Archive for category: Book Reviews

Virga

by Shin Yu Pai

Empty Bowl Press (Aug. 1 2021)

$16 paperback

72 pages

I knew Shin Yu Pai before I read Virga. That is, I could choose to say it that way. I knew her name, her face over Zoom, some professional information, and educational material/advice/readings she gave to my cohort as an authority figure, but did I really know her? No, but Virga is the unfurling of a flower, brimming with wistful, contemplative energy, revealing to us the essence of its maker, Shin Yu Pai: an instructor, mother, past Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington (2015-2017), and captivating poet. The overwhelming boom of the book’s tone is more than enough to corroborate her achievements and my gushing.

I am not religious, nor even spiritual. Yet I felt a weight in my chest lift and settle with the nadir of each poem in this work. Some poems, like “Poems for an Aeolian harp or paintings for the wind,” are sparse. Not in the way that they are missing something, but that they are showing us exactly what we need to see and nothing more. Others are rich with colorful images—koi swimming “in the cataract of blue atlas” or when “shafts of light mimic / rain falling at a slant.” At the beginning of each poem, I found myself bracing for a new venture into tension wrapped in peace wrapped in tension. And underneath all of the trappings of modern poetry, there is a current of discovery tinged with loss. Throughout our lives, we question our meaning in this world, why everything is as it is, how we can come to terms with our short lives and “the urge / to survive.” These are questions that are impossible to answer. But she asks for the sake of the search. 

Pai’s poems focus on being mothered and becoming a mother oneself, the stereotyping of Asian people, Asian folklore, her personal history, and the serenity of nature presented as only itself. Buddhist principles and terminology weave themselves into each poem. Since I am no religious scholar—merely a writer well-acquainted with Google—I credit her for anticipating my ignorance. She provides particular pertinent information that is vital to reaching the meaning she aspires to show us. Though I’m not of the opinion that anyone should have to explain themselves (and really, it’s fitting to the themes of Virga for me to not know already), it is helpful to someone outside of the experience. Through this remarkable, cohesive, 100-ish page piece, I have come to know more of Shin Yu Pai. To delve into those depths that we often pass over on our trip across the water’s surface, only looking at our own reflections. To commiserate. To know the amplitude of both a mother’s love and pain, another person’s formative moments, the lived experience of a Taiwanese-American woman like Shin Yu Pai herself. That is what it means to experience Virga, and I highly recommend giving it a read.

Read Micah Dela Cueva’s Interview with Shin Yu Pai here.

intricacies are just cracks in the wall

By Sarah Margaret Henry

122 pages.  Still Poetry Photography.  $15.00 (paper).

intricacies are just cracks in the wall, a debut collection of poems and lyrical prose by Sarah M. Henry, came to my attention by word of mouth and via Goodreads.  There was a small buzz of excitement among my college friends regarding this book.  I noticed that a few of them were marking the book as ‘want to read’ on Goodreads.  A few weeks later they switched their status to ‘read’ and left compelling reasons for why I should read this collection.  I was told, “it’s not like any poems you’ve read before.”  

While poetry is not usually my genre of choice, I was willing to give intricacies a shot and I’m glad I did.  This book isn’t comprised of just hidden meanings and figurative language like a lot of the poems I have been exposed to in school.  Henry’s intricacies are just cracks in the wall is different than your run-of-the-mill poetry collection because it tells a story that is typically silenced.  

intricacies are just cracks in the wall is an example of narrative poetry.  Narrative poems tell stories or a single story through a collection of poems.  This device is not new, but it was new to me.  The only other narrative poems I have read are ancient epics The Odyssey and The Iliad, but this story was much different than those.  While the epics are made up of formal poetry and special syllabic formations (iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter),  intricacies are just cracks in the wall slips between informal and formal poetry.   

intricacies follows Cassidy (“Cass-i-dy, say it loud, say it proud”) through three relationships—a relationship with Jack, Oliver, and ultimately herself.  Told in the first-person point of view, these poems are broken into three parts: “gradual crucifixion,” “perforated internment,” and “self germination.”  These three parts tell the story of a girl who ends up in an emotionally-abusive relationship, eventually breaks free and finds herself a new, healthy love interest,  and also learns to love herself again.  

Henry quickly displays Cassidy as a proud young adult eager to take on the world “that is [hers] for the taking.”  She unabashedly takes up space, as her mom told her to do, and she wonders if there is enough of her to fill the new apartment that “on paper / [she] knows is [hers].”  She gives herself three days to get settled in before starting her first day as an editorial assistant.  

After Cassidy, the audience is introduced to Jack, who seems amiable and gregarious upon first encounter.  Jack helps Cassidy move in.  Before leaving for the day, he scribbles a note on a business card “Hey Socrates, / Since you’re so interested in commiserating, Tuesday, 7:00, Pints Bar & Grille?” and leaves it in Cassidy’s annotated copy of The Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant.  The Critique of Judgement is about aesthetics and beauty.  Henry has Jack very artfully use Kant to ask Cassidy out.  By using Kant, it is as though he is latently telling Cassidy that she too is beautiful.  

Cassidy and Jack meet up first at Pints and then again at the Midtown Scholar (a bookstore in Harrisburg).  At the Midtown Scholar is where readers first learn Jack is a little bit of a chaotic character as he “tears loose the copyright page” from one of the books.  He proceeds to write a poem on the page and hands it to Cassidy.  Through this, readers see he doesn’t mind destruction even if it’s for the sake of beauty.    

The relationship between Cassidy and Jack continues to develop and Henry places subtle hints that more red flags are going up.  Jack begins to call her Cassie “Before [she] can say / It’s Cassi-”.  While that in itself isn’t wholly problematic, it shows he doesn’t listen to Cassidy who is proud of her three-syllable name.  Henry also brings in the importance of consent.  She writes that Jack “barely gives [Cassidy] enough breath / To collect a no from [her] lungs” when, on date five, Jack tries to get more intimate.  Despite these red flags, when Jack’s landlord’s building is foreclosed, the two move in together because isn’t that what people do who are in a happy, healthy relationship?    

Henry mostly maneuvers between free-verse poems and lyrical prose with a crown of “Panicked!” sonnets thrown in towards the middle of the collection.  While some pieces are longer with more complicated subject matters (58) and others are bite-sized and easily digestible (61), each selection allows the reader to get more inside of Cassidy’s brain and her way of seeing and interpreting the world around her.  

Sonnets are usually associated with love stories and happy endings.  Henry artfully places her sonnets 65 pages into the collection.  However, the pages do not crescendo into a traditional love sonnet for Jack.  Cassidy has realized by this point that though her apartment “looks like a mouth / Filled with missing teeth / [she knows] they were rotting cavities” and “Everything missing is his.”  

Instead of being a love sonnet for someone else, Henry’s “Panicked!” crown of sonnets conveys a message of self-rebuilding and reconstruction.  It is also showing a literal restructuring as Cassidy begins to take medication and starts to reorder her life.  From the first sonnet, Henry focuses on giving Cassidy a “meaning to existence,” an existence for herself, without Jack.  While it is hard at first (“Something simple as a broken teacup / Could cut so deep and fully overcrowd / My mind”), Cassidy begins to reimagine what life can be like (“A shadow slowly growing some color, / Metastasizing into a body”).

intricacies are just cracks in the wall is an important read due to its structure and its content.  While people may be familiar with narrative poetry due to ancient epics, readers can experience a modern-day narrative poetry experience through this collection.  People who are usually put off by the metaphorical and figurative language of poetry should give intricacies a chance because it puts storytelling in a new light.  

 We don’t typically get to hear what goes on during an abusive relationship while it is happening.  Henry uses the concepts of destruction and beauty throughout intricacies.  She shows a relationship, fragments it, and then readers get to watch while Cassidy picks up the pieces and redefines what love means.  

All this being said, readers should be cautious when approaching Henry’s collection.  It digs into an unhealthy, emotionally-abusive relationship that may be triggering or off-putting for some people.  By writing this book, Henry is helping to erase the stigma that surrounds abuse and abusive relationships.  This book is an important read not just because it is able to tell a story through poetry but because the story she is telling is one that often isn’t voiced. 

In her debut, poet Sarah Wolfson becomes both pastoral cryptographer and medium to the wonderfully odd. She is artist and guide, purposefully misplacing the familiar and mundane to a corner of altered earth where magic is once again possible and the strange beauty of nature, home, motherhood, and language is restored. A Common Name for Everything explores these categories with renewed vision. The title itself an entryway for timid readers that at once ask for a predictable book whilst also secretly pleading for wonder and depth. Where my grandfather walked everywhere with a farmers’ almanac and I sat puzzled with a hunger for fairytale, I now see nothing is quite so spellbinding as a cornfield or tomato vine … the doctrine of a particular apple, a mother’s love … the idioms of “if” and the prayers of sheep. If not to exist in a house of wonders without walls or clocks, why do we venture outside?

The collection begins with a question, “have you been to this place?”, a place you surely have been since this spot is earth, but after the first few pages, you can only name certain things you’ve felt in dreams, half-memories, and childhood impossibilities that felt true, but this is earth … you certainly have been. To sit alone on a field and have the moon be yours, alone, because your mother said so? Is it still not so? To have a body full of colonies because your father deems it a “blossoming cooperative of cells” … do you not then have starlit skies in your stomach and stories, many stories, in your eyes? Sarah brings us back to the earth of our childhood, the earth of wonder with a moon off kilter that we somehow get to call our own. 

