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

GRACELAND, AT LAST

GRACELAND, AT LAST: NOTES ON HOPE AND HEARTACHE FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH BY MARGARET RENKL

Graceland, At Last, Margaret Renkl’s collection of essays from The New York Times, unfolds like a “patchwork quilt” of voices, stories, and perspectives from the American South, underscoring how the South is neither one entity nor one voice. Like a quilt, which brings “the past into both the present and the future,” these essays explore far-ranging themes, from flora & fauna to politics & religion, to better understand the strained times we’re living in, and how we must “make [ourselves] look” in a country that is as complicated and troubled as it is beautiful. 

We bear witness to the realities of religion, politics, and capitalism—and the real ways they fail us. Stories of animals and plants native to Tennessee, where Renkl lives, remind us of our responsibility to the natural world and the payoff of paying attention to the life we share this planet with. While these essays were written during the Trump presidency, and some during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Renkl illustrates more what has been gained rather than lost in our communities—much through the work and advocacy of people of color living in the South. Her essays on family and growing up in Alabama bring us back to our own heirloom stories, recipes, and holiday traditions, and what it means to feel the guiding hand of previous generations. The real treats of this collection are her essays celebrating the legacies of two influential Johns in American history: the late John Lewis and John Prine. While the book is not a how-to, we come away with how to better “belong to one another” in a time when we desperately need to.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Shalini Rana

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

SANSEI AND SENSIBILITY

SANSEI AND SENSIBILITY BY KAREN TEI YAMASHITA

In her collection Sansei and Sensibility, Karen Tei Yamashita blurs the genre lines between essay and story, between fiction and nonfiction. All the while, she draws new lines for her readers— lines of connection, roads that twist and turn between the Japanese American neighborhoods of the mid-twentieth century and the Georgian drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s England. Sansei and Sensibility is divided into two distinct parts: a Sansei half that is dedicated to particular aspects of the Japanese American immigrant and descendent experiences, and a Sensibility half that explores these cultural realities through the use of rather satirical Austen pastiches.

The Sansei portion of the collection shifts between short stories and personal essays without warning, barring the occasional footnote. “But never mind arguing whether fiction is true or not,” as Yamashita says in one story-essay, “… it is the speculative aspect of the anthropological project here that intrigues me, how in fact an investigation of culture might predict human reactions and outcomes.” And indeed, Yamashita’s dizzying amalgamation of fiction and history results in something that is both speculative and truthful. This feeling is not disrupted, but rather expanded, by the inclusion of the collection’s Sensibility half, which offers such Sansei/Janeite delights as an LA County Mansfield Park, a 1960s Emma with revolutionary inclinations, and a Lady Susan consisting of post-war postcards and aerograms between Tokyo and California. All in all, Karen Tei Yamashita’s latest is a gratifying jigsaw puzzle of a book, certain to enrapture readers with both its individual pieces and the larger picture those pieces create.

Coffee House Press.

—Review by Lily Buday

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

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

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