TSUNAMI VS. THE FUKUSHIMA 50

TSUNAMI VS. THE FUKUSHIMA 50 BY LEE ANN RORIPAUGH

The poems in Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50, by Lee Ann Roripaugh, serpentine and shed glowing skins as they engineer glimpses of Okuma, the town left-behind, and the displaced persons in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In these pages, the tsunami towers as so much more than tidal waves of water, embodying female rage and pain. The pain inundates and varies as those affected by this disaster and Roripaugh’s poems mythicize the tsunami and those caught and displaced. As her poem “tsunami in love: kintsukuroi / golden joinery” explains, in epigraph, the Japanese tradition to aggrandize broken things by restoring them with gold, Roripaugh also restores with aggrandization but pipes not gold into the cracks and cavities, rather a lush density of sounds: “the bent tin cup’s / cool sluice of rinse / poured over skin’s / delicious prickle.” Her poems are thick and slick with crystalline assonance and velvety consonance, so whether they speak of rape and rot, or tsunami snark, they do so with rhyme and lilt.

On the Tsunami in all her grandeur, she is “slippery and apocryphal / as Butler’s lesbian phallus,” or the man nicknamed the hulk for his daily search for his family in the nuclear zone: “I no longer care about being exposed [. . .] maybe it will make me stronger [. . .] like the weird profusion of / of too-bright and hardy flowers . . .” In this manner, the collection oscillates between tsunami portraits­­—from an origin story to tsunami during her emo-phase—to portraits of those who’ve lost their loved ones, their home, their life. These two poles create a balance; one extreme magnifies the tsunami, and the other re-centers this disaster, this collection in the tangible. Gives a body, a face, and a mouth with which to speak to the ex-inhabitants of Okuma and imbues them with lore and repute, which is also an aggrandization—a kiss of golden joinery. With Tsunami vs the Fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh has written us poetry to infect us as we consume with a momentous voracity that turns its own page.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Madeline Vardell

FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED

FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED BY K CHESS

They shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t even exist. UPDs, or Universally-Displaced Persons, are the refugees from an alternate world destroyed by acts of terrorism against nuclear plants who have crossed over into our world in hopes of survival. K Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived follows Hel and Vikram, two of the 156,000 UPDs that make it through before contact with their world mysteriously vanishes. Hel, a former surgeon, left behind an ex-husband and young son, while Vikram mourns not his family, but that he could not bring more books with him. Hel and Vikram wrestle with how to integrate into our strange world and they create a space for remembering their own, a museum. The words on these pages now belong to the men and women who’ve never before existed in our world. Chess’ reflections on choice, survival, and fate illuminate her characters’ decisions: how they will live in a world that does not want them, a world that worries they have shown up to ruin this world’s timeline as well. The debut novel is absorbing and quick-paced, full of loss and surprising reversals, and with it, K Chess has crafted a story that is universally relevant.

Tin House.

—Review by Lucas Palmer

WHAT'S IN A NAME

WHAT’S IN A NAME BY ANA LUÍSA AMARAL, TRANSLATED BY MARGARET JULL COSTA

“Despite all, I speak of names: / because I cannot find / a better way:” writes Ana Luísa Amaral in her brilliant new collection, What’s in a Name, forthcoming from New Directions. The poems here are translated from the Portuguese into understated, lyrical English by Margaret Jull Costa—poems that are concerned with the power and limitations of naming the world. They read as intimate conversations between the poet and reader, in either the early hours of morning or the late hours of night, where small, everyday moments quickly spiral into great cultural, historical, and even cosmic significance. In the poem “Definitions,” a friend of the speaker must choose between buying a blue or white jacket. Soon, the color white becomes the moon, a "moss-free wall," "the way a cats walks." Amaral connects these images, by the color white, to Emily Dickinson’s "the White Sustenance-- Despair." For Amaral, this white sustenance is "the innermost part, or the part imagining / the unimaginable." It is the blank page.  

