"Bleeding Roses," the poetry of Adeeba Shahid Talukder

Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, is Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s first full-length poetry collection. As the author states in her preface, all the poetry contained in the book occurs “in dialogue” with the Urdu tradition of Ghazal, which Talukder has studied and translated for years. 

“Dialogue” pertinently defines the complex interplay of Talukder’s creation with its literary sources. Such meeting takes a number of forms, from translated or rather “transcreated” quotes to reinventions of entire poems, from tributes to famous authors to the borrowing of traditional characters, imagery and tropes. 

The universe of Ghazal freely and fluently inhabits the page, self-deciphering as the reader proceeds, without need for punctual explanation. Although, at the end of the book the author clarifies her references, giving context to the authors she quotes as well as to the characters that she borrows from them. To revisit the book after reading the final notes is a different and worthy experience.

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But what really counts is obviously the first reading, the one before the notes. Ghazal originated in 7th century within the Arab tradition, later spreading to Persia, Turkey, and the entire Indian continent. Its theme is unrequited love, as a combination of shrill pleasure and unbearable suffering, with its trail of grief and insanity. It is the kind of love we find in the Song of Songs, in all mystical literature and, slightly tamed, in Medieval Courtly lyrics. The language describing it is quintessentially ecstatic, inextricably mixing the spiritual and the sensual, an explosive collusion of carnal and divine.

“Shar-e-jaanaan” is bravely themed after this type of love, which Talukder lets detonate through the pages, allowing it to bounce back and forth a thousand of years, across continents and civilizations, without losing a drop of intensity.  

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The book is articulated in sections titled after Ghazal tropes such as wine, the nightingale, chains, dancing courtesans, the tearing of the clothes, and more. Characters and motifs, though, don’t abide by such grouping. They make loops, go underground and reemerge, circulate at leisure, as if those partitions were loosely drawn Tarot cards, ready to be shuffled again.

The imagery Talukder sifts from Ghazal and then makes her own truly recalls ancient Tarots, even sharing their colors (red, black, white and gold), as well as it evokes European folktales, which of course weren’t European to start with. They condensed East and West as they gathered, preserved and passed down a legacy of symbols drawn from the collective psyche.

The echoes of those tales, not even consciously acknowledged, amply enable the western reader to appreciate “Shahr-e-jaanaan” without mediation.

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For example, the opening poem, a prelude to all sections, coming back in a different version at the end of section v, deals with reaching womanhood with all that such passage entails. As she realizes she no longer can “wait to be beautiful,” the poem’s speaker pushes “bangles upon bangles” onto her wrist, rubbing her “hands raw with metal and glass.”

Each time a bangle broke, I watched
the blood at my veins
with a grim face
feeling more like a woman.

If the wrist is a trope of Ghazal poetry, symbolizing, the author explains, female fragile elegance, so are bangles, dancers’ most typical ornaments. But the association of female pre-nuptial adornment with self-mutilation is practically universal, as is the ambivalence of desire for sex and abhorrence for the loss of freedom and integrity implied by marriage.

So the blood profusely spilled throughout Shahr-e-jaanaan, namely or else in the shape of scattered rose petals (a literal, constant “defloration”), rusty leaves, henna stains, is both menstrual blood and blood of lost virginity, the same bled by all little mermaids when their tail is split into legs. We easily recognize it.

Moreover, wrists like ankles are to the human psyche portals through which bad and good enter our core in order to heal or destroy it, and the same is true for the neck from which Majnoon, a Ghazal character to whom Talkuder devotes many poems, repeatedly tears his collar, shedding basic protection, making himself a pray because of despair. Majnoon is the fool, the one who has lost his reason for love.

And the bangle, the bracelet, is just the first loop of the chain it stands for, the signifier of slavery.

From section viii, “God-shaped Woman”.

… To be a slave:
the pull of light,

the chain’s idle
bind.

So the love addressed by Ghazal poetry, Petrarch’s sonnets, mystic literature, great Romantic novels, the Song of Songs, and by Talkuder, wounds or exacts self-wounding, forces its way into the heart, maddens and enslaves.

It’s a passion we are unable to negotiate because we are too young (it is love seen by the adolescent as the fate life will force upon her) or because our psyche was crushed within the jaws of some binary, smashed by the irreconcilability of pleasure and guilt, gain and loss, want and fear.

Such tornado has multiple facets, some more pleasant than others, as it implies fusional stages and the exhilarating blur of self-boundaries, as it swings between the polarities of rejected suitor and omnipotent beloved, which of course are two sides of the same coin, a mirrored reality.

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Shahr-e-jaanaan isn’t afraid of exploring contrasting refractions, as if perhaps an ultimate meaning could spring forth from their constant shuffling. What certainly emerges is a questioning of the whole mythology, a deep, open meditation made of shattered fragments, as if the poet had first smashed a mirror and then randomly picked shards, holding them to the light for readers to see what each reflects, finally recreating their own vision.

In the first poem of the book, the bangles have “no symmetry or sequence.” Their colors are “bright, jeweled, and dissonant”.

