Category Archives: Reviews

by | December 3, 2024 · 3:20 pm

13.1 | Book Review

Mollie McMullan

Hot with the Bad Things: A Review

Lucia LoTempio’s debut, Hot with the Bad Things, is a lyric published in a post-MeToo world. For women everywhere, this movement felt like a shooting star: burning brightly and dying quickly. But LoTempio’s lyric doesn’t let a reader forget “the girl [she] was and the women who knew her.” This book honors those women, and clings to the belief that all women deserve a voice. Broken into seven sections—which center primarily around a murder/suicide that happened during the speaker’s time as an undergraduate student, the speaker’s experience with violence, her internalization of that violence and abuse, and the ways in which people insert themselves into narratives—LoTempio’s lyric is a soothing balm in a culture where male violence is uncontestable and unavoidable.

The first section of the lyric opens up the entire narrative. LoTempio writes: “I should be a single cauterization; removal to pin down this red.” The mention of cauterization is the first time a reader hears about heat, but its presence is repeatedly threaded throughout the narrative, appearing in lines like: “I’m a fever with the girl” and “If I could reach into the past, would I snuff it out?” In this collection, trauma frequently manifests itself as heat. The speaker is, like the lyric’s title suggests, burning up with the trauma she’s experienced. She wonders if she would “snuff” out her past as if it were a flame, but the speaker’s mouth is paradoxically “full of fire.” Heat becomes the speaker.

Ending that first section is the line, “Listen: if nothing goes to plan, imagine it as bad as possible.” This final line fills a reader with dread. If the first section functions as an entryway into the collection, LoTempio appropriately prepares her audience. What follows is unflinching. The speaker refuses to name her abuser, who is identified in the collection as a dot on the page, but speaks of what he did to her, including the times he raped her. LoTempio examines her speaker’s reaction to violence and abuse, not her abuser. The lines, “Once, ● tied your arms and legs to your throat, demanded you crawl because he / made you immobile. I think a person can be there without being there” is a gut punch.

The second section of the lyric begins with a dream, the speaker rousing “after the moment of plunge.” This dream occurs right after the speaker finds out about “the man [who] murdered the girl and her new lover” in her college town. In January, 2016, during Lucia LoTempio’s time at SUNY Geneseo, two Geneseo students were murdered a street away from the school. The perpetrator, who was an ex-boyfriend of the female victim, killed himself after committing the murders. This tragic event dominates most of the narrative, with the speaker paralleling her own experience to the female victim. With this crime forefronted, LoTempio is able to introduce the complexity of violence, how observing brutality becomes a “mirror game.” She notes the tendency to center oneself in crime, in the “quiet swirling center.” There are ethical considerations here. Is it right to involve ourselves so deeply in others’ tragedies? On this, the speaker–our storyteller–asks: “If telling a story is the mark of victory, what does that make me?” LoTempio, through her speaker, inquires about a writer’s role in relation to the world, and the distance between an author and their subject–especially when dealing with violence of this caliber.

Interrupting this section are pages titled “[Status Update Upstate],” which are composed of “language culled from January 2016 posts and comments on Facebook about Geneseo.” These comments range from the shockingly mundane “I go back [to Geneseo] every few years” to the cruelty of “No / girl is worth this and I know some perfect tens” and “You know what we need? Knife control.” These comments, formatted as a seven-line block of text, feel overwhelming in both their form and content. Within each [Status Update Upstate], a reader assumes the speaker’s place, transported back to 2016, placed right in the aforementioned “quiet swirling center.” We are made to care about the speaker and what she experienced within the turmoil of a crime so close to home, especially knowing the intimate partner violence she herself experienced while at Geneseo.

The next section dips heavily into memory and the ways in which the speaker experienced violence extremely intimately and regularly in her own life. The speaker says: “I loved a man. I loved ●. I don’t know how else to begin.” This admission is a heartbreaking one. Loving someone, as seen in the murder/suicide LoTempio writes about, does not make one immune from abuse. Once, the speaker “ran up cardiac hill, raced ● so hard [she] threw up,” and though the danger here isn’t overt, this hill “teemed with violence.” Sometimes, peril manifests itself quietly, under the illusion of choice. We see this multiple times throughout the lyric. Once, during a shift, the speaker’s boss “told [her] to stir powdered sugar and milk until it was like a / certain kind of fluid.” The speaker “vomited over a bed into a fold of blankets and some man kept / fucking.” “After sex, all sweat, a man laid out how to unsheathe a buck. Pointed on [her] / thigh where to penetrate a fleshy doe.” Over and over again, the speaker experiences indescribable threat from men. LoTempio lets these heart-stopping moments breathe on their own, lets the memories unfurl.

An epigraph from Louise Bourgeois opens up the next segment. It reads: “Fear can be spotted like gold in the ground. Dig them out, and make them help you. Fears make the world go round.” As indicated by the epigraph, this section focuses on the speaker’s relationship with fear. The speaker believes that “A climate of fear is both counting cards and laying its hand on the table.” Our culturally-constructed notion of fear allows for precaution, for an assessment of who has the upper hand, but it also allows for vulnerability, since acknowledging fear—both to yourself in others—turns you on your back, arms up, stomach exposed. The speaker feels this deeply, worried that their fear minimizes them and leaves them unprotected. Originally, they are a “little mouse,” chased by “something shadowed.” However, on the final page of the section, this metaphor transforms. LoTempio writes: “Mouse, but not a mouse–wolf cub learning. Soft belly.” The danger, here, is not between two different species, like a mouse and a cat. Instead, the speaker fears her own kind.

Halfway through the book is the next section, each page formatted as a letter that ends with “Soon,.” Even without considering the contents of each poem, this “Soon,” asks a reader to look towards something. “Soon,” is a promise, left open by the comma. These pages, in contrast with previous ones, are lighter. The speaker comments, “Whenever I’m in the car, I sing like he’s buckled next to me,” and “I feel so little, so small with him & I love it.” Knowing what this relationship grew to be leaves a sourness in the back of a reader’s throat, but sitting in this love is important. The abuse the speaker experienced was so painful in part due to the closeness she had with her partner. The economy of LoTempo’s language is something to admire, but her ability to nuance relationships and trauma in this lyric is a life raft. Something flourishes from this love, the speaker promising: “One day, you’ll write a beautiful book; the love you feel for him will be a palimpsest of joy.” Hot with the Bad Things is that “beautiful book.”

In a life where so much autonomy and personhood is taken from a person, it is difficult for that person to find and use their voice. This is explored in the second to last section of the lyric, this theme beginning with: “The novelist writes, There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable.” This section is quite meta, but it goes beyond being a book about the mechanics of writing itself, largely through LoTempio’s emotive imagery and diction. “In the bad dream,” LoTempio’s speaker “sit[s] behind a desk, [and] nothing shifts or is altered.” Her voice, as a writer and as a woman, is stunted. Her throat is “crackled,” and she hangs “up a phone to cry,” effectively silencing herself. However, the speaker is able to break from this. The collection lingers in Geneseo for so long—and rightly so—but it is clear that distance facilitated the speaker’s ability to communicate. After moving away from Geneseo, the speaker “talked about ●. [She] talked about him a lot.” This sort of triumph is quiet, the simplicity of the language elevating this narrative.

