The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette's The Part That Burns

Jeannine Ouellette is no stranger to pain and chronicles it most beautifully in her new memoir, giving name and form to the multi-faceted circumstances that have produced her exquisite trauma. The Part That Burns holds a light up to these events, crystallized over time, and marvels at the rainbow prism that radiates outward. While pain needn’t necessarily be productive, it is ever present; Ouellette demonstrates through strategic structures how her past trauma—and the generational traumas before her—live alongside her, shaping her choices throughout marriage and motherhood. And though healing might never be comprehensive, she demonstrates it can be clawed, bit by bit, out of life’s indifferent hands.

It is first obvious and required to say Ouellette’s imagery alone make this book worth an afternoon of careful contemplation. “A flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open black water with a sharp tunnel of light.” The colorful streaks of pool balls rolling down a sidewalk. Her father, not a swan: his bones “not hollow inside his flesh.” One might be tempted to think the beauty acts as a shield, softening the atrocities she chronicles in these aesthetic metaphors, bright details and a vibrant world both situating and de-centering the ugly. But another reading is this simply is Ouellette exulting, as any survivor might, in both the glory of the world around her and her ability to make it her own. A world that has given her a bad hand of cards is still home to pontoons on the lake, and Wyoming wildlife, and children.

Ouellette’s slim memoir recounts the events of her childhood and early marriage in conventional, standard prose, then returns to these stories in other chapters via series of vignettes, conversations with her daughter, and her ninth grade autobiography. Some are structured by different members of a similar theme: when organizing herself via various childhood dogs or songs that hit number one on the charts on their respective New Year’s Eves, she uses flesh and fur and Madonna to anchor us to her world. This cyclical structure echoes the cycles of generational trauma that flows from her grandmother to her own daughter but operates as a spiral, pulling us deeper into her understanding of the years of her life. She builds foundations of events in broad strokes, then returns later to sprinkle new detail, realized complexity, and a more full sense of self into the mix. How sobering, to read her molestation from her perspective as a four-year-old and then again as a mother, looking at her own toddler. We can collectively, but compassionately, wince at tenth-grade-Jeannine’s confidence at her Spanish abilities as she sets off to Mexico alone and at the calamities that ensue. Her own mother’s behavior often seems incomprehensible, until we learn her personal trauma includes being orphaned at seventeen, instantly losing two best friends (and, briefly, her ear) in a house explosion. Ouellette meticulously traces the ways our understanding of our pain grow and change when compounded and put into conversation with other experiences.

Some pages I wanted to cover my eyes and read between cracked fingers like one would stare at a smoldering car wreck—not to avoid them, but to shelter myself from the acute feelings she masterfully, and heartbreakingly, shares. Most jarring is her first postpartum sexual encounter, after giving birth to her daughter Sophie. We are transported to a hotel room: John, her first husband, has purchased crotchless lingerie for her, his parents are babysitting, and so deprived from six weeks of no sex, he is ready to “come like a freight train.” But between her cautioning him to be gentle and his first thrust, Ouellette sandwiches in the memory of her episiotomy. A doctor took a scalpel and cut “all the way through the thick, strong muscle of the vaginal wall,” rendering her unable to stand on her own for a week. (As someone who has never had a child, this alone is effective birth control.) Forty pages later, we’re back in the hotel room where Ouellette invites us to another turn of the screw. She tells us that she “slowly recalled,” when first looking at her body post-episiotomy, John had slid down the wall, paralyzed in ashen horror, staring at his young wife. She bloomed with a “swollen bruise the size of a grapefruit,” in so much pain she couldn’t breathe. John, we remember, had requested she keep the bodysuit on during sex: the crotch hole providing all necessary access, the black Lycra providing all necessary coverage. Ouellette ends the paragraph there. What else is left to be said?

During their marriage, Ouellette tells John of the various abuses she suffered at various hands over the years. He offers his pains and embarrassments in exchange: a bout of constipation, drinking as a teenager, and driving his former girlfriend to an abortion clinic. The juxtaposition feels intentional, with its chasm of magnitude so grotesque: John’s long-married, attentive, middle class parents shaped a stable childhood entirely unlike hers (which he unfairly wields against her in arguments that she does not defend). She could easily play the oppression Olympics, pitting circumstances against each other to crown herself the ultimate sufferer. And yet Ouellette is generally earnest and sympathetic about his problems: solemn that he did not go through with his first wedding, acknowledging his long commute, long work hours after fights. To readers more prone to anger, she displays remarkable empathy here. (Or, as someone who has never been married, perhaps this is what it takes to sustain decades of almost-love.)

And while it is true that one can be sympathetic to a spouse and still upset about her own problems, Ouellette savvily understands where actions speak louder than her beautiful words, both in her life and constructing her narratives. John’s frequent selfishness—displaying sorrow “for the pain of wanting and not getting,” his would-be affair, and neoliberal attitude towards sex—willing to go to a sex therapist, but says, “You’re frigid, and nothing will ever feel good to you,” when it isn’t working—builds the case for ending their marriage even before Ouellette guiltily admits to falling in love with someone else. As a child, when she tells her neighbors Mafia is killing her mom, they decline to help and retreat into their home. When she orchestrates a drive to Duluth and pleas for refuge for Rachael with her grandparents, they turn them away (Mafia is in legal trouble for abusing another young girl). What did speaking up do for her?