From “Kathak: The Dance of the Courtesans:”

… You, fragile
as glass, will learn:

you were made       to break.

Should a poem be selected to epitomize the collection, a sound choice would be “When in the dark / my mind brightened.”  It begins the book with striking imagery, gathering in one take the cruel rite of passage later articulated section by section. It brilliantly returns at midway, and dialogues with itself.

Also the title poem, which alone forms section vi, would be a natural choice. It describes the speaker’s admission into a mental ward, following a breakout that turns into a breakdown. Here as elsewhere, Ghazal verse and tropes seamlessly meet the present tense, traveling at the speed of light from remote ages to the now, instantly incarnated, made flesh.

My personal choice is “On Courting Calamity,” a brief poem found in section iv. Rather than exemplifying motifs, it highlights the book’s modus operandi and deeper intent. It expresses a need for joining extremes, such as an old tradition endowed with immense beauty but carrying a mortifying ideology, and a present where the ideology no more applies but the beauty deserves to live. It yearns for reconciling opposites in general, those antinomies that if not harmonized lead to insanity, such as the desire to be loved and the fear of being annihilated, the compulsion of abiding by the myths of beauty and simultaneously denying them. These conflicts are explored throughout Talukder’s verse and they materialize in the body, which they inhabit and haunt, pulling it apart, tearing at its core, unless words find the power to extend themselves over the chasm, to bridge through.

A thread

from pre-

eternity

to past time’s

end, a thread

that binds

movement

to gesture, a crow

to a narcissus.

I stretch.

My waist, this morning,

is a knot.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora, Author of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean

The Distance Is More Than an Ocean is a recounting of Chris Wiewiora’s experience coming to America from Poland, his father’s home country, as a child and then returning as an adult, forcing him to reconsider the homeland that framed his childhood and wrestle with the tenuousness of memory. The moments of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean are situated distinctly in place, but also in places: from a Polish elementary school classroom to an imagined Mississippi River, from Florida’s Coco Beach to the gray, rainy streets of Warsaw. Set against varied landscapes, these reflections on travel, memory, and childhood show the complex ways in which our environments both shape us and are reshaped by our recollections of the people we were in those places—and by the people we became when we left them.

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You chose specifically to subtitle/categorize The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a “travelogue memoir.” Where do you see the line drawn between those two genres? Why was it important to you to have readers consider this as both?

I wanted to label my chapbook with the genre of nonfiction, since the publisher Finishing Line Press’s books and most chapbooks are poetry. I wanted to make sure that readers knew that my chapbook, while lyrical, isn’t poetry. Still, nonfiction contains so many sub-genres.

Nonfiction is the only genre defined by what it isn’t: not-fiction. Who knows why it isn’t labeled non-drama or non-poetry; perhaps since it contains both? Anyway, I wanted to define my chapbook by what nonfiction it is—not just that I didn’t make it up like fiction—and so I used the subtitle of travelogue and memoir.

Both a travelogue and a memoir follow records. A travelogue is a record of travels, while a memoir is a record of memories. I wanted readers to know where I was going in my writing: traveling from the United States to Poland, but also traveling from my adulthood to my childhood.

In The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, I switched between present tense for my travels back to Poland and past tense for my travels back to my memories of Poland. I used tense as a line between the two sub-genres. I saw the line between them as what happened (travelogue) and what I remembered (memoir), but the chapbook walks that line between the sub-genres like when I returned to my family’s Warsaw neighborhood and I was confronted with mis-remembering our duplex, which could serve as a metaphor for the sub-genres under nonfiction: a house split in half with two entrances but under the same roof.

There is also a relationship here between prose and poetry. A poem by James Seay serves as an epigraph to the book, and these pieces reflect the way poetry thrives on compressing, fragmenting, and extending beyond singular moments. What roles do the processes of compressing and fragmenting memory play in writing about the past?

Ten years ago I began The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a poetry collection titled Side by Side. The poems explored my mother’s West Virginian family as well as my father’s Polish family. My poetry sprawled and swelled and contained multitudes. Side by Side contained much too much!

Seay’s poem “Patching Up the Past with Water” gave me a colander to strain through the flood of my writing. I wanted to sift through my past. I wanted to find the quicksilver. I needed to find a way to contain what mattered, but it felt so slippery.

Six years ago, I began to write the poems into essays that became The Distance Is More Than an Ocean. First, I wrote an essay titled “Welcome Back”—where I visited my family’s old duplex on a beautiful summer day in Warsaw, while I remembered the cold and gray and cramped other seasons there. The walk through the neighborhood made me confront what I had remembered with what I then experienced.

I felt like my memory was being rewritten. My memory was fragmented and so my writing needed to reflect that. About three years ago, I began to distill those essays. I compressed them from my mother and father’s family to only my father’s family, and then from the United States to only in Poland, and then within Poland to only Warsaw, and I continued to compress my travels and my memories until I could contain them in a chapbook.

When we write about a place from our past, I think we’re not evoking so much as recreating what we remember of that place. How did you negotiate Poland as both a historical space and a personal one?

