NewPages Blog

Picking up Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose for the first time, I was immediately surprised. The title alone is enough to catch the eye and make you wonder: What does it mean? How serious can this be? How literal?

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I was really excited to read Bri McKoy’s Come & Eat, because as a Christian who loves to eat and feed other people, a whole book about using your table as a way to “celebrate . . . love and grace” seemed like just the sort of thing I wanted.

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Years ago, a hot air balloon landed directly outside my house. I don’t remember the circumstances, but the resulting fascination with them has never left me, so I was delighted to read Kathryn Nuernberger’s opening essays in Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past about ballooning’s forgotten women.

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On August 11, Lola met Kyril, the self-professed love of her life. He proposed on the 15^th, moved in on the 17^th, and they married. This could be a modern love story, except it took place in the late 1930s in Eastern Europe when Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler were tossing lives into disarray. The story of Lola and Kyril is just one episode in Julia Alekseyeva’s richly-illustrated memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.

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Unruly Creatures is aptly named, and it is as unusual and wild as the title forebears. Jennifer Caloyeras colors outside the lines in in this collection. The stories are at once beautiful and tragic, comedic and full of sorrow, as well as strange and telling. Each story is wildly original, and seamlessly comments on current events. Caloyeras’s talent shines through the pages of this collection, latching on to the reader and refusing to be put down.

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Are you happy? What is the source of your happiness? Would you say it’s love? Steven Gillis provides us with a few different answers to these questions in his new novel Liars. His characters find themselves either concretely sure of themselves, or questioning everything they know in this thrilling, somber story of a man trying to understand love.

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In Hipólito Acosta’s newest book, Deep in the Shadows, each chapter is a riveting mini-mystery full of felons and malice, countered by bold law enforcement moves. Acosta, now retired, was a key figure in the US Immigration and Naturalization Service for 30 years. While undercover, he “traveled in the backs of trucks and in the trunks of cars with those seeking to enter our country. I had infiltrated human smuggling, as well as narcotics trafficking.” He writes, “I had twice taken down the most notorious counterfeiter who sold false documents to illegals and manufactured U.S. dollars in the millions.”

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Sarah Cheshire’s Unravelings is exactly the kind of book you never want to read again. As fiction based on facts, there’s a fine line between being able to accept the story as not true, and being wholly disturbed by what parts of it may very well be true. Sadly, the premise is one that has been around since I was in college, and since generations before mine: female student is enamored by male professor, engages in flirtations, perhaps falls in love, all while others—including professional colleagues of said professor—see what is happening and do nothing. Could they have? Should they have? I can’t help but wonder where responsibility lies in these situations, and Cheshire offers no answer either.

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By the River: Seven Contemporary Chinese Novellas provides a view of life in China today. The time is the emerging economy of the last few decades. Many people from the countryside have been forced into becoming factory workers, street venders, pedicab operators, schoolteachers, taxicab drivers, any job they can get to survive. The context is economic and political, but the stories are about the personal decisions of individuals to make their own destiny. The drama of human connection is up close with violence as overt as rape and as hidden as gossip, love both lust and of the heart, political resistance by way of satire, internal noncompliance and humor, and the sheer chaos of living in changing times forcing actions that new, uncharted, economic and political situations entail.

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There are some books that exist to make their audience walk away feeling good about life and the world around them, and then there are books like The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 4, which makes readers face gritty truths, some harder to process than others. Each year, the anthology “collects the ten winners of the 2016 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.” This year’s edition, edited by award-winning Gayle Reaves, features first place winner Stephanie McCrummen with “An American Void,” second place Christopher Goffard with “Fleeing Syria: The Choice,” and third place Sarah Schweitzer with “The Life and Times of Strider Wolf,” plus, the contest’s seven runners-up.

 

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Adam McOmber drags each and every reader into a thick, mysterious fog in his latest collection, My House Gathers Desires. McOmber’s stories quite literally have a life of their own, and the subject matter is relevant and important. This collection takes sexual identity and gender and gives them life in the stories and fables of old, while ultimately showing that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel.

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Minna Zallman Proctor’s Landslide is a collection of “true stories” (essays, really) that focus on matters of family, familiar dysfunction, and/or love gone awry. The essays cover a wide swatch of time, with stories from Proctor’s childhood, her young adult years, and her present, and though each essay can be read separately, together they ask a question that comes up several times: Is Proctor fated to repeat her mother’s life?

