Emerging Writers Network

Book Review 2018-006: The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert

Book Review 2018-006
The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert
2011 by Unbridled Books, 272 pages

 

(I received an ARC of this novel from Unbridled Books and Caitlin Hamilton Summie)

 

So, after waiting 70 plus days into 2018 to begin reviewing, and remembering to jump in a bit during May, we've slipped to nearly halfway through the year with not too many reviews. To us, it makes perfect sense then to jump back to a book we've owned for seven years.

The Coffins of Little Hope is the fourth novel by Timothy Schaffert that I've read and I do believe he has written his best novel to date (that date being 2011). It contains many of the same elements of his earlier novels--offbeat characters, humor that sneaks up on you and a ton of empathy for his oddballs. 

The premise this time around involves a post-retirement age woman whose been writing the obituaries for the small town newspaper since her late teens, a possibly missing girl, a YA book series on the level of Harry Potter, and they all settle down on the small town in Nebraska. The "Coffins of Little Hope" of the title stems from that YA series as its to be the title of the final book in that series--where Miranda and Desiree wander Rottgut's Asylum for Misguided Girls (note  that Schaffert might also have one of the best abilities to put titles together--The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, and Devil's In the Sugar Shop were his previous novels, and even within some of his titles.

The narrator of the tale is the obituary writer, 83 year old S Myles (the S short for Esther, or Essie, or Ess). It's a great choice by Schaffert as she's seen the town's history, as the "missing girl" story ramps up it's mainly through the County newspaper, which not only does she do the obituaries for it, but the publisher is her grandson, Doc, whose daughter Tiff also plays a large role. It also helps the novel that S is caustic and funny and gives no cares at all about how others see her.

The biggest problem I have every time I consider reviewing one of Mr. Schaffert's novels is that if I were to do a real plot description, it would be a 45 page book review. The thing is, he pulls it off every single time. His novels meander and come back on themselves and occasionally open holes that are never filled but Schaffert does this is a manner that his readers simply do not care; they are more than happy enjoying the ride so much that finding an immediate destination does not matter at all. Which isn't to say that his novels don't get anywhere or say anything because they do. I find myself seeing others in a brighter light when I'm reading his novels, or thinking about them and I believe that's  based on how he treats his characters. None of them have all the pegs lined up perfectly and in fact frequently might have less than half of them lined up, but they continually prove themselves worthy of empathy, or attention, or not looking away.

Without obviously attempting to do so, Schaffert sneaks humor into his tales, and he gets you to care about the plight of his characters. Not necessarily the aspects that the plot suggests you should (in Little Hope a woman claims her daughter has disappeared. Not everybody remembers the daughter. No birth certificate can be found. Meanwhile there are Lenorites (the girl's name was Lenore) sitting on the family's lawn. And while that seems to be a plot driver, it was never a main concern of mine reading the book--to discover what, if anything, happened to Lenore, or where she was. All of which helped make the book a can't put down novel for me. And I've not even gotten into the various relationships that the author of the YA series had and how they affect the story. 

All of which is to say, in a long-winded rambling way (albeit, one unlike Mr. Schaffert, does not read well to me), Schaffert has put together a very interesting cast of characters in a small town in Nebraska, created a plot that pulls their various story lines together yet still doesn't force that plot to move in any certain way, does so with a little humor, a little empathy, and even a little spookiness, and does so in a manner that would have left me happy had the story gone on another 500 pages had it done in the same manner as the first 200. 

Book Review 2018-005: The Art Poems by Amanda Bintu Holiday

Book Review 2018-005
The Art Poems by Amanda Bintu Holiday
2018 by Akashic, 28 pages

 

(I received a review copy of the box set this chapbook was a part of)

 

These chapbooks all have introductions and I've tried to read the poetry collection first, usually followed by the author biography at the back of the collection, and then back up to the front to read the intro. It turns out that Kayombo Chingonyi, the person that wrote the introduction, and I had one thought in common--Art Poems. I ended up envisioning paintings or the occasional statue while reading the poems within this chapbook.

From "The Dame With the Goat's Foot":

The two-stringed banjo plays
a theme to our aging, Old soaks,
we sit and talk out the weather,
our fortunes and the price of youth.

We sit in worn frills and garters,
holding on to our daughters
and granddaughters
who sleep unhampered
by our laments,
our songs of love and folly

of men who carried us away
on the back of goats.

had me envisioning a couple of women talking/singing together, holding young babies or girls in their arms while sitting on goats and being led away by men. It's not something that usually happens when I read poems--it was a different experience that I enjoyed.

