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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Weems has commented on (164) products
Gilgamesh: A Verse Play
by
Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia
Weems
, June 26, 2024
I have had the experience of reading a play and being unimpressed to then see a production and come out with a much improved mindset, and this particular script was written with an immediate performance in mind, according to its dramaturg, but the elements that most deflated my interest were its tremendous reliance on redundant dialogue to advance its ideas as well as its muddled and inconsistent characterization of the king of Uruk. While the source material is certainly no model of tight writing, as authorship in ancient Mesopotamia clearly didn’t work on our single-source assumption and we can’t even apply our assumption of a singular text, but Gracia’s introduction about the story being on the fear of mortality doesn’t translate well in this version, which seems hampered by a desire to offer a play imitating a style reminiscent of the original time period. But as the lack of effective performances of Oedipus will attest to this ancient style of performance translates poorly to contemporary expectations of theater. While I always appreciate a script that challenges the creativity of staging, like having stage directions that quite simply state that Humbaba’s arms get chopped off or that the Bull of Heaven attacks, but a story that relies more on its speeches than its actions tends to lose my interest.
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Yellowface
by
R.F. Kuang
Weems
, June 08, 2024
The satire is so, so strong with this one. This story of a white woman who doctors up the unpublished manuscript of her recently deceased (and much more successful) Chinses-American frenemy to publish as the followup to her lackluster debut lays bare the racial politics of the publishing industry, of social media, and explores the mind of a plagiarizing Karen who goes through cycles of self-pitying and imperialist self-justification as the ramifications of her stunt play out. I will admit there are few books I read for the plot itself. I want a plot, I want a sequence of events that show an inherent logic to them that in retrospect prove satisfying to some governing purpose, but not to much as to find out what happens next. This book, however, kept me in that mode of wanting to see what was going to be next, so I found myself checking the time on a work night, seeing if I could get in another chapter and get a decent night's sleep. I got a little worried about how the ending might play out (worried more that I was predicting it too well), but Kuang did not disappoint. So not only is the plot riveting, but the wonderful layers of satire in the most intelligent and intrinsic sense play out in your hands: that you're holding a bestseller that spotlights the way bestsellers are often manufactured by publishing powers that be, and that you're reading a book about yellowfacing that is whitefacing. So brilliant!
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Short History of Trans Misogyny
by
Jules Gill Peterson
Weems
, June 07, 2024
Don't come to this book to find out there is such a thing as trans misogyny (cuz, like, how the hell could you not have noticed?), or if you think trans misogyny is a recent phenomena. Gill-Peterson lays out some centuries of the open and self-justified hatred directed at people who didn't fit into the narrow binary gender system. There are great insights in here into the roots of that hatred and venom and violence, and two of the terms I really latched onto was trans feminization, which is the outside categorization of someone as female who really isn't, a way of minimizing someone's actual identity, and the wonderful sense of 'good enough,' that there doesn't need to be a category or a binary to fit into, that delving into one's own being is all we need to do.
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Temporary
by
Hilary Leichter
Weems
, May 27, 2024
I was intrigued by this book at first and the way it explored temporariness: a woman who works as a temp also maintains several boyfriends and a very immediate lifestyle. But it didn’t take long before I found myself asking what more? The absurdity of the jobs started to feel random, like there had been a target at some point but got lost. This began the skimming, then the scanning. Alas, I just didn’t cling to this book.
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Bliss Montage
by
Ling Ma
Weems
, May 18, 2024
The first two stories had me energized for this collection: Ma gets into speculative very quickly and decisively, like the opening paragraph of the first story that introduces to his the Husband (only name given) of the narrator and the 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a separate wing of the house. The second story, too, is quite a sharp tale of relationship revenge. But I must admit that my steam cooled after those two opening stories. In fact, in one of the longer selections in this book, I actually wondered if I had fuzzed out and had missed the ending of one story and had tromped into a different one. This longish episode also didn't click in with the rest of the story after I had finished it. There are a lot of good ideas at play in Ma's writing (issues of racism, orientalism, toxic masculinity, etc.) and the speculative elements seem pertinent to those ideas, and there are some magnificent moments of writing, but many of these stories simply failed to stick the landing, so to speak. While I wondered if I was unwittingly putting myself in her stories that take on meta-elements and the way other people talk about writing, I found myself a little underwhelmed jsut the same.
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Jewel Box
by
E. Lily Yu
Weems
, May 12, 2024
I was a huge fan of Yu's debut novel, On Fragile Waves, but I was even more excited to see her first short story collection. as the pieces I'd seen in various Best of anthologies were just stunning. And not only are those magnificent pieces in here, like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" and "The Wretched and the Beautiful," but a plentitude more. There is magic IN these pages to be sure, as Yu manipulates speculative fiction with a skill few others can manage: the premises are complex, the exploration of them always surprising and true to the logic of their worlds. Yu addresses xenophobia, sexism, racism and the actualities of human psychology with such alacrity that makes each story feel almost novel length in their depth. But there is magic ON these pages too. What makes these stories feel so rich is how Yu can immerse us within syllables into an already fleshed out world. Yu's precision with language is not just a magnificent show but a show with substance. This is the stuff of great magic. Add to that Yu's intricacies of detail, whether about birds or stair design, and you'll be amazed what one writer can weave.
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It Came from the Closet Queer Reflections on Horror
by
Joe Vallese, Carmen Maria Machado, Bruce Owens Grimm
Weems
, April 21, 2024
This is a wonderful collection that explores the diversity of queer experience and its authors' connections to horror movies. From classics to modern horror, from bi to trans experiences, from joy to heartache and danger (lots of danger, sadly), this collection stands as a compendium of queer writers and a new world of filmic exploration. Standouts for me were Carmen Maria Machado and the amazing Jude Ellison S. Doyle, but as a whole a book worth having if you love horror and want a pile of insight you won't otherwise find very easily in the canon of thought on horror movies.
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Chain-Gang All-Stars
by
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Weems
, November 05, 2023
Adjei-Brenyah is such an impressive writer. His premises are biting satire in its truest sense, in that they cut to the bone of cruelties of the world. Here, it's an engrained sport of having convicted criminals fight to the death to hopefully earn their freedom (though they will no doubt die in the process). If you know his first book, the collection Friday Black, you know how well he can set a premise that runs deep and from there explore it further into its halo issues. I would personally recommend the short story collection over this book, which I slogged through...not because the ideas here are any less sharp, but that the structure of being a novel felt tough to get through. I felt like there were redundancies and not a clear arc of characters here...or, I was just not in the right frame of mind to let this one flow over me. But the fact that this novel not only has brilliance but importance makes it well worth the rating.
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Roses in the Mouth of a Lion
by
Bushra Rehman
Weems
, August 16, 2023
If you know any of Bushra Rehman's previous books, like her first novel Corona and her magnificent poetry collection Marianna's Beauty Salon, you know already that Rehman shows Corona, Queens as a bright and magical place. But not in a sentimental way: Rehman's Corona is dangerous and restrictive, especially for young, queer Razia, the narrator of Rehman's latest work. But there are flowers, dogs who resemble lions, and love to be had. But Razia doesn't always get a lot of help. Her family is very devout and protective, and they have some reason to be in a neighborhood where wearing your house clothes (or being a woman) can put a target on you. Rehman's novel revolves around the problems of categories, especially to Razia, as she doesn't easily fit into any of them completely. She struggles with being Muslim, with being a woman, with expressing her sexuality. At least, she struggles with the way everyone else wants to categorize her. Rehman's novel explores Razia's fight to be (and find) herself, and along the way she gives us wonderful senses of place and descriptions to die for. There's a scene in a Goodwill that is ungodly good. So much to enjoy in this book.
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Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.
by
Laura Jane Grace
Weems
, August 07, 2023
Perhaps not the most well written memoir, so excuse my snootiness, but jeez did I enjoy this book. I'm not as familiar with Against Me!'s music, in that I have listened to their later albums but don't immediately remember lyrics or a specific tune when I see a title, so I think there were no doubt references here that didn't register with me, but I was heartily impressed at the way the book pulls together in the end. For a while, it reads as almost two different books: a recounting of Grace's rise into punk rock with the formation of Against Me! and their subsequent struggles, as well as an accounting of Grace's own dysphoria and her journey to revealing herself to others and finding her personal expression of her identity as opposed to fitting some mold of femininity. But by the end, the two strands come together so well that it all works retroactively as well. And along the way, Grace's candor and direct honesty come through loud and clear. Quite a book.
