THE DÉJÀ VU

THE DÉJÀ VU BY GABRIELLE CIVIL

Gabrielle Civil’s the déjà vu is a portal, a performance, a dream space. The result of “mining experimental echoes,” Civil’s writing traverses space and time. It is poetry, essay, and testament: mind and genre bending. the déjà vu is as easy to pin down as a river.

A Black feminist performance artist living through civil upheaval and a pandemic, Civil gives readers pause. Poems about Black time are interspersed among pieces like “On Commemoration” and “Blue Flag” where Civil’s reflections on her own work reveal the vulnerable self-consciousness of how an artist not only reflects themselves, but how that depiction highlights or obscures marginalized peoples.

Though a performance memoir, the déjà vu hardly reads like a script for stage. Personal essays like “(Banana Traces)” offer a generous telling of how an ingenious Black artist deals with the anxiety of “talking yourself out of your own greatness.” “Unheld breath” recounts Civil’s hospitalization with the tenderness of a survivor who yearns “to be sweetly and indulgently loved,” yet has lived through so much loneliness it is near impossible to accept outstretched hands.

Gabrielle Civil’s the déjà vu is a book for the reader who needs to be reminded of their own power. It’s a book that should take up the space between their hands and reverberate throughout their own dreams.

Coffee House Press.

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

THE GIRL SINGER

THE GIRL SINGER BY MARIANNE WORTHINGTON

Marianne Worthington’s long-awaited debut poetry collection The Girl Singer catapults past readers’ already-high expectations. Worthington’s poems question what we owe our elders, our ancestors, our heroes, and ourselves. The text is split by subject into three parts: the first on women’s experiences in early country music, the second on the complexities of family and mourning, and the third on nature. However, through meticulous weaving, these themes radiate and converse throughout the whole book. This text may be the most finely sequenced poetry collection I have read. 

The Girl Singer acts as a witness to the sins of the past without falling into empty contrition. “Barn Dance (Chorus)” asks the reader to:

…Listen. If you want

us, say the names our mothers gave us.

Recall how we really were: rawboned,

standing spraddle-legged while we

headlined those mean stages. 

The Girl Singer hews to its creed and sings about both the beautiful and the ugly. Worthington does not mythologize the past. Instead, she confronts the sexism in the early country music industry in the “Barn Dance” series and the titular poem “The Girl Singer” and the speaker’s family’s racism in “War Story” and “James Brown Performs ‘Cold Sweat’ on American Bandstand, 1968.”

Form-wise, the collection is delightfully sprinkled with sonnets and includes a pantoum as well as its own take on the traditional murder story/ballad of Tom Dula. Worthington has a knack for choosing evocative verbs: “hills smear” along a highway, a stray dog “scratched up the ridge,” and “chrome / judder[s] in my ears” (italics my own). The musicality of Worthington’s verse is just plain gorgeous. “Strumming and plucking / then brushing and picking,” The Girl Singer is sure to croon its way into the Appalachian, and American, canons.

Fireside Industries.

—Review by Ali Hintz

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE BY MARILYN HACKER AND KARTHIKA NAÏR

At first glance, A Different Distance might appear to grapple with what, right now, hits too close to home and persists still: the global COVID-19 pandemic—but Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr’s shared strength lies in the renga form, a genre of Japanese linked-verse poetry, which skillfully transports us back into those vestiges of beauty, devastation, confusion, and shared grief we all experienced and witnessed in March 2020.

Spanning a whole year from the start of France’s lockdown, these poems quietly haunt—offering the poets’ observations of street scenes and global news events when observing in isolation was all one could do. Naïr notices the juxtaposition of pigeons crowded together on sidewalks while humans on the same ground must heed social distancing. And Hacker gives voice to how we all once felt in our homes—a “perplexed self, desiring” while “home becomes exile.” The political unrest that continues to reverberate now, over a year later, arrives brilliantly in Naïr’s fine-tuned lyric—for example, a “national uncaring” towards the pandemic and disregard for the “nameless” became mottos of international governments. However, amid strained hope, Hacker and Naïr focus on those small glints of beauty, such as “every wave, every clap during our ‘locked-in’ days,” or as Naïr poignantly puts it—those “galloping months.”