LoTempio’s lyric journeys through her speaker’s experience at Geneseo, but the book ends outside of Geneseo’s center, in a “new city, hemmed in with bridges.” In this section, the speaker refers to herself exclusively as “I” rather than a distant “you.” This technique is used sporadically throughout the collection, but the exclusivity resonates in this particular section. Since “you” usually creates the effect of a speaker talking to their past self, this final section feels more current. In it, the speaker acknowledges memories that are like “flash bang[s],” a shock like the “crack of knuckles.” Memory is startling, and yet the speaker still works through these echoes. Despite these explosive flashbacks, the speaker now feels safe enough to be “jealous of anger.” She’s working against rage, now “open like the hull / of a ship.” This allows for some difficult admissions like: “How do I tell him Every time / a man touches it’s better with the promise of worse.” Honesty like this prods at a reader’s own hidden proclivity for pain, since the naturalization of violence is a difficult thing to talk about.

Hot with the Bad Things ends masterfully, the final line reading: “That memory could still be stilled then framed, like a penned-up animal.” This book is like that animal; caged in the frame of memory, both literally and figuratively “penned-up.” This metaphor rings, crystal clear. The lyric ends with the image of two eyes, gazing ahead. There is power in watching, in testifying, in going beyond that. Throughout horror and violence, the woman does not look away. She stares, resolute.

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by | April 29, 2024 · 11:58 am

Book Review

Lili Gourley

Kristen Gentry’s Mama Said: A Review

Kristen Gentry’s debut, Mama Said, is a collection of twelve short stories that offers an intimate look into the lives of young women. More specifically, the stories examine family relationships made complicated by substance abuse and depression. Having recently lost someone to alcohol addiction, a topic often overlooked or glossed over, this book struck an intense chord. With addiction, we often feel as though we’ve lost someone before they’re truly gone, and this kind of loss is demonstrated eloquently throughout Mama Said. The cover alone is a marker of what one can expect: an evocative painting called “The Illusion of Peace” by Ton’nea Green, a Louisville artist. It features a young girl with her eyes closed and arms raised gently as if dancing, a beaded bracelet on her wrist that says “MAMA.” Her cheeks glow and she wears a purple striped bow in her hair. There is a sweetness and a sadness in that image, something that Gentry, who visited campus in April, says she was struck by, as she felt it accurately and beautifully portrayed the complexity of children.

Mama Said is set in Louisville, Kentucky. While the stories are set during the crack epidemic and opioid crisis, there is a timeless quality to them. They explore motherhood, masculinity, and the Black family experience, all issues that remain salient. Hailing from Louisville herself, Gentry paints this composition with understanding and care, drawing in the reader with descriptions of the Ohio River and local Derby Day celebrations. The collection moves from the main character JayLynn to include her cousins Zaria and Angel, and their mothers.

The opening story, “Mama Said,” is compelling, not only in its clear description of setting, but more interestingly, in the utilization of the second person perspective. Within the first few sentences, the audience is in the place of JayLynn as she moves into her college dorm. Second person point of view is risky, but here the payoff is powerful. I found myself very connected to JayLynn, and not just because I was addressed as her. The toll of carrying a parent’s mental and emotional baggage is cumbersome and Gentry’s matter-of-fact style of writing cements us firmly in that place. “Zaria understands your situation because she has her own situation with her mother Dee and Dee’s crack addiction” Jaylyn observes, and this comment shocks with its direct and honest nature. In a time of change in JayLynn’s life, she is still hyper-conscious of her mother’s wellbeing rather than her own. While strangers help JayLynn move her belongings into the dorm, her mother Claudia sits in the car with the air conditioning blasting, listening to James Taylor.

These moments are the ones that stick to JayLynn, and show up in different manifestations throughout the book, like being unable to reach her mother on Thanksgiving day and having to be the buffer for her family’s frustrations while dealing with her own feelings in “A Satisfying Meal.” In terms of language, there is a striking balance between the blunt and the poetic. When JayLynn, leaving for college, watches her mother break down and cry, she’s torn between “want[ing] her to feel the disappointment [Jaylyn] felt when her mother didn’t show up or buried herself under the covers,” and still wanting her mother’s attention, “a love letter you’ve desperately wanted to read all your life…”

Claudia’s struggle leads us to “Introduction,” the shortest story at only five pages, something that Gentry says surprised her as she wrote it. Nonetheless, the story carries the same emotional intensity and depth of the longer pieces. Once again following JayLynn, Gentry switches to first person narration. The emotional maturity forced onto JayLynn from a young age is evident here. As a 20-year-old, she watches as her mother prepares for an AA meeting, rubbing lotion into her legs. As she watches Claudia, she thinks of how her mother’s body houses her insecurities, her choices. She wonders about the cosmetic surgeries she’s had, and why she’s unable to “see her perfect parts.” Jaylyn shares the bathroom with her, putting on makeup that she doesn’t usually wear because “I just wanted to be around her, to soak her up like sun.” Claudia’s invitation to the meeting is a big deal for the both of them, and later at the meeting, Jaylyn can’t help but think of that moment in the bathroom. She’s afraid to tell her mother that she’s beautiful, knowing Claudia won’t or maybe can’t believe her. As a reader, I was enamored with the way Gentry creates characters we can empathize with, characters at once deeply flawed and worthy of love. When asked about the quick yet resonant ending, Gentry said, “thinking about and claiming an addict as a mother is enough of an event” for our main character. “Introduction” is among my favorite stories in the collection for its brevity and its powerful ending.

While the collection examines mother-daughter relationships, Gentry also subtly and artfully examines masculinity and its impacts on the women characters. Only three of the twelve stories are told from a male perspective. We meet Parker, Claudia’s ex-husband and Jaylyn’s father in “A New World,” Waylon in “A Good Education,” and Damon in “To Have And To Hold.” In “Origin Story,” Zaria’s boyfriend comes over to help get rid of a bat from her new home. Again, utilizing different points of view, Gentry reveals the way relationships shape our sense of self. While Parker contemplates the things he should’ve, could’ve, would’ve done in his relationship with Claudia, we wonder if he might have been able to make a difference if he had “flush[ed] Claudia’s pain pills down the toilet, [gotten] in her face and yell[ed].” The likely answer is no. When Zaria watches her son absorb what it means to be a man, she is forced to recognize the limits of her ability to protect her son. The reader is left wondering how Malik will cope. Certainly the male characters are affected by the mothers’ addictions, too, but Gentry’s focus is always the daughters. “I wanted it to be about the daughters,” she said, “not about the mothers [or fathers].”

The final story, “Everything You Could Ever Want” mirrors the opening story in a fulfilling and satisfying way. Also written in second person, we see how JayLynn has internalized the role of the good daughter, even in the most difficult moments in her life. When she miscarries, she thinks, “…you feel like your girl is so like you–uneasy and unsure how to insert herself into the world. So timid that she didn’t try, didn’t want to be a bother.” These devastating lines reveal the damage that ripples through the generations. Gentry makes space to grieve with JayLynn, Zaria, Claudia, and countless others. Alongside this, there are moments of connection, too, and Gentry ends the collection with one such moment. In the end, Claudia does show up for JayLynn and wisely tells her “Of course you’re not okay. But you will be… You’re gonna be okay.”