If the past is prologue, then place is the past’s foundation for the present. I read some Polish history and travel books, but I didn’t use any of that in my chapbook. I wasn’t writing about the historical past and place of Poland, but rather I was rewriting the personal.

I started the chapbook with flying back to Poland—to the same airport, but renamed—and I finished it with my walk through our Warsaw neighborhood. At the end of the chapbook, I considered how the Nazis destroyed the capital’s Old Town area but after the war the Poles rebuilt it from preserved paintings. I had written a personal way from my own history: I had my poems from ten years ago and I had my memories from decades before that—both served as foundations for me to rebuild Warsaw from my return trip and from my childhood.

As a child you viewed yourself not as Polish, but as an American growing up in Poland, longing for the country you considered your real home. But your father was a Polish immigrant, making Poland, to an extent, your family’s homeland. How has writing about these places allowed you to explore the personal/internal tension of being pulled between them?

I used to only say, my last name is Polish. Now, after writing about my past, I say I’m half-Polish.

I want to specifically thank an editor, Tina Schumann, who anthologized my essay, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I,” in Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. That essay served as the undercurrent through my childhood in The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, where I had moved from a Polish kindergarten to the American School of Warsaw and when I had refused to learn more Polish while also not fully knowing English. Tina welcomed me to claim both places.

However, both places don’t exist anymore. The United States that welcomed my father’s family after the war doesn’t philosophically exist anymore, but also the Poland of my family’s homeland doesn’t literally exist anymore. When my grandmother was dying, my father showed her Google Maps and she traced a river back to the valley where her father had been a sort of border patrol agent. However, their village is now in Ukraine.

More recently, my father found out from his cousin that his grandfather’s wife’s family name might be Ukrainian! Some of my father’s family refuses to accept that. However, my first thought was, what Ukrainian writers do I know?

Language itself is a part of this tension as well, as the child version of Chris Wiewiora rejects the language that makes him less American. In one vignette, you’ve returned to Poland as an adult and, as you observe your father and a family friend converse in Polish, narrate that you “don’t remember enough of the language to follow their conversation.” “Remember” is a conspicuous, telling word to apply to language.

Could you talk about how lacking (or losing from memory) a language creates a barrier between a person and a place in which that language is spoken? In what ways would knowing that language allow one to access that place differently?

Language makes us human and allows us to connect to other humans. Language accesses history and thoughts and dreams. Language allows us to remember.

We tell ourselves stories. As Joan Didion would add, “In order to live.” We retell those stories so we continue to live on. But if you don’t know a language—can’t speak it, can’t hear it—then you can’t tell stories and those stories die.

During my return visit, the way I “heard” Polish was my Dad translating it into English for me. At the same time, I had been immersed in the language of Polish while growing up in Poland. I had grown up hearing it and speaking some of it, but thinking I forgot most of it. However, when tapped memory seeps and then trickles and then flows. By the end of our return visit to Poland, I found myself babbling small phrases and then the concepts of what people said formed like shapes in clouds, readying to rain understanding.

The Real United States: A Conversation with Matthew Baker

Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center Of The Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His other projects include Early Work. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Baker’s work since 2013, when, as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, I was introduced to his story, “Goods.” A year later, the journal published another of his stories, “Html,” a story partially written in code.

When I read “Goods” for the first time, I was a first-year MFA student, writing a series of unsuccessful stories and struggling to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be or could be. Baker’s stories were playful and idea-driven, but simultaneously had heart, had the ability to move me. He provided me with an example of the sort of writing I might want to do.

I jumped at the opportunity to read Baker’s new collection, Why Visit America, forthcoming in August, and I was not disappointed. The stories he tells are funny and heartbreaking and familiar and surprising all at once. In this interview, Baker discusses writing high-concept narratives, how speculative fiction can allow us to grapple with controversial topics more genuinely, and the films that inspire his writing.

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Dana Diehl: Many of your stories seem to be driven by “What if…?” questions. What if men became obsolete? What if children were raised by the government instead of parents? What if people could become data? I love how deliciously high-concept this collection is. Did all of your stories begin with a concept? Did any of them begin instead with a character or image, for example?

Matthew Baker: I’m embarrassed to say that every story began with a concept. The book itself began with a concept: thirteen parallel-universe stories (one for every stripe in the flag) that would span all fifty states of the country, and that together would create a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

I once submitted a story to a prestigious literary magazine, and the editor rejected the story with a note that said: “too high-concept for us.” For a writer like me, what that note actually said was: “don’t submit to us again.” I can only do high-concept.

DD: What was it like to write a short story collection with an overarching concept already in mind? Did it make it easier? Did it ever feel restrictive?

MB: It was a tremendous challenge. I loved that about it though. That was what made the writing fun.

DD: Despite these stories being very high-concept, they are also movingly character-driven, grounded in an individual human experience. Do you think character is key to writing narratives that move beyond a concept and become stories? What advice do you have for writers working in a similar genre, who struggle to move beyond their initial concept and develop character or find their inciting incident?

