book reviews

[REVIEW] The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

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Two Dollar Radio, 2019

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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.   

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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

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Future Tense Books, 2018

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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 communities—I’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 literature—looking beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades—I 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 guides—and Hudson—rarely 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.

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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] Slow Dance Bullets by Meaghann Quinn

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(Route 7 Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY GAIL DIMAGGIO

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Meaghan Quinn’s first book Slow Dance, Bullets opens with Withdrawal and closes with How to Forgive Yourself. Between those poles, the poems re-enact a pain-filled journey in language both contemporary and timeless, commercial and sacred. The speaker fasts on Snapple and Mentos, her brothers dip hands into “urinals of holy water”, spring pushes green leaves “up through horse shit” and death won’t hurt as much if we just keep moving. Throughout, Quinn’s voice is as lyrical as a spinning tire swing, as sensuous as a razor blade.

While the journey includes addiction and recovery, it is not defined so much by that contemporary tale as a more primal story: a girl tossed out of paradise, naked and nameless trying to remake the world and herself out of nothing. A sense of sin, it turns out, provides the rocky foundation for identity. In this world, the speaker is one of the “lost kids” who become “something and nothing up there on the cliff/perched over water.”

The poem “A Childhood” combines the sanctified language of Catholicism with the ritualized motion of the pantoum into an eerie sense of constant motion never advancing. Between the first and last stanza, the speaker loses her identity as the obedient girl who took Communion and blessed her dolls and is transformed into a stranger who wraps those dolls in plastic and blames God for the rain. “The babysitter hurt me,” she tells us and then “the babysitter hurt the girl in the white ranch,” and by the time the “baby sitter left, no one knew me.”

For a long time, the speaker searches for someone to lead her home, to lead her back to the “blow up pool.” The few adults turn out to be distracted or beside the point—her beloved mother picking up “cig buts flicked by the sad uncles.” A professor knocking back Tequila shots and conjugating, “the verb to be/ like I knew what it meant to be sum, es, est.” For the rest, she learns what it means “to be” from other ‘lost kids’: “sitting cross-legged…./Rubinoff bottles balanced between our thighs.” And “older girls (who) pushed us out of cars/pretended to brand our feet.” And her brothers: Cain and Abel she calls them, adored and energized and in love with danger.

Cain

even now grinning

under the clothesline

 

waiting to be oiled like

the smooth grooves of a gun

waiting to be triggered.

Increasingly, she searches for transformation in some sexual blood sacrifice as in Construction Sites, where she “wanted them to notice me/ to pin me down/ to beast me into/something I wasn’t//& so I stepped on a nail,” let a boy “carry me like a slain sheep.” She seems to be trying to see if she can make a life and a self out of the religion of sexuality and a sense of sin.

& wasn’t this my entryway into identity

my right to know how wrong this all was because

 

we were running the risk of getting caught….

 

& how even now I’m dreaming of hearing

a tattered mouth suck on a thigh of salvation….

One after one, she turns to her lovers, most of them as lost and suffering as she is: girl in the parking lot/behind McCaffery’s Pub, the girl from the Irish Bar, the soldier in “Camp Le Jeaune” “eyes like a shard of shrapnel.” Each human contact wrapped in pain and promising pain, no available escape but “Escapism.” The journey heads down into the drowning waters of addiction. In “I Don’t Remember Making My Confirmation,” the speaker tells us that she now “feels God in my chest/when I stand sauced//buzzing before the altar”.

Quinn’s poems make it clear that the chance of survival is as random as the chance of addiction. That not everyone finds a companion who sat all night beside the speaker, whose “unholy face [is smashed] against the tiles.” A companion with the wisdom not to ask why she “takes the same thing/they use at zoos to put elephants to sleep.” Another who will paddle out to sea “just as the sky turns neon” and is willing to let her be the one to say whether they stay or turn back.

Of course, in the end, salvation—spiritual or mundane—remains mysterious. These poems are too wise and too honest to pretend we can know what makes it possible for a “lost kid” to accept life, “to learn the hard way that there is nothing/poetic about death.” To decide “to be.”

 

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Gail DiMaggio is the author of Woman Prime, selected by Jericho Brown for the 2018 Permafrost Poetry Prize published by Alaska University Press. Her work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream, The Tishman Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Concord, NH.

[REVIEW] Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

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(The Accomplices, 2019)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s Losing Miami is an outstanding exploration of exile, Otherness, and the possibility of returning to a place you’ve never been to. Unapologetically bilingual and packed with explosions of language in which coherence is ignored and the reader is invited to make connections between words, this poetry collection is at once brave, nostalgic, and passionate.

