Permission to Hope: Every Living Species by Erin Stalcup

Erin Stalcup’s Every Living Species was included in “What to Read When it’s been a Hell of a Year” in The Rumpus as a book that “might set a fountain of radical hope a-burble inside you.” And yet, when I began reading the book it had been so long since I felt hopeful that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe the radical hope fountain within me could even be found, let alone set to bubbling. I’m pleased to say I was wrong. Somehow, while reading this book, my hope fountain flourished and even burbled—radical and glorious (and quite possibly purple).

The narrative weaves the voices and stories of various perspectives involved in the creation and visitation of the Birds of the World Timed Birding Contest exhibition brought to us by Canon and Cabela’s—a domed enclosure manufactured to hold every species of bird in the world. The perspectives in the book were wonderfully diverse, even including a chapter exploring the point of view of a rebel-spirited bird, brilliantly enough. The novel focuses mainly on the narratives of Arrow and Ivan Ríos. Arrow, a purple-haired young woman from Flagstaff, Arizona is participating in the birding contest with her father, while Ivan Ríos, creator of a Hitchcockian-ish film involving the rise of zombie Passenger Pigeons is participating with fashion designer Alistair Askgold.

Arrow’s story, in particular, captured my attention as she struggled with the loss of much of her family land after a fire and the realization she is pregnant during a time when her child will likely have to contend with extreme environmental catastrophe such as the end of the planet’s viability to support human life. However, while Arrow’s story resonated most deeply, the thoughtful depiction of diverse perspectives interspersed throughout the novel widened the scope of the story as these voices combined to give understanding, compassion, space, love, and respect to every living species—bird, bush, tree, and human being.

I gravitated toward Arrow more than the other characters in the book simply because we had more in common. Like Arrow, I began the novel in a space of hopelessness, unsure of my place in the world. In many ways, Arrow is nothing like me, but the way she goes about describing the world she lives in, the attention to detail she pays, and the absolute wonder she finds in the flora and fauna of the world reminded me of the wonder of my childhood. Arrow pays attention to what’s around her. She loves the land she grew up on with a fierceness that is difficult to match, though I certainly hope that I might rise to the occasion. I could taste, touch, and especially smell the world Stalcup rendered. I was transported back to a childhood spent with the places and plants Arrow describes. Places I mapped as a barefoot child running about the forests of the Rocky Mountains and the low desert of Arizona. I felt as if I were at home while I read, though I could also never forget neither Arrow nor I were really in a natural space. Instead, we were in a giant dome full of fake sky. Still, when Arrow pressed her nose against the trunk of a ponderosa pine to inhale vanilla, butterscotch, caramel, cupcake, or sugar cookie, I could feel the rough reddish bark scrape the skin of nostrils. I could feel the ache in my lungs as I chased my grandmother along the dirt road of her neighborhood street lined in ponderosas. And then, just as quickly, I was in the desert I grew up in, hunting for birds or anything else I might find, avoiding fallen cactus bits that might spike my bare toes. Though when I read the book, I was sitting on a futon in Ohio, I could still feel the slender waxy crush of creosote between two fingers, transferring the scent of rain onto my fingerprints.

Hope is the not the emotion I expected when finishing this book, but it came anyhow. As the characters in this book chose love, as Arrow chose hope, I found myself thinking I could join them. I could choose. I have a choice. When I put down this book, for the first time in a while, I felt I was being given permission to make a hopeful choice, even if that choice was simply allowing myself to feel hopeful in the midst of environmental strife and climate change. I am reminded of a quote from Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks: “Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it.” This novel is absolutely an experience of re-wonderment. Stalcup has intertwined political concerns with stunning descriptions of setting, diverse characters, powerful voice, and her own sense of wonder to tell a story that is bold, beautiful, and above all hopeful. I am left with a sense that even amidst our own fraught climate we may yet manage to make this world as beautiful as we hope it could be.

This Far Isn't Far Enough: An Interview with Lynn Sloan

We met at a faculty retreat, Lynn Sloan and I, quite a number of years ago. Lynn taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I teach creative writing, and I still remember her speaking about the potential for narrative in series of photographs. (I wonder if she really did talk about that, or if I have revised that memory in order to encapsulate both her evocative photographic images and her deeply engaging fiction?) Our paths cross often in Chicago, this remarkable literary city, and each time we meet, I am reminded of her kindness and curiosity, two traits a writer of any merit should have, I think.

We had the chance to talk story a bit, on the eve of the release of Lynn’s new short story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough from Fomite Press. These stories—full of “powerful yearning” (her phrase, not mine, although I wish I could claim it)—are so smart and so masterfully crafted, it was delight to hear her talk about how they came to be.

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Patty McNair: Your stories are populated with characters we readers feel we might know. They could be our neighbors, our colleagues, a friend of our mother, a customer, a family member. These are people engaged in the daily business of their lives, but often at a moment when a choice must be made, an action taken. And therein blooms the drama. I wonder, Lynn, what comes first for you? Character or dramatic moment?

Lynn Sloan: I suppose that it’s dramatic moment, in this sense: what comes first for me is a question: Why? I overhear a conversation, I encounter a situation, I read an item in the news, and I wonder, Why? Or, What’s behind this? For example, “Ollie’s Back,” the first story in my collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, started with a feature story in the paper about a food critic who’d amassed a vast cookbook library, and who hosted a series of dinner parties, cooking from those books. Afterward he insisted that his guests take home armloads of books until finally his library shelves were bare. Why? The article said he was moving to a smaller apartment. That didn’t explain it for me. Naturally I came up with lots of possible reasons, all of them springing from his desire to move away from his past. Someone connected with food wanting to move away from his past, that was the beginning of “Ollie’s Back.” Ollie, my protagonist cook, does give away much of what he owns, but this gesture is connected to his future, not his past. Where I start when I start a story is seldom where I end up.

