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Ayiti, by Roxane Gay

20 Oct

At the heart of Roxane Gay‘s devastating debut collection, Ayiti, is truth. Whether a language is shared or a language divides, what it offers, when spoken with strength and authority, is an opportunity to share the truth. There is a connection to the desire for truth from the title of the book, which is the Haitian Creole for Haiti, to the final words, which are about more than language. The final words are about that which is beyond language. That which we all share: a desire for love, a release from fear, a necessary need for freedom.

Each of the stories within this book is a slice of heartache and of truth, but the one that struck me most was the one at the very heart of the book–both its physical center and its spiritual center–and that is, “In the Manner of Water or Light.” From the very first words, I was swept into a dark, puzzling, and beautiful world:

My mother was conceived in what would ever be known as the Massacre River. The sharp smell of blood has followed her since.

The Massacre River is both the taker and giver of life. It offers a baptism in blood. And as important as the river is to the players in the story, it is also the keeper of their secrets:

The ugly details are trapped between the fragments of our family history. We are secrets ourselves.

Indeed, “we are secrets ourselves” is at the core of the stories within these books. It is as if each is a confession whispered into a deaf ear, or, conversely, a secret bursting forth, no longer able to be contained, screamed loudly from the tallest mountain, “You will hear me!” These are secrets that need telling. It is in telling and sharing the secrets that people are set free:

I had pictured the river as a wide, yawning and bloody beast, but where we stood, the river flowed weakly. The waters did not run deep. It was just a border between two geographies of grief.

If you had never read anything else Roxane Gay had written, you would certainly know from these stories that she is a truth teller, which she is. She does not hide her face or turn away from that which people do not want told. Ayiti is a brave and beautiful book, filled with truths that need to be told. Read it.

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

17 Apr

When I turned over the last page of Gabrielle Hunter’s debut memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, I was genuinely devastated. I had thought I had a few pages left. I wasn’t ready for it to end. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

This is not to say that the book does not end well or just as it should, rather I had grown accustomed to Hunter’s company and I knew that when the book was finished I was going to miss her. Yeah, she’s not perfect. In fact, she can even be sort of an asshole sometimes, but from page one of this gorgeously written book, filled with honesty and life, I knew that I would love her forever. And I do.

To me there should be another subtitle: motherhood lost and found for within motherhood and food and feeding are intertwined just as they are (or can be) in life. Even when my own mother was emotionally lost to me, she always fed me. In fact, the smells of my own kitchen now are what remind me the most about her. Just as Hamilton describes her relationship with food: all returning back to that first kitchen.

The book begins when Hamilton’s mother and father divorcing, and with Hamilton’s mother moving to Vermont leaving Hamilton rootless and motherless. From there Hamilton rebels, she screws up, until eventually learning to nurture and mother herself and put herself on a path to find her way. In the years before she opens Prune, she works as a caterer and enters an MFA program in Michigan, where she takes a second job working with a woman who will become her cooking mentor. In short, she finds a stand-in mother for a time. And like Hamilton’s own mother, the relationship circles around the cooking, the food.

Finally, it is through her sad marriage that Hamilton meets the uber mother stand in: the Italian matriarch. Though she and her Italian mother-in-law don’t speak the same language, they learn to communicate with each other through cooking. And in the end as Hamilton’s marriage more fully dissolves and as her mother-in-law’s life winds down, Hamilton and her mother-in-law very nearly become one–just as one does with a child in the womb–as finally Hamilton is passed the torch to be the next Mamma.

As for the food: Hamilton should not be mistaken for a foodie. In fact, she would like (paraphrasing) people to just eat and shut up about it. She’s equally ambivalent about celebrity chefdom, even though she sends herself farther down that path with the release of this book.

It’s a terrific book. Filled with humor and exotic locations and hard work and sad times. There’s also a lot of love.

Read it.

Mad to Live, by Randall Brown

4 Mar

The stories in this new printing of Randall Brown’s debut chapbook, Mad to Live, absolutely sparkle with desire—for life, for love, for something unnamable. They are stories about sons and fathers and husbands and wives and lovers—all burning with want. I found words for this want in one of the “bonus track” stories entitled “Out of Love” in which the narrator says:

“The ache of longing is better than the nothingness of before.”

Within that line is the kernel behind all of the stories. It is better to want and not receive than to feel no desire at all or, worse, to feel your self unworthy of even desiring another person or thing. To live without desire is not to live at all.

Brown writes with such brave honesty in this space of these lives in flux—children who are lost, parents who are needy, parents who are cold, husbands who leave, come back. Wives who were never there. But mostly, he writes about love. About those people who love the people who hurt them and those people who love the people they will hurt or are hurt by. And from this love comes understanding, growth. This is living. This is truth.