Like Dickinson, these poems inhabit a lush inner life, one that “does not pass / quietly—”. In “Casualties of War,” the speaker shakes “a tiny speck / from this sheet of paper” which in a matter of stanzas becomes “a flamethrower of inflammable fluids / with a past waiting to attack.” After meditating on her own cosmic insignificance in “Differences (or minor glimmerings),” Amaral writes across “this sheet of paper. Which is what will remain. / As a book: interstellar ring, / like an onion awaiting a moonlight / other eyes cannot see.” In these pages, the inner life becomes external and the external world becomes internal. Words, which always “grow shorter / when said,” slip away from the things they name. And yet, the poems always land somewhere deeply human, with compassion for friends, for daughters, for refugees and the victims of war. These poems challenge us, asking: “Is it the light that’s late, or our / configuring gaze? / And the years translated / into our language, the millions of light years / made space-devouring / waves, do they cause space to collapse or to soar?”

New Directions.

—Review by David Brunson

HONEY IN THE CARCASE

HONEY IN THE CARCASE BY JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

In his newest collection of short prose, Josip Novakovich takes the reader on unexpected and familiar journeys: from hitchhiking through the American heartland; to one man’s modification of his body to procure a near-perfect likeness to a sibling rival, in the arena of love; and a war-torn eastern European village, where bombs drop as frequently as rain, and one resident, teetering on the edge of losing everything, just wants to be reunited with his beloved bees. Novakovich’s stories are rife with brilliant and keen observations. His unique brand of moral exploration and honed wit is often coupled with horrendous acts of violence, appearing and concluding as quick as light glints off the edge of a blade. These drastic shifts from the lighthearted to disturbing (sometimes in the physical sense, other times in the cerebral), while they shock and surprise, are an inevitable and necessary driving force behind his 14 stories that provide the reader with characters plucked from everyday life and demonstrate the breadth and elasticity of Novakovich’s ability as a master storyteller. Reading each of the stories in Honey in the Carcase is like traveling a winding country highway at night, taking in what the headlights shine upon, never certain of what they will illuminate around the next turn.

Dzanc Books.

—Review by Nicholas John-Francis Claro

OFF SEASON

OFF SEASON BY JAMES STURM

Originally released serially, during the fraught and divisive days leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, James Sturm’s graphic novel Off Season tells the story of a marriage as it crumbles. Mark and Lisa are divided by their failed attempts at understanding and comforting one another’s inner despair; each chapter is a short vignette, taking on one moment at a time. The mundane springs to the surface—snow tires, kids demanding cookies, a cold beach; meanwhile the fraught backdrop of the election, economic instability, the universal pains of watching someone you love die—all take the background as American burdens: impossible to look at directly, impossible not to carry.

Sturm’s art is muted in shades of grey and blue, sometimes so soft it seems perceived through tears. All the characters are drawn with cartoon dog faces, which lends a gaze of kindness to their worst moments, and also reminds us how much one struggling, broken-hearted person resembles another. The story moves slowly, through present-day and memory, showing the reader how the moving pieces of a life can work in harmony or grate against one another. In one scene, Mark (who is the focalizer of the story) lies awake listening to his wife sob, and admits being, “. . . slow to recognize what I am hearing.” Confessional moments like these offer mirrors of our own moments of missed connection, slow-to-start empathy. Through close examination of these moments, Sturm offers a meditation on where things go wrong, and the difficult self-reflection we must employ to steer them right again.

Drawn & Quarterly.

—Review by Joy Clark

THIS WOMAN'S WORK

THIS WOMAN’S WORK BY JULIE DELPORTE, TRANSLATED BY ALESHIA JENSEN AND HELGE DASCHER

Julie Delporte’s This Woman’s Work, translated by Aleshia Jensen and Helge Dascher, is a beautiful and resonant autobiographical meditation on art, gender, and identity. The author sifts through her cultural consumption to find the root of her frustrations with gender inequality, sometimes so deeply ingrained that it is impossible to pinpoint their original source. She wonders, “What are the images that hold us captive?” Captive, that is, in repeated performances of gender that feel impossible to break. In pursuit of this question, Delporte presents the reader with her recollections of paintings, film stills, statues and texts, all evoked in bright and expressive colored pencil. Through vignettes, she wrestles with difficult breakups, pregnancy, and the fear of being alone. She expresses her anxiety and frustration with gender roles too. Recalling experiences of sexual assault as a child as well as potent micro-aggressions and barriers ingrained in the language of the adults she loved—and indeed, language itself, the masculine-centric French—the artist seeks to be liberated from womanhood, imagining herself as a wolf or a dolphin.