Pain and sorrow so frequently warp and deform their recipients, but for all her woes Ouellette is externally neither bitter nor resentful. Instead, she turns her attention inwards and fixates on her own brokenness. Ouellette is accustomed to suffering in silence, a practice learned from her mother who “closes the book” on the “particular sorrow” of her abuse. This silence is gendered, of course: it is almost redundant to explain the ways women are taught to be silent, about everything, especially for survival. This is why Ouellette curls her toes and bites her lip to avoid complaining during sex. Foreplay and her own pleasure, she tells her therapist, isn’t of interest. As a child, she is ‘grounded’ frequently and lives the life of a ghost, sleeping in the basement, making separate meals for herself. (And when she stays with a friend, her mother calls the police to forcibly retrieve her runaway daughter.) Most telling is in the basement of Trinity Lutheran. One member of the childhood sexual abuse support group is noticeably loud in discussion: she is moaning constantly, “a low, wet gurgle,” until tears spatter and stain her shirt. At the same time, Ouellette holds her breath to stop her body from vibrating, desperately focused on containing and suppressing her emotion. She hates this woman, she writes: “for being exactly like me—ruined—but letting it show.” She hates this woman for refusing to be silent.

Instead, Ouellette processes her world by escaping her own body, leaving the physical constraints of her circumstances. “I just pull myself through a doorway inside of me,” she explains after referencing her mother’s explosion, the tickle game with Mafia, and how jackalopes try to trick hunters to reach safety. She watches herself from above when she has sex with her first boyfriend; she dissociates: “my body is not me. I am connected to my body by a string.” Her mother takes long drives to nowhere, which Ouellette spends a chapter eulogizing: empty distance, barren country roads, the heft of the boat-like sedan encasing its inhabitants in safety. She eagerly searches for portals to another world in a canyon full of wildflowers. And she passes this practice to her daughter Lillian, who uses it after her own abuse. “My Self with a capital S—that’s what Mama says—would push against the boundaries of my skin,” the couch her boat, floating in the sea. Unanchored, unbothered.

Ouellette is keenly aware of the efforts healing requires to achieve only incomplete results, of the ways our bandages and scars layer on top of one another. From the way her new wedding ring, after replacing the engagement ring intended for the other Janine, catches on items around their home to how thick scar tissue finally replaces the pea-sized rock embedded in her knee, pain transmuted into new forms remains and adapts. She contemplates the metal pins in her mother’s shoulder. “Trauma is coded into our genes, mapped into our DNA,” she reads, to ask the question: can we eradicate our experiences? The ghosts of the past occupy the same physical space on our bodies and in our homes, lingering without a friendly neighborhood ghostbuster on the scene. Memories too are their own location that our minds visit, over and over, as she is plagued by thoughts of Mafia. Bravery, it would appear, is one solution; choosing love despite the circumstances. “Still, I had you,” she tenderly admits to Lillian. A decision once declined, now accepted. Despite the genetic propensity to inherit pain, abuse, fear. “Still, I have you.”

We receive an eponymous chapter in the middle of the book. “I am the part that burns,” Ouellette explains, as she tends to her fruitless garden; worries about toddler Sophie’s bad habits; confronts her mother about her childhood; remembers the explosive trauma her mother suffered; has her second child. She anxiously monitors all of her attempts at healing, knowing breaking the cycles requires growth, requires a venture into the unfamiliar. Repeated actions, her cycling through time, generate friction, fertile for a jumpstart. Her mother taps her cigarette before the explosion; she strikes a match on her marriage. “Fire starting is a felony, but workers need work,” she reasons. The burning, it seems, accompanies the healing; temperatures reaching a crescendo to melt and fuse broken pieces together. Cells and tendons knitting together to smooth over into a lumpy scar. Torn and whole, the body remembers. This memoir is her healing.

A Review of Kat Meads' Dear DeeDee

If one does not know what is meant by the experiences of memory in the living presence of an image of things past, nor what is meant by seeking out a memory, lost or recovered, how can one legitimately ask oneself to whom this experience or this search is to be attributed? . . . [I]s memory primordially personal or collective?

– Paul Ricoeur

Wry and deeply nostalgic, Kat Meads’ novel, Dear DeeDee, lands on the cusp between two broad categories of the epistolary novel form. In the traditional construct, the author beckons readers to observe an unfolding of love, the tension in its development, the harrowing moments of near collapse whether by distance, poverty, death or disappearance. Here, think of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, a novel of letters exchanged between impoverished distant cousins in St. Petersburg, Russia, who live across the street from each other, and yet send daily letters. Fast-forward in time to Nick Bantock’s popular tale of love and art intricately staged in the letters of the eponymous Griffin and Sabine.

