantry, just for show. Hell is making small talk with strangers at your mother’s funeral. After 20 minutes of this, I go sit with my dad at the side of the room.
“Do you want to start your speech soon?” I ask him. I don’t know the schedule for these things. Shouldn’t someone say something? Did we make a program? Instead of going to the front of the room my dad quiets everyone from the couch. I’m trapped next to him and feel all the eyes in the room shift to us. He begins his speech and I know I can’t get up and leave him. My sister sits safely with E in the back of the room.
“Kathy died on February 18, 2018 at the age of 66 from complications from Lewy Body Dementia,” he begins.
We’re already doing it wrong. My mom would’ve hated everyone knowing her age, a fact she kept secret from me until I found a birth certificate in the basement. She didn’t trust me not to tell the other moms how much older she was than them.
“She loved New York City, her daughters, and a good sale.”New York City first, me and Lynna second. We deserve to be first, I think. She sacrificed so much for us.
“She loved to travel. When we’d explore a new city on foot, you’d have Kathy walking fast in the front, Lynna a few feet behind her trying her best to keep up, and then me dragging Alex a block back trying not to lose them.” People laugh at this, and I do too. I’ve always been my family’s comedic relief. I look at my sister and am surprised to see her sobbing. Just two days ago, she’d told me she had no good memories of our mom. E gets her a tissue and I want to rip it from his hands.
My dad talks about meeting mom at work. How she gave him his first job in the city at Manufacturers Hanover, a now defunct bank. They traveled Europe together and dated for five years before getting married. If they weren’t my own parents, it would strike me as cool that they didn’t rush into anything while both approaching 40 in the 80s. But then, they took their time and they still got it wrong.
My dad ends his speech by asking for others to share their own memories of my mom. I grimace knowing no one will say anything. But I’m wrong. My mom’s cousin speaks up. “I loved Kathy’s cookies,” she says with a laugh. “So yummy.” That’s all she says. I look at my sister and we inappropriately burst out laughing.
We calm down and our old neighbor, who I’m shocked to see is still alive, starts asking my dad questions about banking in the 90s. When did Manufacturers Hanover close? Didn’t Kathy work at Goldman? And when did you move to Chase? And when did Chase become JP Morgan Chase? Oh god, now they’re talking 9/11. I know we all want to crawl out of our skin except for those who are old and unaware or perhaps those with an interest in finance.
The insufferable conversation goes on for at least five minutes during which I continuously make eye contact with my sister, silently begging her to shut it down. E must be blocking our telepathy because she does nothing. I force myself to stand up and thank everyone for coming, let people know there’s a memory book to sign (Lynna’s idea. No one will write anything) and then thank them again because I don’t know how else to end things.
•
When she died, my dad asked if Lynna and I wanted to give the eulogy. We both said no. I wanted to, but knew I couldn’t. How could you encapsulate someone so beautiful, smart, complicated, neurotic, and sad into a few paragraphs? I couldn’t boil her down to shopping, fast walking, and cookies. No, I wouldn’t.
•
I thought of your mom today. Kat, an old friend, texts. I signed up for this expensive pottery class. I almost didn’t but then I remembered what your mom always said– you can never waste money on learning something. I clutch my phone and close my eyes. I sometimes forget she mattered to anyone else but me.
•
After the funeral, Lynna and I look through our mom’s closet and I notice a small dry-cleaning bag. Curious, I open it and find a collection of handmade, crocheted child-size sweaters with happy patterns of clouds and ducks and frogs and trees. A note is tucked on the hanger in my mom’s almost illegible handwriting– save for grandchildren.
•
The ancient Chinese believe the body is a gift from one’s ancestors. You must protect it and treat it well. The greatest punishment in ancient China was to be beheaded because it meant your body would be damaged beyond repair. No longer whole. You must keep your body whole if you wish to be reunited with your ancestors in death.
I suppose I am not whole by design. Half Chinese. Half White. I don’t think I believe in an afterlife. But sometimes I think— how will I ever find her? Are we not bound together?
Without each other, can we ever be whole again?
•
I tell my dad it’s time for me to go back to Austin. For the first time since I was a child, I feel sad to leave him. We don’t hug goodbye; I can’t remember the last time we did that. Instead, he waves me over to his desk drawer to take a stack of $20s. I protest, and then give in when I see he won’t relent.
I leave him alone in our big house, happy that the aides will stay on, checking on him twice a day. I feel the money, heavy in my coat pocket, and can’t help but feel like my dad just paid me to come watch my mom die.
•
Sometimes in the year after her death, when I’m feeling extra delusional, I’ll wonder if my mom sent me the guy from the dating app. A boyfriend to ease the pain of her absence. But of course, if she could’ve sent me something, she wouldn’t send a man. She would send an all-expenses paid vacation to Europe, a successful business venture, maybe a nice jade necklace, or a Marimekko dress.