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Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
by
Laura Jane Grace and Dan Ozzi
Weems
, August 07, 2023
Perhaps not the most well written memoir, so excuse my snootiness, but jeez did I enjoy this book. I'm not as familiar with Against Me!'s music, in that I have listened to their later albums but don't immediately remember lyrics or a specific tune when I see a title, so I think there were no doubt references here that didn't register with me, but I was heartily impressed at the way the book pulls together in the end. For a while, it reads as almost two different books: a recounting of Grace's rise into punk rock with the formation of Against Me! and their subsequent struggles, as well as an accounting of Grace's own dysphoria and her journey to revealing herself to others and finding her personal expression of her identity as opposed to fitting some mold of femininity. But by the end, the two strands come together so well that it all works retroactively as well. And along the way, Grace's candor and direct honesty come through loud and clear. Quite a book.
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Ones Who Dont Say They Love You Stories
by
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Weems
, June 19, 2023
I had previously read We Cast A Shadow and found it inconsistent and clunky in pacing. There was so much praise for this collection on the cover of that book, enough to give this one a shot. But the ideas feel too much in the sleeve, run out there to make sure you get the point rather than smack you with it. There’s a lot of powerful stuff behind these stories, just not in the stories themselves.
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Liberation Day
by
George Saunders
Weems
, May 27, 2023
George Saunders is high on humor and rich with an ear for odd idioms that keep his work immensely readable while still being fresh and genius at its core rather than dumbed down. I frankly do fear that Saunders will be (and has probably already been) an object of critical study, but I fear worse that Saunders may in some way aspire to that canonizing. There are stories here that do the classic Saunders switching PoV, or taking us deep into a stilted PoV that makes us crawl out to figure out the actual situation at hand, which are methods that testify to Saunders's skill and humanity: the PoV switches making himself sympathize with all, and the immersion into his fictional worlds is also an act of kindness, for his logic is consistent and navigable to the reader who cares to ride the wave. Butat his best, Saunders makes the horrific laughable, and vice versa as well. Saunders can deliver a good kick in the pants, but if you want an author with a reminiscent style who DOES offer a good kick to the pants, get yourself some Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I've only read the premier collection, saving the debut novel for my summer reading, and it's a little sad to say that I'm capping off my review with a recommendation of a different author, but I do feel it's time to let the white guys step back a bit and let the real pant-kickers kick some pant.
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Date of Birth
by
Shawn R Jones
Weems
, May 26, 2023
When you've been a fan of Jones's poetry as long as I have, you know that her work jumps into the deepest cuts of pain but also the sublime cocoons of joy. Date of Birth comes to a new level, if a new level among such extremes is possible (and it IS possible, if you read this book). Date of Birth has found that spot where pain leads to the compulsion to save everyone from it. As the speaker of "Afraid To Open This Letter From Inmate 17650-328" insists, "I don't know how to love//without exhausting myself. I keep running from/window to window punishing myself every time//I miss." Some poetry wallows in its pain, yearns for pity, but Jones shows us the thrust to save others because of that pain, and despite the reality that we can't save everyone that smacks us with every miss, we're better when we keep putting out our arms to catch others. This is a mighty, mighty book.
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Black Guy Dies First Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar
by
Robin R Means Coleman, Mark H Harris
Weems
, April 29, 2023
Coleman's Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present is, in of itself, a magnificent book: a highly studied and researched history of Black representation in horror movies that points out the (many, many, many, MANY) problems as well as the successes as well as the noted room for improvement. I am really happy that Coleman offered it to be (hopefully) a mainstay and pinnacle text for film studies. My only hangup about that book was its academic tone:necessary for its venue, but unfortunately limiting in its appeal. So how wonderful to see a followup, this time joining forces with BlackHorrorMovies.com pioneer Mark H. Harris, for this volume that offers all the magnificent research and insight that made Horror Noire a masterpiece and to bring it all (and more) out of the "horrid halls of academia" (thanks Faculty of Horror) and into another highly studied and researched history of Black representation in horror movies that is consistently funny, wise, horrifying, and full of love and a desire for better work from the genre. From segments on bad use of hip-hop in horror movies, to the treatise on queer representation, back to other whimsically serious segments like "10 Horror Movies About Race Relations Not Named Get Out," Coleman and Harris have yet another pinnacle tome on the problems and the progress made in a genre that is rich in social commentary, despite the plaintive screes of White gatekeeping bros waving tiny T-rex arms.
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Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
by
Georges Perec
Weems
, April 22, 2023
Perec’s La Disparition is legendary for being a 300-page novel that doesn’t use the letter e. It doesn’t remove this common letter: Perec simply (yeah, easy to say) doesn’t use any words with the letter in them. It’s an amazingly tough restriction that is meaningful to the subject matter of the book itself. But not nearly enough heralded is the fact that Gilbert Adair’s English translation, A Void, is also e-less, which only seems logical, but impresses me even further for having a restriction of alphabet coupled with a restriction of content, as Adair had to be e-less while honoring Perec’s content. All of the foregoing is to establish Perec as a highly intellectual writer who is tough to translate. And that I felt disappointment with this book on both ends of that dynamic. The premise is of only mild interest: Perec observes a popular spot in Paris for its more mundane details, scripted out periodically in list-like format. The end result is of mild interest at best, and I don’t fault the English translator for that but that the original comes across as an exercise rather than a final product, though the translator’s ebullient afterword comes across as overcompensating and trying to justify this extravagant expense (considering the brevity of pages you get for the price) that has such little payoff.
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Unidentified Mythical Monsters Alien Encounters & Our Obsession with the Unexplained
by
Colin Dickey
Weems
, January 02, 2023
I must admit I was not sure I was going to like this book as much as I enjoyed Dickey's previous book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. I was hesitant because the joy of Ghostland was the travelog element, Dickey going from haunt to haunt to give us direct observation as well as those wonderful insights into the needs these ghost stories fulfilled. The Unidentified takes a broader view with less of the travels involved, due in part to many of the stories of cryptids and UFO sightings happened a long time ago, and thus I thought the book's scope would undermine it. Well, I was absolutely wrong. Dickey doesn't hesitate to delve into matters of white supremacy and your needs for certainty to dig into the atmosphere behind these drives to conspire and invent connections, sometimes while on the other hand professing scientific standards. Dickey doesn't look to disprove, but to delve into the sociology and psychology that these conspiracy theorists express through their rants and arguments and professions. With only a well-deserved hint of MAGA, the taint and roots of Q-Anoners and other beliefs have shape, all while Dickey reminds us that these extraordinary theories are rooted in human bases.
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House of Day, House of Night
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, December 27, 2022
Requires a little patience on my end to immerse myself in some of Tokarczuk’s novels, most notably works in this style, where we are introduced to a series of threads that read like momentary vignettes or observations rather than fragments of a building storyline. The language and descriptions of people and places are marvelous and insightful, but it’s hard to see the narrative drive. But Tokarczuk rewards your patience, if you grant it. Many of her books explore our tendency to want borders and boundaries. This book turns on transformations and how they challenge our notions that things must be separate: waking vs. dream life, gender, countries, nature and humanity. Most marvelous is Tokarczuk’s love of change not to make things shinier but also how change leads to a lovely messiness. Tokarczuk is amazingly philosophical while so rooted in the tangible and its inherent beauty, especially when it comes to mushrooms.
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Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done
by
Eric Powell, Harold Schecter
Weems
, December 13, 2022
A graphic true-crime novel on the crimes and times of Ed Gein (cannibal, necrophiliac, grave robber, killer, human skin home decor reupholsterer) underwhelming and frankly rather purposeless? This book disappoints in a few ways. First off, this is a story that’s been told and told again, so if you are already even somewhat acquainted with the Gein situation, there is little to learn further here: the pop culture connection with Hitchcock and Hooper, the body discovery, etc. And if this subject is new to you, the problem here is that it’s a book that lingers on the creepiness of Gein’s life and crimes, which is an old fashioned, antiquated to tackle true crime. No doubt, there is still a thriving industry of crime fetish (ie, Netflix’s recent Dahmer series), but take recent efforts like I’ll Be Gone In the Dark or even The Vow, you see a greater effort to minimize the perpetrators and spotlight the victims. This book does the exact opposite. But this book also disappoints in its graphic format as well. Just a couple of stylized images of Gein’s mother. Otherwise, the imagery is bland and stale. To sum up, fetish-murder true crime account that can’t even admit to its fetish and instead pulls back as though it is a text to be taken seriously. Just a disappointment.
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The Rupture Tense
by
Jenny Xie
Weems
, December 10, 2022
Xie's writing appears on the page often with wide gaps between lines because the poetry itself is so thick with meaning, as so many of her poems in The Rupture Tense are about defining the self. Xie dives into that constantly elusive definition through setting, through artwork, through memory, through language. All often simultaneously. The titular poem, an epic in its own right, is so fascinating in its efforts to nail down on the page what it is unable to do, as that exploration itself is so absolutely the point. A magnificent collection.
