[REVIEW] The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

Two Dollar Radio, 2019

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X is a strangely poetic, heartfelt, dark, and wonderfully creepy exploration of womanhood dipped in surrealism and wrapped in a bizarre love story where physicality plays a central role. Packed with writing that inhabits the interstitial place between horror, literary fiction, science fiction, and dark fantasy, The Book of X is a unique narrative that pushes against the boundaries of the genres it draws from while simultaneously carving a new space for itself in contemporary fiction.

Cassie, like her mother before her, was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. Despite the deformity, she spends a somewhat normal childhood with her parents and older brother on the family meat farm. She usually stays home with mom while her father and brother go to the farm to rip chunks of flesh from the earth to sell at the market. When Cassie starts going to school, her life is sometimes disrupted by people who discover her physical abnormality. Cassie grows up and learns that finding a boyfriend and making friends are no easy tasks when your body is considered grotesque by most people. After surviving school, she leaves home and moves to the city where she finds a desk job. While living in the city, Cassie meets a few men, but it never works out. Meanwhile, the knot in her abdomen starts causing her pain and she begins to visit various doctors in hopes of finding a solution. The struggles with her body seem to be a physical manifestation of the struggles she is forced to face in her new life. Her boss is abusive, the city is depressing, and her family is far from perfect. The meat from the farm brings less money every day and her parents’ aging becomes obvious to her. Finally, her father dies and that sends her back home. Her return to the farm, an experimental surgery, and a new man who enters Cassie’s life under less than ideal circumstances force her to reconsider her life as she learns to enjoy imperfect love and comes to terms with her identity and body. 

Etter created a unique world in The Book of X. Most of the narrative deals with everyday events like going to school, going to work, financial woes, a rough mother, and coping with rejection and depression. On the other hand, the story is infused with surreal elements?a store that sells men, meat farming, strange medical procedures?that somehow make perfect sense within the context of the story. Reality and weirdness inhabit the same spaces effortlessly and without clashing against each other. The result is a novel with a gloomy, depressive core that is also somehow hauntingly beautiful and wildly entertaining in its strangeness.

While this novel is unique and Etter’s voice is entirely her own, there were passages that reminded me of a variety of works, all of which are among my favorites. For example, the combination of sadness and strangeness brought to mind the novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Also, the book features short chapters made up entirely of dark imagery, strange visions, and nightmares that haunt Cassie. These passages are strong enough to cause discomfort in the reader. Also, they reminded me of the bizarre sense of discomfort and fascination I always feel while watching Begotten, an American experimental film written, produced, edited, and directed by E. Elias Merhige that has no dialogue and is entirely made up of dark, gruesome, religious, disturbing imagery:  

“He opens the lid wider. More light creeps into the box, and I can see bodies slithering beneath the water, slick, scaled. Suddenly, a small face comes into view beneath the surface: two eyes, strange nose, a mouth.”

While the darkness that permeates The Book of X is one of its most powerful elements, the narrative is also infused with poetry that comes at the reader unexpectedly, kind of like finding a gem while looking for lost papers in a dumpster. That said, the poetry is also imbued with an unrelenting melancholy that crawls into your chest and refuses to let go, settling between your ribs and camping out for a few days: 

“My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.”

Etter is a talented storyteller and The Book of X is proof of that. This is a book that is many things at once. On the surface, it is a narrative that explores a disfigured woman’s life and how cruelty and adverse reactions to those who are different are at the core of humanity. However, just under the surface, it is a sorrowful story about a lonely woman whose biggest wishes are to achieve some degree of normalcy in a world that has shown her how ugly normal can be and a look at the ways in which our nature as social animals drives us to relentlessly pursue companionship even when doing so repeatedly leads to suffering and rejection.

“In the afternoon, I read a book on the couch. I can barely catch the sentences, I can only imagine Henry’s lips, the history of the entire world in a kiss various genealogies of flowers blooming each time our mouths touched, how first I smelled lilac, then rose, then hyacinth, wet from the garden.”

The Book of X shines because it brilliantly enters into multiple conversations with various genres and shows how writers can use elements from whichever genre they please while respecting the rules of none of them. Etter’s many conversations, and the way she creates something entirely new, effortlessly bridge the gap between bizarro fiction, surrealism, horror, literary fiction, and noir without ever adopting any of their limitations. Furthermore, all of it happens while she creates a delightful dark and brutally honest narrative that shows what it means to be a woman in the world and that explores the ways in which what we are is brutally and/or tenderly shaped by the way others perceive us. In a way, this is a book created to expand the canon of what can be considered feminist literature, but it is also a celebration of storytelling that proves making up your own rules is sometimes the best way to create something unique and memorable.   

GABINO IGLESIAS is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson

Future Tense Books, 2018

REVIEW BY KAIT HEACOCK

As the Pacific Northwest editor for Joyland—a magazine founded on the idea that fiction is an international movement supported by local communitiesI’m tasked with determining what makes PNW literature. Through Joyland, I had the pleasure of meeting Genevieve Hudson, author of the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). I’ve carried the book with me through two moves, and many of its stories have stuck with me like they are my own memories of childhood heartbreak, adult heartbreak, and all the inside jokes that help you laugh through those aforementioned heartbreaks.

When I consider Pacific Northwest literaturelooking beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the CascadesI search for the stylistic choices and thematic concerns that connect writers of this area. First, I must consider some of our historically iconic authors: Ken Kesey, Oregon’s merry prankster of hippie lit, and Tom Robbins, whose novels are like the West in book form, boundary-pushing pioneers of prose. What connects these authors is their playfulness, even in the face of tragic plots.

But to sum up who we are as writers that way doesn’t feel complete. There’s more, and it’s something sacred. Where our books may laugh in the face of God (Oregon and Washington are part of the “Unchurched Belt”), we do show absolute reverence for nature. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to enlightenment and Lidia Yuknavitch continues to find new ways to transform bodies into oceans. Many of us may lack religion, but we have no shortage of spirituality.

