REVIEW – Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster by Caroline Hagood

Posted on November 30, 2022 by Mitch Levenberg

Review by Mitch Levenberg

Caroline Hagood is an Art Monster, and the more I read her prose and poetry, the more monstrous she becomes. She is Frankenstein, Ursula, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Lady Gaga rolled into one. She is also, by the way, not “in the way,” a mother, but as Hagood declares in her new book length essay, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), the two are not “mutually exclusive.” “I absolutely find it to be practically a fight to the death,” she says, “to ensure that the duties and expectations of ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ don’t suck up the artist in me . . .I think if you fight tooth and nail for your art, being a mother can feed it.”

Yes, this is a monster story, a mother story, a declaration of independence perhaps, a “taking back of art from men . . . for mothers—even if it is a bloody battle.” Woman as monster. Monster as artist. Woman as artist. Monster as mother. …” the M of Mother and the W of Writer as flipped versions of each other.’ “When I got pregnant,” she says, I “contained multitudes.” She is the best monster her kids know. “I chase them around the house while roaring loudly and they love it. . .And then it starts: the monster questions: “Are there any nice monsters?” They ask. You don’t have to be afraid of monsters,” she tells them, “Because I’m queen of the monsters. Mommy Monster, and they’re all afraid of me.’” Her children are her inspiration. These sticky creations are also her art. She sees her “literary and biological creation as feeding one another.”

Hagood is keen on “crafting a new genre for women in ‘my workshop of filthy creation’ just like the one Dr. Frankenstein had. This time I’ll make do with this sticky desk in my kid’s room.”

Indeed, according to Hagood, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “can simultaneously be read as a book about three kinds of creation: the creation of an actual monster, the creation of a book, and the creation of a child.”

Then there’s Lady Gaga, a particular favorite in the author’s “art monster coven of women,” Lady Gaga, who “march outside the expected gender and sexuality borders,” whose song Frankensteined “creates an alternate reality, a safe space, in which the woman monster lives to tell her story.” The Bride of Frankenstein is doomed to destruction in both novel and film, but in Gaga’s Frankensteined, she lives to dance to the beat of her own ‘twisted rhythms and create create create.’” Gaga becomes mother monster “to what we can only imagine will become a gaggle of ‘little monsters’ . . . She too, like Shelley becomes the tripartite monster giving birth to herself, her music, her fans.

Entering Caroline Hagood’s mind, is like entering a living room, or maybe a “sticky kids’ room,” littered with lots of esoteric fun and games for the imagination, dog leafed books and journals, notepads with brilliant insight and grocery lists of who and what we should all be reading. When listing all the “hybrid and super cool work being done by women writer’s today,” she parenthetically tells us to “email me and I’ll send you too long of a list.”

This book length essay is made up not so much of chapters but of chapterettes, observations, allusions, conversations, fragments, revelations, suggestions, asides, creating a whole book, like body parts stitched together to make a whole monster, reflecting the author’s intention to “derange reality . . .fragment it . . .make of it a mosaic, a collage.” Reading this book, sometimes I feel like Frankenstein’s monster, leaping from chapter to chapter, thought to thought, speculation to speculation, as if from one craggy mountain or beautiful azure lake to another.

Hagood takes us, as usual, on a wild journey, through body and mind, from the reality of her kids’ poop and dirty diapers to the mythical labyrinth of the Minotaur, “that real world counterpart to our inner space, external corollary to the thrilling but baffling inner tangle within us.” How wondrously entangling, how grammatically labyrinthine is that sentence alone!

“Perhaps.” she reflects, “philosophers link labyrinths to thought structures because of this eerie sense we have that we inhabit something that seems patternless but if we can only rise above ourselves and take a look, we’d suddenly get it.” Indeed, the structure of the book itself is somewhat “patternless” as if she has constructed her own labyrinth, her words, her memories, her aspirations, leading herself and us along the winding road towards revelation.

“. . . the labyrinth fascinates me,” she continues, because of the monster at its center, at the center of us all . . .as a writer I don’t run from the monster but towards it, beg it to haunt my labyrinth. The monster is the story, the inspiration, the beating heart of the narrative. . . The writer is the one who navigates the labyrinth, encounters the monster, and lives to tell about it.” And it is in the “telling about it,” that we begin to hear our own hearts beat louder, as with joy and anticipation we welcome another great art monster to the world.

Mitch Levenberg has published essays, reviews and short fiction in such journals as Fiction, The New Delta Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Local Knowledge, The Assisi Journal of Arts and Letters, The Same, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. He teaches Writing and Literature at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.

[REVIEW] Ghosts of America by Caroline Hagood

Posted on October 7, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY DAKOTAH JENNIFER

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Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.

Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.

Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.

Herzog spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us with his… personal habits, and seems oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all, he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he, “Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about women who were nothing but tools.

Jackie Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her. Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,” but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.

Valerie Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman, who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says, “Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author, they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.

The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.

Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.

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Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

Desire and Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song

Posted on August 6, 2021 by admin

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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I’ve been fixating on gardens recently. Maybe this is because I live in an apartment, and I’ve been spending all my time inside. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens because they remind me of my childhood, when my family lived in a house with a backyard framed in the ferocious green of mid-Atlantic weeds. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens simply because, at the time of my writing, it’s spring. It’s the time of year when life reminds us that things are still moving forward, even if we think they aren’t.

Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song was released in late February of 2020 as a single. Shortly after, it became Bridgers’ most popular song, soaring ahead of Motion Sickness. After the release of the album Punisher, Garden Song was buried among a series of electric and sentimental songs. But Garden Song remains important for me. It is irrevocably linked in my memory to where I was at the beginning of the pandemic.

Garden Song is a moody ballad. The introductory thrumming feels like it is made to be heard from inside a house, the sole sounds emptying into a room where one sits alone. It’s a song about the future. I started listening to the song in the beginning of March 2020, well before we knew things would be as they are now.

In the song, Bridgers’ narrator tells us she’s looking to the future, to a “someday”. She’s dreaming, reflecting on the possibilities of a particular imagined day. Bridgers pelts us with details: a house upon a hill, a skinhead neighbor, false flowers in bed, a fire in her youth. But the chorus is where it hits us. The chorus is where she reveals the emotions grounding the whole piece.

There, she reveals that she is looking at someone. This is the person she wants to share her “someday” with. She tells us this she wants a shared future. A future with a garden. Who knows if it will happen? Who knows how much will have been lost along the way?

There’s a certainty in that desire that is grounding, especially when life becomes loose at its hinges. Time becomes a detail. Instead, we are asked to look inward. Bridgers points us to an internal clock which is significantly less meticulous. It is type of time-keeping that has very little to do with regular rhythms. Garden Song begs the question: Do you know what you want? It doesn’t ask how long it will take to get there.

Wanting these days is a complicated feat for me. It’s naïve, it’s romantic, often, it’s pathetic. I can’t help but feel as if I’m experiencing a crisis of desire. This crisis feels reflected back at me in the media I consume. In the books I read, disaffected narrators state the facts of their life with no gesture towards their desires or the future. In the news I watch, we move away from the hopefuls towards the expected. Desire loses its currency in a world that is closing in on itself. The center, once firm, does not hold. But desire propels us forward. Strong desires are often indecipherable from needs.

Garden Song gives wanting a kind of value that is, for me, hard to overstate. To want something is to believe, however impossibly, that it might given to you. TWhen we desire something or someone, we implicitly say that we are willing to do something to get to the object of our desire. We admit that we have not given up. Desire is the antithesis of the resignation I find myself wearing as an everyday garment.

Times between when I first started listening to Garden Song and now seems to have passed in one fluid stroke. Like Bridgers’ narrator, I don’t know how, but I got here. I’m here in my apartment in Connecticut, and it is spring. Every morning at 8, the birds hum their tune at a pace paralleled in Garden Song. Somehow, I lost winter along the way. The days are often sunny and brisk. The trees look courtly in their coral and blush plumes.

Today, I saw the loose petals of a cherry blossom tree scatter in the wind. I was listening to Garden Song and thinking about how I wanted to share this memory with someone. Like Bridgers’, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know if my parents and grandparent will make it to the end of this virus. I try to keep my eyes trained on the horizon, Bridgers’ invoking “someday”. I am trying to make space for wanting in my life because I can’t let myself give up. I look for the beauty provided by the earth’s movements.

I stay inside. I call my parents daily, sometimes multiple times a day. This is the closest I’ll be to them for months. I dig my hands into more books, into a fresh set of pencils and charcoals. I want to read. I want to draw. I want to see beauty in life’s edges. I want to, like Bridger, look up into the world and see a life worth living.

So, yes, I’ve been thinking about gardens, the kinds which are starting to flourish in New England every spring. Sometimes, I smell the fresh soil and grassy dew of gardens in my dreams. I see their colors outside my window, where the birds have been singing into the late morning hours. Gardens are the product of years of desire and hard work. They demand patience and investment.

I’ve been thinking about the kind of person I want to be. What kind of world I want to grow into, what I want my garden to look like. Who I want to grow alongside. If you listen closely to the song, you can hear a second voice paired softly with Bridger’s at the chorus. A voice which amplifies her own. This voice is also thinking about the future, wondering how we got where we are. This voice is just trying to figure it out, too.

I’d like to think that someday, I’ll have a house with an herb patch that produces perfect pleats of hot peppers. I’m trying to focus on the small details without paying attention to the kinds of things that could hurt. I’m putting effort into imaging a future of gardening, where desire rules my life in an orderly fashion. I want to believe that there will be good things waiting for me and the people I love in a decade or two. I have to.

The life I live after this virus – if it might be said, however daringly, that there will be an after — will be one haunted by all that preceded it. It will be filled with the ghosts. So, I don’t flood my future with my mother’s face, my grandfather’s smile. I fill it with a sense of calm possibility, the very mood brilliantly echoing throughout Garden Song. I want big bay windows and sunlight that soaks in all the warm colors of my house. I want a family. I want to love many people. I want a life full with all its living. I tell myself that I know that I will get there.

Like Bridger’s declining, soft voice tells us at the end of the folksy tune: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work/And I did everything I want/I have everything I wanted.” Like Phoebe Bridgers, I concede to my desire, because I know it does something profound: it keeps me alive.