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All Aunt Hagars Children
by
Edward P Jones
Weems
, November 25, 2022
I had been utterly mesmerized by Lost In the City. Critical responses to Jones comparing him to Alice Munro were accurate in terms of the way he can embed a lifetime into a short story while still making honoring short story form through immediate action, but Jones also has a thickness of US culture, the clash of tradition and heritage, that simply isn’t in Munro’s wheelhouse. But when I started this collection, I was a shade cool about it. I felt there was the form and writing brilliance that had part of my allure to Lost, but the stories hadn’t grabbed me yet. Until “Old Boys, Old Girls,” that is. And I was back into that brilliant density. So much so that I went back and reread the stories that had passed without endearment and proved myself wrongheaded. I rarely do that. There is just so MUCH at stake in Jones’s stories. They are gritty and poetic, racism and white supremacy often in the corner but never oppressing the stories themselves. And a potent sense of geography, for the characters as well as the reader. Even his opening sentences are thick, making you read on his terms to enter the current of the story you are trudging into. I almost can’t imagine Jones can maintain that energy in a full-length novel, but that book awaits me on my not-yet-read shelf, so I can’t deny the possibility.
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All Aunt Hagars Children
by
Edward P Jones
Weems
, November 25, 2022
I had been utterly mesmerized by Lost In the City. Critical responses to Jones comparing him to Alice Munro were accurate in terms of the way he can embed a lifetime into a short story while still making honoring short story form through immediate action, but Jones also has a thickness of US culture, the clash of tradition and heritage, that simply isn’t in Munro’s wheelhouse. But when I started this collection, I was a shade cool about it. I felt there was the form and writing brilliance that had part of my allure to Lost, but the stories hadn’t grabbed me yet. Until “Old Boys, Old Girls,” that is. And I was back into that brilliant density. So much so that I went back and reread the stories that had passed without endearment and proved myself wrongheaded. I rarely do that. There is just so MUCH at stake in Jones’s stories. They are gritty and poetic, racism and white supremacy often in the corner but never oppressing the stories themselves. And a potent sense of geography, for the characters as well as the reader. Even his opening sentences are thick, making you read on his terms to enter the current of the story you are trudging into. I almost can’t imagine Jones can maintain that energy in a full-length novel, but that book awaits me on my not-yet-read shelf, so I can’t deny the possibility.
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Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law
by
Mary Roach
Weems
, November 24, 2022
There is just so much to take from Mary Roach’s work in every subject that comes under her scrutiny. Her humor seems to be something often tagged in any address of her journalistic style, and hell yes, I had lol moments galore (ie, bear roleplay). But humor is too often dismissed as not serious (I know, “No, duh”), but yes, good humor comes not from an ice cream truck but serious effort, and Roach is unsparing in her immersion to make sure she can appreciate and thus provide us with a four-dimensional view, this time of the science behind humanity dealing with the rest of the animal (and even plant) kingdom. She immediately gets, not judges, the people dedicated to finding the balance of effective tending of invasive species that don’t upset balances built by aeons of progress. There are of course revelations to be found here about species and scientific practices and disproving popular thought (since, to paraphrase Mark Twain, common sense isn’t). And Roach’s conclusions are so knowledgeably humanitarian and humanistic, I think I’d vote her ambassador to any extraterrestrial meet and greet.
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Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
by
Mary Roach
Weems
, November 24, 2022
There is just so much to take from Mary Roach’s work in every subject that comes under her scrutiny. Her humor seems to be something often tagged in any address of her journalistic style, and hell yes, I had lol moments galore (ie, bear roleplay). But humor is too often dismissed as not serious (I know, “No, duh”), but yes, good humor comes not from an ice cream truck but serious effort, and Roach is unsparing in her immersion to make sure she can appreciate and thus provide us with a four-dimensional view, this time of the science behind humanity dealing with the rest of the animal (and even plant) kingdom. She immediately gets, not judges, the people dedicated to finding the balance of effective tending of invasive species that don’t upset balances built by aeons of progress. There are of course revelations to be found here about species and scientific practices and disproving popular thought (since, to paraphrase Mark Twain, common sense isn’t). And Roach’s conclusions are so knowledgeably humanitarian and humanistic, I think I’d vote her ambassador to any extraterrestrial meet and greet.
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The Famished Road
by
Ben Okri
Weems
, August 25, 2022
There is an endless fascination to writing stories about beings who live in and out of our existence, as old as Gilgamesh and no doubt far older. So this book doesn't really break new ground, but the rather distanced writing here, with its sequences of very declarative sentences, seem to suggest some sense of discovery or uncovered philosophy, which makes the rather dispassionate approach feel ultimately arrogant. It was hard not comparing this book to Freshwater, which I didn't wholly embrace by the end, but in retrospect I appreciate more now how Emezi brought much more emotion and emotional impact to the spiritual world in their book and clearly had good use for it in their narrative, while here I was having strings of concrete details thrown at me with less and less drive behind them.
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Kangaroo Notebook
by
Kobo Abe
Weems
, August 23, 2022
There's a fine line with surrealism, and when you fall off, you often do so in one of two directions. One is realm of the Random, where the details feel generated on a wheel with little connection among them, leaving little interest to be had among them, as there's no shudder of recognition of even of the author's imagination to be wowed by. The other direction is that of the Faux-Symbolic, where every pipe is no longer a pipe and looms there as Something Else, which again lowers interest, as it now feels that the author is playing a cat and mouse game, trying to hide meaning from us and frankly being a little superior and toying with us. I don't know which side Abe falls onto with this book (and with many of his books, as I've been finding out this summer), but he's well off the fine wire, in my opinion. Surrealism seems to work best when it explores its own logic and carries us along with that exploration. It can be a little offsetting, like a Kafka story or a Lanthimos movie, but if its logic is sound, we'll catch up if we're diligent. Abe's novels, this one included, seem to throw random elements to shock or confuse us, but rarely with much payoff. Radish sprouts and secret corridors in hospitals might be the fodder of sociologists to dig into for critical studies, but they's leaving me rather cold in reaction to reading.
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Box Man
by
Kobo Abe
Weems
, August 17, 2022
Been (re)reading (kinda, see below) Abe this summer as I’ve been shelf-auditing: going through tomes I’ve held onto to make sure I have enough recollection of them to warrant keeping them. In grad school and shortly thereafter, I picked up a fascination with Abe and Kenzaburo Oe, but Abe in particular I hadn’t returned to in close to 30(!) years. Looking at them, I recalled basic premises, but not much more. And certainly not the endings. And with Box Man, the third disappointment in my return trip, I honestly think I would have similarly stared blankly at you back then had you asked me what happened in this book. Abe sets himself up for potentially interesting philosophical questions (here, a homeless man who lives like a turtle in a cardboard box is paid by a doctor who wants to do the same, which carries some commentaries on attitudes about homelessness and identity when two identical box men present themselves) but the Kafka comparisons I’ve read are a far, far stretch and the absurdism sweaty and quite forced. Nostalgia’s a bummer.
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Better Luck Next Time
by
Julia Claiborne Johnson
Weems
, August 17, 2022
Sorry. The tone of this book was too on the sleeve for Bestseller Contention. Seemed to run through a checklist of things I’ve agents talk about when noting books that Sell. So I felt like I wasn’t reading anything at all.
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Face of Another
by
Kobo Abe
Weems
, August 17, 2022
I waffled between 2 and 3 stars to come down on 2 by the very end end. This book ultimately felt rather dated, a Novel wanting to explore Big Ideas when a scientist who has burned his face horribly in an accident decides to create a prosthetic face, as it were, to rejoin society, which gets him into tangents about the prejudice of faces and of course the question of identity if you have another face. The story is told from the scientist, so I’m not assuming his philosophizing to also be Abe’s, but the passages are long and essentially epistolary, a format that breaks down greatly in the end and convinced me towards the lower rating. Seems there was a style of the manly Novel where small moves made for chapters of pondering, all for a premise that could have come forward fifty or so pages to challenge itself further.
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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Revised Edition)
by
Jesse Andrews
Weems
, August 14, 2022
Sorry. Just couldn’t read this book past its references. And I don’t mean its internal references. I means the John Green meets Lemony Snicket meets Nick Hornsby style. I’m one who does feel art isn’t created in a vacuum, but this book felt like it was using the above and more rather than launching from them.
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How Much of These Hills Is Gold
by
C Pam Zhang
Weems
, August 14, 2022
Understanding that reviews are measures of reactions and not an estimation of quality, you should note that there is a lot I am glad to see about this book: new faces at the table, new perspectives, new stories being told. And there is great potential to this story: an orphaned brother and sister in Gold Rush days having to make it on their own, the baggage of their troubled immigrant parents and their own growth obstacles as well as say to day survival. Except that this plot line is actually a minority of the novel, and that’s one of the main elements that spurs my rating. A major chunk of the book goes backwards, explanations I wasn’t compelled to leave the present narrative for. It isn’t a senseless intrusion, of course, and Zhang is skilled enough to justify it, but it was a method that worked only logically for me but not as a compelling story.