MB: I think about storytelling less in terms of “plot” and “character” and more in terms of “idea” and “emotion.” Strategically, I don’t approach a story thinking “how can I develop a plot?” or “how should I develop this character?” I approach a story thinking, “Given this premise, what combination of events and desires will maximize its emotional impact?” In my experience the nature of the work becomes very clear very quickly when plot and character are viewed as ingredients in an emotional reaction in the reader, rather than simply as necessary elements of a story.

DD: Was there a story in this collection that especially challenged you? What do you do when the right ingredients are difficult to find?

MB: “To Be Read Backward” was the greatest challenge conceptually—trying to imagine the physics of that universe accurately, and to be consistent in how the narrator uses language, especially verbs, to describe the events of the story. But the story that was the greatest challenge narratively was “Testimony Of Your Majesty.” I wrote about half of the story and then got stuck. I knew the emotional reactions that I wanted to synthesize, and I had assembled some reliable ingredients, but I still couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve what I wanted. I set the story aside for a couple of years, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again. That was the process. Years of failed experiments. That story was a work in progress from 2013 through 2018.

DD: Were there any concepts or ideas or stories or experiments written for this collection that ultimately didn’t make it in?

MB: There were a number of concepts that didn’t work on the page. And there’s one story that I actually completed and even published—a story called “The Eulogist” that appeared in New England Review in 2012—that I was still planning on including in the collection as late as 2018. Ultimately, though, I decided the story was just too rudimentary and clumsy. Also, I wanted the collection to have a neutral emotional pH—there could be stories that were depressing and there could be stories that were uplifting, but I didn’t want the collection overall to register as depressing or uplifting—and “The Eulogist” would have given the collection an overall unneutral pH. So that story got replaced by “The Sponsor.”

DD: The issues tackled in these stories are painfully familiar. You explore violence against women, parents struggling to accept their transitioning child, and flaws within the justice system, just to name a few. But by placing these issues within parallel universes or dystopian (or utopian) futures, you allow readers to see them with new eyes. Why do you prefer speculative fiction for these stories instead of straight realism?

MB: In any human society, having a constructive conversation about social or political issues can be difficult, and we live in a country so radically polarized that at times it seems to be on the verge of a civil war. If you try to have a conversation with somebody about a topic like climate change or gun control, immediately these walls come up, these psychological barriers as thick as brick. It’s become impossible to talk about anything important. There’s no way to do it—unless you disguise what you want to talk about, cloak the topic in a seemingly harmless form. I turned to speculative fiction in hopes of giving readers a space to genuinely grapple with the ideas behind these issues and to genuinely access the emotions involved.

DD: If you had to live inside one of these futures you’ve imagined, which one would it be? Why?

MB: “A Bad Day In Utopia.” I wouldn’t mind having to live in a menagerie, and I honestly do think the world would be noticeably improved.

DD: How would you spend your time in this hypothetical menagerie?

MB: Probably reading, writing, napping, and trying to convince the guards to play chess with me.

DD: You’ve also written a really wonderful children’s book titled If You Find This. Can you talk about the experience of writing this novel and how it differed from your experience writing short stories for adults? Were the experiences surprisingly similar in any ways?

MB: Well, If You Find This was also high-concept: a children’s novel narrated partly in music dynamics and math notations. And like Why Visit America, If You Find This is a book that’s about place. It’s a Michigan novel, a Great Lakes novel. But If You Find This was also a very personal book for me. It’s not autobiographical, but in that book I was writing about my childhood and about my family and about my friends back home. Why Visit America is different in that I wasn’t writing about my own life in any of the stories in this book. In Why Visit America, what’s personal are the issues.

DD: Who or what are your inspirations outside of the literary world? Are there any filmmakers or artists or musicians who influenced the stories in this collection?

MB: The films Her and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind had a tremendous influence on the book, as models of emotionally rich sci-fi. The anime Sword Art Online, which for me was a master class on sincerity and vulnerability and the virtues of sentimentality. The video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite, which deliver social and political commentary with such supreme grace and skill.

But—I hadn’t thought of this until just now—maybe the biggest influence was an old VHS tape that I discovered at my father’s house when I was a child. Written on the tape in my father’s handwriting were two words: “The Wall.” I distinctly remember watching that tape later that afternoon, alone in the basement, lying on the carpet, gazing up at an old cathode-ray television. It was Pink Floyd — The Wall, the film adaptation of the rock opera by Pink Floyd. Seeing it was a revelation for me. I hadn’t realized until that moment that a music album could be more than a collection of random songs—that together the songs could tell some larger story. From the beginning I’ve thought of Why Visit America as a concept album, and that old VHS tape is what taught me what a concept album is.

DD: Is there a short story collection that you feel like does this especially well?

MB: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, although that’s composed primarily of nonfiction. And Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, along with Invisible Cities, although that’s technically considered a novel. I especially adore The Periodic Table.

DD: Who should read Why Visit America? Who is your ideal reader?

MB: All true Americans.

