THE YEAR OF THE HORSES

THE YEAR OF THE HORSES BY COURTNEY MAUM

When someone who rides horses is asked about their connection to the four-legged, half-ton creatures who make the pastime possible, answers tend to fall in one of two categories: the simple, wherein the horse’s presence is something so everyday, so necessary, that you might as well inquire about the person’s connection with breathing; and the fiendishly complicated, wherein the horse is bound inextricably with the horse-person, yes, but in such a manner that the person can’t help but poke at the places where they’re tied together, looking for answers to explain how they got there. In her memoir The Year of the Horses, Courtney Maum shows herself to be in the latter camp, which is a stroke of luck for the reading public, since the introspection and self-knowledge present on every page of the book are as stunning as the prose itself. 

Maum’s book is an exploration—not only of the way that horseback riding helped her return to herself and her family after a period of prolonged depression, but also of the ways that her own nature does and does not mesh with that of the horse, and the places in her life where this is particularly visible. This is a deeply affecting memoir that leaves no proverbial stone unturned—marriage, motherhood, politics, the female body—but always returns to the horse in the end, and for good reason. “I don’t care where you stand on horses,” she says toward the end of the narrative, “if you set out to debunk the hold they have on people, take away their power, prove that they aren’t as enchanting as they seem to be, you will lose, because they are that powerful, they are that moving, they have something that there aren’t words to explain.” Maybe, as Maum says, the world doesn’t contain quite the right words to describe the human connection with horses. But The Year of the Horses gets as close as can be, with an under-the-skin magic reminiscent of the animals themselves. 

Tin House.

—Review by Lily Buday

THE WHEEL

THE WHEEL BY AM RINGWALT

AM Ringwalt’s The Wheel is a prism: a treatise on temporality, resilience and psychic acuity that yields light at every poetic turn. This turning is part of the project’s meditation as well: “The wheel turns. The wheel turns.” This movement, rendered as meditation, guides us through the pages. We travel across the States and across Europe, making stops in California and Indiana and Massachusetts as well as a recording studio in Rome, a park in Trastevere, and the precipice of the Spanish Steps around Gucci-clad tourists. From the beginning, the speaker’s mission is clear: “I wanted to explore resonances between and beyond Christian and Pagan systems of meaning-making” in the birthplace of Tarot, Italy. In enumerating these resonances, The Wheel becomes the fruit of its own exploration.

Ringwalt navigates conversations between the artist as self, the artist as extension, and the artist as an influence; a dialogue that is rendered seamlessly. The Italian history of Tarot speaks to W.S. Merwin’s melodious translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (from which the book takes its name) and Alice Notley’s epic critique The Descent of Alette. An insistent verse from Colleen’s A flame my love, a frequency and the voices of Nina Simone and Devendra Banhart resonate in their midst. Everything is a point of influence. In acknowledging this, The Wheel creates language to speak on the very poetics that brought it into being.

Perhaps one of the most spellbinding aspects of The Wheel is its ability to portal through time without betraying a sense of its passing. The reader feels suspended in a mythos of place and witness. Poetic fragments of memory and song bookend scenes of listlessness, scenes of vulnerability and survival, scenes of longing.

Throughout, Ringwalt treats us to an accumulation of her longings: “I only want to fill this space with bells, with olive trees, with stone pines, white pillows.” The statements ring as mantra, a self-fulfilling prophecy that harnesses art as a mechanism for healing.

Each page is a spoke in The Wheel’s poetic apparatus, spinning a poetics of equilibrium and wonder that makes the reader feel as if they are held in confidence by a close friend.

Spuyten Duyvil.

—Review by Vasantha Sambamurti

REEL BAY: A CINEMATIC ESSAY

REEL BAY: A CINEMATIC ESSAY BY JANA LARSON

Filmmaker and writer Jana Larson’s book-length essay Reel Bay is a captivating blend of memoir, true-crime, meditation on women in film, and fantasy played out through the pages of screenplays that will never be completed.

The story follows Jana, a grad student struggling to finish her MFA in filmmaking, as she tries to piece together the life of Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman found dead in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Jana travels first to the Midwest to interview witnesses—where she finds she’s trailing just behind a BBC film crew researching the same case—and ultimately to Japan, where the once-clear image of Takako seems irreparably obscured.