At the same time, much of her meditation centers on the life of Tove Jansson, a Finnish author and painter whose story and work inspires Delporte to explore her own trajectory as a working artist and the additional stumbling blocks that female artists face. Still, as she reads Jansson’s books and letters, it is through them that she eventually begins to feel that she is finally able to find that she is “falling in love with the idea of being a woman.” While This Woman’s Work captivates in its personal expression of womanhood in all its vicissitudes and complexities, Delporte, by placing her life within the contexts of larger cultural narratives and the lives of other artists, also earnestly opens the door to other women’s experiences, asking how much of her story is her own, and how much is “the story of all women”?

Drawn & Quarterly.

—Review by Rome Morgan

RAIN AND OTHER STORIES

RAIN AND OTHER STORIES BY MIA COUTO, TRANSLATED BY ERIC M. B. BECKER

Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories maps out a Mozambique that’s torn with war, heartbreak, and loss. While some of the stories read as fables, offering meditations on the lives of men and women grappling with displacement and rebirth, a Chekhovian subtly is achieved, even when their realism turns to the magical: “The flowers, the one’s with a blue glimmer, began to swell and soar toward the sky. Then, all together, they plucked the girl. . . She was swept away into the same womb where she’d seen her father extinguished, out of sight and out of time.” In other stories, readers witness the departure of characters as Couto’s narrators suggest an uncertainty of their return. And it’s this uncertainty, and the motif of rain and all of its implications, that connects one story to the next.

However, what’s most successful about this collection are the ways in which Couto repeatedly asks unanswerable questions, piquing reader curiosity. Take “War of the Clowns,” a story of two manipulative clowns who, through their arguing and violence, profit off an entire city and incite war and inquiry. “What’s going on?” ask the spectators of the clowns, and although Couto describes to readers what occurs, he never tells us why. Instead, confusion swells among spectators until the “supporters divided into two camps, [and] little by little, two battlefields began to form.” By the end of the story, answers manifest through subtext, and the effect is both chilling and tragic. In this collection, Mia Couto, via Eric M. B. Becker’s aesthetically rich translation, packs an emotional resonance in each story—despite brevity, many only reaching five pages—that lingers with readers long after putting the book down.

Biblioasis.

—Review by Patrick Font

COMPANIONS IN CONFLICT

COMPANIONS IN CONFLICT: ANIMALS IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE BY PENNY JOHNSON

We’ve heard the African proverb of what happens to the grass when elephants fight, but what of the donkeys and ibexes, the boars and hyenas, the cows, camels, jackals, and gazelles, when hominids take up arms against each other? Penny Johnson’s Companions in Conflict strives to answer this question, interrogating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of large mammals, domestic and otherwise, whose commercial licenses are revoked, migration routes are barricaded, and find themselves on an increasingly regular basis bombed, exiled, or jailed.  

Don’t worry, homo sapiens, you’ll find this book interesting because it’s about you, too. On every page of Companions in Conflict, we come face to face with our human selves—infiltrating the lines and the spaces between them, occupying territory that’s not really ours. From Mahmoud Darwish wishing he were a donkey to Kafka’s jackals exhorting travelers in the Holy Land to murder Arabs with sewing scissors, Companions in Conflict, overrun with beasts of the imagination, surveys centuries of narratives that we’ve spun about ourselves, our relationships to other species. Even our piecemeal efforts to rescue these mammals—a vegan Israeli refusing to enlist in the army unless she’s issued synthetic boots; PETA calling for terrorists to stop using donkey bombs—remain oddly oblivious to the endangered among our own species.

Somehow, Johnson ends this nonfiction tragicomedy on a high, if tremulous, note, invoking Terry Eagleton’s notion of “hope without optimism.” “[T]hose animals who are the most like us,” she writes, “in their ability to adapt, survive, and even thrive amid our garbage and detritus . . . will persist and flourish.” She calls for “Acts of environmental imagination,” not just to “reviv[e] a desolated landscape” but also to “resurrect . . . memories, preserve . . . what is left, [and] envision . . . possible futures.” Deep in the Negev desert, wolves and hyenas—historic enemies—have been spotted hunting together, getting along. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into this. But then again, maybe we should.

Melville House.

—Review by Mekiya Walters