McNair: How do you find these characters? What sparks their existence for you at the writing desk?

Sloan: I like to write about characters who, in life, would be easy to overlook, those who are neither successes nor exquisite failures, people on the periphery of the middle. The lonely mother of a disabled son who can’t get a date in “Grow Animals,” the aging actor who plays second fiddle to his famous actor wife in “Call Back,” the old woman who feels imprisoned in the retirement home, the feminist in “The Collaborator,” who is regarded as a tedious bore—she might look different in this #MeToo era—these characters engage me. I make them up. My secondary characters are sometimes based on people I know, but my protagonists start with an idea, then, as I write, whoosh, they become round and full, the way those little capsules, grow animals, dropped in water, become something else.

McNair: While these stories are not linked in ways that some collections are—no recurring characters or obvious settings repeated—there do seem to be certain emotions that connect them. Your characters face loss and longing, a certain kind of aching love, regret. And the tug of these emotions often leads your characters to a desire for escape, a desire that they give in to in a whole variety of ways. I wonder if you were aware of these emotional threads that run through the stories, or if they emerged as you wrote them, as you collected them, as you considered which of your many stories should be part of this collection, which should be left out?

Sloan: Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Me too. After I’d written and published a few stories, I looked back and discovered that no matter what I thought I was writing about, it all came back to yearning. I thought I was exploring very different characters and situations, men and women, young and old, clever and not-so-smart, sophisticated and earthy, and yet, what is central is their powerful yearning, their unmet desires. My editor at Fomite, Marc Estrin, a brilliant writer and editor, remarked that all my stories revolve around the character failing to outrun their pasts. He’s right, although I hadn’t seen it that way. You say, and you’re right, that my stories are about seeking to escape. But for me, the thread is one of yearning.

McNair: One of the things that I particularly admire in these stories is that your characters are not young. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the young protagonist, my stories are full of teenagers. I think that might be—for me—because there is a certain ease in creating characters who face moments of change, and teenagers are ripe for it. In this collection, your characters are often on the threshold of something, and you masterfully allow them to face this with a depth of knowledge and experience, and yet—each story feels as though your characters are discovering something entirely new. This collection put me in mind of some of Tessa Hadley’s short stories, and of Roddy Doyle’s collection Bullfighting. Stories that are a kind of “coming of middle-age.” Why do you think you are drawn to this life stage in these stories?

Sloan: What a smart observation! I hadn’t realized this. I have written a few stories about children and teenagers, but they are all flash pieces. I wonder why. You’ve given me something to think about, maybe you’ve even given me a challenge. What I know is that I like reading about the young and I’m grateful to writers like you, who write so well about growing up, in your story collection, The Temple of Air, and your recent non-fiction collection, And These Are the Good Times. But adult life just holds my focus. When I was a kid, I had no interest in books like The Secret Garden or The Chronicles of Narnia. I preferred James Michener, Herman Wouk, Daphne du Maurier. My parents did not approve. I sneaked these books, and others with racy covers. Adult life is so interesting, and, it seems to me, that it’s always about coming-of-age. “Coming of age” isn’t one stage or several stages of life, it is life. At every age, more is demanded of us than we are prepared for. Each of my characters confronts a moment, a situation, a series of situations that are particular to the “now” of the story, and this “now” is different than previous times because the character has lived through those earlier times, and has, in fact, come to a new age.

McNair: “Safe,” a story that is rather quiet on its surface but hints at a violent history between a mother and son, depicts a brief and tense reunion between the two after a long estrangement. Karen, the mother, says to her son Ben, “I tried to take care of you.” When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think how many of your characters in these stories could say the same thing to another character. It implies both good intentions, as well as possible missteps. There should be a question here, but I guess there isn’t a precise one. Maybe you can talk a bit about that dynamic—characters trying with one another, and characters failing. How does that help to create momentum in the narrative and/or complication in the story’s psychology?

Sloan: Failure is, I think, what drives stories. Succeeding, never failing, might be what we want in life, but in stories what we want, I want, is to fall into a world where characters are faced with troubles. I’m not interested in cataclysmic events. I don’t care about runaway trains, avalanches, murderous villains. What I want to write about is what happens when basically good people need what can’t be given or are denied what they want. Then what happens? That’s what I want to discover as a writer, and as a reader. “Safe” is story that has elicited responses that surprise me. At one reading, some of those listening argued heatedly that the mother was a bad mother, and others that the son is a sociopath. I, the person who made up these characters, couldn’t make sense of either opinion, which makes me think that this story hits some people hard in a place that hurts. It’s not a safe story.

McNair: Lynn, when we first met, I knew you as a photographer. You still are that, and I was delighted, after reading these stories, to skulk around a little on your website, see the visual art there. I was particularly attracted to the collection of photos called “Abstractions” where you have taken pictures of ordinary objects through fascinating vantage points that reduce (or perhaps elevate) the objects to shape and line. Also, there is a collection called “Carnival World,” that shows realistic images of carnival rides and attractions, but they are infused with other images that are altered in some ways, making the real and the dreamlike intermingle. To me, each of these collections remind me of things you are doing with your stories—shifting vantage points, merging the real with the imagined, the dreamed of, seeing the familiar in new ways. Does your work in photography inform your fiction writing? Do you see these creative practices as interwoven in any way? How do (did) you move from one art form to the other?