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by | December 4, 2023 · 1:52 pm

12.1 | Book Review

Jess Marinaro

Sarah Freligh’s A Brief Natural History of Women: A Review

Sarah Freligh’s collection of flash fiction A Brief Natural History of Women is a kaleidoscope of snapshots from women’s lives set in and around Detroit, Michigan. This collection exists as “a post-Roe book that recalls the bad old days pre-Roe” Freligh said in an interview with novelist Leslie Pietrzyk. Each flash fiction piece leaves readers with an acute sensation of longing to know these women, but for most we only get a glimpse into a few moments from their lives. The collection meditates on grief in many forms; from the death of a brother in “Other Tongues” to dealing with televised trauma in “A Brief Natural History of Law and Order.” Despite this, there are many ways in which this novel challenges the notion that to be a woman is to perpetually suffer. It argues for women to be loud and unapologetic in their pain. It argues that community and resilience are true markers of womanhood. It argues that grief is not isolated, and that the most human thing we can do is share our grief with each other.

The collection begins with one woman’s individual grief over her brother’s death in “You Come Here Often.” The specificity in the details and the use of second person brings us close to this woman, adopting her grief as our own. From there we are given a guide through which to navigate a more collective notion of girlhood and womanhood in stories like “A Brief Natural History of How it is to be a Girl” and “A Brief Natural History of Lipstick.” Here we see many revelations related to female bodies, sexuality, and what it means to become a woman. The stories slip in and out of specificity, but they always stay open enough to allow the reader to feel they are a part of each life we see careening by us. The collection does not follow a single narrative but rather provides many short explorations of narrative that build on top of eachother with both associative and direct connections. For example, the bar in “You Come Here Often” is, “always tuned in to a Law and Order episode” linking it to the normalized violence towards women that is explored in the later story “A Brief Natural History of Law and Order.”As the collection progresses, all these small threads weave themselves together into an incredibly intricate fabric.

I find it striking and poignant that even in a collection dedicated to women, a story titled “A Brief Natural History of Our Fathers” should show up. This story, along with many others, first presents an idealized image of traditional gender roles and then with strong, poetic language, Freligh quickly strips away the veneer to reveal the belly of the beast: “Our fathers are men. What our mothers say when we ask why our fathers never cook or change diapers…Some of our fathers die drunk in head-ons or face down on the factory floor, their rotted hearts knotted as pine trees. Some of our fathers carry their coffins and try not to cry.” Freligh’s observations of masculinity are like a hot spotlight directed at these issues. Dedicating a story in this collection to a discussion of the way patriarchy has shaped male suffering feels both surprising and completely necessary at the same time. I was not expecting to see it here, and yet without it, the collection would feel incomplete. “A Brief Natural History of Our Fathers” utilizes the unique collective “we” and “us,” the first-person plural, to tell the story. Freligh does this in other places too, such as “Girl Talk,” “All We Wanted,” and many of the “A Brief Natural History of…” stories. The result of this choice is a feeling of collective understanding. The reader is being roped in with these women, and in a way we become them as we read. This can be said for Freligh’s use of the second-person perspective as well, which is used in stories like “A Brief Natural History of Law and Order” to bring readers more directly into the lives of these women. Suddenly we are being stuffed in a body bag and our dead body is being autopsied. In a moment we become the overworked mother in “Oh, the Water” and the burden of her decision to leave is now ours to bear too. In this way Freligh constantly reminds us that other peoples’ grief is not separate from ours, as much as we may like it to be.

Along with a masterful manipulation of perspective, Freligh’s use of metaphor creates throughlines that connect stories that may seem otherwise unrelated. A great example of this is the language surrounding cars and automobile machinery that can be found throughout the collection. In some places it’s obvious, such as the story “A Brief Natural History of the Automobile,” in which she uses the car to compare and commodify women: “You’re no longer a sports car but a utility vehicle whose body is chipped and dinged,” or when referring to an affair, “You understand completely. Your husband has always wanted a Mercedes, now he’s found himself a good used one.” However, cars crop up in many of the other stories in more subtle ways. The woman in “A Brief Natural History of Babies, Because” conceives a child in the back of a car, and the fathers in “A Brief Natural History of Our Fathers” are compared to “headlights on a wall, there and gone.” The car imagery that haunts this collection seems to often be associated with the disconnect between what we expect of ourselves and what we actually become. There is a sense of just trying to survive, and doing what you have to to get by. It also has a masculine connotation and reinforces how traditional gender roles often push men and women to their limits.

Freligh’s acute precision with language allows much of her prose to feel like poetry. In this way the collection almost seems to inhabit a liminal space between genres–it has a hand in everything. I think this perfectly conveys the personality of the collection. There is a refusal to compromise the women’s voices, and through the diversity of stories, a refusal to be boxed into any concrete narrative. This refusal is what sets this collection apart. Stories like “The Thing with Feathers” are candid about the fear that lurks in the ugly shadows of womanhood. The title’s reference to Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”, sets up the reader to expect an uplifting message of perseverance, but that’s not exactly what we get. As the narrator confesses her sadness to a stranger on the street, she shares a story of a woman named Denise in her support group saying what she is grateful for, “I’m alive, Denise said.” This strikes a chord with the narrator. She says she is grateful she doesn’t have cancer, and at times she almost wished her life did have a set expiration date so that she could be done with “the business of living.” Essentially, she lands on the thought, “I’m bankrupt. I’m alive.” Here Freligh refuses to romanticize suffering and instead cuts to the core of the feeling. Like Dickenson, Freligh embraces hope, but she acknowledges the limits to it as well. Hope does not have to be a mighty bird, and sometimes all it can be is a simple affirmation of endurance.

In our interview with her Freligh describes “A Brief Natural History of the Girls in the Office” as the story that inspired the title, and it isn’t hard to see why. Coming in at the end of the collection, its focus on female camaraderie shines a light on the way women bond over shared grief. The story follows a group of work friends who check in with each other as they grow older and life attempts to break their spirits. “A Brief Natural History of Girls in the Office” feels like a cornerstone story in this collection. It emphasizes the resilience that can be found even within mourning over painful life experiences, “The few of us who were left started bowling together on Wednesdays, pretending the pins we scattered were second wives or the exes who were late again with the support.” This resilience exists because of community. It is found in break rooms and bowling alleys, and readers are inclined to think about all the other places they’ve known this camaraderie to exist in; salons, kitchens, bar bathrooms, and college dorms to name a few. This isolated example of female friendship ends up transcending its own individual circumstances and, like every story in the collection, illuminates the power women hold in standing with each other against the relentless pain of life.

