A Review of Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vanessa Hua shares 13 stories that revolve around Asian and Mexican immigrant families in Deceit and Other Possibilities. Hua, the author of A River of Stars and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has received praise and recognition for her writing, some of which are through the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature among many others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and in this reissued collection of stories first published in 2016 now featuring new stories, Hua once again gives a voice to immigrant families as they find a way to make America their new home all the while trying to hold on to their culture and familial values. The majority of the families are possessed to lie or keep secrets from one another in order to protect their family but sometimes only with their own best interest at heart, which leads them to acts of deceit. You’ll find yourself asking how far the characters are willing to go to protect the truth.

Hua does an extraordinary job at pointing to issues immigrant families face in America, many in which the younger generations who sometimes live in two worlds face all on their own. Identity becomes an issue that is mostly grappled with in the younger generations, those who were born American but raised with different cultural values. The collection of stories touches on both the older and younger generations to show the whole picture of a family and the ways they are able to survive together and as individuals. As kids it becomes our nature to want our parents’ approval, and disappointment has a major role throughout the book. Take for example the story of “The Older the Ginger” that show other realities of returning to a birthplace where you have been gone for too long that it doesn’t feel like home anymore and where people look at you differently. The main character is an older man who never married and comes back home to fulfill his mothers wishes of taking a wife. Then, we have the prospect of marrying someone that comes from America even if they are from the same birthplace, they have become a new version of who they were solely because they’ve lived in America. We see how they’re taken advantage of by family and friends. On the other hand, the character of Little Treasure also shows the extremes people willingly put themselves through to exceed in life, almost as if it’s for survival. Little Treasure and people alike represent that story but also how they view American life, and most times that’s in a fantasy land. America is an illusion to the rest of the world but that misrepresentation is only broken once you can see it for yourself. Yet, the possibility as the title of the collection reads comes head on through the intentions of the characters in this story and many others. Readers that have seen or heard of this in their own close circle will see this as part of their story, one way of honoring their truth and also showing others who don’t understand the struggles immigrant families face whether here or in their birthplace, the realities that live within them. Family is all you have and that becomes specially true when that’s all you have in a new place and sometimes that might feel enforced as if you have no option but to follow the example. 

It is difficult to cover all the realities Deceit and other Possibilities touches on and “What We Have Is What We Need” is one of the many true but sad realities that immigrant families face. The story is about a Mexican immigrant family where the father is the first to come to America, the mother follows at one point and then the oldest son, Lalo. There are two younger brothers that are left back in Mexico with family, an inevitable result of immigration where families are separated for one reason or another. The story is told in Lalo’s point of view where we see him first say goodbye to his mother and a few years later watch him make the journey on his own at age eleven. We see him relish in feeling like an only child when he reunites with his parents. “In America, I was an only child, and I liked having all the attention.” The separation of what was and what is, is a result of a new place to call home. This quickly changes when he starts to witness how that is also changing his family dynamic in America. As the mother starts school while working and taking care of her family, tension rises as the father starts to feel that he and Lalo are being neglected by other duties. Later they find that she had been lying about working late, instead spending time with an American born man who shows her a different future, one that her husband and family can’t provide. Lalo reflects on this when he’s older, “She had an alternate existence, happier than what she was born to, bound to. The perfect life that she hid from us, the one where she did not cry for her lost sons or get on her knees to clean toilets or argue with her husband. The life she deserved.” These revelations are brought forth and the family fights to stay together even if its not entirely what each of them wants. This is a recurring theme, the mother struggles between picking what could be the American illusion becoming a reality and the actual reality. Lalo and many other children are witnesses to the life choices our parents make for the sake of staying a family. It introduces a cycle, Lalo’s parents stayed together and he followed their dreams for him, “I got the desk job my parents wanted for me. It is my gift to them. My burden.” The character learns a lot, grows up in a unimaginable truth by being left behind, leaving his family behind, crossing the border, marital struggles his parents faced, learned street smarts, avoided gangs, and how you live your life for the ones that gave up so much for you. In the end he followed the American illusion his parents set up, and for him although became a reality, it wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself.

