NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ BY MORGAN TALTY

Sometimes it’s not strangers who plague us, but rather those we know best. In the twelve linked stories of Morgan Talty’s blistering and bleak debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, curses come from family and friends, in the form of the trauma that’s passed down through generations, and the people to whom we are beholden.

Early in the second story, “In a Jar,” the collection’s protagonist, David, finds a jar of teeth hidden behind the front steps of his new home. David brings the jar to his mother, who shows it to a medicine man, Frick. Frick deduces that the jar is a curse, the significance of which hangs over the rest of the tales. 

At home in the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation, David is shackled with poverty, addiction, and abuse—shared, intergenerational curses all. Likewise, the secondary characters who criss-cross through the collection both grapple with and impose binds of their own: Frick is not only a nearby medicine man, but also David’s mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend; David’s friend Fellis requires frequent trips to the methadone clinic, with rides from David; and David’s older sister, Paige, arrives back at home one day, unannounced and pregnant.

Nature, too, is often a visceral reflection of the pressures David faces. In “Get Me Some Medicine,” a card game leads to useless violence and a quixotic quest to catch porcupines. In “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars,” Fellis and David drive over a horde of the titular larvae, exploding them with the sound of “popping corn.” The dead insects, described by Talty in his dynamic, impish prose as smelling “of bait, of something chewed up and spit out or even shit out,” sicken the two friends, twisting this symbol of rebirth toward a potent reminder of all that keeps them tethered to the reservation.

That’s not to say that the collection is entirely grim. Talty has a knack for generating hilarious, surreal situations that reinforce the book’s themes of captivity and obligation. In the first story, “Burn,” David returns from a failed quest to buy weed and runs into a panicked Fellis, whose hair has frozen to the ground during a drunken roadside nap. David eventually cuts his friend’s hair with a pocketknife, freeing him from the ice, and wonders whether the braid can be traded for money.

No, he ultimately decides. Instead, Fellis suggests they burn the hair. “Don’t want spirits after us,” he says. Perhaps, in this fiery, wonderful collection, some tethers can be broken.

Tin House

—Review by Eden Shulman

Read “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars” in ArkInt Issue 12!

FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE

FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE BY ELOISA AMEZCUA

Eloisa Amezcua’s poetry collection Fighting Is Like a Wife is a textured retelling of the tragic marriage between boxer Bobby “Schoolboy” Chacon and Valorie Ginn. Amezcua’s research lends the collection a sense of devastating reality that is established from the very first poem, “Tale of the Tape.” Here, the poet lists stats for both Bobby and Valerie, placing Valorie in the division of “spouse,” while Bobby is in the “featherweight” division. This poem is bookended with the “date of birth” and “date of death” of each, leaving the reader to wonder what led Valorie to such an early grave, a question that the poet does not shy away from exploring. 

Amezcua uses fighting, in its many forms, as the lens through which she views Chacon’s relationship with his wife and with the ring, using experimental shapes to reflect the push and pull of physical and emotional combat. The collection has an incredible topography, which visually indicates the emotional vortexes and moments of reflection that accompany such a consuming relationship. Amezcua accomplishes this through the clever manipulation of text, making the reading experience anything but orthodox. Many of the poems also employ a limited vocabulary, which emphasizes the exhaustion and repetition of arguments, both internal and external. These poems explore every iteration of a series of words, indicating how something as finite as word placement can have infinite repercussions. For example, “she thought no one loved / her she wanted me to sit / down & love her” eventually becomes “she loved no one & she / thought she wanted me / to sit down & love her.” These meditative techniques form a bond between reader and subject that persists long after putting the book down. In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Amezcua has crafted a finely-tuned recipe of intuitive formatting and poetic restriction, creating poems that beg to be read again, immediately.  

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sylvia Foster

THE WET HEX

THE WET HEX BY SUN YUNG SHIN

“Everything was white. My footprints—wet, then white. My shadow—west, then white.” 