Our literature exists in this intersection between the irreverent and the reverent, and that’s where I found Genevieve Hudson. She came to me by way of the short story “Too Much is Never Enough” about a young protagonist with two best friends, a boy and a girl she loves in different ways, but who are confused by or disinterested in her love. The main character first meets Catherine Elizabeth, her inseparable childhood best friend she calls Lizard until the girl’s mom stumbles in on them while they are making their vaginas “fart.” It’s a funny scene of kids innocently discovering the absurdities of having a body, but it quickly darkens when the mom, confused by the tomboyish best friend, enrolls her daughter into ballet classes and effectively ends the friendship.

Next, the girl befriends Mason, a rabble-rousing boy introduced holding a homemade bomb. “Mason looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the devil so the two just about evened themselves out.” With Mason, she smokes stolen cigarettes and arm wrestles. As her body matures past childhood lines, she finds herself wanting to be him and to be loved by him. But instead, Mason finds Lizard, now Katie: “There was something they found in each other they could never find in me. I was not enough boy for Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I was something in between them.”

In between is where Genevieve’s stories live: characters in-between identities, settings in between Alabama and Amsterdam, a tone in between hilarious and heartbreaking. Her writing lives in a fluid space between a funny anecdote someone told you about their rural childhood and your third eye’s fever dream.

“Too Much is Never Enough” is not the only story of a tomboy figuring out how she fits in at the skatepark and punk shows where teens constellate in Pretend We Live Here. In “Scarecrow,” it’s Crow filming her best friend Jed and his fearless little brother on her camcorder while the boys perform daredevil stunts. In “Skatepark,” the protagonist is the only girl who skateboards besides the boys, and one of only two “12-year-olds who were brave enough to drop-in on the 12-foot half-pipe.” These stories are ripe with young girls who run from Sunday school dresses and refuse to stand on the sidelines while the boys have all the fun. Instead, they run towards their best friends’ older sisters, and they are wild with rebellion and first love. “She takes off at a slow pace for the show. It’s the kind of night with the day still in it…She stops and rips a sprig of lavender from a bush. She rubs it over her face and arms, shoves it inside her training bra.”

In many of these stories, the tomboy experiences a loss of innocence: a confusing sexual encounter she immediately regrets, following a reckless crush, watching her best friend sacrifice a piece of himself for the love of an estranged parent. These stories end with each character’s sudden jolt into adulthood. It’s as if the characters in these stories grow up and become the jaded, sarcastic, but occasionally still optimistic adults of the collection’s other stories.

The title of the collection is a line pulled from the story “Date Book,” in which the protagonist recounts a year with her long-distance girlfriend in short blurbs for each month. “By September you are another country again. The thought of you causes me to pick weeds, to put poems on the back of receipt paper. I get a package in the mail. It’s wrapped in a map of the place where you live. I fall in love with the smell of the cardboard, the image of your palms folding the top down. We meet on an island in the middle. I feed myself to you until we’re full.” The months are carefully and lovingly filled with acutely personal details, so that when January gets only the solemn entry “January,” the reader knows the end is near. “In February we go to Seattle to say goodbye. We accidentally rent a weekend apartment over a lesbian bar. We laugh all the way up the stairs.” It the end of their story, but they are pretending together. “We pretend we live here. We drink from cups. We unmake the bed.”

As the title of the collection, Pretend We Live Here sounds more like a command. It seems again to point to the in-between space this book evokes for me. There’s an implication of transience in the title, which is true for many people who come west. The Pacific Northwest, as the farthest point of the Contiguous United States, is often where people end up, particularly now as an influx of workers come here for tech jobs. Hudson is herself a transplant to Portland from Alabama, and her stories draw from all of her real-life settings. Whether the stories are set in a small town in Alabama or the queer art scene in Amsterdam, the characters within them are searching for something.

The first story in the book, “God Hospital,” and the last, “Boy Box,” both end with the protagonist being led away from a place. In each, the young girl follows an older girl, who acts as a guide, either away from or, potentially, to danger. The characters in the collection, children figuring out gender fluidity and first crushes or adults navigating complicated relationships, are seeking guides, but the guidesand Hudsonrarely take the reader to expected places.

Don’t try to pin Genevieve Hudson down. She will keep you guessing, and goddamn that’s something I adore in a writer. She has taken up the mantle of Robbins, Kesey and the other psychedelic, blue-collar poets of evergreens, mountain streams, and witty one-liners, and is queering the canon of Pacific Northwest literature.

KAIT HEACOCK is a writer and book publicist whose work centers the lives of women and non-binary folks, particularly those in the queer community. Her shorter work can be read in literary places from Joyland to The Millions, infrequent reviews for the Women’s Review of Books, and in her debut short story collection Siblings and Other Disappointments. Her work has received support from the Montez Press summer residency at Mathew Gallery and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel about what happens when women turn their anger outward.

[REVIEW] The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

W.W. Norton & Company, 2019

__

REVIEW BY JOHN KAZANJIAN

With The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste presents a complex story that examines the effects of colonialism on the national, social, and the individual level. Mengiste uses war’s ability to untether people from their ethos in order to provide her multi-dimensional critique. The rich themes are balanced by the pacing and the powerful prose. Mengiste compels the reader to turn pages eagerly in search of reprieves from the intensity—reprieves which rarely come.

The story’s protagonist, Hirute, is a young woman whose prized possession is her grandfather’s rifle. But when her fellow Ethiopians are called on to fight Mussolini’s fascist Italian Army, it is unceremoniously taken from her. It’s from this point that Mengiste begins her war story. However, it is one not limited to military conflict. Brutal violence and the struggle for sovereignty occurs on the battlefield, in the home, and within the body.

Hirute experiences the full horrific spectrum of colonization, both in terms of her country and her bodily autonomy. She serves Kidane and Aster, a couple who exercises full domain over her. After Kidane, an officer in the Ethiopian Army, takes her rifle, he brings her along on the battlefield and rapes her each chance that he gets. Aster, who dreams of fighting alongside the men, trains her to be a soldier, and when the opportunity is presented, Hirute also fights the Italians. The novel follows the unrelenting destruction of her identity until she redefines it as a soldier with only her country in mind.