The collection of stories is captivating for its realness, a kind of story that although at times sad or hard to grasp feels close to your heart and one that can show Americans how sometimes even if dreams can happen, they don’t always come true for immigrant families. Lalo kept the picture of his mother that once belonged to the American man, which is how he and his father found out about the lies his mother had been keeping, unknowingly helping the man that was trying to win her over. “I keep the picture as a reminder of how that smile can disappear, if you take for granted what you can never possess. You must make her yearn only for the life she already has. To want nothing more.” The collection of stories offer an appreciation for truth, a way into the lives of those you see on TV screens or passing by on streets. Within each story we see how deceit can tear a family apart as well as keep them together. The character of Lalo, a young boy shows wisdom as he figures out how to adapt to life in America, a place that has given his parents and himself opportunities but also given his family many struggles along the way. He says, “you can never see all angles at once” and this quote provides an insight to the book as a whole. Hua casts a light on deceit where it is provoked by circumstance and consequences in Deceit and other Possibilities that surround the lives of immigrant families but does well to remind the reader that such things are true within any race within any country, birthplace or not, we are all same, human. In the end, irony rules as truth is centered around the stories told in the collection but it is also deception that is equally as important. 

A Review of Black Ice by Kerry Shawn Keys

I first encountered Kerry Shawn Keys in the early 1970s at a poetry reading in Philadelphia. As I recall, he was hustling across Broad Street, carrying a large walking stick — brandishing would be more accurate — that looked as though  he had ripped it from a fallen tree and carved a knobby handle on the end. Somehow, I knew all about him, even before I met him — that he had been living in a hunting cabin in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in central Pennsylvania, that he hunted his own game, picked his own berries, and bathed in a warm spring deep in the woods. Oh yes, and that he wrote poetry! I don’t remember who was reading that day. It might have been Jerome Rothenberg or Charles Reznikoff or Robert Bly — certainly  poets worth traversing broad stretches of land to see.

Over four decades later, no longer the young man from the provinces — Keys’ new collection, Black Ice (his 30th or so) retains many important elements of his pastoral, mountain-dwelling past. In “Affinity with Beans,” he writes:

Last evening, I cooked potatoes and kale 
and a fish fresh from the creek. 
All quickly went to mush in my stomach.
Did they find another life there, a congenial rebirth,
or were they merely eaten away 
by the acids of nothingness into a nauseous mortality.

Here we have the Emersonian-Thoreauvian reveling in self-reliance and nature, and yet that innocent transcendental stance has been tempered by experience in the world. Keys spent extended periods of time in Brazil and India and, currently, Vilnius, Lithuania, where he’s lived for over two decades. The poem’s final lines present a more complicated view of the life of a hunter-gatherer:

Part of my supper by now has become part of my flesh,
and should a soul be inseparable from its tenure, 
do all these souls share my sense of oblivion, 
of our time asleep being our only redemption.

Although the natural world, the world of mountains and forests and streams, are still touchstones in Keys’ poetry, there is also the Shamanic, mythic, and primal urge to interact and manipulate that realm. “Ringing the Dead” evokes a terrifying upheaval in the natural order of things. The poet seems to be participating in a ritual where “throats exploded into fiery snakes, / arms and legs baked on the spot…,” where “tongues screamed in tongues” and “Bridesmaids married death.” This could be a scene culled from a dream, but it could also be a description or poetic reenactment of a pagan ritual from a remote region of Brazil or India, or even his current home in Lithuania, the last European country to convert to Christianity. A country rife with primeval forests and mushrooms, and remote villages, traditions suppressed throughout its long history — by the church, the Soviets, and now capitalist financiers.

No matter how far Keys roams from his Appalachian origins, he always seems to arrive — curious and eager to participate — urgently poking around with his carved walking stick. In “Hoffers,” regarding his ancestors — versions of which he encounters in far off places, he admits that he doesn’t

…know much more about them other than 
that they were like my father, all of them orphans. 
Their fathers and grandfathers, also doubtless, itinerant orphans, 
persecuted in their homeland to be rebaptized Pennsylvanian.

There seems to be a primal search in these poems, a search that in its very nature is at best futile and at worst treacherous. In “from Tao Te Ching Meditations, Bones & Buzzards,” a poem about his sojourn in Brazil, the poet (always and forever Orpheus) ends up with his head severed 

[floating] down the river into the jaws 
of the hippopotamus, the razored saws 
of carnivorous, Brazilian piranhas.