The contemporary incarnation of the epistolary novel frames a skirmish in the battle over the position of the reader’s experience, particularly vis-à-vis realism and whatever one might claim as its antithesis, and so is only too ready to upend trust in the authorial voice. Take for example, John Barths’ novel LETTERS, or Chris Kraus’s I love Dick. Both quite exhilarating for the reader who enjoys watching a train speed off of well-worn tracks, engaging the reader in questioning the limits of the form, and especially of how, when, and by whom speech within a contextual milieu becomes authorized, and when speech invites distrust. It’s the “world-making capacity of language,” as Susan Stewart notes, that actively situates and transforms the reader as a narrative declares its intention to either mimic reality or to point to language’s place of origin in constructing everything the reader experiences.

In a series of short letters dated over the course of eleven months, Mead’s Dear DeeDee tells the story of the letters’ writer, Aunt K, born and raised in North Carolina. The stories in Aunt K’s irreverent and often poignant short letters unfold from a rear-view perspective, one developed long after she moved to the West coast. Aunt K addresses her letters to her college-aged niece who also grew up in and remains in North Carolina. Aunt K’s letters seek to bestow sage coming-of-age advice, offer tender descriptions of DeeDee’s father, and select tidbits of uniquely small-town, Southern, White life.

As the novel begins, Aunt K notes the difficulty of getting started with her project, running through a halting series of salutations, only to cross each out before the ink dries: “Dear, Dearest, Darling DeeDee, Darling niece, Greetings.” In the opening letter, Meadstips her hand toward the arch tone she  maintains through much of the novel, referring to the distaff members of DeeDee’s clan as “ancestresses,” each plagued by the effects of the Southern mores Meads makes careful note of, those that shuttle older women into a state of “grumpiness” rather than of “confidence.” In Dear DeeDee, memory unfolds along a matrilineal line. Men come in and out of view but mainly to serve as markers of female introspection: the curious case of the uncle who cries silently at the dinner table for no apparent reason; DeeDee’s father’s black patent leather shoes; a series of nameless boyfriends.

Meads engages in a bit of gamesmanship as Aunt K advises DeeDee that “literature teaches us to lead with force, provocation, mystery, feeling” and then worries whether her opening gambit contains enough of these in any measure to hold her niece’s attention—an undercutting move, one taken to prime the pump of sympathy for the storyteller.

The substrate of Meads’ novel, then, as memoir, enacts memories of her early years in a voice that is at once jaded and swaggering, disarming and joyful; a voice intent upon providing loving counsel to DeeDee, but one that seems to want to unknow the very same emotional wrangling with adolescence, spoken and unspoken family disagreements, admiration and shame of her small-town roots: “Recalcitrance. Pretty standard Southern hiccup”; “Digging in one’s heels, affably appearing to agree. Both regional staples. What I reiterate here, you no doubt figured out rolling in your crib.” Aunt K occasionally askes DeeDee a direct question: “And how are you spending your undergrad Sundays? Cramming for Monday midterms? Throwing back Tequila shots?” These direct addresses bring DeeDee to life in tiny spasms of presence that break, for a moment, the cadence of Aunt K’s storytelling.

Dear DeeDee mimics the movement of a certain type of social discourse—a banter of Southern, snappy retorts one might expect to hear spoken among those who haven’t left home, those who are overqualified but continue to slug it out in a series of dead-end jobs. Until leaving for the West coast for good, this was Aunt K’s world, with the exception of a brief stint in NYC—and ostensibly Meads’ as well.

The depth of field Meads painstakingly develops in Dear DeeDee creates a kind of Geertzian modality, a thick description of the valences of time, place, mood—all of which make it a pleasure to read, full of local color, brimming with remembrances of a certain strain of American family life, with its quirks, snarky asides, and quiet tragedies. Quite interestingly, the letters are full of literary, film, and brand references too numerous to name here, with the exception of Virginia Woolf’s work and life, which have a place of prominence. Aunt K uses these copious references to literary work, and its making, to foreground her own story as fabrication, world creation.

The reader will soon begin to intuit that since DeeDee never replies with letters of her own, she doesn’t exist, nor does DeeDee’s father, whom Meads takes great care to describe. DeeDee is, as Aunt K finally concedes, a conceit created as a reason for the discovery, naming, and parsing of memory: memory at once vividly personal and tangentially collective; the latter unabashedly pointing to a kind of genealogy, to bloodlines writ large as persona. One might assume that a memoirist might choose to keep certain members of the family disguised for the sake of privacy, and while this may be the case, Meads seems to have something else up her sleeve. The simultaneous embrace and refutation of her project—of which she says her “working theory is to pimp nostalgia as connection, a connection with who I was and therefore am. Unfortunately, that face-saving spin ignores a basic horror. The past is set. No revising or improving it.” Meads’ Dear DeeDee declares itself as writing in-and-of-itself, and perhaps with no more allegiance to the past than DeeDee herself.

An Interview with Katie Nolan, Author of Confessions of a Hobo's Daughter

Deborah Woodard: Congratulations on the publication of your memoir, Confessions of a Hobo’s Daughter, Katie. This is such a multilayered remembrance, and it’s a real page turner! It features family secrets, tales—some of them hair raising—of riding the rails during the Great Depression, an ongoing query into how to live one’s own love story, and even phone calls to your writing teacher. How did you come to write Hobo's Daughter?  Was there a moment when the book clicked into place for you?