Home: a planet on a planet with a kitchen sink draining spoiled milk. Where minced garlic means memory and a large grapefruit a tumor. The direction of the rooms does not always make sense—disappointment, safety, death, wonderment, blunder—but it is a place we have either been or make. 

Motherhood? Curious Taxonomy? In Sarah’s words, “if you believe at any moment any being might abruptly change direction …” continue on, please. It is one thing to devour a book and walk on. It is another to carry it with you back into your body, your home, your little corner of earth and give it recourse to live again each day. 

So here, an excerpt from a curious section called “Earth-Things”:

“— We’ve lost the trail

on purpose to find

the bog which suggests

another life: not an afterlife,

But the prospect

of a moist, colloidal

parallel existence. After

the bog the mountain goes to bramble,

which raises lines

on our still uncertain

Legs. What good are we 

with our three names

for birds and our zero

language for their songs?

We’re up the mountain 

to tend something 

Electric. We carry a hunch

our future may be wrapped 

in the whisper of a bear. 

We lose the mountain

to find the bramble. —”

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Kevin Noble Maillard’s children’s book—filled with inspiration for adults—illuminates the complexities of culture through food.  Bread, the stuff of life, is the medium to enlighten our understandings of history and diversity.  His book is authored with the youngest readers (up to age 6) in mind. Yet, it carries a message for us all.

Maillard himself represents a multitude of cultures, including African American and Seminole Indigenous American heritages. As the author notes: Fry bread is us. Fry bread is everything.  Throughout the book we see depictions of people young and old who represent the broad spectrum of identities through their physical appearance. Blond with light color skin through dark-haired corn rows and rich brown skin tones are all identifying with Native American family heritage and the symbols and sustenance of the classic fry bread.

Fry bread is the essence of soul food; the physically and spiritually nourishing survival foods wrought from captivity and separation from indigenous cultures that is manufactured through government-sponsored oppression. Similar to the fried chicken that became a necessary staple of survival for Black Americans escaping enslavement and in response to the deprivations of Jim Crow,  fry bread is a simple dish that is filling and, through the frying, well-preserved to last for long treks or long days with uncertain access to nutritious meals. Maillard does an excellent job of transmitting the messages related to tortuous histories in powerful and accessible ways for youngsters while providing meaningful insights for the adults who will share this reading experience with them.

Fry bread was invented when the Diné people were removed from their land and given government rations. Maillard does not ignore this truth but portrays it in a way kids can understand: “Fry bread is history. The long walk, the stolen land, strangers in our own world with unknown food, we made new recipes from what we had.”

For adults who may not know this history, and for children when they’re older, the author’s note at the end of the book gives the more thorough history of brutal relocation.

This book is an heirloom that will grow in meaning as the youngest audience members develop in their skills as readers and their curiosity blossoms as pursuers of knowledge. The work is also bookended with extensive lists of Indigenous Tribes and Nations, illustrating for the readers the expansive and too often overlooked presence of Native Americans.  In these ways, Fry Bread completes its mission as an artful and impactful chronicling of our sometimes hidden histories. The book is a welcome addition to the diversity of our childhood libraries.

Recipes are woven throughout the tale showing us how the mix and measure echo who we are as we acknowledge and uphold traditions. The youth oriented narrative subtlety challenges notions of self and what appearances say about us. Accordingly, Fry Bread challenges assumptions and offers important messages of unity.

There could be no better time nor better lesson for our growing generation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most overwhelming task in authoring The Water Dancer is overcoming the rampant cultural inclination toward schadenfreude—that is, the pleasures derived from observing the misfortunes of another, especially a particularly successful other. His achievements as an essayist, christened by Toni Morrison as the second coming of James Baldwin, already have earned him the skeptical ire of preeminent scholar-cum- sociopolitical-critic Cornel West. Wading into the rarefied world of powerhouse literary fiction is for Coates a daring swim in perilous and dare I say shark-infested waters. Doing so while very likely under the tutelage of the late Morrison herself, however, vastly increases his odds of success. And, similar to the complexities of Toni Morrison’s works, this is not an easy read. We are caused to linger over each word, juicing each sentence for the fullness of its nourishment.

Novelist Coates sustains his deft hand at constructing uniquely powerful and lyric sentences for which his essays have garnered due acclaim. He has stated that the book required ten years of authorship. That weight is apparent, and the struggle renders a fiction, which while not effortless, is not mired in anticipated tropes, excessive hyperbole, nor vapid descriptions. In this book, Coates displays an adept ability to illustrate settings and characters based on the nuanced actions of the characters he brings to life within his world. This does not feel like a novice effort. It is replete with the studied narrative devices that bring breadth and life to the pages. The result is a powerful exploration of magical realism in an antebellum setting with a clear nod to the classic Beloved that more than meets the task Ta-Nehisi Coates has set for himself. Task being indeed an operative word in what I find to be a queerly mystical uncovering of the peculiar institution at the heart of this work.

Coates rarely uses the words slave or slavery throughout the novel. He refers to the labors of plantation servitude as the Task and those forced to endure those labors are the Tasked. The enslavers, referred to as the Quality, discover themselves bound within their own institutions: The Whiteness of their own construction inextricably ensnares them. By juxtaposition, Coates explores the ways in which the Tasked are the talented, thoughtful, and creative embodiments that generate the social, cultural, and economic goods which the Quality are ill-equipped to produce. Due to their ineptitude and self-affirmed brilliance in the midst of their actual mediocrity, the Quality cause the collapse of their agrarian markets and rural estates.

Meanwhile, the magic resides within the Tasked. And so, the queerness here is not overtly one of sexual or gender identity expression, but one of dismantling the normative by exposing the hidden institutional histories and turning popular perceptions of enslavement on their heads. This telling bypasses many of the often-recounted daily tortures and horrors, refocusing our attentions instead on the efforts among the Tasked to create dignity and freedoms within the apartheid of daily life.

Hiram is the intellectually and magically gifted protagonist. He has a remarkable power of total recall, with the exception of memories of his estranged mother. That gift and the commensurate limitation are linked to his power of Conduction, the ability to instantaneously transport from one location to another. Hiram has the potential to become the conductor of his own Underground Railroad. He, however, is not in full control of his teleportation ability. His power is directly affected by his inability to fully conjure, and thereby confront, the pains of separation from his mother who in his younger days was sold to another far away plantation. His unique gifts mark him as outstanding among the Tasked and require that he keep his abilities on the down low.

Coates enhances his focus on dignity within the confines of the Task by emphasizing delayed satisfaction that toys with a further queering of the enslavement narrative as we follow Hiram through a sexual awakening of sorts. At age nineteen, he somewhat suddenly displays a romantic interest in Sophia, another of the Tasked and the concubine of a neighboring man of the Quality. Intentional or not, Coates establishes a non-normative and anti-stereotypical relationship: in Hiram’s rather advanced years this is the first consideration of an intimate interlude, which culminates in a drunken intertwining of the arms while gazing at the stars. The rather lengthy chaste courtship of these two, and Hiram’s lack of earlier sexual desires, runs counter to heteronormative expectations under optimal conditions, let alone in a context in which one’s potential love interest could be sold or otherwise unduly spirited away. In the midst of our greatest national tragedy, Coates brings us a self-conducted politics of respectability and access to a utopia represented by an Underground to freedom.

This queering of the cultural enslavement narrative questions the predominant perspectives on rebellion and revolution in the midst of the institutionalization of chattel slavery. The power of Conduction interrupted by the inability to remember the penultimate event of Hiram’s Tasking existence is a metaphor for the nation’s reticence to fully face, reconcile, and thereby become empowered by our history. The greatest gift of The Water Dancer is Coates’ intention to uncover the Underground and provide us a path to reimagining our tortured past. Toppling norms not only provides creative insights into what has been but proffers opportunities to create futures that challenge the dominant beliefs that structure our present.

A collection of geographically diverse essays, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, works to illustrate how seemingly disparate refugee narratives can interlock the universality of homeland flight. With seventeen international writers reflecting on the refugee experience, the collection, edited by Viet Thang Nguyen, attempts to humanize the demonized, and give voice to individuals that have been deprived of an identity.

The opening essay, “Last, First, Middle” by Joseph Azam, is concurrently an homage to the unknown grandfather that named him, as well as a meditative reflection on a central theme that runs through the collection—homogenizing oneself into a suspicious culture:

My name was a product of my grandfather’s hopes and conviction; it was my inheritance…I would rid myself of the name Mohammad, which I could not fashion into anything that could pass.

Many of the finest essays draw from this common thread of assimilation anxiety; passing, fitting in, while also blithely chipping away at your ancestry to take advantage of the opportunities and anonymity of the United States.

In Reyna Grande’s “The Parent Who Stays,” assimilation anxiety is woven together with familial loss and the linguistic barriers of a young child whose lack of descriptive language does not allow them to process what is happening:

These words weren’t part of my vocabulary, so I never used them—I described my feelings through stories…I was a victim of a consequence of migration that is often overlooked or given little importance—psychological violence of watching your family fall apart.

Another standout essay is Joseph Kertes’ “Second Country.”