Sloan: Oh, this opens up so many angles! Photography, I love photography. I love how the world looks. I made photographs that I believe hinted at what lay beneath the surface of the world. All of what was included within the frame of the picture was held in suspension to be examined as long as necessary until it yielded its facts and its deceptions. But after a time, I wanted change and movement and time. I wanted not just this one moment depicted in the image, but the before and then the after. I wanted people doing things and feelings things. As a photographer, I was frustrated by what I couldn’t reveal. I couldn’t reveal what was underneath the visible. As a writer, I’m often frustrated that I can’t bring everything together at once.

On a practical level, I have to guard against my love of the visual. I can spend paragraphs describing the way the reflections dance on the surface of coffee. Reader alert—I cut out those paragraphs! As Elmore Leonard said, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

McNair: This Far Isn’t Far Enough. What a wonderful title. How did you find it; how did you choose it? What are you hoping we will understand about the collection because of it?

Sloan: I’m so glad you like it, author of And These Are the Good Times and The Temple of Air, two great titles. Titling is hard for me. My story collection was accepted for publication under a terrible title that my editor said had to go. I made long lists of titles, all of which were terrible. A friend suggested that I skim my stories for nice phrases, but I got caught up with reading. I tried again, starting from the back pages and moving forward. This Far Isn’t Far Enough came from near the front of the book, so I had to read backward a lot of pages before I found a title I liked. This Far Isn’t Far Enough says something essential about this collection: in each story, the characters believe they are free of their pasts, and they aren’t.

McNair: Let’s talk endings. You know how when you go to a classical concert, and they ask that you don’t applaud immediately after the last note has been sounded, but to wait until it entirely dies away? That is how I felt reading your endings. It wasn’t as though you used them to conclude anything, to bang a final downbeat, but instead to create a sense of resonance, a vibration that would play out long after the last note. Some of this has to do with your final sentences themselves, to the way they employ both rhythm and breath in their syntax. Some of it has to do with the possibilities your characters understand—in these final moments—are still ahead of them. A bear may or may not be waiting in the woods and shadows outside a woman’s house. A mystery lover appears in the doorway of a lonely, exhausted mother. A mother and daughter sing what they remember of a hymn as they spread the ashes of a loved one. “Neither one of us knows the words to what comes after,” the mother says, the final note. Wow. Do you write with an ending in sight? Do you discover it along the way, polish it once you do?

Sloan: I’m going to save your comments, so that next time I’m agonizing over an ending, I can re-read your words and . . . No, bad idea. I will feel even more intensely that I’m not up to writing the ending that I want to write, the ones you are describing.

When I start a story, I don’t know where I’ll end up. About halfway through the first draft, I’ll get an idea, often an idea that I know is lame, but I aim toward it trusting that as I draw close, I will figure out what must happen. Once I’ve figured this out, figured out the facts of what happens, then I try to find the words, the rhythms, sometimes suggestions of the unspoken, that reveal these facts and also will evoke emotions. An ending must ring like a bell, the sound and its aftermath, the facts and the feelings. You described this perfectly, “after the last note has sounded” waiting for it to die away. Thank you.

McNair: This collection is your second book, the novel Principles of Navigation your first. Does your process for writing short form differ from what you do when you are writing long form? And do you know right away if a story wants to be short or novel-length?

Sloan: Before I begin, I do know whether I’m starting on a story or a novel. When I start with a puzzle, the question of why that I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a short story in the works. If I begin imagining a large social landscape, then I’m on to a novel. Within that large landscape, there will be lots of why questions. I’ve never had a story that wanted to go big, although I’ve seen that happen with some writer friends. With novels—I’ve got several novels in boxes that should never be opened—I begin with a vast muddle and write, toss out, write more, toss, until I discover a lean story that makes sense. This is the first draft. Then I start again.

McNair: What’s next, Lynn?

Sloan: I’m finishing the first draft of a novel. Now that I understand what it’s about, I’m eager to revise. But I might pause on that, and take a short break. I believe you challenged me to write a story about a young person.

Almost Human by Thomas Centolella

Were a joke to begin So Jesus walks into this little piano bar in Berlin, then almost all of Almost Human would serve as punch line.

This collection, exquisitely tuned by a musical ear, finely turned by the hand of a master poet — one of our best — clearly revels in its obsessions: Jesus (or the Holy Spirit) adrift in the present day; the piano, the recurrent piano, which tinkles along to no small delight as leitmotif through its pages; Berlin, chockablock with griefs and guilts that the poet sometimes takes upon himself (“A city/that wasn’t me, but could be”).

And then there is a further preoccupation, the focus on loneliness, on isolation . . .

For example, my beautiful neighbor.
Passing me on the street or in the aisle
of our local grocery, she made certain
her eyes stayed trained on some
distant target of oblivion.

. . . an isolation which never strays far from the open sea of hostility:

And approaching me in the street
on the shortest day of the year,
a tall creature with long lively hair.
Kept my eyes down until the last
possible moment. And when I looked up —
Beautiful Neighbor, cutting her eyes at me,
rushing by with the startled look
of Who the fuck are youand what do you want from me?