•
On the escalator down to baggage claim at the Austin airport, I see a mother holding a sign that says, “WELCOME HOME, KELSEY!” She is shaking it wildly above her head. A girl in front of me, Kelsey, I assume, starts waving her hands and jumping up and down. I watch her run down the escalator and into her mother’s arms. I wait until I get into my car and then I start to cry. I feel stupid for it. My mom was never that type to run towards me and embrace me. That could have never been us. But then I think, maybe it could’ve been.
•
Later that year, I will go to San Francisco to get a soul tattoo from a witchy, white woman with soft pink hair. We will meditate together as she designs my tattoo. She’ll show me the design– a rose with deep roots surrounded by cedar, mugwort, and poppy. She’ll say that there is a lot of emotional damage and darkness being held in my womb space. The flowers are the plant medicines I need to cure it. She’ll stab the flower essences mixed with ink into my veins for three hours. Heal me. Heal me. Heal me.
I think about how she’ll look at me and immediately see a giant gaping hole where my womb should be. A hole that wasn’t created by my mother, or even her mother, but maybe a woman generations back: whoever the woman in my family was who decided that to love greatly was a sign of weakness.
•
I don’t think my mom would’ve wanted a funeral. I imagine she would’ve preferred to go in silence with no big performance for those who didn’t matter to her in the end. She would’ve wanted me and my sister to remember her from before she got sick— her good, her bad, her complicated.
She’d want us to remember her as the woman who didn’t leave her office in the city for over 48 hours because of a deadline. Her eyes dried out so much from the lack of sleep that her glass contacts affixed to her eyeballs and needed to be surgically removed. She’d want us to remember the flat tire she got when she was nine months pregnant with Lynna and how she pulled over on the highway to change it by herself. She’d remind us that she used to design her own clothes, of the importance of our Chinese culture, and how much she loved her own mother.
I think she would have wanted us to know that she was hard on us because she so badly wanted us to be capable and independent when she was gone. Maybe she’d even tell us that we were everything she’d hoped for.
“I have sweetness too, just underneath thicker rinds.” (131)
In the acknowledgements for her short story collection BLISS MONTAGE, author Ling Ma cites film critic Jeanine Basinger as coining the book’s title term. Basinger’s 1993 work A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 details a phenomenon in film of a woman’s briefly allowed period of happiness before the movement of the plot inevitably invites heartbreak. The audience, Basinger argues, has only a passive engagement in women’s joy, and the “Happy Interlude” or “Bliss Montage” serves only as a prelude to her far more interesting trauma.
The Bliss Montage is a flattening technique, a refusal to recognize a fulfilled woman as complex and whole but to instead portray her as an object upon which the world must inevitably shape a recognizable narrative. But Ma’s characters continually break from their assigned roles and emerge raw. In “Los Angeles,” a woman lives in a sprawling house with her stock Husband and one hundred ex-boyfriends, including an abuser. She luxuriates in her mansion and her adoring suitors while navigating the complexities of victimhood: How does one own their narrative without being reduced to it? In “G,” an Asian-American woman uses an invisibility drug to ease the pressures of moving through her world in a non-white body. “I have done so much G that my adult sense of self formed in the complete absence of my reflection,” the narrator says. “For a person like me, that’s a certain kind of freedom.” (50)
The women in Ma’s stories are constantly changing, shifting and adapting to their world. Her first novel, SEVERANCE (2018), told the almost eerily prescient story of a woman continuing to work in a country shut down by a pandemic. The book was praised by author Jia Tolentino, who called it “the best work of fiction I’ve read yet about the millennial condition—the alienation and cruelty that come with being a functioning person under advanced global capitalism”. BLISS MONTAGE has the same grip on the surreal millennial experience: as the metanarratives Ma’s characters have been told about the world and their place in it fail, they plunge into an adulthood that appears similar in theory but far different in practice to the one they prepared for. In “Returning,” a woman visits her husband’s home country for the first time to experience a local festival together. When he slips away from her in the airport, she is forced to encounter the strangeness of his hometown alone and learns that the festival they have come to attend involves people burying themselves alive overnight in hopes that they wake up healed—if they wake up at all. “Another self,” the narrator reflects, “was needed to move into the future.” (105)
A metamorphosis, Ma seems to suggest, may be the only way to move forward on one’s own terms. In “Office Hours,” a young film professor takes her old mentor’s office only to discover a hole in the wall leading to a world frozen in time. As she navigates the politics of an academic career for which she fought tooth and nail, she teaches her class on The Disappearing Woman, noting that unlike in the films she shows, she cannot simply pick up and move to a new world that meets her expectations. After watching Ghost World, her students agree: “Enid gets to disappear, but most of us can’t do that. Most of us are like Rebecca: we’re critical of the world but we still have to live in it.” (155) Reflecting at the end of his career, her mentor says the same: “The sanest way forward—you have to split yourself up, like an earthworm,” he tells her. (142)
Ma’s women are both anxious and joyful, selfish and caring, unfeeling and full of wonder. They are the before and after of the Happy Interlude we never see onscreen. BLISS MONTAGE asks: How do we break free of the narratives placed on us? We split. We refuse to stagnate. We bury ourselves and regrow into something new.