Mengiste enhances the discussion of entitlement by presenting the second Italo-Ethiopian War in a dialectical fashion. She neither romanticizes nor fully condemns any character on each side of the conflict. Rather, she humanizes them and demonstrates their behaviors as results of predilections and pathologies. Every character is shown to suffer.

This is particularly apparent with the Italian photographer Ettore. He is serving his fascist army by documenting the war. When he joined the military, he sought to define himself with a sense of honor. But he has quickly become disillusioned from snapping the shutter before Ethiopians who are lynched or thrown off of the cliff by the prison camp. Moreover, he is Jewish and anticipates the betrayal of his fascist country. Ettore is the eye that witnesses the truth behind the propaganda of the photographs that he takes. The suffering around him conquers his spirit, and he frantically looks for sanctuary in the letters of his parents.

Hirute and Ettore eventually meet on opposite sides of the prison camp’s fence where her body appears before his camera. This encounter untethers Ettore from his nationalistic identity. When he leaves, he buries his letters and his family’s secrets, entrusting their location to Hirute. This solidifies their connection throughout the years. And it is at this later point in the story, in 1974, that the book opens as Hirute travels to meet him with his letters in tow.

Mengiste bookends her story with Hirute 39 years older and intersperses descriptions of photographs and songs to reframe the action from the gaze of the future. This generates a collage effect and exemplifies the elusive nature of memory. Adding to this effect is the fact that the sections are short, often leaving the characters abruptly and in danger or without a sense of closure. Withholding information like this also mimics the vast emotionality and the limited information of a photograph. The result is a somewhat epic feel but requires the reader to shift suddenly in plot and mood. It successfully portrays the exhausting pace of war and oppression’s relentless suffering. The reader’s heart breaks perpetually throughout the book.

However, the pacing and structure do prevent access to interiority. We must interpret characters through their actions, histories, and dialogues. Hirute is a tragic figure, yet her transformation leaves a great deal of room for speculation. Her own evolving perspective feels absent. Eventually, she finds love with a soldier named Aklilu, whose only bond with her seems to be that he shows romantic interest. The reader is left wondering why she has chosen Aklilu and how, with all that has happened to her, she is able to trust someone else.

But perhaps this is the intention. History often mythologizes stories, and there is a barrier of access to the humanity of the people involved. What we lose in photographs and letters is incalculable. Mengiste very well may be petitioning us to consider the lives of these people as we would any other figure in history, investigating the clues, but never reaching certainty with a story that belongs to someone else.

JOHN KAZANJIAN is a New York-based writer. His fiction and reviews have appeared in JMWW and The New School Creative Writing Blog. He is currently an MFA candidate at The New School. Find him on Twitter: @johnkazanjian.

[REVIEW] Aria Aber’s HARD DAMAGE

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

In an increasingly global society, there are many whose upbringing is centered around two or more cultures, which at times can be in harmony with each other, and at others in conflict. In Aria Aber’s debut collection, Hard Damage, a strong sense of identity lies at the center of each of the worlds explored, with every poem seeking to interrogate the historical and the personal, to flesh out what it means to have a past that impacts the present, and vice versa.

Winner of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Hard Damage examines various aspects of the immigrant experience and the manner in which one navigates the complexities of a new life. In the proem “Reading Rilke in Berlin,” the speaker reflects on learning English and her father’s journey to a new country:

Into English I splintered the way my father clutched

his valise at the airport, defeated and un-American.

It took me twelve strange springs to know: nothing

occurs out of a sudden. How do I let it go?

Little has been purloined from me and the ghosts

of childhood still sibilate, by which I mean

nobody has touched me on my innermost parts.

Despite the sense of loss the speaker’s father feels, and that the speaker herself feels by splintering into a language her parents don’t fully know, there is no coming back, and they both must commit themselves to a land and people that are as intrigued as they are indifferent to new inhabitants. When we arrive at the end of the poem, the speaker’s mother responds, rather confidently, with a “fine, ou hare you?” after being asked where she is from, and the speaker, aware of the callous attitude of the immigration officer she encounters, says she wants nothing more than to “[rip] out his tongue/… and [wait]/ for it to bloom new [in her] blood,” thereby fully possessing what at the beginning of the poem wasn’t quite hers.

Although the speaker interrogates the nuances of her identities (Afghan, German, American), there is no denying that she accepts every part of who she is, regardless if part of her upbringing isn’t fully attached to one geographical location. She is not quickly or easily defined, and for others, this concept can be lost on an adherence to stereotypical expectations of what someone should be. One of the most memorable poems in this collection is “The Ownership of Naming Things,” which details what others see the speaker as rather than what she is:

What once was feathered like a voice, a seduction

of finches, now is vigorous, bids me into the sun.

I am not less enough. Once, a man unbuttoned

my spine into the purple noise of night, swore

You’re not like them, look at how light your skin

is.

Her skin may be light, but it doesn’t mean she loses her Afghan identity because of it, and it doesn’t dictate that she should shun what is essential to her being. As she says, quite directly, “I am not / delicate. Look at me. I am not trying to disappear.”

The process of not forgetting takes up the entirety of the third section of the book with the poem “Rilke and I.” The eight sections are titled in both German and English, and they highlight not only the attention to language but the manner in which certain words and phrases shape identities and worldviews. This can be as minuscule as the word “I,” which in the first section captures its implications:

Ich, the German first-person singular pronoun, is not capitalized.

Is my German selfhood humbler, does it fold into itself? Why is the

English I so prominent, so searing on the page?

It could look like an | and therefore like a wall more than a door—

altogether very different from the little ich, which is the scaffolding

of a roof, a cathedral, something to contain the collective.

Putting a microscope to things that might not seem important is at the core of the speaker’s attempt to understand her history better, and to form a new way of looking at what is too often overlooked. Although contemplative and philosophical, Aber’s ability to switch into the narrative provides the perfect balance to insights into the speaker’s past, as shown in “Und/And”:

As children, it’s the only word we use to comprehend continuity. “And

then what?” we ask.

And then we had to leave Afghanistan.

“And then? And then? And then?”

You and I. You, who made me. And = the umbilical cord.

