The Bitter Kind – Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey
The spread of COVID-19 has greatly impacted the human experience of 2020 across the world. In addition to our shared illness—and our losses of loved ones, income, and stability—our attempts to combat the virus interrupt our ongoing need and search for human connection. Many of us are feeling painfully isolated. Even in these strange times, though, books continue to provide insight into these particularly human emotions, and they are a source of connection in and of themselves. One such book is The Bitter Kind.
The Bitter Kind by Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey (Oct. 2020, Červená Barva Press) is a fascinating lyric novelette divided between two alternating points of view: Stela, a survivor of childhood abuse that follows her into a transient adulthood, and Brandy, a Chippewa orphan, a seer, deeply in tune with nature, and a drifter.It’s…
Thin Places: Essays from the In Between by Jordan Kisner
On the edge, where Columbus and Chicago Avenues meet in Minneapolis, a familiar sign is plunged past concrete, into layers of soil. The background is a deep red, like blood. The letters on the sign are white and centered. Stop, it said, and cars and bikes and pedestrians did. When I came near the sign, I noticed it was different. Stop, it said. Yet, underneath this word a sheet of white typing paper was attached at its edges with electric tape. On the paper were the words, …killing us. A block over from where I stood, George Floyd was murdered by a policeman just days before. The officer’s knee rested on George’s neck, even as George cried, “I can’t breathe,” and the crowd pleaded with the office to stop, to no avail.…
The City of Hate, the city that titles Timothy S. Miller’s forthcoming novel, is Dallas. It’s a relatively modern version. Dealey Plaza buzzes with tourists come to see the Sixth Floor Museum and relive the events of President Kennedy’s assassination, but this Dallas still has answering machines, printed glossy photographs, and storefront bookstores as (mostly) viable business models. More striking, though, is the emptiness within this busy, thriving city. It’s not the buzzing, numb kind of empty, but an emptiness that writhes and howls and demands to be filled.
We walk the streets of Dallas in the shoes of Hal Scott, a cynical, triggered alcoholic clinging to sobriety by his fingernails. Hal, himself empty, fills up his inner monologue with paranoid speculations of other people’s lives.…
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination – Jess Row
Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race.
As
Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver,
Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out
a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or
tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of
life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10).
Written
primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful
making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the
literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the
Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10).…
Chelsea Wagenaar’s poetry collection The Spinning Place is an intensely personal exploration of relationship, family, and motherhood. Her voice is that of a mystic, reporting to us the connections everywhere between the mundane and the sublime, the infinitesimal and the infinite. She fearlessly relates the sacred mysteries of life: the dreams of infants, the cold silence after an argument, the empty space where a barn once stood, and the miraculous odds of having been born at all.
Wagenaar’s sparkling train of thought stitches together these otherwise disparate elements, these connections we miss in the rhythm of our daily lives. In “The Spinning Place,” the first of three poems with the same title and the poem that opens the collection, Wagenaar leads us through a graceful flow of subjects, leaping from the creative writing classroom to the delivery room to the Mars Rover, singing “Happy Birthday” to itself alone on that red, alien planet.…
Most of my friends, even the ones who share many of my interests, hate the books I recommend to them (at least for the first fifteen pages). Probably because I have an unconscious addiction to the trauma of being dropped into a confusing situation. Something about replicating birth. When I first meet a book, I like it to make me feel out of place. I like to feel the structure or language push up against me and be totally unsure about its rightness or wrongness. Andrew Weatherhead’s latest book of poetry, $50,000, has made me feel what all my favorite books do. What begins with jarring confusion over form transformed this reader into a believer in the pace and texture of the mundane.…
Someone You Love is Still Alive – Ephraim Scott Sommers
Even before I read the poems in Someone
You Love is Still Alive, I heard reports from shootings in schools and
malls, in nightclubs and the bases of armed forces. I remembered hearing
stories from survivors of natural disasters in reports on radio and television.
I remembered how buildings like the Twin Towers in New York City fell. I
remembered the death of Prince. I remembered the crumbling of the Roman
Catholic Church under the sexual abuse claims against priests and bishops. I
remembered the death of my dad, the death of my first marriage, the death of a
dream that would never be. They were just too painful to remember. I am not sure
how to make sense of these events whose presence has become a fixture in my
memory.…
