ÖRÆFI: THE WASTELAND

ÖRÆFI: THE WASTELAND BY ÓFEIGUR SIGURÐSSON, TRANSLATED BY LYTTON SMITH

Öræfi: The Wasteland, Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s stunning novel, translated by Lytton Smith, opens on an injured Austrian toponymist—naive, curious, passionate to a fault—ostensibly arriving at Skaftafell National Park Visitor’s Center after dragging himself down a glacier. There, he is treated by a vacationing veterinarian, the brilliant, frenzied Dr. Lassi, and the two swap tales of how they, and the wasteland, have come to be there. What follows is a collection of Icelandic stories, realist and mythic, historical and fictional, nestled inside an epic adventure. It is at once a history of place, and a man’s intensely personal journey through the elements of the land, and of his own mind. A delightfully complex play on the epistolary novel, the narration of Öræfi is layered, at times coming to us through five or six levels of character interpretation.

On translating Öræfi, Lytton Smith says: “The fiction of translation is physical: a translation is a creation in which one geography gets moved to another.” Read Öræfi to be transported to a world of beauty, horror, treasure, and ghosts. Full of tall tales, mighty storms, mysterious sheep, and impossibly large traveling trunks, Öræfi: The Wasteland draws you in to its baffling web, asks you to linger in this brutal, exquisite place

Deep Vellum.

—Review by Remy Pincumbe

REVOLUTION SUNDAY

REVOLUTION SUNDAY BY WENDY GUERRA, TRANSLATED BY ACHY OBEJAS

In Wendy Guerra’s debut in the English language, Revolution Sunday, translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas, her protagonist Cleo is a writer; indeed, she is an award winning writer, but only outside of her home country, Cuba, where her work has been denied publication. In the face of this severe censorship and increasing surveillance, Cleo doubts everything. When her parents pass away in a mysterious accident, she confines herself to her house, turning inward, working only on her writing. After continual raids and surprise visits from government agents, the only person she can trust is her housekeeper, Márgara. And when Gerónimo, a Hollywood actor, appears at her doorstep, he claims to be working on a documentary about Cleo’s father—only, the man he describes is not the man Cleo has long believed to be her father, but a political revolutionary.

Guerra’s Revolution Sunday is a story about the nature of art in the face of censorship and surveillance, and shows how the survival of art mirrors the survival of the soul.

Melville House.

—Review by Rome Morgan

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEATH

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEATH BY KIM HYESOON, TRANSLATED BY DON MEE CHOI

Have you heard yet what death has to say? Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, translated by Don Mee Choi, tells just this. In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death’s cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers. In the skewed scape of this book, life merges with death. Poem “Already, day twenty-eight” enunciates this in a single couplet that serves as a microcosm of the entire collection: “You are already born inside death / (echoes 49 times).” Death is mommy—stolen from child—and death nurses as child born the moment there was life. Yet, death seems on a quest to shed the corporeal: “They say birth is always a plunge / and death is always a flight / so take off [. . .] now are you liberated from yourself?” But no peace is found in this autobiography born from too many deaths—deaths, Kim explains, caused by the rigid authority of a cruel government. In these elegies death is mercurial, never embodies a single mode nor size: sinister and cartoonish; gargantuan and petite; lonely and longing for privacy. “Do you want to be a friendly corpse? / Do you want to be a scary corpse?”

Other concerns surface—who misses you in death? what remains of your life: “this morning the nightgown hiding under the bed / is sobbing quietly to itself . . .” During this cycle, death is cast as something of life’s ex, a cast out trailing the patterns of life lost and translator Don Mee Choi distills the collection with magnetic energy, granting English readers access to the relentless rhythms that Kim transcribes. For Autobiography of Death will continue haunting your thoughts long after the close of the 49th day.

New Directions.

—Review by Madeline Vardell

OCULUS

OCULUS BY SALLY WEN MAO

Sally Wen Mao has a gift for persona poems. In Oculus, she depicts figures such as Anna May Wong, a Chinese–American Hollywood star, and Afong Moy, the first female Chinese immigrant, in vivid, autonomous ways—contradictory to their blurry historical representations. While other poems pixelate or distort the world rendered—for purpose of criticizing the inability of white America to see, instead of display, others—these persona poems strike with conviction. Anna May Wong’s voice proclaims, “I’ve tried so hard to erase myself. / That iconography—”

Here Mao discusses the dehumanization of women of color by offering them protection: blurred images, new armor, grounds and oceans to bury and lose themselves in, “Because being seen has a different meaning to someone / with my face,” she writes. The poems in this collection can be stark and violent, where “blood sickles down,” and the speaker deforms herself, and hands are “cold like gauntlets,” but despite this and the ghosts that follow her, Mao carries through “an exhausting / hope” that makes Oculus a victorious and worthwhile read.

Graywolf Press.

— Review by Emma Jones

LOVE DREAM WITH TELEVISION

LOVE DREAM WITH TELEVISION BY HANNAH ENSOR

“Our fears distort our reality,” writes Hannah Ensor in her first book of poetry—and this phrase begins to sum up Love Dream with Television. In addition to hinting at the pervasive fear of otherness that plagues our present, the poems in this collection wrestle with the scrutiny of bodies, unfair representation, and popular culture’s effect on our thinking, claiming that “we want our poems / to have beloveds / because / beloveds / give us an excuse / to talk about television.” Despite the low–key anxieties present throughout the collection, each poem travels persistently—if not boldly—through its subject: all questioning in some way the human experience in relation to oneself and to one another.

As Love Dream with Television time–travels through the 21st century—pausing to wonder why we should aspire toward the behavior of celebrities, or watch television shows like Friends and America’s Next Top Model—the reader is implicated in the cultural phenomena; but I found that, after having “gone through all the emotions with / them: they were TV emotions: some more than others,” I was comforted by the book’s occasional tenderness, where Ensor cautiously reminds us: “My book loves you [ . . . ] You are a friend.”

Noemi.

— Review by Emma Jones

GOD WAS RIGHT

GOD WAS RIGHT BY DIANA HAMILTON

Diana Hamilton’s collection, God Was Right, delivers a series of essayistic poems proffering meditations, arguments, and direct addresses like never-ending conversations inside her speaker’s varied mind. Curious and compelling associations are found here between Flaubert and baby goats; lists of the ways a woman might like to be kissed, and arguments circulate on the point(lessness) of poetry, etc. As one poem puts it, “the speaker’s saying ‘fuck you’ to her // academic readers in their own tongue.” Hamilton also offers us many other critiques—by way of her speaker’s thorough observation—of graduate study, the handsy steering and grooming for a single school of thought, the male gatekeepers of academia and publishing alike, one’s own able-bodied privilege and how all of this—even the speaker’s voracious analysis—is reductive, chases its own tail, unable to set down the monocle of study.

Even so, the poems in God Was Right are jammed with humor, seeming to anticipate would-be criticisms and who can be upset about the roasting when Hamilton also roasts herself? One lyric spouting announces, mid-monologue, “I think a lot of poetries have conspired against the monologue” and it’s this cheekiness that sustains our attention. Her honesty is addictive too, in poems like “Autobiography of Fatness” when her speaker sees her desire to write about her own could-be fat body as a way to side-step power and privilege. By admitting this, her speaker can do neither, is held in account. There is so much accounted for in this collection, appraised on one page, only be reappraised and found to the contrary on the next, and that’s what life is like—at least a life spent in and out of books. A series of readings and re-readings that pain and nourish us. As Hamilton’s final poem tells us: “Why does God tempt us to think about it too much if he doesn’t want / us to? // Because he wants us to suffer” but suffering is never the end, and of course, Hamilton tell us it is right for us to make our coffee and to continue.

Ugly Duckling Presse.

— Review by Madeline Vardell

NORTHWOOD

NORTHWOOD BY MARYSE MEIJER

Northwood by Maryse Meijer explores the ebb and flow of a violent affair effervescing from a cabin in the woods. Written in nonlinear verse, various sections capture the intimate process of the delusions, realizations, and recovery that typically tracks destructive love. The novel follows a relationship that culminates after the summer solstice and the protagonist returns to normalcy by marrying a different man. Notable for its emotional intensity and apt descriptions of attachment, this novella follows on the heels of Meijer’s Heartbreaker, a collection of stories striking for similar weight: the balanced expression of hard-to-handle truths on a blurred line of prosetry. In Northwood, readers are pulled into a tumultuous relationship with phrases that probe a contained emotional history, to evoke a pathos that lasts the length of the novella. “How wealthy I was, how fragile, how strong like the strange / skin of a bubble that can resist so much and then / nothing at all.” The vulnerability, slicing for its exposition and lyricism, sweeps us in; we cannot refuse reading, returning, and reflecting.

Catapult.

— Review by Kaitlyn Yates

WILDER

WILDER BY CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM

In her second collection of poems, Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm navigates her readers through a richly chronicled though devastating world. These poems are inhabited by splitting lands and bodies, their speakers and lyricism propelled by the search for hope, for relief, for a better future. They hold such weight—as in the poem “Beginning,” where a speaker boldly implicates themselves and us: “Now we began to wonder whether we had done wrong things. Or rather, which of our wrong things had been wrong enough.”

Though the collection grapples with difficult subject matter, Wahmanholm’s careful curation of words and sounds cradle the reader in an assured, almost omniscient, voice. The internal rhyme and rhythm of these poems help us to carry them. So stricken by the sounds, I found myself reading out loud to hear, and hear again, the stories Wahmanholm is telling us—or rather, reminding. The poems in Wilder are powerful and compelling, interested not only in confronting the rifts in our history and landscape, but connecting us to each other.

Milkweed Editions.

— Review by Emma Jones