And Mother and Father, at last. Yes, he was there—a distant firefly in

a field; like the traveler that he was, which as the meaning of his last

name, he was always gone, trying to become an American.

Again, a single word is sufficient enough to meditate on what exactly “continuity” entails, and how moments from our life are connected in more ways than we originally thought.

The past here is personal, but it doesn’t entirely exist outside of history. “Operation Cyclone,” titled after the code name of the CIA’s program to arm and finance the mujahideen during the 1980s, interweaves various stories with the reality and consequences of such an operation:

a brother a favorite among his eight siblings

a brother believed to be gone

a brother’s name crossed through, filed away under “collateral”

a cheek held to the soles of the occupation

a country surveilled and censored as X

a cyclone as metaphor

a family collapsing at the grave, the grave empty, the stone etched

with cursive Died: unknown; died believing in good, beloved son,

brother, and uncle

a family cowered at the dinner table thinking of their brother

a family scouring through death lists, searching among the names of

the tortured, the detained and executed for a trace of their brother

a family waiting for news

a father beginning a joke with There’s no Walmart in Afghanistan

a fridge full of light

a funeral willowed and willing

a funeral with sisters wailing like blue jays, flagellating themselves and

each other

a funeral without a body so sober the orchids are flushing

I include this entire stanza because it’s important to read the totality of Aber’s attention to events that most Americans more than likely know nothing about. For the speaker, it’s a truth they must live with constantly, recognizing that she doesn’t want your sympathy, but instead she “want[s] your attention.” Even if that can be bothersome (think of all the people who shed light on unjust issues in order to promote their own brand or because they are merely hopping on a social bandwagon), it’s something that is nevertheless necessary in order excavate every aspect of the truth, regardless of how tragic that truth may be.

Recently, there has been some debate about “Best of” literary lists, whether they are too narrow in their scope or simply biased toward works that have been bestowed with awards, failing to consider the abundance of books that deserves a wider audience. Regardless of where you land in this debate, it’s hard to imagine, as 2019 nears its end, that Hard Damage won’t be on every one of those lists. It’s an incredible achievement that doesn’t sugarcoat the subjects it tackles, and if there is a book that so thoroughly explores the human condition this year, it is undoubtedly Aber’s, one that will move you as much as it will stir serious discussion with others and, most importantly, with yourself.

ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for [PANK] and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures by Alejandra Pizarnik, Trans. Cecilia Rossi

 

(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

 

SOMETHING

night as you go

lend me your hand

work of a teeming angel

days commit suicide

why do they?

night as you go

good night

Alejandra Pizarnik

 

Ugly Duckling Press sponsors a Lost Literature Series that “publishes neglected, never-before-translated, or scarcely available works of poetry and prose.” Painter and writer, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 -1972), is among the avant-garde writers highlighted—a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to Argentina who died from an overdose of Seconal while on furlough from a mental institution. Most of the online and textual sources that I consulted label her death, “suicide.” It is well-documented that Pizarnik endured challenges growing up, particularly problems affecting her physical appearance (acne, weight gain) and social presence (stuttering). However, she coped sufficiently during some periods as a young adult, living and studying in Paris for four years and traveling widely on Guggenheim and Fulbright awards. I first became familiar with Pizarnic when conducting research on Marosa di Giorgio, another South American poet resurrected in Ugly Duckling Press’ recovery project. Marjorie Agosín’s edited volume* provided useful “portraits of Latin American women writers,” documenting that, of the sixteen included in the book, six died tragically—among these, four poets who died by suicide.

The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventure comprises two poetry collections, published 1956 and 1958, respectively, of mostly short pieces revealing Pizarnik’s self-absorption and dark mien, presented in styles that are difficult to classify, though she is generally placed among the literary Surrealists (unconscious motivation, dream analysis), with a current of Romanticism (inner world, feelings, emotions). Like her noteworthy visual art, however, Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrates an affinity to Expressionism’s emphasis upon emotion, exaggeration, anti-realism, and psychological reality. It was also an important movement in the fine arts in Argentina during the 1960s, according to Edward Lucie-Smith (Thames & Hudson, 2004). It is not clear to me why Pizarnik switched from literary studies to painting and then to writing; however, an online source suggested that she considered one of her teachers—“pre-Surrealist” Giorgio de Chirico— to be a poor artist, and therefore possibly a source of disillusionment for the young student.

Argentina has the highest per capita number of psychoanalysts in the world, and one online report is titled, “Almost everyone in Buenos Aires is in therapy.” In addition, Argentina has high rates of depression and suicide. Pizarnik wrote in this psychosocial milieu, combined with a political context characterized by authoritarianism and military dictatorship. Although Pizarnik was a lesbian (or more probably bisexual) the scholar David William Foster pointed out that, “Her poems reveal only scant same-sex markers,” a characteristic that Foster attributed to the need to remain conventional under repressive regimes. On the other hand, a 2015 article by journalist and editor Emily Cooke demonstrates that, in letters to her analyst, León Ostrov, to whom The Last Innocence is dedicated, Pizarnik spoke openly, even flirtatiously, about her sexual attractions and fantasies (especially in Letter #10 dated 12/27/1960) and that she was consciously aware that she (and, he?) had entered the Freudian stage of “transference,” where unconscious sexual motivations transfer from patient to therapist and vice versa.

Indeed, the letters discussed by Cooke suggest to me that Pizarnik’s correspondence to Ostrov may have been manipulative, though, to what end? The letters leave the impression of a playful girl, and Enrique Vila-Matas, writing in Lit Hub in 2016, states, “The dark force of her Immaturity produces an irresistible attraction,” different from today’s “academic lyric poetry.” Pizarnik had a history of rebelling against the academic establishment, a characteristic that she shared with the Expressionists. But The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures, collections written before her residence in Paris (1960-1964), has more affinities to Surrealism as compositions representing the poet’s unconscious psychological states of being and deep motivational drives (e.g., epigraph poem).