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A Children's Bible
by
Lydia Millet
Weems
, August 12, 2022
Millet's book works through the perspective of a teenage girl, Evie, who has separated herself from the grownups as well as the other children during a group summer vacation. During this particular vacation, disaster strikes. Millet's approach of working with a young narrator is surprisingly effective. She doesn't overdo Evie's knowledge or outlook, as so many YA adventure stories suffer with, nor is her approach condescending or stink of an older author pretending to be young, like Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. My only holdback about this book is that the disaster portion of the book makes moves that I found myself doubting. As I read on, I wondered at times if such events were going to turn out to have been fantasy, but at the same time I didn't want the book to turn out to be a form of dream that someone wakes from, as that would have been SUCH a weak, beginner move. I like where the book ends up, and I do think some of the blurbs on the back are quite on point (I only read them after I'd finished the book) about the book ultimately commenting on generational divides and the perspective of young people when faced with the dumpster fire their elders have left for them, but I somehow can't get over how little I was ready to give myself over to some of the events that happened along the way and found myself dubious of them, even when the book pretty plainly laid them out for me.
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Hearing Trumpet
by
Leonora Carrington, Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, August 07, 2022
Carrington's novel is probably one of the most Kafkaesque novels I've read in a while, especially among novels I've seen described as Kafkaesque. The novel follows an elderly woman, Marian Leatherby, whose family dump her onto a rest home of sorts for elderly women who are relegated to outdoor structures that resemble miniature golf obstacles and subjected to persistent lectures from the owner and his wife about how to live properly. The institute has secrets, of course, and Marian and her compatriots start to delve into the darker aspects of the institute in ways that are positively apocalyptic in nature, all stemming from Marian receiving a hearing trumpet from a friend of hers that allows her to listen finally to all the talk that has been happening all around here. Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk offers an afterword that at first offers a great point about how Carrington's novel makes an important feminist statement by taking up the story of old women, castoffs in society for having lost their objectifying appeal. But I was already struggling with the ending, which in some ways felt a tad overdone, but Tokarczuk starts to break down the feminist allusions to be found at many parts of the novel. If this book is ultimately a collection of representations to various feminist figures and details, than I have a lower recommendation for it, as I think the story and style make a strong enough statement without the checklist of references.
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How Long til Black Future Month Stories
by
N. K. Jemisin
Weems
, August 04, 2022
I struggle with a lot of genre fiction, and that’s usually because so much of it is written at a level that is adequate at best, and more so resorts to a common toolbox of techniques (i.e., expositionary dialogue, diction drops that give a sense of otherworldliness) that I become quickly bored. So thankfully there is Jemisin. The writing here is sharp and expert. And the ideas are wonderful and so thankfully beyond the white patriarchal world of macho heroes taming more and more buxom nymphettes. Obviously, I’m oversimplifying the wider sci-fi/fantasy out there, but not by a whole lot. Jemisin brings a queer, feminist, diverse perspective and even better writes as sharply and with the imagination and philosophy of a Borges. As this is my first experience, I am eager to read more.
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Queen of Teeth
by
Hailey Piper
Weems
, July 28, 2022
I really wanted to like this book more than I did, as the material is rich with connections to bodily autonomy and the fight against others who want to have say over those considered Other, as Yaya, a queer woman with a monster literally growing inside her, comes to understand her power. Perhaps my failing to embrace this book is my own preference away from genre, for I found the narrative too loose, needing to fill in moments step by step rather than finding a point to condense and intensify the story. And for having a story of a monster growing out her a woman’s body, the imagery just never struck me sharply as I’d hoped it would. I hope others get much more from this book than I did.
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That Old Ace In The Hole
by
Annie Proulx
Weems
, July 25, 2022
Proulx is so good at painting such oddball characters at a pinch, with a talent for skewing our perspective about as quickly as Flannery O’Connor. But Proulx surpasses Flan-O with names that seem wholly absurd yet possible. This novel follows Bob Dollar, who has been living with his Uncle Tambourine (see?) since being abandoned by his parents. Now wanting to get out on his own, Bob takes a job as a site scout to find Texas farms ready to sell for the pig industry. Bob, of course, finds his job hard when he gets into the territory itself. Think of the movie Local Hero but in a panhandle. Proulx’s magic is indeed a wonder on a sentence level, but the opening third of the book felt more like an anthology than a cohesive narrative, with a timeline that seems to twist into four dimensions with strings that feel less than necessary. And without this backbone, even some of the more striking paragraphs later on felt more and more wearying, much like the gear most of this book happens in. Had Proulx managed and ending that had thrown me for a warmly surprising loop, I might have felt more forgiveness for the book as a whole, but alas she did not. A novel that unfortunately could do with a highlight reel.
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The Overstory
by
Richard Powers
Weems
, July 21, 2022
I came back to this book after a false start because Keanu Reeves spoke highly of it. Powers, a man whose name would NEVER work in a work of fiction if you were naming an author who wrote Big Books, is an author of Big Ideas, though I am honestly only acquainted with two of his novels now. Powers works on good scientific knowledge of nature and how screwed we’ve made ourselves through our treatment of it, but not just to preach but to examine how we throw ourselves blindly to (and past) the brink (he types during a near-90 day in upstate NY), and how even our efforts to save ourselves only leads to stubborn acts of reciprocation (sound familiar?), but with hope that the world will correct us, that we are necessary but certainly not top of the food chain.
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The Overstory
by
Richard Powers
Weems
, July 21, 2022
I came back to this book after a false start because Keanu Reeves spoke highly of it. Powers, a man whose name would NEVER work in a work of fiction if you were naming an author who wrote Big Books, is an author of Big Ideas, though I am honestly only acquainted with two of his novels now. Powers works on good scientific knowledge of nature and how screwed we’ve made ourselves through our treatment of it, but not just to preach but to examine how we throw ourselves blindly to (and past) the brink (he types during a near-90 day in upstate NY), and how even our efforts to save ourselves only leads to stubborn acts of reciprocation (sound familiar?), but with hope that the world will correct us, that we are necessary but certainly not top of the food chain.
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The Overstory
by
Richard Powers
Weems
, July 21, 2022
I came back to this book after a poor effort at it because Keanu Reeves spoke highly of it. Powers, a man whose name would NEVER work in a work of fiction if you were naming an author who wrote Big Books, is an author of Big Ideas, though I am honestly only acquainted with two of his novels now. Powers works on good scientific knowledge of nature and how screwed we’ve made ourselves through our treatment of it, but not just to preach but to examine how we throw ourselves blindly to (and past) the brink (he types during a near-90 day in upstate NY), and how even our efforts to save ourselves only leads to stubborn acts of reciprocation (sound familiar?), but with hope that the world will correct us, that we are necessary but certainly not top of the food chain.
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The Vegetarian
by
Han Kang and Deborah Smith
Weems
, July 15, 2022
Kang's novel is a disturbing account of a woman who makes a horrid choice: she declares herself a vegetarian. Well, in the world of South Korea where this novel is set, Yeong-hye's decision is in fact that horrid. Kang spend the first two thirds of the book immersing us in the perspectives of Yeong-hye's husband and brother-in-law to show us how this decision of hers is treated as an illness (and an alluring one, unfortunately) by her entire family. Yeong-hye, of course, doesn't get a voice in any of this, because Kang's book seems to study the patriarchy hovering over her and the extents they'll take when a woman makes a decision about her own body. The third portion is where Kang lets us see more into the message of the book, taking on the perspective of Yeong-hye's older sister. While the back cover matter asserts the book as Kafkaesque, Kang's efforts are even darker, if that is possible (and yes, I think it is). My only holdback is that it took the final section to really lift the book for me. Before that, I felt too dragged down by the lousy men, not because they were lousy or I wanted them to be less so, but I found them less interesting for their issues and not carrying the narrative for me. Still, a powerful book overall.
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If I Had Your Face
by
Frances Cha
Weems
, July 10, 2022
The opening chapters of Cha's novel are highly engaging, as she delves into issues not only being applied to South Korean culture but also to any patriarchal system: women who live on the edge of disaster, who have jobs that literally cater to men by pouring their drinks and flirting with them, sometimes delving into more, requiring them to upkeep themselves with painful and expensive surgeries to keep what little advantage they have. Cha chooses a split narrative, shifting among these women and others teetering on a precipice due to the power the men in their lives, as well as the higher class people they service, with an economy that will bury them if they fail. As the novel continues, however, these shifts in narrative feel more like an accounting of social issues and the effects of classism and patriarchy than delving further into character, leaving the latter half of the book without much drive for me. Even though some dramatic events occur, I felt they were more to play out the commentary than engage me with the characters themselves.