A Review of Little Feasts by Jules Archer

“If I could marry a myth it would be monstrous, but not monstrous like frightening — monstrous as in a monstrous love” states the narrator of “How to Love a Monster with Average-Sized Hands” in Jules Archer’s collection Little Feasts. It is a monstrous love that is explored in this collection, the women are desirous, hungry, for it, while the men are monstrous and running, running towards the women or away from them or away with them. The stories team with this hunger, this passion — the absolute heat and power of it. Hunger begins to feel a lot like love and love becomes all consuming, powerful, monstrous. Jules Archer skillfully examines and explores the desire to devour and be devoured.

The struggle to fulfill the need to be loved only serves to fuel this hunger. In the opening story “In-n-Out Doesn’t Have Bacon” the narrator, Catherine, who hungers for meat, who sleeps with Tom while grieving the death of her husband, puts it best: “My stomach feels greasy from the burger, from Tom, from some strange artificial sense of connection.” Food and love are basic human needs but she is filling herself with the wrong things, with fast food and a man who is more interested in her sister than in her. Her grief, her hunger have driven her to these things and she has filled herself but is still left wanting. “Hunger never felt so hard.” Catherine says.

It’s the same for Elizabeth in “Everlasting Full” Elizabeth who was cold and hungry until she ate her husband Eddie when he said that he would stop cooking for her. Ginny in “Hard to Carry and Fit in a Trunk” eats but is still hungry to be chased, wanted. So much so that she fantasizes about being kidnapped, particularly by Buffalo Bill who covets her size, who would celebrate her hunger. There is a striking and terrifying honesty in the way Ginny wants to be skinny enough to be considered ‘prey’. Here, Archer is holding up a mirror to society with our beauty standards, our rape culture and we deserved to be loved, but not like this. These stories push wanting to the extreme but that is what wanting to be loved feels like — a huge overwhelming hunger that we would do anything to get, and anything to keep.

The dangers of women loving men run under the surface of all the stories. There is a never-ending reminder of how our desires mix with our vulnerabilities, how our hunger puts us at risk. Forever in the back of the women’s minds is the fact that they love, they hunger, for someone who could kill them. In “My L.A Jerry” the narrator exaggerates this knowledge by having an affair with a man, a stranger who visits the Museum of Death where she works. “Nothing says romance like a dismembered headless torso.” She muses.

In these stories, however, the women get angry and they fight back. In these stories expectations are challenged, tropes are subverted and the men get eaten or beaten and the women take power into their own hands.

In “Far Away From Everywhere” the narrator, only a teenager, is in a family taken into a cult by the father. Her anger buzzes in her body like bees, her anger is hot. Her friend Sissy lights a match and burns everything down and the narrator, with her sister, move to warmer Phoenix with their grandmother. This transition from cold and hunger to warmth and safety repeats. Elizabeth is angry about the cold and hunger she experienced as a child and vows to keep herself safe whatever the cost. When Elizabeth meets the man she is to marry she is in a cold bar but his hands are hot and warm her up, she does whatever it takes to keep this warmth. In “Backseat Blues” Maybell’s mother drives into the cold lake while Maybell, angry at her mother and more attracted to the light and warmth outside of the car, was spared. In “Skillet” a pan is passed down, daughter to daughter, sizzling and cooking. The narrator practices swinging it high as she looks at her mother’s face, bruised by her boyfriend. The images of anger mixing with heat, coupled with the idea of warmth equaling safety, leads to the idea that a woman’s anger can keep her safe.

Archer also plays with form, updating tired old horror movie tropes. In “The Ice Cream Cone” the narrator is running from a man, she notes how he should not being able to chase her so well due to his weight and lack of grace but this is how a typical horror movie goes; the woman stands no chance regardless of what the man looks like. Archer lists what this woman has had to learn as a result of growing up in this world “the boy in high school sticking his sneakered foot in your crotch beneath your conjoined desks.” And because she has escaped before (over and over), she escapes again. She stops, turns and pokes his belly with her pink ice cream spoon. The spoon, an image reminiscent of childhood, like a nod to how girls are forced to learn the possibility of danger so soon. And with that the trope is quite literally stopped in its tracks.

Archer’s matter-of-fact language faces head-on the realities of what it is like to be a woman in our society. She pairs this style with beautiful turns of phrase and fantastical elements to create a dreaminess and playfulness that evokes childhood. The overall effect being that Little Feasts presents a complex picture of what it is to want to love as a women who has grown up in this world. Her stories are bold, unapologetic, honest, and tender. It is a beautiful collection that encourages its readers to explore their desires and needs, and to confront their ingrained fears. We cannot fight the wanting but we can fight for what we want.

A Review of The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a collection of modern day fairy tales that are each unique and yet have a strand of connectivity between them. I was immediately interested in picking up this collection of short stories as I was curious to see how Gatza balanced relatable messages in a modern setting that is still filled with magic and imagination. The cover — and its subsequent images inside — seems to convey a message of fun antics in store for readers of all ages. Inside they will find six short stories ranging from a few pages to multiple sections, but more importantly, they will read tales of determination, excitement, and the meaning of family.