—

Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is an MPhil Candidate for World Literatures in English and a recent graduate of Yale, where they studied Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Ananya is interested in the dynamic between speculative work and contemporary narratives around reality. They are a proponent of literary romance and local public radio. When they’re not reading, you can find them listening to love songs and playing with their tuxedo cats, Patchouli and Arlo.

[REVIEW] The Purple Lotus by Veena Rao

Posted on November 14, 2020 by admin

REVIEW BY KIRAN BHAT

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We begin the pages of Purple Lotus in transit, or in travel. The main character, Tara Raj, is a young girl on a train heading to Mangalore. Though “peanut shells and crumpled newspaper [strain] over the floor,” and “stink of urine [emanates] from the toilets three compartments down the corridor,” Tara is a little girl filled with wonder, and hope. She sees her mother with “her hair coiled into a neat bun – like Belle in Beauty and the Beast,” she notices the presence of the child in her mother’s belly like “a birthday balloon,” she describes the passing landscape dotted with, “dark clouds too, smudges of dense black ink that threatened to let their wrath loose again.” Do not be fooled. We spend actually very little time in Tara’s childhood, as the chapter immediately after morphs Tara into an adult, having landed into Atlanta, after having been arranged to marry an Indian-American she barely knows. Yet, in the same way that Rao has taken extra care to decorate her language with the right amount of detail, but never too much so as to render her language garish, Rao has started off our imaginary of Tara as a child for a reason. The journey to loving oneself is long, the journey to understanding yourself is just as hard. A superficial read of Purple Lotus would make it appear like the biography of a woman who dealt with constant gaslighting, spousal abuse, and denigration, during her marriage, and found recognition in herself later on in her divorce. At the same time, I think Rao is attempting something much bigger here. Rao is trying to tell the story of the innate smallness each and every one of us have in a society, culture, or family, and yet to remember that, despite that smallness, we offer a vastness of our own to the world.

One of Rao’s great talents at play in Purple Lotus is her ability to reveal the full depths and feelings of a character in an extremely small space. A few days after Tara is brought to Atlanta, she lays in bed, jetlagged, thinking about whether to call her parents or not. Her husband Sanjay has called her, but she does not understand what he said. Later at night, he confronts her. Tara quite earnestly explains that she could not understand his accent, which causes Sanjay to scold her. After insult upon insult, he roars, “‘Aren’t you supposed to have a master’s in English literature?’” and Tara’s instinct is to escape to the bathroom. “She couldn’t let him see the tears. She felt so stupid. She had already rubbed him the wrong way. The tears flowed, hot and earnest.” These handful of lines do pages of work for Rao’s characters. They reveal the lack of compatability in Tara and Sanjay’s worldview, they foreshadow the further toils and turmoils that Tara’s marriage will result in, and they are just simply relatable. Anyone who has been a migrant to the US will know where Tara is coming from, and instantly feel a connection with her inability to fit in.

Another talent of Rao’s is to imbibe the immediacy of an image or sensation into the reader using language. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri, Rao writes about food in a way that not only makes the reader salivate, but also educates them about the importance of food to culture and the building of relationships. For example, in an effort to make their marriage more amenable, Tara tries to learn how to cook Italian and Mexican food. “Her first attempt at making veggie lasagna was a disaster, but her refried bean enchiladas turned out better—the cheese had melted sufficiently, the sauce was still bubbling when she pulled the dish out of the oven, and the chopped black olives and cilantro added aesthetic appeal to their plates.” Ignoring the fact that Rao’s sentences make me wish I had some Mexican food right in front of me, what is important to the narrative is that Sanjay responds to Tara’s hard work by saying, “It’s good,” and still going out to eat most nights elsewhere. Tara savors what little positivity Sanjay gives her, but to the reader, it’s very clear their relationship is going south, or has been south since it has started.

As per the affair, and what happens after, this is where Rao starts to stumble. It was so obvious that Sanjay was cheating on Tara that I would have almost liked to have seen the story go in another direction for subversion’s sake, and while Sanjay appeared like a well-drawn Indian-American initially, his abuse later on reveals him as a character of very little subtly or three-dimensionality. One wonders, is there anything Sanjay likes to do other than rag on Tara and cheat on the side? A similar problem seems to exist for a lot of the other characters Rao introduces. Tara’s Russian neighbour Alyona often comes off as a generic Eastern European immigrant, with very little detail that reads true to anyone who knows Russian culture well, and Rao’s second love interest Cyrus seems to only exist for Tara to dote on. In fact, it’s such a shame to see Rao’s flimsily realized side characters, because Tara is so strongly developed, and realized, and even real.

Still, all writers are learning their craft, and Rao is no exception. No matter what misgivings I have about certain aspects of the novel, Rao’s prose is so well-paced and structurally formed that hundreds of pages can be read in a few hours, and there’s a lot in her writing that is not only likeable, but courageous, and commendable. Purple Lotus proves Rao to be an apt writer of character study and an effortless storyteller. I’d recommend it first and foremost to people who are fans of the expansive storytelling of Tayari Jones, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, and then to anyone who wants to add to their bookshelf of growing Atlanta literature.

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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.

