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Original poems & found images
–by Mia Sara
Dream Girl Drops Dead
At what point does the grasp let go the reach
so that you trip and catch yourself clinging
to the coattails of a this spurious dream,
bloated lies that so outweigh the genuine
article, and flatten even the innocent longing
to be right as you are, just where you’re standing. Continue reading
200 pages, $15.95
Review by Thomas Michael Duncan
Standing in the remains of his fire-ravaged apartment, gripping an iron poker from the fireplace, staring down a man who will not and can not reciprocate his obsessive devotion, Jack Gorse says, “Tell me that you love me.”
So begins the thrilling climax of Pamela Erens’s debut novel, The Understory, reprinted earlier this year by Tin House Books. This rare edge-of-the-easy-chair moment stands out in the otherwise quiet, understated novel, heavily preoccupied with the internal conflicts of Jack Gorse’s devastated psyche. While The Understory is perhaps not as complete or compelling a novel as Erens’s sophomore effort, The Virgins, published by Tin House Books to national acclaim in 2013, this debut bears the watermark of a uniquely talented writer. Continue reading
–Interview by Diana Clarke
In “Winter’s Kitchen,” November author Dalena Frost wrote hunger and cold. Digest her words just in time for this new dark season.
1. I loved your use of apt and incongruous figurative language—the sun a “slow oil bubble” in a “denim sky,” its setting like “a witch deflating.” It rendered the ordinary experience of a sunrise strange, and therefore noticeable and tangible—but even moreso it made the whole idea of figurative writing strange. Why, so often, are we taught to write congruity? What happens when we reject it?
Thank you! If we reject congruity, I hope we can reject traditional or clichéd ways of seeing, and wake up to the present, to seeing for ourselves. The world is always strange and fresh and unsettling, but with familiarity, we forget.
2. There’s such darkness and estrangement in the arrival of the ant-man with his “gleaming, sharp” sword. The haphazard menace of something or someone with “a claim on [our] past.” But writing often demands that we confront history. How do you handle your own? Continue reading
242 pages, $22.00
Review by Carley Moore
I didn’t know it, but I’d been waiting for Stacey D’Erasmo’s fourth novel, Wonderland. I’ve been working on a novel for the last year about a young woman who tries to change her life by running away with a female-led indie music band in 1990, and so I’ve steeped myself in rock n’ roll memoirs and journalistic accounts of bands on tour. Many of the books were male affairs, with the exception of two of my favorites—Pamela DeBarres’s groundbreaking and sexually frank groupie memoir I’m With the Band and Sheila Weller’s well-researched and historically-minded Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carley Simon and the Journey of a Generation. These books gave me a unique glimpse into what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field, and the complex interplay of power, artistry, and sexuality that is the heart of playing in a band and performing for large audiences of adoring fans.
Still, D’Erasmo’s protagonist, Anna Brundage is a revelation. She’s a female artist who is sexual, in and out of love, and determined to stage a comeback though she has no clear idea how to make that happen. Anna’s fortunes and her fame are not particularly tied to those of the men around her, and yet she works with men, fucks and loves them, and calls a couple of them mentors and muses (such as her father, who is a famous conceptual artist, and Ezra and Billy Q., older, more successful musicians who have helped her career). I love Anna because she’s smart, sexy, and really and truly on her own. She’s not looking for any saviors. Continue reading
176 pages, $5.55
Review by Aria Aber
The first time I read Good Morning, Midnight was during my quarantine in a single hospital bedroom immediately after a New Year’s Eve party. My exclusion from the exterior world and the corollaries of my comedown facilitated a hefty journey into the depths of this underrated, forgotten little book. I couldn’t help but think of my grandmother, who believes that humans, if seen through the clarity of simple eyes, are, at their innermost core, emotionally tied to only one of the following: sad or happy. I don’t want to encourage anyone to follow this psychologically ignorant analysis, but I do praise its applicability whenever I encounter someone who has actually read a Jean Rhys novel apart from Wide Sargasso Sea (to which they were probably forced during an academic excursion) and enjoyed it. If they did, chances are they are somehow… sad. Not 2005 self-harm-glorifying Emo sad, but melancholy. It’s obvious that unlucky, poverty-stricken, white Creole writer Jean Rhys was one of the sad ones herself. You don’t have to be born into the wrong caste or know what it feels like to have to steal your lunch at the supermarket in order to understand Rhys – but you have to be receptive to the melancholy in everything: in ‘afternoon light’, in sunrises, in dancing under confetti storms, in ice cream, and even in grandparent couples who lovingly smile at each other. But this isn’t the only reason why I can’t quit reading about a depressed alcoholic woman in her mid-50s haunting Parisian streets between the World Wars. It’s because it’s wonderfully crafted, intensely poetic and brutally relevant … even today, almost 80 years after its publication. Continue reading