The last story of the collection “Mad” seems to bring us full circle, back to the woman we first sympathized with in “You Come Here Often.” The narrator’s aspirations are crumbling and “her heart is a stone” as she mourns her brother. The story ends with a mandated therapy appointment in which she is asked to draw what she thinks heaven looks like. With crayons she depicts a bar filled with plants and bird cages, comparing the birds’ beautiful singing to her late brother’s voice. Joe, her therapist, suggests, “Why don’t you open up the cage?…so she does. And oh, what a wild bird can do when set loose in doors.” This bird motif calls back to “The Thing With Feathers” only this time the bird’s wildness is big and destructive. This comparison also goes to show us how individual grief is intertwined with a myriad of other womens’ experiences, culminating in one final thought: “Such madness. Such carnage.” This final story ties together the entire collection and makes clear what Freligh wants to say about grief. Here the bird is still trapped indoors, causing wreckage–but she’s a little more free than she was in the cage. She can breathe just slightly easier; she has the space to express her pain as messily as she wants. Here Freligh resists the traditional Western conventions regarding grief. There is no insistence on moving on, only the recognition of all the complex weight that grieving women bear.

In more ways than one, this collection delivers on what the title offers. It is brief, and therefore not all-encompassing, however it is unflinching in its depictions of the lives real women lead. As the cover art suggests, it is an accumulation of small, but powerful, moments that reveal something larger. Sometimes it is beauty or grief, and always there is solidarity. A Brief Natural History of Women succeeds at an improbable task by interrogating womens’ grief and landing on a hopefulness that feels genuine and honest.

 

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by | May 1, 2023 · 1:44 pm

11.2 | Book Review

Julia Grunes

Stephanie Vanderslice’s The Lost Son: A Review

Stephanie Vanderslice’s historical novel, The Lost Son, begins quietly, with its protagonist, Julia, waiting in an unwelcoming doctor’s office, “the vinyl edges of the examination table cold against her thighs.” The prose pulls the reader into the life of Julia, a German immigrant living in New York City in 1945, waiting to see if she is pregnant. Though she does not end up being pregnant, and the doctor says it is more likely that she is nearing menopause, this beginning sets up one of the defining characteristics of Julia: her motherhood. However, Vanderslice refuses to allow that to be Julia’s only defining characteristic. As the narrative flows back and forth from New York in 1945 to Julia’s childhood in Germany in 1910, the reader is shown how her intelligence and love for stories continues throughout her adulthood, even if they don’t seem to be as close to the forefront of her personality.

Vanderslice masterfully pulls the reader from place to place, time period to time period, with prose that sings, allowing the reader to hum with it, to become fully immersed in the settings that she has so artfully created. This immersion comes with the small details that are mentioned, like “a spot on the wooden table where someone had carved the initials JR SN inside a jagged heart” that Julia is running her fingertips over. With the use of these details, Vanderslice weaves together Julia’s past and present, revealing information with a gentle hand and at just the right time. When what has happened to her infant son Nicholas is revealed, the carefully placed thoughts about her husband Robert and her dread about remembering the infant’s “insistent tug on her breast” all begin to make sense. Julia is trapped in the past as she tries to survive in the present, and it only makes sense that the reader should be pulled into that same past as well.

Though Julia’s past is what motivates her for much of the novel, much of Vanderslice’s story focuses on the necessity of hope, on looking forward rather than back. Vanderslice encourages the idea of faith in humanity, even in the face of betrayal, even in the face of the horrors that the characters learn are occurring just overseas in the Second World War. In spite of the enormity of these events, Vanderslice reminds readers of a truth that is still relevant today: no matter the largeness of what is occurring, we are all still human. We are allowed to want things for ourselves and to be treated with respect, with love. One of the most poignant moments of the novel, in my opinion, is after Julia has gone on a date with Paul, and Vanderslice writes, “Julia wasn’t sure she had ever felt more listened to in all her life.”

In addition to its focus on motherhood and on womanhood, however, the novel explores a plethora of different topics, making it a story that any reader will find compelling.

Vanderslice touches on everything from the experience of soldiers in World War II, to the incubator babies on Coney Island, to the struggle of being an immigrant. The Lost Son refuses to be defined as only one thing, just as Julia refuses to be pigeonholed into any one role, whether that is as an immigrant, woman, or mother. Though this novel is surely historical, its themes follow us into the present day, and the questions that it presents about love and loss, about family and betrayal, are ones that will cause readers to take pause, to look at their own lives. Do you allow yourself to enjoy the moment, the life, that you are living in? Or have you become “so preoccupied with waiting” that you have “given no thought to what would happen afterwards”—whatever that afterwards is for you? Because there is always something. Something to wait for, to work towards. It is all too easy to forget to care for ourselves in the now, when there is always something that we can be reaching for, whether that something is in the present or in the past. For so much of her life, Julia struggles with allowing herself to be wanted, to be proud, to see her own worth.

As such, Julia’s lost son, Nicholas, represents the title of Vanderslice’s novel, but not the heart of it. In the end, Vanderslice allows Julia to come to the realization that, “all we can do is mend ourselves. Mend ourselves by reaching out for one another, even when it’s hard. When it’s frightening. Honor the dead by living. By telling their stories and inhabiting our own.” Julia realizes that she can be the beating heart of her own story, and by the end of The Lost Son, she has claimed this story, her life, as her own. Not Nicholas’, not her son Johannes’, not her sister Lena’s, not even Paul’s. Hers.

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by | December 9, 2022 · 11:19 am

11.1 | Book Review

Elizabeth Roos

Stephen J. West’s Soft-Boiled: An Investigation of Masculinity & the Writer’s Life: A Review

Stephen J. West’s Soft-Boiled follows the writer as he shadows the private investigator Frank Streets. Though much of the book takes place in rural West Virginia, West is a western New York native and attended SUNY Geneseo. To say the book is a memoir is a limiting description, as West also writes as a reporter, critic, and essayist—not only does he report his interactions with Frank Streets, but he also reflects upon his childhood and adolescence, his relationship with his wife, his experiences with fatherhood, and his purpose as a writer. In addition, West attempts to answer a question that many of us as writers grapple with: why do we write? And what does it mean to be an artist?

West’s title, Soft-Boiled, is a pun upon the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, which the book both analyzes and scrutinizes. Intertwined with discussions of masculinity and artistry, West takes time to talk about the purpose of “escapist reading” and cites passages from W.H. Auden. In particular, West analyzes how these “whodunits” connect back to the idea of the Self-Made Man—a concept that West interrogates in detail in his book. He compares, alongside Auden, the mystery stories such as Sherlock Holmes to the hard-boiled, “depressing” stories of The Maltese Falcon kind—a story that Auden believed to be “works of art.” However, West proposes a different conclusion: as the narrative concerning Frank Streets culminates in his arrest, West drops the fiction analysis, and begins comparing his motivation to write to his own metaphorical Maltese falcon. He begins to wish that Streets is guilty, so that his book can conclude with excitement. In the end, however, he finds himself ashamed of this fact—while also finding it ultimately inconsequential to the heart of his own story.