At first, I was confused by the presence of hippos in the Amazon. In the Greek version, Orpheus’ head just keeps on singing as it floats downriver; in Keys’ version, the beheading by the Maenads is only the beginning of the terror. And, although I have no way of knowing, I imagine those poet-devouring creatures as part of the escaped hippo-herd, now roaming the Amazon, that once belonged to Columbian drug lord, Pablo Escobar.

A significant number of poems in Black Ice seem to wander off the transcendental-shamanic path into the perhaps wilder and sublime field of fatherhood and family. These poems reflect Keys’ current existence as an expatriated American living in Vilnius, in what was once the Jewish quarter. In “The Curse,” he sketches his new life there:

Black mold on the wall in the kitchen, presque vu,
in the former Jewish ghetto in tonight’s upper room
drunken delirium, the blood of Rabbi Christ 
surfacing as frescoed pentimento long hidden.

The horrific barbarism of the not-so-distant past is ever present, unspoken but always on the tip-of-the-tongue, as he wanders through the old city with his kids. In “All Soul’s Eve (Vilnius),” as his son innocently questions whether the souls of the dead are really present, his daughter whirls about, fluttering her hands, “pretending that she is leaf and dove/let loose from a dark magic theatre above.” At times, Keys’ children — because they are his offspring — participate in the mytho-pagan realm alongside him. Other times, however, the world of fatherhood is more mundane, though hardly less poetic:

Now, there’s no vision of heaven or earth anymore, 
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, 
or mortal intimation of immortal, celestial realms 
other than the chirping, glad chorus of my children,
sweet Sonata’s boneless, tumbling, yearling twins

(“Aurora Aurora”)

I hesitate labeling Black Ice a poetic journey, even though it seems to begin with Keys’ actual birthplace and conclude in his newly acquired home and  family. The poems and the poetic gesture of the whole collection are much more complex, nuanced, and captivating. They conjure up the slick, translucent, and reflective surface over which we are bound to slip, glide, and skate, fully aware of the underlying darkness coloring it.  

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A Review of St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon’s slim, yet layered fifth novel, St. Ivo, takes place mostly during a weekend getaway. Sarah and her husband, Mathew, visit their long-estranged friends, Kiki and Arman in upstate New York. The story, however, is far from linear. There are secrets in the background. There are masochistically overplayed memories and one, looming, life-defining mystery about Sarah’s absent daughter, Leda, that will keep you turning pages, as if you’re reading a thriller, even though you know it is not that. 

St. Ivo is a story about one woman’s search for connection. Sarah struggles to connect with others while she struggles to connect her past and present lives because something happened with Leda that cleaved her life in two. There is before and there is after and Hershon’s mastery lies in her ability to show Sarah’s disjointedness, while making her story, as a whole, feel connected and complete. 

Sarah lives inside a hardened shell, an all too familiar mechanism. As with Sarah, as with ourselves, the shell stems from pride, from a secret fear of not being enough. To avoid judgement, we keep thoughts, wishes, hopes, facts to ourselves. Habits, money, geography — other obstacles wedge themselves between relationships so that if we don’t make an effort, if we don’t share our secrets, our vulnerabilities, we lose touch. Our shells harden. 

This isn’t new information. We know we have to be honest and open to connect with others, but it’s so much easier to digest this fact when we see the world through Sarah’s eyes, when we see how disconnected she is from her best friend, when we watch her seek out hollow connections with strangers because she can tell them lies. The lies provide only a temporary balm, a way to keep her hurt private and intact. 

Sarah’s pain defines her and it takes the whole book for her to acknowledge that “Leda’s absence…was the center of her life. She’d chosen to make it so.” Here is the crux of all sustained misery, which Hershon drives uncomfortably yet satisfyingly home — more often than not, it’s of our own making. Yes, some things are out of our control but once the waves pass and we pick up the pieces, we can either choose to move on or we can stay put and polish our shells. 