BLISS MONTAGE can be purchased from Macmillan for $26.00.
David E. Yee is an Asian American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. In 2017, he won the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, judged by Colm Tóibín, as well as the Press 53 Flash Contest judged by Jeffrey Condran. He is based in Columbus, OH, where he works as a bartender, and is a graduate of OSU’s MFA program. He spoke with our Associate Reviews & Interviews Editor, Nikki Barnhart, about his first collection of stories, Mongolian Horse, published this summer with Black Lawrence Press.
There’s so much musicality in this collection—references from the Beach Boys, to the Smashing Pumpkins, to the McDonald’s jingle are tangled into the stories, but there’s also music in the sheer language itself, the rhythmic prose throughout. I’m curious about your personal relationship to music—are you yourself a musician, past or present? How much does listening to music play a part in your inspiration or process?
Music was my introduction to art. I grew up in orchestra, transitioned into bands as a teen, played in jazz bands in college. I associate a lot of wonder and pain with music. Also, I try to focus on all five senses when writing, and noise is so commonly overlooked. Songs carry intrinsic weight when coupled with a moment in your life. I like recreating that in a narrative. I am also someone that doesn’t write in a vacuum. I prefer a busy room which I’m blotting out with music. Certain albums or artists help recreate a mood for me, and when I’m working on a particular piece, I’ll only listen to those works to stay locked in that mode.
Besides music, what would you say are some of your other influences? Did any specific writers or works help you form your own voice, or are there any that you feel in conversation with?
Stylistically, my biggest influences are Stuart Dybek, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer. There is a beautiful rhythm to their prose. Dybek and Packer—this collection is definitely informed by their style of short story. I could list a hundred short story writers I admire, but these two are the voices in literature who I feel I strive to be nearer to. I don’t know if there is a writer I worship on a line-by-line level as much as Toni Morrison. I can attribute learning how to tame the more unwieldy parts of working in first-person to reading Kazuo Ishiguro.
Most of the stories in Mongolian Horse take place in Maryland, where you’re from—a Maryland that feels at once sharp and visceral, but also hazy and distant. They feel almost nostalgic, but I hesitate to call them that because they seem to occupy that narrow space of wistful recollection without necessarily a desire for return. How did writing these stories affect your relationship with Maryland as a place both in the world, and in your mind and memory?
Maryland is a large part of who I am, even though I didn’t realize that until I moved to Columbus. I didn’t find value in knowing how to navigate a place without a map until that ability was no longer viable because of my relocation. Every part of Maryland has a memory attached to it. It’s such a compact place, and I could drive around and be reminded of my entire adult life constantly. Leaving felt like closing a chapter, and having a bit of finality made it easier to write toward those memories.
When you’re writing a story, what usually comes first—the imagery, the voice, or the language? Each of these elements are equally prominent in every one of these stories.
To be honest, it’s a bit of a dubious process. Typically there’s an overarching idea that brings me to the page, but I’m always hesitant to write an “idea story” so I try and smash it into a character/circumstance that is also somewhere else in my mind. Sometimes I’ll write from an individual line until it fails or finds ground. Or I’ll have a circumstance and I’ll write toward it. Sometimes the whole thing is amorphous and I have to hack away at it to make it work. Sometimes the only changes I make are on a line level. I try not to overanalyze myself. I want the work to be fun.
In your acknowledgements you say, “I was never a person who was in love with writing. I wrote because I felt trapped, wanting to create but having no outlet.” Can you speak a bit more about that and your journey to becoming a writer?
I’ve always loved stories. I grew up with books. It was one of my favorite ways to pass time in a part of my life when I had very little. But I didn’t start writing with any volume until my band broke up. I sacrificed a lot of relationships for music. I worked in an office and four days a week after work, I’d go straight to band practice, play shows on the weekend, then eat/sleep/repeat. When my band ended, I was just working in an office 45 hours a week with a bunch of very fragile friendships. I didn’t have a creative outlet, and writing felt like a safe way to be imaginative without having to rely on others. And I needed something else to pour myself into. I was already getting ready to go back to college and decided to go for English because of that. But I’m not someone who wanted to be a writer in that modern sense of devoting every minute to the craft. Writing has been a way for me to translate and understand my life. Those years of grad school when it was all-consuming really changed my relationship with it, but the education I received was worth it. I think I was also feeling some kind of woe and longing when I wrote those acknowledgements. Who knows.