Vila-Matas refers to Pizarnik’s story as “an unstoppable myth,” and much has been written about the themes of childhood, not-belonging, woman-as-hostage, and silence in her oeuvre. In 2006, scholar Susana Chávez-Silverman referred to the poet’s “complex textual self” expressed in “a variety of…voices”—dolls, little girls, “automata,” animals, the wind, etc. Pizarnik’s writing has often been compared to that of Silvina Ocampo, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath—Ocampo because of the tendency to “decouple emotion and action”: “…a dead bird / is flying toward despair / in the midst of music / when witches and flowers / cut the hand of the mist. / A dead bird called blue.” (49); the other two poets because of an emphasis upon death, dying, and interiority: “…there is something that tears the skin, / a blind fury / running through my veins.” (21).

In a 2019 Bookforum article, Cooke discussed Plath’s letters to her (female) therapist, showing the poet to be supplicatory, demanding, desperate for attention and aid, and, in the words of poet Vijay Seshardri, “psychologically sensitive.” While Pizarnik’s letters to Ostrov are clearly attention-seeking and, possibly, unconscious cris de coeur, she performs her writing with vigor and feigned or exaggerated self-confidence rather than Plath-like neurasthenia. Nonetheless, some psychologists speak of the “Sylvia Plath effect”—the purported association between creativity and mental illness. Indeed, following an American Psychological Association article, Aristotle wrote “that eminent philosophers, politicians, poets, and artists all have tendencies toward ‘melancholia.’” It is a simple point to observe that Pizarnik’s persona is consistent with the Plath effect; however, unless I am mistaken, the validity of the hypothesis is controversial among psychologists and feminists—open to interpretation, gendered, and lacking hard evidence.

In a recent New Yorker interview between editor Kevin Young and Seshadri, Plath was discussed in terms of several traits, some applying readily to Pizarnik. For example, in contrast to the classicism of Elizabeth Bishop, Seshadri pointed out that Plath’s writing is “absolutely individuated—it’s very hard to see Plath as an exemplar of anything but her own situation and condition.” One might consider this characteristic to be an artistic limitation; however, both Plath and Pizarnik have proven to have lasting popularity, particularly among women and the young, raising issues of “gendered and sexualized” self/ other contrasts as well as spectors of “power and powerlessness,” topics discussed in numerous scholarly and critical papers available online. Seshadri goes on to point out that both Bishop and Plath wrote poetry that communicates “wildness” and animality, also features of Pizarnik’s writing as noted above.

To speak of self/other raises questions about “alterity,” a topic fundamental to the Lacanian psychoanalytical traditions in Argentina. For Lacan, the Other is the subject—symbolically and metaphorically, and the role of the Other is to mediate its relation to the unique, “individuated” subject in a dialectical manner. Thus, Pizarnik’s “you” may be understood to be herself: “this dismal obsession with living / this distant madness of living / it’s dragging you down alejandra don’t deny it” (17), suggesting a circular, internal, “individuated” relationship of the poet to the environment that is, presumably, unconscious– “I must go / but on you go, traveller!”(25). Perhaps this characterization of Plath and Pizarnik relies too heavily upon a conceptual framework implying narcissism; however, more than one scholar has interpreted Pizarnik’s self-absorption in this manner (see, for example, Stephen Gregory, 1997, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 74). To speak of self/other or subject/object incorporates another of Lacan’s essential ideas—“mirroring.” the process of objectifying the Ego, typifying “an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image”: “alejandra alejandra / beneath I am me / alejandra” (29). Pizarnik entered psychoanalysis at a relatively young age, demonstrating a precocious grasp of its canon in letters to Ostrov; thus, authentic and accurate critical scrutiny of her oeuvre must include evaluations of Lacanian psychoanalysis on her state of mind, behavior, socio-economic-political contexts, values, attitudes, opinions, and writing.

Vijay Seshadri noted that Plath’s poems are “not just held together by form.” Similarly, Pizarnik’s compositions rely not only upon innovative uses of lineation, punctuation, and other grammatical conventions, but also upon complex semantic, imagistic, and musical features transmitting powerful emotional content open to multiple interpretations, including possibilities for identification—no doubt major determinants of Pizarnik’s appeal and endurance, particularly for women and young adults. Cecilia Rossi’s sensitive translations will widen Pizarnik’s readership and contribute to the increasingly common recovery projects of female writers and visual artists forgotten, lost, passed over, overpowered, or dismissed. Too many of these women lived or died tragically; the least we can do is to honor their work.

 

*Borinsky Alicia. Alejandra Pizarnik: the self and its impossible landscapes. pp 291-302 in Marjorie Agosín, Ed. A dream of light & shadow: portraits of Latin American women writers. (1995) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

 

Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is the author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal (Gauss PDF, 2019). Clara also conducts research on experimental literature and art & technology.

[REVIEW] BLUE COLLAR BALTIMORE: NEW AMERICAN REALISM, paintings by Tony Shore

Taking Your Shit | Tony Shore

REVIEW BY M. SULLIVAN

“They don’t photograph well,” Tony Shore says, laughing, “so I need to get people in front of them.” Looking at the image printed on the press release, then looking at the work itself, it’s easy to see how right he is. Each work is done on black velvet. A harsh source of light softly diffuses to an edge of darkness where it is swallowed into an all-consuming black such that the scenes appear to float as in a vacuum or in a memory. A photo does little to adequately present this reality. The depth and richness of the black velvet, the precision of texture, and the fineness of expression are dimmer if not completely lost in the photocopy. But to truly see these works—they engulf you and are beyond compare.

BLUE COLLAR BALTIMORE: NEW AMERICAN REALISM, shown at the Ethan Cohen Gallery, is a culmination of fourteen years of work that demonstrates Shore’s understanding and love of working-class Americans, as well as his dedication to a medium few have practiced and even fewer have mastered. The subjects Shore chooses are often the downtrodden or the violent, and his use of chiaroscuro evokes the same emotive theatricality of a Caravaggio. The result is a series of works that often feel like tonally darker relatives to the Ashcan School’s oeuvre. But Shore’s signature use of black velvet takes these two styles to their relevant extremes. While velvet is a hallmark of the low-brow, amplifying his subjects’ societal standings, the velvet also absorbs more light than traditional oils or acrylic, allowing Shore’s shadows to be considerably darker. The already dramatic lighting is heightened even more and the physical and emotional realities of the people depicted become more poignant. All the same, the otherwise understated features and ordinary settings stave off any sense of melodrama.