Ojeda-Sagué is fully aware of his status as a displaced person. His Otherness, like that of many others, make him a permanent nomad, someone who belongs only to movement and transitional/interstitial spaces. The same applies to his family, which came from Cuba. His work reflects that. Much like Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza, the poet and his family live surrounded by the idea of a return to a place that never was or that could never be again:

I am asked if I would go to Cuba now that policies

have changed. When I ask my abuela the same

question, exchanging “irías” for “volverías,” she says

que “no tengo nada que hacer en Cuba.” Somehow,

I feel the same, even if I could never say “volvería”

because I have never been to Cuba. Returning would

not be the form, in my case. But to grow up in Miami,

as the child of exiles, is to always be “returning” to

Cuba. Everything has a fragrant—not aftertaste,

but third taste—of Cuba. Angel Dominguez writes

“What is the function of writing? To return (home)”

but his gambit is that the flight (home) is the writing,

the verb “to return” is the writing, not the home itself

or returning to it. What is the function of writing:

“to return.” The answer is no, I would not go to Cuba,

because the Cuba I come from only can be returned

to in the murmurs of the exile.

Ojeda-Sagué is a very talented poet, but the most beautiful element of Losing Miami is the code switching. Anyone who follows my work knows I love bilingual writing, and Losing Miami is full of it. The poet cambia de idioma de momento, sin perdir permiso a nadie y sin preocuparse por hacer que los lectores que no entienden el idioma lo puedan entender. This gives the collection an undeniable sense of authenticity and a cultural depth that few of its contemporaries share. Whole poems are written in Spanish without translation. They aren’t italicized or explained. They are what they are in a language that isn’t foreign; it is the poet’s language. Here’s “Esponja”:

el internet me hace sentir horrible, como si

todo pasara a la misma vez, y como si hubiera 30

horas en el día / casco del demonio / ciruela /

avenidas y malas noticias / dominó / dibujo el

mundo sobre un papel / duermo adentro del congelador /

encuentro parte de un radio en el patio / lo siembro /

allí crece un manicomio / azul y marrón /

en seis semanas / azul y marrón /

ciruela / una uva entre los labios de Patroclo /

en seis semanas todas estas ideas

serán ahogadas / serán fluidas /

al dibujo le añado agua de una esponja

While the poems in Spanish can be hard to decoded for those who don’t know the language, they are relatively simple and will not offer much of a challenge for those who opt to translate them. However, there are other poems in which Spanish and English share space that are not that easy to decipher. Ojeda-Sagué writes rhythmic clusters of words that act like a celebration of language, a bridge between cultures, and an invitation to fill in the blanks. These don’t appear early on. Instead, they show up once the reader has an idea of how the poet’s brain works. They are fun to read. They are intriguing. They tell tiny single-word stories and sometimes add up to bigger, multilayered narratives. Readers should slow down when they encounter them. These poems demand to be read twice, to be explored, to morph into new realities in the brains of those who read them. Here’s my favorite one:

sincrética allowance pájaro steak dar

criminal coraje water tendida field debajo

salted mar virus sigue giant carabela city

palma awful infección girls abierta bluer

grama palms sudan rafter mariquita heat

boca agape el great mosquito summons

coraje and viento acid pueblo gridlines

pobreza dreaming Haití they mandan

back queman back pobreza back abierta

back rezo that no take mi sweet vida back

If Losing Miami is any indication of what The Accomplices are going to be publishing, then do yourself a favor and put them on your radar immediately. The strength of this book sent me looking for more of Ojeda-Sagué’s work. It will do the same for you.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, book critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. His work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and nominated to the Wonderland Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His literary criticism appears regularly in venues like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other print and online venues. He was a juror for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a literary columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Lima : : Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

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(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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One only needs to look at the current debate regarding reproductive rights in various state chambers across this country to see that there are still political parties and groups that want to limit the legal and social rights and privileges of women, convinced the gap that exists between them and their male counterparts need not be closed. It’s a tiresome fact, and how we as a society view the female body leaves politicians, pundits, and those closest to us with no shortage of opinions. If, however, we believe that literature has the power to spark change, then we must also believe that it acts as a tool to help curate a history we want to leave for future generations, especially if certain narratives don’t align with the realities of marginalized and underrepresented voices. Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires.

The collection begins as a snapshot of innocence, with the speaker of the poem “Lima:: Limón: Infancia” explaining that she “wants to be the lemons in the bowl/on the cover of the magazine.” This picturesque image doesn’t last long, however, and three poems later, the speaker is in a completely differently situation, devoid of any still-life serenity.

I lie on my back in the grass & let the weight

of a man on top of me. Out of breath, he searches

for a place on my body that hasn’t flooded.