Food is another common link in this collection, from fast-food joints, to bakery jobs. Was this a conscious motif?
I focus a lot on sensory details and mundanities in my work. I find a lot of very plain aspects of living to be quite meaningful. Because of that, my stories very rarely have too much wonder or strangeness forced into the world of the character. Especially in this collection with the motifs being small moments in a character’s life that had more meaning than they realized—many of the plot aspects of the story are centered in what would otherwise be very average parts of a routine. We eat a lot.
Can you talk about the process of this particular group of stories coming together as a collection? When did you start to see a connection? Did you write any stories in response to the patterns you noticed yourself working in? What do you see as the ligaments of this collection?
These stories are the bulk of my work from 2012-2017. I found a voice that I set as a boundary and tried to explore different avenues of it. I wasn’t really working on them to be a collection, but was enjoying exploring this particular style. Hung Do’s Kung Fu was the first piece. It was the first time I allowed myself to write an Asian American character which later became another repeated theme. That story feels very close and raw in a way that rereading makes me squirm a little. Donut Man was the last piece I wrote here, and there is a lot more armor being built around the perspective. There are definitely similar shapes to many of these stories with varied breadth being used to accomplish the narrative. My focus became how the shape of these stories can inform the truth of the character.
Can you tell us how “Mongolian Horse,” the last story in the collection, ended up being its title? How do you feel it encapsulates the rest of the works within?
Because I write primarily in first person, many of these stories are in the format of a narrator worrying a memory. The work of the story is the digestion of this memory by the character and how it helps them arrive at a moment of change and truth. This is typically a bit underplayed in some of these narratives, but in Mongolian Horse it is the exact purpose of the character. It’s the story in the collection where the theme and the voice really are the most paralleled. The image of the Mongolian horse—a near-forgotten animal that has great importance—lines up thematically with the rest of the stories. I was very inspired by ZZ Packer on this. The line that her collection is named after (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere) reads so nonchalant but has an immense amount of gravity for the entire book.
In her first memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras performs a delicate balancing act of history, memory, and myth. The Man Who Could Move Clouds begins with an echo. On a winter day in Chicago, a biking Ingrid crashes into a car door and suffers from temporary amnesia in the aftermath. The accident is eerily similar to one decades before, when her mother lost her memories after tumbling down a well in Ocaña, Colombia. When her mother’s memory returned, she also gained the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices. Their family rejoiced and feared her new gifts, recognizing them as the same talents possessed by her father Nono—a curandero who could heal the ailing, divine futures, and move clouds.
After her own accident, Ingrid wanders back home and tells no one of her forgetting, privately enjoying the peace her amnesia grants her: “…it wasn’t the terrible thing she implied, but actually the best thing that had happened to me. I was boundlessly rich in loss.” She pantomimes knowledge of her life while her memory slowly returns. But, unlike her mother, she recovers without any notable powers to speak of. Instead, five years after she’s regained the stories of her own life and her family’s, she’s struck by the urge to write them all down.
Her mother becomes furious at the idea of revealing the secrets of their gifts. In an argument, she threatens to never speak to Ingrid again if she chooses to share them with the world. That night, Ingrid goes to bed with the hand-mirror her mother once used to heal her own amnesia beneath her pillow. Whether by its magic or not, she sees Nono in a dream. “I fear he is there to tell me he doesn’t want his story told, just as Mami has done; instead, he takes my hand, and immediately we are transported to Bucaramanga, Colombia… we are in the back garden and he is pointing down the hill to a glittering river, and I hear him clearly as he says, This is the scene.”
Portals abound across the pages. Her mother’s well serves as a passage into the space between reality and un-reality. Mirrors become paths tread by both Ingrid and her mother to return to their memoried selves. Dreams are accepted as a “burrow of the great beyond.” So when Ingrid wakes and finds that her family’s reported similar dreams of Nono requesting to be disinterred, it is only logical for them to take up the quest to share their story, and return to Colombia to lay Nono to rest once more.
In the same way, Ingrid the author acts as our portal to a legacy that extends far beyond her own. Readers are carried across time to the colonial histories of Colombia, its myths, and the spaces where it is difficult to distinguish the two. The reader will find that these distinctions hardly matter. In the Contreras family, all stories begin by asserting their truth: “Other people’s stories began, Once upon a time. Mami’s began, Once, in real life.” Ingrid takes up the mantle of this tradition, asserting early on, “Not once upon a time, but once in a specific time, in a real place…” One might be forgiven for reading this as a request to give her the benefit of the doubt as she shares tales rife with curses, witches, and ghosts. This is a work of nonfiction, after all. But in reading on, it becomes clear that Ingrid is not presenting us with a plea, but a declaration.