Katie Nolan: I carried my father's hobo stories, both written and in my memory, for years. So the idea that I ought to write them in a book form was there as well. Some of the stories were poignant, like the one where my parents, after retirement, were traveling with my nephew. My father gestured to the town jail as they traveled through and exclaimed, “I was jailed there once.”  My mother immediately said, “Don't say that in front of your grandson!”  There was always this tension in the family as to whether his story should be told, or not. I felt that telling his story completely would vindicate him, create empathy for his plight, and that of many others, of being forced into a life on the rails due to the Great Depression.

DW: You tell the parallel stories of Bud and Katie, father and daughter. Both of them ride the rails, but in different ways. Bud never buys a ticket, for instance. Did you ride the rails to prepare for writing the book?  If so, what stood out for you as illuminating moments?  Did this journey make you feel closer to Bud?

KN: I rode the rails along the same routes that I knew my father took; I was in search of my father, someone who had always seemed bigger than life and heroic to me, in the way that he sacrificed, first for his parents by helping them with his meager earnings, then for our family of five, as he worked full time as a logger along with his second job as a dairy farmer. All of this labor and he was still able to spend lots of time with us on camping trips. I think what dominated my thoughts during my thirty-day train trip was how amazing it was that my father was able to be the most optimistic person I'd ever known in spite of hardships that would turn another person despondent. By his hobo stories and his everyday joviality, he taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my life—how to be positive and optimistic in the face of darkness. His joviality took the form of singing silly songs on his way to the woodshed every morning, and of tickling the feet of his children to wake them up. My childhood friend, who often stayed with me, remembers the latter and the memory always makes us laugh. I have always felt very close to my father, but the journey and my writing of the book brought insights into him as an exploited human being. My admiration of him took on a new form, a new understanding, beyond those early memories of daughter and father.

DW: You write a lot about the Great Depression in your memoir. Were anecdotes of those years passed down to you by your parents and grandparents, or did you rely on research. Or both?

KN: My parents and grandparents did often speak of living through the Great Depression. To this day, I learn some new stories from cousins who had their father, and my father's brothers, tell them similar tales. Each of the brothers, except for the youngest, was told that they “better get on the road and find work, so that they could feed the girls.”  From my earliest memories, my grandparents lived in the schoolhouse that they had bought at auction when they arrived in the northwest. We visited there often, as they lived less than a mile down the road from where I grew up. My grandparents came as many others did after being blown out from the dust storm. They lost all they had in the dust bowl, except for the few things they could tie onto their old jalopy. I recall the wood cook-stove that they brought with them, which looked huge and imposing to me as a child, and the story was told that grandpa didn't want the burden of bringing the stove along, but grandma insisted. Walls and rooms were built into the schoolhouse over time, but they never changed the porch where students had hung their coats on their way into the schoolroom. In bold red paint it said “Play Ball!”  Because my grandparents spoke often about coming to the northwest, I definitely felt the history they described. I did some research, including verifying that Nebraska also suffered from the dust bowl, something that is not always mentioned in the history books. I also researched the resistance of workers to the injustices of that time, including the famous “hunger marches” of the unemployed. On March 6, 1930 there were hunger marches all across the country, including the one mentioned in my book at Union Square in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers marched in major cities throughout the United States, demanding relief from joblessness and hunger. Marchers were generally met with brutal repression; however, after the marches public sympathy for the plight of the workers increased. Unemployment insurance eventually followed.

DW: Despite the hard times that Bud endures, the book is full of moments of keenly-felt joy and companionship. I'm thinking in particular of some of the scenes in the hobo camps, for instance when Bud scores a chicken and they all make hobo stew. And also of Bud's friendship with Harry, his fellow former convict, which is every bit as satisfying as Thelma and Louise. Do you feel that extreme circumstances can give rise to joy?  If so, what characterizes this joy?

KN: There is joy and companionship in hard times. Perhaps there is a relationship between extreme circumstances and tight bonds between human beings. Relationships deepen when you see that you can trust someone with your life. This is revealed when you face life threatening circumstances together. But I'd like to believe that we can experience the same deeply trusting relationships without going through starvation or war.

DW: I understand that you are a former philosophy professor. Can you share a bit from a philosopher you find more relevant?

KN: One of my readers stated that I had “bared my soul” in the book and that was part of what she liked about it. Well, opening one's soul can leave one feeling both embarrassed and vulnerable. But my embarrassment is also related to a recent epiphany that I, as the daughter, perfectly exemplify the Buddhist philosophy of grasping, aversion, and delusion, otherwise known as the wheel of samsara (basic and universal human suffering). I see myself as this very confused, deluded person grasping for love in all the wrong ways, then expressing an aversion to the project of love. It should make me blush, and does, that I was so blind.

There is a great deal of depth to the concept of delusion that I am not addressing here. Nonetheless, the basic idea that delusion, as it is related to reality, ontologically and epistemologically, and as it drives our grasping and our aversions, seems to be something I totally missed when grappling with my failed romantic relationships. This perhaps adds substance to the opinion that we do have to deal with our emotional blind spots, use psychological tools such as counseling if needed, before we can successfully embark on a spiritual path that promises to remove suffering. I can only hope that my epiphany will help me install a bit more wisdom into my next book!