The Self-Made Man is a concept that is central to this book—it is one of the main ideas West seeks to understand, and it is discussed alongside other concepts such as “traditional American masculinity” and “authentic American brand of manhood.” These concepts seem to arise out of West’s questioning of his own motives: why is he writing in the first place? Very early on, West recounts an interaction between him and a writer friend, where he confesses that he is “uninteresting at a macro level” and could be described by sociologist Erving Goffman as “the one unblushing male in America.” However, West continues on about his experiences with gender theory, and writes, “Yet I blush, dear reader. I blush for my desire to matter more than my privilege. I blush for my need to make art, even when my art is not needed.” This raises an important question that is, perhaps, unanswerable—however, by the end of his book, West makes a strong attempt to answer it.

West’s analysis of masculinity majorly remains focused on himself throughout the book. However on occasion he also extends his internal discussion to the subject of his writing inspiration, the private investigator Frank Streets. As previously mentioned, West is motivated by an interest in detective fiction; it is for this reason that he chooses Frank Streets to interview and shadow while writing his elusive first book. In West’s description of his first meeting with Streets, there are numerous comparisons between the reality that West experiences and his previous knowledge of fiction: “He’s no hard-boiled private dick,” West writes, “he is a man of obtuse angles, not the stuff dreamed up in a hard-boiled novel.” However, this is not to say that Streets completely subverts West’s expectations, or that he is something beyond West’s conceptions of masculinity. In fact, West writes that Streets is a “bear of a human” and that “the room felt smaller with him in it,” all familiar descriptors for a stereotypically masculine man.

It is evident in West’s recounting of interactions with Streets that he views himself and Streets in high contrast—West, in dissatisfaction with his own masculinity, describes Streets as incredibly masculine, and himself as unfortunately feminine. This is most evident in the handshake the men share: “My hands are not small [but] grasped in Frank Streets’s calloused paw, my hand looked girlish, like he might crush every bone in it by accident.” This is perhaps one of the most common ways that West reflects upon his masculinity throughout the book. In his descriptions of the interactions he has with others, he commonly writes his actions and dialog with negative and/or demeaning descriptors. Later on, during a meal shared with Streets and others, West describes himself as the following: “I sniffled and swallowed…I squawked…I chuckled and buried my face in my soda.” I found this detail to be intriguing; instead of using neutral descriptors, West chose these—why?

Perhaps because it lends itself to the idea that West embarked upon writing this book not only as “An Investigation of Masculinity” as the subtitle says, but as an investigation of “the Writer’s Life.” Aside from his chronicling of interactions with Frank Streets, West also analyzes his relationship with his wife and his experiences with fatherhood. In his recounting of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, to support the writing of his wife K, West laments, “that was before El and I nearly missed our flight because he wasn’t listed on my boarding pass; before I learned that a man traveling alone with an infant is more likely a human trafficker than a father…” What follows is a moving account of West struggling with his purpose in Oaxaca, his importance to his wife and child, as well as what it meant to be an artist. Following a tense conversation with K and an interaction with a street artist, West truly seems to open up to the possibility that he will never be a “writer smirking with the secrets of the world.”

It is at this point that the main ideas of the book come to a head. To be a writer has been West’s primary motivation for writing the book—a perhaps cyclic philosophy, but not one that has gone unquestioned by West. “Fuck books. Fuck art. Fuck the desire to be petty,” West writes. “Fuck all of it. I like being ordinary…Can I also be a man? Can I also be an artist?” Eventually, Frank Streets is cleared of all charges. Despite this, it appears that West has departed from his reasoning to writing about Streets. K has received a position teaching at SUNY Geneseo, and the pair have left West Virginia. West does not return to speak with Streets about his story; instead, he takes the final pages of the book to define himself. He reflects, once again, on the idea of his purpose. At the end of the exploration, West becomes content with his insecurity, and leads the reader to become content with theirs, as well.

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by | May 4, 2022 · 11:38 am

10.2 | Book Review

Alison DiCesare

Leslie Pietrzyk’s Admit This to No One: A Review

Leslie Pietrzyk’s short story collection, Admit This to No One, illuminates the lives of Washington D.C. residents. Following a cast of recurring characters whose lives are intertwined as well as several standalone narratives, Pietrzyk weaves social and political conflicts together in a series of stories that are all, ultimately, about power. In the words of the character Lexie, “politics is about power. Likely art is too.” Not a moment goes by when the reader is not painfully aware of the power dynamics between any given characters and the tension they create.

This book is set to the backdrop of Washington D.C., which, as a setting, serves as both a symbol and connective tissue. In the abstract, the city represents politics and how everyone in the stories wears some kind of mask. This theme of facade runs through the entire book, especially when it comes to the elusive Speaker; everyone says one thing and means another, hoping to be more powerful than someone else. She creates an enticing dissonance between the characters’ actions and their intentions that makes reading this book an experience akin to gossiping, complete with all of the accompanying discomfort and titillation. The city also connects the stories in a more literal way, bridging the gap between narratives that are, on the surface, unrelated. Two stories, “We Always Start with the Seduction,” and “People Love a View,” both take place on the Wilson Bridge, which invites comparison, even though the first is about the Speaker seducing interns and the second is about a couple attempting to intervene in an incident between a Black man and a police officer. The setting makes you think about how all of the characters are working to their own ends, pretending they’re noble (and, in some cases, believing it) as they disregard the wellbeing of the people around them.

A unique element of this collection is the cast of recurring characters that all exist in relation to the Speaker. The first story, “Till Death Do Us Part,” introduces Madison, the daughter of the Speaker and a woman he had an affair with who he largely abandoned in childhood, moving on to yet another new family. Madison, as a narrator, sets the tone for the entire collection, her voice injected with biting teenaged cynicism. She carries herself with an at times cringeworthy mixture of precociousness and naivete, scoffing at “cow-faced” bystanders who lack the status she has only because of her connection to a father who, when asked directly if he hates her, responds “I barely know you.” Pietrzyk revisits Madison in “Anything You Want,” and then again for the final story, “Every Man in History,” both of which show her struggling to connect romantically with men. In every story she’s in, she grapples with what love really is because the Speaker never taught her, only able to feebly declare that “I do want to love someone” as she sleeps with married men. Pietrzyk also follows Lexie, the Speaker’s daughter from his first marriage. Her first story, “Stay There,” stands out because it is the only one in the collection not set in Washington D.C., though it’s set largely on the journey there. Lexie is supposedly the one who escaped, the one who “stomped [the Speaker’s] goddamn heart” and got away with it, cutting him off and becoming an artist and professor, far away from the world of politics. Yet she still ends up drowning in the sea of her father, letting her own career implode for an affair, just as her father did, and desperate for a child so she can finally know unconditional love. After the Speaker left his family “with such shameful finality,” Lexie struggles to hold onto people, unable to shake this fear that they, too, will leave. He always holds that power over her, no matter how far she runs. In some ways, she has power over the student she’s dating. She’s powerless to aging, which she fears will cause the loss of her desirability, and along with it both her sexual power and power to have a child—this story is a tangled web of power structures imploding in on each other and themselves.