Dialysis | Tony Shore

Three of the paintings form a mini-series of their own: Vacancy, Duke’s Motel, and Date. The first shows the namesake motel off of Pulaski Highway in Baltimore and the latter two depict interiors of rooms at the motel. In the first interior scene, the composition is pushed to the top of the velvet and the bottom is left black, forcing you to look up. A man with a pot-belly and a red trucker cap reclines in the bed on the right, relaxing, while a woman sits on the bed to the left, taking off her shoes. The purely black expanse of the painting remains impossible to ignore, overwhelming you with its brazen emptiness, and provoking an uneasy feeling bordering on anxiety.

The second interior is similar, though, with marked differences. There is graffiti on the wood-paneled walls, the bed on the right is empty, the man is naked, a little smug, and even though the woman sitting on the bed with him is almost entirely in silhouette, her stare is unmistakably blank, and her slightly parted lips reveal her disquiet.

Shore mentions that Date was inspired by his Uncle Jimmy, who knew every prostitute in Baltimore. “Uncle Jimmy’s Harem,” they called it. But Shore is not casting judgment when he says this. And I notice that in both these paintings the lamp glowing on the nightstand between the beds creates a halo-like light around the women, elevating them from sinful to angelic.

Date | Tony Shore

When he talks, Shore is very convivial. Holding a pale ale and wearing jeans and a gray flannel, he is an ambassador for the everyman he portrays as well as a relief in a roomful of finely-dressed art-scene regulars. When asked about his work, he focuses on the hours he commits, the quality he pursues, the unrepeatability of his paintings, and the difficulties he endures. In particular, he emphasizes how unforgiving velvet is—how he can’t correct, how he’s thrown out works that were three-quarters of the way finished simply because there’s no way to change them, and how highlights are achieved by painstakingly building up layers and layers of paint. Because of all these drawbacks, he imposes constraints on himself in an effort to ease the pains, meticulously planning each piece. He says it all causes him a lot of stress and jokes that copycats are welcomed “if they’re willing to put up with the shit I put up with.”

Working with constraints naturally causes stylistic choices that Shore otherwise may not have intended or pursued. Referring to the painting Glass Upholstery, he tells us that the puddle reflecting the neon light was actually less strictly planned and that it was freeing to paint. Within the water’s wake, we see some of Shore’s more instinctive tendencies—the swifter brush strokes, the murkier colors.

The scene was staged for Glass Upholstery, though not all of the paintings were. Shore gestures to the disturbing fight scene, Fucked-Up, and says people tell him he’s horrible for just standing there and painting it. Learning that there are staged scenes may seem surprising, may seem to contradict the fact that it’s realism. In fact, Shore goes on to further alter what he sees, blending key features from separate photos to achieve a truer, more intensely real composition. “Her hand was originally flared out, and I put it in her pocket,” Shore says, to give an example.

The emerging ambiguity between what was and what is shown is inescapable in the exhibit. In Dialysis, is the man straining to sit or to stand? is Aunt Nellie crying, yawning, smiling? In Taking Your Shit, the red and blue glare of police lights blend together and form a haze over the scene as two youths begin to fight, suggesting what may happen next, but still leaving it unresolved. A painting has no end, after all, and, unlike a novel or a poem, it cannot have an end. All of these snapshots, these glimpses of limned figures, are merely beginnings. When we look at them they stir in us interpretations but, unmistakably, whatever we feel we know, nevertheless, remains unknown.

Though, what would realism be without that sense of ambiguity which like an ineffable fixture accompanies us in our own daily lives? Where there is sadness, there once was joy that lingers still, where there is ugliness, there is an unappreciated beauty, and where clarity appears, there is also newly revealed obscurity.

 

Blue-Collar Baltimore: New American Realism will be on view at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts,  October 17 – November 16, 2019. Learn more about the artist. 

__

M. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn.

[REVIEW] Night in the Sun: Stories by Kyle Coma-Thompson

nmightinthesun

Dock Street Press, 2016

REVIEWED BY CALEB TRUE

Reading Kyle Coma-Thompson feels somehow universal, as though he were writing in a tradition of philosophical inquiry and his writing just happened to take the form of short stories. The pursuit of big questions, a sharp sense of humor, and sly skepticism unify the stories in Night in the Sun, Coma-Thompson’s second collection. Diverse in form, structure, tone, and perspective, and employing an eclectic host of characters and situations, these stories provide functional answers to the meaning of life, answers sometimes neither pretty nor conclusive, but always elegant.

The first two stories in the collection inhabit their subjects through memory, anecdote, and comparison. “Idaho” observes Djuka, a Hungarian history professor. Coma-Thompson’s unnamed narrator synthesizes Djuka’s character through various evidence—Djuka’s own offhand admissions, his history, his battle for career and marriage—with the ultimate goal of understanding Djuka’s impulses following a street massacre he witnesses in Florence. Memory is used similarly in “New Delta Future,” a short piece about a return to old haunts, but in this case memories are reanalyzed in an attempt to understand a town forsaken by time. Both “Idaho” and “New Delta Future” paint their resolutions circumspectly. In “Idaho,” the narrator reconciles Djuka’s academic elitism—and all elitism, possibly—while Djuka and the narrator drink at a workingman’s bar in an unnamed Midwestern town. The narrator’s consolations act as an answer to Djuka’s trauma of witness. “New Delta Future” employs a more intimate anecdote, poetically drawn, to point optimistically at the title, suggesting there is indeed a future for the dying town.

In “Back Pay (& Other Vagaries)” the character under scrutiny is fortune itself. This story tracks the ironies of economic success and failure of city planning and the dashing caprices of society’s striving dregs. It ends with a vagabond’s binge after hours in a Kroger grocery store. A folk hero, he is found the next day covered in vomit and dozing happily in the ceiling, having “sle[pt] it off above the heads of shoppers, swimming like a dead king in the circuits of their haloes.”