[REVIEW] The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Posted on November 4, 2020 by admin

Saga/Simon & Schuster, 2020

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REVIEW BY THEODORE C. VAN ALST, JR.

Gabe’s dad looks out the kitchen window, at the wall of the house right beside his, maybe.
Who knows what old men look at?
—Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

When it comes to reading, anyway, what do we, old men or not, look at? The words we read, the images they evoke? Cover art, name, title?

Or ourselves, like the best art asks us to?

Stephen Graham Jones always asks, subtly demands, and ultimately forces us to engage with all of the above along with the not-so-casual why of why we read at all.

For scholars of Native lit (whatever that category may be, or ever have been), a new offering from Jones presents two possibilities, both usually inhabiting the horror category (and increasingly the genre). The first; what terrors await us as readers and teachers of his work that always pushes and stretches our intellectual abilities and classroom boundaries, the second; as Native scholars of lit, well, it’s only having to examine the boundaries of what we do and who we are.

Jones’s notoriously difficult and elastic experimental work in texts such as The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto present their own academic challenges in the field, but his own essays and thoughts on being a writer (“Why I Write,” 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” “The H Word: What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror Endings”), and being a Native writer (e.g. the oft-cited multiply-published “Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer, and Maybe to Myself,” first heard at the Native American Literary Symposium in 2015) make us do the real work.

On one level, Jones’s latest, The Only Good Indians, makes a similar in structure but different in move via tone that I found in my first reading of Silko’s Ceremony. In the 1986 Penguin paperback version, the “Note on Bear People and Witches” appears on page 131, exactly halfway through the book. While I may have noted it as a postmodern turn at the moment, it was nonetheless the moment in which the text rolled from a self-conscious exercise in projected classroom teaching to the vibrant, layered storytelling masterpiece I hoped it would be. Though not quite at halftime, the moment in which The Only Good Indians moves from a story I found myself describing in a note as a work that “reads a thousand years old and not-born for even more, while it lives today with each next word. The first segment was a hundred grocery store paperbacks comfortable, that best voice to hear, so I should have known it wouldn’t, couldn’t last,” to an expectedly unexpected slow inferno in a Jones work is demarcated in post-postmodern (I’ll go with “neocosmic” [new world] for lack of a better term as to what debatable literary/theoretical moment we find ourselves currently inhabiting) fashion by the author himself: “It’s a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.”

It’s been a minute since Jones published anything with an identifiable “Indianness” in its title (of course in the week or so since I started writing this he’s published Attack of the 50 Foot Indian in typical Jones prodigious fashion), and though I am not making the argument that doing so now marks a departure from his commitments to “Indianness” everywhere and nowhere, The Only Good Indians marks a broad Big 5 (soon to be Big 4, I assume) release, and through no fault of the author picks up the requisite looking-for-an-Indian-in-this-cupboard mainstream boosts along the way. According to Saga Publishing, Jones is “The Jordan Peele of Horror Literature,” and in his latest, “The creeping horror of Joe Hill meets Tommy Orange’s There There in this dark novel of revenge told in Stephen’s unique voice.”

Puns and jokes sing throughout the work, from protagonist Lewis Clark to “The Last Finals Girl.” Jones gives Native folks some much-appreciated inside Crow jokes to go along with almost every Native kid’s school experience: “Is this really Indian, D? Shouldn’t you do something to honor your heritage?” (129). Challenges like that can unwittingly escalate to unmooredness, to the cultural vertigo Jones deals with in showing the shame and awkwardness of disconnectedness, telling us “Lewis never built the sweat he wanted, but if he stands in the upstairs shower long enough that it’s all steam, he can pretend, can’t he?” (105).The fear of ill-defined identity is as nerve-wracking as the inexorable approach of hulking monsters. The Only Good Indians examines the trauma of place, of leaving the reservation, and also how those who stayed behind are really never that far away.

The physical sense of immersion is equal to the mental depth provided by Jones. The deep cold of the northern plains and mountains is palpable, leaving us wanting a blanket against the chill as much as we want it to fight the terrors that waltz under the bluewhite iciness of black Montana nights. And when we think we couldn’t possible feel more alone under those clear hard stars, he switches to 2^nd person narration for Elk Head Woman, leaving us utterly lost in the snow. This masterful melding of cultural specificity that translates to universal horror is the neocosmic approach of The Only Good Indians, a much-awaited offering which thoroughly delivers on Entertainment Weekly’s declaration that it’s “One of 2020’s Buzziest Horror Novels.” It marks, intended or not, the departure of Jones into the broader mainstream, with, for the field of Native literature, a guideline over Jones’s always-generous shoulder, bringing so many of us along with him while reassuring the good doctor, as if he needed it, that we’re with him, still connected, looking forward to the worlds he’s heading into.

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THEODORE C. VAN ALST JR. is Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. He is a former Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and has been an Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent work includes “Lapin Noir: To Del Rio It Went” in A Critical Companion to the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, ed. Billy J. Stratton from the University of New Mexico Press as well as the chapters “Navajo Joe,” and “The Savage Innocents,” in Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013), available from Michigan State University Press. His current book-length project is Spaghetti and Sauerkraut with a Side of Frybread, and his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones was released in April 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press, who are also publishing a collection of his short stories in 2018. His fiction and photography have been published in Entropy, The Rumpus, Indian Country Today, The Raven Chronicles, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. He has worked as a consultant on multiple projects for the Disney Channel as well as on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has recently appeared in multiple segments of the History Channel series Mankind the Story of All of Us. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Native America Calling, Smithsonian Magazine, and Al-Jazeera America Television on a variety of subjects, from Native representation and Tonto to Spaghetti Westerns, headdresses, and Twilight.