In addition to his daughters, the collection follows Mary Grace, a character who works for the Speaker and appears in “I Believe in Mary Worth” as well as the titular story, “Admit This to No One.” A cutthroat Washington insider, Mary Grace is the Speaker’s senior staffer, the most powerful person in the office until the boss walks through the door. Mary Grace is compelling because in “I Believe in Mary Worth,” Pietrzyk presents her as sympathetic, a woman struggling to make it in a man’s world and help other young women when she can. Yet, in “Admit This to No One,” she is revealed to be an opportunist. She is with the Speaker because of where he can take her career, and cares more about getting ahead than whether or not she hurts people, stating that, to her, “bad news is perversely good news, because it’s a sure indication that she’s important. That she’s powerful.” The Speaker, though the driving force behind all these narratives, is only a protagonist in two stories, “We Always Start with the Seduction” and “Admit This to No One.” The former is fascinating in how distant and disingenuous the Speaker feels, even as we glean some insight into his inner world for the first time. Even at his most personal, the reader is held back and the mask never slips; he is so infuriatingly in control of his own narrative that even as he contemplates jumping off the Wilson Bridge, he views it from the perspective of the media, wondering “how the headline reporting his death would read, the size of the font.” His manipulation of events runs so deep that even the narrative lies to the reader to favor his version of reality, Pietrzyk ending the story in the masterful move of revealing “He’s lying, of course. Of course he is,” making the reader feel both betrayed at the manipulation and stupid for ever believing him.

The stories that stand alone, detached from this web of recurring characters, still focus on power, just in different ways, often stepping away from political and parental power. “Wealth Management,” the second story in the collection, focuses on two couples having dinner while the narrator’s wife, Chloe, is having an affair with the other man at the table, who she calls her “work husband.” This story had every muscle in my body clenched as all four grappled for power: the narrator, Drew, doesn’t care about his wife but is determined to prove himself to be superior to her work husband and also humiliate her as punishment; Chloe and her work husband are flirting overtly, and the work husband’s wife is flirting with Drew in order to get back at her husband. The whole scene, which consists solely of the couples talking at a table in a restaurant, is a power struggle that reveals that none of them care if they hurt each other or even innocent bystanders as long as they win. “People Love a View,” also has four people acting towards their own ends, only this time there are much higher, more physical stakes as a Black man is pulled over by a cop and his dog is mortally wounded. A woman, Jillian, inserts herself into the situation in order to help, but really only cares about keeping up the appearance of a good person and the social currency she will obtain from it. Her date, Patrick, scorns her even at the risk of appearing racist because she’s making him uncomfortable. The Black man goads the cop into shooting his dog just to make him feel bad. Again, everyone’s only thinking about themselves. This story and “This Isn’t Who We Are” deal primarily with racial power, “People Love a View” addressing white people being performatively antiracist and “This Isn’t Who We Are” dealing with internalized racism. The latter slips into the realm of metafiction, which happens twice in the book, ending with the haunting command “Read this, and pretend that it’s not about you. Publish it, uneasily, as ‘fiction,’” a call to accountability from Pietrzyk herself. Indeed, the use of metafiction calls into question the power dynamics of the whole collection, written by a white woman who has power over all of the narratives.

One of the greatest strengths in Pietrzyk’s execution of this collection is her ability to write unlikable characters who are fleshed out, compelling, and for whom you end up rooting. As Jillian gets a man’s dog killed on the Wilson Bridge, the readers cannot be confident that she would have been a better person if she had walked away. As the Speaker’s daughters hurt their romantic partners, we can’t shake our pity for their misunderstanding of love, even when that romantic partner is a student being exploited by a professor. As Mary Grace grabs shamelessly at power, dismissing a sexual assault survivor on her staff, we attribute wisdom to her decisions because of how much she has struggled as a woman to make it in politics. Even the Speaker, so cold and calculated, has a moment when he claims that “He deserves this delight,” and doesn’t everyone deserve to find happiness, really?” There are no heroes and villains in this book. Every single character does at least one questionable thing, and none of them get happy endings; Pietrzyk often ends on disquieting moments with no closure. This collection is about the fight for power, and how it seeps into every aspect of one’s life—personal, social, political. The book doesn’t shy away from the gritty nuances of this struggle as it captures all the things that power really means.

Alison DiCesare is a senior English creative writing major with a minor in film studies. At school she is a tutor for the Writing Learning Center, the secretary of Circus Club, and a dancer for Orchesis. At home she spends her time reading, writing, watching YouTube, and practicing her belief that dessert can (should) be eaten all hours of the day.

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by | December 6, 2021 · 11:46 am

Maria Pawlak

Gail Hosking’s Retrieval: A Review

Less than a year ago, the United States ended its longest-ever conflict. The country left Afghanistan without grace, hiding highly-publicized videos of departure behind policy and promises. For many, it was an all too familiar scene. Forty-six years earlier, the United States ended its then-longest war in much the same way: carelessly and without poise. Even now, the U.S. government clings to technicalities in order to avoid officially calling what transpired in Vietnam a “war” at all. But its legacy endures. In her book, Retrieval, poet Gail Hosking demands that readers wrestle with the discomfort of a war many would rather forget: one that took her father from her. Through her skillful writing, deft descriptions, and immense vulnerability, Hosking takes the reader on a tour of her memory—a tour that’s fundamental to understanding the enduring history the Vietnam War era leaves behind on a human level.

While the book is split into three sections, Hosking makes the conscious choice to shy away from distinctly ordered memory. The poems do not follow the chronological order of the speaker’s life. Rather, they feel spontaneous and disjointed, attacking and retreating like soldiers without commands. The opening poem, “Chance and Hope,” sets the stage for the ensuing exploration into memory with the observations of a child. Hosking writes, “[m]y father put together survival kits…concentrating like a character / with his script of danger, his story of men.” By comparing the narrator’s father to a character with a script from the onset of the collection, Hosking explores the falsehood of eager duty that much of the country was lulled into during the war.

She repeats this assertion in the second section of the book in the poem “Notes From the Underground,” writing that the soldiers “knew the war was run by politicians / but went anyway because that’s what soldiers do.” The speaker carries more cynicism here, well aware of the politicized nature of the war, but that doesn’t change the fact that soldiers do what they’re told. In the very next line, she imagines that the soldiers are the “ones who help paint a picture—a case of hand grenades / under my dad’s cot…” Once again, these soldiers are not mere men; they are painters setting a scene like the character with a “script of danger” that Hosking imagines the speaker’s father to be in the opening poem. It’s with this expert reimagining and returning that Hosking lets the speaker explore the same experiences and memories more than once, each with new heartbreaking observations and declarations.

Hosking’s poem, “Personal Effects,” is emblematic of the expert skill present throughout Retrieval. Bare-bones and practical, “Personal Effects” is a list that goes through each of her soldier father’s belongings. Alliteration threads the seemingly simple poem from start to end, opening with the line “[s]ix short-sleeve shirts / four wash-and-wear trousers.” While the opening is innocuous enough—who among us hasn’t packed T-shirts and simple shorts in our travel bags?—each consecutive line ups the ante. The final several lines pack a punch:

six month’s gratuity pay

one signed statement

I fully recognize the hazards involved

one black body bag.