"The Blue Pot" had the couplet:

and a big blue pot
pressed on his head

that had me envisioning a blue pot sculpture, one made by something like a high school student in their school's kiln that has lots of shiny, glazed, blue paint.

Another that really had me putting together the image of a painting in my head was "The Angel":

The donkey was stubborn
and Mary dug her heels into its side.
But the mule was tired of walking
and now the baby was crying

with the obvious realization early on that this was Jesus and Mary which probably made the envisioning of a painting a bit clearer and quicker. I definitely found myself reading these poems a bit differently, just from the title alone. And my second read through was enhanced after reading this bit from the author bio:

"Amanda Bintu Holiday considers herself an accidental poet having been an artist and then filmmaker for much of her life." It led me to focus even more on a visual experience the second (and beyond) read through. The thing is, it works and I've picked up other collections or poems since doing so with this collection and have not had the same reaction, even when heading into my reading with that in mind, leading me to believe something about this poet's past artistic endeavors have affected the way that she writes her poems. 

Book Review 2018-004: Title 13 by Michael A. Ferro

Book Review 2018-004
Title 13 by Michael A. Ferro
2018 by Harvard Square Editions, 369 pages

(I received a review copy of the book and am embarrassed to say that I don't remember if it came from the publisher or the author--it's not signed, but I still think Michael sent me the copy--and kind of remember thinking--man, he didn't sign it).

 

There must be three or four unpublished novels in drawers and closets in Michael A. Ferro's house because Title 13 does not at all feel like a debut. Ferro has the confidence to bring forth a plot point--that in the Chicago Regional Census Center, a document known as Title 13 has been found to be missing 37 pages of highly confidential material and the person responsible must be found, as do the pages--and allow it to slide into the background through the course of the novel. It's not a move I'd expect of a writer early in his/her career as it projects a certain type of confidence in one's ability to maintain their reader's interest without following through on the initial exciting story line.

Likewise, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on that plot. It does allow Ferro to play with some things structurally though; there are a couple of in-the-office interviews with superiors pushing the workers for information and what might know about the missing pages, or their co-workers. But his willingness to allow it to slide along the back wall of what the reader is watching has me wishing to look at that front matter a bit more. 

The story that Ferro concentrates on is that of his protagonist, Heald Brown, and it's not always a pretty one. While that back story involves government intrigue and the early 21st century recession and an intrusive government, our initial exposure to Heald and his co-workers, especially Janice Torres, who Heald has eyes for, and Milosz Pavlenko, a former Ukranian who does a similar job to Heald and Janice and eats lunch daily with them, starts off rather quietly. Near the end of a work day, discussing Title 13, and their jobs. They all head off toward home.

The reader, however, is allowed a peek into the fact that Heald is more than a little bit of a drinker pretty quickly. We also learn that Heald is a lonely individual, and seemingly by choice to at least some degree. His only real interactions are those at work, which he's somewhat forced into, and a weekly drinking/movie watching session with Alice, a neighbor that lives above him who also has at least the beginning of her own drinking problem. He's also one helluva smart ass. Part of that seems to be a mechanism to help push people away, but part also seems very natural to Heald. He's dark, but doesn't seem to be going dark in his conversations for effect.

Ferro slides in facts about Heald's personality, his thoughts, in a smooth manner. It never feels like he's forcing in some big explanation, but allowing his story to naturally develop. Unlike how Heald feels daily--not much of anything beyond vodka feels right or natural to Heald. Numerous things made him anxious; normal daily events. Taking his coat to a dry cleaner, slipping his rent check (slightly overdue) under his landlord's door, and this anxiousness led to Heald isolating himself away from others. And while the focus is on Heald, Ferro let's the reader see just how disjointed many of Heald's generation are--while Janice, Heald and Milo spend every day with each other at work, and lunch together regularly, an after-work visit to a local watering hole shows just how little they know about each other outside of work. 

Heald is becoming more aware of just how his drinking is a problem, noticing his hands shaking, and later noticing pain below his ribcage, as well as the beginning to think about alcohol as soon as he wakes up. He's constantly thinking about how to keep that information to himself. He comes to the realization that he's a big enough drinker though to actually worry about what Alice, a heavy drinker herself, will think about him during their movie nights, so he schemes on how to sneak back to his own apartment for a bit of drink that she won't see him partake in. 