The only dry patch left is my hair, which he uses

to wipe the sweat from his face. He is disgusted

because I have turned the earth beneath us

damp. He says I am an experience, like standing

in an irrigated grove of lemon trees.

The “man” here, both a specific man and a composite of other men, is dissatisfied with the body in front of him, searching for what hasn’t already be explored and occupied. It sounds harsh using such terms, but that discomfort is what Scenters-Zapico is pushing us toward, and it doesn’t relent when the man says that the speaker’s “moisture/brings mold & [her] body is nauseating.” The image of the lemon enters near the end of the poem, but we are no longer seeing it in the same light as earlier. What was once a symbol of opportunity and tranquility is now an object that is processed for someone else’s pleasure and consumption.

Although the occurrence above might seem mutual (even though there are hints that it is anything but), the speaker, at other times, must ward off men who believe that anything can be bought.

My landscape of curves & edges

that breaks light spectral

 

is not for sale, but men still knock

on rib after rib, stalking the perfect house –

There is a violence here, and that desire to invade and claim the female body, as if it were real estate, is prevalent throughout. Often times, it’s implicit–a husband criticizing his wife for attempting to surprise him for his birthday by jumping out of a cake; a woman laughing at jokes at her own expense in order to maintain a “porcelain doll” image in her household–but there are poems when this violence is visible, and none other is more direct than “More Than One Man Has Reached Up My Skirt.” The speaker recognizes that she has given up protesting not only the act from which the poem takes its title, but other things: catcalling, being seen exclusively as a servant, and even the guilt that comes with having to resort to an abortion. Despite this, the speaker finds herself “lucky” due to the fact that “other girls/work in maquilas” or “work in brothels” or “are found/wearing clothes/that don’t belong to them, or no/clothes at all” or “are found/with puta/written in blood across/their broken bellies.” The speaker, remembering a conversation with her mother and how she used to cover her eyes when they encountered girls working the corner, states that yes, she is “very lucky,” but whether she believes it is a different question entirely. How can a woman truly claim prosperity when the social, economic, and legal forces that govern what women can and cannot do are consistently acting upon her? The answer obviously is that she can’t, since institutions, although favorable to certain races and classes of women, are still a part of the patriarchy, one that actively seeks to control how much “luck” women have in their everyday lives.

It’s ironic that after various violent encounters, the man in certain poems returns to the speaker, unwilling to leave her for fear – we can assume – of being lonely, being emasculated, and of completely breaking who they feel is their right to control. In the poem “Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,” the speaker so aptly questions, “How do you write about the violence/ of every man you’ve ever loved?” This is not easy to answer, but Scenters-Zapico has found a way, and it’s fitting that one of the last poems of the collection ends with a mother detailing her advice to her daughters, hoping, perhaps, that she can prepared them enough to not ever have to ask such a question. She warns about police, about taking an exam without a social security number, about men who want to hurt them just for the sake of seeing them suffer, and emphasizes that despite all that life throws their way, they have “good bones/ for hard work” and shouldn’t be ashamed, just as we as readers shouldn’t be either, to try to “make this place beautiful.” Scenters-Zapico has offered us something to help with that; we in turn must do our part to continue unveiling the cruel reality marginalized women face, and bring it to the forefront of conversations we have on how to leave the world better than we found it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Cove by Cynan Jones

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(Catapult, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Cynan Jones is one of those authors who constantly reinvent themselves. His body of work proves he is fearless when it comes to exploring new territory and always willing to explore the way language can be used to maximize the impact of a narrative. In Cove, which was published in a beautiful hardcover edition by Catapult, Jones offers what is perhaps his most minimalist narrative while trying out new rhythms and showing what extreme economy of language can accomplish.

A man is out at sea. He is in a kayak and gets caught in a sudden storm. Then he is struck by lightning. When he wakes up, adrift on his kayak and with a shattered hand, he finds his memory gone. He can’t remember who he is, where he came from or how and why he ended up floating in a kayak in the middle of the ocean. Despite his lack of memory, he knows he has to move, to push forward toward the shore, to survive. In the absence of recollections, his instincts take over and survival becomes his main goal. In his struggle, the ghost of a sensation, not quite a memory, comes to him: a woman and a child are waiting for him, and he has to make it back to them. What follows is a short, visceral read about a wounded, memoryless man fighting for something he barely remembers.

Cove is a self-contained master class on economy of language. It is also a outstanding example of what happens when writers allow brevity and poetry to mix outside of poetry:

Still, his memory is out of reach, things approaching, dipping, disappearing. A butterfly, nearly knowledge. He thinks of the state of his skin, does not know if he had started out clean shaven, knows, though, that his stubble grows at uneven rates.