This piece is a meditation on a hidden yet common migrant experience—the hostile rejection of home; an anti-patriotism that develops when one’s own people and government are the cause of suffering, when escape from a homeland is the only opportunity:

The other memorable thing my father used to say, after years in Canada, was that ‘Europe is a failed experiment. It should be paved over and turned into a parking lot.’

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, internally displaced people or IDPs now form the majority of the more than 60 million people who have escaped global persecution since 2015. (IDPs are people that have been first forced from their homes, but not their country of origin; while refugees and asylum seekers are people who have been initially forced from their homes and countries.)

Many of these IDPs are from countries with protracted civil wars, bigotry, gang violence, government corruption, or simply no economic opportunities. These factors leave people with little alternative but to become asylum seekers, usually in neighboring countries just as underfunded that quickly strain under the financial and security pressures of hosting the refugees.

The refugee crisis of 2015 sparked a global debate about the social responsibility of displaced people. Under the Trump administration, the United States has cut accepted refugees from 110,000 to 45,000 per year. Global ring-wing political parties, from Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary to Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party in Brazil, have taken advantage of people’s fear, consolidating power with divisive and fear-driven rhetoric. What these seventeen essays do so well is deconstruct that manipulative language, and illustrate with moments of reinvention and the reclamation of identity that the global refugee crisis is not one of border wars and xenophobia, but of liberalism in its truest form—egalitarianism in the face of tragedy. The belief that open-minded altruism will bring relief to those not only escaping to save their lives, but for a life outside of an indifferent and hostile homeland.

Dayton J Shafer has been involved with theatre for over fifteen years as a writer, director, and actor.  His original pieces have been performed in fringe festivals, barns, abandoned factories, converted laundromats, black boxes, and street  sides. His poetry and prose has appeared in The Mountain Ear, Split Lip, BULL, and Mock Turtle Zine.

Sugar Land is the story of one hell of a character called Miss Dara. The novel, divided into three sections, is set  in 1920’s Texas, and spans Miss Dara’s whole life. We meet her as a 19-year-old when she falls for her best friend, Rhodie. The attraction is mutual and they spend a few weeks together in bliss before being caught by Rhodie’s mother. The local preacher is brought in to deal with the girls. Rhodie leaves town for college and Dara takes a job in the local prison, Sugar Land, as a cook. Once there, she becomes close to Lead Belly, the historically known blues singer. He is determined to get out legally, and does so by singing to the Warden and Governor who grant him a release. Lead Belly makes Dara promise to leave as well, to follow her own passions.

The second section, “Nana Dara,” is the shortest with only 44 pages, and is focused on her time after marrying her way out of prison. Her husband is the Warden, an easy-going man with two young children of his own. It’s a surprisingly happy marriage, despite him knowing she’s gay and missing her first love.

The last section, “Mrs. Dara,” the longest one, is also the funniest and most engaging. Mrs. Dara is a widower, full of herself with a wonderful inner logic and attitude to life. She’s grown into a mischievous character:

‘Now I was an older lady–a widower even–I felt somehow above the law. “I’m going to sneak in and take the pictures down.”

“This is criminal behavior we are discussing here.”

I tsked and pulled up the leg of my coveralls to scratch my knee.’

*

Stoner writes such great character descriptions that stay with you throughout the entire book. For example, Stoner opens Sugar Land with Dara describing herself:

“I wore a dress that made me look like a curvy brown sack and I couldn’t stop burping up the oatmeal I’d had for breakfast.”

The tone and voice of Dara’s character are given to us immediately so lightly and vividly, it’s great. Later on, Dara describes her husband, the Warden, as a “big-chested man with precisely trimmed sideburns.” Again, the description of when they’re first married, Dara says, “He held me all night long with his forearm as warm as butter on my belly.”

Stoner’s use of language is so precise and perfect for the time and era and for these specific characters. This skill shows up in the chapter titles too, such as “The Preacher said sit down, so I did,” “Pepto Dismal,” and “Hairnet.”

The simple sentences suit Dara, and her inner monologues catch her emotions in a few words.

When Dara receives a love letter from her girlfriend soon after taking the job in the prison, and still a teenager in love, “I didn’t care about making my bed. I didn’t care about pie.”

Later on, when Dara faces another painful moment with her step-children, she says, “A tumbleweed rolled across the empty space inside my chest.”

I’d expected more of a harsh tale about being gay in that time frame, given how the blurb on the back cover had mentioned how Dara discovered that life “outside isn’t all sweet tea and roses.” It was instead a light read, generously spirited, and satisfying in many ways. The friendships and relationships were done with such humor and witty observations that you couldn’t help but like them all—even the fussy daughter, Debbie, as well as the useless but well-meaning friend called Fiddler, who moves in to her trailer for a while. Dara describes him by the results of him helping out:

“By the end of the first year, I’d lost three clocks and two phones and had to have the oil seal on my truck redone, God bless him.”

There are great moments of slapstick done in a deadpan voice and this is what’s so magical about this book: Dara’s voice. You want to stick with her and hear what she gets up to. You’re never that surprised (in a good way), like when she breaks into her daughter’s place and utterly fails. “I was lying in the exact location the Rottweilers visited every evening to relieve themselves of what must be high fiber meals.”

Stoner has written a book that is heartfelt and tender. Her characters linger and are quite unforgettable. Sugar Land spans decades in a well-told, easy going manner and I finished the book with a satisfied smile.

Sugar Land

By: Tammy Lynne Stoner

Fiction, 344 pages, $16.95

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Just what I needed. It was a snowy afternoon in Vermont and I was bored. I picked up Moderow’s Fast into the Night: A Woman, Her Dogs, and Their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail from the pile of books next to my bed. I started the memoir and then put it down. Why? I knew I wanted to settle into it, and have a chance to read a good chunk undisturbed.

Dogs walked and fed. Snacks on a plate. PJs on. Glass of Malbec. Back to the memoir.

And what an amazing memoir. What an amazing world she brought us into. Iditarod, the Alaskan landscape, the characters, the dogs, and her family’s support. Incredible. I pulled up the covers and kept reading.

Moderow is passionate and compassionate. Her focus was constantly on the comfort and health of her team of dogs. She was so in tune with the needs of their individual needs and personalities. She wouldn’t put them in danger just to finish Iditarod. That would have gone against her integrity and heart. You have to respect her for that. Her goal was simply–if it could be simple–to complete the course with happy and healthy dogs. She tried twice, once in 2003 and again two years later. She finished with a healthy team in 13 days, 19 hours, 10 minutes and 32 seconds.

Moderow captures her characters so well, the four and two legged ones, that we see her all the more clearly too. Moderow, even when struggling so intensely, carried on. This is bravery in action. She is such a role model for following your dreams without hurting others. Incredible, her internal and external journey.

Fast into the Night is written in the present tense, and takes us into the moment to moment challenges she faced as a rookie, including  preparation, dressing for such cold, as well as the colors and images of that first day: “Sixteen huskies donning crimson harnesses charge into the chute.”

The first chapters were so immersive. At the start of the race and the book, Moderow spent time with each of her dogs, one by one, walking along the team and so introducing us to all sixteen of the family. “Kanga is a serious brown girl with a tan trim. She knows more about Iditarod than I do. Juliet is my playful Tinker Bell. She’s the whimsical cheerleader, my tiny grey spitfire who runs up front with a light-hearted disposition.”

Her first few hours of the race set the pace for the next two weeks on the trail. “When the team scrambles up an icy bank and the sled ricochets around a tight, dark wooded corner, I exhale relief.”

Yes, so did I. Time for another glass of wine and a snack. The snow still fell outside my apartment in town. I had it easy. Moderow didn’t. She tells us how she had to “cover my nose with my neck gaiter, and my goggles fog up. To take them off would risk my eyes, so every few minutes I scrape ice from the lenses with the back of my arctic mittens.”

Details such as those kept me turning pages; her story just stunned me; and the level of cold and endurance was beyond impressive. “A granola bar – it’s frozen and the last thing I need is a broken tooth. So I stuff it into my armpit to thaw.”

As you do, nothing unusual, right? Sheesh. I read on, huddled in my little bed with my two well-fed Huskie mutts on the end of my bed. No, we’d not be trying this ourselves.

Iditarod is a challenge, obviously. There’s the physical conditions, but also there are the emotional hurdles she faced. There were times when she had to make potentially life-altering decisions when so completely drained and exhausted that clear thought was not easily grasped. What was best for each of her dogs? When should she ‘scratch’ even if the volunteers showed no compassion for her place and experience? I wanted her to make it. I knew she ultimately did from the blurb on the back, but I wanted to know how. How did she do it? What kept her going?

“I stand alongside my dogs and everything is quiet. It’s the profound stillness that arrives in a flash, when everything changes.”

You’ll have to read it yourselves if you want to find out how. Please do.

Fast into the Night: A Woman, Her Dogs, and Their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail

By: Debbie Clarke Moderow

Memoir, 288 pages, $16.95

Red Hen Press (June 2018)

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Neil Gaiman doesn’t know this but I’m devastated that the one time I lived as an NYC-expat was when he reigned as Neptunian king at this year’s Mermaid Parade. So, this summer, instead of reveling in my usual Coney Island haunts, I decided to grow a fishtail in my bathtub as I read the short fictions and wonders of Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, starting with “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire.”