The collection starts off with the story of the book’s namesake. It follows the young Albert Ross as he befriends a wild albatross who let him escape beyond his home. Within his home, Albert’s family is constantly focused, ironically, on other modes of communication: his mother is constantly on her phone, his father is on his computer, and his sister stays in her room with hints that she is communicating to friends via some kind of technology. They are all distracted by these means of escapism and yet they fail to see the truth of Albert and the Albatross. While their technology allows for them to hear about the albatross, they each ignore that he exists beyond their technology. The albatross is a means for escape for Albert and he takes the young boy away from home to meet a family that spends time together and gifts him a decoratively carved rock. Albert is the only one who experiences true escape via the albatross as he experiences what it is like to spend time with a family who is focused on one another. It is not until he comes back and his mother sees him being happy that it begins to change his relationship with his family. We are left with hope that his family members will put down the technology and spend time with him and each other instead of by themselves. Being able to spend time together as a family is the most important escape of all as seen by this story.

Talking about family, we are led into reading “Emory Bennett’s Halloween,” which follows a young Emory and his friend Henry. Henry’s mom is going through chemotherapy whereas Emory’s dad is learning how to walk again as an amputee. The boys discuss a riddle about the “one word of human knowledge” that could be death, life, or even recovery before going to a friend’s house to look for a ghost that lives in the attic. While Henry discovers that the ghost is actually a cat and keeps the secret to him and Emory, Henry understands that “sometimes we need our ghosts” in order to move forward. As both Emory and Henry have seen each of their parental figures go through near-death experiences, it only makes sense that in order to live they must focus on recovery and the future. People must understand what haunts them and their personal pasts in order to move forward whether that be away from cancer or losing a loved one like Eliza’s mother. It’s important to understand their grief before they work towards a brighter tomorrow.

In “The Butterflies of Cranberry Chase,” Gatza continues on the individual focus of relationships between children and parents. Crispin and his mother turn into butterflies by a spell put upon them by their neighbor who happens to be a witch. After spending the evening together flying around the witch’s garden, she turns them back into their normal selves. Living the afternoon without its threat of wildlife — like the witch’s pet crow who we later find out is harmless — and potentially being squished makes being a butterfly more exciting and full of life. Gatza addresses the idea of living a life even if afraid that it might be the last day or moment makes life cherished more and those who you spend it with more precious. Life is not truly lived until wings are grown and challenges are taken on with those we love in order to push ourselves.

The longest and last of the stories is “A Rocket Full of Pie,” which follows a young rabbit, Freddie, as he is challenged by his uncle to think outside of the box when Freddie has to remember a poem for school. The pair reimagine the familiar nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” to it being about a rocket full of pie. This whimsical change surprisingly allows Freddie to win the poetry presentation in his class and he later presents it to his family and the school. His usually stern and strict teacher surprisingly becomes the one who truly wants Freddie to challenge what he is taught and look at it from new angles — a lesson useful to all regardless of age.

Gatza’s collection of short stories highlight important ideas such as connecting with family members, living the fullest life, challenging how to think beyond the obvious, and learning how to handle grief. Each of these lessons are truly important for both children and adults alike. What connects each of these stories, however, is the ability to experience each day with someone that readers care about whether that be a family member, a parent, a friend, or a sibling. This collection has magic and mayhem that increasingly gets more and more whimsical with each passing story that makes it enjoyable for readers, but its heart beats powerfully throughout it all. The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a moving and playful collection of short stories that will appeal to both children and their parents.

Once Upon A Wild(Ness)

What would it be like if land came to life? If it murmured muddy syllables and moved in moss and tidal swells? Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood is a book where land moves, speaks, and breathes new life into our world. With mystifying lyricism and illustrations, these collaborators conjure a realm of ruin and rewilding — a realm in which the land reclaims its own sacred magic. 

On a mysterious salt-and-shingle island stands a decaying concrete structure known as The Green Chapel. Inside the structure, a nuclear ritual is underway, led by an ominous figure known as The Armourer. However, crossing land, sea, and time, five non-human forces converge to stop this ritual from being completed. These five totemic forces are she, he, it, they and as, and together, they become Ness. 

This island Ness seeks to reclaim was inspired by the Orford Ness National Nature Reserve on the Suffolk coast of England. During the Cold War, Orford Ness was used as a testing site for the atomic bomb by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Continuing through the 1960s, half-buried concrete structures were built to contain these lethal weapons. Now, Orford Ness is a sanctuary for wildlife. 

Chinese water deer and the elusive hare roam the landscape, and barn owls and marsh harriers mottle the skies. From its brackish lagoons and reed marshes to its mud flats and vegetated shingle, Orford Ness offers a sliver of wildness to surrounding plant and animal life. The former Bomb Ballistics Building and other military structures on the island have been converted into nature viewing spots for visitors.  