The personal side of the story line takes full control of the novel when Heald gets word that his grandmother, a woman he was extremely close with growing up, is dying. He heads back from Chicago to the Detroit area where he grew up and his family (grandmother, father, mother, sister and her fiance) reside still. There's very little talk of Title 13 or his co-workers while Heald is in Michigan. There's focus on his relationship with his grandmother, and his family's not-so-subtle (yet, still too subtle for Heald to not recognize) attempts at nudging Heald into talking about his alcoholism. When talking along with his grandmother and hearing just how comfortable she is with his forthcoming death, Heald actually thinks about wanting to open up, but he can't convince himself to do so. The whole section, that of Heald visiting his family, is a very emotional read. They perfectly capture his family's dynamic, especially that between he and his parents--the dad more willing to skirt the issue, while Heald's mother is all but crying out for him to help himself and it is the scenes with her that are most heartrending. 

The novel does come full circle though and back to the Title 13 story as Heald heads back to Chicago and has a one-on-one talk with Janice---this is after she's started to see Milo. She's direct and asks Heald about his drinking, something his family so wanted to do but couldn't. This is followed by Heald having a one-on-one interview with his department's ultimate superior, which leads to his being let go. Not so full circle however that we find out exactly what happened to those 37 pages, but we don't care. The book has two more very important scenes after Heald is let go and they honestly were a surprise--much like the conclusion of a well-done mystery can be a surprise. Only this time it wasn't the mystery we thought we were looking for the answer to. 

Michael A. Ferro writes some funny dialogue. Dark as hell, but funny. He boldly took this novel in a direction I was not expecting at all and nailed it. If his look at our society and how even though we have more access to each other than ever before, we are generally at least a little more isolated from each other, in this his debut shows off his understanding of human nature and the situations we find ourselves in, I definitely look forward to future, "more mature" efforts from him.

 

Book Review 2018-003: Armeika by Umniya Najaer

Book Review 2018-003
Armeika by Umniya Najaer
2018 by Akashic Books, 28 pages

(I received a review copy of the box set of chapbooks, New-Generation African Poems, this is a part of from the publisher).

 

Umniya, born to Sudanese parents, begins this collection with a quick vocabulary lesson noting that armeik is a verb meaning 'to throw you' and that amreika is a noun standing for the United States of America and then notes that "armeika is a term i have heard used in the US-based Sudanese diaspora to imply that the country will toss/fling/throw / dispose of one." I sadly admit that while I've noticed headlines over the years, I do not have a great knowledge, or understanding, of Sudan, either pre, or post, split--it's something this collection has me hoping to rectify in the near future.

The first of fifteen poems within the chapbook, "beit fundurq masr al-khaliq ghost house," hits the reader hard:

 

bashir's security apparatus repurposed the
widower's home, converted the master bedroom

into the site of al-hafla, the storage room into a cell,
the children's play area into a mock execution ground

 

with "al-hafla" asterisked with a note that this means 'the party,' or "what the torturers call the initial act of torture. The torturers blindfold and collectively beat, rape, and abuse the newly imprisoned activists/artists/racial minorities for anywhere from six to twenty-four hours."

The poem continues to notice that:

 

for years the ghost house is invisible in plain sight,
masked whiel the neighbors go on hanging laundry,

to dry, quickly, before the coffee boils over,
stirring warm sour dough & whistling hamza al din's tune,

about a bird whose addresses are dreams,
etched into beating hearts--oblivious, that just next door,

that very tune is your last anchor, a realm
between death's cliff & the flesh-tattered

dentures of afterlife's shore

 

The next two poems continue with similar beginnings:

 

<the ghost who lives>
only when your torturer is certain beyond a
doubt that he severed your spirit from you
body, does he consider releasing you--ghost--
now emaciated & battered, to stagger into a
broken world

and

<ghost takes shots>
after months, you limp your way home,
& on the way come up with a story to tell your wife

you cannot tell her about the rape,
the mock execution & the failed kidney

 

 The poems then shift:

 

<moya zargaa (n. blue water, drinking water>
at home i drink from al nil,
en route, i sip the mediterranean's water grave

in armeika, i do not know the origin of water
while weeping for home

and

<amatu>
until one day she tucked kisses
into her children's children's palms

& promised to return with green cards
so soon no one would have time to miss

but the ticket did not take her
to the promised destination, instead,

armeika was a concussion to years 
of wide-eyed nights in the basement

and

<crossing the ocean,
this is not what anyone expected>
one day a wife to a doctor,
suddenly a widow in a strange land

 

The poems capturing the definition of armeika given to Najaer's readers early on both in tone and their scope. 