Jones is a superb writer, and he flexes new muscles in this book. Besides his usual storytelling, there are things happening with the writing here that go beyond good writing. The most memorable of them is the rhythm of the prose. Insistent is not a word usually used to describe writing, but it applies here. The words keep coming, hitting the reader the same way the water laps against the kayak. Sentence construction follows an arrhythmic sort of melody that constantly changes, shifts in lengths, and then returns to previous cadences:

He looks at the stars, sees those on the horizon. That some of them might be the lights of ships, of land, he can’t allow himself to think. Cannot allow himself to image the warmth, the food, the safety they would mean. It is better they are stars. That they are out there somewhere in the same infinity as him. That they are not real beacons.

The plot of Cove is deceptively simple: a man trying to make it back to something he barely remembers after having a horrible accident. That said, there is an honesty to the writing, to the simple actions of the man, that makes this a captivating read. Furthermore, once the man is invaded by the idea of a memory that may or may not be real, his demeanor changes, his priorities morph and give him renewed strength, and readers go from being witnesses to actively rooting for him:

With the knowledge of her had come the need to ease her worry. It was impossible for him to believe he would die, but it was possible for him to believe he could leave her alone. Her and the child.

This is more a novella than a novel, but regardless of what you call it, this book cements Jones as a master of the short book and a leading voice in terms of maximum impact packed into extreme economy of language. If you’re a fan of great writing, don’t skip this one.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, book critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. His work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and nominated to the Wonderland Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His literary criticism appears regularly in venues like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other print and online venues. He was a juror for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a literary columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

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(Omnidawn, 2018)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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To quote a phrase from Terrance Hayes’s foreword, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen is a collection of “exile and elegy.” The poem’s first line proclaims there “is no ecologically safe way to mourn,” and because there isn’t, at least not within the collection’s context of loss, the search for identity, and the acclimation to a culture of a new country, Nguyen so confidently writes in a style and voice that is as innovative as it is maturely aware of its subjects and themes.

Two pages in, and we are introduced to one of the collection’s most intriguing forms; “Triptych” (the title of five other poems in this collection) is composed of an altered, blurred photograph of a family (Nguyen’s own) with a piece missing (which Nguyen’s brother cut himself before his death), followed by a fragmented poem (taking the shape of that figure), and a prose poem that seeks to illuminate the meaning behind the photo and the previous poem. Although a form like this runs the risk of seeming forced, and can look to an experienced reader like something the poet learned in a workshop and was excited to put on the page (think of all the poorly constructed ghazals that randomly show up in a collection that doesn’t need them and that don’t fit with the poet’s overall style), Nguyen is able to use this form in a manner that is never superficial. The beauty of these poems lies in the seemingly chaotic nature they take as the collection progresses. By the fourth “Triptych,” the photograph is altered to the point of nausea, and the fragmented poem that follows singles out the speaker’s brother, Oliver, as a figure so far removed from anything that resembles that serene family in the photo before:

Re

mem

ber the

handsom

e boy pla

ying ball i

n the decay

ed city? Thin

k about him

how he’s pla

ying and pla

ying not as

king a singl

e question,

think abou

t that how

My replication here doesn’t do the justice to what the reader will experience firsthand with these poems, nor will any replication successfully capture the essence of the “Gyotaku” poems (Gyotaku is a Japanese form of printmaking that uses fish or other sea animals as printing plates). These poems are more vibrant and visually jarring as Nguyen prints her text onto the altered photographs. In one instance, the name “oliver” (shaped into a disembodied figure) is juxtaposed next to the cut portion of a family portrait and then splashed in various trail-like patterns across the next page, all in different shades of black and gray. Such a technique recreates the footprint the speaker’s brother left behind. The speaker, through these pieces, copes with these memories, and the page offers no better canvas to visually express the labyrinth of emotions still fresh after such a loss. Near the end of the collection (in the last “Gyotaku” poem), multiple lines of olivers (printed in light gray) occupy the whole page, while a poem in the shape of dark figure lingers the right hand corner, as though the ghost or spirit has nowhere to go, stuck in a two-dimensional limbo that prompts the speaker to ponder how it’s “not the body/but the self that is/a suffering form.”

In no way should anyone confuse these poems as a cheap substitute for the language Nguyen achieves in the book’s more “traditional” poems. In “I Keep Getting Things Wrong,” the speaker reflects on their parents’ exile from Vietnam to the United States. The speaker’s father is depicted with deity-like qualities, giving “his hand to his mother,/[while] all around them, a thousand hands reach up” for salvation. The father leaves Saigon unscathed, resettling in Southern California. But such happiness doesn’t last long, and the speaker’s brother’s death inserts itself in the present as much as it does the past. The speaker feels inclined to “eat the food/left out for [her] dead brother” and at one point, while sitting at a desk typing, remembers that she dreamed twice that she “fucked” him. The speaker cannot escape what so painfully plagues her, and though for some it might be exhausting to read, the subject is reformulated in ways that allow for greater understanding, empathy, and reflection.