There is in these pages a pronounced focus on beauty, on perfection (“a startling examination/of the secret life you can’t easily articulate to yourself/and half the time are glad you can’t”):

you’re out in the unpredictable world, and some woman or man
is close enough to touch, or to study with impunity,
and what binds you like a spell is something like the symmetriaof Polyclitus: a face so pre-possessing, so proportionate and marble-smooth,
at first you can endure it only in its particulars —
the bridge of the nose, the ripple of a lip, how perfectly
each brow crowns each mesmerizing eye

Obsessions — Thomas Centolella makes the most of them with his gift for the particular, figuring the essential in diligent detail, rocketing from the lurid to the longed for, from admiration to astonishment:

In the next gallery an athlete by Daidalos is so lifelike
I can believe the legend that says he had to tie down his statues
to keep them from fleeing. Anchored in her own room —
not that she seems to mind — a woman of dusky rose,
of wide-eyed wonder, holds a small fruit over her stone womb,
and nobody knows: Is she Persephone? Or someone’s smiling wife,
smiling mother, enjoying the secret of her immortality?

Centolella, in fact, is the sort of lush (though never louche) philosophe you not so much teethe on as graduate to after making your way through the mush and slush pile of marginal poets. As it’s said, when the reader is ready, the poet appears.

Poets, though — and, alas, prosodists — toil eternally at the margins of significance, of consequential human endeavor. They work, often single-mindedly, always hopefully, at Almost (but perhaps not quite) Work – being, by extension, almost (but perhaps not quite) human — their occasionally sublime efforts irrelevant to the moth-eaten, the mundane, the unambiguously non-spiritual churn of the day: the roil of Bitcoin and mass shootings, of partisan incivility, of claims about fake news.

Still, poetry is the news from somewhere, so sayeth (famously) Dr. Williams, so sayeth (darkly) Ezra Pound. Quiet news from the calyx of the Big Bang. Against no lesser backdrop than this, a giant elliptical galaxy — a galaxy evoked in the first poem of the book, “Virgo A” — Almost Human unfolds.

And the labors of this Almost Work, anchored more in the Spirit than the Street, give rise in their escalating otherworldliness, in their meteoric clang against the surface of the worldly, to the small (or not-so-small) splendors of the almost human. The beyond human — the numinous. The mystically better than human.

From these quiet collisions, these Little Bangs, Centolella mines his title. And shares his insights in shy sequence, very like a flower unfurling.

Unfurling altogether logically, though.

As the last of its five sections is revealed, the book discloses the full reasoning behind its author’s choice of Teilhard de Chardin (wearing both of his hats here: philosopher, Jesuit priest) to bestow a benediction — the elegant little epigraph that serves as prologue and summary, both, to the book’s central concerns:

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Not quite, but almost, human, you see. Upon this premise the poet builds his case and sets his goods.

No surprise, then, when Jesus — almost human, he — enters the city after midnight in the final surge of the collection, trampling like a beatific elephant through Centolella’s fragile, elegant wares.

I was a genius of dreams,
a reticent guest, the exhausted angel
without blessing or bliss, the friendly
demon that keeps things interesting.
The world called me human
but what was the world?

But that’s from the last part of the book. To retreat amidships:

Beyond Jesus in the modern day (“Nobody here bothers him with more than a glance:/his reputation might precede him but not his mug”) — beyond the piano (whose voice “will rise/as needed/before slipping back/into its bed of silence”) — beyond Berlin (“a city said to be evil, holy, shining, eternal,/a plexus of animus and genius, renowned for its ravishments”) — beyond his recurrent points and counterpoints, his favorite dishes, amply dished, the poet finds his surest footing in the dynamics of the oldest war: the one between the sexes, the story of Mars and Venus, in these pages clashing and clarifying, anticipating and isolating. (And more on that particular choice of words some paragraphs hence, in a few comments on Centolella’s craft and musicality.)

So. Mars and Venus. An example: From a dizzying study of a study in the Rijksmuseum, a real life woman in blue stands before an enigmatic Vermeer, and through an exercise of empathy — in what might be an instance of autobiography, as well — the speaker, the voice of the poem, stalls on the borders of a borderline love- or loveless epistle, interpreting the thoughts of his woman in blue watching the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter:

The letter says he’s not coming back.
He has his reasons. There are always reasons,
aren’t there? They make sense —
call them reasonable — even if
they’re far from fair.

And there’s this, in charming and poignant antiphon, a classic He said, She said:

While the music played she took off her glasses and looked at me, and I remembered that the eyes of the temple figures had been made large on purpose, to approximate awe in the god’s presence.

I don’t know if he wanted to kiss me, but he didn’t move his eyes from mine, he didn’t move at all.

She was leaning slightly toward me and her black sweater made the color of her eyes more compelling, and I wanted desperately to touch her in some way, but the god was unyielding and held me firmly in place.

He was so well-behaved I was aching to kiss him, though I knew I shouldn’t.

The song ended and then it was just the rain and its solitary syncopation.

There are splendors scattered like diamonds on the loose floor of these pages. There is “Your Legion,” “encoded with messages” crucial to the survival of this craft and sullen art, crucial to its admirers, to its practitioners. There is “Pergamon,” well worth the tour. And “Examination,” which bears (and stands up to) close scrutiny.