Phrases like “signed statement” and “black body bag” invite the reader to enjoy delicate, alliterative language even as the implication of these words leaves a hole in one’s heart. As one reads, the practicality gives way to tragic truth in the form of a life signed away. Hosking knows to leave her readers gasping; she doesn’t have to spell out what that black body bag means for the speaker’s loved one. It’s clear enough after a simple four-word line. The restraint of this poem paired with the more exploratory nature of “Hope and Chance” and “Notes from the Underground” demonstrate the dichotomy between the truth of the fact at hand—that men are packing up their bags and going to war—and how it feels to witness this as a daughter of one of those men.

Throughout Retrieval, Hosking’s voice never falters. While “Personal Effects” might end with a plain yet foreboding “black body bag,” it’s “A Life” that says plainly, “[t]he week he is killed she cooks / black-eyed peas and ham hocks,” as if the death of one’s father is no bigger an event than a rainstorm or grocery trip. By choosing to go small when exploring huge wells of emotion, in this case grief, Hosking hooks the reader with an understated, restrained tone.

Visiting her memories through Retrieval is a journey the reader is lucky to go on; an experience that leaves one changed. Through each poem, Hosking picks apart a sliver of history on two levels, one personal and one wrestling with the legacy the Vietnam war era has left behind. From “think[ing] about what your father / goes through over there / in the jungle…” to newer memories that invite “a calm settling inside me, my heart / opening from rusted chambers,” the clarity and contemplation of Retrieval leaves one mournful yet serene and, surprisingly, full of hope.

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by | May 3, 2021 · 4:22 pm

9.2 | Book Review

Rebecca Williamson

Albert Abonado’s JAW: A Review

The mouth is crucial to our identity. It is vital for our most basic need of eating, but it is also essential for language, love, and song. It’s with our mouths, after all, that we form our most important and difficult questions: who am I? Where do I belong? In JAW, poet Albert Abonado, a first-generation Filipino American, explores identity, family, and culture. With attention to the human body—specifically the various parts of the mouth—Abonado probes what it means to be both Filipino and American. In poems that are both serious and funny, Abonado tackles the question of identity and reveals the challenges of sustaining one’s cultural heritage.

The collection  begins with “America Tries to Remove a Splinter,” a poem about assimilation. Despite America promising it will be quick, the reader understands there is a cost to the extraction: 

you will not notice how

I have put my hands inside your bones which are hollow 

which are your father          your mother         I have your hand

on my palm       how does this feel

The person who has the splinter never responds in this poem, but the following poems provide some answers. In the poem “How to Unbend the Tongue.” The speaker admits he has tried to learn Tagalog, but can’t fully master it. He wishes he was comfortable “to say / blood and dick with sincerity” in Tagalog but can’t do so. In the end, he is unable to unbend his tongue to speak the language of his family. Another poem that explores language is “The Greeting,” where the speaker dreams about his father’s tongue, “how it contracts, isolated, / enters the world already heavy / and blackened.” 

Family history is also examined as a way of understanding what it means to be Filipino American. The second section of the collection is focused on Tito Manuel, who Abonado said in an interview on The Sundress Blog is based on his deceased Uncle and his stories of surviving World War II. In “Tito Manuel Escapes the Death March,” the speaker says:

No offense to the man whose
body I hide beneath, but I am good
at being dead

regardless of what
my urine soaking
in the ground might suggest. 

The  image of the speaker—Tito Manuel—burying himself under a dead body to remain alive is harrowing and reveals how significant experiences of inherited trauma might become woven into one’s identity. Tito Manuel’s story becomes another layer of what it means to be a Filipino American, especially how such identities are heightened during war. 

In JAW’s third section, Abonado turns to popular culture to further explore identity. Through poems that address Harold and Kumar, the Asian characters in the buddy film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Abonado questions the losses of immigration, the challenges of  assimilation, and the damning effects of stereotyping. In the poem, “The Darkest Sugars Are Always the Sweetest,” the speaker says:

Kumar, 
you and I are great Americans. We have great American 
Hands and great American hair. Great American American holes 
in the elbows of our button downs and great American 
teeth with great American coffee stains.

Here, Abonado seems as if he is persuading Kumar of their shared Americanness, the proof is the love of Coca-Cola, that most American of beverages, and the rotten teeth it creates. Indeed, the speaker “cannot stop singing about its virtues to [his] wife.” In “The Mercy Suit” we are again confronted with images of the mouth, though here it stays closed: “Kumar, I have watched my loved / ones do this, leave behind holes / where their voice should be.”

The final section feels like a reconciliation of the Filipino and the American within the speaker. “Someday I Will Love Albert Abonado” acknowledges that the name—Albert—had belonged to the speaker’s grandfather’s. Albert is told “learn / to love your spine, which is a collection of your mother’s / spindles, love the fingers that break each time you use them / to count.” Here, our speaker returns to the body to plead with Albert to love himself. He encourages Albert to see the name as “sweetened,” a bounty,  “harvested again.”

JAW is about family, identity, immigration, and what gets left behind. As the collection ends with “Self-Portrait as a Wisdom Tooth,” the speaker says, “I collide against myself, recoil from / my ghostly hum. I do not own / the blood that passes beneath me, but I threaten its alignment.” JAW, a moving and resonant collection, is a reckoning with the past and the future as the speaker in “Idle” says:

They followed a star here 

They came looking for myrrh          This is an old story

Maybe you’ve heard it before

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by | November 30, 2020 · 3:31 pm

9.1 | Book Review

Sara Devoe

Sonya Bilocerkowycz’s On Our Way Home from the Revolution: A Review

People have various identities. There is one’s gender identity, cultural identity, ethnic identity, sexual identity, and so on. But what does it mean to take pride in one’s identity? What defines one’s identity? Is it understanding one’s own roots? Is it participation in certain cultural events? Is it going to the Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village of Manhattan, or sacrificing relationships to fight in a revolution? In her collection of essays, On Our Way Home from the Revolution, Sonya Bilocerkowycz tackles these questions as she explores her identity as a Ukrainian American. 

On Our Way Home From the Revolution is comprised of fifteen essays in which Bilocerkowycz pieces out where exactly she fits in the timeline of the Ukrainian Revolution. In doing this, her essays look at family relationships, culturally immersive experiences, and travel to show a changing sense of what it means to be Ukrainian. We are welcomed into Bilocerkowycz’s Ukrainian heritage and invited to watch memories of her family (specifically her Busia, which is Ukrainian for grandmother) play out. Busia is a central figure throughout these essays; guiding Bilocerkowycz on her journey of self-discovery from afar. On their relationship, Bilocerkowycz says, “I don’t know where Busia ends and where I begin.”  Bilocerkowycz travels to the Ukraine to teach English, where she experiences revolution firsthand. 

Extensive research also informs this collection. For instance, “Word Portrait” is a document taken from police files which lists the characteristics of Bilocerkowycz’s grandfather, also known as prisoner No.XXXXX, who was arrested for betrayal. Bilocerkowycz obtained this through emailing the Ukrainian archives about her grandfather. Other instances of research mixed with speculation are the multiperspectivity that lies in “Duck and Cover.” Bilocerkowycz imagines herself in the shoes of several different people. She imagines herself as Sasha, an eight-year-old student who was present at the time of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. “Duck and cover is what your fourth-grade teacher screamed, but what she meant is this is war,” she would say to Sasha. Bilocerkowycz also puts herself in the shoes of Anna Politkovskaya, a Ukrainian journalist who was murdered in an elevator. Bilocerkowycz says, “Ten years later, when my grandmother dies, I will admire her crown of glory and think about where I came from.”

