In the title poem of The Keys to The Jail (BOA Editions, 92 pages), the latest stunning collection from poet Keetje Kuipers, the poet writes, “We tell our sad stories / until the dog hangs his head.” Those two lines shadow the collection’s heavy sadness, but it’s a sadness from which Kuipers crawls out of, escaping the morbid nature of life and displaying a gift for relating her experiences of the world. We feel we are discovering the world as she is: “the breath / is our own, the voices belong/ to you and me.” The poem that follows, “Birthday […]
Category: Book Reviews
Of Hope and Devastation: Michael Cunningham’s ‘The Snow Queen’
by Irene Huhulea
“A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.” So begins The Snow Queen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages), the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham. Like his previous novels, The Hours and By Nightfall, Cunningham combines delicate prose with poignant subject matter, exploring the themes of love and mortality through the relationships of his characters. Beginning in 2004 on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, The Snow Queen tells the story of a group of friends across a span of […]
Books, Not Just the Characters, Are the Point: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s ‘Severina’
by David F. Young
In his introduction to Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Severina (Yale University Press, 112 pages), poet and translator Chris Andrews writes that for readers expecting the “baroque exuberance” of fellow Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, Rey Rosa’s fiction will come as a surprise. Not only does Rey Rosa eschew the colorful language of his predecessor for more restrained and economical prose, he allows dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations to regularly puncture his character’s worlds. In this respect, Andrews observes, the writer who Rey Rosa remains the most in debt to is Jorge Luis Borges. Reading Severina—only the fifth of Rey Rosa’s many works […]
An Elegy and a Testament to a Culture: Joan Naviyuk Kane’s ‘Hyperboreal’
by Maggie Millner
“I could make passage / A thousand obscure, / Contradictory ways,” claims Joan Naviyuk Kane in “Mother Tongues,” a poem from the collection, Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 65 pages), winner of AWP’s Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. In five precise, prosodic quatrains, the poem navigates vast and difficult territory, memorializing both the poet’s mother and her mother’s native tongue, the King Island dialect of Inupiaq. An Inupiaq/Inuit, and among the last living speakers of the King Island dialect, Kane contends with biological, cultural, and political threats to her ancestral community, including climate change, language death, and the diaspora prompted […]
The Whole of the Iceberg: Rabih Alameddine’s ‘An Unnecessary Woman’
by Rebecca Huval
In his fifth book, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 304 pages), San Francisco author Rabih Alameddine examines the past and present life of a 72-year-old Lebanese divorcee and translator, Aaliyah, who has distanced herself from family and lost her only two friends. As she holes up in her spacious Beirut apartment and braces for bombs during the Lebanese Civil War or wanders the streets of her city decades later, Alameddine’s novel stays lodged within the confines of Aaliyah’s erudite mind, where she bounces effortlessly between Fernando Pessoa and Bruno Schultz. Literature is her only salve. For sticking with Aaliyah, the […]
The Archaeology of Gossip: Edmund White’s ‘Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris’
by Daniel O'Connell
In 1983, with a Guggenheim fellowship and his acclaimed novel A Boy’s Own Story in tow, Edmund White left what he calls New York’s “gay ghetto” and moved to Paris. The site of what White thought would be a jaunting continental vacation, a respite from the AIDS outbreak and the long shadow cast upon the utopian project of sexual liberation, Paris served as his home until 1998 and ushered in a renaissance for one of the progenitors of the gay novel. In his new memoir, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (Bloomsbury, 261), White recounts these fifteen years abroad […]
Claiming Her Origin and Her Life Apart From It: Gillian Conoley’s ‘Peace’
by Maggie Millner
The poems in Gillian Conoley’s Peace (Omnidawn, 112 pages) are characteristically spacious, speculative, full of breath and light. Drawing on a range of registers—the geographic and technologic, emotional and workaday—Conoley explores several categories of peace, broadly construed: the peace of armistice, of reflection, of liberation, of death. In her sparse, inventive lyric mode, Conoley weaves personal and political threads into an incantatory not-quite-narrative whose power lies in the gravid spaces between juxtaposed images and thoughts. It is in the emergent rhythms of “each euphoriant ephemery” that Peace finds its logic—and, perhaps, its peace. […]
A Transgendered Youth’s Search for Self: Kim Fu’s ‘For Today I Am a Boy’
by David F. Young
Over the past several years, the transgender perspective—once a marginal voice even within the LGBT community—has gradually emerged into the mainstream. In 2003, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex helped raise awareness of gender identity issues when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Elsewhere, transgender actress Laverne Cox has found acclaim on a popular show, and actor Jared Leto recently won an Oscar for his depiction of a transgender woman. Recognition is not tantamount to acceptance—for this, a long road still lies ahead—but Kim Fu has chosen an auspicious time for her first novel, For Today I Am a Boy (Houghton Mifflin […]
All That Woe Out There: Rob Fitterman’s ‘No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.’
by Maggie Millner
“I am a genius of sadness,” reads a line from Robert Fitterman’s book-length poem, No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (Ugly Duckling Presse, 80 pages). “I am a prism / through which sadness could be / Divided into its infinite spectrums.” It’s as good a description as any of the book’s central premise: the appropriation of public articulations of loneliness and angst from blog posts, song lyrics, and ads, and the collaging of these excerpts, without context, in a relentless, eighty-page masterwork of Weltschmerz. Invariably first-person and homogenously histrionic, quotations give rise to an emergent “I” that is at […]
What It Means to Be Alive and Dying at the Same Time: Jack Mueller’s ‘Amor Fati’
by Maggie Millner
Amor Fati, a thick volume of new and selected poems from Beat affiliate and once San Francisco fixture Jack Mueller, truly lives up to its name (Lithic Press; 177 pages). “Love of fate,” as the title translates, appears in these pages in many forms: as contemplative acceptance, surly fatalism, awed joy. One moment pondering the nature of death, the next exuberantly describing a bird, Mueller vacillates between optimism and resignation as he moves between the registers of philosophical abstraction and concrete observation. Distinctly the work of an older writer, Amor Fati tackles almost exclusively cosmic questions—about mortality, love, and our […]
Troubled & Young, But That’s O.K.: Adam Wilson’s ‘What’s Important Is Feeling’
by Joseph Bien-Kahn
What’s Important Is Feeling (Harper Perennial, 198 pages), the new collection of short stories by Adam Wilson, begins with a few lines from Denis Johnson’s poem “Enough”: “as if we held in the heavens of our arms/not cherishable things, but only the strength/ it takes to leave home and then go back again.” The push and pull of home—the fear of arriving unchanged, still incomplete—is an ever-present theme throughout Wilson’s fiction. His first novel, Flatscreen, told the story of Eli Schwartz, a stoner in his early 20s who lives at his parents’ house in a ritzy Massachusetts suburb, a young […]
The Lone Survivor Bears Witness to Atrocity: Jessica Bozek’s ‘The Tales’
by Maggie Millner
The Tales by Jessica Bozek (Les Figues Press, 78 pages) consists mostly of prose poems from a variety of first-person narrators, all on the subject of a fictional genocide known as “Operation Sleep.” Inspired largely by the literature of witness, on which she based a seminar at Boston University called Reading Disaster, Bozek tells the grim story of a land whose citizens die en masse upon a visitation from a soldier who hails from a powerful nation and is fluent in the local tongue. When the soldier speaks, the people of the land sink into the earth—except one, known as […]