The last two poems, "homecoming after twenty years, 2010" and the six sectioned "in a truck climbing the left ventricle of omdurman's heart, three girls; two cut, one uncut" end the collection powerfully with a return to Sudan after 20 years in armeika and seeing it at the precipice of division, as well as a look at female genital mutilation. Throughout the collection, Najaer lays things right out for the reader--nothing is hidden or even softened a little bit. Trauma of various types are not shied away from, instead they are a big focus of Najaer's work. It's a brave collection, and one I expect to be going back to often.

Book Review 2018-002: Acts of Crucifixion by Kechi Nomu

Book Review 2018-002
Acts of Crucifixion by Kechi Nomu
2018 by Akashic Books, 28 pages

(I received a review copy of the box set of chapbooks, New-Generation African Poems, this is a part of from the publisher).

 

There's a repetitive refrain in Nomu's poem "Postscript: Four Boys are Murdered One Morning in Aluu":

I am telling you there is a fierceness to these things:
A body letting itself be penetrated by all these forms of love at once.

that seems to hit on things seen throughout the sixteen poems in this chapbook. A body being penetrated, or if not penetrated, worked to some degree, appears throughout the collection:

The boy's body
bends

 

Your old bones are seeking
wooden crosses

 

a little of the love still burning,
a little of the places inside him where his bones have been bent,
broken.

 

once I saw a man like me take a knife to the center of his hands to crucify him-
self, to show us where, how he bleeds.

 Nomu also provides that fierceness noted in that refrain in poems:

Inside you: beast trapped in car light at dusk,
giving birth to another beast.

 

Mouthful, how long does a person not breathe
before they stop altogether?

 

She dies carrying a bomb,
head severed from her body,
memories severed.

Without creating named characters, Kechi Nomu has put together a short collection of poems that almost moves along as a novel might. The opening poem, "Note to the Boy Kicking the Stone" ends: 

Here, a story begins,
rises, falls,
and ends
in ghosts.

and the final poem, "Memory," ends:

Your memory,
jellyfish soft,
unguent hungry,
eats everything in plain sight
because the past wants to speak to you.

and in between are fathers and sons, generations of women, people who sin, bleed, searched for God, bombed for God, loved, and interacted not out of love, but to avoid loneliness. Her poems look at memory and how it's processed--how it affects one (often by having it oddly interact with the current, and maybe even the future, at times). Nomu's poems seem to lead into each other as one nudges the next forward from that initial story beginning to the sharing of memories at the end. It's a chapbook that makes me anticipate a full Kechi Nomu collection.

Book Review 2018-001: The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Book Review 2018-001
The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty
2018 by BOA, Editions, 72 pages

 

(I purchased this signed copy direct from the author shortly after it was published).

 

I've noted elsewhere that The Second O of Sorrow reminds me of flayed skin, or crumbling teeth--the poems within rub readers' nerves they are so raw. Dougherty grew up in Ohio and currently works a third shift in Erie, Pennsylvania and he captures the working class of the Rust Belt like one who has truly been there for years.

An early poem establishes his Rust Belt beginnings:

Somehow, I am still here, long after
transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared

driving from town to town across Ohio
selling things, the music where we danced

just to keep alive. I now understand I was not
supposed to leave so soon, half a century

The next poem's title could almost be a poem in itself, "What Do You Say to a Daughter When She Suspects Her Mother Is Dying," but it's well worth the time to read the entire half-page prose poem, which ends:

Or back to a place and a time where the Medicine Mother grinds a few twigs, some leaves into a powder that tells the body again how to spell the names of hte Gods in its bones. You want to say draw me a window so I may step into and take you to see her when you were a baby and she could run through the grass through the Balkan fields of yellow flowers and climb the mountain of the cross. A window to show her before her mother's hands turned blue as the sky after it has snowed.

Grief is described as having a "wet dog smell," and "Red dirt women can all speak to their dead." "Blood-red leaves like knives cut the air of autumn," and a poem could be "the hole that is left when the bullet goes through." Jobs are worked, jobs are lost, loves are found and lost as well. Toledo as a child, memories of a father, worries of health, long shifts in hard labor jobs fill Dougherty's works here.

Current, or recent, public names appear at times--a poem for Tamir Rice, and later a poem about Lebron James that can be seen as a metaphor for all of Ohio (and subsequently the entire Rust Belt to a degree). There are beautiful images such as those at the beginning of the poem, "Something Lovely as the Rain":

When pain pauses a new world emerges, something lovely as the rain, or like the sunlight strolling in the afternoon without teeth. Or a cracked egg, or a piece of glass.

