STORIES WITH PICTURES

STORIES WITH PICTURES BY ANTONIO TABUCCHI TRANS. ELIZABETH HARRIS

“No one can write a book. Since before a book can really be, it needs the dawn, the dusk, centuries, arms, and the binding and sundering sea.” If this assertion from “Story of the Man of Paper,” is true, then Antonio Tabucchi is, in fact, in possession of dawn, dusk, centuries, arms, and the sea because he has written a masterpiece collection, Stories with Pictures, translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris. The book is an extended ekphrastic exploration of the relationship between visual and written art. Each story in the collection opens with an image that inspired it—either overtly, such as in “Faraway,” where the story begins with the mention of the iron bars from the paired image: “My darling, I started painting behind the fence. Strange how iron bars can signal other times,” or subtly, such as in “Flames,” where the connection between three panels of an almost floral explosion of reds and burgundies and the tale of a dying miracle worker requires deeper reading to ascertain.

The relationship between visual art and writing is not the only connection that Tabucchi is interested in. Throughout the stories, the themes of color, composition, time, movement, and music emerge. The book is divided into three sections: Adagios; Andantes, con Brio; and Ariettas. Each section’s stories mirror the musical movement suggested by the section headings: the stories in the opening section are paced slower than the stories in the second and third, matching their ascribed tempos. Tabucchi does not stop there. He includes, for example, the ballet definition of adagio in his story, “Rainy Evening on a Holland Dike,” where he depicts the back and forth between a man and a woman who share a past connection and have reencountered. Each story in his collection is an examination of art, art’s interactions with other art, the way artists create, and the ars poetica. 

Stories with Pictures is a book for artists and art-lovers of all mediums. The stories within, along with the accompanying artwork, are short and engaging. Each one seems to say something new and important about life and the often-unnoticed impact that art, in any form, has in shaping us. 

Archipelago Books.

—Review by Sam Campbell

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

SOME OF US ARE VERY HUNGRY NOW

SOME OF US ARE VERY HUNGRY NOW BY ANDRE PERRY

The interconnected essays that make up Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now by Andre Perry are affecting, timely, and make for a debut you can’t put down from a new and significant voice in nonfiction. Within its pages, Perry showcases his unique creativity and enviable dexterity as a writer by hopscotching from the traditional essayistic form over to the experimental, taking the shape of a screenplay, frank epistles, or even faux interviews. Perry reminds the reader words are often sharpened on both sides, giving them the capability to venerate or denigrate. “Human language,” he writes, “bends so flexibly; such subtle shifts in situation and intonation turn salutations into weapons.” These essays will make you question your accountability for the words you use; cause you to think twice about what you say, how you say it, and two whom.  

Every one of these essays is in itself a unique expedition crossing time and time again into the deeply charted territories of race, self-conceptualization, privilege, and sexuality that Perry experienced in his life, sometimes as far back as childhood to more recent times, living in San Francisco and Iowa, or traveling abroad to Hong Kong. And, with Perry as our guide, we are more than willing to follow him as he dispenses insight in each essay with an unclouded lens, and expressive, lyrical language that sings right off the page. An astounding debut.  

Two Dollar Radio.

—Review by Nicholas John-Francis Claro

ME & OTHER WRITING

ME & OTHER WRITING BY MARGUERITE DURAS, TRANSLATED BY OLIVIA BAES AND EMMA RAMADAN

It is difficult to classify this collection of the late Marguerite Duras, experimental writer and filmmaker. Within it, she covers the publicized French trials of Yves Saint Laurent, the loss of a child, the madness of parenting, and intersubjectivity. Confidently and passionately, she examines it all through the lens of her own experiences.

From her title essay, “Me” (1986), she pens, “I don’t know what non-violence is, I can’t even comprehend it. Peace with oneself, I don’t know what that is. I have only tragic dreams, of hatred or of love. But I don’t believe in dreams. I write. What moves me is myself.” Duras uses this internal struggle, here and elsewhere, to explore the external struggles in the world around her, ranging from political to historical in her scope. In her 1985 essay, “The Men of Tomorrow,” she layers and juxtaposes to show us how the quotidian impacts the eternal: “The everyday issues that arise for the individual, meaning those related to his purpose and his futility, are crucial issues for all of humanity, and they are mundane, they are the most observable, the most frequent.” The work’s translators, Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, do a wonderful job of capturing Duras’ unique, liquid prose that shimmers between fact and fiction, mystery and truth, personal and political. Me & Other Writing is both a wonderful, accessible introduction to Duras and a collage-like collection offering aficionados a fresh view at a writer who escaped genre constraints and offered literature a new realm of possibilities.