From the title story, we see a man who becomes a boy once again in wake of his father’s death—revisiting the scenes from their past in his father’s empty classroom where he teaches himself the truth about his father:

“I begin to sense the irony of my father’s position, drenched in uncertainty, yet convinced of the rightness of his beliefs. He thought he knew, but he was just guessing. And what if he guessed wrong?”

I invite you to be mesmerized by these stories. Hopefully, you will see some glimmer of yourself and find that you, too, are mad to live.

The Wilding, by Benjamin Percy

4 Jan

On the surface, you might consider Benjamin Percy’s chillingly brilliant new novel The Wilding to be a classic tale of man vs. nature. Scratch beneath the surface, and you will find that man’s biggest fear is not the beast without, rather it is the beast within.

Commonly, we understand frontier times (and consequently the literature of that time) to be about (white) human beings conquering the land and conquering those (man and beast) who inhabit the land. The Wilding has a kinship to the frontier—an exploration of the American far West, a land both mountainous and arid, where old-growth forest meets high desert. A wild place that many people have not visited and yet it is now on the fringe of expansion as more and more towns, like Bend, push beyond their boundaries into the wild.
Within The Wilding, there is a family in crisis—generations of fathers and sons and a fractured and fragile shell of a marriage—and there is a man in crisis—the creepily and yet not unfeeling drawn war vet, Brian. There is also a landscape in crisis—a once wild place about to be developed. Any one of these three would make the great basis for a novel but all three of them together, set this novel on fire. I typically read before bed but there were times that I was so on edge with reading this book that I had to put it down and pick up another so that I can make sure I would sleep. It got under my skin.
But not simply about suspense, this book is also about human beings: Justin, who has spent his life on the precipice of manhood, never fully able to jump over the line as he has been living under the thumb of his force-of-nature father; Karen, damaged nearly beyond recognition from a miscarriage, she hides her many wounds beneath her physical armor; and Brian, mentally and physically damaged by the war and grieving for his dead father, he gives in to a life time of impulses.
Each one of the main characters has a big decision to make revolving around their very sense of humanity. Will they give into temptation and give up what it means to be human? Or will they let their animal nature push through?
You will have to read to find out. You won’t be sorry you did.

Sorta Like A Rock Star, by Matthew Quick

19 May

This one is for all of the kids who live outside the edge of normal, all of the kids who have secrets behind what their faces show at school each day, all of the kids who have been picked on, and especially for all of the kids who when faced with the worst, offer up their best.

This one is for all of you who are rock stars of hope, just like Amber Appleton the winning heroine of Matthew Quick’s charmingly heartbreaking YA novel Sorta Like a Rock Star.

I’ve been a fan of Quick’s writing for a while now and I expect a lot from his work. I expect honesty and humor and a wacky set of characters doing interesting things: and, boy, does this book deliver all of those things in spades. Most importantly, this book delivers a great big heart, all packaged within the body of Amber Appleton–who is one part Dorothy in Oz, one part Alice in Wonderland, and one part all her own. She’s a girl who has been pushed down into a dark place due to circumstances beyond her control and when life deals her an unfair and devastating hand, even though she wants to give up, she refuses to.

Partly she keeps going because Amber is not alone in her hardships; through her dark times she has her friends (a group of misfit kids, a haiku writing war vet, a Nietzsche quoting nursing home villain, and a Catholic priest among others). In her darkest hour when all she wants to do is be alone, they will not give up on her. They fight for her in the way no one else ever has–not even her parents.

Amber teaches us to never give up yearning for a better future. She teaches us what it means to survive. Most importantly, she gives us hope.

Buy this book for your favorite high school kid. Buy this book for your mother and father. Buy this book for a complete stranger who looks like he is having a crappy day and needs a reason to believe. Buy this book.

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.

13 Jul

I worried through the entirety of my pregnancy. How, I fretted, could I bring a child into this world? How could I protect him? What did he have to look forward to but melting ice caps, tsunamis, wild fires, genocide, floods, hurricanes, drought, war, war, war, serial killers, crazed gunmen in schools, bullies, etc. Now that I am a parent, I realize I can’t protect him from these things. I can only protect him from what I can control, and even then I am often left powerless.

We will do as we wish, we humans.

Ron Currie’s daring, humorous, poignant, heart-wrenching, and, ultimately, joyful second novel, Everything Matters! also addresses the question of how can one bring a child into a troubled world. Most importantly, though, it follows the life of Junior, who not only knows how he will end, but knows how the world will end as well.

It is from there, his foreknowledge, that we witness the choices he makes in his life–when does he choose to give up and when does he choose to push beyond his limits. When does he choose to live and accept all of the beauty that life has to offer him even though he knows it will one day be taken away.