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Inter Ice Age 4
by
Kobo Abe
Weems
, July 03, 2022
This was among some books on my shelves that I knew I'd once read but had little recollection of otherwise. Abe has intriguing ideas, but I recall his novels feeling unwieldy (or the translation). There is an imaginative view of the apocalypse here, but Abe's moments of character logic are often unappreciable, making the human commentary underneath a little difficult to ride along with to get the full picture of Abe's vision.
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How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
by
Jane Wong
Weems
, June 27, 2022
Wong’s poetry is so wonderfully playful in both diction and form, with surprises around every space and line break. One might think the next page can do more, that the permutations must have run dry, but no, the next page and the next set another universe to explore.
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Best American Short Stories 2010
by
Pitlor, Heidi
Weems
, June 21, 2022
So the B.A.S.S. series, while self-aggrandizing on one hand, also shows a limited scope of consideration, as despite the length of publications they may list in the back every year, there is a much wider scope of zines out there, even if you keep to the realm of the literary. This has always been a limitation of this series, fueled no doubt by publishing interests to keep a certain pantheon of publications in the spotlight, but this particular volume crossed the line with me. Guest editor Richard Russo’s intro set a vapid tone for his aesthetic, but regardless of the guest editor’s peccadilloes, I usually find some stories to warrant at least a couple of stars (and yes, this is an early appearance by the amazing Karen Russell), but series editor Heidi Pitlor’s foreword, to first try to champion the dinosaurs BASS has always championed and try to make us weep for their growing obsolescence, but the also lament that at one point of the production stage she wondered if they would have enough stories for this year’s volume?!? When a publication so limited in scope double downs on it and acts like there’s nowhere else in the world to look for competent writing, I got little love for your efforts.
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A Lucky Man
by
Jamel Brinkley
Weems
, April 15, 2022
My reviews are personal reactions. I don't offer them with any intention of deciding what is Good or Bad, Worthy or Unworthy of attention. Simply put,for me, I found these stories tending towards spirals rather than progression, starting with a decent amount of energy, but then feeling a need to come back to starting moments to explain rather than moving forward. For me, this kind of freeze for exposition feels like a latent distrust that a reader can make the Connection, and worse stalls all progression of the story itself. Starting off with a child pretending to be a robot, for example, when the author shows us a problematic relationship with his mother, makes the point rather clear: that the boy wants to make himself emotionless, impervious to betrayal or neglect. But rather than build on that kernel, Brinkley feels compelled to explain to take us out of the situation of the story. A small example, but indicative of a pattern I found again and again, which broke my dream of reading.
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Everything I Never Told You
by
Celeste Ng
Weems
, February 12, 2022
I found Little Fires Everywhere magnificent, and while Everything I Never Told You has a similar vision, but it somehow grabbed me less immediately, and I felt just slightly disengaged from the book. Ng has such powerful things to say about interpersonal relations around race, but this book read to me like the Goodfellas when I'd already gone through the refinement and perfection of Casino. Weird simile, I know, but Everything had all the stuff going but somehow didn't grab me in the process.
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Everything I Never Told You
by
Celeste Ng
Weems
, February 12, 2022
I found Little Fires Everywhere magnificent, and while Everything I Never Told You has a similar vision, but it somehow grabbed me less immediately, and I felt just slightly disengaged from the book. Ng has such powerful things to say about interpersonal relations around race, but this book read to me like the Goodfellas when I'd already gone through the refinement and perfection of Casino. Weird simile, I know, but Everything had all the stuff going but somehow didn't grab me in the process.
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Everything I Never Told You
by
Celeste Ng
Weems
, February 12, 2022
I found Little Fires Everywhere magnificent, and while Everything I Never Told You has a similar vision, but it somehow grabbed me less immediately, and I felt just slightly disengaged from the book. Ng has such powerful things to say about interpersonal relations around race, but this book read to me like the Goodfellas when I'd already gone through the refinement and perfection of Casino. Weird simile, I know, but Everything had all the stuff going but somehow didn't grab me in the process.
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Lost In The City
by
Edward P Jones
Weems
, January 16, 2022
This is an extraordinary book of short stories. Jones takes the geographical focus of the Washington DC area to study a host of characters being faced with their shortcomings, their enmities, and also in finding their joy. Jones infuses a lifetime into a short story, including one of the shortest in this collection, "A Butterfly on F Street," where a recent widow runs into the woman her husband had left her for on the street. In some stories, like "The Store," Jones take us through an extensive chunk of a character's life, but the most potent stories, like F Street, land us in a moment when the character's entire essence is being challenged: was Mildred Harper anything more than a jilted wife before this run-in, where she can make herself more? Another potent story is "A Dark Night," where a group of women in an apartment building for the elderly all huddle in one as a fierce storm threatens, two of the women once good friends who have estranged each other. Jones's characters don't always succeed, nor would we want them to, but the way he packs a lifetime into a sentence or two is beyond impressive. Take this sequence from "A Dark Night": "The four women seated around Carmena Boone's efficiency apartment grew still and spoke in whispers, when they spoke at all: They were each of them no longer young, and they had been all raise to believe that such weather was-aside from answered prayers-the closest thing to the voice of God. And so each in her way listened." What a book.
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Ghostland An American History in Haunted Places
by
Colin Dickey
Weems
, January 10, 2022
In the classic vein of sociology, psychology and monster theory (concurrent and consecutive), Dickey takes us through a myriad of haunted sites in the US to sometimes dispel rumor with fact instantaneously to get at the heart of the question: why do we NEED these haunts? What do they say about the way we want to see our history? What are we avoiding by telling a ghost tale rather than the sad story of the Truth? Dickey’s insights in every chapter amaze and enlighten. For example, that a place of horrors, where slave trade and the torture of the enslaved can come out with ghost stories of white people to pave over their dark history, thus showing how even ghost stories smack of white privilege. From Salem to New Orleans to Hill House, Dickey maps the country with the stories we tell and why we tell them.
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Indigo Arm Wrestling Snake Saving & Some Things In Between
by
Padgett Powell
Weems
, December 18, 2021
At first, I was going to recommend skipping entirely the meandering, self centered Foreword by Pete Dexter, and I am still something of that mindset, but in truth, it probably IS a rather noteworthy opening to this book, which is more of a collection of various and sundry nonfiction efforts by Padgett Powell, wordsmithy extraordinaire. From a profile of a world champion arm wrestler's return (not to competition weight, but to the industry), to a craft talk reeking of contractual obligation, to snippets on writers meaningful to Powell. So there is almost no reason to read this in the order they are offered, nor in any rush. That way, you may soak in a sequence like the following, from the memoirish piece, "Hitting Back": "One day, wearing this natty outfit or one like it, I had been playing with my disapproving friend, and after play, inside, discovered dog sh*t in the pocket of this handsome blouse. What was particularly galling was my mistaking the matter for dirt until virtually tasting it in the course of my assay. I concluded that my friend Don had put the sh*t in my shirt: it must have slid off the hoe when he hit me in the head with the hoe. That - being struck - was regular and acceptable. But this fouling of one's wardrobe was a bit wide of beam, perhaps even my mother was besmirched, and I recall this moment as my very first instant of moral outrage. I did nothing about it."
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Freshwater
by
Akwaeke Emezi
Weems
, December 13, 2021
As Emezi’s essay at the end of this book attests, this book is about identity in various ways, as you would expect a competent novel to do: national identity, racial, gender, sexual. Emezi tells this story through a multitude of gods inhabiting the main character, to take us through the struggles of finding one’s place. I wish I’d been as fulfilled by this approach as I’d been enthralled by it at the onset, but I hope others have seen into this book with more vim, for Emezi’s talent is clear, and I hope to see more.
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A Sentimental Hairpin
by
Flower Conroy
Weems
, December 13, 2021
To say these poems are stripped to the bone is so inaccurate, because there is flesh here too. Flesh and sinew and the moments of doubt and passion and sadness and love that fill the gap between synapses. Flower Conroy shows us the worlds contained within hyphens, the negative images of our fears that only serve to highlight them more clearly. These words of mine do no justice to Conroy’s. You need to dive into them yourself, and when you do, I hope you find the incorporeal, meaty self these poems dwell in.
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Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family
by
Hannah Howard
Weems
, October 23, 2021
I personally find memoir too self-indulgent a form, but Hannah Howard hits us with a level of honesty that overshadows egocentrism, and speaking of indulgence, the glories of food and the horrors of the struggles of body image and eating disorders are all fair game for this powerful writer. Throw in some homage to mighty women in an unfortunately male-dominated food industry, and you have yourself quite a package of a book here.
