Jacob Spears

[REVIEW] The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

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argonauts

Graywolf Press

160 pp, $23.00

 

Review by Jacob Spears

 

The unsettled prose in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reflects the intractability of her concerns in writing about identity, personhood, and how we make relationships with others. The white space that surrounds each paragraph is a return to the fragmentary form she developed in Bluets, which also found Nelson using the intimacy of her life to write about larger cultural ideas. The Argonauts, however, is a more difficult work, interested in expressing concerns about gender and normativity without attempting to situate those concepts through a fixed discourse. Every bit as erudite as her previous book, The Art of Cruelty, though not as magisterial and academic, The Argonauts embarks on a voyage of exploration in which the ship, like the Argo, “designates molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip,” intent on retaining “a sense of the fugitive.”

Though it swells in and out of its address, Argonauts unfolds mostly as a confessional written to the second-person ‘you’ that is her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who very publicly underwent a transition from female to male through the course of their relationship. “Something about identity,” Nelson quips, “was loose and hot in our house.” As a memoir, Nelson’s account of intimacy is at turns light and disturbing, charming and uncomfortable. What if where I am is what I need? she asks, citing Deborah Hay. “Before you, I always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situations. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.” Argonauts is an attempt to chart this course in which her position and experience—like language—is anchored in the moment of exchange. A place, context, or sentence inevitably shifts understanding, performance, and intention. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Sidewalks, by Valeria Luiselli

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Coffee House Press

120 pp, $15.95

 

Review by Jacob Spears

 

In the essay “Joseph Brodsky’s Room and a Half,” Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli searches out the Russian-American poet’s grave on the island of San Michele in Venice. As she gets lost among the tombstones of other famous artists and writers, she meditates on the futileness of seeking out the burial sites of authors whose work she reveres and the gap that exists between a work and its creator. Her goal of communing with the dead is stymied by an elderly lady who scavenges the graves of people like Brodsky, collecting anything of value some admirer might have left behind. Luiselli feels the fleetingness of her efforts to find the literary in the world, while the elderly woman lets out a cackle, scratches her legs, and is on her way.

Born in Mexico City, Luiselli takes from her experiences as a resident and traveler of cosmopolitan cities to reflect on the author’s place in the twenty-first century metropolis. Like Faces in the Crowd, a novella released simultaneously in the United States, Sidewalks is a collection of essays that imagines a fluid relationship between writers, readers, and the world. If literature does engender readers who wish the world appeared more like art, it also has a history of condemning those who believe the demands of art can be fulfilled by life. In the European literature that has so clearly colored Luiselli’s life as a reader, the most that can be hoped for is to copy what’s already been produced like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet. Which is maybe why her attempt to have some graveyard connection with a dead author feels so futile. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Self Unstable, by Elisa Gabbert

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self unstable

Black Ocean

96 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Jacob Spears

 

 

In a world turning increasingly to the virtual, the brief prose poems in Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable read like postcards or dispatches from a new frontier in which the map is just as much a part of reality as the territory. It is a change in form from her debut collection of verse poetry, The French Exit, and because most of the pieces in The Self Unstable are longer than a tweet, at first glance their brevity calls to mind status updates, social media, and the world of our virtual selves. The connotation seems intentional, as many of Gabbert’s entries in the book come up against conversations that social media encourages only the self-obsessed and that what is disguised as insight in a post is so often banal. By weaving witty aphorisms, poetic images, and personal reflections into each entry, Gabbert charts out new territories for conceiving of the self and our relationships to the world, both real and virtual.

Each one embarks on a line of thought, for instance, child rearing: “If you suspect your child is a genius, observe it carefully.” After pointing out high curiosity levels and a sense of humor as baby genius indicators, Gabbert’s satirical joke reaches its punch line:  “Always keep a control child nearby for comparison.”  But the narrator moves away from the joke and follows the contours of that line of thought. “I strongly suspect that I was a control child. My brother convinced me I wanted to be a boy. Or, because of my brother, I wanted to be a boy.” By the end we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar place we did not expect to be taken, pondering questions of identity. As a result, new ways of thinking emerge in The Self Unstable that are surprising, yet they resonant with sense of familiarity. Continue reading →