Check out book reviews of titles from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Blog.
Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations by Ira Sukrungruang is a testament to the variety of forms nonfiction writing can reach as well as this author’s mastery of each. For teachers of creative nonfiction, this text models a range of approaches; for students of CNF (whether formally enrolled or not), this is a wonderful mentor text; and for us more general readers, this is a book to expand our experience with great satisfaction.
Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss is a powerful new book by Lisa Romeo about the way our relationships with those we love change and deepen, even after death. Telling the story both of her father’s death and of her need to heal and go forward, this memoir is a moving account of the never-ending love between a father and daughter.
Ahmed Ismail Yusuf’s The Lion’s Binding Oath and Other Stories, presents an insider’s view of everyday life in Somalia during the mid to late 20th century. Yusuf had fled his birth country in the late 1980s during the Somalia civil war, and has since lived, educated himself, and worked in Minnesota.
Continue reading “The Lion’s Binding Oath and Other Stories”
The Undressing examines the physical, bodily relationship with the spiritual relationship between two lovers. There are elements of the political—the strongest portions of the book—and of the foreign. Li-Young Lee’s collection is philosophical, not exactly accessible for a first-time poetry reader, but one that with re-readings gathers depth and meaning each time.
Whereas the race card is now everyone’s card
in a deck I did not cut. I hate card games,
the conceit of the shuffle. I hate when white people
hate white people because hating white people
is fashionable. A person’s color is a still thing
to hate.
—from “Nonbinding Legislation, or a Resolution”
Cameron Barnett’s first collection, published by Autumn House Press, is powerful. Each poem in The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water is a full meal, and not always easy to digest. His craft is superb, pure excellence in both expression and thrust, but the themes are exhausting, necessary, and yes, every single thing is race. Barnett’s endurance analyzing America’s binary black and white world is honorable, essential, and true, yet leaves the reader bone-tired.
. . . I met my husband in a class
on Ovid where we learned longing
changes us
to limestone, or causes us
to caress the white bull—no matter
that he’s animal and his child minotaur,
the dividedoffspring of our love.
—from “At the Reading of the Antiwar Poets, 2007”
Every time I read Jehanne Dubrow’s work, I write a good poem. In fact, after reading and reviewing her book The Arranged Marriage over a year ago, I wrote a whole chapbook, published the following year. Perhaps she is something of a muse to me. Perhaps this is why, after spending nearly two years in Denton, Texas, and nearly also working as an adjunct instructor at the University of North Texas where she serves as an associate professor, I did not try to meet her even though I was encouraged to.
Maybe our muses are best left alone, enigmas granted asylum from gaze and inquiry. In any case, Dubrow continues to bring me good luck and inspire more poems.
With the #metoo movement still changing the conversation on how women are treated in the US, this book of stories set in the 60s felt culturally relevant rather than retro. In three short fictions, Sandra Scofield examines the ambivalence and vulnerability of three women as well as the entitlement and ignorance of the men in their lives. Gender, more telling of one’s mobility and expectations in the 1960s than today, casts the male and female characters in narrowly defined roles. Women long for masculine freedoms and adopt a rebellious edge to keep themselves out of prepackaged social norms, while the various men in their lives conform to egoism, salvific nostalgia, and violent acts of privilege.
Toward the middle of Sustainability: A Love Story, I decided to read slower in order to sustain it, if only for a minute longer. I didn’t want the journey to end, just as the author, Nicole Walker, doesn’t want the world to end; there are too many great things to live for, this book being one of them. It is composed of thirty-eight essays, all of which read like prose poems, stuffed with scientific research on topics such as recycling, McDonald’s, and suicide. Most of all, it’s a love story written to Portland, Oregon; Walker’s family; and the little blue dot.
Reading graphic novels sort of makes me feel like I’m ten years old, but when they include issues like poverty, molestation, and the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, I realize that a ten-year-old me wouldn’t know what to think. I still don’t, for that matter. Angelitos by Ilan Stavans and Santiago Cohen throws you straight into the lion’s den of Mexico, where homeless children run amok, and the only one that seems to care is a Catholic priest by the name of Father Chinchachoma.
Gloved Against Blood by Cindy Veach is about the textile industry in the 19th century, and the people whose lives it directed, including the lives of Veach’s ancestors. Her poems bring to light the oppressing conditions the women who worked at the mills endured. She uses found poems from news and slave narratives to add a level of expose to her work. The poems also weave a history of Veach’s family, and she hints at the fact that this history, like many hardships endured, is never completely shaken but inherited, like a thimble passed down might hold a stain of blood.