And then there is the poem “Nuptial.” Perhaps the best in the book. None wittier, none more evocative, none more technically acute. The word cant never employed more cunningly. Appearing early in the collection, an incitation — a stand up poem. This reviewer, reading the pieces in sequence, noted at the bottom of the page, “Now I know I’m in the hands of a professional poet.” The piece cannot be quoted here in full, and deserves more than to be quoted in part. It is, standalone, worth the price of the volume.

As are others, such as “Meadow,” which delivers a 21-line one-act play with the brevity of a bullet. And “Why I’m in Awe of the Spiral,” where even the flush of a toilet is significant “when its swirling is a variation/on our sidereal drift.”

Back to Berlin: “Say the one you loved was Jewish./Grief and peace just a block apart.” This is sad and syncretistic and wise, worldly-wise, a fusion in tone of the horror of the city’s history and the wistfulness of its charms — one of those moments “you’ve always heard about,/the one that could kill you but prefers to make you stronger.”

How fail to mention a poem with “a woman sitting so still/she had all the affect of a mannequin” or the dazzling “Namaste” or (of equal brilliance) “The Lost Coast”? Or a piece that offers a glimpse of the musical composition process which leaves little doubt about its similarities to the poetic process, a poem in which “an elegant dark-haired song, glistening with sweat” has walked to the poet’s house “all the way from its neighborhood in Havana” (has sweat ever been sexier?); or an internee poem thematically evocative of Plath and Auden; or “Simulacrum,” if only as an unexpected homage to Yeats? Centolella leaves few leaves unturned. There’s even a sprinkling of haiku.

On craft and musicality: Some few lines above were fretted with a couple of choice pairings (clash & clarify, anticipate & isolate) designed to pleasure the ear. The ear of a poet. And all in good fun. Get the essence of the game? Centolella does, in spades, in compounds of glorious aural enchantment, discrete snippets here adduced from various of his pages (which morsels, incidentally, nearly cohere as a poem when stacked thus):

a plexus of animus and genius
renowned for its ravishments
affection and its afflictions
alliances and allegiances
iritis in both eyes
arthritis in both knees
soothe and scathe
meager and mundane
cirrus and circus
gone to gray, gone for good
vexing as a hex
fidgety with tangent and anecdote
the radiant and the raucous
a concrete bunker on a lonely campus
the diligent clarity of a Kashmiri sky
without blessing or bliss
I despised the despoilers that would deprive
plash and swoosh
against hull and paddle

The poet’s technical tool chest is formidable. Alliterative adornments. Check. Range of expression. Check. The gift of clarity. Check. Sensitivity to consonance. Check. Shaking the kaleidoscope from the sacred to the profane. Check. Skillful striptease to stark-naked truths. Double check. And yes, the rare abilities to engage, to delight, to load, to lighten, to skirt the sentimental whilst rambling the rim of poignancy. De plus en plus.

Many artists, most writers, all poets, operate on the fringes . . . the fringes of an overwhelmingly Bottom Line culture, a society where quantifiable achievement — Work! — engulfs anything so frail, so vague, as the “spiritual,” the “almost human.”

Yet it is precisely in this vector that Thomas Centolella purées his gruel, where his poetry negotiates “the mysterious union of the divine and the human,” a phrase he employs in describing his piano, but which is likewise descriptive of his work.

These are poems of dramatic diction and street level brio, spirit elevators and gut punchers, poems of great learning and great good humor. These are ideas scrupulously framed and delivered with virtuosity. A fine, very fine, refined intelligence gleams here. And a pleasing modesty as well.

This is not a collection for the unconcerned, largely tuneless, unsmiling frantic nest of humanity, not a book for the man in the street.

But very much one for the reader in the subway, where poetry crawls from car to car, on placards, on signs, on ribbons of graffiti — poetry almost human — forcing the agile rider to lift her eyes wide open.

Tomb Song: A Novel by Julían Herbert

Julián Herbert’s mother is dying from cancer in the Saltillo University Hospital. He sits by her side, keeping notes, remembering her life as a runaway and a prostitute, cataloging their family’s slow ascent into the middle class, sharing, at times, in her fever dreams. His bedside thoughts become the novel Tomb Song, a piece of lucid autofiction that finds its structure in association and metaphor more than in any conventional plot. In one chapter, we move from the history of the small fighter squadron Mexico committed to World War 2, to the construction and architecture of the University Hospital itself, to eavesdropping on two orderlies having sex in the morgue in the present day. In Tomb Song, the present serves as more than a framing device, it constantly resurfaces with acute descriptions of Julián’s mother’s failing body and the machines attached to it, of the Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy, of Julián’s own excursions around the complex. Though any small association can lead from the present to a memory, or story, or dream, we always return, eventually, to the reality of the hospital room, the helpless son, the dying mother.

The primary point of departure from other contemporary autofiction like Knausgaard or Lerner, is Tomb Song’s willingness to abandon the truth. Specifically, Julián seems interested in the corrosive effect that narcotics and fevers have on both actual and narrative reality. During an opiate binge in Cuba, we are introduced to a degenerate artist named Bobo Lafrauga, who Julián follows to a bar called El Diablito. We later learn that Bobo was the intended protagonist to a novel that Julián scrapped when his mother fell ill, that Bobo and El Diablito are aborted fictions blurred into autobiography. In one breath, Julián will describe a prolonged, heated affair with a television weather woman and in the next he’ll claim that none of it was true. Fiction and non-fiction intersect in this way throughout much of the novel and Julián is always present to help or hinder the distinction between the two.