In a handful of stories in this collection, narrative is constructed seemingly out of history itself. For instance, in “Dread Elders,” a triptych story, a handshake between a cop and a young man holds an entire misunderstanding and potential for positive communion. At the end of “Judges,” the second piece in the triptych, when the ‘judge’ and the newlyweds are no longer furniture in each other’s tangential lives, one can sense a heavy emptiness in the intersection of strangers. In these vignettes, and more singularly in “Story for Fire,” the narrative reaches its critical point only beyond the page, as though Coma-Thompson has suspended the final piece of the puzzle, preserving in these stories an ouroborical permanence.

The collection closes with two excellent form plays; “Spite & Malice” and “Andrej Lives.” The first is a sixteen-part mosaic associating the risk-reward strategies of the card game Spite & Malice with a wide array of cultural and historical curios. This masterful story marries Coma-Thompson’s essayistic, analytic penchants to formal structure.  A narrative forms from this mélange as once-seeming coincidences are inextricably interwoven. “Andrej Lives” is written in the form of a reply letter to a friend who has asked his friends to provide him with reasons why he should not commit suicide. It’s meandering and beautiful, and as funny as it is touching; the sincerity of it makes the humor in “Andrej Lives” all the more biting. Perhaps we could decide, given the title, that Andrej does not in fact kill himself, but the heart of the story lies in the ambiguity through which it is written, all the way to the final aporia, in the final paragraph, which also happens to be the last line of the collection itself: “Tell us[, Andrej,] about Vitamin D, how prolonged exposure to sunshine is as dangerous as it is vital to your health.”

The stories in this collection where the author is addressing the reader feel the most original, the most unique. There are, by contrast, a handful of stories written from different perspectives and without the strong presence of the author coloring our understanding one way or the other. These more conventional stories are, on their own, excellent, and if I were to discover them in journals rather than in this collection, they would shine from the pages. However, next to Coma-Thompson’s more personal, weirder stuff—where the intense authorial presence elevates the stakes—these ‘normal’ stories feel comparably ordinary.

Coma-Thompson is at his strongest when he is working in this omniscient, essayistic mode, just kind of talking, pondering, all the while slyly assembling a narrative before our very eyes. It is difficult to accurately describe this unadulterated, unmanipulated form of narrative without getting messianic. In a way this type of storytelling feels like pure narrative, motive free. There is so much formulaic elicitation in modern short fiction, so much effort towards and emphasis on locking in a reader’s emotion early on in the hopes of hedging against a reader’s flimsy attention span. This strategy becomes tiresome; the real thing—what feels like honest storytelling—can feel like a good friend telling you a story, and that makes for effortless reading. In many of these stories, Coma-Thompson achieves something like that.

The stories in Night in the Sun ponder outsize questions. The ruminations of the author—on history, his subjects, narrative trajectory, the purpose of narration in general—seem at least as important as the stories themselves. Some have compared Coma-Thompson to Danilo Kiš and Alexei Remizov. I would add Bolaño to that list, for the Chilean’s preoccupation with the meaningfulness (or lack thereof) of art; and Kundera, for Coma-Thompson and Kundera are both explicit ponderers of the meaning of life. There is something very global in Coma-Thompson’s fiction, even when he’s addressing the pitiful tribulations of provincial America, one of Thompson’s preferred arenas for grappling with life’s penetrating absurdities. This philosophical grappling is crucial, and is part of the reason this collection stands out. Without this kind of grappling, modern fiction risks irrelevance, becomes twee. At the same time, Coma-Thompson understands that fiction must be an escape from certain realities, an opiate against life. Coma-Thompson has navigated a middle ground to that paradox of literature: Night in the Sun feels simultaneously like an escape from certain realities and an intensification of them.

[REVIEW] Marigold by Troy James Weaver

Image of MARIGOLD BY TROY JAMES WEAVER

King Shot Press, 2015
138 pages, $10.00, Paperback

REVIEW BY ALEX THOMAS

Troy James Weaver’s Marigold speaks to suburban depression and 21st Century existentialism with a fresh new voice.  The novella focuses on a young man grappling with the issues of suicide and loneliness and their meanings in a seemingly meaningless society.  The piece opens with an epigraph by Franz Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops,” a quote that fits nicely into the Kafkaesque search for meaning that is the driving force behind the piece. Marigold is Weaver’s third publication and is published by King Shot Press which produces what it refers to as “literature for the unheard.”

In Marigold, Weaver appropriately casts a protagonist that is not original but rather plays the role of the everyman; he could be inserted in any existential fable.  In fact, Weaver seems to actively stray away from even naming his main character.  But he quickly establishes the lead man as somebody who is frustrated with life’s ambiguity through prose like “these lines point us toward our menial jobs, our stupid Wal-Marts.  The true rebels, the heroes to the causes of disorder and anarchy, are the martyrs who die in the easiest ways possible: accidentally.”  This Meursault-like character works in a flower shop, which is a superb setting, where he encounters different people but unites them in their struggle to make meaning of the world and their own demise.  These characters are also drawn very well, even though they are a bit clichéd.  There’s the kid-who-twirls-his-hair, the woman who will die from skin cancer and the tough Hawaiian and all of them are locked in this vicious battle for meaning.

The theme of the marigold as a parallel to the human condition is revisited throughout the novella with pages bare except a sentence or two of prose dedicated to the flower.  Weaver writes “Marigolds bloom from September to the first frost.  Then they die and return to the soil, where they wait for the next September sun.” And then later, “Marigold florets are often mixed with chicken feed.  Makes the yolks a brighter yellow, I’m told, for those who care for such things.  The marigold excerpts can be interpreted as chapter breaks but they can also be read as a reminder that life is shit, but it’s also kind of beautiful and it goes on.  This may summarize the thinking of the main character, who at one point even says “I know life can beautiful for a lot of people, but not for me.”

