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.…
Jessy Randall’s 2018 poetry release How to Tell If You Are Human contains 29
black-and-white, grayscale, or full-color diagram poems, encompassing a
dizzying range of personal experiences. By calmly exploring and analyzing mental
illness, isolation, and multiple facets of human relationships, Randall’s
speaker helps to raise our understanding of the bewildering set of interactions
a person must navigate on a daily basis to function in American society.
Commendably, she accomplishes these observations, all the while touching upon
the spirit of the iconic 1990s Nirvana album Nevermind. In a brief 78 pages of verse, observations, and
illustrations, the reader is left with a humming sense of his own disconnected
state, coupled with the realization that this unique predicament is universal
and, in fact, entirely disconcerting.…
Drawing inspiration from her dreamscapes, Southern roots, and the innovative rhythms and structures of Americana music, Lauren Moseley has crafted a sensual and provocative collection of poems that invites us to reevaluate the connection between our inner and outer worlds. Her debut, Big Windows, which Carnegie Mellon University Press released in February of 2018, has surfaced at a time when humanity is confronting an onslaught of social unrest, political upheaval, and aesthetic bankruptcy that often distracts us from the ecstasy we might otherwise find by tuning into our immediate environment. Each poem in this collection is a progression through the stages of disillusionment, humility, wonder, and ultimately, enlightenment.
Moseley’s writing challenges readers to reinstate the practice of observing what the French writer, George Perec, refers to as, the infraordinary—the seemingly trivial and yet intrinsically beautiful objects and events of the everyday.…
The first work of Sheila Heti’s that I read was her book How Should a Person Be?, a novel about being an artist—or, more specifically, a novel about being a woman and an artist, and how those two things inform and sometimes resist one another. The book was extremely polarizing; some reviewers found it riveting in its experimentation, while others found its content indulgent and its lack of form irritating. I was enamored by it, as Heti has an extraordinary ability to capture the convergence of creativity and self-doubt while voicing thoughts most people believe are unsayable.
Like How Should a Person Be?, Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood,isn’t for everyone. For people who turn to books primarily for their plots, this is not the one (or the writer) for you.…
We’re born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes. I am twenty-two.
Thus opens Where Night Stops, the latest book from American writer Douglas Light, whose story collection, Girls of Trouble, won the 2010 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. (Also, his debut, East Fifth Bliss, was turned into the film Trouble with Bliss, which starred Michael C. Hall, Brie Larson, and Peter Fonda.) Filled with tense and intriguing situations, plenty of poignant and philosophical sentiments, and an assortment of colorful—if also slightly underdeveloped—characters, the novel is a captivating psychological drama whose relentless vibrancy and pace mostly makes up for its marginally opaque and repetitious core.…
Amy Bloom’s latest novel, White Houses, is a work of historical fiction that recreates the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. The novel is told from Lorena’s perspective and spans decades, encompassing everything from her abusive childhood in South Dakota to her time spent living in the White House (and ultimately finds her in her elderly years). Lorena makes a witty, charismatic narrator, and her relationship with Eleanor seems built on a mutual respect for each other’s strength. As a result, White Houses is a charming and tender depiction of middle-aged love, and Bloom captures the gamut of emotions—everything from rapture to pain—that accompanies growing older with someone.
Lorena’s childhood in South Dakota informs facets of her relationship with Eleanor, and this section proves to be one of the most moving and vivid parts of the novel.…
There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.…