[REVIEW] Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich

Posted on September 23, 2020 by admin

Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY SHANNON PERRI

The cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection, Animal Wife, might make you scream. On it, a quintessential 1950’s housewife, dressed in a frilly apron and with a bow in her meticulously curled hair, offers a look of shock on one side of her face, while the other half has transformed into a snarling wolf. The effect is jarring. The cover suggests that, inside of this domesticated woman, lives a wild and dangerous beast clawing for release.

The characters in Ehrlich’s collection battle a sense of entrapment, too. These dark, fairy tale-esque stories reckon with how a civilized world holds girls and women captive. Like wild animals locked in cages, the characters rage against their plight. They bare their teeth, only to have their captors saw them off. For instance, in “Night Terrors,” a girl wakes up with an ominous feeling that something terrible might happen to her or her family. She is taught to quell her fear, only to learn that her instincts were right. In “Kite,” a mother “feels alive like a soaring kite and ignores the pull from far below, as if someone were tugging the string.” But the pull is there, limiting and restricting her.

Though these fifteen stories vary in length and only some contain elements of magical realism, they all share an absurdist, allegorical, and feminist tone, similar to the works of Carmen Maria Machado and Kate Bernheimer. Many of the stories are told in the present tense, heightening the brooding suspense. One is not even confident that the characters will survive to the end of each page.

The first several stories in Animal Wife center on girls, many of whom struggle with the anxiety of not knowing what it is they don’t know. They wade into murky waters, unsure of what danger lurks beneath the surface, but certain that danger is there. The protagonists age as the book moves forward. In fact, the collection is bookended by two linked stories, “Animal Wife” and “Animal Wife: Revisited.” The title story is told from the perspective of a girl whose mother suddenly vanishes. Many gendered rules constrict this girl. Her father instructs her not to fidget, develop calluses, or make others feel uncomfortable. Yet her mother, a sad and restless homemaker, has taught her differently. The girl reflects:

“My mother said girls have to take care of themselves. That’s how we avoid turning into sea foam and falling down wells. That’s how we escape hunters and kings who chop and carve and snip and steal. That’s why I practice punching every afternoon.”

The girl is devastated her mother has disappeared, and though there are hints as to what happened, it is not until we read the final story, told from the point-of-view of the mother, that we fully grasp the choices made and the transformation that has occurred. Ehrlich reveals why the mother had to leave, as well as the painful consequences of her decision. We feel for both the daughter and mother. We sense their ache. It is this sort of complexity that makes these beautiful stories so haunting and evocative.

Throughout the collection, many of the characters rebel, though rarely without a hefty cost. Often, their freedom from the captivity they’ve known only leads them to another prison. In “Vanishing Point,” one of the strangest, yet most stunning stories in the collection, a newly single academic “needs a change she can’t come back from,” so she tries to transform herself into a deer. She eats grass, wears a deer suit, even tricks a buck into mounting her. Yet as the story goes on, she finds herself enslaved to a new master and committing acts of betrayal.

Another compelling and especially timely theme explored in Animal Wife is the weight of motherhood. With the pressures of a deadly, uncontrolled virus on the loose, mass financial stress, evaporating childcare, and escalating racial tensions, many women are bursting with what The New York Times deems “mom rage.” Though perhaps intensified by the current moment, Ehrlich reveals how this anger is nothing new. It is not that the mothers populating Animal Wife don’t love their children, it’s just that they love themselves, and the worlds they inhabit make it nearly impossible for both to be true. One story states:

“In the fairy tales, a stag eludes a prince, drawing him deeper and deeper into the forest. There, the prince finds a maiden: a swan princess, a sleeping beauty, a girl dressed as a beast with three dresses folded into nutshells. He finds her in a lake, or a hollow tree. Although he doesn’t threaten her outright, he rides a stallion and carries a bow or a gun. Often, there are dogs. He bears her back to his palace, assuming she yearns for domestication. She grieves her wildness, even as she bears the prince’s children, maybe even comes to love them.”

Despite the devastating entrapment so many of these characters endure, a sense of hope prowls these pages, too. These girls and women are mighty. They do not give up or accept their fates. They swim across monster-filled bodies of water. They attend emerging writers workshops after years of putting their families first. They construct cage-fighting alter egos who can crush skulls between their thighs.

It is no surprise that Animal Wife is the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award. Through gorgeous, searing prose, Ehrlich has created a cast of unforgettable heroines who rail against the unfair societal expectations that confine them. By telling their stories with beauty, nuance, truth, and magic, she has finally set them free.