Suicide plays such a large role in the novella that a fitting epigraph might have been the Camus quote “should I kill myself or have another cup of coffee?”  There are a lot of darkly comic bits where the protagonist calls the suicide hotline and nonchalantly chats with the voices on the other end.  About halfway into the piece, one of the workers at the flower shop kills himself and the protagonist is caught in the moment surrounding the incident.  He muses, “he was more than a hair-twirling coworker, he was a human being.”  But then Weaver brings him back to life for the second half of the text.  The last few pages paint a beautiful picture of the meaning of life and the absurdity of suicide when the hair-twirling kid calls and Weaver writes “and suddenly I’m crying, too, and we are in this immense moment of existential togetherness, astray in the wilderness of being, but hand in hand.”  He goes on to say “’Listen closely.  You want to know the best way to kill yourself?’ He sniffs, says ‘yeah’ I tell him ‘that’s good I’ll tell you tomorrow.’”  And there is the hard-hitting punch that the novella has been building toward, the coup de grâce.  It’s the subtle call back to the marigold which, like life, is beautiful and meaningless and sometimes people care about it and sometimes they don’t but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Though Marigold is a strong work, it does almost feel like this has been done before since the theme of suburban existential angst is nothing new.  But the power of the piece is in the presentation. Weaver pushes the text at us in short bursts.  Rather than berate the reader with existential musings he presents us with a novella that, when considered as a body of work, is one large existential statement.

[REVIEW] Gutshot by Amelia Gray

Gutshot Cover

Gutshot by Amelia Gray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

224 pages, $14.00, Paperback

REVIEW BY T.M. SUMNER


Amelia Gray is a mortician with an overactive imagination.
Gutshot, her fourth publication, is an unflinchingly gory examination of life and the human interior told through stories and flashes that go for the gross out. Gray dissects human anatomy and the human spirit: blood, severed appendages, and mucus. Her stories extract the weird darker side of society—violence, vileness, longing, and despair. She punches us with a reading experience that is at times surrealist, absurd, or, on occasion, sentimental. This work is a complement to her three previous publications of oddities: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, and Threats.

 

Gutshot is divided into five sections that vary in theme and influence, but they connect through Gray’s unmistakable style. She draws from literary fiction, horror, surrealism, romance, fabulism, thriller, and science fiction, often breaking from traditional storytelling altogether. She pulls in readers while pushing them into unfamiliar environments that inspire feelings of confusion and conflict. Her prose is punctuated by micro-epiphanies that challenge us to consider what we’re made of—emotionally and biologically: “Your heart is a wall of the same brick repeated,” she writes in “Loop.” She questions what we’ll leave behind when we die: “Every body of work deserves its spoils. When we keepers go, we’ll get maps and plans and cenotaphs in miniature, all housed deep under slabs bearing the names of every man, woman, and blue-faced baby we drew down, a towering monument to our work,” she writes in “Legacy.” She examines what interior and exterior spaces haunt us: “Our home was once the preparation wing of a garment factory, in which material was boiled with chemicals to change its color and character,” she writes in “House Heart.”

 

Gray’s writing possesses an intimate quality. Yet like the accouterment—spatulas, incision spreaders, mirrors, embalming fluid, an absorbed twin—resting on a mortician’s tray, it also hints at the grotesque. Her prose is brutal and bizarre. It incorporates unusual images. A whale’s heart. Crowbar. Swan poop. A Dunkin Donut’s in flames. Benzoyl peroxide. Scorched plastic. She utilizes the mundane to call attention to apparatuses we often overlook: “Every problem in the world can be traced to attention or its lack,” she writes in “Loop.”

 

Most of her characters would make nightmarish neighbors (unless you want to live next door to the Klopeks from the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘Burbs). They rent a young woman and lock her in an air-conditioner intake duct, develop chronic puking problems, become cannibals, mutilate, castrate, and devise strategies for killing their boyfriends. But her freakishness is tongue-in-cheek and balanced with humor and heart. For instance, in “Date Night,” a couple goes to dinner and begins physically ripping their bodies apart: “Another man flicks open his button fly. His public hair scatters like dandelion florets. The man howls and a woman rips his dick off and drops it into a bowl of soup. What’s the deal with soup!” While Gray may be the queen of differentiation, here she points to a universal if not familiar theme: what it means to be alive. The mutilation isn’t an incursion; it is a celebration of humankind. She writes, “Every piece of internal armor on each individual is so thick with shine that even light from the recent past and future finds a way to burst forth, shattering across shattering glass, covering all in a blinding healing bleeding screaming LIGHT because that’s what LIFE is, you assholes! That’s what it means to be alive!” Her words remind us that the human body is a casing similar to a beetle’s shell. Inside, we’re soft.

 

Gutshot’s heavy-handedness is both its shortcoming and its strength. Gray tries—with great success—to be different and deliver what no one else has said. Underneath her eerie, original imagery and sentences, she explores ubiquitous themes: relationships, love, death, and life. The heart is a central image to her work, as is the house. She is a mortician who spends time with the dead, but her job doesn’t depress her. No, no. It makes her more alive. Lucky for us, she’s brought to the page her secret, which is hard to succinctly write but I’ll give it a try: To live without ghosts is not to live at all. Tell me, what will you do with the rest of your life?

T.M. Sumner is a freelance writer and the managing editor of Rathalla Review. She is an MFA candidate at Rosemont College, where she is writing her first novel. She holds a MS in Publishing from NYU and a BA in English from VCU.

Books We Can’t Quit: Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy

face
Harper Perennial
236 pages, $14.99

 

Review by Megan Culhane Galbraith

 

Just when I needed it, when I’d planned to write about Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, for “Books We Can’t Quit,” the book quits me. I couldn’t find my 1994 edition in my own bookshelves (had I loaned it to someone?), I went to the Saratoga Springs library and it was listed as “lost” in the catalog. I found one copy, a reprint, and the last one on the shelf at a local, independent bookstore. How, I wondered, could I have allowed one of the most important books in my life to vanish?

Was this a metaphor for what Grealy’s book has meant to me? Why has it haunted me since I first read it in 1994?

Autobiography of a Face is an excavation of Grealy’s soul. In it, she dissects the pain endured by multiple surgeries to her face as a result of a Ewing’s Sarcoma discovered when she was just nine years old. Skin grafts, bone grafts, tissue expanders, chemotherapy, and radiation, these are all physically painful, but it was the emotional agony that resonated with me: her throbbing, metaphysical pain. Continue reading