NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, Dimitris Xygalatas brings a wealth of research about rituals, both from the laboratory and the field, but also a depth of passion and interest in a subject that doesn’t get as much study as it does reflection. He is honestly looking for an answer to the question his subtitle implies, as he understands that rituals don’t provide any practical meaning to our lives, but we seem unable to live without them.

Xygalatas delves into how rituals provide order to people’s lives and how they help people bond. He explores how non-religious rituals help people connect with something beyond themselves and why people are willing to sacrifice their time, their money, and even their bodies for such acts. He illustrates how rituals help one’s mental and physical well-being, even when there’s intense suffering involved.

Near the end of the book, which he wrote during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he shows how even minor rituals are important enough for people to try to recreate, such as drive-by birthday parties and graduations, and how rituals must be flexible to continue providing meaning as our world changes. He differentiates between ritual and habit, revealing how we all need a source of purpose in our lives, whether religious or secular, and how rituals that don’t make much sense to those outside of a tradition help us find that purpose that encourages us to keep living and growing.

Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas
Little, Brown Spark, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Guest Post by Debbie Pierre

Winner of the 2023 The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Fiona Lu’s debut chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, is a layered introspection on survival and mourning.Lu offers a glimpse into the irreplaceable and delicate nature of life on a personal level, as discussed in “Elegy” and “Misstep.” On the other hand, she plays devil’s advocate by painting the insignificance of one’s life in the grander schemes of the world in poems such as “Loneliness” and “Poem Made Entirely of Gardens.”

In addition, Lu’s poetry collection displays a great deal of hand imagery to convey the God-like power and control that lie in one’s hands, “he / stuck his hand into a fishtank and squeezed,” as well as the kindness and humanity capable from the same hands, “the way he always claps his hands in apology / before he feasts,” as demonstrated in “Hunting.”

Lu’s quiet resilience commands each page or world of hers, unafraid of experimenting with different forms and rhythms. Evidently, she has given much thought to the artistic composition of her pieces, since many are worthy of the cork/bulletin board treatment.

Overall, How to Become the God of Small Things delivers startling reality checks on mortality, leaving readers to ponder its visceral imagery in moments of stillness.

How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu. October 2023

Reviewer Bio: Debbie Pierre is working towards an MFA in Creative & Professional Writing from William Paterson University. She is the recipient of Bloomfield College’s Joyce Carol Oates Award in Creative Writing in 2022. As an up-and-coming poet, her poems have appeared in BC Underground. She loves the macabre, the arts, and cheesy jokes.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, Navied Mahdavian’s graphic memoir, is, on the surface, the story of his and his wife’s attempt to literally make a home in rural Idaho. They have Amish builders construct and transport a tiny house to their land, and they begin learning how to survive in harsh conditions.

During their first winter, they’re unable to start their cars and, thus, get anywhere to buy food. Their attempts to raise enough food to live on doesn’t go well for their first year or two. They struggle to stay warm during the long, Idaho winters. However, their neighbors (loosely defined in such a rural setting, as they’re often more than a mile away) help them out, tell them stories about the area, and give them tips to help them survive. However, those same neighbors tell Mahdavian, whose parents are Iranian, that ISIS is in Idaho, they ask him if he’s Muslim, and they use racial and ethnic slurs to describe others when talking to him.

Navied and Emilie move to Idaho just before the 2016 election, which highlights such comments even more, making the book ultimately about Navied and Emilie’s attempt to find a country, to truly make a home, in a place that doesn’t welcome them. They ultimately have to face the choice of living the rural life they want or going elsewhere to try to create the life they want for themselves and their daughter.

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian. Princeton Architectural Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite