DISSOLVE

DISSOLVE BY SHERWIN BITSUI

In Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve, a book-length sequence with a single poem acting as preface, the Diné poet and Whiting Award winner examines and reinvents language. Here, punctuation marks engage with the landscape, “Hyphens sash the tree line’s dashes; / sleep seeps from its turquoise wails,” as Bitsui examines the ways in which places and people both create and are created by language. Merging images from urban and rural places, Bitsui insists that his readers remember “What crows above a city’s em dash, / doused in whale oil, / hangs here—named: nameless.” In this surreal and imagistic lyric, landscapes are always in motion—in process: “Slipping into free fall, / we drip-pattern: the somewhere parts, / our shoulders dissolving / in somewhere mud.” Elements of nature are active and given their own agency: “Falling from their cut hair: / hearth sounds sunlighting / the hallway back to then.” Sunlight becomes a verb, an action, that can be performed by sounds as the senses and the landscape come alive. Images circle around, blurring and fading and then returning, creating an experience like moving through the dark. We can only see what Bitsui carefully illuminates in front of us, “Mother, hovering / above cellphone light,” and “The city’s neon embers,” the rest swirls somewhere at the edge of the senses, until we are guided, once again, toward the light.

Copper Canyon Press.

— Review by Gwen Mauroner

HOLD

HOLD BY BOB HICOK

In Bob Hicok’s Hold, his tenth collection of poetry, the poet’s humor, punning, wit, wisdom, and humility lead to small revelations, introspections, and musings on the human condition—all in the face of danger and atrocity. As its title might suggest, this book yearns for and struggles to hold strong to self and to community, to hold to the body, to hold to the world, to hold—yes—to optimism, to hope.

In “Faith,” Hicok writes about the Holocaust denier who works at the local grocery store: “[he’s] a Nazi out of loneliness, / unlike his friend, who’s a Nazi / out of tradition.” As the poet watches a rabbi speaking to this grocery clerk “about baseball and Auschwitz and girls,” he thinks she will win him over eventually because “hands are fans of hold / more than shatter.” The poet asks, “[t]his is not the life we wanted, is it?” and throughout the book, he struggles to understand our differences in light of our sameness. In one poem, the speaker is disturbed to have the same “number of legs / and heads / and chromosomes” as the slavery apologist talking about the War of Northern Aggression. In another poem, the poet wakes in the morning to read news of “another black man / cop-shot.” “Every time a cop kills a black man...the killing / is white. I’m killing these men and want me / to stop,” Hicok writes, unsure of how to navigate whiteness and all the harm it implies: “please—don’t keep looking like me / and saying this is justice. This is hunting.”

If Hold asks many questions throughout, they are not rhetorical, nor are they theoretical—instead, they’re practical questions about our living in this world. When the speaker sees a homeless man sleeping on the street, he wonders how to walk by him “not in some future but this life— / not in theory but in fact.” In a unique blend of punchline and sincerity (that few other poets can pull off so well), Hicok confesses, “I’m scared, but not shitless.” And we are meant to take some small hope in that—hope that “splayed / and broken is the beginning / of harmonic and blessed.” Yes, hope that something might hold even in our dark times: “Hands are good at that. Holding. / Hands are good at almost everything / we ask them to do.”

Copper Canyon Press.

— Review by Josh Luckenbach

FRUIT GEODE

FRUIT GEODE BY ALICIA JO RABINS

Alicia Jo Rabin’s second poetry collection, Fruit Geode, explores the multitudes contained within the body. Past, present, and future overlap and part within the cycle of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, and the speaker finds herself “juggling too many lifetimes to count / so I let them drop like planets / marbles falling on the carpet of ocean.” Her beautifully precise descriptions of fertility and pregnancy, “seed lined arc / mother papaya,” create a kaleidoscopic palette of the body, a subject which she treats with honesty—at turns praising the body, at others lamenting its changes, but always returning, again and again, to gratitude.

In examining these experiences of womanhood, the poems of Fruit Geode also sift through a wide variety of collective and inherited wisdom. Jewish mysticism, climate change, ritual, and herbal medicine thread through these poems, creating a web of experience that centers the speaker’s journey in her own body, her own relationships. Within this center lies the creative self, a witchy spirit, in which the speaker asks herself, “don’t you want / to steal one more spirit / from the spirit world / and bring her down / in the form of a small body / weaving itself / of stem cells?” and where the speaker looks back to the time before motherhood, where, “once life was a blank / white sea with blue lines.” Instead of loss and regret, the speaker renews her creative journey, finds transformation, and declares, “I become the page / that holds the story.”

Augury Books.

— Review by Rome Morgan

SO FAR SO GOOD

SO FAR SO GOOD BY URUSLA K. LE GUIN

In So Far So Good, a master of the science fiction genre, Ursula K. Le Guin gathers poetry written in the final years of her life and leaves us a valedictory collection rich with wisdom. Here Le Guin paints images of wind, rain, seasons, sleep, darkness, old age and death—across seven sections—and with an omnivorous sense of language, music, and curiosity for the world. The poems are sonorous and spellbinding––flowing with a lingering cadence that echoes deep within the reader.  

Some poems wrestle with the journey and destination of the body and soul: “I think of the journey / we will take together / in the oarless boat / across the shoreless river.” In others, Le Guin yearns toward mysticism: “to your soul I say: / With none to hide from / run now, dance / within the walls / of the great house.” She reflects upon old age and affirms its ramifications, writing that “all earth’s dust / has been life, held soul, is holy,” and commanding the spirit to “rehearse the journeys of the body / that are to come, the motions / of the matter that held you.”

Each poem within So Far So Good is a journey that beckons its readers to set sail, to pay attention, and to flutter in the wind. Le Guin finds delight in the dark mysteries of life and conveys her own experiences with a kind of urgency. Her poems root themselves in the natural world to incite inner transformation: “The world may be as it used to be / but I am altered, I the eye that sees / all half known, half strange as if newborn / and fresh to its mortality.” Just so, Le Guin’s So Far So Good guides us, with dreamlike imagery, through the waters of mortality.

Copper Canyon Press.

— Review by Samuel Binns

CAMELLIA STREET

CAMELLIA STREET BY MERCÈ RODOREDA, TRANSLATED BY DAVID ROSENTHAL

Mercè Rodoreda’s Camellia Street is a study in whiplash. Though first released in Catalonia in 1966, the book remains sharply resonant and intimately relatable today to any woman who has ever felt herself apart, numbed by life’s vicissitudes even as she finds sweetness in them—any woman “trapped alive,” as narrator Cecília notes, “in a piece of candy.” In less than 200 pages, Cecília charts her history: how she was discovered as a foundling, how she abandoned home to live first with her young love Eusebi in a shantytown, then with a stream of various men solicited on street corners, in cafés, through friends. Though fraught with loss and near-constant uncertainty, Cecília’s past as she tells it is one of relatively little emotion. Buoyed as much by own hard shell, her own stark remove as the sensory details of post-war Barcelona—a bejeweled silk dress stitched by nuns, a wooden angel with hands removed, bluebells planted then crushed between fingers, the velvety ferns in a café, the lime-flower tea—she flits from one café to the next, one man to the next, finding herself installed in one apartment after another in detached fits and starts.

If she is dream or doll to the men she encounters, Cecília is fully real to us readers, made vivid through Rodoreda’s careful attention to details both sensory and strange, and often grim; “. . . how the moon,” Cecília muses, “was gnawed by termites with worms in all holes, like corpses in burial niches.” In this regard, Cecília’s sense of remove only serves to make her feel all the more human; her detachment a survival mechanism as hard and cold and necessary as the stone benches she sits on when she works Las Ramblas. Though, as translator David H. Rosenthal astutely notes in his introduction, “[t]he parallels between her inner life and the disoriented, catatonic Barcelona of the 1940s and 1950s are striking . . . Rodoreda never presses the point.” Indeed, what’s most brilliant about this book is its myopic lens; its keen ability to peer narrowly, vainly, self-absorbedly outwards through a wonderfully crafted mind.

Open Letter.

— Review by Elizabeth DeMeo

MADAME VICTORIA

MADAME VICTORIA BY CATHERINE LEROUX, TRANSLATED BY LAZER LEDERHENDLER

Using the unidentified skeleton of a woman found in 2001, outside of Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, as her nexus, Catherine Leroux creates a collage of womanhood: fluidity and joy; erasure and pain. In twelve separate stories, she imagines variations of the life of this woman, Victoria, which inevitably end with her death. She peppers the collection with small chapters on the nurses and hotline workers, all while the public continues their quest to identify her. It would be easy for this type of structure to become disjointed, as each Victoria is fully realized—a sex worker proud of satisfying her customers, a time traveler, a grieving teenage mother, an experiment-turned-invisible, a lover who didn’t uphold her end of a suicide pact—but Leroux uses the repetition of these themes to maintain her cohesion: arrows pointing north, characters with heterochromia iridium, movement and migration.

Lazer Lederhendler’s English translation also sparks and simmers with luminous prose, allowing Victoria to emerge as a guiding star, the one constant in a shimmering landscape. “She gets the feeling every now and then that time has remained suspended since the first day she entered this house and that whole generations have passed through her hands, where they were rocked and wiped before racing toward adulthood; that, in their turn, those adults, the corners of their mouths still studded with cereal crumbs, send her their offspring not yet able to speak their given names; that from one generation to the next these people are increasingly shapeless, and that in a few years nothing will be left of them but vague outlines.” Juxtaposed in this way, Madame Victoria honors all women on the margins, all women dismissed by society. It tempts us to reconsider the ways in which we think of victims, showing us that if we listened, there is much they could teach us about ourselves.

Biblioasis.

— Review by Joy Clark

DEATH AND OTHER HOLIDAYS

DEATH AND OTHER HOLIDAYS BY MARCI VOGEL

Marci Vogel’s Death and Other Holidays, the inaugural winner of the Miami Book Fair / Degroot Novella Prize, is a tour de force that comprises a year in the life of April, a painfully average woman who grapples with the vicissitudes of young adulthood after the death of her beloved stepfather. Composed of gorgeous vignettes that chronicle April’s trials and tribulations in 1990s Los Angeles, Death and Other Holidays is raw, honest, and darkly humorous. Vogel’s tight prose reads like something of a diary by its immediacy, capturing the inner workings of April’s mind, and speaks to the aching young adult in all of us. From one section, April recalls a science experiment where researchers measure molecules before and after having people watch them, and they find that the molecules have changed. “Something as minor as taking pictures changes the world, at least on a molecular level,” writes April. Here, too, readers who watch as Vogel’s endearing protagonist battles death and young adulthood will most certainly find themselves changed.

Melville House.

— Review by Hiba Tahir

IN COUNTRY

IN COUNTRY BY HUGH MARTIN

Hugh Martin’s second poetry collection In Country delves into the war in Iraq from the American soldier’s perspective. The language and listing quality of his memories are plain and simple, but the stories they tell are not. Readers see the complicated relationship that the American militia, both as individuals and as a collective, have with Iraqi civilians. Poems move from tenderness—Thanksgiving dinners with the Iraqi soldiers and games with children in the streets—to the brutality of beating an Iraqi man until he’s the shade of plum: “As he lay there in his own piss, I saw his eyes shut, / sealed with swollen skin (this isn’t to say this incident—just one small evening event—is to showcase some soldiers / saving men / from beatings. We, / mostly, weren’t).”

Martin’s poems deal with the aftermath of war too—the resentful parents who mourn the sons they believe the US took from them, and then, the particular hardships felt by soldiers, chiefly, the combined monotony and isolation from American society. Still, In Country continues to return to the question of what is service? Poem to poem it is posed: “I served by opening each drawer, / each cabinet, looking for wires / & weapons while women screamed in a room / where we’d put them with the children / away from the men / we’d put in another room / to be watched while we searched. I served / by handing out peppermint candies / to children in villages / as fathers and mothers stood in doorways / not speaking, even though if they did / we’d never know what they were saying.”

BOA.

— Review by Jenee Skinner