In their new collection, The Wet Hex, 신선영 Sun Yung Shin, born in Korea then adopted and taken to America at a young age, leads their reader through the Underworld, to the nature reserve that is the Korean DMZ, and along the shores of Christopher Columbus’s journals (juxtaposed with their own immigration documents). The book navigates Shin’s identity—or, identities—as well as womanhood, tradition, what it means to be cast away, and the parts of you that (could) die in the process. 

These poems offer more than just the romanization of featured Korean words—they’re accompanied by the Korean spelling in Hangul. Similarly, one of the aspects I loved most about this book is its appendix of familial terms in Korean, under the title “L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral.” The collection as a whole superimposes the words’ iterations, which Shin themself bridges. It is a “map of what could have been,” as Shin writes, and mourns.

It reminded me a bit of Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche, which sometimes substitutes Chinese characters in place of their English counterparts to form a language barrier, a blending; to put the reader in that place. Here, though, we learn the words along with Shin—an experience complementary to the tensions in the poems. 

Swatches of Korean folklore illuminate the many narratives of the book, and Shin in turn shucks Western religion—namely its God—in favor of Korean shamanism. In their poem titled “Gaze_Observatory_Threshold: A 바리데기 Baridegi Reimagining,” accompanied by the art of Jinny Yu, they highlight the tale of Princess Baridegi, known in Korean mythology as the first shaman. 

Shin’s retelling forefronts the abandonment of the shamanist “foremother” by her parents (she was one girl too many, born into the royal family), and its consequence once the king falls ill: “A king does not need a princess. Until.” Meanwhile, with a series of black and white and gray shapes, entrances and exits and pure space, Yu’s art enraptures the reader, the sections of the poems almost labyrinthine. 

The image work in The Wet Hex is to be gnawed on, deserving of attention and study—and readers will find this worthwhile if they want to make a dent in all the bones laid by Shin’s juxtapositions and syntax, and all that’s in between. The stacked images at times reminded me of incantations or ingredients for rituals, for potions—linked back to the word “hex,” which—as we’re told—has no male cognate.

This is a collection that can teach anyone, especially a poet, plenty about themselves and their art—that can teach anyone to interrogate their place in the world. Spend some time with this one.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Jami Padgett

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

CONSTELLATION ROUTE

CONSTELLATION ROUTE BY MATTHEW OLZMANN

As snow melted and we moved into a newly unfamiliar world, without mask mandates or social distancing, Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route arrived like a lost bundle of parcels. Olzmann’s work is vibrant, tender, and, above all, honest about the loneliness of being ostracized from the world and ourselves. Gun violence, environmental erosion, racism, and the anxiety of things falling apart fill this collection, and yet Matthew Olzmann’s epistolary poems continue to reach out a hand. He writes to the dead, to canyons and trees, to river monsters, with language that reverberates like the grooves of a Motown record playing for an audience who, like the barkeep in “The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639)”, can listen in to feel the pure expression of loss and love.

The most poignant example of this is in “Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale,” where Olzmann asks the whale: 

Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe

no one will make the effort? That you can work really hard to be a

good person and try to make a difference in your community, but then—at

the end of the day—the waves will just swallow you whole?

If you have a long-lost love across the ocean or at the other end of the covers, or you see a world of forests and televisions on fire, or you find yourself in an alternate river of consciousness on an impossible mission to an unreal place with no chance of return, unsure of where you stand, open up Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route. It’s addressed to you. 

Alice James Books

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

SIX WALKS: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU

SIX WALKS: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU BY BEN SHATTUCK

Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau is a love letter to New England’s natural world and the timeless revelations that walking in nature gives to us. Six Walks, crafted as travel essays, centers around Shattuck’s walks through New England, each one a retracing of Thoreau’s steps. Through Shattuck, the reader travels to the national seashore of Cape Cod, the highest summit in Maine, his family’s lost home in Rhode Island, and more. Pocked with pieces of Thoreau’s own writing, Six Walks recontextualizes Thoreau’s philosophies within our modern world. 

After a few hours of reading Shattuck’s essays, I found myself setting an alarm for 5:45 a.m. to see the sunrise on my in-law’s farm. I painted a watercolor, taking inspiration from Shattuck’s own sketchings scattered throughout the book, and I journaled, copying lines from Shattuck, just as he had done with Thoreau. 