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SHANNON PERRI holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her words have appeared in a variety of newspapers and literary magazines, such as Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Observer, Joyland Magazine, Fiddleblack, Literary Orphans, and fields magazine. Her short story, “Liquid Gold,” was a finalist for the 2019 Texas Observer Short Fiction contest; her story, “The Resurrection Act,” was awarded a 2016 Joyland Magazine Publisher’s Pick; and her story, “Orientation,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets. Follow her on Twitter @Shannonperriii.

[REVIEW] this is no longer entertainment by Christodoulos Makris

Posted on August 14, 2020 by admin

A video online might make you laugh, say aww, or appall you — whatever the reaction, one of the most common actions after the viewing is to scroll down to the comments and see what everyone else is saying, and agree, disagree, respond, or, if you’re like me, lurk behind the screen, eavesdropping with your glass to the digital wall. Christodoulos Makris has taken this oddly satisfying online social activity and made poetry with his new book, this is no longer entertainment, a work of documentary poetics that sources all of its language from the comments section of various websites. As you might expect, there is much language that is harsh, insensitive or mistaken at best. But there is also language here that approaches profundity, oftentimes in a voice that smells like a world-weary cultural critic (and it may well be) more than it sounds like a petulant youth complaining online about pop music, immigration, or the demise of Great Art.

The book is wide-ranging, as you might expect — Makris covers pop music (Huey Lewis and the News make an appearance), impressionist painting, international travel (the Balkans, France, Ireland), and dabbles in immigration, gender, as well as class politics, and it does so in an acrobatic manner, darting between poetic registers, code-switching from satire to sentiment. For example, in “7.” we see that

He also says, “Like rain

Passports outside the Western world do not let us

Citizens pass any port

Ask Snowden or Assange how free is the western

Followed by the next poem, “8.” A poem that responds to “7” indialogic fashion:

I don’t believe the writer

Why didn’t he stay with many of his fellow

countrymen

Looking like a Somali I would be concerned if I

Wasn’t stopped and questioned

It’s happened to a Muslim friend of mine who also

Travels a lot in his line of work (telecoms)

I get calls where a number is displayed but when I

Call back it’s disconnected

I suggest getting rid of the beard (21-3)

The book’s most affecting moments happen when the mind puts those two poems together (that is, after having read both). These collisions mark the book — between poems, between registers, between East and West, between ideological positions. Speaking of those positions — reading the book, one gets the feeling that the comments might have been posted by those that fall on the ends of the ideological spectrum (a spectrum that changes based on the given poem’s subject), and Makris writes in a way that takes note of the pleasures and pitfalls of extremes while displaying a wariness of both as he watches dialogue between two sides that are dug in.

As much as anything, the book reaffirms the idea that the internet is a place, with an ethos of its own, (the phrase, the internet wins recalls similar phrases used by hikers and hunters when speaking of the wild). That said, this reader has the sense that there’s a bit of despair in this place. Yes, authority has been diffused, but the economic and political power structures to which so many poems here speak — often in diatribes, sometimes in lament — those are very much in place. I mean to say that the book seems to assert that the internet is to dissent what the steam valve is to the tea kettle. But Makris also offers wonder and hope. After all, that same steam once powered locomotives, and here we are, a few months removed from a video of George Floyd dying with a knee on his neck, a video that sparked online outcry and a global movement for justice, widespread talk of reform, and a handful of policies and laws (local and national) that have already been amended. A way of happening, Auden wrote of poetry — this book by Christodoulos Makris happens in a similar fashion to the way the internet does — leaping, at all turns witty, unexpectedly poignant, and brutal in the most disgusting and hilarious ways. This book is a testament to the relationship between poets and physics — as long as there are space and time, the space being physical or cyber, poets will occupy that space, and listen.

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Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.

[REVIEW] Skin Memory by John Sibley Williams

Posted on May 7, 2020 by admin

Breakwaters Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

I remember first reading Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and feeling uneasy for the absence that pervades the novel. The story centers around Juan Preciado and his journey back to his deceased mother’s hometown of Comala, where he hopes to find his father but instead encounters a town populated by ghosts. The novel is surreal, and the way that Comala is described illuminates the tragedies of those who occupied the land. John Sibley William’s Skin Memory might not fall into the precise category of work that Juan Rulfo’s does, but the descriptions of absence in these poems succeed in the same manner, illuminating the consequences of loss, and revealing—if we weren’t aware before—how fragile the world around us truly is.

Skin Memory is a mixture of free verse and prose poems, but in many ways, the distinction between the two poetic forms is secondary to the content and to how much can be said with such concision. In “Sons of No One,” the topics of the poem range from suicide to extinction to the nature of creation:

So far all the suicides have been men
                   in my family. When I draw them
            close, it helps to remember the lake
                   beneath the desert the animals
            cannot taste but know exists.
                     It helps to draw them hungry
            clusters of light loping across the night
                     sky, such flames in their belies.

As the speaker goes on to discuss their naming of the stars, they feel, indirectly, that they had a role in the creation of the world—a feeling the speaker attempts unsuccessfully to achieve because of the lack of control they feel when one male family member after another takes their life. The speaker isn’t helpless as much as they are reflective, trying to understand what exactly is in their grasp and what isn’t. We see this in the next poem “Spectral”:

Each body is an outpost, populating, on its way to becoming a city. How the lights multiply, the surrounding darkness swell: how the moment speaks in future tense: if I’m being honest, how we miss what we never quite had, holding the light up to it- self, saying this is what we needed you to be.