DW: That’s fascinating! More love stories should be written by philosophers. I just have a couple more questions for you. Katie reminisces about her past relationships while on the train. Without giving away the revelation at the end of the book, could you draw any parallels between what Bud and Katie experience and come to learn?

KN: Since I was raised poor, perhaps I have an inherent understanding of how economic injustice creates barriers to healthy intimate relationships. In this country, propaganda has convinced many that being poor means you are a flawed human being, perhaps lazy or stupid. I found that many potential partners I met were either true believers in this myth—this was always painful when I realized their view—or subconsciously, perhaps, judged me as inferior somehow. I couldn't help but take it personally.

DW: We may be facing another Great Recession. What lessons can we learn from Bud's story?

KN: Dad's life is an example of economic and social injustice. With minimal research it becomes evident that very few wealthy people go to prison. Or in street talk “We get the best justice we can buy.”  Bud was put on a chain gang because he had less than a dollar in his pocket—at that time this was the result of a vagrancy law. Massive imprisonment of the poor seems to me to coincide with economic instability and its creation of the poor, the majority of whom are women and children. It is still true that approximately 80% of the world's poor is composed of women and children, while women continue to do 80% of the world's work!  This creation of the poor, which increases with each recession, is also complicated by institutional racism.

Laws and policies are intimately connected to the specter of another recession. Laws favored the banks when my grandparents experienced the loss of the family homestead in Nebraska. During the Great Recession of 2007 onward, policies favored the banks and the 1% of the wealthiest. Or as a friend put it when I lost my house and life savings in the 2007 recession, “You didn't lose your house and savings. That money is in someone’s pocket.” 

Unless we strengthen democratic institutions, history will repeat itself.

A Review of Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins

Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins, comes at you raw, unapologetic, heavy. From the first three lines of this poetic memoir, you know she’s going to be honest. This is her immigrant story and as she makes clear, she is in control of her own narrative.

I am 40,
I have saggy tits, white pubes and a story
to tell…

It’s evident Calderón-Collins will tell the reader the truth about herself, the entire truth, as she’s “lied my way through life not only/to others, but also mostly to myself.” This is in the untitled Introduction where she explains the essential reason for writing the book, for replacing the harmful “magick,” of making and portraying herself as someone she’s not, to a healthy, honest, truthful “magick,” “a magick that loved me back,” to make clear that her trauma did happen, that it’s not dismissible and to make clear the recursive process she uses to build a healthy life to avoid the setbacks trauma brings.

*

Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins was born in El Salvador in 1979, at the outbreak of the civil war between the government and a coalition of left-wing military groups. It was a time of unrest and violence, prompted by socioeconomic inequality, where “men/[walked] around/in dirty green uniforms,” where “I’d hear shots go off.” At the same time she fought her own personal war, the kind she said that, “lived/in dark houses.” The sexual abuse began at age four when Don Chepe and his wife were left in charge.

“It started with a kiss,” and ended with, “his cock/in me.” At four, this was the prevalent war in Calderón-Collins life, not some adult conflict over important adult issues she was too young to understand and played out at a remove from her immediate world.

The opening section after the introduction is written in a verse that draws the reader in and builds. Information is revealed gradually, in the same way people learn about themselves. On one page Calderón-Collins writes:

cracked hands scratch
the softness
of her thighs—
he is gentle, a giant

Then, two pages later she reveals who “he” is—Don Chepe. But how and why was he able to molest her? On another page it’s reveled he was left in charge of her, like a babysitter. The pieces of her life begin to fall into messy place; what kind of world she was born into and the consequences from living in that world. And from the gradual reveal of information, Calderón-Collins deftly illustrates the lingering effects/consequences of her trauma, from Don Chepe and others, and how she carries it with her throughout her life. Even in many of her word choices, such as “scratch the softness” that enables the discomfort, the PTSD flashbacks, the self-hate, to resonate and linger in the full effect of their seeming contradictions, works towards developing an honest portrayal of how disorienting and disorganizing trauma is to get a hold of, in order to have any clear understanding of who one is, what life is, what a person deserves and how to be a functional human being.

*

When Calderón-Collins immigrates to the United States with her parents at age six, and when she’s older, after being deported back to El Salvador, Los Ángeles, the city of immigrants, becomes her home. As a city of contradictions—its natural beauty and the ingrained racism that tinges the residents socio-cultural interactions—it mirrors who she is and welcomes her as is. Being told she’s special as she’s being molested. The city hints at what the second half of the book is about—healing.

It’s here in the suburb of El Monte that she first learns beauty is possible. But it’s a certain kind of beauty. “[H]uge trees and the huge yard…and love is only something for the/pretty girls, the white girls” because it’s “a quiet, perverted city…where a certain type of/immigrant lived/where we lived, this certain type of immigrant.” Quiet, assimilationist. Where Calderón-Collins language shines when she repeats, but rearranges, the two lines about “a certain type of immigrant,” giving this idea new meaning and depth. She rearranges lines several other times with the same success. However, this L.A. flies in the face that certain neighborhoods remind her of the familiar, comforting cultural aspects of El Salvador.

For many different reasons Los Ángeles has always played out as a contradiction, especially for the people who call it home.