Dorothy, a publishing project.

—Review by Joy Clark

ANIMAL

ANIMAL BY DOROTHEA LASKY

Diving into the trickster-like nature and imaginative qualities of self, ghosts, color, and bees, Dorothea Lasky’s essays within Animal invite “the I to be its own cool animal.” Like a gust of wind, Lasky’s first essay about ghosts prompts poets “to resist the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself,” which forms the central call to action of the collection. Animal serves as a handbook to fortify the infrastructure of the city of Imagination.

Lasky crafts a dazzling testimony of color and its transformative role in how we perceive the world. She puts a light to prisms through discussions of synesthesia and Rimbaud’s disorganization of the senses, illustrating color as a “live wire that illuminates its frequency.” Referencing Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, she shares “poetry can learn from others on the autism spectrum and those who sense the world differently because color is sensual.” Lasky champions for the inclusion of colors beyond ROYGBIV to convey an image's unique and iridescent brilliance.

And her navigation of creativity is a model to follow: to celebrate the inner spirit and personalities of each word. She advocates for naked truth and intuition: “our greatest gift as a humanity is the dance of the spirit through the imagination as manifest in language.” Speaking of a poem’s own manifestation, Animal features an elegy for bees: “what the bee makes, a set of containers of well-used space, is the nonsentimental machine of a poem.”

Throughout each essay, she draws curtains and attempts to undefine the spatiality of poems, weaving threads of liminality in order to navigate the spaces between the human and the animal, the real and dream worlds, the living and the dead.  Lasky unboxes the pigeonholes and Animal resides in a realm of poetic possibility.

Wave Books.

—Review by Samuel Binns

SAVAGE GODS

SAVAGE GODS BY PAUL KINGSNORTH

Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods sings with introspective urgency, transcending plot and narrative to get at the heart of the questions he considers truly important: what’s the usefulness of writing and language? Why exist, communicate, connect? And how can we ground ourselves in a shifting, uncertain world? As an author of eight previous works, Kingsnorth is no stranger to the process of writing, but Savage Gods, which he calls “organic,” represents a departure from convention and a move toward self-reflection. 

Kingsnorth sets us at his new family home in Ireland, using his surroundings to interrogate his relationship with place and contentment. While this book dives deeply into these personal philosophies, it also poses much bigger questions around our very existence. “We write,” he says, “because of life’s brevity and the need to blaze.” Though the text is highly contemplative and pulls from the philosophies of many writers and thinkers, Kingsnorth situates us firmly in the personal, drawing on his relationship with his father and his father’s death to illustrate the unknowability of other people and the lack of control we can exert over our lives and even over our own words.

“Life is not the shape of a book,” Kingsnorth says, and that’s why he’s written this one: to push back against narrative, to suggest another route. Deep but digestible, brimming with wisdom, this book asks: “Can you convey the heat of it?”

Two Dollar Radio.

—Review by Victoria Hudson

TSUNAMI FROM SOLARIS

TSUNAMI FROM SOLARIS: ESSAYS ON POETRY BY AASE BERG, TRANSLATED BY JOHANNES GÖRANSSON AND JOYELLE MCSWEENEY

Swedish poet and critic Aase Berg’s new collection, Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry, beckons readers into a mountainous range of essays covering poetry and the human experience. Edited and translated by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, each essay swells with an introspective metamorphosis. The collection features an expansive scope of enlightening ruminations, including musings of wounds and scars; pregnancy and motherhood (“that cute, paradisiacal madness”); subversion of the patriarchy and capitalism; playfulness; joy and suffering; adulthood; the awe-inspiring madness of children; and the nature of language and a poem’s landscape, all which offer readers new lenses and modes of thinking—to employ for the creation of poetry—to experience the world as a human being. 

Berg advocates for wonder and protests patriarchal seriousness. Provocative questions undulate throughout the collection: “is language a game?”; “should one in certain moments avoid writing about or depicting angst about mortality?”; and “why is the poem such an insult to the cruelty of life itself?” She leans toward a trickster poetics: “the poem is formless, a protoplasm, a jellyfish, an amoeba that glides around and ignores the human race’s grave chronologies.” As poetry is a playground and “language is a living being,” each essay is full of breath and enrapturing choreographies of meaning. Berg writes that “the playground is the garbage heap of the patriarchy,” and Tsunami for Solaris is a call to action for all writers to “steal back the yellow, happy, pathetic joy,” to play and play madly without boundaries or fear. 

Action Books.

—Review by Samuel Binns