It would be a flattening to place The Man Who Could Move Clouds in the realm of magical realism. The memoir is not a spectacle of the fantastic so much as it is a call for the reader to reconsider and expand their notions of reality, to recognize the multitude of fictions we tell ourselves and deem to be real.
In a lesson on divination, Mami tells a young Ingrid, “You have to tell a story that will allow the client to experience the truth without your ever having to name it.” Through this lens, readers will become skeptical of Ingrid’s claim that she didn’t inherit her family’s gifts. With sweeping research and tender lyricism, Ingrid masterfully succeeds in divining a story that sits at the edges of reality, luxuriating in its truth whether you accept it or not.
The Man Who Could Move Clouds can be purchased from Penguin Random House for $30.00.
Sumita Chakraborty’s debut poetry collection, Arrow, is a sprawling expanse of loss. Centering the story of her sister Priya, Arrow is both a testament and letter to her sibling —who died at age 24—as well as a record of the poet’s large and undefinable grief.
The collection is richly inhabited by figures from mythology: a vast array of flora, fauna, and strange objects—orchids, hurricane plants; bees, sarcophagi; fish, bleach; rose bushes; tulips, irises, stags. They permeate the imagined landscape of the poems. The subject of death, ever-present, raw, and real, is encased within fables and stories so the speaker can interact with the painful reality of mourning through a prism of make-believe. Many laments — direct references to death and violence, particularly against women in both existing myth and invented story — spill out with singular focus, as if the poet cannot avoid thinking and speaking about them. Hands, tongues, heads of people and objects are cut off: blood, asphyxiation, shrieking, sacrifice. Although there are attempts at resurrection and renewal, Arrow does not take the easy way out by offering the clarity of healing or time—even at the end, “we arrow from times of grief into—well, into more such times” (75). Sections end with a sense of arriving, emotionally, right back where we started.
“Dear, Beloved,” by far the densest poem, is composed of one continuous stanza of long lines, a lyrical and painful crux of the book. The worldbuilding brims with energy and expands outwards, even as it never veers from the central theme of death. It forms a microcosm of the book as a whole: pain, guilt, anger, and grief’s circular, non-linear shape. It opens with hypothesis: “It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam / would fall on me” (22) and describes a mountainous landscape envisioned by the speaker, where most of the poem takes place. Unlike the real world, here, her sister is present: a living and breathing character in a bleak fairy tale setting. Tied to this world, we see the speaker in deep turmoil: imagining the self as “some fantastical beast with eyes / lining the inside of my body (26),” confessing desires to die in multitudinous ways, only to be amended; “I did not want to die, but I wanted to want death” (26). The speaker’s grief appears in many ways: complicated by guilt, helplessness, inevitability.
This struggle is especially heartbreaking considering the admission towards the end of the poem that “I am lying to you” (32). Tension and tone quickly ramp up: “It was a sky in which every child of every star, / living or dead, could be heard humming” (28). These images—sky, child, humming, living versus dead— are heightened and strengthened through a repetition of loose, gauzy imagery. The ending’s rich language pulls everything together, collecting and funneling into one bottlenecked explosion — a space where she and her sister exist together.
Chakraborty’s work is a study in repetition, in returning. Every recurring thread—ash, singing, hum, lullaby, vegetation, deer, dear, doe, children— is further deepened through layers of meaning, contradiction, and re-definition. Even its title, “Dear, Beloved,” plays on these different associations — and on the meanings of her name: Priya.
At times throughout the collection, the speaker addresses us as readers — but we sense that, despite this, she speaks only to her sister. Readers, along with other secondary characters in Arrow, are just overhearing. Chakraborty uses images that are terrifying and brutal (incision, ash) yet delicate and moving (moths, stars); precise in their meaning, yet, like most moments of intense human emotion, containing a multitude of conflicts and contradictions. Opposite feelings coexist, fighting each other for space in excruciating relentlessness. “Yes, there is much to love about the body. / Too, there is much to hate” (24). We encounter such immense detail that we find ourselves reading everything many times, carefully, to see the whole multi-prismed painting.
Arrow deals with all these particulars of emotional turmoil even as its centering pull is one of grief. It’s not for us to know the origin of every struggle — for them to be named — but we witness the narrator’s pain, both emotional and physical: senses that cannot be separated from each other. “Sister, could I find you on that horse mountain? I wonder / if I want to. Have I made this world?” (27). Moments like this frank confession remain shrouded; we’ll never know the entirety of what the speaker feels. Perhaps the speaker does not either. Neither purely narrative nor image, and never resolving through its very nature what cannot be resolved, Arrow requires us to hold both truths: there is some meaning to grieving, and there is nothing to be gained from it. The poems in Arrow are a mastery in re-definition – they are kaleidoscopic. The refrains presented in this collection leave their tracks all over the speaker’s mindscape, creating a world of tragedy, memory, danger — and some small amount of comfort.