The associative propulsion from one tangent to another, from the real to the unreal, is often smooth but, due to the distractibility of the narration, topics are sometimes dropped before they have a chance to develop into anything substantial. Micronarratives start off focused then wander. In one instance, Julián remembers what he characterizes as his complicity in the death of a neighborhood boy and how this complicity has haunted him. He then steps back, describes how his family had come to live in the area and only later mentions that the extent of his involvement, in what turns out to be an accidental killing, was that he was there when the murdered boy’s brother bought the gun. There is little reflection here to guide the reader to understand Julián’s self-blame. The benefits of fiction could be used, in instances like this, to enhance these tapering anecdotes or to better calibrate suspense.

Early in the novel, Julián takes stock of the state of fiction while setting a challenge for himself, saying: “we demand it (narrative art) be ordinary without cliché, sublime without any unexpected change of accent.” The real achievement of Tomb Song lies in Julián’s solution to this paradox: his narrative voice. Throughout Tomb Song, we have access to Julián’s lucid, honest, perspective. His voice provides continuity and allows for beautiful and unusual motifs (including a particularly strange sea cucumber metaphor). Though the subject matter is often clinical and bleak, and though he is far from the first narrator to wax poetic by the side of a deathbed, Julián provides so many fresh perspectives, analogies, and turns of thought as to make avoiding cliché in such weighty moments seem simple. It should be noted that it is Christina Macsweeney’s excellent translation deftly brings Julián’s pin-point word choice to English.

In Tomb Song Julián Herbert draws unexpected associations between dozens of disparate topics, stories, observations, and dreams. In the last chapters, from this kaleidoscopic fabric, a larger picture takes shape, a unique perspective on life and the living of it. Readers looking for a current, honest, and unique novel or fans of Ben Lerner, Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin, and even Roberto Bolaño, will find a lot to love in Tomb Song.

Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz

Latinx Los Ángeles. One of the main reasons the city is always praised for its diversity. Spanish peppering homes in Bell Gardens and mariachis shooting the breeze as they wait to be hired at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights.

But pay attention to the media or watch the movies and T.V. shows made by Hollywood, and it’s like the community doesn’t exist. As Chris Rock said in his 2014 Hollywood Reporter article criticizing the industry’s lack of diversity, “You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.” It’s as if Hollywood refuses to know its own city. A willingness to ignore a community that makes up half the city’s population.

However, Latinx Angeleños, like poet Vickie Vértiz, are increasingly penning their own narratives of a lived life born here in Los Ángeles and of the community they’re from. These writers, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, use their writing to portray their loyalty and love for their community in the context of discussing social issues. This Latinx Angeleño literary tradition took hold in the 1980s, in part due to what L.A. poet Marisela Norte said about her community living on the Eastside of the L.A. River: “I don’t know why things start and stop and matter once they’re safely over that side,” the Westside, “of the bridge.” [1]

That’s why in 1982, the poetry anthology Two Hundred and One: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles/The Latino experience in Los Angeles appeared, that focused on these long ignored voices of L.A.’s Latino/a poets. The anthology included such future heavy hitters as former L.A. Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, Victor Ville, Marisela Norte and Helena Maria Viramontes. [2]

*

Vickie Vértiz’s second poetry collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press), sidesteps the glare of Hollywood and vividly focuses on her community of working class Latinxs in Southeast Los Ángeles. At the outset, the first poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous,” places the reader directly into her family and community with Amá and her uncle whose “breath is two cases of cigarettes and one/aluminum beer.” Where “Amá throws/up two dollar wine/after a pool party.” This place is where “the songs of crows/outside unspool.” However, Southeast Los Ángeles is more than just the stereotypical working class Latinx. Vértiz tells the reader not only that “my first kiss is with an uncle/comforting.” but that:

When his sons leave for the Persian Gulf  he kisses them too   and
I’m                  confused
because men never embrace around me…
I understand, then                there must be other ways to love
your children

This is what Vértiz’s collection explores, the different ways to love a person or community. One of the most personal and prevalent ways she explores, Vértiz learned from her father. She explained in an interview that “my relationship to home is…the way my father related to the family he made with my mom…that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back.”[3] And in Palm Frond she periodically leaves Southeast L.A., at one point, the outset of part two, traveling to Paris and Mexico. But when Vértiz returns home, her poems retain that intimacy and socio-critical eye that illustrates that her community matters and that it matters in/to L.A., while retaining the love and empathy of a place that will always be a part of her.

In the persona poem “Don Mario” she says:

One bedroom in the city of crowded…
covered in finger filth…
In the living room, darting bullets in the dark…
Mario dreams of driving
his plump neighbor on her errands
: church first, the 99 Cent Store
Bursting with school kids

Vértiz does a powerful job of allowing the reader to experience her Southeast L.A. community through her and her fellow Latinxs as individuals, employing precise line breaks. These breaks create multiple contextualized levels of meaning, like ending with “driving” in the above poem. That evokes open freedom and possibilities before cementing Mario’s dream into a more realistic and plausible one, shaped by Mario’s reality and circumstances. Circumstances born out of a long history of neglect that Vértiz understands all too well.

*

Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut also expands on Los Ángeles’ Latinx literary tradition of documentation, of giving a “historical and cultural consciousness” to a community,[4]by Vértiz including her own queer Latinx identity. This is one of those other ways to love that she tactfully alludes to in “Already My Lips Were Luminous.”