What begins as a cataloguing of a ravenous, journalistic hunt becomes a mesmerizing exercise in projection and subjectivity, as Jana’s obsession with the case becomes less and less rational. A search for answers moves far afield while painfully circling the same set of circumstances: a dead girl in the woods, two champagne bottles, a hand-drawn map, and a letter prophesying her death. But Jana is a centrifuge that fails to separate truth from speculation, reality from fantasy, and her search collapses spectacularly into questions that are increasingly unanswerable.

With this essay, Larson captures both the fanaticism of creative fixation and the listlessness of artistic existential dread with clarity and empathy. “How did she become so lost?” she asks, not only about herself, or even Takako. As we are told from the beginning of the book, “you are the woman in this scene,” and indeed this is a story about any woman who, as Larson puts it, “doesn’t have the equipment to make her life work.” There is something inherently defiant in Larson’s exploration of those who are lost and deluded, and something freeing in bearing witness as she becomes the true subject of her art.

Coffee House Press.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro

STAY: THREADS, CONVERSATIONS, COLLABORATIONS

STAY: THREADS, CONVERSATIONS, COLLABORATIONS BY NICK FLYNN

Nick Flynn is, among many other things, a collagist. It should be no surprise then that his latest book is a collage of sorts— a selection of his poetry, memoir excerpts, interviews, essays, photographs, collaborations, and, yes, collages— from the last twenty or so years. In Stay, the reader gets as close as one possibly can to Flynn’s goal of “trying to know what [is] essentially unknowable— what it is like to be someone else.” When his words aren’t enough, he works in short pieces by other artist-friends such as Josh Neufeld’s comics and Zoe Leonard’s photographs.

 Flynn’s nonlinear narrative spans the themes of family, time, torture, death, birth, race, capitalism, becoming, war, and creation. The front half of the book gives the reader all the necessary information to begin to understand Flynn— his relationship to his mother, his father, his childhood, and his growing up. The sections that come after are the glue of the book, particularly “Ark/Hive.” Here, the tension running through the book is distilled:

…everything

is something else. This is the story

we’ve been telling ourselves

since we could speak. Possess

nothing, Francis says. Do good

everywhere. No one believes

those wings will lift you.

As a disclaimer, I have been meaning for years to (but have not) read Flynn’s work before Stay. Perhaps people more familiar with his writings would find this rehashing of his prior works redundant, but I doubt it. Personally, this book came to me when I needed it and detangled some of the loose threads balled up in my mind. This book is a self-portrait, a collaboration, and a piece of art. This book is essential.

ZE Books.

—Review by Ali Hintz

DIVIDE ME BY ZERO

DIVIDE ME BY ZERO BY LARA VAPYNAR

Tolstoy, Brodsky, math word problems that lead to orgasms, hyperbolic geometry, experimental braces, bedbugs, George Bush’s chicken thighs, caviar, immigration, the writing life, a loveless marriage, love emails, Orthodox Christianity, and school essays where the mother is the hero.

Such are the pleasures of Lara Vapnyar’s Divide Me By Zero, a smart and moving hybrid novel/memoir that explores the narrator’s relationship with her dying mother—a brilliant math teacher who immigrates with her from Russia to Brooklyn—alongside the narrator’s three love affairs with three very different men. Vapynar makes this odd conjunction work. She writes, “Back when I was seventeen, the only love that I had witnessed was the love between my parents, which was all-consuming and absolute, and I thought that it was only natural that my love [. . .] should be the same. What I didn’t know then was how quickly all-consuming and absolute can turn into obsessive, strip you of sanity . . .” She shows us how love, in any form, manifests in our lives as incomprehensible, without form or sense.

Vapnyar creates a form for this senselessness, using notes from her mother’s self-help math textbook. She pulls the reader into conversation with these themes using boxed-off asides, asking for comparison and empathy, offering life advice. It is this unique structure that makes Divide Me By Zero such a mesmerizing, intimate text, inviting every reader—no matter how affected by lost or broken love—to enjoy the mystery of the tangles and snarls, the absurdity of our relationships with one another.

Tin House.

—Review by Joy Clark

THINGS WE DIDN'T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL

THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL BY JEANNIE VANASCO

The epigraph and question that opens Jeannie Vanasco’s memoir-in-conversation comes from a poem by Paisley Rekdal: “But what is the word for what I experienced after?” Throughout Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Vanasco undertakes this impossible task of articulating the before and the after of her rape by Mark—a close friend; trying to name, understand, and further the larger #MeToo conversation.