K-Ming Chang’s stories vibrate with energy, lyricism, and the hysteria that comes from the crushing weight of history. As a collection of stories, Gods of Want spans generations—orbiting relationships between women, their bodies, their ancestors, and their wild environments. There is an aura of mythic simultaneity in the work as deceased ancestors, immigration trauma, environmental anxiety, and queer relationships collapse into poignant, uncanny narratives. Chang’s writing style is musical, heady, fabulist, and straddles the line between grotesque and lovely.
As a book, Gods of Want is rich with hauntings. Its stories measure quantities by negative space and absence: what is lost, forgotten, dead—or deadish—as ghosts weave in and out of the pages. Whether it is the woman followed by a legion of spectral relatives in “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” the aunt swaddling a potato instead of a baby in “Auntland,” the “dark jelly” inside the bellies of shot raccoons in “Dykes,” or the ghostly absence of a cousin in “Anchor,” Chang’s characters experience a full spectrum of griefs and ghosts. In response to this hauntedness, the tales become obsessed with cataloging, with lists ranging from aunts and cousins to widows, foods for the dead, and, most importantly, names. But even these names are slippery with negative space, contradiction, and layers of heritage. The story “Eating Pussy” begins: “Her name was Pussy, but the rumor was she didn’t have one.” These anxiety-inducing inventories are frantic in their attempts to bear witness to what is important before it is lost—even to memory. A conversation in “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” further expounds on the project of the stories: “We need an exterminator, my wife said, but all the ones I called were men who said they didn’t deal with what was already dead.” Men might not be willing to treat with the expired, but that is exactly what Chang’s stories do, placing a finger on the vivid intersections of loss, trauma, queerness, feminism, and the Asian American experience. As a character in “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” explains, “You can’t take a picture of an earthquake…You can only take a picture of the aftermath.”
Threading the tales together is a powerful through-line of gender and queerness as Chang’s feminine protagonists must wrestle with the expectations, duties, and dangers of their families and world. In “Xífù” a woman hounded by her mother-in-law tells her daughter:
That’s the only requirement I have: Don’t marry a man with an origin. Set his family on fire. But she tells me it’s okay, that she’ll marry no one’s son because she’s a lesbian, and I’m so jealous I could kick her in front of a car, the way I once did to the neighbor’s pit bull when it shat maggots on my feet.
The portrayal of cyclical inheritance is dynamic and bracing: in “Auntland” the narrator tells off an aunt for kissing another woman at Costco, but as an adult, finds herself in the same situation, saying “I had an aunt who saw me kiss a girl in the booth of a Burger King and said, I knew it. I knew you were supposed to be born a son.”
As a whole, Gods of Want is a glitteringly surreal collection that flirts with genres like magical realism, humor, and horror but defies the very categorization it attempts—some things can’t be measured, only experienced. Within the book, the lines between lyric essay and fiction blur with repetition and musical language, rewarding intuitive readers who allow the words to wash over them. In a 2021 Editors Panel, Chang told me, “I invented my own queer ancestors so I wouldn’t feel as alone.” Gods of Want is a culmination of that inventiveness—a full community of voices infused with their own complexities, absurdities, and desire.
Quotes from advance uncorrected proofs. Official publication: July 12, 2022 from Penguin Books.
April 19, 2022 | Grace Tessier Culhane | interview
Sebastian Castillo, a Philadelphia-based fiction writer, teaches creative writing at Temple University and at the University of Pennsylvania. His short story “The Cigarette Painter,” was the runner-up of BOMB’s 2021 Fiction Contest and appeared in that magazine’s winter 2022 issue. His second book, Not I, was published by Word West in 2020. Castillo spoke with me over the phone about his recent publications as well as his work in progress. The following interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Grace Tessier Culhane: One thing I’m noticing about Not I is how much is happening off the page. You’re trusting the reader with a lot of negative space. What led you to make that decision? What’s changed about your expectations for the reader [since publishing 49 Venezuelan Novels in 2017]? Or has anything changed?
Sebastian Castillo: I’m not so sure, because a part of me in the moment of composition only thinks of myself as the reader. I don’t ever conceptualize a phantom future reader, so a lot of those questions fall away or seem less pertinent. I’m just trying to make a compelling experience for myself, both as a writer and a reader.
With that project, and that book in particular, I was thinking about the limitations of what the speaker could say. I was thinking about what they weren’t going to say about themself, or the supposed self, which was suggested with all these first-person declarations. But sometimes I make what the speaker says contradictory. I sometimes suggest a narrative attitude that is then interrupted by non sequitur. So there’s a kind of “there and not there” quality.