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In the Dream House
by
Carmen Maria Machado
Weems
, October 02, 2021
I wasn't a complete fan of Her Body and Other Parties. And I also found myself shy of embracing The Low, Low Woods.But inthis book,Machado delivers, not only to bring light to the subject of abusive queer relationships, but to offer up a memoir that presumes no interest and instead generates its own. One thing Machado does so expertly is the use of 2nd person point of view. All too many memoirs feel the need at some point to wax philosophical, or historical, or even mythological, something like a chapter in the book Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, that takes us through a prolonged exploration of the myth of the Green Knight. The chapter feels horribly indulgent, the author talking down from the pulpit, and worse, exploiting any sympathy they've generated to highlight their own pedantry. Machado does offer a rather intellectual reaction to her own past, but she handles this aspect regularly along the way of the book, rather than stepping out of the timeline for a prolonged exercise in self-obsessed thought. That the book is generally set up in relatively short chapters probably helps this matter, but I found the scattering of this approach rather than the lump-chapter approach so much more engaging. Again, I am sorry that I am finding Machado's strongest work to date the result of having to struggle through the horrific events she offers up, but I hope the process was healing. Call me an unreserved Machado fan. I look forward to what comes next.
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Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
by
Kate Moore
Weems
, September 04, 2021
The events behind this book are of course disconcerting (to say the least) and deserve to be told: how for years, women had been hired to paint watch faces and other equipment with radium, and how ignorance, greed and patriarchy made the resulting illnesses of these women something to overlook, and how the women themselves (the surviving ones) took a stand and made changes. Worthwhile and necessary facts to help with the continuing drive to enlighten our history. My rating simply comes from the writing of the book itself. Moore clearly cares a lot about the stories of these women, but the presentation of the story simply became redundant and droll. I'm glad I know of these women. I just wish the book itself had been more engaging for me.
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Handmaids Tale Movie Tie In
by
Margaret Atwood
Weems
, September 01, 2021
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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Handmaids Tale
by
Margaret Atwood
Weems
, September 01, 2021
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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Handmaids Tale
by
Margaret Atwood
Weems
, September 01, 2021
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by
Margaret Atwood
Weems
, September 01, 2021
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by
Margaret Atwood
Weems
, September 01, 2021
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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A Safe Girl to Love
by
Casey Plett
Weems
, August 23, 2021
I really enjoyed Plett’s novel Little Fish, and what I feared (and got over) in that book turned out to be what had me losing interest in the longer stories of this collection, which was to feel like there was more of an effort at representation than story. Granted, the literary realm is woefully light on meaningful trans characters, so Plett is thankfully shoveling dirt into that void, but I was generally drawn more to the shorter pieces, with the biggest standout being “Twenty Hot Tips to Shopping Success.” That story alone keeps this book at three stars, even if the rest of the collection were randomized Rorschach tiles. Such a wonderful intensity and drive to that story, one that really spotlights Plett’s talent.
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An American Marriage
by
Tayari Jones
Weems
, August 22, 2021
Books that switch perspectives are already a hard sell for me, but more so, books that switch perspective, AND fall into epistolary format, AND have little immediacy to their starting points are an incredibly hard sell. This novel took about a hundred pages to get to some potentially intense drama, of a love triangle where a woman’s husband is at long last released from wrongful incarceration after his true love has moved on. The desire to tell this story from different perspectives just didn’t prove very fruitful to me, which the book itself proves when it ditches that format entirely to give us Roy and Celestial’s correspondence while he’s in prison, a portion that could have been covered in background when the actual tension of the book begins for me. But still, Jones insisted on perspective switches, which just led to a lot of repetition and certainly not enough payoff.
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
by
George Saunders
Weems
, August 16, 2021
How hard it is to talk convincingly about art that you like. Having a personal reaction isn't enough in certain fields: one must offer an objective view of something that is highly subjective. The arguments that work worst for me are the ones that try to make that subjectivity inarguable: a necessity for common culture, or the Canon with no skepticism as to what creates that Canon. George Saunders nicely avoids this trap with this book, in that he studies the stories herein for what they show us about writing stories and how they provide viewpoints of human character and how writing can capture complexities that seem indecipherable to us on our best days (without the writing itself getting indecipherable). And what helps his case greatly is that he remains open to disagreement, with himself above all.Now yes, Saunders focuses on dead, white Russian men of a rather specific era of Russian literature: Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy. I do not quibble with his choices of writers, and he is critical at times of their execution. But yes, in the end, the exemplars of this book are dead white men. I would imagine he himself would see the white supremacy behind these choices, so I would also love to see him offer a followup to give us also the hope of how great writing continues beyond this particular geographic time period. I know Saunders would be up to the task (or empowering someone else to take up this cause with his blessing).
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We Cast a Shadow
by
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Weems
, August 14, 2021
There are a lot of really powerful ideas and statements behind this book, ideas about systemic racism and how people of color are beaten down (literally and figuratively) by that system into continuing the cycle of abuse. Ruffin’s protagonist, a lawyer in a mixed marriage worried about his son being perceived of as black, lives in a world that is satirical but not speculative: Ruffin makes only lightly veiled references to events of violent racism, like the MOVE bombing. Policies made against black people get couched in the same rhetoric of privilege we hear today. This father has every reason to have his son not want to be seen as black. And this becomes the central problem of the book. But ultimately I found the writing of the book itself tough to embrace. The protagonist is generally redundant in his desires, the opening chapters in particular with little dramatic drive (I nearly gave up during the first third). Ruffin offers an interesting attempt at a humorous tone in the midst of horrific events, but the writing becomes extravagant and needlessly detailed. Maybe it’s the minimalist in me, but I found myself regularly looking for necessity, a narrative drive that was more painfully funny more regularly. There are glimmers of that here, but not enough to make me impressed with the book as a whole.
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First Person Singular
by
Haruki Murakami
Weems
, August 12, 2021
First know that I haven’t really enjoyed a Murakami since Kafka on the Shore, and Killing Commandatore disappointed me thoroughly. So when I say I have mixed feelings about this book, note that it’s a compliment of sorts, in that I found that the book didn’t suck. Not a ringing endorsement, but again, a better reaction than I’ve had for a while. Murakami, as always, proves an easy read: even an opening that introduces a character as ugly is soon retextualized, apologized for and explored further, through narrators that, typical to his style, are quiet but are only introspective in the events of their stories, their searches for meaning (if you can call them that) usually befuddled by the sheer randomness of the world. There are some almost standard Murakami bingo items (a talking animal, an overt reference to avoiding metaphor, a teasing of Murakami as his own narrators), but I found these stories a pleasant enough read, maybe with stuff I’ll reflect on later but overall not feeling duped, like I have for his last few novel outings. So I’ll rate it Good, and perhaps hold to an idea that his Steiner work for me, overall, has been his short story work.
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Demonic Classics: Once Upon a Debacle
by
Kim Plasket and Erika Lance and Jm Paquette
Weems
, August 07, 2021
This horror anthology sparked its writers to take classic stories and characters and reinvent them through a horror lens. One standout piece here is John Di Donna's "Mad Mad Captain Ahab." Di Donna lets Ahab finally score his nemesis, but does the nemesis have an even greater nemesis? Di Donna takes us into a dark, visual world that may have you rethinking Melville...or at least realize why you were falling asleep to it.
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The God of Small Things
by
Roy, Arundhati
Weems
, August 07, 2021
Keeping in mind that a review is an honest reaction first and a measure of quality second, I have to admit I struggled greatly with this book and ultimately decided that my persistence was only making my reaction worse. The writing of this book demands a lot of memory and cross checking at times, and perhaps I’d grown tired of its parenthetical format, where events in one timeline open up long expanses of background events. Not an uncommon format, but too often left me mystified in this book where I was. Perhaps I’m just too run down right now to give this book its due attention.
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Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present
by
Robin R. Means Coleman
Weems
, August 07, 2021
Robin R. Means Coleman takes us through the history of Blacks and Black representation in horror movies, focusing of course more on Blacks as represented in movies made by Whites since the majority of the canon is under that banner. Coleman, through extensive research and experience with horror movies, breaks down Black representation, its heights and valleys (and, when you get into films as early as Birth of a Nation, where a valley of racist imagery is being kind). The era of Blacksploitation, moments when people of color have taken the opportunity to tell the story rather than be the residual sacrificial lamb, or initial death, or comic relief. Of course, this book isn't just a scree, but Coleman gives credit where it's earned, like Night of the Living Dead and The Thing, and of course notes where the gaps appear. I really loved how elegantly and completely Coleman identified the problems of the Magical Negro trope, how it dehumanizes Black characters and shows to what extent a Black character needs to be considered at all human. There is also a documentary stemming from this book that isn't just a recap of Coleman's points but takes it further into marvelous extents. This book should be required reading: not just for horror fans, but just so you can see the limits we continually suffer with in our media.