What if Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of JFK was thwarted? What if a hardworking FBI agent discovered the 9/11 plot and arrested the terrorists before they boarded planes? What if an 80-year-old Martin Luther King swore Barak Obama into office as the 44th president? What if a California screenwriter and professor, Stu Krieger, followed four families through these what-ifs from 1963 to 2009? Well, that would be That One Cigarette.
If you happen to notice the number of pages in this book before reading the review, don’t think you’ve seen a typo. Nicole Cuffy’s Atlas of the Body is indeed 17 pages long, and she fills out those pages with small scenes that open a larger story.
The Comet’s Tail is a book about memory, the lack of memory, and the slow and painstaking process of recreating life and meaning after a coma.
What other dangers will you step through tonight?
The hours baggy and gathering.
There is nothing mere about this.
I wanted like hot skin thumping around
the splinter caught within. That, and a tidy gold peace.
—from “Where God Was Not”
Libby Burton’s collection Soft Volcano is a delicate and sensuous meditation on the quotidian. By taking the smallest detail and transcending into the metaphysical, Burton is doing what the best writers do, asking questions that linger in the mind and heart.
Elly Blue of Microcosm Publishing has complied a mixed-genre anthology including essays, poetry, fiction, and even a recipe on cycling, empowerment, and the politics around transport and urban living. If you live in Portland, have a tendency for activism, or have just traded in your used Ford Corolla for a refurbished fixie, then this just might be the zine to slip into your back pocket for that next ride.
Not since Jose Luis Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica, a dictionary of 120 mythical beasts meant to be “dipped into” and read “randomly, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope,” have I picked up such an intriguing and beautiful collection as Monster Portraits by brother-sister, artist-author, extraordinaire collaborators, Del and Sofia Samatar. The fact that Borges was not a Somali-American growing up in the 1980s makes all the difference between the two works. Style, structure, and intention draws parallels, but the narrative of “other,” of foreign, of nomad, adds a profound political and emotional layer.
A figure named Alice dominates the initial section of Beth Spencer’s poetry book, The Cloud Museum. Is Alice real? You’ll have to judge for yourself. The second section of the book swirls around the definitely real artist Jay DeFeo.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a delightful piece of “futureliterature” that spits in the face of gender, ignorance, and what it means to be “normal.” The protagonist, Paul (aka Polly), can change between male and female whenever he/she wants, and at first, I was a little confused by the pronouns when “he sat to pee with his exciting new vagina,” but then I realized that they never really mattered. Men, women, we’re all the same twisted people.
Before reviewing The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape, I feel obligated to mention the fact that I am from Chicago, specifically, the northwest side, where violence never really touched. Petty theft and the occasional flesh wound was about as “Chiraq” as Old Irving Park got. So, when people assume that all of Chicago is some Cormac McCarthy novel, they couldn’t be more wrong. This book is an attempt to prove that, and moreover, even where the unacceptable amount of death does occur, life is present too. The End of Chiraq is an anthology composed by the city’s youth, showcasing the beauty in the chaos, the “flower growing from the concrete” (Aneko Jackson, “Concrete Flowers”).
Paisley Rekdal’s The Broken Country, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, grips you from the beginning, starting with a vivid description of a stabbing in a Salt Lake City parking lot, a crime perpetrated by a Vietnamese refugee. We later learn that Rekdal, who lives in Salt Lake City, just a few blocks away from the site of the crime, happened to be in Vietnam when it happened and daily visited the war memorial featured on the book cover—a sculpture created from the wreckage of wartime airplanes, tanks, and other vehicles. Gripped by the realization that the trauma of the Vietnam War still affects American culture—especially in the private communities of refugees and immigrants—Rekdal weaves together an investigation into trauma, war, and refugees that makes it impossible to forget the ongoing tragedy of wars, past and present.
I really like the phrase “the chaos of memory.” My spirit latches onto it and wraps its arms around its queer, hairy legs. The phrase expresses what kind of happens to your brain during and after trauma. Chaos roots itself in memory. My chaos came when a Mexican man sexually assaulted me on a sidewalk in the afternoon sun.
—from “Semester 1998”
My first introduction to Jenny Boully’s work was her essay The Body, which is written entirely in footnotes and has a whole lot of white space. What an inventive mind, I thought, and her latest book, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, reinforces that thought.