It’s been real tough for a salty chick to come by a laugh these days, so Gaiman’s satirical title promised me some fun. After first reading the graphic novel adaptation  of “Forbidden Brides,” illustrated by Shane Oakley, I then dove headfirst into Fragile Things for the original version, where I sought a tale of Gothic motifs featuring the forlorn creatures I’d hope to find at the old cemetery, manor ruins or writer’s desk.

As I read of strange fiends grappling with the art of mimesis, blood-bound ritual and breakfast toast, I loved how Gaiman’s writing offered more than just the levity of, say, seasonal escapism or parody. It offered coziness in a macabre world where shadows howl in the dark and night creepers crack jokes. Before I knew it… “somewhere in the night, someone was writing [a review for a Neil Gaiman story].”

“Forbidden Brides” spoke to the creative process, of how ghouls such as doubt and uncertainty make art as they roam with the writer’s pen onto the page, whether its contents have been summoned from the realm of fantasy, realism, horror, or the Coney Island boardwalk.

Although “Forbidden Brides” was a short piece that kept things odd and humorous, it reminded me that stories are vessels, transporting imaginations to worlds of the familiar (and unfamiliar) and transforming our understanding of those places, their ghosts, and ourselves.

Neil Gaiman’s fantastical tales set my mind abound with magic and terror, as I sunk into the clawfoot tub, book in scaled hand, and found myself at the Mermaid Parade in spirit.

Next up in the Fragile Things treasure trove is “Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot,” and you can bet Queen Amphitrite’s glittering seashell pasties that this short story’s title alone has already left mer-me shipwrecked, and feeling right at home.

Paperback (Harper, February 2010)

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In Guardian Angels & Other Monsters, Daniel H. Wilson’s short story collection invites us to consider the question: How far would you go to provide for your children? “The Executor,” a noir-esque short story, reimagines a hypercapitalist future world in which the descendants of the galaxy’s richest man have fought centuries-long wars over their vast inheritance, and it is a fight people are still fighting.

Philip Drake is a widower, afflicted – like his daughter, Abigail – with “meta-Parkinson’s,” an illness that requires the use of a powered exo-skeleton. He can’t however, afford the exorbitant cost of a similar prosthesis for Abigail. Out of desperation, he conceives a plan: he will approach the Executor, the artificial intelligence who manages his ancestor’s estate, and ask for help. When the ancient AI refuses him, Drake must find a way to save his daughter’s life while being chased by assassins, police and the super-rich.

The action comes in quick, sharp strokes, like Zen calligraphy. Wilson creates a harsh, glittering world that seems at once alien and far, far too familiar. This is a crisp story that packs a lot into a few pages. “The Executor” reads with the grit of noir and the cut of sci fi, steeped in dystopia, wrapt in the ambiguity of mystery, and it leaves us asking ourselves: What am I willing to do for the people I love? And am I willing to risk it all for them?

Guardian Angels & Other Monsters was published by Vintage on March 6, 2018.

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VCFA’s Hunger Mountain gives a special thanks to our local branch of Bear Pond Books for providing our book reviewing staff members with Advance Reader Copies of Pre-Released titles! Montpelier’s local branch of Bear Pond Books is located on 77 Main St, Montpelier, VT 05602. Bear Pond Books’ selection is also available online: http://www.bearpondbooks.com/.

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To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Hogarth Shakespeare Project began inviting novelists in 2015 to reimagine the Bard’s canon in contemporary works of fiction. A number of writers were contacted, such as Howard Jacobson, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Jo Nesbø, a Norwegian author primarily known for his Harry Hole series of hard-boiled crime novels. In an interview with the New York Times, Nesbø said that when he was given the opportunity, he told the publisher “if I can have Macbeth, then I’m in.”

Nesbø’s retelling of Macbeth is set in a gloomy, economically-depressed town somewhere in Margaret Thatcher’s UK: a dark, rainy place rife with crime and corruption. Following the death of a fabulously shady police commissioner named Kenneth (who has raised a huge statue of himself on the bridge into town) the visionary and idealistic Duncan comes into power, vowing to break the hold of the drug lord Hecate. Inspector Macbeth, a recovering addict, is the head of the police’s SWAT team. As the novel opens on a drug raid gone wrong we see our lead character in his larger-than-life, heroic, impetuous, conflicted glory. Macbeth is soon set on a collision course with Duncan, through the machinations of his lover “Lady,” who runs the Inverness Casino, and of Hecate, who sees Macbeth as a catspaw to finally cement his control of the town.

Perhaps knowing that readers would be hunting for the correspondences with Shakespeare, Nesbø lays out the characters and the scenario rather quickly in the beginning. Like many of his other novels, the opening chapters of Nesbø’s Macbeth are almost glacial in pace, and the author uses this time to introduce us to Duncan, Macbeth, his mentor Banquo, “Jack Duff,” the Norse Riders motorcycle gang, the trans sex worker Strega (“witch”) and her “weird sisters,” along with “Lady” and the rest.

Once the scene has been set, though, the action takes off and the world expands into gritty color and three-dimensionality. The elements of madness and the supernatural in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which might have presented a challenge to an author trying to bring them into the modern day, are deftly handled by reframing them into the context of intoxication and addiction. As each character descends into their own struggle with the temptations of power and desire, secrecy and control, the allusions to Shakespeare fade into the new world of Nesbø’s retelling. Even though any reader familiar with the original play knows exactly what Macbeth’s fate will be, Nesbø’s story remains propulsive to the end. Additionally, the translation by Don Bartlett (who rendered the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive My Struggle series into English) is both lyrical and noir-esque.

The world-view and philosophy of William Shakespeare’s time are in many ways baked into the cultural consciousness of the English-speaking world, even in this post-postmodern era. There are echoes of the Elizabethan concept of fate in the way the media views drug abuse, for example, or the irredeemability of the criminal. As a result, it makes sense that “the Scottish play” can be such a natural palimpsest for a 21st century crime novel. Though times change, the human heart and mind remain what they were in centuries past, and perhaps have always been.

Macbeth was released in the US by Hogarth on April 10, 2018.

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VCFA’s Hunger Mountain gives a special thanks to our local branch of Bear Pond Books for providing our book reviewing staff members with Advance Reader Copies of Pre-Released titles! Montpelier’s local branch of Bear Pond Books is located on 77 Main St, Montpelier, VT 05602. Bear Pond Books’ selection is also available online: http://www.bearpondbooks.com/.

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Megan Hunter’s haunting debut novel, The End We Start From, explores a mother’s journey through London underwater. Immediately, the reader is gripped by Hunter’s visceral imagery, as she describes the protagonist, who is preparing to give birth as “a lumbering gorilla with a low-slung belly and suspicious eyes.” Through Hunter’s poetic prose and honest revelations, readers learn about this pregnant woman’s precarious predicament, as the British city she lives in becomes completely submerged in water. Similarly, Hunter’s writing style takes on an experimental and fluid form through its urgent and rhythmic sensibilities. For instance, we are introduced to “R” for example, “R has N’s watch, he tells me. He has it somewhere. He doesn’t put it on.” Hunter won’t use proper names like “Robert” or “Nathan” and the effect is chilling. For such a personal story, Hunter seems to shy away from intimacy with her readers, instead of zooming into the scenes that she has elaborately written. And yet, readers can look forward to a hopeful ending. After all of our heroine’s persistence, fraught with the trials of new motherhood and ardent survival, there is still hope. Hunter’s prose is well-suited for fans of post-apocalyptic fiction and believers of the magical.

The End We Start From was released by Atlantic Monthly Press on November 7th, 2017.

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VCFA’s Hunger Mountain gives a special thanks to our local branch of Bear Pond Books for providing our book reviewing staff members with Advance Reader Copies of Pre-Released titles! Montpelier’s local branch of Bear Pond Books is located on 77 Main St, Montpelier, VT 05602. Bear Pond Books’ selection is also available online: http://www.bearpondbooks.com/.

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Let’s Talk about Boyfriend(s)

School dance, prom, holding hands, kissing, dating, love, and boyfriends. Full of reminiscent nostalgia for the past, Bachofner explores young love in her latest poetry book, The Boyfriend Project (2017). The catchy title attracts instant attention, especially from girls of all ages, who love to reminisce about romantic relationships from their youths, especially the early stages of blossoming teenage romance. The puppy kind of love. 

Bachofner begins with wonder in the prologue, “Puppies and Stolen Things”:

“She wonders

about sweet boys from long ago.

On a list somewhere, or in an old diary,

. . . These boys are moments like sand

turned over and over

on the beach. Some are gone, some

misplaced.

. . . She spreads

photos of these boys on her coverlet:

Where are they?

Do they think of her?”

Like playing an old album on a record player, it’s pretty obvious what kind of music it’ll be playing to the rest of the album on the record once the tune comes tinkling out.

Then Bachofner takes the reader on a journey of love talk from the very beginning of her youth. She begins the journey, the first poem after the prologue with a sense of innocence, as if she begins writing in a blank page. On the first poem, “It’s so innocent, isn’t it?”, Bachofner shows innocence and shy desire for romance.

“The kind of love, that first

kiss or handholding

or a glance or two on the bus,

in the gym, at the ballfields.”

But soon after that, Bachofner erases this innocence as she transitions to transformation of boys entering puberty in “No Boyfriends in Junior High”, a bluntly honest poem.

“By the 8th grade, all the boys

had matured into jerks.

They swaggered, leaned together

outside Cox’s Store, made dirty jokes

about every girl who walked by.”