Dougherty captures the working class Rust Belt and finds happiness, and hope, and sparks where maybe others would have to search too hard to notice: a night in a karaoke bar, seeing a meteor shower from a gas station parking log, a lunch lady telling stories while sipping a beer at the Polish Falcons social club, and more. 

The poem "Youngstown Monologue: Captured Light Stained Glass", a wonderful poem about caring for an aging mother, ends:

I know to live inside this fragile skin
is to be the light captured by stained glass.

It's a couplet that to me describes living inside this fantastic collection of poems.

Reading in 2017 - Emerging Writers Network

Plenty of reading was done around the ol' Emerging Writers Network in 2017. I'm positive I read more poetry last year than in any year of my slightly over a half-century of existence--Tommye Blount's chapbook, Joanna C. Valente's re-published Marys of the Sea and various new works of hers throughout the year in journals, Robert Fanning's fantastic Our Sudden Museum, and the chapbooks from Akashic's New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (NNE). All were great and have me leaning more toward reading new poems when stumbling across them as opposed to leaning toward avoiding poetry.

Authors by novelists that were new to me were read--Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi comes to mind first, as does Stephen Mack Jones with what I truly hope is the first in a new Detroit based mystery series. Some novels that were published in previous years that I finally brought to the table--Mark Doten's The Infernal, re-discovering the novels of Timothy Schaffert and finishing up the Unbridled Books portion of his backlist (three that I'd not gotten around to before). Reading new works from those that I was anxiously awaiting like Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, Percival Everett, Holly Goddard Jones and especially David Abrams.

I finally picked up the first Tod Goldberg "Gangster" book so I could have it read before his new one hit stores. Then I read the galley of that and now cannot wait for the third in the trilogy to find its way to my mailbox. There was also the third great museum chapbook by A. Kendra Greene that was absolutely fabulous and I can't wait to read more of her work as well.

I read way  more graphic novels and memoirs than in the past, with a good portion of them, like The Ladies-in-Waiting, and the first two The Future of the Arab memoirs having been translated. But also those like the memoirs of Mimi Pond, the fantastic Hostage by Ed Delisle, and multiple by Jeff Lemire. And more comic book series than ever in my life as favorite prose writers like Ben Percy and Scott Snyder are penning Green Arrow and Batman and other series and a plethora of comics penned by women--Bitch Planet, Animosity, Monstress, Clean Room, and that list goes on as well.

I cannot fathom a guess as to the number of individual short stories I read in 2017. I know I picked up 100 of the collections published and read at least one story from every collection that came in the door. Not to mention those I was still trying to catch up on from 2016 and earlier, and new stories in journals, etc. If there is a story that stands out in my mind it's Carmen Machado's "Especially Heinous," with a small section written for every episode of Law & Order: SVU--it started off fairly straightforwardly and then I noticed some oddities and then BAM--she'd turned the characters from the television show into her creatures of her own making and it just kept getting stranger and stranger while somehow making more and more sense. It's a story I've thought of many, many times since finishing it months ago.

And of course, I have had the pleasure of reading so many Dzanc related works--those published last year, some that are coming out in the next few months and I'm thrilled about all of them and can't wait to share some of the future titles with you as they hit stores.

A few things stand just a bit higher in my mind, and mainly memory, than the rest. Some of the above I may have had to resort to notes--and it's with great happiness that I'm reminded of the things I've read--but these others I'm about to talk about need no prodding to remember them, no quick searching of notes to remember what it was about them that is stamped in bold letters into my reading mind. I don't think I want to rank these at all--just note that they are going to be the five things that I absolutely know that in ten years if you ask me about them, I will know exactly what you're talking about, won't need to pull a copy off the shelf, will remember reading them, how I felt, how much I thought about them, etc. I will list them in the order that I read them throughout the year:

 

Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke -- an incredible graphic memoir that I started talking about back in 2016 actually when I received the galley but I probably have read it half a dozen times since, continuing to enjoy it, to search through the various panels for things I've missed on earlier reads. It's a title where I think everything works on it's own--writing, drawing, ideas--and is even better together.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc -- her second novel and it's freaking creepy. I think it's the second to last book that I gave my dad a copy of to read that I know he read and we talked about it afterward and that's all he said for the first five or ten minutes we were talking. CREEPY. But it's so much more than that. It used the tropes of horror or at least the haunted house aspect of that genre and spins them around, and then spins them around again, and every time you start to feel comfortable she does something else to keep you off balance and not in some trickster fashion, just with damn good writing. It's a book I'd hope to never stumble upon a The Making Of scenario showing the sticky notes on the wall--I don't think I'd be able to make any sense out of them if I did.