Yes, on the surface this is a book about mass destruction, but it’s not about hopelessness. Rather, it’s about what we wake up and choose to do each day–put one foot ahead of the other and move forward even though we know that one day we will cease to be. We are all brave to live, to choose to live.

Some books you read to be entertained, others to learn something, and some you read to change your life. Everything Matters! was all of these books for me. I finished it just as my two-year-old was waking up from his nap. I was crying as I picked him up from his crib, not because I was sad, but because I was so happy and grateful that he was alive in this beautiful world where everything matters.

Big World, by Mary Miller

16 Feb

I first encountered the work of Mary Mill when I was guest editor for SmokeLong Quarterly and my friend Katrina Denza suggested I check out her writing. I did and asked her to submit for the issue. She sent us this: A Blind Dog Named Killer and a Colony of Bees.

All this is to say that before I even cracked the spine of Big World I had a feeling that I’d love reading it.

And that feeling was right on. Miller can write the hell out of a story. Most (if not all–I think there may have been one in 3rd person) of the stories within the book are written in 1st person, told from the point-of-view of a self-conscious and yet feisty female narrator. These are women who understand precisely where they are on the food chain and sometimes they like just where they are, but more often than not, they’d rather be elsewhere:

She prayed to St. Jude, she told me, the patron saint of lost and hopeless causes, and I didn’t mind being lost but hopeless bothered me. Hopeless was going too far. Someone was going to have to tell her.

These women are bar flies and usually they are in bad relationships. Or these aren’t women at all, they’re lost little girls, wanting love, comfort, something. Whoever and whatever they are, the story that pulls together the common threads of this collection, is the gloriously painful title story, “Big World”:

You want it too much, I told her. You want it so much no one’s ever going to give it to you. We were tipsy and someone was dead and I was under the impression we could be honest.

They are telling the truth about all of their pain, sharing it openly, wielding it like a weapon:

I liked to say things to shock him, the truth. Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was.

You might think this book sounds bleak, but I promise it’s not. It’s funny and, at times, hopeful about the future. As it is rooted in a sense of reality, this book doesn’t try to show us a beautiful, sugar-coated world. Does not strive to show us an optimistic and wonderful world. Instead it offers us a big, ugly, real world and even then, it’s still one well worth living and surviving in.

Read this book.

The Silver Linings Playbook, by Matthew Quick

10 Sep

Philadelphia is not only the home of the quintessentially American Liberty Bell, cheese steak, and Rocky, but now Philadelphia offers us another American original: Pat Peoples, the neurologically-damaged, ex-wife pining, mother-loving, uber Eagles fan protagonist of Matthew Quick’s dazzling debut novel The Silver Linings Playbook.

You might think that a book about a guy who has lost so much–his wife, his home, his job, and many years of his life in a mental health facility–would be depressing. Far from it. In fact, this book is uplifting. For what Quick offers us is not just the brutality of life–a father who won’t talk to his son, a cheating wife, many violent tempers–but also the beauty of it–finding love in unexpected people. Basically, Quick shows us that no matter how far down you fall, there are people willing to help you pick yourself back up. Quick gives us hope.

Does everything turn out the way Pat wanted it to? No. But it does turn out just as it should: with two broken souls coming together, hoping, and believing in the silver lining.

In short: a gorgeous, poignant, funny and uplifting book. Read it.

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness — my review at Quick Fiction

3 Aug


I’m delighted to direct your attention to my review of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women over at Quick Fiction.

I loved the book and so will you. So please do order yourself a copy. I promise you will be captivated.

Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee

21 May

Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh is necessary, is timely, and is downright gorgeous despite it’s sometimes ugly subject matter.

This is the story of Fee–how his life ended up the way it did, on a beach, deciding to live instead of die.

It is also “a fox story. Of how a fox can be a boy. And so it is also the story of a fire.” The significance of the fox comes from Fee’s heritage–the myths of the shape-shifting fox demon and how that demon returns and speaks through those possessed. Most importantly, it is about how the fox demon turns back into a human being, back into a man.

The significance of fire is that it is how things die; they are set alight and then they extinguish, keeping their secrets:

“Burning hides what burns there. Somewhere deep in him was a memory of light that pierced him from end to end like a spit.”

Mostly, it is a tragic love story. Unrequited love. Burning love. The horrible love of a man for young boys. The wondrous love of a boy for another boy. The unbearable love of a teenager for his teacher. The never-ending love of a boy for his lost sisters.

There is also a love so desperate that it sends its owner underground, beneath the earth into tunnels he builds so that he might hide from the love and bury himself alive: entomb himself within it for to do so would mean his beloved was trapped in that moment with him.

This is a rich, many-layered novel, filled with mythical allusions and using language that is always gorgeous. You will marvel at the beauty of these sentences even when what the author is describing is something you do not want to see.

Read it.

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