The poem’s unapologetic tone is from a teenage girl’s perspective who departed from her childhood, as Bachofner shows the acts the boys were trying to do to prove that they were big boys now:

“They’d taken up smoking, held cigs

Between thumbs and forefingers,

Smelled like sweat mixed with Old Spice

Boosted from their father’s dop kits.

Sure enough, as Bachofner goes on, she begins blooming the teenage romance in “There Was the Year”

of learning to kiss,

positioning noses, closed

eyes. Sneaking

a look to see if his eyes

were properly shut. Brown

eyes laughing, soft lips breaking

into laughter at my dare.”

Her poetic free verse flows freely as she replays all of her memories on many moments in that one poem. It’s like flipping through a photo album that consisted of many photos over a decade, captured many moments in many seasons. She followed the teenage romance throughout. Especially on a mini poetry series, “Boy Time, with music and prayers” that consists several small poems that are chained to one and another with the written time on the the titles: “10 p.m. School Dance”, “11 p.m. Perkins Cove”, “12 a.m. Nobble”, “1 a.m. Parked”, “2 a.m. Old and New”, “3.30 a.m. Dance”, “4 a.m. Prom”, and “5.30 a.m. Out”. Bachofner creates a sequence of several small scenes that captures a precise moment at a certain time. Which builds up to the climactic moment when she’s finally settling down.

Because it’s a nostalgic themed poetry, Bachofner spends some time on on relishes in memories of long-ago lovers and/or crushes she had romantic encounter with, as she writes the dedication after the title of the poem: “High School Sweetheart — for DW”, “Cliff Walk — for Roger”, “Five Hundred Pictures — jor JSW”, and “Locket — for J”. In those poems, where it’s sappy and cheeky, shows the ultimate puppy love in teenage romance.

“Five hundred pictures of you,

five hundred kisses haunting my lips,

five million drops of rain still falling.”

After a journey of several falling in love and old boyfriends, Bachofner ends the book with an epilogue, “Love Actually”. Which, she dedicated to one person consistently. The readers might assume, she finally met the love of her life, as her poems within the epilogue showed the growth and maturity that ended her boyfriend project.

The reminiscence of love in all of her poems uncovers so many nostalgic feelings about teenage romance; a never-ending subject that can easily become cheesy and cliché. However, Bachofner boldly writes it down on the page, and shares it. 

The Boyfriend Project

By Carol Willette Bachofner

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At the Crossroads of Woman and Mother

A Review of A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother by Anna Prushinskaya

How are women’s stories told? Who hears these stories? How do the terms ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ relate and differentiate? Can they coexist? These are some of the questions Anna Prushinskaya tackles with lyrical honesty in A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother, her debut essay collection. Her book unpacks the complexities of motherhood itself, as well as the transitions of “woman” to “woman with child” and from “mother-to-be” to “mother.” Through a mixture of her own meditations and examples given by respected female writers and thinkers, Prushinskaya illustrates that “mothers” are women as diverse, as complicated, as unique, as flawed as any other group of humans, and deserve to be recognized for their commitment to take on the demands of maternal work on top of the demanding struggle of being a woman in today’s society.

Prushinskaya structures her book along a chronological timeline. Bookended with the inscriptions “Does it help to know this was written while I was pregnant?” and “Does it help to know that this was written after I became a mother?”, the essays document Prushinskaya’s growth into her own identity as a mother. We are privy to witness the fluctuation in emotions and confidence as that identity changes.

Throughout the eleven essays, she artfully weaves together a wide-range of seemingly disparate topics, including technology and online maternal support communities, home births versus hospital births (Prushinskaya herself works as a doula now), the wonder of forests, and her own family’s heritage and memories of the former Soviet Union.

The book begins, fittingly enough, with the grandest mother of them all: Mother Earth. “Love Letter to Woody Plants” at first makes us wonder if we’ve picked up the wrong book. We weren’t expecting a naturalist’s diary. Speaking about types of maple trees, she writes: “They have a thorny, suckering habit. They are part of one another.” She observes that “the forest changes…[it] is strange and lovely, a place to touch and explore…I am not particularly spiritual, but I quiet…My instinct is to not to trust [the forest].” Even as she speaks about nature and its changeable ways, a subtext of self-doubt and the physical metamorphosis of life forms introduces us into the major themes of the collection. We can’t help but regress into childlike wonder amongst the backdrop of such natural splendor.

Does it help to know that I am a woman and a writer? Does it help to know that I read this book and am not a mother?

“It is a strange thing to know someone based only on what they feel like from the inside,” Prushinskaya says in the collection’s titular essay. Speaking from the precipice of becoming a mother as a woman 37 weeks pregnant, her anxiety and doubt create tension as we wait, too, for her water to break. She balances the anticipation with a delightfully dark sense of humor: “I took a shower. The shower was hot, and I worried about whether I was scalding the baby…I felt a pop and a gush, the sort of thing that happens in the movies and is actually very uncommon. I spent my pregnancy pointing out instances of such unrealistic portrayals.” At the climactic moment of her baby’s birth, she turns her experience into something beautiful and metaphorical, something that only a master poet could put into words: “Motherhood is an encounter, a shadow in mirrors, a beast laying low in the grass in the field.”

The personal essays are lyrical in nature, which comes from Prushinskaya’s early roots in poetry. She has an intimate and down-to-earth voice, yet not so intimate as to confide everything to us. Her language is careful and controlled. There are moments in the essays where Prushinskaya hints to hardships in her past, such as an abusive relationship or a possible addiction. With no further elaborations, her narrative stays focused on the topic of motherhood; thus communicating that the hardships she’s overcome are part of who she is today, but are only sideline spectators to the story at hand.

Prushinskaya’s last essay, “One Mother’s Answers,” takes the hyper-experimental form of a one-sided abstracted conversation, in which we only hear the mother’s answers. We must fill in the blanks with our own questions. The author here begs us to remember that while some questions are universal, each person’s answer is distinct. The memory, the voice, the cadence, the preoccupations—all unique.

Throughout her essays, Prushinskaya both pushes back on the constructs pinned upon mothers (be selfless, be perfect, be gentle) while actively seeking to embrace the image of doing motherhood right. This ability to see her identity as a “both/and” instead of an “either/or” makes this collection highly evocative and admirably honest.

Does it help to know that I would like a family one day? That I want to continue to work and write. Does it help to know that I want to love a baby from my own body? That I’m scared, excited, curious, clueless.

Prushinskaya’s collection gives me permission, as a woman writer, to have all these emotions simultaneously.

It is true that this collection is firstly concerned with telling a woman’s story. In fact, the only men who appear (briefly) in the book are Prushinskaya’s husband, the “EMS guy,” and the author’s Russian grandfather. But Prushinskaya reminds us that “we are all a history of someone else’s limbs.” We are all born from mothers, no matter our gender. A mother is a mother even when you grow up. A mother’s story may even be a prehistory of you.

A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother is undoubtedly an important contribution to the world of women’s stories. From the book’s beginning to its end, Prushinskaya strives to showcase one writer’s definition of herself as a “woman.” Being a mother, for her, was a choice; a voluntary path she understands is not available to all women. She shows that there is no right way of being a mother, nor of being a woman, and ‘the right way’ to be that person can change daily. Perhaps there is no ‘right way.’

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It’s only fitting that for our issue on firsts I’m writing my first book review, and it’s on Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, a book that (among other things) tells the story of the first nonstop transatlantic flight.

Like a lot of people approaching their first book review, I have no idea what I’m doing. So, for my sake, and for the sake of other would-be reviewers, I decided that, in addition to my review, I would compile a guide on writing book reviews. Never mind that I’ve never done this before; the fact that I’m on the Internet gives me the authority to tell you how to do things.

Step 1: Pick a book.

You wrote a pretty good essay about Ethan Frome in high school, right? Honestly, you could probably re-use that, and no one would notice (I mean, who actually reads book reviews?). But writing a book review is also a good excuse for you to read a new book, so try to pick something by an author who is still alive.

Also try to pick someone more famous than you. Colum McCann is more famous than you. His book, TransAtlantic came out last year. It’s perfect.

But can you really criticize Colum McCann? The guy is a Guggenheim fellow. He won the National Book Award. You, on the other hand, have never won anything (except, of course, the third place ribbon in the 7^th grade science fair). Who are you to take on Colum McCann?

That’s the beautiful thing about book reviews, though. McCann, with all his notoriety, now must answer to you, the lowly reader. You are the little guy, the everyman. You are a force for democracy in literature.

McCann is Goliath. But don’t let that stop you. Take your flag and plant it firmly at the top of Mt. McCann, look to the heavens, and shout for the world to hear: “This book was all right I guess!”

Step 2: Get the book.

Most publishers will send you free advance reader copies if you ask. Requesting a review copy will make you feel important. You’re a book reviewer, a taste-maker, a connoisseur of culture. You stand above the general reading public and dictate down to them what they should love or hate.

This feeling will be diminished only slightly by the fact that Random House will never actually send you the review copy, and you won’t receive the book until months later, when your editor picks it up and mails it to you.

Step 3. Read the book.

First, find a comfortable spot to sit.

No, the armchair won’t do—the back is too stiff, and it’s covered in dog fur. The couch is better. You can stretch across it, underneath the window. Don’t turn on the overhead light. Just let the natural sunlight break through the trees and spill across the page. Remember to take your shoes off: don’t drag dirt on the couch.