In the essay titled “The Allagash: Nature Must Have Made a Thousand Revelations,” Shattuck finds himself camping on Pillsbury Island with his friend, John, and musing on the nature of friendship. There, he tells us about his friend Emily—a neuroscientist—and her beliefs on loss. She says, “souls don’t observe strict boundaries of ‘mine’ or ‘yours,’ but rather exist in an interconnected set of pattens that carry our essence forward, distributed across people and time,” and Shattuck remarks that he feels this with John: “He holds something that he isn’t aware that he’s holding.”

I think Shattuck holds a piece of Thoreau inside him, too. As I sat on the front porch of a farm, reading the last lines of Shattuck’s Six Walks, “the world around me was always there and waiting to be seen again when I was ready, and when I was ready, it looked only beautiful,” I felt that I held a piece of Shattuck, now, and Thoreau, too. Maybe if I’m lucky, they will hold pieces of me as well.  

Tin House.

—Review by Caitlin Plante

& THEY LIVED

& THEY LIVED BY LA FELLEMAN

LA Felleman’s debut chapbook, & they lived, is a refreshingly blunt collection that holds a mirror up to its readers, exploring the individual moments that make up a life: yours, mine, ours—anyone’s. Her poems seek to shine color and sound upon the canvas of existence—the humor, regret, and possibilities that fill our lives with meaning.

Felleman doesn’t shy away from experimentation in this collection, with several of her poems pushing convention. From caesural play in “Hum” and “Tossed,” to a poem-within-a-poem in “Imperceptible Forgiveness,” to using symbols as titles, Felleman aptly demonstrates her precision and control over language and form. 

It is also worth noting the emotion that Felleman’s collection elicits; line-by-line, she hints at more than what is on the page, leading readers beyond their initial reactions. In “Bella,” the speaker reminisces about a puppy that she had loved, but that had been taken away from her: “your intent alerted my husband / You went back to the shelter the very next day. . .” (10). Within a few short lines, the poem opens up to reveal an entire subcontext regarding the dynamic between the speaker and their husband. What at first glance appears to be a nice poem about a dog suddenly balloons outward to become about love, marriage, regret, power, and how something as simple as a pet can serve as a symbol for all of this. 

& they lived challenges the reader to evaluate who they are now, who they were in the past, and who they want to be in the future. It is a collection that will reveal the world to be more than what can be seen on the surface, and it will remind you that life is always in flux. After all, as Felleman puts it in “Postlapsarian,” “Younger me would have found your concern annoying / This-age me accepts your regard / As cherishing” (22).   

Alien Buddha Press.

—Review by Sam Campbell

THE KISSING OF KISSING

THE KISSING OF KISSING BY HANNAH EMERSON

Read this book.

I’ve been obsessed with The Kissing of Kissing since I received an advanced copy early this winter. It took me three months to finish reading because I wanted to gnaw on each line. Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” comes to mind.

In the time you spend reading this review, you could order The Kissing of Kissing. Do that now, then please come back. You deserve a preview.

The Kissing of Kissing is the most original collection of poetry I’ve read in years. Emerson uses sparse language, repetition, and the imperative mood to create a rhythm that runs through the book like a heartbeat. She makes forms and breaks forms and in doing so lets loose the sounds of the universe.

I am biased. Emerson touches on many of my favorite subjects: water, soil, plants, fish, kissing, worms, poetry. Nestled in the middle of “Giveness,” she posits her theory on the work of the poet:

…The poets

here to keep telling the truth

of the keeping the life going

to survive. Poets give grounding

in helpful knowing the voice

of the universe. Please listen

In “A Blue Sound,” she enacts her theory:

Blue fish is swimming

jumping great keeping

the world from tilting

… I am

blue too. I help the fish

live in the keeping

of the sound.

Emerson’s poetry works simultaneously on the individual and cosmic scales. The rule of all for one and one for all is a constant theme and delight in her poems. Her ability to transmit the full-body experience of joy is rivaled only by Whitman.

Please, please read this book. Your mind and your poetry and your life will be better for it.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Ali Hintz