A good example of what independent presses have to offer is Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven. No formulaic pap, no ‘been there, done that.’ Just fine, original storytelling. At first I tried to pin down a genre for Myint’s book. Then I relaxed and let her story take me to a horrific ecological event that ruins a city and upends the lives of its people, all who are unnamed. We have the narrator, her family, and “the baby.” There is also a friend called “the girl” and assorted others, including a king and his family and numerous enemies.
Continue reading “The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven”
Diana Arterian presents a force of nature in her debut, full-length poetry collection Playing Monster :: Seiche. Formed after its namesake, seiche, the book plows ahead, a standing wave, a constant, nonbreaking push forward. Throughout the pages, Arterian writes with insight and honesty while weaving together the story of her family’s abuse at the hands of her father, and a period of her mother’s life in which strange men suddenly appeared with the sole goal of threatening her.
Unfamiliar with Barrie Jean Borich’s previous works, I decided to forgo my usual research concerning the author’s expertise and dive into reading Apocalypse, Darling right away. Peeking inside just to get a taste of her writing, I suddenly found myself unable to stop reading despite my previous plans for the evening. Just like the author, “I almost forget we have some place to be,” so I cancelled my plans to explore Borich’s world of “the beautiful wastelands.”
Winner of two NEA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and an award from the Academy of American Poets, David Rigsbee is a seasoned American poet who has published ten books of poetry, multiple chapbooks, and a few translations over the past forty years. The poems in Rigsbee’s newest collection, This Much I Can Tell You, are as circumspect in language as they are in dispensing an immediate and experiential wisdom, as the book’s title implies.
Best not to imagine your love dead
or to put literature ahead of life.
Best not to write certain things down.
—from “Cartas de Amor”
If forced to write a narrative log-line for Mather Schneider’s A Bag of Hands, Rattle Poetry’s 2017 Chapbook Prize selection, it would be simple: Cab driver marries Mexican, life ensues. But that is veneer.
I still remember being in awe as I first learned about the RMS Titanic in grade school. I pored over books with clear pages I could peel away to reveal the layers of the giant ship, I unsuccessfully tried to imagine the wonder the public felt at the size of the ship with its pool and gym and cargo and grand staircase, and I repeatedly played through the 1996 PC game, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, that takes place onboard. Despite all of this, there was still always an incomprehensible aspect to it—the ship, accident, and amount of lives lost. With years between its existence and my own and with games and movies made about the tragic event, there was something “unreal” about the Titanic. That’s where Anna M. Evans comes in.
When first opening The Science of Lost Futures, I was already familiar with some of Ryan Habermeyer’s works, so I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. Habermeyer’s mysterious fiction defied all my expectations. This collection of stories pulled me into the strange world where a woman can turn into a snow leopard, people admire a giant foot, and turkeys take over a house. These strange occurrences, however, become fantastic circumstances for Habermeyer to explore human relationships. In this collection of witty stories, Ryan Habermeyer places humans in bizarre and sometimes absurd conditions which creates a rich world with relationships at its center.
If I can own anyone
I ask for noneunlike orchids that cannot
grow unless paired.I don’t know.
I remember you lovedto swim. Everything I am
become water
—“Madrona”
John Canaday’s newest book of poetry, Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project, easily reads like a story about an era of American history that impacted the entire world. The Manhattan Project, code name for creation of atomic bombs during World War II, referred to the New York City borough where the project’s headquarters were located. The bombs, however, were assembled in New Mexico at the Los Alamos Laboratory and tested in a desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945.
By some stroke of luck, I had Philip Sterling’s new book with me as I laid in bed, sick from the change in altitude after arriving in Bogota, Colombia. As I choked down saltines and felt sorry for myself, these self-effacing, wise, and often revelatory poems delivered me from myself for a few hours. Continue reading “And Then Snow”
Dong Xi, author of the novel Record of Regret, began submitting writing to Chinese magazines when he was fifteen, according to the novel’s translator Dylan Levi King. Since then, Dong Xi, the pen name of Tian Dailin, has written four novels and is a writer in residence at Guangxi University for Nationalities, China.
The twelve stories in These Are Our Demands dip their toes into potential futures and alternate realities. The characters in Matthew Pitt’s stories are vivid and sassy, and the writing is otherworldly. This collection lures you in with the promise of comfort, and then pulls down the straps and sends you on an unexpected wild ride. The stories have an unrivaled originality that is bound to keep you reading till the las page.
Rachel Rinehart’s new collection The Church in the Plains is a historical, cultural, and religious journey, as Rinehart explores her German Lutheran roots in a richly reflective and imaginative book of poetry. With a knack for rendering human peculiarities and foibles, Rinehart writes poetry with echoes of Robert Lowell and the confessional poets, but with a streak of heritage and flair all her own.
