Thirst For Salt
Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt bilaterally reframes the way one might look at intimacy. On the one hand, we have the tendency to think of intimacy in the sphere of physicality and sensuality—neither of which is absent from this compelling novel. On the other hand, we have intimacy as Lucas explores it in an evermore refreshing way: intimacy as it relates to the temporal passage of a shared love and the memories we gain, lose, and seek to remember on the way. Thirst for Salt depicts the transformation of the self through the memory of the past; specifically, a summer spent on the beach of an Australian coastal town.
The Hurting Kind
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is a spellbinding love letter to nature. The collection, separated chronologically into four seasons, opens in the spring with a description of a groundhog on its haunches, stealing tomatoes from a backyard garden. Observing this quotidian scene with unmatched curiosity, the speaker compares herself to the animal, wondering, “Why am I not allowed delight?” From this query onward, Limón revels in the interconnectedness of nature and human experience. Depicting cockroaches, lindens, forsythias, horses, and hawks, she writes of loss, infertility, and cultural and familial legacy with stunning attention to detail.
Civil Service
Civil Service is clearly (and self-consciously) the culmination of many years of what Fred Moten refers to as study (a “devotional, sacramental, anamonastic kind of intellectual practice”): Schwartz writes first and foremost as a reader, and the book wonders seriously and thoughtfully about state power, 21st century capitalism, race, sex, love, and even—maybe especially—metapoetics.
A Shiver in the Leaves
Crows swirl and gather in Luther Hughes’ A Shiver in the Leaves. As death-omens and figures of blackness, the birds flit through poems that sway with the tenderest desire and still with mourning. This debut collection from the Seattle-based poet memorializes black boys killed by police and black boys and men who were recent victims of anti-gay hate crimes (Tamir Rice, Giovanni Melton, Dwone Anderson-Young, and Ahmed Said among others). Against the pervasiveness of racist and homophobic violence, the poems in this collection ask if the spaces of healing and intimacy provided by queer domesticity can serve as a sort of refuge from the world.
Francisco
Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco, an autobiographical novel chronicling the young actress’ days in Hollywood and the 1970’s Black Arts movement, was first published in 1974. After years out-of-print, having fallen into relative obscurity, it arrives for contemporary readers as a re-release from New Directions with a foreword by Saidiya Hartman, forthcoming in 2023. Francisco chronicles its protagonist-- an unnamed facsimile of Newman herself-- drifting from day to day through California in the 1970s, demarcating time with a colloquial “anyways” addressed to the reader as she goes between San Francisco and Los Angeles after rejecting an early career in acting. Her language is flooded with the vernacular, all lower-case and typically taking on a familiar, conversational tone with the reader that makes her all the more charming.
Stay True
Though Stay True is about Ken—and succeeds as a full, uncompromising portrait—it’s also an attempt to understand why one’s life is the way it is. It’s a typology, a disaggregation of all that has potentially (re)calibrated Hsu’s life: the immigrant story that his Taiwanese parents can be fitted into (and that the book then moves an appropriate distance away from, to its credit); the American music he inherits from them and discovers for himself; his discovery of Asian America; his political involvements; his experience teaching at San Quentin; a few girlfriends and a few academics.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Rarely do I encounter a work that speaks more to its zeitgeist than Chen Chen’s most recent poetry collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. While the subjects discussed are undeniably tragic—the racism Chen experiences as an Asian American, the Pulse nightclub shooting, his mother’s refusal to acknowledge his queer identity—the collection as a whole drips with sardonic humor. Chen manages to walk the fine line between mockery and hilarity without detracting from the collection’s impact.
Life Ceremony
Sayaka Murata’s prose is deadpan. She is straightforward - no frivolities– she has a knack for dark insight into everyday behavior cut down into a few simple words. Her newest book, Life Ceremony, is another display of this incredible talent. The characters are a mix of old ladies and young women who undergo transformation in the most absurd and unlikely places. By mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, Murata starts to push at the ordinary until it unravels into unusual shapes.
Please make me pretty, I don't want to die
Throughout his debut collection, we read and hear Mulalu stretch the lonely forms of elegy, aria, and sonnet to reflect the breakages of migration and the heart-politics of interracial intimacy. The choice of cover art (Władysław Podkowiński’s Frenzy of Exultations) is as much of a provocation as Mulalu’s epigraph to the first “Aria,” quoting Sylvia Plath’s use of the n-word in “Ariel.” Racialized aesthetics resound within Mulalu’s work, confronted variously with a skinned-raw hurt, an ambivalent probing, and with bleaker, Marecherian pronouncements like “All my poems are in whiteface.” Mulalu’s triad of film studies poems is notably adept at parsing this subject.
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel takes the reader on a poignant journey in an exploration of the simulation hypothesis and prospects of time traveling in her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility. Weaving together contemporary and historical tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic, World War I, and futuristic prognosis of potential technological failure, exemplified as the “file corruption” in the now parseable timeline (Part 6, Chapter 3). Mandel probes the apocalypse not as a source of mass panic but as a series of breakdowns in individual lives.
The Trees Witness Everything
The first thing you will notice about The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang is the shape of the book. An oddly tall, unusually narrow volume, it sticks out on any bookshelf you put it, among any stack of books it lies. It feels odd in the hands, as if it is both too much to hold but not enough to grasp. And when you do open it, another detail will strike you on the very first page: there are two poems, not one. A choice that defies the usual formatting of volumes of poetry, where each poem starts its own page.
Scattered All Over the Earth
Scattered All Over the Earth, the first installment of a trilogy by Japanese novelist Yoko Tawada, opens on the image of Knut, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, flipping through the channels on his TV and dozing off to its unintelligible hubbub. It is in this sluggish position that he chances upon the live recording of a studio program and gradually realizes that the panelists speaking are all people whose birth countries no longer exist. Though eager to change the channel – “this was much too heavy to relax to” – he practically slides off the sofa when the face of a young woman resembling an anime heroine appears on his screen.