Although the poems observe and reflect outward, their gazes are uniquely intimate, perhaps mirroring the witnessing and introspecting many of us did during the first phases of the pandemic. I can’t help but imagine that this renga practice between Hacker and Naïr provided some relief, consistency, and comfort to the poets during those early, difficult days. As I read, comfort it certainly did provide.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Shalini Rana

ON CATS: AN ANTHOLOGY

ON CATS: AN ANTHOLOGY BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Critically acclaimed yet equally mistrusted, cats are inarguably one of the most enjoyable parts of life. For centuries, cats have been worshipped as gods, feared as predators, and documented by authors around the globe. Through letters, memoir, poetry, and prose, all things cat are explored in this new anthology. With an introduction by Margaret Atwood, On Cats is a must-have collection for cat-lovers, book-lovers, and anyone in-between.

A pocket-sized book with a cloth cover and a ribbon bookmark, On Cats is a delightful experience from the moment you pick it up. Not only is the book a physical treat to behold, it contains a smorgasbord of treasures from some of the world’s most notable literary geniuses—Lewis Carroll, Alice Walker, Mary Gaitskill, Christina Rossetti, and John Keats, to name a few. “Writers and their cats—it’s a theme,” writes Atwood in her introduction, “Are they Influences? Are they Muses? Yes and no, depending on how you count.”

Interspersed amongst the novel excerpts, poems, letters, and other cat-filled narrative bits are gorgeous black and white photographs of cats, making On Cats an aesthetically pleasing experience from cover to cover. The book concludes with a charming section aptly titled “Cat-echisms,” filled with famous quotes pertaining to these “purr-fect” pets. One such quote by Charles Dickens posits: “What greater gift than the love of a cat?” To which I would have to answer that there is none, but On Cats would certainly be a close second.

Notting Hill Editions.

—Review by Sam Campbell

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS BY CAITLIN HORROCKS

Brimming with loneliness, isolation, and hope in impossible places, Caitlin Horrocks’s short story collection Life Among the Terranauts is a masterclass in how fiction may be “sweeter than the truth” and still haunting.     

Bookended by “The Sleep” (a 2011 Best American Short Story) and the collection’s namesake “Life Among the Terranauts,” Horrocks’s stories encapsulate lives trapped in places they must call home while they look out at unattainable possibilities. The people of Bounty, Minnesota sleeping through the depression of winter and the demise of their small town and the “terranauts'' scrabbling to survive in their biodome in the desert remind readers of the all-too-familiar anxieties of being trapped in one location, needing money that has no chance of arriving, and living in a place humanity has built and cannot sustain.

Between these two behemoths lies a personal mixtape of stories for the lonely. People take pleasure in what intimacy is available, and comfort in regret because it reminds them of who they are. Yet, there is no pity, no questions of “if only” or “what if.” Buried within Horrocks’s collection lies “Chance Me, ” a story whose often-forgotten optimism asserts “uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from the right angle.”

All-too-relevant for a world coming out of quarantine and into the Anthropocene, Life Among the Terranauts is essential reading for the twenty-first century.

Little, Brown & Company.

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

DISCIPLINE

DISCIPLINE BY DASH SHAW

Dash Shaw’s tour de force of a comic book Discipline tells the compelling story of Charles Cox, a fictional Quaker teenager who runs away from his pacifist Indiana home to fight for the Union Army. From the first chapter I was entranced: I haven’t sped through a book this fast in years. The black-and-white illustrations are austere and fierce, conveying most of the action and setting the pace of the book. The writing, consisting mostly of dialogue, private thoughts, and letters between family members, fluctuates between lyrical and sparse, giving insight into Quaker society in the Civil War era and Shaw’s characters..