Set your phone on the coffee table. Some people will tell you turn off the phone, and with good reason. It’ll be tempting to check email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the dozen other sites you frequent, but think how satisfying it’ll be to respond to every message with, “I’m sorry. I can’t be bothered right now. I’m reading Colum McCann’s new book so that I can review it for Hunger Mountain.”

Okay. To work.

It begins with a one-page section set in 2012. What’s this about? Gulls dropping shells on a house? Is this some kind of metaphor? Wait. “Squadrons of blue and grey”? Hopefully the Civil War won’t make an appearance in this book, or else that might seem like a ham-fisted reference.

Now: The first line of Book I, “It was a modified bomber,” is a beautiful and subtle way to set up a theme about forging peace out of war, and it raises Alcock’s and Brown’s transatlantic flight from interesting story to potent metaphor that will preside over the entire novel (why did McCann waste time with that first seagull image?). The next two chapters, covering Frederick Douglass’ trip to Ireland and Sen. George Mitchell’s roles in the Good Friday Accords, are also engaging.

At the same time, these chapters feel like a missed opportunity—McCann is well known for his gift of taking historic moments and illuminating them, making popular figures into living, breathing beings. Here, however, it feels like McCann might be shoving too much into one spot, and so much potential gets reduced to summary.

Now the historic triad is over, and it isn’t clear where exactly McCann is headed. Page count-wise, you’re nearly half-way through, but what is the joining thread of this book? What is this book really about? Is it a book of juxtapositions? Is McCann performing some kind of literary jazz?

But you trust him. You take his hand. You keep reading.

In Book II, he throws you through time again. You end up reliving all three historical events from Book I, but instead of watching through the eyes of historical figures, you’re now working through the history of a fictional family living through these times. Lily Duggan, the matriarch, has a poignant section (there’s the Civil War, just as the seagulls promised), but after this, the historical events feel a bit like cameos.

You’ve made it to Book III now, and you want desperately to love this book. You hope that Book III will tie it all together and blow you away. But at this point, the novel changes to first person, and McCann insists that the storyline is circular:

“The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again.  We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing Mobius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.”

The book isn’t a Mobius strip; instead, it’s a series of separate strands. The connections McCann promises never really come to fruition.

McCann is undeniably a great writer, and the idea driving TransAtlantic is powerful. While there is much to love in this book, it feels as though the concept is what you like best about it.

Step 4. Write your review.

What would happen if you gave a lukewarm review to Colum McCann? He could excommunicate you from all of literature. He could make Steve Almond break your writing hand. You could end up blacklisted from the New Yorker.

To be fair, though, there’s a good chance that the New Yorker isn’t going to publish you anyway, and your novel is just scraps gathering dust while you spend all your time and energy writing things like book reviews and mediocre tweets.

In the end, you have to be honest. You liked the book, you didn’t love it. That’s the way it goes sometimes. You’ll continue to read McCann’s books, to think about how he does what he does best, what you can learn from his storytelling triumphs and missteps.

It turns out you like book reviews. You like to engage on this level with the literature of today. This is your first book review, and hopefully not your last.

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From Reading to Wonder: 

Erika Anderson on Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino

~6th in a series

When I tell people I’m a writer, they ask what I’m reading. This is smart. It’s smart because more often than not, we’re in a bar, and I’m not sure if I want to talk about my writing at top volume while “Somebody That I Used to Know” wails in the background. Every time I try to explain what I write and for whom in short bark-like shouts, I find myself on an existential quest. This is not how I want to spend my Friday nights.

What I’m reading is Marie-Helene Bertino’s Safe as Houses, her debut collection and the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. I’m into atheist, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Ruby, the protagonist of “Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph.” The sisters want Ruby, the new groundskeeper, to talk to the tomato plants and make them grow:

Sister Charlene leads [the Sunday school class] out of the courtyard and Sister Helena has business in the kitchen, so I am left alone with the tomatoes. I feel nervous, like a newcomer at a party, trying to smalltalk with a person I’ve just met. I say, “How you bitches doin’?”

Everyone always laughs. They don’t giggle or smile. Short of throwing their heads back, or actually rolling around on the floor, their faces are soft and happy and everything is right.

I’ve seen Bertino read twice now, once at WORD in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint, where Bertino stood in front of the podium, saying, “I promise there will be no audience participation.” She read from “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours,” narrated by an alien who faxes her observations about human beings to her home planet.

Human beings, I fax, fetishize no organ more than the heart. When they like someone they say, There’s a girl after my own heart. They will stand or sit very close to the person they love with their heart. When they are sad they say, My heart is broken. They will tell large groups of people things they don’t believe. But the heart is just a muscle with an important job. Just an area in the body.

What is it about the heart? Did Hallmark put us up to this? Could we just as easily be talking about the liver? Does grief cause us to delude ourselves, to say I’ll never find someone else like him? It does. Yet in the moment that delusion feels true, it feels necessary.

Both the alien and Ruby introduce themselves and their stories with what I like to think of as a statement of purpose. Prior to moving in with the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Ruby proclaims:

I am quitting a boy like people quit smoking. I am not quitting smoking. The pamphlet insists: Each time you crave a cigarette, eat an apple or start a hobby! Each time I think about Clive, I smoke a cigarette. If I have already smoked a cigarette, I eat an apple. If I have already eaten an apple, I start a hobby. I smoke two packs a day. I pogo-stick, butterfly-collect, macramé, decoupage. I eat nothing but apples. I sit in my kitchen, a hundred of them arranged on the table. If I can eat this pyramid of apples, I will be over Clive.

Ruby’s plan leads me to wonder what simple equations I have relied on. If I like you, then you will like me back. If you like me back, then you will call me. If you call me, then we will go out. If we go out, then we will fall in love. Always in, never out.

Ruby’s plan also leads me to wonder what I have reached for in desperation. The wrong boy at the right time, his eyes saying everything he would not? The last piece of pink frosted sheet cake, the sides drying and crusty after sitting out all afternoon? Shots of I-don’t-even-know-what with bartenders at the end of the night?

Toward the end of “Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph,” Ruby contemplates the children in the Sunday school:

These kids will grow up. Some of the boys will never feel tall enough. Some of the girls will look great in pictures but in real life will be dull and forgettable, the girls on the bench at the mall you ask to move so you can throw out your soda. Some of them will never be able to find their keys. Some will triumph. One day a person they love will say I do not love you. One day every one of them will die. Today is not that day.

For the first time I wonder if this place that hurts might not be the heart but something else altogether, or perhaps nothing at all. I wonder if there’s no special meaning to the one who has left us, or to the one we have left. I wonder when I’ll know what kind of writer I am, or if it doesn’t matter anymore. I wonder when I might describe my writing in staccato bursts over the latest break-up anthem without feeling the need to prove anything.

~

Safe as Houses
Mary-Helene Bertino
University of Iowa Press
2012

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Penny Blubaugh on Lisa Goldstein’s Walking the Labyrinth

Lately I’ve been seeing my writing life as a labyrinth. The twists and turns it takes are even more dramatic than I expected, and believe me, I did expect drama. But more and more often, the dark parts of my particular labyrinth have been harder to illuminate, and the bright spots have been harder to find.

Walking the Labyrinth by Lisa Goldstein is one of those novels that I reread every now and again. I don’t know what calls me to it or why I decide to revisit it when I do, but I do know what I love when I get there.

I love the names of the characters. Neesa. Callan. Thorne. Fentrice. Corrig. Perfect for a traveling troupe of magicians.

I love that their last name is Allalie, which breaks down into all a lie.

I love Callan’s question for everyone in almost every situation: “What have you learned?”

I love that everything, absolutely everything, is based on illusion and trickery. That no one knows where illusion stops and reality starts.

I love that heroine Molly says, “I learned that illusion is a way to truth.”

The labyrinth in the book is underground and a place so full of confusion and razzle-dazzle, dark and light, blood and gaiety, that no one, least of all Molly, can ever guess what will be found around the next corner. Like all labyrinths, it paints you in. It grabs you. It holds you fast. And you may never escape once you’ve entered. The longer you travel the maze, the more it seems to grow.

I have two books to my credit. Two published books, that is. I won’t talk about the other ones, the ones that are written but that lie on their backs in the lost-book box with nowhere to go. They’re in their own labyrinths, and none of us, not me or the books, know when—or even if—they’ll find the passageway that leads to the reward at the center.

The book that I recently finished has been rejected, and rejected again. It hesitates and stumbles as it tries to negotiate the maze of the publishing world. It keeps getting pushed back, back into scary passageways it thought it had left behind. It isn’t sure which corner to turn. Rewrite? Revise? Give up?

I look carefully at the new books coming out. Some of these books are Allalies—illusions that exist just long enough to fool, to cast a spell before they disappear into stage smoke. I also see, like light when I turn the right corner of the labyrinth, a brilliance so bright it practically blinds. These are the books with lyrical writing, multi-faceted characters, stories so original they take my breath away.

These lights make me examine my own writing with a magnifying glass, make me look at ways to improve. They show me that the group of writers I want to follow through the labyrinth are the ones who write to make a work shine, to make it sing, to make it something I would read again and again. I want to be behind these writers who will help me craft books that someone will love the way I love Lisa Goldstein’s. But even though I’m following them, I keep losing them; I keep walking around the wrong corner. Or maybe I’ve picked the right corner but just don’t know it yet. Illusion. It’s a complicated maze to walk some days, but it’s all I’ve got.