Similarly, the landscape in Macfarlane and Donwood’s Ness is a place of contrasts. The island in Ness is a site of potential hostility and danger because of The Armourer’s nuclear ritual, yet the landscape aches for freedom from human violence and domination. This island has a protector: Ness. Willow-boned, Ness moves by hyphae and sings in birds. Ness speaks in swifts and has skin of lichen and moss. Ness breathes in rain and exhales rust. Ness has hag stones for eyes. Ness sends “flints through time to foretell their seeings.” Ness is here. Ness is now. Ness begs to be heard: “Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.” Ness is multiple; it is being, place, and time, and it has come to reclaim the land. 

The image at the core of Ness is the hag stone, as it’s known in Great Britain. Found in dry riverbeds and along the seashore, hag stones are stones with naturally occurring holes in them created by water erosion. According to folklore across Europe, hag stones are believed to possess a variety of magical properties and offer protection for those who find and carry the stones. It’s said that to look through such a stone is to see into the future or the past—to open a portal between realms. Ness acts as a hag stone itself, giving us a glimpse of the deep time that enfolds us, and as we peer through it, we can see the past and the future we face. 

Ness is a feral and startling incantation that pushes against the extinction of wildness. Weaving threads of ancient myth and Middle English storytelling, Macfarlane and Donwood create an illustrated poem-prose-play that brings to life the fundamental crisis of the Anthropocene: climate change and rapid globalization. As a response to the incipient threat of climate change, this modern mythical tale ruminates on the relationship between humanity and Nature.

At its core, Ness asks us how we defend ourselves from the dangers we inflict upon Nature, and consequently, ourselves — the dangers mankind creates as a result of our own hubris, ignorance, and taste for dominance. These dangers are visually realized by artist Stanley Donwood. Donwood’s shadowy illustrations capture a rooted sense of place that sprawls and anchors Macfarlane’s lilting words. Through this illustrated poem-novella-fable, Macfarlane and Donwood remind us that Nature is the force that tethers the past and future to the land and that humanity and Nature are bound to one another. 

Ness is a timely book that speaks to the power of Nature and its indomitability—it reminds us of a world beyond human. Macfarlane writes with the vision of Nature reasserting itself and reclaiming its power to flourish and provide life. Though humans are now considered to be the dominant species, our legacy will pass, and everything will once again return to the land, the wildness. 

A Ritual of Grief in New Waves

In New Waves, Nguyen tells a story of an Asian American — half Chinese, half Vietnamese — twentysomething working in the tech startup space just after the 2008 stock market crash. What is included is often just as important as what is not. The theory of omission. The bottom of the iceberg. Lucas Nguyen, male protagonist, was not line-driving into a blossoming future as an engineering mastermind but he was flittering about in his parents’ bed-and-breakfast before stumbling out of Oregon into tech as a customer service rep. And maybe it would have been more resonant to operate with this sort of Silicon Valley archetypal Asian male who codes at breakneck speed because he was born a mathematical genius, bred with discipline, and by such hard work, has climbed the ranks to become another version of the model minority in a technocratic American Dream. Instead, he strips away the stereotype-clad character lest we mistake economic rise with visibility of the Asian American. 

This ambitious debut speaks about the world of tech intelligently, always being critical but never anti, always hoping to evolve it and expand it to become big enough to include us all and never to cancel it. It doesn’t trivialize tech but asks the tough questions. How does our value in data and expediency in algorithms coexist with human labor? Can it? If not, is there not something fundamentally compromising, fundamentally inverted, fundamentally absurd in our incommensurate value system? Should it not cause us to both laugh at such a farce and cry at such a tragedy of replacing humans with machines? For those who default to “business as usual” methods, these questions might not have clear answers. Otherwise, they may seem merely rhetorical. On the contrary, if coexistence is possible — and it must be — how can we maintain such a world? Nguyen does not seem to go as far as to answer this.

It is no surprise that Nguyen’s ability to critique tech is razor-sharp since he is an editor on The Verge, a media platform that largely covers tech and science, but that’s not all within his repertoire. New Waves does not stay in the abstract world of ideas or the belligerent space of confrontation. It is grounded by so many lines of dialogue washed in wit and comedy that I was left shaking my head in deep satisfaction again and again. 

Much of the use of dialogue comes through Lucas’ memory of Margot. Margot was Lucas’ best friend, a no-nonsense engineer of great talent, unafraid of contention, and perpetually hampered by society’s reminders that her body was racialized. “Being black means you are merely a body—a fragile body.” In the very beginning, they commit a data heist in a drunken moment of retributive angst after Margot is unreasonably fired. “What is any company’s most valuable asset? . . . its information”. It was a sly way to expose a rhetorical point — a point that ruthless capital-hungry companies seem still to miss — that we have mistaken the dispensability of human workers with the dispensability of data. The theft of data leaves no void. The loss of people leaves one that cannot be filled. Margot is snatched from us almost immediately once the story begins. She dies suddenly by a car accident Lucas was not present to witness. The heist merely hands Lucas his best friend’s login credentials as a flashlight that guides him through the aura of mystery surrounding her death. Nguyen lays out an entire stage for grief to speak.