Various by Colin Fleming -- I read a lot of Colin's work throughout 2017--fiction, stories, the first 85% or so of a novel-in-progress and while I dug all of those quite a bit, it's his non-fiction that I'm going to remember the most--which, if you've read the fiction, says a lot. The number of topics that if you toss them at him he could riff on, and do so with precision, with knowledge, making sense, making powerful arguments, upon is ridiculous--and it turns out that many of them are things I'm interested in as well--hockey, music, books, movies, some television--and then take each of those categories and chop them into dozens and dozens of offshoot categories. During that last quarter of the year, I always had a few books with me--I also always had printouts of something this guy had appear online somewhere, or in a magazine, or journal. With stories in the latest Post Road, Boulevard, Glimmer Train and one coming in Harper's later this spring, plus a new collection coming out soon as well, AND a non-fiction work around next Christmas, you have ZERO excuses to not google this man's work and enjoy it as much as I've been.

Inside My Pencil by Peter Markus -- yes, a Dzanc title, and as much as I love the writing, it's not why this one hits this slight elevation. This is a teacher's memoir. I've known Peter now for a little over a decade now and consider him a friend. He's also one of my favorite writers. He's a great husband, and dad and all around good guy. And what he does on a daily basis is go into various Detroit schools and Mr. Pete, as he's know there, gets kids to dream, to open up, to experience, to believe in magic, to maybe disappear from things, or rather, allow some things to disappear, even if only for the hour or two he's there, but more likely even in bits and pieces after he's gone. I read the opening essay to this book years ago and it's stuck with me since the day I did. This is a great book by an incredible guy doing absolutely an absolutely wonderful thing with his life.

And lastly, even though I've been reading some of the works all year long (and longer really). However, I also read all of the poems in Christina Kallery's manuscript (as well as some that didn't quite make this particular cut) right up until, and on, December 31. Of the works I read in 2017, her poems were the last, and it was intentional. Her work allows in longing and regret, but ultimately I see it as hopeful, as something believing that continued plugging along, doing things your way, pushing forward, is going to ultimately lead to something good. And much as I simply enjoy them straight up as fantastic poems, I wanted to head into 2018 thinking this way as well.

All in all a great year of reading.

Book Review 2017-013: Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene

Book Review 2017-013

Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene

2017 by Anomalous Press, 30 pages

(I ordered this one early enough to receive one of the limited edition letter press cover copies)

 

Having thoroughly enjoyed the first two chapbooks A. Kendra Greene had published about icelandic museums, I was on high alert for the third in the series. Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors did not let me down even a little bit. 

The same wit and excitement can be found in Greene's writing this time around that were present in Greene's first two books. Those, a look at a phallological museum, and a museum of stones, were presented in a similar fashion to this third volume: Greene takes a look at the history of the individual(s) responsible for the museum, and specifically looks at what led them to their interest in the topic, and then looks at the current museum itself, while taking a longer view toward museums and collecting things in general.

Vagrants is a term used when discussing birds in Iceland--one of five levels of expectant levels of seeing the particular bird type. The first four levels are: common, less common, uncommon, and rare and per Greene these "have to do with certainly, with whether you can absolutely depend on seeing a bird in suitable habitat in proper season," where a vagrant "are out of their normal range; vagrants have appeared somewhere new."

Not all of the birds in the Sigurgeir's Bird Museum are vagrants, in fact there are examples of every modern Icelandic bird except for one. But it does have its vagrants and its uncommon visitors as well. The one modern it does not have is the Red Phalarope, a bird that Greene describes "it used to be they were come all at once, in one flock, birds that would blot out the sun." She adds on a few lines later "Perhaps Sigurgeir's grandmother knew these days without having to be told." This is something Greene does that I love--she brings things full circle, even things one might not expect. This note was on page 24 out of 30. The book opens with: "Their grandmother was blind. She hadn't always been, but as the glaucoma took her sight, she would ask, each day,what birds were on the water." In a nice nod to Sigurgeir's grandmother, the being told about the Phalarope's blotting out the sun Greene brings her, and her own interest in the birds on the lake the family lived on, back to the reader.