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In his recent essay at the Poetry Foundation blog, “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, and the Political,” David Trinidad makes a case for concrete imagery in poetry: “Without image I am bereft. I’m reading a poem by Contemporary Poet X and it’s nothing but abstractions, like ‘truth’ and ‘memory,’ like ‘despair’ and ‘joy.'” In audacious lushness, Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn delivers layers upon layers of detail that are refreshing in the face of contemporary poetic trends.

Nutter’s luxuriance in description brings to mind neoclassical novels, where the exposition of the plot depends on, say, the roving depiction of a bedroom. And this is precisely why Cities of Dawn delivers more than a message or concept. If one is reading with a metacognition, or awareness of one’s own reaction, the book—with its unfolding, seemingly endless worlds of objects and people—reflects our current cultural preference for a point, as we mine texts and rush toward abstraction.

In fact, in “The Radiant Manifest,” the speaker is faced with many objects: “plenty of tiny structures built into the waterless / pond” and “The probabilities, the double-sided / panels that turn toward one another.” At the turn in the poem, Nutter acknowledges our preference for thinking rather than experiencing:

And we were trying to “think it through” in the
way we knew how.
But it’s not something you can think your way through—
You think your way in and stay there.

From the very beginning of Cities at Dawn, the reader’s expectations are delightfully toyed with. The title for the first poem, “A Small Victorian Object,” sets up the ornamental preciousness of the Victorian world, and yet the poem ends by juxtaposing disparate objects:

Buttons; bottle caps; small bits of Styrofoam
that look like shells or coral; a few dead crabs;
a cracked porcelain vessel from the Victorian era
for containing the tears of those
who have survived the death of loved ones.

This poem is an example of how Nutter brilliantly performs a complex act of meaning so simply: as if in a museum, Styrofoam is displayed next to an antique porcelain vessel, and the contemporary viewer is forced to rethink the legacy of our familiar world. Time, too, is masterfully explored throughout the book, such as in “A Lapidary Crystal,” where Nutter’s arcane diction documents strange and fanciful things such as, “caustic potash,” “smoked eel and lemongrass,” and a “subterranean food court.” In the end, he uncannily conjures an obsolete world so similar to our own:

And its citizens are sleeping
but many are awake, and those
who are awake are turning in their beds,
as others lay their heads upon the cold
night pillows stuffed with ash and jasmine
for the calming of insomniacs [ . . . ]

Just as our forefathers couldn’t sleep, the speaker in “My Name Is Dustin Hemp” castigates the bookshelf of a seemingly invented ancestor in a manner reminiscent of an all-knowing hipster. After rattling off all the important books Hemp has not read, (including, hilariously, “the New Selected Wallace Stevens,” Derrida, and six bibles, such as “The Vinegar Bible” and “The Idle Bible,”) the speaker scourges cryptically, “Mr. Hemp, Your library is panoply / of iridescent darkness [ . . . ].” Speaking of hipster, the poem becomes self-referential when an admission appears halfway through: “The anachronisms in the poem are most marvelous.”

At The Kenyon Review John Ebersole adroitly observes, “Geoffrey Nutter’s poetry recalls the charm of a Wes Anderson film: so full of sculpted artifice that it manages to achieve authenticity.” A small minority might quibble with the word “authenticity” when it comes to Anderson’s films—some might argue that obscure aesthetics and emotional restraint become stilted and ultimately predictable. And like Anderson’s work, because Nutter’s pieces favor arcane encyclopedic knowledge and fanciful travels, at times it can be difficult to ascertain what emotion brought the speaker to share. Yet in poems like “These Are Cliffs of Wonder,” it becomes clearer where his art proclaims allegiances. Beginning self-reflexively, the poem could make any poet blush at their crummy metaphors:

When we moved to the wilderness
(of our feelings), past the granite quarry
and the salt works and the winding
towers (of our feelings)

Then, after cataloging the setting in a very simple manner, as in, “The houses / stand along the town” or “the wind is blowing,” the poem declares the epic: “These are the Cliffs of Wonder. / They rise from the Sea of Astonishment.” Suddenly, his rhetoric erects a cosmology, and in effect, Everything Ordinary stands in caps and possesses a mythical back story. The concrete is holy. And like E. E. Cummings, Nutter renders us so rudimentary, we look realer than ever:

The Person of Day-To-Day
Living lived day in, day out, among
the Big Geraniums of Guesses and the Waves,
in the Shadow of the Rickety
Lighthouse of Conjecturing.