Yet, at times, her use of language falters. Her constructions can be awkward, such as “[a] caring tongue burn” when sipping hot chocolate and discussing hypocrisy. Here, Calderón-Collins is again constructing a contradictory image, but instead, when read, it sounds as if the reader stumbles over the language, the flow and rhythm of the verse. However, such occurrences are minor, only briefly taking away from the new and deeper meanings she’s crafting and the comprehension of the poetic narrative.

Calderón-Collins’ healing truly begins when she crafts the image of rebirth, resets her narrative, two-thirds through. “[O]nce upon a time on a warm 9th day,” she begins, now taking active control of her narrative, of her life. Taking control, she reminds the reader and herself, is difficult because “abuse tinges everything.” No interaction is “normal.”

Her true work of understanding herself, from this point to the end, is powerful because her need for it is palpable and her use of language sorts through all the messiness and contradictions in pieces and steps. Gaining confidence from reminding herself that she does deserve the basics of a healthy life: real love by herself and others, the calm of home, of knowing who she is, not what the world says she is.

Calderón-Collins is creating her new “magick.”

Yet, Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole needs to be longer. What would help this “magick” linger, both the old and new, is by inhabiting more of the specifics of her life she already includes, to feel and understand how they shaped, sustained or altered her. Most importantly, Felix Serria Montoya, an El Monte neighbor she calls “a saint,” and “the first man who treated me like/the child I was,” needs to exist in more than one brief section. Don Chepe’s impact lingers, but in what ways does Montoya’s? How, exactly, did he help her survive?

However, Calderón-Collins did more than survive, as a woman, as an immigrant, but most of all, as a human. What so many in L.A. have always done. And by telling her story unapologetically, Calderón-Collins emerges as a complete three-dimensional person. Someone who thrives.

The Unknown Unknowns: DJ Lee's Wilderness

In 2018, 15 years after DJ Lee begins exploring the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, her long-time friend and intrepid wilderness ranger, Connie, is reported missing. At first, Lee is inclined to disbelief: how could someone who knows this area of land so well become absorbed by it? But as Remote demonstrates, wilderness—and particularly the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, one of the most remote wilderness areas left in the United States—will always remain somewhat unknowable, even to its most dedicated worshippers.

A map at the beginning of Remote shows the expanse of Selway-Bitterroot, spanning a northern portion of Idaho and the very Western portion of Montana. It is accessible only through a smattering of small towns around its edges. To experience the more secluded internal areas, one must travel by foot or helicopter, which Lee does many times over the last 20 years, in search of both her own sense of belonging and her family roots. Lee brings a sense of awe to her descriptions of the land, recognizing that the wilderness is not something to be mastered or understood but instead appreciated. “None of us really owns the earth,” Lee writes. “This is a lesson I relearn again and again.”

Lee’s personal connection to the Bitterroots emerged in February of 1999 when she was instructed by her grandmother to retrieve a mysterious box from her attic. Inside the box is an old photo with the enigmatic note scribbled across the back in grandma’s hand: “Moose Creek Ranger Station, in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where I spent many miserable years married to a man I didn’t love and who didn’t love me.” Thus begins Lee’s search for the stories of her grandfather and grandmother, Esther and George.

If anyone is to be handed a box full of mysterious old documents, it should be Lee, a meticulous archivist. Weaving her own family history with those of the original Native American inhabitants and various homesteaders throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Lee crafts a sort of patchwork anthropological history of the Bitterroots, from lost pioneers to modern-day opportunists. Most interestingly, Lee also includes photos in almost every chapter—of her relatives, of strangers, and of the land itself, curating a multimedia sensory experience that seems rarer in prose narratives than it should be.

In her journeys into the Bitterroots, Lee meets a slew of memorable characters, including Dick, an unofficial Bitterroot archivist, and the “The Indiana Jones of Moose Creek,” and Joe, who operates a shuttle service for hikers, described as petite, but gregarious. Of course, the character who made the biggest impression on Lee is Connie, who hovers as a presence in Lee’s memories throughout the text, offering both warm and hard lessons about how the wilderness has a certain disregard for human experience. In one passage, Lee recounts a story Connie told her about witnessing a moose mating ritual:

“And then one morning I woke up and there was blood all over the ground. I investigated and it was clear that another animal hadn’t died there—that was obvious. I knew it was some mark of animal life, some mark of love. Makes you think about the mystery of life that thrives in that place, and there I was, a lowly human, trying to figure out what happened.”

Connie’s is only one of a long line of disappearances in the Bitterroot, some of them positively haunting, like the story of George Colgate, a cook in an expedition of wealthy men from New York who became sick and was abandoned by his party. Later, a message in a bottle with a goodbye to his wife and children was found. Though these stories, Lee also paints the wilderness as its own character: an enticing mistress, one with no allegiances. Despite the love that the author has for the land, she also recognizes it can be a profound place of loneliness and unease, both for herself and her grandmother, who suffered from unnamed mental illness during her life as the wife of a wilderness ranger at Moose Creek. Through these stories and others like it, Lee also seems to be crafting a subtle portrait of women in the wilderness, and how their relationships to the land might be different than men. When Lee and her family are on a camping trip, they encounter a young woman, covered in bruises and near-starving, who arrives at their campsite with her menacing boyfriend. Refusing to leave with Lee and her family, the woman continues on her trek, and Lee worries after her welfare. When she confides in her mother, her mother replies that some people don’t want to be rescued. “And I knew immediately she was right,” Lee writes. “Because this was the wilderness, where people came to be left alone. Where people could disappear, if they wanted to.” 