Greene tells us more about Sigurgeir and how a neighbor's finding a Grey Heron dead at the lake led to his collecting. For whatever reason, when shown the bird that the neighbor had frozen, Sigurgeir took it and had a taxidermist take care of it. When he picked up his newly stuffed bird he decided to purchase two others that were on hand in the store. As Greene notes, the town around Lake Myvatn was about 400 people, a number "too small for secrets." When word got out that Sigurgeir had an interest in dead birds, he began to get calls. And collect Sigurgeir did. 

However, even though Sigurgeir did the collecting, and the museum is named after him, he had nothing to do with the museum itself, which is a major difference between the first two museums Greene wrote about and this one. An accident on the lake that led to his death is what brought about the museum. His family struggled for nearly a decade after his death to put together everything that turned his collection into a museum, one run by his youngest sister, the youngest of seven siblings and the one that still runs the family farm with her mother. Stefania is her name and after milking the farm's cows every morning, she opens up the museum 360 days a year. Between 10 and 20,000 people come through annually.

While Greene does a fabulous job at describing the museum itself and its roots and the history of the individual and family that put it together and run it, something she's done throughout this series is to consider museums, and collecting, in general. Specifically in this particular chapbook she writes:

But what Sigurgeir did was a different kind of making. It was not his hand that mattered, but his eye. And surely every museum is a museum of selection, a museum of choices made, but here the how of collecting seems not to matter. The source of a thing does not matter. it is the thing that matters in its own right. And that shouldn't shock me, surely it shouldn't, but when was collecting ever just about things?

It's a continuation from an earlier book where she wondered about the randomness of how a collection might go from just that, a collection, into becoming a museum where others become involved, sometimes just in the visiting and enjoyment of one's collection, and other times in the running and operations as well. I don't know how many museums there are in Iceland, but I hope there are many, many more and that Greene continues to find herself with questions about their origins, their impact, and just what they accomplish so that she continues to publish more of these chapbooks, or maybe even something larger.

2017 - Mini-Reviews Part I

Much as I love the EWN, it always seems to lowest on the many rungs of my totem pole (which might explain the average of six daily visitors here). It's not intentional and it's become so much easier to do a quick post on Facebook or elsewhere to make sure that what I'm reading gets seen by some people (more than here typically) but I do want this site to maintain an actual reading record. I still hope to do full reviews of these works before too long, but for now--some mini-reviews will have to suffice. So, some titles read this year that aren't among the dozen or so that were fully reviewed.

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones

A dystopian effort set in the future United States where the border, the Salt Line, is one that protects the citizens from disease-carrying ticks. The few that venture across said border are looking for kicks, typically the wealthy being taken on junkets to the danger zones. One of these trips is sabotaged and it leads to a novel about survival, and what one will do to make sure that they do survive. Written with the same empathy that HGJ's previous stories and novel were, it's a captivating read that would fit nicely on your shelf alongside Station Eleven (or Holly's other two titles).

The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God by Timothy Schaffert

This novel, his second, has the ability to crush you while you laugh; to make you smile while you feel like somebody has just punched you in the gut. To try to do a quick synopsis would be ridiculous—it’s one of those novels with THAT MUCH going on, but we’ll say this—it involves those that one might refer to as being on the more down and out side of things, their relationships with each other, with their offspring, with career choices good and bad, with hopes and dreams and love. And it handles all of them just about perfectly.

 

The Ladies-in-Waiting by Santiago Garcia with artwork by Javier Olivares, translated by Erica Mena

A wonderful graphic novel about Las Meninas, the painting by Diego Velazquez. Both the writing and the artwork are great. It's a fictional look, using this famous painting, at relationships between artists and their art, and their patrons, and their audiences. You'd swear three or four artists did the page work with the varying styles utilized throughout.

 

What Are We Not For by Tommye Blount

Some fantastic poetry by somebody I've had the pleasure of reading since seeing him read in Detroit years ago. Getting a chance to read his words between covers was a treat. Blount's work slides into an area I find myself really liking in poetry--capturing longing, and a hopefulness with his poems. Here's hoping this chapbook is only the appetizer for a future main course sized collection.

 

 Gangsterland and Gangster Nation by Tod Goldberg

I'm putting the two in one bit here as they are deemed to be the first two parts of a trilogy. Gangsterland has Chicago mobster hit man Sal Cupertine make a mistake, which leads to a trio of FBI agents getting killed. The heat over this is high enough that Sal agrees to reconstructive surgeries and a move across the country, where he becomes Rabbi David Cohen, taking over for an aging Rabbi to run a congregation in Vegas. Gangster Nation finds Rabbi Cohen overseeing an operation that is running like clockwork, though personally effects from his surgery are driving him mad. At the same time, a couple of ex-FBI agents (ex having to do with Sal) are on the hunt for Sal. Both books go at a breakneck pace, are both hilarious and tension filled, and only leave one anxiously awaiting the news that number three is hitting stores soon.