In other poems, the speaker imagines herself as a house occupied with emptiness and guilt, or envisions a world where she pours pieces of herself into a dog (not that the dog has any particular significance other than being an entity in which the speaker’s desires can be projected and potentially take form). Nguyen’s poems also extend to lyric narratives. The poem “Ghost Of” recounts a family’s history, detailing what appears on the surface to be trivial matters (how parents came about naming their son, how a young daughter walks around pigeon-toed, how seat belts enumerate a mother’s failures), but that ultimately shed light on the complexity of this “story of refugees” (a subject that is all too relevant in today’s social and political landscape). Ghost Of carefully moves at a pace that is thoughtful, innovative, and elegiac, and never once shies away from speaking about death in a manner that is both personal and universal. After all, as Nguyen so aptly puts it, in times such as these, “there is no shortage of gain or loss.”

—

Esteban Rodriguez is a poet and teacher. He is the author of DUSK & DUST,  forthcoming from Hub City Press.

[REVIEW] Darker with the Lights On by David Hayden

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(Transit Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY STEPHEN MORTLAND

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David Hayden writes stories that feel like magic tricks. They begin with something familiar, an object, an experience, a relationship. Then the stories shine, they distract the eye, they muddle the familiar to the point of its disappearance. The reader is left suspended, unsure, waiting, until, finally, the familiar returns. But it has been changed. What was once familiar, an object of disregard, has been made new, a rabbit pulled back from the invisible world of the magician’s hat. Reading Hayden’s debut collection, Darker with the Lights On, is both a visceral and an intellectual experience. The stories occupy the space of dreams. The fiction is unbound by rules, or at least unbound by the rules that dictate our experience. It is, in fact, the boundlessness and unpredictability of the stories that allow them to so adequately reflect our experience of living in an ever fluctuating and tenuous world.

“Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge.” So opens Darker with the Lights On. “Egress,” the first story in the collection, is a monologue from the mind of a man perpetually falling from the top of a building. This unruly marriage of motion and permanence is representative of the rest of the stories in the collection as well. They evoke the dream phenomena of immobility, our legs churning and yet nothing really changes. The stories are filled with a sense of mystery with no direct object. We piece together clues to solve a dilemma we have not been able to articulate.

I expected to be cold but the air was mild, the speed delicious, the freshness vast and edible. I remember looking up briefly to see my fellow directors staring with alarm through the boardroom window. All except Andrew, who pinched his tie, smiled and waved.

I stopped of a sudden on the air, all my mass returned to me, seemingly in the pit of my stomach, my arms and legs flopped forward, and I gazed down to see a woman with a chestnut bob staring up – I was definitely too far away to tell it was a chestnut bob. She looked away, down at her feet or towards the door of the yellow cab that had just pulled in to the kerb, and I began falling again as quickly as before; and the cab door opened and, as she stepped in, she glanced at me again, and again I paused, juddered in the sky, and I heard the door thump closed – I was probably too far away to hear the door thump closed – and I began falling all over again with fresh delight. I sang, and the stale, old words tore away from my mouth and up towards where my life had been. (“Egress” excerpt)

The collection, put out by Little Island Press in the UK and Transit Books in the US, is beautifully rendered and meticulously crafted. Each sentence is a labyrinth, each word in conversation with the words surrounding it. Vocabulary is liberally appropriated to fit the purposes of the imagery. The resulting language is entirely innovative and startling—symbolic without submitting to easy analogy, metaphors built entirely of association. The language resists mere interpretation and is hell-bent on gaining its own autonomy. It becomes a moving, acting force in the stories alongside character and scene. The stories are as much about the shifting and capricious movements of the language as they are about the decisions and impulses of the main actors. There is no sentence in the collection that is without a trace of Hayden’s singularly distinct eccentricity or off-kilter idioms.

The radio comes on loud in the yellow bedroom. I feel like my teeth are going to fall out. My teeth fall out and then fall back in again. I get up and the sofa’s skin stretches and snaps back to itself. I stumble for the stairs. Light is washing and blinking around the trembling frame of the bedroom door. The handle rattles. I know I will be shocked if I touch it. There’s a rushing sound behind me and I run into the bathroom waving steam away. The shower is on, yellow, green, red, silver sweet wrappers spray from the head into the tub and onto the floor. I close my eyes and grab the tap turning and turning, and when the flow stops I stand up and hear silence where the radio’s clamour was. I undress and get into the bath, the heat and sweet perfume soothes me, frees me of the need to sleep that I have had for as long as I can remember.