Leonard Cohen famously sung, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, as an interplay of the holy and the broken, the truth in the mess. The pessimist in me wonders whether or not this interpolation of hope in life’s tragedies is just our own willful conjurings. Our need to formulate redemption when there is none. But Nguyen’s elegiac prose is not meant to inspire fatalism or to discuss objective reality. He acknowledges the tendency of the living to write narratives for the dead whether or not those narratives are given consensus. We are human and that’s just what grief does to us. It isn’t an act that is only selfish but also an investigative ritual where grief hands us a spade and challenges us to probe deeper and longer than we once did. The plot structure ebbs and flows from Lucas’ reality to memories of his dead best friend in such a way that invites the past to whisper secrets into the present like grief swimming with resurrection.

This commingling is the flagrant act of a rule breaker demonstrating that the boundaries that limit our world only serves to restrict us from innovation. As Lucas breaks into the first of Margo’s accounts, he is faced with the dilemma of how to give meaning to her death by the constricting choices laid out before him. “Memorialized or deleted. The only two states for a dead person’s Facebook account. . . . A memorialized Facebook account was preserved in stasis, frozen in time like a caveman in ice. Deletion was, on the other hand, a complete erasure.” Stasis or obliteration. Our world, at least the technocratic dimension, suffocates the substance of death and allows a binary to be oozed out. Nguyen is clearly not satisfied with this and insists instead to innovate it.

As Lucas goes on a reluctant rampage, hacking into Margot’s accounts, he discovers her online presence on a forum for sci-fi aficionados, harking back to his shared history with Margot on another online forum. He becomes privy to her threads of conversational content with Jill, Margot’s virtual friend and published sci-fi author, who quickly becomes co-conspirator. A stark difference exists between Margot’s virtual identity, when cloaked with anonymity, and her embodied identity. She seems liberated to empathize, to opine, and to create. At every moment of pause Lucas has with this conquest, his grief betrays his integrity. He eventually finds a library of WAV files with recordings of Margot drunkenly creating fictional worlds. “Grief isn’t just the act of coping with a loss. It’s reckoning with the realization that you’ll never discover something new about a person ever again. Here it was, though. Something new.” Nguyen snidely stages an existential coup on the limits of death, ripping the ceiling wide open. Grief is not the twist of the knife or the apotheosis in dying. Grief gives us permission to revolt against stasis; to continue creating even past disembodiment. 

The novel is layered with a metanarrative conducted by Margot’s resurrected voice, breaking through the forcefield of mortality to communicate that she too lived with her own grief. The illusion of dialogue.

“She had a way of seeing the world for its composite parts. Everything could be broken down into systems, each with their own rules and consequences. I think engineering data architecture was effortless for her. It was so self-contained. But when she’d look at the world more broadly you could see her trying to piece it together, but it was just too much at times. Systems of sexism, systems of racism, systems of social class, all interlocking and tugging at each other in different directions.”

As Lucas irresistibly shuffles through her deeply stowed audio files, his portrait of Margot becomes clearer. She imagined blasting into intergalactic realms to resettle on planets with no trace of life like drawing on a blank canvas. She spoke presciently of the dissolution of a world ruled by a cacophonous tribunal that would sail into its eventual extinction by natural causes. Grief compelled her to write new realities that were unencumbered by the infrastructural chaos rendered her world uninhabitable.

Like Margot, the entire cast of characters find themselves living in an equally restrictive world — a white CEO who wants to build something noble but is forced to alter the shape of his company according to market demands, a customer service staff that is marked by dispensability where hard work will never reward them in an industry that refuses to assign them value, an author who’s best work comes not from herself but from an anonymous online legend that proofreads her copy. What if we could rip open the ceiling to create a new world?

In many ways, New Waves celebrates the human achievement that has ushered us into the digital age. Without the dawn of the internet, the luxury of anonymity which re-humanizes us for community would never have been possible. End-to-end encryption has secured confidential messages which is crucial to virtual organization for social activism. Algorithms are mystifying to most, but they have also built realities and systems for us that once existed only as a figment of our imagination. 

This doesn’t mean that Nguyen coddles the tech industry. All innovation with noble origins can become corrupted and co-opted for the most egregious means. At one scene, a CEO of a startup searching for funding from a venture capital has an idea for a facial recognition application because a photographer once took a picture of him and his ex-girlfriend happily in love on the subway. Sentimentality frozen in time. He combed through the entire internet and could not find the lost photo floating nebulously in virtual erehwon. The next time he appears, he has sold it to a government sector using his application for comprehensive surveillance. To make sure that the metaphor does not drive us down the edge of the cliff because this fiction is bordering on reality, he decides to call the company Panopticon, satirizing tech with a double entendre hiding behind the shadows. 

Nguyen recognizes that there is no formula to striking that balance or to how humans and machines are to coexist. Algorithms and data may never get humans right and our worlds may continue to feel restrictive to us, but in the face of it, we must write habitable worlds if only that we could live. Grief does not become any less liminal, but rather than a prison we are trying to escape it can be a shelter that allows us to create. Instead of being paralyzed by stasis or releasing by oblivion, it can be tossed with the waves of resurrection to bring about something new.