Callan Allalie would say, “What have you learned?”

I would say I’ve learned, and am still learning, about the dark paths in my own labyrinth. But I’m learning about the bright ones, too.

A quote from Mae West hangs on my Pinterest board. It reads, “I never said it was going to be easy. I said it was going to be worth it.” If I do find the center of my labyrinth, I think that quote will be hanging there, painted in bold colors on a weathered board, swinging from the ceiling on silver chains.

~

Walking the Labyrinth
Lisa Goldstein
Tor Books
1998

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John Proctor
on
selected essays
from
The Best American Essays 2002
.
~9th in a series

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Most of us living in New York City on 9/11 were not in the World Trade Center, many of us nowhere even near it. I was working in market research on 25^th Street and was supposed to start teaching night classes to new immigrants that evening. I left work after the second tower fell and walked all the way back to my apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn—through roadblocks and makeshift water stations, past bars full to capacity, then home over the Manhattan Bridge. I didn’t leave my apartment for three days.

Each of us felt a sense of dread as pervasive as the smell that anyone who was in New York then can remember—a vague admixture of sheetrock, petroleum, and barbecue that few can describe but still, twelve years later, comes back to me vividly at random moments when some element of that smell enters my olfactory glands and sends me into a panic attack. But that dread—at what had happened and what might follow—was commingled with a vague hope that lingered, a hope stirred not by what had happened to our city but how the nine million treated each other in its wake.

I have to admit, in my own backwards journey through The Best American Essays series, I approached the 2002 volume (essays written in 2001) with some trepidation, as if I were drawing near some looming chasm between pre- and post-9/11 nonfiction writing. I actually looked forward to being done with it and enjoying a more innocent brand of writing on the other side.

One of the contributors to this volume, Adam Mayblum, is not an essayist. He isn’t even a writer, at least not professionally. His essay “The Price We Pay” recounts, in a linear narrative, his life from the time a plane crashed into 1 World Trade Center while he was on the Eighty-Seventh Floor working as managing director of a private investment firm until shortly after he escaped. The last paragraph of the essay, however, offers a remarkably insightful, harrowing, hopeful summation:

If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States and the ultimate price we pay to be free, to decide where we want to work, what we want to eat, and when and where we want to go on vacation. The very moment the first plane was hijacked, democracy won.

Mayblum’s account, in the months after its writing, was featured on NPR, paraphrased in emails, and recounted on television the world over, so much that many people started to wonder if it wasn’t faked. (Snopes.com has since verified its accuracy.) I think Mayblum’s essay affected so many people so deeply because there were nine million stories like his.

“Word on the Street,” co-written by Richard Price and his daughter Anne Hudson-Price, documents, in a series of short vignettes, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 through third-person renderings that are intensely personal, yet epic in scope. The cabby pieces, with titles like “Cabby No. 2, Sept. 19,” work off each other in a cascade of interactions between the fares, all white New Yorkers, and the cabbies, all Arabic New Yorkers. The “Kids” pieces, with titles like “Kids No. 3, Oct. 9,” narrate interactions between a father, presumably Price, and his two daughters, revealing the daughters as just as mature and capable in the midst of the horrors of this aftermath as their father. At one point the older daughter writes him a letter, saying:

Dad, it’s like these days, there are adults, and there are children. Only two camps now, no intermediate zone for teenagers like myself. If you possess the information, if you understand what’s going on in the world, you’re an adult, no matter what your biological age; all others are children … the gut instinct of kids my age to go to their parents and demand comfort, answers, or whatever doesn’t work now, because we are aware that we know just as much about the world as you do…. And along with the scariness that comes with being a member of this new group of adults without any actual adult experience is the sadness that we bear for the years we had to surrender in order to accept this mutual burden with you.

I now have two daughters myself, one three years old and the other three months old. When I read this letter from a teenage daughter to her father, my immediate response was, This is it. This is the chasm. I was reading a lot of Jung and Blake in August of 2001, thinking about personal mythology and the collective unconscious, and the signs and symbols that fit within them. The child, in most cultures, symbolizes innocence, and the passage from childhood to adulthood is a passage from innocence to experience. The daughter in “Word on the Street” is the voice of a child who sees the collective innocence of an entire city’s children—and adults—replaced by the knowledge, the “information” in her words, of the horrific, destructive force lurking behind their civilization’s cardboard façade, and the mutual sadness that knowledge engenders.

Rudolph Chelminski’s “Turning Point” has, in the years since its publication, rightly become considered one of the great New York City essays. In a remarkable sleight of hand reflective of its subject, the piece narrates a famous feat that occurred right after the towers were erected, providing an elegiac bookend to the towers’ demise.

When I see two oranges I juggle, and when I see two towers I walk.

These words belong to Phillippe Petit, who gained instant notoriety in 1974 for tightroping between the World Trade Center towers and who experienced a renaissance after the towers fell in 2001 due to this piece and the ensuing documentary on Petit—a fascinating man who seems possessed in equal parts by genius, orneriness, and insanity. Chelminski also brings the reader up to date with Petit, revealing his longstanding occupancy at NYC’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 112^th and Amsterdam, where Petit is Artist-in-Residence (or resident Quasimodo), wire-walking over the building to raise money for the cathedral’s building fund.

Another piece, Amy Kolen’s “Fire,” documents New York City’s other major occurrence of people jumping en masse from a burning building—the Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Kolen’s grandmother was a secretary for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company when the horrific factory fire occurred; she barely escaped, mostly because she was a cousin of the owner who worked administration rather than in the sweatshop that was locked from the outside, trapping hundreds of female garment workers.

The crux of the essay is Kolen’s struggle between loyalty to her grandmother, who wrote extensive, loving letters to Kolen throughout her granddaughter’s life, and a search for the truth of the event:

I’m uneasy taking sides—management against workers—but everything I’ve read and heard makes me embrace, instead, the workers, the survivors from the eighth and ninth floors, whose words … are testimony to a reality different from the one Grandma experienced.

Kolen wonders what people were thinking, questions her own motivations, and asks how she can simultaneously love and betray her grandmother by writing this essay. She ends it with a brief, intensely personal rendering of herself when she was seven years old in Queens with her grandmother, trying to light a leaf on fire with a magnifying glass. This little scene, giving us a very human glimpse of her grandmother, reads as an act of forgiveness.

Sebastian Junger’s journalistic essay “The Lion in Winter” isn’t technically about 9/11, but, perhaps more than any other essay in this volume, it is. The lion of the title is Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan guerilla leader who went from fighting Soviet invaders in the Seventies and Eighties to fighting the Taliban in the years immediately before 9/11.

Junger continually alternates the zoom on his camera out to the historical development of the Taliban and in to Massoud’s role as an elder Afghan warlord. In some of the most fiercely and elegantly rendered scenes I’ve read in quite some time, Junger also reveals his own trip with Massoud’s army, from the foxholes where Junger fears for his own life while shells crack all around him to a gorgeous, humane moment alone with Massoud, Massoud’s doctor, and the photographer who accompanied Junger, when Massoud reveals his post-war wish:

[A] room for my children, a room for me and my wife, and a big library for all my books. I’ve put them in boxes, hoping one day I’ll be able to put them on the shelves and I’ll be able to read them. But the house is still unfinished, and the books are still in their boxes. I don’t know when I’ll be able to read my books.

In what many U.S. counterterrorism officials cite as the moment they suspected something was horribly amiss, Massoud was killed on September 9, 2001 by two al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists.

The specter of death extended its hand to the Guest Editor of The Best American Essays 2002. Robert Atwan, in his annual foreword, had the unenviable dual task of eulogizing Stephen Jay Gould, who died of cancer unexpectedly just months before the volume’s publication, and addressing the horrific and permanent change in the landscape of not just literature but the world. He performed both with grace and dignity, noting that Gould “promised to finish the introduction before undergoing the [cancer] surgery. And he did.” Atwan then wrote about the essay post-September 11, 2001:

The essay always seems to revitalize in times of war and conflict—and it’s usually with the return of peace and prosperity that fiction and poetry renew their literary stature…. Perhaps in times of conflict and crisis people want to be in the presence of less mediated voices—we need more debate and directives, we desire more public discourse.

I think many writers—and readers—of fiction and poetry would disagree with this assertion. I remember, in December 2001, the collective national obsession that accompanied the movie trilogy adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The journey of Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest of the fellowship provided both a mythological framework through which to contextualize our collective national tragedy and an alternate universe in which the fate of the entire world could be reversed by throwing an old ring into a volcano.

But I also remember that the days, months, and years after 9/11 were the first time I formed concrete opinions about the world outside my own little life, the first time I realized my life was simultaneously a self-enclosed story and a small part of a much larger public discourse. In short, this was the first time I took the nonfiction world around me as seriously as I took the stories and verse I’d been ingesting since I was a toddler.

Now, twelve years later, I feel a creeping uneasiness as I realize that not only the Guest Editor, but many of the writers in this volume—and indeed many of their subjects—are now dead. David Halberstam’s and Christopher Hitchens’ pieces, “Who We Are” and “For Patriot Dreams” respectively, are included in the volume. Both of them quote the same poem by dead American poet W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939.” On April 23, 2007, Halberstam was killed in a traffic accident while researching a book, and Hitchens died at the end of last year after a well-documented bout of lung cancer.