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The Lying Life of Adults
by
Elena Ferrante and Ann Goldstein
Weems
, August 07, 2021
Well, it finally happened. When I first picked up My Brilliant Friend, I was amazed at how close Ferrante brought us into the perspective of her main character. The Days of Abandonment had similar power, again for how Ferrante could keep us deep into the manic depths of a woman who was just has just been handed monstrous betrayal and the depression and anguish that comes right after. And what amazed me further, beyond the impressive depth of human emotion and the complications of human relationships, including with the self, was that this tight, singular perspective can so easily go wrong. So easily tedious. So easily TMI. And that’s what I finally came to with this novel. All the great insights that you’ll find in a Ferrante novel are here. A young girl with a seemingly idyllic, intellectually and emotionally satisfying life learns of a darker side to her father’s family, and thus his own background. But this time, I just couldn’t stay with this narrator with the same level of interest. Ferrante’s style finally wore me down and got me wanting for of the exterior drama than the interior, when before I had been content with both. And unfortunately, it’s hard to separate the two in the writing of Elena Ferrante. So on this one, I found myself needing to step back rather than embrace.
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Little Fish
by
Casey Plett
Weems
, August 07, 2021
How wonderful to live in an age where access to writing and art from a wider and wider array of artists is more and more prevalent. Perfect? Absolutely not! But while we lament to scourge of misinformation and the rise of fascism and racism, let's also remember that there is a rise of voices that were previously outright silenced and, if published at all, probably found their way into tiny, homegrown presses for only a select few. Little Fish follows Wendy, a transwoman with a supportive group of friends, and a father who is also supportive and loving while also a little hairbrained, while she still tries to sort out her way in the world. Plett takes us through the hardships of an existence others have trouble accepting (and of course have to take that out on others) while Wendy struggles with loss and with family secrets that might not leave her so alone in that sphere. Plett is unabashed with the joys and the horrors of Wendy's struggles, but this novel isn't just a act of representation but an intense story of finding one's place, especially when there is so much of the world unsympathetic to who you are. This book greatly won me over.
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Heads of the Colored People
by
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Weems
, August 07, 2021
In her first collection of stories, Thompson-Spires offers an intense and deep dive into her characters, who all feel so fresh and vibrant and lurch at you from the page. These are characters who struggle with so many of the classic ills explored in classic short stories: relationships, self-deception, how they come across to others. So those classic issues, along with the issues of white supremacy, police violence and systemic racism, make Thompson-Spires such a contemporary necessity for reading lists. I couldn't help but see a needed update in the story "Not Today, Marjorie," where a black woman deals (poorly) with a long wait at the DMV, bringing us forward from the classic Flannery O'Connor story "Revelation," which focuses on a white woman being faced with (and possibly talking herself out of) an affront to her perception of the world. This book gave me a fresh, new view of fiction moving forward, and I really REALLY like it.
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Im Waiting for You & Other Stories
by
Bo Young Kim
Weems
, April 18, 2021
Time and time again, I delve into genre writing that promises to be new or original, and perhaps it’s my inner snob that kicks in, but all too often, genre writing taxes me with its plain, frankly boring, conventions. Kim clearly has a new mindset, with ideas that are more inclusive and breaking walls of Bro Genre, away from miniskirtted spacesuits and boobplate armor, but a wish a more refined box of writing came with it, to worldbuild in ways that don’t involve large expanses of expositional dialogue between beings that don’t need to explain the world to each other, for example. Kim has revolutionary concepts, but the same old ways of expressing them.
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Low Low Woods Hill House Comics
by
Carmen Maria Machado
Weems
, April 09, 2021
There is a lot to admire in this book, which is the same way I felt about Machado’s short story collection. When things are on, they are SO on. The backstory of the mining business in town, for example, and the final chapter is really fine work, and the best aspect of this story that is REALLY worth the wait (I am working REALLY hard to avoid spoilers here, but just be assured from me that some key ideas really come together well in the final chapter). But at the same time, I felt there was a little too much that was out of control here. To devote nearly an entire chapter to exposition from the witch, for example, really threw off the rhythm of things, and in some ways didn’t feel entirely necessary to get us from that point to the ending. Also, as much as I loved the atmosphere, the world-building felt a little too inconsistent. There were some things that felt either like red herrings that never announced themselves as such, or just too many ladles in the stew. The skinless men and the deer woman both felt like elements that didn’t quite sync in with everything else. Machado, in the interview at the end of the book, was hesitant to categorize the book, which I applaud, but also wonder if in the process of writing this, certain checklist elements needed to be ticked. Again, this is a rather powerful graphic horror novel in all, but it didn’t quite end with that resonant hum when everything proves to have its place.
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Solutions and Other Problems
by
Allie Brosh
Weems
, April 07, 2021
In the Age of Influencers, Brosh is a pleasant reminder that self-centered stories don't have to be selfish. Solutions and Other Problems give us glimpses into a wonderfully unique view of the universe, the details and reactions routinely surprising but not alien. While the plethora (and a half) of self-important content providers out there, providing content that is mostly egotistical and assumes its own importance (and remember, children, what happens when we 'assume'?), seems to suggest (and simultaneously negate) that everyone has a story to tell, Brosh gives us a highly personal viewpoint that toes its own line of logic and also proves wise and familiar. A friend of mine gave me this book and provided one selling point to get my butt into reading it: that the last sentence of the first chapter described her own life. That sentence? "The only thing worse than getting trapped in the same bucket nineteen times is surrender." Brosh has a talent for phrasing and perspective that makes this book something I'd love to hand over to aliens as good reason NOT to destroy us with their antimatter-based weaponry. I think aliens would appreciate us better than influencers do.
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Beasts Of No Nation
by
Uzodinma Iweala
Weems
, April 04, 2021
Iweala takes into the perspective of a child drawn into war and all the horrors therein. A powerful book at its start, though I think the only thing that didn't have me dive into it wholeheartedly is the element that comes up too often in fictional works that deal with important subjects, which is that the topic itself takes over, and the idea of telling a story infused with deeper relevance falls by the wayside. There is a lot I like about this book, and it presents us an important topic, but the ending left me feeling more that the plot had come to end rather than shake me with deeper recognition.
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Primeval & Other Times
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, April 04, 2021
Think of this as a Slavic One Hundred Years of Solitude, except this author brings the entire world in to play, and games that break down the mythical origins of the universe, and trees that think, and moments of philosophy that will shatter your bones. I wish the overall arc had been just a little tighter for me, but there were individual moments I adored.
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On Fragile Waves
by
E Lily Yu
Weems
, April 04, 2021
If you’ve read E. Lily Yu in Clarkesworld Magazine or in her appearances in the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy series (and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor), you’ve seen her immense talent to not only take a rather standard sci-fi or fantasy trope (an alien landing, or a knight off to slay a dragon) and invest life in it not just through her sharp writing but through her lens of compassion, with the mistreatment of the aliens, for example. In her first novel, Yu brings those skills to tell the story of refugees and the anguish of finding home. Yu used interviews of refugees in Australia as the basis of the story of a family from Kabul and their flight and fight to find a safe home. But as we’ve seen and have always seen if we’re bothering to look, too many people have a big problem with refugees, with the white people scared of everyone at all darker than them being terrorists and thus terrorize in response. Yu gives us the incredible Firuzeh, a young girl being thrown into situations involving the deaths of friends, the hatred of others and the struggles of being a girl. But she has a family who knows how to tell stories, a power that sustains them (sometimes only barely) in the firestorm raining upon them. On Fragile Waves is a magnificent book.
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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies
by
Caitlin Doughty and Dianne Ruz
Weems
, April 04, 2021
If you know any of Caitlin Doughty’s work, you know she manages wicked humor with wicked levels of research and facts in her endeavors to help us be more aware of death and the dying process. While her stick can get a tad predictable at times, I always admire her mission and the way she presents her ideas in a very consumable, direct and, yes, enjoyable way. So, she has put together a book of informative essays based on children’s questions about death, for kids and for, no doubt, those of us who like to have an excuse to read children’s books. As the best writing for children does, this book takes its audience seriously and as beings capable of serious thought. It’s more of a book to pick up on occasion to peruse an essay or two before going on to other things, but still a highly enjoyable read that I will no doubt go back to from time to time to settle arguments.
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Wonderama: Poems
by
Catherine Doty
Weems
, April 04, 2021
The true wonder of Doty's poetry is the way it reminds us of the memory we should have of the world we grew up in. Her poems give us such vivid, emotionally startling visions of the past: the horror of mystery as well as its joys, and facing a world and parenting that always shocks these poems' speakers into recognition. We've waited too long for another book by this amazing poet.
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Blues for All the Changes
by
Nikki Giovanni
Weems
, March 07, 2021
This book may be a couple of decades old, but her inauguration poem in this collection could have been used for Obama (both times) and should have been read at Trump's (only! and to replace every other word spoken), a poem about hope and the miseries of centuries of racism. Giovanni always mixes both brilliantly.