Vanasco’s books is composed of a series of present-day conversations with Mark, where her questions and his answers—their responses to each other—are pulled apart, replayed again and again, weighed and considered. This is not just a book that asks the hard questions of how seemingly good people can do terrible things, or why those we trust choose to harm us, but interrogates why we perform gender, in spite of the damage it causes? Why we buy into societal structures that dismiss and discredit victims?

Despite the weight of this book, despite the painful subject matter, it is Vanasco’s generosity and openness that left me in quiet awe. Vanasco obfuscates nothing, not even self-criticism or doubt or complexity. She writes, movingly: “This is hard, much harder than I thought it’d be [...] I occupy different planes of time. I’m reliving the conversation just as I’m reliving the assault just as I’m reliving my friendship with Mark.” 

And Vanasco displays a gift for listening to those around her—partner, friends, students—that expands these conversations in unexpected and significant ways, into other directions, other spaces, some of them involving revelation, even healing. By inviting the reader into these imperfect conversations, Vanasco opens up space for other difficult conversations, perhaps with our own fathers, brothers, friends, or selves.

Tin House.

—Review by Joy Clark

ROUGH MAGIC: RIDING THE WORLD'S LONELIEST HORSE RACE

ROUGH MAGIC BY LARA PRIOR-PALMER

“Somehow,” writes Lara Prior-Palmer in her debut memoir, Rough Magic, “implausibly, against all odds, I won a race labeled the longest and toughest in the world—a race I’d entered on a whim—and became the youngest person, and first female, ever to have done so.” In 2013, she indeed won the Mongol Derby, a grueling, 1,000-kilometer race on horseback styled after the medieval Mongol postal system. Any prosaic record of this improbable victory would sell plenty of copies. But Rough Magic doesn’t just describe one triumph: it constitutes another, and in a whole new territory. “Because my competitiveness is like a kite I refuse to pull down from the sky and examine,” Prior-Palmer writes, showcasing both dexterous imagery and hapless ambition, “it has power over me.” Through arresting landscapes and many awkward moments, she rides a muscular yet floaty prose, replete with deftly mixed metaphors and off-kilter verbs. Dogs “snorkel” along the ground and cameras “drink color” from the land.

The memoir draws much of its energy from Lara’s escalating rivalry with the frontrunner, Devan Horn, which, we begin to understand as she paints the Texan “devil-woman” in increasingly cartoonish hues, is really a rivalry with her own vices—fear and self-consciousness, pettiness and ambition. “Who’s worse?” she asks at one point, “Devan or Lara?” On the page, the main difference is that Devan keeps her mask on, but Lara lets hers slip so that readers can peer beneath. If we still have trouble grasping her, it is only because, as she writes, “[t]his being human means inhabiting an unfinished form, forever moving on to the next thing . . . What use is a conclusion, or an understanding, when all I want to do is open up, mess up, unpack, and unreel?”

What use, indeed?

Catapult.

—Review by Mekiya Walters

THE BODY PAPERS

THE BODY PAPERS BY GRACE TALUSAN

In The Body Papers, Grace Talusan positions her memoir as a series of bodies: the body of the family, the body of a city, the body of a culture and a heritage, and all link inextricably back to the personal body that Talusan inhabits. The topics she explores are numerous, which could become overwhelming if not for her undaunted prose, the connections drawn between images. The memoir itself becomes a body—many parts cooperating, an alliance of movement.

It would be too simple to say this is a brave book. Talusan guides us, so we see what must be seen about how a body survives, the danger from within and without. As a Filipino immigrant, she grows within a racist society that simultaneously others her and makes her invisible. Her memoir tells us of the measures that her parents took to protect her from deportation; her sexual assault as a young girl by a grandparent, leaving her with unanswerable questions and harm to her body and mind; and the cancer she faces in adulthood, in her own body and in the bodies of beloved family members. But in each of these narratives, Talusan finds a way to reflect on love, community, and responsibility—even in their most broken, desperate forms. She writes of watching Filipinos cross the life-threatening streets in Manila: “They do it calmly and gracefully, taking a few steps and then stopping in the middle of a busy intersection, where they wait patiently for cars to cross their path. They don’t flinch when a car brushes past them. They don’t scream or jump when a car speeds towards them. Sometimes they hold on  to the person next to them and they cross together, guiding each other to stop or go, now, quickly.” With The Body Papers, Talusan offers to cross with you, through distress and danger, always moving the body forward.

Restless Books.

—Review by Joy Clark