In many of the stories, Hayden presents a version of a traditional horror or mystery story, immaculately stripped to its barest essentials. In this narrative minimalism, the absurd is highlighted and space is created wherein Hayden inserts strange emotional energy and a sense of vulnerability. Often the central horror of a story is obscured—introduced quickly and just as quickly forgotten in the flutter of linguistic flourishes. A home invader is hiding throughout a house, but we watch as a loaf of bread scuttles and presses itself against the side of a bread bin. A woman is sobbing on a sofa, but the reader is carried along a wintry beach with the sky, a vast anvil, hovering over it. Nowhere is this obscured horror more severe than in “The Bread that was Broken.” A charred corpse with an accompanying place card labeled “Thomas” is carried out and set on display amidst a dinner party. The body is introduced without explanation, Hayden’s exacting language employed in service of the truly horrific.

A fierce, continuous hissing came from the great platter and a dense weave of odours: scorched wool, bad fat, warm urine and excrement, and the bitter, chemical stink of blood. The bearers stepped away from the table. There on the platter was the blackened, smoking corpse of a man.

Moments later we are lost in the absurdist dialogue of the guests, bantering in ways that feel fraught with peculiarity about domestic matters of marriage and children. Just as the body is nearly out of mind, it returns to the narrative for updates on its cooling and cracking, its shifting and bending, the pooling of its fat and the smell of the smoke rising off of it. Given the absurdity of the charade and the strangeness of the characters, one is tempted to read the story as a sort of surrealist satire leveled at the entire human endeavor, a pained mockery of guests and corpse alike. But midway through the story, Hayden reflects on the corpse with a sincerity that makes tragic what had previously been merely symbolic.

His wrecked eye and his good eye both blind, his brain complete and darkened, all electricity gone and with it the mind. The mind that knew, or thought it knew, the purpose of taking a daily walk, of a regular haircut, of holding open a door to a woman and nodding slightly as she passed to own, momentarily, whatever faint perfume might be on the warm air closest to her hair or neck. The purpose of being Thomas.

Nineteen stories make up the collection, and, even though death and danger are constant themes, it should not be assumed that all are as macabre as the story above. A large talking crow, godlike in its abilities and its self-conception, descends to save a man in “Remains of the Dead World.” The crow goes on to (maybe) usher in the apocalypse. In “Hay,” the mine in a small town is nearly ruined with flooding when anyone who steps inside is inexplicably overcome with torrents of tears. Reading, a story about a man with a theory of a sort of literary afterlife, is a Borgesian romp that turns in on itself, forcing the reader to question the very shaky boundaries of the story’s reality. Two of my favorite stories in the collection are buried near the end, no more than a page and a half each, “After the Theatre” and “Light” are strange and poetic love stories, in celebration of commitment and in fear of love vanishing. Hayden is an expert at crafting unsettling opening sentences and endings that reframe the entire story preceding it. Often in a sentence, sometimes with only a word or two, he provides a reinterpretation that demands a second and closer reading of the story.

The collection boasts a great versatility in content, but what is most impressive from this debut is the distinct singularity and confidence of Hayden’s voice and style. The stories are not overly-beholden to his influences, and they set themselves apart by their lyricism, their minimalism, and their bold strangeness.

I found myself returning to a sentence from the story of the charred and burning man. The language encapsulated for me what I find so unique and moving in Hayden’s writing and the result of his obvious toiling over the text.

“The guests were calmed and charged, they luxuriated; the dinner enlarged what was already there.”

It would be both honest and misleading to say that not very much happens in these stories—that the rabbit, once pulled from the hat, is still a rabbit. Perhaps a more apt way of explaining it, though, is to say that David Hayden’s stories take and enlarge what is already there.

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Stephen Mortland lives in Indiana. His book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from Entropy Magazine, Necessary Fiction, 3:AM Magazine and Full Stop Magazine. His fiction has appeared in XRAY Literary Magazine, Faded Out, and Five:2:One (forthcoming). You can find him online @stephenmortland.

[REVIEW] They Call Me Güero by David Bowles

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(Cinco Puntos Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are books that go beyond their intended audience and become necessary reading for everyone. David Bowles They Call Me Güero belongs to this special group. A collection of poems about growing up near the border as a bilingual, bicultural kid, this book is a deep, nuanced, heartfelt, and culturally rich look at the life of a kid that mirrors the backgrounds of millions of US residents. Between family, school, growing pains, and first love, They Call Me Güero touches on things all kids go through, but does so in a way that also appeals to adults.