Jennifer Elise Foerster’s brand-new poetry collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather is an elegant, lyrical journey across lands near and far and times past, present, and future. A very gifted poet with an NEA Creative Writing Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Scholarship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Foerster, a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, writes poems that are teeming with connection to the natural world, yet also aware of the dangers of human greed.
A thing is a cicada when it tends toward sexual disorientation
& I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me.
Aditi Machado’s debut collection, Some Beheadings, is a delicate meditation on the origin of thought. Somewhere between Wittgenstein and Rilke, with splatterings of Gertrude Stein, each page is a flower opening to reflect spring. “A wind blows, the desert unfolds.” “The desert melts, the sky’s glass.” Some Beheadings reads like bits of a shattered rainbow.
If I told you the quick plot summary of Tina Goes to Heaven, by Lois Ann Abraham, you might visualize a familiar movie reel of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stories, and then you might yawn and ask me what else I was reading. But you’d have it wrong, and I’d have done you a grave disservice. Continue reading “Tina Goes to Heaven”
Have you ever taken homemade food to a picnic just to have it ignored? Then you might recognize yourself in Vincent Chu’s story called “Ambrosia,” which appears in his first book of short fictions, Like a Champion. In it, our narrator’s girlfriend brings the sweet dessert to a barbecue with this result: “In the middle of the table sits the uneaten ambrosia, cubes of strange fruit drowning slow deaths in white glob, wincing under the summer sun.” But in this case, a simple sentence will turn the embarrassing situation around with unexpected results.
Terry Ann Thaxton approaches her third book of poetry, Mud Song, with a native Floridian’s familiarity. We know about Florida oranges, alligators, and hurricanes, and she doesn’t ignore these attributes, but there’s a lot more of Florida in her book that won the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Okay, ready? Would you rather be completely covered in fur, like, head-to-toe, monster type of shit or, stay with me, stay with me, be completely smoothie-smooth in all of the right places: thighs, crotch, armpit, upper lip, neck?
— from “We Play Would You Rather at the Galentine’s Day Party”
Patricia Vigderman’s book, The Real Life of the Parthenon, appealed to me because, like her, I’d walked up to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. My walk was during a honeymoon, hers—for the most part—were more empirical.
The Amazing Mr. Morality is a collection that dives head first into the shallow end of a pool full of ethical dilemmas. Jacob M. Appel creates wild worlds just inches beyond reality, but still close enough to the real deal that you can absolutely imagine them coming true. The writing is sharp, the characters are witty, and the stories are original.
Eleanor Lerman began her writing career at twenty-one as a poet, branching out over the years into short stories and novels while winning prizes along the way. Her latest book is a suspense-filled science fiction novel called The Stargazer’s Embassy.
“Another endangered syntax descends.” —from “Echolocations”
If ex-poet-laureate Billy Collins is correct in saying that poetry is “everyday moments caught in time,” then Jenny Molberg’s debut collection The Marvels of the Invisible, winner of 2014 Berkshire Prize, is exemplar. As if flipping through a family album, Molberg covers a personal history from birth to death, hospital and bible, family and landscape, hope and redemption.
At times in life, we dive in, ready for action. At other times, often in transitional phases, we hang back and observe, browsing through possible lives and paths we might pursue.
What do you do when the person who promised to stay with you for better and worse, sickness and health leaves? What if they leave by taking their own life? What do you do with the subsequent feelings of betrayal, sadness, and guilt? If you’re Taylor Mali, you write poetry about it. The Whetting Stone, winner of the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize, encapsulates Mali’s grief in the aftermath of his wife’s suicide in 2004.
“where time, they say, ends. Whereas for extending, whereas what you might call a leaking or a wandering. Incalculable lang, incalcable list—what’s spun down the hole. No pulling or leaping up. Blackness, only the din of our existence. Wishing-rod defunct. Hear my voice without echo, always defunct. A stone in hand. A crown in laughter.”
— from “One falls past the lip of some black unknown”
“One thing we ought not forget in this America is how our impulse to forget is so strong.” Rilla Askew, Most American
From where I sit right in Shawnee, Oklahoma, I am 41 miles from Rilla Askew, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of Most American: Notes From a Wounded Place, a collection of essays on race, violence, history, and Oklahoma. Six months ago, I would not have expected this proximity and would have read this novel from a distance out of curiosity, but disconnected from the Oklahoma Askew memorializes in these pages and connects to the larger American drama.