The essays stand alone, but together the effect is one, long story with intertwined characters and once central conflict–a search for identity. The interconnectedness we see between “The Village (Fugue),” “The Village (Reprise),” and “The Village (De Capo)” is a great example of this. All three stories follow Bilocerkowycz’s grandfather, and her journey of discovering his past actions. In “The Village (Fugue),” we are told by Busia about the village elder in the small Ukrainian village, who then becomes Bilocerkowycz’s grandfather who was aiding the Germans in “The Village (Reprise).” Despite what she learns about her grandfather, Bilocerkowycz does not let the facts erase what she feels for this country and her people. In “The Village (De Capo),” she tells the reader “…I am telling my daughter she may go to the revolution. Which means I am telling my granddaughter, too: Yes, of course, leave home and go.”

Bilocerkowycz’s use of vivid imagery makes the reader feel as though they are experiencing life alongside her. With just its title, “I Saw the Sunshine Melting” offers a both innocent and eerie way to describe the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Bilocerkowycz mentions how many of the bus drivers, one including her great-uncle’s cousin whose name they don’t know, got out as evacuation was occurring and sunbathed, blissfully unaware of radiation poisoning. Readers would also be struck by the imagery in “Encyclopedia of Earthly Things,” a story that is written entirely about Bilocerkowycz’s affiliations with certain words–like the word “poppy,” which she describes as, “Petals of red paper, easily lost. Suggests virginity. The seeds are also like fish eggs.” Each word or object she describes comes along with a resonant image affiliated with her Busia, and although some are sweet, some are brutal, like “A Sunflower Field,” which she describes as, “…a graveyard. It is a cemetery for Boeing plane parts.” 

Though On Our Way Home from the Revolution is rich in history, it is not just a collection for history lovers. Unlike history books, Bilocerkowycz immerses readers in another’s life. We come to understand the emotional reckoning Bilocerkowycz has undergone. As much as this is a collection of essays about revolution, it is also about the yearning to discover one’s place in the world. As Bilocerkowycz asks, “Am I just a reflection of a reflection?” It is a collection for readers who desire to open themselves to harsh realities and see how those realities pave ways for new beginnings. 

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by | December 6, 2019 · 11:15 am

8.1 | Book Review

Nicole Callahan

Aisha Sharif’s To Keep From Undressing: a Review

What is the connotation of the word “performance?” Our primary association with “performance” is the theatrical; our understanding of performance has become inextricably linked to the idea of something pretended, something acted out but not done. We think of performance as dishonest. To perform humility or joy is not understood to be the same as to be humble or joyous.

That may be why people dismiss the idea that identity is a type of performance. To say that identity is what you do and not simply what you are is often an uncomfortable proposition. Many people find comfort in identarian labels—for good reason. Labels like “woman” or “man,” “gay” or “trans,” “Chinese” or “Jewish,” unite individuals with shared experiences and allow for societal comprehension of complex concepts. Aisha Sharif’s collection of poetry, To Keep from Undressing, resonates with a truth seldom expressed so thoroughly: that identity is a performance. A complicated, contradictory performance, clearly, but a sincere one, nonetheless. Throughout her collection, Sharif’s speakers wrestle with their lived experiences. They are Black, Muslim-American women; daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and poets. The way these identities interact is at the very heart of Sharif’s work, it informs the structure of her poetry and her understanding that each identity is its own intricate performance.

To Keep from Undressing is divided into five sections. Each includes a part of the poem “If my Parents Hadn’t Converted: Questions and Answers,” which straddles the line between humorous and sincere hypothetical scenarios. The poem explores how the speaker’s entire life was shaped by one decision. Christian Aisha, or “Marian Elizabeth” would have had a prom dress “just short enough / to reveal / [her] knees.” When asked how many Muslims the Christian version of herself would “actually befriend,” she leaves no response at all. The poem serves as a pillar to the collection, always returning it to the key questions of who we are and how our experiences shape us. Sharif suggests that her Christian self is still her in a way, but that despite the fact that we all have various versions of ourselves contained within us, the Christian Aisha is missing certain key experiences that are an important part of her current identity.

The experimentation with structure in Sharif’s poems establishes her poetic identity. Sharif manipulates the formal aspects of poetry to build upon new ideas. Her poems’ experimental structures further emphasize the importance of performance. In the poem “A Mathematical Expression of Faith,” the relationship between the speaker’s family’s old Christian ways and the new Muslim ways they practice is presented as an equation to balance. Many poems have a call-and-response structure or a song-like quality to them. “After School on the City Bus, Memphis, TN,” for example, is performed as a school yard chant. At a live reading of the poem, Sharif’s voice echoed out the words of a juvenile bully, a taunt which she wishes she had responded to with a song of her own, by singing “Muslims know god.” Poetry’s very roots lie in performance, and these poems emphasize that relationship. Sharif has a firm understanding of her poems’ sonic qualities and the way they play with language and vernacular, for example in “Hijab Be,” where Sharif discusses the versatility and freedom of her fellow hajabis, how “Hijab be prayin’ still. / Hijab be raisin’ hell.” She combines and shapes her different identities and different schools of thought—scientific, schoolyard, Black, Muslim—to establish the identity of her work.

The collection’s philosophy on identity culminates in “The Fitting Room,” where Sharif’s speaker explains to a non-Muslim saleswoman why she wears the hijab. The speaker questions her own choice to cover, though she doesn’t reveal this to the saleswoman. Despite the way she questions her faith, she chooses to put her hijab back on, “pinning the performance in place.” This action is her way of performing faith through her doubt, which shows the complexity of her relationship to covering. Sharif’s hijab reifies her belief in a concrete way. In the simple act of putting on a headscarf, a mere performance, she creates her identity.

In contrast to the act of dressing, the creation of poetry serves as a symbolic undressing. Sharif’s work is the dissolution of identity markers to reach at the undefined internal experience. The collection takes its name from a line found in “Iddah: Part II,” which explores the time after the speaker’s sister got divorced. The sister lies stagnant in yesterday’s clothes, she does “anything to keep from undressing.” When considering the way in which putting on a hijab cemented her external identity in “The Fitting Room,” the act of dressing becomes synonymous with performing identity. In this way, her sister’s fear of undressing signifies an unwillingness to lose her identity of “wife.”

To Keep from Undressing balances the creation and deconstruction of identity. The collection constructs identities, as contradictory and complex as they may be, but it also deconstructs the actions we take to create our identities. It dresses and undresses the poet. To Keep from Undressing is itself a performance that created something real.

Nicole Callahan is working towards a degree at a college. She has done some things, does other things currently, and would like to do still other things in the future. When she isn’t in one place, she can often be found at another. She loves certain books, foods, and activities.

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