There are certain things that will always live at a distance, and even though we may think that we know someone, and by extension know their body, we find, as Sibley Williams describes, moments where we don’t, and we realize at other moments that this understanding was never something we had a claim to.

This sentiment isn’t exclusive to family and those closest to us, but to the landscape as well, and when put under the microscope, we begin to question our role and purpose on this earth. In “Dear Nowhere,” a poem that traverses Montana, Alaska, and North Texas, we see this firsthand:

{Somewhere in North Texas}
Failing
to separate ground and sky, I’m complicit
in the steady collapse of clouds over barns.
Look—how red they rise from this dry
body of earth.
Is this only body placed on our tongues? Is this blood
we’re washing it all down with? I’m watching
bales of hay unfasten in the distance and wondering
if in another rendering of paradise we wouldn’t be
throwing stones to silence the owls at night.

A cathartic scene prompts the speaker to question their “complicity” in watching the course of events unfold (clouds collapsing, bales of hay unfastening), and in a larger sense, readers can’t help but wonder if the speaker is referring to complicity on more serious issues. After all, how often do we sit back and barely acknowledge the ways in which the world is collapsing all around us? Perhaps this interpretation is stretched, but poetry that engages its readers in this manner and allows such layers of meaning is poetry we need in such a flawed and complicated world.

As much as Skin Memory examines the world at large, it never fails to bring the focus back to the familial, and toward the end of the collection, Sibley Williams reminds us how necessary it is to cherish the small moments that might otherwise be lost to the grander scheme of things:

My son has not yet found a reason to love or hate the silence following us around the house. All he knows: something palpable is missing, not yet profound, not yet painting nightmares over his sleep, just a steady lack of arms where arms should be. The hundred nightingales trapped in my chest are chattering all at once. I don’t know which to speak from, if any voice is true, & if I’d recognize it.

Although the son in “Absence Makes the Heart” is still innocent in a lot of ways, he knows something is not quite right. Sometimes it feels that when nothing wrong is happening then something must be wrong, and the son, almost instinctively, feels this too. But the speaker understands that as his father, and as someone who is still trying to figure out if “any voice is/ true,” he must guide his son in the best way possible, hoping that when the silence is no longer around, his son hears something akin to love.

Perhaps the best way to close out a poetry review for a collection as timely and important as Skin Memory is to let the work speak for itself, and the last poem “Forge” sums up what both the speaker and reader experience when they have reached the end, whatever that ending may be:

We are here; this happened; a
simple record. If we’re lucky, a catalyst. One door framed
within another. Even if closure is a construct, I cannot rule out
heaven entirely. Whatever finally breaks me, I cannot refuse it.

—

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] Homie by Danez Smith

Posted on April 28, 2020 by admin

Graywolf Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

No one does it quite like Danez Smith. That’s it. That’s the review. Okay, that’s not it. You obviously need a little more. Here we go.

Danez Smith doesn’t just dance to the beat of their own drum; they slaughter magical animals of oppression with their hands, dry and stretch their skins, build the drums, call everyone together for a party, and then play the drums while dancing in a house built of words that can withstand a hurricane, the weight of history and racism, and a collection of memories best forgotten.

Homie, which is the title of this book only for the uninitiated, is a celebratory dance, a slap in the face of complacency, and an invitation to a revolution. It’s also a superb collection of poetry from one of the most interesting and unique voices in contemporary literature. In Homie, Smith opens their heart and their past and invites us all in to take a look. In fact, Smith does more than that: they make us their friend, especially those of us who, as people of color, have faced a different set of struggles.

There isn’t a single throwaway poem in Homie. That said, I won’t discuss all of them. Instead, I’ll give you glimpses of those that have stuck with me for weeks and are still with me now, a month after turning the last page.

The first one is “dogs!,” a strange crowning jewel that contains the taste of many of the cohesive elements that make this collection read like a whole: anger, humor, rhythm, and a message that’s stretched on top of the words like a cat, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to recognize its existence. It’s made up of little poems, all dealing with dogs in one way or another. Here is one I had to share on Twitter:

“scooby doo was trying to tell us
something when every time that
monster mask got snatched off it
was a greedy white dude.”

Here’s one that comes later and slices through our times all the way to the marrow to expose one of those problems that live at the core of this country like an intractable cancer:

“a dead dog is a hero, a dead lion
is a hero, a cloned sheep is a
miracle a dead child is a tragedy
depending on the color, the
nation, the occupation of non-
occupation of the parents.”

Danez’s is the kind of in-your-face poetry that revels in celebrating Otherness, that screams about the realities of the poet’s positionality. They are here to say things that matter, to scream about injustice:

“i didn’t come here to preach peace
for that is hot the hunted’s duty.
i came here to say what i can’t say
without my name being added to a list
what my mother fears i will say
what she wishes to say herself”

And this is Danez’s book, so they say whatever they want to say. In that regard, I guess some readers could find the language shocking. However, the way they use it demands attention. The title inside the book, the real title of the collection, contains a world of meaning. The words here are words that live in the interstitial space between being horrible insults and operating as reclaimed/repurposed terms that carry power with them. Yes, there are words here most people wouldn’t say/shouldn’t say, but “this ain’t about language/but who language holds.” Danez is in your face about these things because ignoring them is not how we make them better, how we bring people together, how we shine a light on racism, homophobia, and injustice.