In the poem “Portrait as a Deer Hunter” Vértiz places her Latinx queerness, by again using history, in the struggle for LGBTQIA rights, including an epigraph about the famous Stonewall incident in New York. But it’s her ability, as she says in “Lover’s Letter,” “To be untranslatable” that infuses many of these poems with her compassion and certainty, that creates a refreshing queerness that’s definitely her own. Vértiz says at one point, “Today is more like summer in South Gate or/Bed-Stuy.” This is the regular everydayness of being a queer Latinx, the unnoticed and unrecorded parts of these lives that occur once the media has left.

Vértiz skillfully captures this “untranslatability” because she understands how to adeptly use poetic lines. She creates extra spaces within a line to capture the extra meanings and layers of her queerness with a verve and sincerity that lacks the typical insecurity that accompanies such a self-discovery and portrayal. These extra spaces cause these otherwise easily accessible poems to strategically pause, powerfully allowing the reader to notice and feel the extra complexities of the love and affection she has to navigate through.

As Vickie Vértiz says in the final poem, about her language—these poems—they are “My resist.” In the Latinx Angeleño literary tradition she vibrantly expands on, and brings thought provoking light to, her Southeast L.A. community. And when readers step away, a part of that light lingers inside them.

Notes

[1] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[2] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[3] Membreno, Soraya. “Fierce As Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer.”Bitchmedia.org, Bitch Media, 6 Oct. 2017, 9:22am.

[4]Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

The Infinite Future by Tim Wirkus

With a feeling akin to falling into a Wikipedia hole, Tim Wirkus’ debut novel, The Infinite Future, dives headfirst into the many ways in which a story can affect the human condition. With a crass, yet self-reflective style, Wirkus depicts the constant changes that stories have on our everyday interactions by using characters that are constantly reflecting on their own personal histories and relationships throughout a story that revolves around a quest for the long lost novel by an elusive, could-be-crazy, pulp science fiction author.

Something like a reflection on Plato’s cave with a literary tilt, like Wirkus is playing a game of telephone with himself.

This book takes the meta-narrative to the next level. With a heavy nod towards obscure sci-fi, Wirkus creates the most elusive author possible to ignite a hilarious, yet insightful romp through Brazil, Idaho, and the universe, of course. Tim Wirkus wields a humor that rings of Vonnegut, but simultaneously digs at character like Joyce. This book is for the literary that isn’t afraid to classify Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick as Literature.

This epistolary journey begins in the author’s foreword as he depicts his encounter with an old colleague from his undergrad years at BYU that “looked like the (Orson) Welles at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, hollow-eyed and shaken.” The author’s initial antipathy towards Danny, someone unknown beyond his love for power pop, is soon overcome by curiosity when Danny hands him a manuscript of a mysterious Brazilian sci-fi author named Eduard Salgado-Mackenzie. Wirkus takes the translated version of the text (containing Danny’s own hefty translator’s note) with understandable reluctance (one in a line of many reluctant readers of Salgado-McKenzie). Patience eventually gets the better of him as he is eventually enchanted by the author’s strange and lasting impression.

From there the novel evolves into personal histories layered upon personal histories revolving around Danny, a hermit librarian, and an excommunicated Mormon scholar. Rife with farcical encounters, Danny’s self-deprecating voice sets an atmosphere that is skeptical, yet faithful all at once, making an impressionable and passive character that is drawn into a journey to look for a book and author that may or may not exist. This is where Wirkus really excels — in his ability to turn a book into the most active character of the novel. The novel’s tiny facets and the interactions that each of these characters have with the book leave you hanging in suspense while laughing at the misfortunes of their curse of knowledge. Their relationships with the Adventures of Captain Irena Sertorian constantly change and fold over on themselves as every discovery is made. This all culminates to the point where you actually get to read the novel by Eduard Salgado-McKenzie, a sci-fi story that becomes closer and closer to you as the story moves on, leaving you to search for some meaning that could be seen through the Translator’s Note, only to realize that the story within the translator’s note was the story all along.

The Mormon-heavy locations chosen by Tim Wirkus is something known to him — and it shows. Religion is a strong motif throughout Infinite Future; an identifiable sensibility that is obviously very near to him. This book is a clear investigation of the ways that we interact with stories and he portrays this via his own experiences with Mormonism. Danny’s character is a Mormon that defines himself as a “more laissez-faire [Mormon],” one that, “may be very devout, but they also compartmentalize their Mormonism to a much greater degree.” This sort of clear reflection can only come from his own experiences with religion and appear to argue for a story’s ability to inspire and move people.

The Infinite Future reads like a science fiction novel that, instead of relying on space and fantasy to propel the story’s wonder, has Wirkus tap into the absurdity of the world we already live in as the catalyst. In fact, when I finally got to read the interstellar sci-fi novel, I found the novel’s obscure laws and rituals oddly familiar. This novel succeeds in blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction, a trend that has been observed in books like Robin Sloan’s Sourdough and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan. The result brings together an intriguing narrative that tests the limits of our imagination and Tim Wirkus displays this with a wit and humor that forces our focus on the quotidian strangeness of our lives.

Tim Wirkus has written a novel that will make a lasting impression on our perception of language and the written word. By comparing the abstract world of science fiction with the inane world that we encounter every day, Wirkus has given literature new life. From the author’s fictitious preface, to Danny’s unexpected quest in search of an elusive author, to Captain Irena Sertorian’s quest across the universe, Tim Wirkus’s greatest accomplishment is making fiction feel more connected to reality than ever before.