“Who We Are,” written shortly after 9/11, is, as the title implies, an examination of what it means to be an American, specifically what it means to be in a democratic republic that’s threatened. Halberstam is fundamentally hopeful, stating, “One of the advantages of being older and having some degree of historical knowledge is the faith in the free society that eventually comes with it,” but he also warns, “We have been quite differently conditioned than our parents and grandparents were in what to expect out of life. This is a much more self-absorbed society, one that demands ever-quicker results; it is accustomed to being secure—and entertained.”

With the benefit of the ensuing years I unfortunately don’t share Halberstam’s sense of hope: we are more self-absorbed than ever, with more and more media to use as myopic mirrors; our private sector has become, if possible, even more indifferent to its social responsibilities; and the government, despite our electing a President who is a direct opposite of the last one, seems just as incapable of acting as a moral compass for our people.

Whereas Halberstam only gives the Auden poem a passing mention, Hitchens, in “For Patriot Dreams,” makes it a central text for understanding 9/11:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse…

Hitchens, like Halberstam and most of us in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the towers, was feeling patriotic, even as an Englishman in New York, though he makes sure to define his terms:

[The U.S. is] the only place in history where patriotism can be divorced from its evil twins of chauvinism and xenophobia. Patriotism is not local; it’s universal.

Most of those terms unfortunately went out the window during the five or so years after 9/11, as Hitchens’ patriotism ironically morphed into an anti-Muslim stance that bordered on both chauvinism and xenophobia, until he softened his stance after having himself waterboarded in an experiment in immersive journalism (he lasted seventeen seconds).

Perhaps, finally, I’m not only examining the question of post-9/11 writing, but also of post-9/11 reading. One essay in this collection that seems especially resonant post-9/11, perhaps in ways it hadn’t intended, is Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Why Literature?” which seems to have been written as a philosophical response to 9/11. I want to quote about three quarters of it—there’s so much in it for a reader and writer to embrace and love—but I’ll limit myself to the following:

Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of nonconformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete … to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us. Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarily—but in this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal.

While reading and rereading this essay, itself a work of nonfiction, I found myself thinking about fiction, and poetry, and other forms of writing that seek not merely to portray the world but to transform it into art. I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and Blake and Jung, and the stories each of the nine million had to tell. I thought about Massoud’s boxed-up library and Petit hanging by a wire between the towers of the yearling World Trade Center.

Perhaps, and I don’t think I’m disagreeing with Robert Atwan’s assertion in his foreword, in a modern time of mediated crisis what people need most is the child-like illusion—some would call it hope—that it all means something, that everything will be alright, and that we are not alone in a world that seems less safe now than it did earlier, when we were children.

More of John’s Hunger Mountain BAE reviews. 

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The Best American Essays 2002

Stephen Jay Gould, Editor

Robert Atwan, Series Editor

Houghton Mifflin

 

2002

 

 

 

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on “A Bridge Under Water”

by Tom Bissell

The Best American Short Stories 2011

~3rd in a series

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I dated a man in college who could not bear to leave food on a plate, his or anyone else’s. He would dispatch his food with good speed, then pick at the borders of my meal while I ate. Before my fork hit the table he’d drag my leftovers to his side and tuck in. To my shock, the first time we went out with friends he did the same thing to everyone else. What does this behavior say about him? Compulsive eater, yes, obviously. But also, pretty aggressive, right? And confrontational—if he doesn’t expect you to hold onto your own food, he’ll assume your opinions are easily slapped from your grasp as well. Selfish. Probably doesn’t respect boundaries. If on our first date I’d focused less on how everything I ate was going to affect my breath, and more on the way this guy behaved when he ate, I could have saved us both so much time, so much heartache.

I’ve got a long list of such eating-makes-the-man examples. My father refuses to taste food—any food prepared anywhere by anyone—before he coats it with salt and pepper, my mother has never left a dinner table without a new food stain, when in public I am incapable of delivering lettuce to my mouth without painting a cheek with salad dressing. Respectively: control issues, perpetual distraction, social anxiety. I could go on but I should save these details about me, my family, and people I have known for my fiction. Because readers can learn an awful lot about a character by watching her eat.

Yet. How many stories can you think of—quick, right now!—reveal personality by showing how a character eats?

From the opening paragraphs of Tom Bissell’s “A Bridge Under Water,” the third story in 2011’s Best American Short Stories:

“So,” he said, after having vacuumed up a plate of penne all’arrabiata, drunk in three swallows a glass of Nero D’Avola, and single-handedly consumed half a basket of breadsticks, “Do you want to hit another church or see the Borghese Gallery?”

She had plunged her fork exactly ten times into her strawberry risotto and taken two birdfeeder sips from the glass of Gewürztraminer that her waiter (a genius, clearly) had recommended pairing with it. She glanced up and smiled at him (more or less) genuinely. The man put away everything from foie gras to a Wendy’s single with the joyless efficiency of a twelve-year-old. He never appeared to taste anything. The plate now before him looked licked clean. When he return-serve smiled, she tried not to notice his red-pepper-and-wine-stained teeth or the breadcrumbs distributed throughout his short beard. …

We learn a great deal about both characters from these lines but my main takeaway is that the woman values sophistication, restraint, and neatness, and she feels anger toward this man, even contempt. Because the narrator speaks for the woman, we see the man’s behavior only through her biased reporting—is he a fast eater or is she an extraordinarily slow one?—but probably we can trust that he has eaten his entire meal and a lot of the breadsticks, likely his teeth are spackled with lunch and his beard is a little crumby. So we know that he is not particularly concerned about being tidy and he’s not the most mindful of eaters. Is he unaware of her anger? We don’t know yet. What does he feel about her? We’ll have to wait for that, too. But already—we have not yet finished the second paragraph—we have tension and conflict and a fair amount of personality, mostly showcased by the way in which these two people eat.

For some time now my favorite scenes in television and film have been eating scenes. I think I first became interested in these scenes when I noticed the myriad ways that two actresses who play sisters in my favorite television series—I own and regularly watch the DVDs—contrive to limit their consumption to about a teaspoon of food whenever they have to eat on camera. When the women chat over two gigantic muffins, they both keep swirling an index finger around the top of the muffin, then licking the fingertip. Once she withdraws the finger from her mouth, each woman muffles her words a touch, as though the crumb she just deposited has morphed into a genuine mouthful and she is actually eating. In another scene, the sisters are enjoying deli sandwiches on a couch. One dangles a slice of pastrami over her mouth, then a pickle—but when she moves the food away to speak, it’s whole.

I never would have deconstructed the sleights of hand these women use without the benefit of repeat viewing. But once I noticed their tricks I was disappointed. So much of the energy of their performance was aimed at convincing the viewer they were eating. Actors, do you know how to ensure the viewer believes you’re eating? You eat. They could have devoted the energy spent on feigned eating to how the characters eat, adding layers and details to our understanding of these women, raising a good performance to sublime.

Since noticing the feigned eating, I’ve paid close attention to how other actors eat. This is what I’ve noticed: actors who commit to actual eating—and it is a significant commitment, because who knows how many times he has to bite off half that candy bar or she has to cram those french fries—say far more about their characters than one can convey by licking a finger or kissing a pickle. When Andre Brauer cradles his hamburger with loving hands in Men of a Certain Age and takes a huge mouthful—stopping the flow of talk only for a fraction of a second, then talking around the food—he’s just used one bite and one line to deliver a multi-layered performance. This is what I see: He is very comfortable with his two friends or he wouldn’t eat with his mouth full. He is so impatient for the joy of eating that he can’t stop, put the hamburger down, argue a point. And trust me, I know, he holds that sandwich like a man who loves to eat—supporting the bun from end to end, promising an equal share of each element with every bite. This man is very attached to his hamburger. You might say that hamburger is the fourth friend at the table.

Feigned eating versus eating. Good versus sublime. In a good version of Bissell’s scene, we would be told that the man’s plate was clean, that he was still eating breadsticks, that he had a few crumbs in his beard. We would know that the woman was working her slow way through a plate of risotto, that she sips her drink. But Bissell doesn’t settle for good. The man, reports our narrator, has vacuumed his meal, the woman has taken birdfeeder sips. We know she has kept track of how many bites she has eaten in the time it took him to finish his meal. When he smiles she considers it a return of serve and it’s ruined anyway by the clotted teeth. This kind of detail—this level of commitment to the scene—is what I loved first about this story, and, in the end, also what I love best.

You’ll have to finish that second paragraph to begin to understand what’s at stake for these characters. On page two the stakes go even higher—keep reading to discover exactly what those lunch table observations are hinting at, to learn the source of all that tension. You’ll be carried far from the petty concerns of what to order and when to wipe your mouth, and you won’t be disappointed by the journey or its finale. But for now, before moving away from these words, savor those sentences I quoted just one more time. Land on each word, spend a little time with each line. You know, the way you might tear apart a buttered muffin and watch the steam rise from the moist crumb before you allow yourself that first, lingering taste. Or how you let the mustard dot your lips, forgotten napkin by your elbow, while you sink your teeth into a mouthful of pastrami.  trace affiliate link | Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “UNC Patent” Obsidian/Blue Chill-White For Sale – Fitforhealth