Homie is timely, powerful, and honest. It’s one of those rare poetry collections that demand to be read because it contains the usual elements (i.e. love, memories, regret), but also brings other elements to the table, elements that are timely and important: bigotry, poverty, culture, and family. This is an elegant collection rocking short shorts; a fun read that’s extremely serious. Go read it.

—

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] The Black Ghost by Alex Segura & Monica Gallagher

Posted on April 21, 2020 by admin

comiXology Originals (2019)

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REVIEW BY JOHN VERCHER

If you had told me that I was going to love a new comic that was Lisbeth Salander meets The Spirit; that was a dash of Dick Tracy, a smattering of Stumptown, and a sprinkle of Alias; that had elements of Eisner and Rucka, a little bit of Luna Brothers, and even a hint of George R.R. Martin? I’d have laughed in your face and told you that sounded like a derivative mess. And I’d have been dead wrong. You, of course, would have been talking about the fantastic series, Black Ghost, written by Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher.

Instead of some seasonless word-and-picture potato salad made up of disparate elements that don’t belong together (raisins, anyone?), this collaboration from two gifted comic book veterans feels more like a comfortable homemade recipe where all the ingredients come together—the influences from great writers and artists of the past and present blending perfectly. Instead of copying their inspirations, they pay homage to them while creating something wholly unique and original.

Black Ghost follows the travails of Lara Dominguez (a Latina heroine who’s the lead in her own title? Don’t mind if I do!), a reporter/teacher/vigilante on the come up. We’re dropped into her story in medias res—and she’s immediately kicking ass. The writing from the get-go is crisp and economical, abandoning the exposition and introducing us immediately to our heroine who’s got heart and snark to spare.

Lara has been obsessed with tracking down a vigilante dubbed The Black Ghost—a modern-day version of Eisner’s The Spirit—and that singular focus has brought her dangerously close to losing her job, as she’s passed up the stories her boss actually wants her to work on. Adding to her compulsion for the Ghost is an Anonymous-type entity, Lone, who contacts her through her computer, giving her clues about criminal goings-on where the Ghost might appear—or where she might have a chance to hone her burgeoning fighting skills.

Segura seamlessly infuses his noir roots into the story—simmering beneath this drama, Lara is dealing with the unsolved murder of her brother, Tomas, a community organizer in Miami. It is the motivation behind her drive to bring other criminals to justice—but his death also triggered the contact from Lone. She is not oblivious to the coincidence, and the mystery deepens.

Issue #1 takes a George R.R. Martin-esque turn on the final page—that’s right! Someone you thought was indispensable gets Red Wedding-ed (no spoilers here)! The savvy of Segura and Gallagher’s writing chops make the event feel natural and not done simply for shock value. It’s a compelling end to a riveting first issue that manages to give us an origin story without talking down to the reader.

Issue #2 is where things get a little darker and a little grittier where Lara is concerned. There’s nothing more compelling than a character in trouble, and, man, Lara is in some shit of her own making. The second chapter dives deeper into Lara’s internal torment, and how she quiets it—or attempts to—with booze and other people’s warm beds. The Bendis/Alias influence is apparent here, but unlike Jessica Jones, Lara is hindered by her reliance on alcohol, not enhanced by it. It becomes quite clear in this issue that it is a kryptonite she can’t resist—as much as we want her to.

While she clears the cobwebs, Lara discovers that the mugging she saved her student from in the last issue is more complicated than she first suspected—a lot more so. If only she had time to deal with that instead of clinging to the last threads of her job before she’s fired. Did I mention Lone is getting a bit more aggressive in his encouragement of her vigilante activities, and that’s she having an increasingly difficult time with Tomas’s death and what it might mean?

This is to say that if you think chapter two slows down for you to catch your breath—think again. While Lara’s story gets more textured and layered, it only adds to the emotional heft and propels the narrative instead of turning it into a slog.

This is to say nothing of the art of George Kambadais and the coloring by Ellie Wright. The cartoonish style recalls the art present in the Luna brothers’ works (The Sword, Ultra, Girls), while the bright primary colors harken back to the era of Dick Tracy. While these styles might seem out of place in a noir-influenced comic that doesn’t shy away from profanity and violence, Kambadais renders facial expressions, body language, and action in a way that, in combination with Segura and Gallagher’s script, conveys the gravitas in every scene.

If the first two issues are any indication, comic fans are in for one hell of a series. I can’t wait to see what this team does next.

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JOHN VERCHER is a writer currently living in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He holds a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. His fiction has appeared on Akashic Books’ Mondays are Murder and Fri-SciFi. and he is a contributing writer for Cognoscenti, the thoughts and opinions page of WBUR Boston. Two of his essays published there on race, identity, and parenting were picked up by NPR, and he has appeared on WBUR’s Weekend Edition. His non-fiction has also appeared in Entropy Magazine. You can find him on his website www.johnvercherauthor.com and on Twitter at @jverch75.