In the Johari window, a therapeutic schema popularized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon briefing in 2002, there are four categories of knowledge that one has about the self and others. There are things known to the self but not known to others, things others perceive but not the self, things both others and the self can perceive, and finally, things neither known about the self nor others. These are the true “unknown unknowns,” the category of which I might put Lee’s story. As much as Lee works to “solve” the mystery of her grandparents’ lives, and Connie’s disappearance, the lesson learned here is that the wilderness, like the true narratives of our lives, rarely wraps up in neat ends.

But there can be a kind of spirituality in the limits of where our knowledge can take us. In one of the most moving and fascinating threads in the book, Lee describes the phenomenon of “constellation workshops,” in which participants are asked to re-enact each other’s family and ancestral dramas in order to bring new energy and light to the hardships they faced. At first, Lee is skeptical of the practice, preferring her data-driven approach, but eventually, she attends one, letting strangers and the workshop leader, Barry, re-enact the story of her grandparents and the wilderness as a live drama. Here’s what Lee writes after the workshop:

It was more than insight that I had gleaned. As we motored through the streets in silence, all I could think about was how, at the end of my constellation, George had said, “I love the land more than I love them,” how Barry lined up the women, Great-Grandmother Mary, Esther, my mother, the representative of me, and me, each with our hands placed on one another’s shoulders, my own hands stretched toward an imaginary Steph and whoever would come after her, and how Barry said, “you can let the land go, but it’s there for you, always.” How the thunderstorm that had been building outside finally burst and rain hammered the metal roof to drive home the point.

And so, in essence, is Lee’s point—the wilderness can be there for us as a refuge, but, like people, we have to learn to accept it in its refusal to be contained or completely understood. In this acceptance of the unknown, we can also find a sense of belonging.

Bill Lavender’s My ID: A Genre Bending Narrative Memoir

Reading poetry can be a radical act of self-reflection. I find myself unpacking my own depths in the presence of a great writer’s fearless journey, whereas maybe I cannot find or accept that moment in other genres or therapies, medicines or practices. Like My Life Lyn Hejinian’s profound imagist memoir, Bill Lavender’s new BlazeVox volume My ID is opening those doors for me.

Lavender’s title poem near the start of the book is a list of firsts that begins with that nearly universal American act of getting a Social Security card as a teenager:

1965, I’m 14, at Evelyn Hills Shopping Center
SS office, where my mother brought me to get
my first card, and next door a wallet to put it in

We hear of the mundane, the triumphant and the embarrassing. We learn who he is by the images of a life fully lived and decades passing by:

VISA, permission to enter, end
of the phone book, second marriage
license, houses VI,VII,VIII, inheritance,
first last will and testament…

A “list of firsts” poem may be a brave and wonderful Proustian exercise but Lavender takes it to master’s level. The yellowed card is “a handsome artifact” and he uses it as the book’s cover. He lets us know he is not going to hide anything in his memoiristic prose poems.

He describes his father’s face in his sister’s portrait one of “primal ambivalence” in the finely tuned poem “Imagework.” “Structures” is a dream poem, both descriptive and analytic and “Grand Isle” takes us on a fishing trip. The ID and the id are both in play. This is the work of a writer in his 12th book. His writing is prone to analysis, sometimes psychoanalysis, and at its best his poetic and genre bending narrative memoir is gripping.

At the book’s center is “Tui: an Elegy.” It is a tryptic, bookends of a mourning process with a travelogue in between. The beginning and end are unpunctuated creating an unnerving staccato, and the travelogue in the middle introduces denser prose text. It is a journey about travel and loss, and the writer’s compulsive urge to document it all. His sure language and process succeeds in bringing the whole to us. “More and more life feels emptied like that” he says in recounting a memory of another travel journey in the midst of the one to Tui, Portugal. He and his partner Nanc have taken many journeys together. She is there in a way that is essential. Their feet land in the familiar place, “The big room where we used to have to ask people to move to make room for a dart game, was empty but for the bartender.”

“Time” is the collection’s most fearless work. Here Lavender recounts clear eyed seeing his oldest friends who’ve scattered and regrouped, the 30 years gone by and how to relate and re-relate to them in the present, again in an unpunctuated flow, a satisfying collision of memory, thought and action on the page.

The book’s final piece is a “magpie scholar’s” history of “La Police” both the origin of the word and the concept of the modern police force. It was originally written as a Locofo Chaps chapbook, sent to the 45th president on his 100th day in office. On first read this writing seemed tacked on to a collection which felt complete. Then I found myself discussing Lavender’s assertions, re-read it, and understood its place in a book about an ID card. “One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.”

In Bill Lavender’s ID, wisdom is the bittersweet prize of a life well lived. So much can change that simple pleasures become unfamiliar. This book is full of timeless empathy: “Poetry that ancient broken/ pottery of sound.” It is a gift to all who strive for sentience.