Hershon doesn’t tie everything up with a bow. There are questions left unanswered. There are levels to Sarah that might never be known, even to her, but we are left with hope. We are reminded that the spaces that form between true friends and partners are never permanent — they can deflate after just one, honest conversation because genuine connection breaks down our barriers and allows life, the ebb and flow of it, to come rushing back. In Hershon’s words, “they were breaking apart. They were coming together. They came and went with the tide.”

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calderón-Collins is creating her new “magick.”

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

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

The Unknown Unknowns: DJ Lee's Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Native Grey: Andrea Rinard Reviews Chuck Augello's The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love

Chuck Augello’s debut collection of short stories, The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love, presents a retinue of Everyman characters and their stories, revealing quotidian reality so painful and recognizable that it hurts, wonderfully. Augello doesn’t explore or examine loneliness, or hope, or grief or love as much as he breathes closer and closer to those ubiquitous human experiences, detail by detail. The characters who pass through Augello’s gaze express the exceptionality of the everyday, leaving us blinking and shaken in the marvel of the universe behind the faces of characters who are achingly familiar.

Flynn, the first character we meet in “Pizza Monks,” is an appropriate gateway to the stories that follow in this collection. As he weighs the ethics and inconvenience of staying after-hours to make pizzas to cater a self-immolation, Flynn speaks of the motions of kneading dough as muscle memory. This idea serves as an underpinning metaphor through the subsequent stories as the characters either succumb to or break free from the habitual motions of being human. Brother Phap Dong, the Buddist monk intent on setting himself on fire, exhorts Flynn to “find your pain and make an offering to it.” For all of Augello’s characters, the pain is merely the commonplace pain of being human. Their offerings are as disparate and profound as redemption, absolution, enlightenment, or simply momentary respite from the inevitable messiness of life.

For Kevin in “Smoke,” the pain is steeped in his regret of one youthful choice that has doomed him. Years later, his older, successful brother, Jerry, wants him to burn down his over-mortgaged, post-recession McMansion, and Kevin can see no way to refuse. Augello shows how the forks and bends in a life’s trajectory are as illusive and potentially destructive as fire. Kevin’s one bad decision lingers like a stench of smoke, cloying and unmistakable.

In “The Prerogatives of Magic,” a seven-year-old girl named Chloe accidentally makes her mother disappear, and the father is left not questioning whether or not his daughter’s “tricks” are real but simply and quietly begging for his wife to reappear. It doesn’t matter whether Chloe has a power that “just comes.” Instead, Augello presents the magic of two people who find “a comfortable spot and try to hold on.” Even through ten years of marriage, there is the magic of a husband who makes his wife a cup of tea every morning and leaves it for her when she emerges from the shower. He offers his pride in exchange for her return even as he imagines “a hotel room with her blouse and skirt neatly folded on the desk, her underwear dropped at the foot of the bed.”

In “Little Green Everything,” Keith is out of work and feeling “obsolete” and “useless.”  He struggles with the brutality of the modern world at the same time he tries to help his wife Penny through her response to it. “No other planet hurts like we do,” Penny says, and Augello distills that agony into moments that ache with the simplicity and banality of a bruise. That throb continues in “All God’s Children” as an unnamed veteran and a capuchin monkey liberated from a research lab mourn the loss of Kristin, the woman they both love who was killed in a hit and run.

Augello’s Dash in “Cool City,” clings to and depends on the reliability of numbers and the presence of fire extinguishers. He finds unexpected respite and acceptance from a “level one fast love practitioner” while in the oncoming path of a hurricane. Annabelle has her own gale force impact on Dash as she extols the virtues of avoiding finding reasons not to love someone while offering unexpected and heartbreaking moments of grace and love. Like Dash, William K. in “Languid” finds himself moved incrementally into changing from a listless and indifferent Best Buy employee who encourages his customers to pray in supplication to the appliances he’s selling for a 10% discount to a man rocketing into a new velocity.

Through the extraordinary, ordinary catalysts of murder, suicide, infidelity, computer code tattoos, natural disasters, alien abduction, arson-for-hire, mysterious packages, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Augello’s cast of characters are familiar like a drop of water placed under a microscope. The proximity and access Augello provides is his offering to us and the heartbreaking wonder of being human. Each character is a foreign land for which we need no map or translator. As we follow the characters, we realize that “inexplicable grey space” is our native home, filled with people who are just like everyone we know. Just like us.