The only fallback that I’ve come across is the sheer headiness of it all. Wirkus has provided a social commentary on the imbedded nature that stories have in our lives, and that is no easy feat, in that any critical dissection of the affect that story has on us, especially one that is done with a story, will be convoluted by nature. The result becomes a rabbit hole of stories within stories within stories, and this had me looking back to fact-check and remind myself of who was relaying whose monologue.

The Infinite Future is genre-bending, witty, and leaves the reader with a new lens on the absurdity that we confront every day. In one fell swoop, Wirkus has crafted an argument for every stories’ place in the universe, all while crafting a story that is page turning and hilariously human. By using a pulp genre as the glue that holds the story together, we receive a poignant reflection of the ways in which we craft and receive information. The Infinite Future holds the key to the next generation of fiction and, from here on, I’m never going to find a story without thinking about the endless connections that they create between us and the world we inhabit.

Otherworld Ambush: A Review of Jacqueline de Weever's Trailing the Sun's Sweat

It’s thrilling to read the work of a poet who draws on varied interests, pursued with passion and erudition. That is the case with this vibrant collection of poems, written by Jacqueline de Weever. A professor Emerita of medieval literature, she is also an accomplished watercolor painter and collage artist. Her decades-long devotion to scholarship provides the underpinning to these hauntingly painful poems, written in response to The Journal of Christopher Columbus, translated by Cecil Jane. The famous explorer penned observations as he encountered the “New World” and its inhabitants, whom he clearly regarded as less than human. As if to crawl inside Columbus’s skull, de Weever writes:

Which leaf, which plant or flower packed
in parchment by botanists companioning
slave-ferries of humans wedged in excrement

can erase shackle bruises healed
to ridges of jelled skin?

Here, we witness the inner workings of colonialism in all its cruelty. To morally justify genocide, one needs to portray its victims as inferior. Even today, eminent domain is invoked to perpetuate superiority over native peoples. Sadly, imperialism has repeated itself through human history. But this is our country, where Columbus is lionized and celebrated every year.

A rhetorical question springs to mind: Why is this journal not better known? This collection forces us to question our notions of historical accuracy. However, the poet knows that it is crucial to show, rather than to tell. Instead of railing against the crimes and inhumanity perpetuated by colonialism, she avoids didacticism and finger-wagging. She creates delicate, broken settings in which violations are enacted: “[S]oft bellies of our islands, / penetrate our forests, / slice our drums.” We experience destruction and abuse as if they were happening to us now. The horror is amplified as she includes snippets of Columbus’s journal, much like a linguistic collage. Indeed, de Weever’s considerable talent as a visual artist informs her use of language. It comes alive through the agency of imagery: the nuanced colors, the feathery textures, the flicker of a dark butterfly. We are never manipulated into what to think or feel. Instead, we emerge from this timely and necessary collection transformed, for we have lived the anguish of the poems; we have sweated their blood.

The poet also explores the depth of human contradictions. In “Lament,” Columbus concedes, “All display the most extraordinarily gentle behavior.” Yet, later he asserts, “I took the natives by force to give me information.” This is acknowledged by a man who had no moral quandary in killing to obtain land and raw products. The poem weaves repetitions and rhymes, shifting from the first person of the journal to de Weever’s indictment of Columbus in second person, “You plot their enslavement and I weep / that their offers of cassava and casareep / did not contrive the magic wand / of their safety …”

One of the many gifts this poet possesses is the control she wields over voices. Plaintive wails rise from erased histories to ignite the reader’s awareness/empathy. To do so, de Weever always writes with lyricism and humanity. The speakers, whom de Weever would have us remember, are still “whispering lost languages in warm winds, / waiting for the cyclones of hurricane season / to howl their vengeance in the ocean’s / requiems.”

Indeed, “Currency” is a chant against forgetting: “Their ghosts infect later landscapes, in wind howls, / in lightning flash and thunder crash familiar / in Ghana and Malawi …” Notice the subtle use of alliteration and internal rhyme. It’s as if de Weever has transmuted the luxuriant colors from her artwork into the richness of wordplay and sonic invention. This as an example of synaesthesia—color and form becoming sound and syntax. But her literary devices are neither facile nor ornamental. They propel the reader into these poems and histories. She establishes a poetry of place. Setting, often associated with fiction, has an important job to do here as well. From the first page, we are transported in time and place. We smell the nectar and the sea. We see the “white ginger in clouds of butterflies.”

The journey, into the past and across the ocean, becomes the reader’s journey as “a slave shipped along routes / shown by the map on the wall. // He explodes, split open…” Like a cartographer, one moves through this book’s peregrinations, hearing a choir of disembodied voices, some speaking in apostrophe, directly to the reader,

Tonight I am Maya
weaver of the cosmos and its gods
into my garments
my shawl, my blouse,
although not my genes
but who knows?

We are drawn into the poet’s inquiry of self. Beginning with “I am,” she invokes the Hindu concept of the material world as illusion. She ends with a rhyme for her own last name; after all, this is about identity. Indeed, she is weaving times, places, fragrances, histories. She’s examining notions thought to be accurate, histories deliberately erased like a palimpsest. But, through the alchemy of language, these histories emerge again, begging to be heard, revealed in the audacious light of truth: “Memory—what is it? / Silence ripens into weeds / daring yellow.” Jacqueline de Weever does indeed dare to upturn our cherished, long-held beliefs about the heroes and victors, exposing “sacred landscapes” that may have vanished in their original state, but which live on—redolent and triumphant in these poems.