One Wild Ride: A Review of Million Dollar Red, A Memoir by Gleah Powers

Reading Gleah Powers’ memoir Million Dollar Red is like going on an impromptu road trip with a smart, funny, but not always reliable friend. There were times when I wanted to step into the story and protect the narrator from the reckless decision-making of her vain, much-married mother; there were times when I wanted to jump between the narrator and her own bad ideas. But throughout, the lively writing and the speaker’s pure, admirable instinct for survival kept me hanging on her every word.

The book begins with the ten-year-old Powers and her younger sister, Kimberly, being retrieved from summer camp by their mother. Our narrator — who, we’ve been informed in a head note, went by the name Linda then — clearly admires her trim, glamorous Mom, and as both girls run toward her yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” we might be deceived into thinking that there will be familial sweetness in this story. Instead, their mother reveals a troubling surprise: along for the ride is her new, third husband, Jack, acquired while the girls were away.

“It means you can call him Daddy because that’s what he is now,” their mother says. While Jack works to woo Kimberly, Linda stews. “If I hadn’t been at camp, I was sure I could have stopped this,” the ten-year old thinks, wrapping her arm protectively around her sister. That sense of responsibility, and that awareness that the presumed adults in the picture cannot be trusted to care well for the two girls, falls as painfully on the reader as it does on the writer. And yet, there is no trace of self-pity in this book. The young Linda is as tough as she is intelligent.

Like many such young women, Linda becomes a kind of counselor and protector for her younger sibling and for various friends, none of whom seem to have her gift for survival. In a particularly haunting chapter, “Abortos,” Linda and her friend, Arlene, newly graduated from high school, drive from Phoenix to Nogales so that Arlene can obtain an illegal abortion. It’s 1965, and Linda has a clear-eyed view of the dangers: “I tried to conjure up a good outcome, but couldn’t help tensing the muscles in my chest and ribs, armoring myself for the possible butchering of Arlene that I would somehow have to handle. Raised Catholic, she feared God would punish us, and though we were almost in Mexico, I worried that if God didn’t get us, the U.S. government would.”

What ensues is tragic in every sense — a messy abortion in a roadside motel room performed by a “doctor” whose insistence on partying with the girls afterwards is broken-up by the arrival of Arlene’s gun-toting boyfriend, Leonard. In a reversal that feels all too real, Arlene, previously determined to break up with the abusive Leonard, decides his pursuit of the girls means that his love for her is true. She decides to return home with Leonard, dismissing Linda by cruelly accusing her of “always” being jealous of Arlene’s ability to attract boyfriends.

As with every chapter in Million Dollar Red, “Abortos” is written to be read as a self-contained story. Aside from the obvious commercial value of this structure — the stand-alone nature of the chapters makes them ideal for promotional excerpting — it also allows Powers to pinball about in her life story. Instead of following a single linear path, the reader scrambles through Powers’ memories with her, alighting here and there for a tense and telling anecdote.  What is lost in such a form is the sense of perspective that a more linear framework would allow. But the book mirrors the hectic, arbitrary twists and turns of the writer’s life.

Chief among these is a chance meeting in a Scottsdale bar with Ray, a costume designer in town to work on the Michelangelo Antonioni film, “Zabriskie Point.” Ray and Linda become a couple, and before long she is traveling with him, meeting a series of artistic and cultural luminaries who she finds alternately intimidating and inspiring.  One of the latter is Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Black Panther co-founder Eldridge Cleaver, who powers meets when Antonioni is filming the group in New York. Cleaver provides the narrator with a powerful life motto: “Imagination is the most powerful weapon we have.”

As Powers makes her way from LA to New York, the pace pics up, along with her artistic aspirations. She paints, she acts, she takes voice and dance lessons. As with so many artists, the day jobs she takes to feed those aspirations are sometimes tedious and sometimes outright weird, as when she is hired as a personal secretary to a “law enforcement philanthropist” who spends his time and his inherited fortune researching the history of law enforcement in the United States, establishing a small private museum of related artifacts, and receiving award from various sheriff’s departments. The narrator begins pilfering money from her boss and then, out of gratitude and guilt, has sex with him on a holiday visit to his parents. Powers concludes the brief, cringe-worthy encounter with her trademark wit and sharpness.

Before he passed out, he told me it’d been a long time since he’d been with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute. His therapist had been encouraging him to start dating.
“I’ll never forget this,’ he said.
I drifted off, wondering which category I fit into. For the first time in months, I slept guilt free.

The author’s boldest move is her concluding one: for her final chapter, she switches from Linda’s pint of view to that of another character whose own story seemed a minor part of this particular book. This device, used in novels such as Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover and Don DeLillo’s The Names, gives the reader a brief jolt of displacement until the “ah” of recognition settles in. I will offer no spoilers here about the identity of this character, but as with the DeLillo and Sontag books mentioned above, what first comes as a surprise is, by the last page, such a satisfying narrative decision as to seem inevitable. Such a bold move suggests to me a writer who is still growing in ambition and range. I’m already looking forward to Gleah Powers’ next book.