The Quaker faith lends a riveting cultural backdrop to the book. Shaw, himself raised as a Quaker, interrogates the faith and the culture surrounding it throughout. His hero Cox grapples with his teenage desire to fit into mainstream Indiana society and his faith that denies “the vain fashions of this world” like singing, dancing, and fighting. His dialect and inexperience set him apart from the other soldiers but he quickly learns to conform by playing cards, suppressing his “doth”s and “thee”s, and fighting in several battles. Neither Shaw nor Cox shy away from the horrors of war.

Shaw spent six years scouring through libraries to write Discipline, and it shows. He incorporates passages from “actual letters and diaries of Civil War-era Quakers and soldiers” into his text. His characters’ letters don’t just feel authentic—in many cases, they are. Part meticulously researched war story, part coming-of-age graphic novel, Discipline immerses the reader into Cox’s battles with his wartime enemies, his loving family, and his divided mind.

New York Review Comics.

—Review by Ali Hintz

ALL THE NAMES GIVEN

ALL THE NAMES GIVEN BY RAYMOND ANTROBUS

Bold and tender, Raymond Antrobus’s poetry collection All The Names Given traces the speaker’s ancestry and places them in a family history filled with dreams, memory, and legacies tied to colonialism. These voice and narrative-driven poems bear witness to the gaps in language, speaking, and understanding—moving seamlessly through new poetic and visual forms in the pursuit of bridging and speaking to these gaps.

In our current times, when accessibility issues still prevail and communities begin to implement captioning, Antrobus redefines sound to focus on the experience of deafness. With poems and interludes written in captions that capture unexpected sounds, such as the “[sound of self divided],” he brings readers on a journey to interrogate the infinite possibilities of what sound can hold, drawing on the work of Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which inspired Antrobus’s use of captions. Language and white space play together deftly in these captioned sections, creating the necessary soundscape of silence and noise that emanates throughout these poems. And here, the poem becomes a space in which the speaker reckons with mythology, brutality, mirrors, mothers, fathers, surnames, and intimacy. Language, or the shaping of language into experience, is then the vehicle that transports us through this reckoning. By the end of the collection, we journey with the speaker into silence, something shared and transformed into a possible place of empathy. If Antrobus claims that there are “enigmas in my deafness,” then these poems feel like a palpable answering.

Tin House.

—Review by Shalini Rana

THE NAOMI LETTERS

THE NAOMI LETTERS BY RACHEL MENNIES

“Everything inside of me has changed, and everything outside of me / has changed,” Rachel Mennies’ speaker writes to the woman she loves, Naomi, in the final poem of The Naomi Letters. Through its form of epistolary narrative, this collection unifies exteriority and interiority, the light of the sun and the glow of the bedside lamp. Allowing her reader to inhabit a space traditionally reserved for the sender and recipient, Mennies places the private, domestic sphere of letter writing in a public space, casting Mennies as the sender and her readers as the recipients. Like Naomi, the reader is privy to the speaker’s meditations on vital aspects of her identity—her bisexuality, her Jewish upbringing and the impact of intergenerational trauma, and her mental illness.

Separated into four seasons, the letters are all dated, save for the unsent drafts. The chronology of the epistolaries illustrates distance, the spatial and temporal depth between the speaker and Naomi, between the speaker’s past and present, between the speaker’s body and psyche. The speaker distinguishes and blends these points of separation to examine the influence of love and grief in the configuration of her identity, calling upon familial, cultural, and personal history and invoking the work of poets like Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. The intertextuality woven throughout her letters reflects the desire to reconcile those distances inside and outside of self through poetry. In an unsent draft, the speaker writes, “It is false, Naomi, this separation.” Reckoning with identity, Mennies’ epistolaries provide the space for the speaker’s language to transform knowledge into understanding, thus achieving revelation.

BOA Editions.

—Review by Dylan Hopper