 

 So Much Blue by Percival Everett

In less than shocking news, I did in fact read Percival Everett's latest and believe it to be up among his top five novels so far. The novel of Kevin Pace, painter, written in both current time, about a decade ago when he had an affair with a younger French woman, and back in the 70's when he and his best friend went to El Salvador to try to track down said friend's brother, mixes the times and relationships like the pieces of a puzzle. Everett hits on some of his favorite themes, including the relationship between an artist and his/her work, and does so very well. Like most of Everett's work, it's written in a different style than most of what he's written before--and once again, it does not matter at all, the work is still excellent.

 

Barn Blind by Jane Smiley

Earlier in the year I'd started to read the first of Smiley's trilogy in the 100 year novel and I'd read a novella and some of her stories. At some point I decided I was going to read all of her work--and it seemed to make the most sense to me to start at the beginning, so I set aside Some Luck and began Barn Blind. It's a really well done story of a family and the way they learn to get along with each other, to work together to run a farm and horse riding school, how the ways of parenting can be seen through the actions of children. I've started her second novel and believe I'm going to be very happy with this reading project. It may end up coincidental that this is listed right after a Percival Everett title--I have a feeling I'm going to find two big similarities--widely changing styles and topics, and great writing.

 

 

Book Review 2017-012: Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Book Review 2017-012

Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi

2017 by Soho Press, 191 pages

 

(I received a copy of the ARC of this from the publisher)

 

 

In her debut, Hannah Lillith Assadi has given us an almost anti-coming-of-age novel in that her young characters seem to have been of age from the get go. Not that the main duo, the narrator Ahlam (known as Ariel through much of the work), nor her friend from high school forward, Laura, don’t come of age—more that even while doing so they don’t really seem to be moving beyond any sort of innocence.

Ahlam’s father is Palestinian and her mother Israeli, leading to conflict within the home on a regular basis. They live outside of Phoenix, allowing them frequent access to the desert. She meets Laura their freshmen year of high school and bond the way that maybe only outsiders can—that bond where neither will ever let go because they believe there may be no other person to bond with. They also bond over the fact that Ahlam sees things, has visions of the dead, while Laura has been told that, like her Mexican-American mother (who is not around), she’s a witch. In the case of Laura and Ahlam, their bonds remain tight through early experiments with drinking, drugs, and sex. They spend time in the desert and have classmates die mysteriously over the years.

Their bond continues on after the girls move to New York together after high school. There they meet back up with Dylan, an older guy they’d met in the desert a year earlier. He allows them to live with him while they take their own shots in the arts (Laura via music and Ahlam through dance). Neither is quite up to making it level, though only Ahlam really seems to realize this and take on jobs like waitressing and as a secretary. The lifestyle with Dylan takes the party experiments to a much higher level.

Assadi captures the bond and friendship of these two young women very well. At times the characters blend into one another and this is intentional, not a lack of control in the writing—it’s Assadi showing just how close the girls have become over the years. Through the NY second half of the novel, Ahlam and Laura remain outsiders even though they live with Dylan, live where the partys are held. Their thoughts and actions are always just on the periphery of main conversations and the actions at the home. Neither one “makes it” in their field.

Assadi hits on what it’s like to be in a friendship like that when you’re the, even if only slightly, more grounded friend. There’s a serious question throughout whether or not Laura is going to party herself to death or not, and while she’s headed in that direction, is Ahlam going to fall with her, or be able to steady her? And all the while, Ahlam is occasionally heading back to Arizona to visit her father who has health issues of his own.

None of this is a world I’m overly familiar with—there would have been a much longer, louder discussion had I suggested to my parents that I head to NYC after high school with a buddy of mine. I also don’t know the odds on finding free living arrangements—even as an attractive young woman, that last for a couple of years of spiraling downward. But Assadi has made them believable with her writing and development of the two characters. I’d also be surprised to find that Assadi didn’t have some poetry in her background, or maybe even music—the writing is lyrical at times, lovely combinations of words that sing and it might takes half a paragraph to actually grasp the drudgery one or both of the girls were going through. It’s really quite lovely what Assadi does there and the book is a very quick read—between the writing, and the story, there wasn’t a lot of setting the book down. It’s a great debut by an author I look forward to reading more of in the future.