GTC: I was struck by its algorithmic quality, the way the statements lull you into a false sense of randomness only to mess with that. I was wondering if you could talk about the work’s relationship to technology, if there is a relationship.
SC: I don’t think there is. But I would say that in terms of questions regarding the algorithm and thinking about procedure and the work, I had the structure first. Before I even wrote a word, I already knew what the book was going to be like. When I was doing research, I looked up, “What does somebody study when they’re trying to learn English grammar, whether it’s for a high school class or a second language?”
I kept seeing this list of tenses in the order that it’s presented in the book. I wrote the book linearly from the simple present to future perfect continuous.
Then as I was editing it, I kept thinking, “What’s the actual experience of going through all these tenses?” A lot of the time in the early part of the book, I wanted to have a quotidian, almost universal quality to all these statements. And then as the book proceeded, I wanted to push against what someone would naturally say in the English language. In terms of writing it, the first draft came out quickly, and then it was really the editing that took most of the time.
GTC: I experienced it as a story. Were readers meant to take that away from it?
SC: Yeah, I wanted it to have a kind of momentum in that sense. I remember when I first talked about it with a friend, he called it a novel, which I thought was hilarious because I didn’t think of it as a novel at all—it’s so short. But I was pleased by that characterization because, especially in the last section of the book, I wanted to gesture at and at the same time push away closure. But that gesture is there. I didn’t want it to be totally anti-climax. I did want to feel like there was a rhythm or a pressure that was building.
GTC: I’m looking at the end now. [You write], “I have been saying pithy aphorisms for the sake of genius.” Is that the climax?
SC: Yeah, I wanted this narrator to be both pitiable, someone you can have sympathy for, but also kind of ridiculous and bathetic. I’m looking at the last page: “I will have been feeling like it didn’t come out right / I will have been trying despite this / I will have been leaving the book on your desk.” This feeling that as much as all of these systems of language allow one to communicate a self, there’s still this kind of lack, or this incompleteness, of not getting it quite right. Which is one of the reasons each tense is repeated twice. I wanted there to be the suggestion of, “I’m gonna say it once and get it right, but no I didn’t, so now I have to say it again.”
In the book there’s an epigraph by Ron Padgett quoting Gertrude Stein. Someone asked her, “Why do you always repeat words?” And she said, “Well, you say something you like, so you say it again.” What I found extremely funny was that despite my best efforts—I even had a friend help me—I couldn’t find the Gertrude Stein quote. Either he made it up or misremembered. I found that really satisfying.
GTC: Can we talk about “The Cigarette Painter”? I was thinking about all the artists that come up throughout the story, and this idea of the randomness of violence and the randomness of despair. I have a broad question, which is, what do you think art’s role is in creating or imposing a kind of meaning on that randomness?
SC: There’s an ability in narrative — and maybe this is one of its false comforts — to create an arc that to some degree systematizes or explains those modes of violence so that they can be given a category and therefore understood. I think at the same time, there’s the ability to demonstrate how unsatisfying that is. Things that are violent in that nature do just happen without a reason, without an explanation, without even really any consequences whatsoever.
[“The Cigarette Painter”] culminates in this stranger entering the house, which coincides with the intervention that’s happening for the father character. [The intervention] is supposed to be this revelatory thing that’s happening. Then it’s punctuated by a random act of violence, and it’s over with. Nothing comes of it. Nothing is satisfied. And all you really have is the memory of it happening.
GTC: Do you want to talk about your process a little bit? Where do you start with a piece?
SC: The thing I’m doing now, a novella—I did a lot of outlining in terms of the story itself. There’s a bit of an Oulipo-style constraint. I’ve done constraints before, but in terms of story planning, I’ve never done anything like what I’ve done with it. I usually just go from a rhythm, with a feel for where the story might end up. I wanted to do something a little more schematic or planned.
I’m on the third draft now. My hope is to finish it soon. But that’s something I like about writing. I can create these conditions for every new thing. Especially with longer, book-length projects, I like to create a different way of tackling it that makes it interesting.
GTC: It feels like a lot of your previous work is defined by a kind of restriction or a constraint, and it sounds like you’re moving away from that with your novella. Is that a permanent shift? Or just the mood you’re in?
SC: Well actually there is a constraint in this book! It’s written in small chapters, and with every chapter there’s a system in how many characters the narrator can talk to per chapter.
I’ve always been drawn to the Oulipo writers. Everything they did, even when they wrote about very serious things, feels animated by a sense of mischief. There’s this real spirit of fun and mischief in their books. It’s a way of getting at a project, rather than just sitting down and saying, “I want to write about loneliness.” I don’t have much to say about loneliness, but I could probably make some weird game out of a book.
GTC: Are you reading anything good right now?