Bowles writing is proud and unapologetic. This is his vision, pulled from his blood. In a way, the collection is a thinly veiled autobiography that offers a glimpse into life on the border, into families that are from, and belong, to both sides of that dividing line. That the frontera will be at the core of the collection is something the poet establishes in the first pages and reinforces throughout the text:

We have breakfast in our favorite restorán.
Dad sips café de olla while I drink chocolate—
then we walk down uneven sidewalks, chatting
with strangers and friends in both languages.

Later we load our car with Mexican cokes and Joya,
avocados and cheese, tasty reminders of our roots.

Waiting in line at the bridge, though, my smile fades.
The border fence stands tall and ugly, invading
the carrizo at the river’s edge. Dad sees me staring,
puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, m’ijo:

“You’re a border kid, a foot on either bank.
Your ancestors crossed this river a thousand times.
No wall, no matter how tall, can stop your heritage
from flowing forever, like the Río Grande itself.”

The beauty of They Call Me Güero comes from its simplicity, which hides a multilayered discourse. This is a collection about growing up in the interstitial space between cultures, in the space where languages intersect, and in the transitional time in life where magic begins to die and reality begins to set in, even if it’s still tinged with the fantastic myths, creatures, and fears of childhood. Bowles navigates these spaces incredibly well, showing that youngsters tend to fluctuate between micro spaces where little things mean the world and macro spaces where their past and present meet to tell them things about them, their culture, and even their future.

There is a kid at the center of these poems, but that kid simply acts as the filter for a plethora of events, scenes, and an entire family. Hanging out at the house, sending time with family, sharing meals, and learning about the past are all things we would like children to experience, and that experience here can be shared and explored within the context of Otherness. Sure, cultures and languages crash, but the result is not destruction; the result is a new way of life, an ever-changing mixed culture. Take, for example, the beautiful “Uncle Joe’s History Lessons”:

My uncle Joe
is the family chronicler,
a cowboy philosopher,
our local expert in
Mexican American history—
he lived through a lot of it!

One day we head to the river,
set up chairs in our favorite spot,
a shady refuge at the edge of his ranch.
“When I was a chavalito,” he says, watching
the water flow, “didn’t nobody teach us
about our gente, about the Revolución.
They made the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
sound like a blow struck for democracy
instead of the violent land-grab it was!
This should be México, m’ijo. The border?
It crossed right over us.

Es más, when I was in elementary
they didn’t let me call myself Jose?!
It was Joseph this and Joseph that.
So I became Joe. And forget using Spanish.
They caught you saying a single word, y
¡PAS! You got smacked.
Spellbound and angry, I ask Uncle Joe
if that’s why he never went to college
even though he’s so smart.

“Pos, si?. Also, nobody believed in me.
Fíjate. When I was in 7th grade like you?
Counselor asked me what I wanted to be.
A lawyer, I said. That white lady almost
laughed in my face. ‘What? No, Joseph.
You should go to a technical college,
become a mechanic. No shame in
Hard work!’ Vieja racista.

“Still, I kept at it, Güero. Studied hard.
But in high school? Turned in a paper
for world history about the Conquista.
I worked so hard on it, did research,
revised and edited, todo ese jale.
Know what I got? An F. I’m not kidding.
Teacher said it was too good.
Obviously plagiarized. After that, pos,
I gave up. Gatekeepers weren’t letting
this Chicano through.”

Then he leans forward and looks
at me, super serious, his eyes suddenly red
with rage or sadness or hope.
Even the chachalacas go quiet,
like they’re listening, too.
“Don’t you let them stop you, chamaco.
Push right through them gates.
It’s your right. You deserve a place
at that table. But when you take your seat,
don’t let it change you. Represent us, m’ijo,
all the ones they kept down. You are us.
We are you.”

Conversations, memories of stories told by grandma, games with friends; all these and more come together in this collection. They make it unique and universal, simple to understand and heartfelt, beautiful and ugly in many of the truths they carry. Since they were written with kids in mind, the poems have a Dick and Jane quality to them, but that only makes their enjoyment more immediate, the same way it happens with Langston Hughes work.

With They Call Me Güero, Bowles has added an important text to borderland writing that would have made the great Gloria Anzaldúa proud. This is a collection that resonates with readers, and that given the current political landscape, demands to be read.

[REVIEW] Against Memoir by Michelle Tea

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(Feminist Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Editor’s note:

Mandy asked to have these notes published with the review. They are crucial to understanding the text and the review, so I decided to have them before the piece:
The term “womyn” is used to describe second-wave TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who are cisgender and primarily white.
The term “womxn” is used to describe intersectional feminists who accept and/or experience gender fluidity and do not subscribe to the gender binary.
When the terms “radical feminist” and “radical feminism” are used, it is not a nod to or endorsement of TERFs, but rather feminists that are often deemed too unpalatable, too violent, or “too much” to capture the attention of the mainstream feminist movement.