The Trauma of Girlhood and Womanhood: A Review of Elizabeth Hazen's Girls Like Us

If the legacy of a timeless cri-de-coeur out of the depths by women writers has seemed to become redundant in the last twenty-odd years of post-feminism, then Elizabeth Hazen’s poetry collection titled Girls Like Us is the aesthetic equivalent of pushing the finger back into the unhealed wound: the trauma of girlhood and womanhood in this society as in most others. Her poetry brings up into view what is so often swept under the carpet: a dystopic world still uniquely a part of women’s experience because of gender ideologies hardly as moribund as many young women today would like to believe. This is poetry in its best form: ineffable interrogator, ethicist and chronicler of human history.

Hazen, whose first book Chaos Theories was also published by Alan Squire Press in 2016, explores the clot of sexual trauma often connected to the wounds of addiction and mental health issues in young women and girls. In Girls Like Us Hazen doesn’t ‘unflinchingly’ approach these topics. She very much flinches, as a poet with an experiential dimension to her writing might or  will. The pain is there on the surface ; the pain is in black and white ; the pain refuses to be swept under the carpet.

No one would doubt that Hazen came of age when women were re-launching (as women’s movements need to do again and again, there being no rest for the weary) the third wave of feminism in the face of the budding backlash that since then has become a slashing of women’s rights and freedoms.  As testament to the timeliness and resonance of what she has to say, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School and other journals. In girls like us, the “self” exposed by a language apparently almost bleached of vibrancy swiftly establishes itself as the opposite of “singular.”

Hazen writes in “Why I Love Zombie Women”: “because her need/ is clear, uncomplicated. . . . because she doesn’t stop/ even after the hatchet hacks clean through/ her reaching arm; because she will pursue/ her prey till they have nothing left to chop/ Because when she lies in pieces, inside out/ she will not knew regret, or shame, or doubt”. And this, to compound the fun, is composed as a classic sonnet. Refreshing as Hazen’s wry and rueful engagement with rhymed verse always is, the hardihood she displays in this collection running words around the ring of their own formal antecedents and prohibitions — sonnets are about consuming love, aren’t they? — allows her to hold up the monstrous mirror in which patriarchal representations of femininity can see themselves refracted as who they are.

Still, in the slippage and space between real and representational, Hazen hangs out miracles and wonders like the Himatsu-Bako box whose “emptiness becomes its promise, vast as a blank page”. Also, perhaps the felicitous alignment of her insights with her expressions is rather like the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets who astonished the old world with unimagined similitudes and verisimilitudes plucked out of an unfolding natural world and Natural Philosophy aka Science. Thus, Hazen writes in “Alignment”: “Planets align from time to time, and much/ is made of the effects such cosmic chance/ could have on Earth, though in fact/. . . such coincidence can’t touch/ the craft of carpenters with their dovetail joints/. . . . /And what of the body? . . . .  the problem is my lust’s incongruity with logic. . . ./ I want to rearrange my heart, to alter/the facts, selectively recall — I falter/ fall out of line, think only of his face”. While Hazen’s words do recall sexual trauma familiar to many ‘girls’ living under the ‘Law of the Father,’ it is this very incandescent precision of her language that allows Hazen to fashion with compassionate irony co-dependent worlds of desire and despair: “The moon’s pull is nothing compared to the weight/ of my body sinking into his bed again/ The acceleration of a falling object/ occurs at a constant rate, and repetition/ changes nothing unless conditions change”.

Arrangement of poems is an important thing in this volume; whereas sometimes the poems of Part 1 feel flatly accusatory — note how different is “Blackout is for girls like us/who can be rearranged” from the later poetry cited above — those later poems in Part 2 feel like meat on the bones of the longing to be whole and to heal, living outdoing the bruises of death and love, love of death, and death of love. In the 2nd Part the raw anguish of the hungover fall from grace in “Decisive. Indecisive. He decided” gives way to a wiry wisdom that finally sees that  “We’ve been called so many things that we are not/ we startle at the sound of our own names”. Finally, lines of verse step out and push one hard in the chest, obliging exclamation, pause, reckoning, refamiliarization, resumption. Readers of Elizabeth Hazen can expect long years of magic as well as precision-tool craft with words.