SC: I’ve been reading more plays in the last few months than I ever usually do. I’ve been reading everything from classical dramas like [Heinrich von] Kleist and [Georg] Büchner to more contemporary things, Caryl Churchill and some of Thomas Bernhard’s plays, and — I’m not sure this even counts — the scripts from Seinfeld. The second half of the novella I’m writing is written like a play, and I wanted to immerse myself in some of that writing. I was interested in how you get things moving beyond expository writing, where it’s really relying on simple movement and dialogue. I just really wanted to get into that energy.
GTC: I’m excited to read it. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk.
SC: Thank you! Thanks so much for reading my work. It was a pleasure.
“This is the era of building/ and taking apart, our landscapes/ and skylines changing, shaken/ as the tectonics of the moon…/ This isn’t hyperbole–/ we’re terrified of entropy, of the world/ as it once was. This is the era of discontent/ where imagination’s gone mad” – Brianna Noll, “Aesthetics for Toxic Times”
Brianna Noll’s second collection of poems, The Era of Discontent, is laden with both the frustrated and hopeful ruminations of a society in crisis.Written and published during the Covid-19 pandemic, the collection is a rallying cry for those disillusioned by the promises of modernity — and a call to remember humanity’s roots as we rebuild.
Noll’s work is enigmatic– deliciously rich in its intricacies, it requires careful contemplation from the reader. She masterfully weaves a vast array of muses into the collection’s fabric, blowing the dust off of forgotten artifacts, individuals, and legends. Noll’s prose emboldens us with a sense of urgency and wonder as we scour the internet for additional context. In “How to Give Birth to a Rabbit (after Mary Toft, 1726)”, Noll approaches the universal, heart-wrenching grief of a miscarriage via the story of Mary Toft, who infamously convinced several 18th-century doctors she’d given birth to a rabbit following the loss of her pregnancy. It was later revealed to be a hoax, and Toft became the subject of much scrutiny.
“This makes you a monster,/ of course” Noll writes. “Tread lightly./ No one will think about/ your miscarriages, your/ empty salt cellars and/ candles re-formed from/ their drippings, which alone/ mean little but add up to/ a fervent kind of desperation.”
It’s in her compassionate treatment of stories like Toft’s that Noll shines. She mixes current events and cultural oddities to evince ideals that transcend space, time, history, and belief—placing her squarely in conversation with something more overtly cosmic.
Still, these detours don’t detract from the collection’s purposeful and timely narrative arc. The collection is broken into three untitled sections artfully structured by Noll to play off of each other. In the opening pages, Noll cheekily offers her readers insight into her central line of inquiry. “Epistemological Snapshot” finds Noll rebelling against the assumed, unquestioned truths of our existence — comparing them to a ruler in both measurement and rigidity. Noll implores her readers not to become complacent and to remain curious, writing, “You know you cannot know what actually exists–/ you’re just tired of the same old stories.”
After setting up her epistemology, Noll peppers the first section with sharp criticism and warnings. In “Isolationism,” we find a rare moment where Noll uses the first-person to reflect. She laments, “But I worry we’ve otherwise become/ strangers in our own worlds, / and isolated in turn. What do we hold/ on to when the world around us/ fades at twilight? There’s little and less/ to grasp when our eyes, so used/ to light, must acclimate to the dark.”
Positioned against the woes of the first section, Noll’s voice in the second is luminous, baptismal water. It offers solace, companionship, and encouragement. In “The Lake We Call Medusa,” Noll pleads:
“You must be/ a light-bearer,/ or the water will/ make a statue/ of you, calcify you/ from the outside in… You are/ your own instrument./ You must learn/ to cast light/ from your fingertips,/ your vocal chords,/ or better yet, your/ pores. The demon/ in this water cannot/ bear the dawn.”
The final section crescendos with a deep ache to reconnect with our humanity, exemplified in “The Collective Unconscious”:
“Some things have been with us/ a long time, like the words spit, / fire, and mother, or the color/ black. We are born with them/ on our tongues, as we are born/ knowing that haloed suns foretell/ rain. We share the land and / the language to speak it, but/ these commons grow fewer, / and we’ve stopped trusting/ in lore… Look backward:/ anyone who’s seen a lingonberry has named it for an animal: cowberry, foxberry, bearberry, cougarberry. / This is the legacy we leave—truths we feel in each other’s bones.”
The Era of Discontent provides readers with a welcomed respite from the loneliness, chaos, and confusion of our current cultural epoch: a gaze into our ancestral precedence, creating a concrete antithesis to the digital-age’s intangibility. In “Elegy for the Ground We Walk On,” Noll ends with a message of hope as she considers the changes necessary for a brighter future, writing, “This need not be a disaster:/ we could better cultivate our sight, / unclench our hands, and learn new/ words for a world we do not shape/ to our will, but shapes itself–/ more pliant than we’ve ever believed.”
The Era of Discontent is available from Elixir Press for $17.00.