Michelle Tea is not one to mince words. In her latest essay collection, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms she tells you exactly what you’re getting and they come in dedicated sections on Art & Music, Love & Queerness, and Writing & Life. It is, arguably, this kind of directness that the modern third-wave feminist movement is sometimes lacking, to its detriment.

Against Memoir is a blend of memoir, journalism, and social anthropology. Tea has an insatiable curiosity about people who go largely ignored in the mainstream. Her book discusses transphobia at the lesbian haven Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, contains a eulogy for radical feminist and would-be Warhol murderer Valerie Solanas and a tribute to the lesbian biker gang HAGS, as well as the challenges of being a queer parent and trying to have a baby via fertility treatments in a system intended for straight people. The essays don’t shy away from topics like first loves, prostitution, drug use, the struggle of getting sober, dysfunctional parents, sexual assault, adolescent sex, alcoholism, summers spent getting fired from first one job then another, and finding the right shade of hair dye after several unfortunate attempts. Against Memoir is a memoir of a feral childhood and a life spent in queer counterculture doing damn well what she pleased.

Tea has been giving voice to these populations whom popular feminism has often left behind long before it was popular to do so. She’s been writing since 1998 with the publication of her first book, a novel titled The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. In total, she’s published 14 books including Against Memoir and edited four anthologies.  She’s currently the Amethyst Editions editor at Feminist Press.

Tea embraces a kind of radical feminism that, despite our progress, many are afraid to touch. Hers isn’t the rah-rah, feel-good, commodified feminism that’s easily marketed and sold. This is the feminism of sex workers and butch dyke biker gangs and womxn who are not afraid to forcibly remove men from the streets, responding to patriarchal violence with violent reparations of their own. This feminism isn’t cute. It doesn’t look good mass-produced and printed on a t-shirt. This is the feminism the patriarchy fears most; the feminism of womxn who were ahead of their time.

There’s nothing “cute” about this necessary feminism or the people it serves––they’re not the underserved population that the general public generally wants to rally behind. I imagine people getting a mailer with their pictures and pre-printed address stickers and their stories, particularly those of sex work and drug use, not garnering empathy even from those who would self-identify as charitable––and dare I say feminist––people. And this is precisely why Michelle Tea and the people she loves who appear in these essays occupy the fringes of society. Not because there’s something wrong with them, but because society at large doesn’t know what to do with people who reject convention, choosing instead to live life on their own terms outside of patriarchal norms, and thrive in the underground.

All too often, feminism is sugarcoated and made palatable to the masses. This in itself is a system of oppression because it appeals to the prejudices of the day and pushes only as far as the more acceptable forms of discrimination allow. With the inevitable byproduct of having the most polarizing members of the movement forced to wait in the wings, this makes for slow progress.

In the essay “HAGS In Your Face,” Tea describes the biker gang womxn as “the deepest, wildest, truest feminist they frightened other feminists, so feminist they could shit-talk the movement and write it off as trifling because they were living the most hardcore feminist lives that only someone like Valerie Solanas would have recognized and understood. And me. I understood too.”

In the same way Tea’s feminism lacks candy coating, so does her writing style. It’s clear and direct; it is without fluff and doesn’t bother with poetry. Her writing is unabashedly colloquial and makes radical feminism accessible without compromising its steadfastness.

Against Memoir boils down to an exploration silencing: who is given a platform for their voice, both inside and outside of the movement; whose voice is uplifted and represented; and who is palatable enough to garner grassroots support and inspire new feminist recruits. I don’t get the impression Tea stakes her feminism on her ability (or desire) to win people over. Her feminism is hard-won––something she gained through the trials and tribulations of lived experience––and the acceptance of her radical feminism into mainstream feminism should not hinge on the whims of others who know nothing of the particular oppression to which she bears witness.

Likewise, Against Memoir is about representation: who has it, who needs it, and who deserves more of it. The groups where Tea found herself and her feminism, the groups about which she writes, and the community she’s helped foster in these fringes fit comfortably in the last slot. And that’s what makes Michelle Tea’s work essential––in a time when “feminist” is a buzzword, her words are a bellwether.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born who now calls Columbus, Ohio home. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Entropy Magazine, The Citron Review, Barely South Review, The Missing Slate, PANK Magazine, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Her poems are forthcoming in Southern Women’s Review and Heavy Feather Review. Read more on her book blog offthebeatenshelf.com.