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What We Owe
by
Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, Elizabeth Jane Clark Wessel
Weems
, February 02, 2021
For being a relatively short novel (200 pages), this book was still one I had to take on slowly. Bonde takes us through a highly intensive, emotionally close exploration of Nahid, an Iranian refugee, starting with her admission of an oncoming death from cancer. From there, we go through her past and things Nahid feels she needs to pay for and her concerns about what she can pass along to her daughter and future granddaughter. While the intensity here somehow isn't as palpable and powerful as something like Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment, as Bonde sometimes resorts to dialogue to explain a tension rather than make us feel it, the weight of this short book is quite heavy.
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The Freedom Artist
by
Ben Okri
Weems
, January 19, 2021
There were a lot of things I wanted to like this book for: the impassioned message behind it, its dystopia glimpses of the machinations behind government control and how people fold to that control, its brief moments of philosophy and activism. The novel pursues two characters trying to look behind the wall of lies the powers that be have constructed to hold sway over the people, and to look behind, one has to look deeper within. Because of this perspective, I found the comparisons to Kafka quite off the mark. Rather, I’d put Okri more in line with Saramago in terms of his potent political viewpoints and vision. But my low rating comes from the bland impression so much of the writing left on me. Okri offered temporary moments of sharp imagery, of dialogue that crystallized characters for me as symbolic but still human. But these moments were too far away from each other, and I found my progress, despite the short chapters, plodding and glacial. I found myself regularly checking my progress, wondering how much more I had to go, and frankly getting a little annoyed when the book turned out to have another shift of plot. More sharp imagery and lyricism, aesthetic nuggets along the way, would have helped me be more patient along the road of reading this novel. Still, I do entertain picking up his previous novel, which had a lot of praise in the cover matter.
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The Awful Suicidal Swans
by
Flower Conroy
Weems
, January 10, 2021
Conroy’s poetry has that kind of immediacy I look for in poetry: sharp language whittled down to the barest of structures to thrust daggers of emotion into us. Lust, anger, regret, ecstasy, love: these are all the stuff of Suicide Swans, delivered to us by a passionate, able hand.
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If Chins Could Kill Confessions of A B Movie Actor
by
Campbell, Bruce
Weems
, January 09, 2021
This book is refreshing in many, many ways;how to count them? Rather than be easily categorized into A or B, Campbell has spawned a brand new creature, a whole new blood type of actor: AB+. His role as Elvis in Bubba Ho-Tepis probably the best example of this: the movie is of course quite a lark and laugh(an aged Elvis pairs with a delusional black JFK to combat a cowboy-hat-sporting mummy who has been sucking out old people's through their anuses (ani?))but there are also some tender moments with the King and his desire to redeem himself and his legacy. To be honest, I don't think I've ever been able to finish any star's autobiography, simply because of the smarm and conceit that laces the pages, and my simple nauseating ethics than keep making me wonder if this person really NEEDS me to contribute another dozen bucks or so to his or her estate. But Campbell has earned my money, and I read this book with great pleasure. Were I to pursue acting, I would want a career like Campbell's, though I would hope that some tips in the book would get me past some of the bumps in the road...but maybe the bumps in the road were things that helped Campbell keep his ego in check and helped him to be the wise and compassionate man that he is. Don't cheat Bruce!BUY THIS BOOK. Forget signing it out from the library;own your own, and be comforted that you're giving your money to someone who deserves it.
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The Wrestler's Cruel Study
by
Stephen Dobyns
Weems
, January 09, 2021
This book is just astounding - I may have read it three times, possibly a record for a book that I've never taught. This book is wise and philosophical and bawdy and inventive and just plain funny, much like a lot of of Dobyns' great poetry. THIS is the film that should have brought back Mickey Rourke, a professional wrestler goes on a hunt for his missing girlfriend, but of course the hunt becomes one of his own identity, and professional wrestling's place in the world of identity.
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Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work
by
Philip Roth
Weems
, January 09, 2021
The interview with Edna O'Brien is by far the best part in here, but my overall disappointment is that this book is not filled so much with conversations as with interviews, where Roth constructs paragraph-long questions (questions in the guise of diatribe at times), when I think I had a desire to read conversations, exchanges of ideas. And the follow-up pieces exclusively from Roth on different artists falls into the mode that I find unenjoyable from him: paint-spatters of literary name-dropping, reference upon reference upon reference that, frankly, makes him sound more like a (far more well-read and intelligent, mind you) Dennis Miller. But read the Edna O'Brien interview. Marvelous stuff.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, January 09, 2021
Had to admit I had a hard time with this for a while. Maybe not hard so much as not driven. I’d read, enjoy, but not feel compelled so much to dive back in. Tokarczuk’s narrator is an intriguing presence, but overall the book wasn’t calling me to get back in, so my progress for a while was halting, staccato. Perhaps there’s a thread very rooted in a place whose tensions I am not as much familiar with, the setting offered in a village between Poland and Czechoslovakia, where names and languages and cell phone towers tread both borders. A few deaths look like possible murders, our narrator convinced animals are taking revenge on the people. She herself is an astrologer and a part time translator of William Blake, a recluse with either a tenuous grip on reality or one more profound than we could hope for. Her voice and insights were nicely toeing an internal logic, but at times I didn’t see the thrust to keep me moving forward. But like Flights, this book grew on me, it’s last fifty pages an intriguing confrontation of our place in nature, and nicely treading reason and absurdity. Now, the book comes together for me, an investigation of the borders between things, but scarier, perhaps the lack of borders altogether. I came out of this book quite impressed.
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Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
by
Stephen Dobyns
Weems
, January 09, 2021
I can't figure out just yet if I've become much more well read since I read Best Words Best Order,and so his references seem less convincing to me, or if Dobyns' treatise in the last essay of this book, about (among other things, including the history of language) how poetry has fallen into a kind of residual position, with poets themselves to blame, is indicative of the essence of his fall of late in my opinion. His more recent poetry collections have ranged from rather plain to unreadable, and in them there seems to be an uncomfortably earnest attempt to make poetry 'matter,' and in all the wrong ways. Whether they're paper-thin political observations inWinter's Journey, or , as in Mystery So Long,ars poetica that sound like superficial rehashing of much more interesting stuff we've both read. In this unfortunate follow-up to Best Words, Best Order, Dobyns offers wonderful insights about poetry and its relationship to the brain and its inner workings, but his analyses fall well short at times, diving into deep abysses of literary terms but lacking followthrough, making many of his 'insights' feel like paraphrases of others. More so, there's a push here to be an American Master, a level of salesmanship that may have been in his work from the beginning, but before, the quality of his work made such salesmanship a minor element and non-intrusive. Of late, quality doesn't seem to be eclipsing his ambition.
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Girls Against God
by
Jenny Hval
Weems
, January 02, 2021
Like Rupi Kaur's poetry, which I find well-intentioned in spirit but reads more like someone else summarizing poems than actually reading poetry, Hval's fiction read for me similarly. Most importantly (and disappointingly), its lack of strong scene and imagery. While Hval has her narrator take a shot at conventional writing like that of Raymond Carver's in her diatribes on creating something new, the bare mention of scene and detail in the early chapters as all-too-quick setups to go into cerebral matters left me with little experience to give the ideas context. Later chapters seemed to improve with establishing scenes, but by then I had already tuned out most of my sympathy and had too little investment to apply much by then.
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Trainwreck The Women We Love to Hate Mock & Fear & Why
by
Sady Doyle
Weems
, December 28, 2020
Sady Doyle dissects with (yes!) scalpel-edged wit the constant threat women pose to patriarchal norms when these women dare to be anything but pure, submissive vessels for its junk. And, of course, the penalties said patriarchy inflict upon these women. And Doyle does so with such compassion for the victims, all of them, including herself, as she studies the effort to be a ‘good feminist’: in other words, a unique human. What a wonderful book!
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Educated: A Memoir
by
Tara Westover
Weems
, December 19, 2020
The most compelling aspect of this memoir to me was the experience of cultish thinking, the control and debasement wielded in a family and the difficult process of extracting oneself from its chains. Westover’s story, her extraction despite her good fortune and opportunities, helps us understand how helpless many may without such good fortune, how obeisance proves less dangerous. That even hatred isn’t the key, but perspective. Wisdom. Education. Why else would teachers and schools that hold themselves to standards of logic and humanity be high on the hitlist of fascist conservatives and despots?
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Thick: And Other Essays
by
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Weems
, December 19, 2020
An astounding collection of hard-won, hard-hitting essays that are scholared but not academic, that drive forward and plow you into the wall if you need it. Foregoing the dry sludge of academia, this tome of black experience and the sociological haze of systemic racism should get through your thick, willingly blind skull in a heartbeat.
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Mother Said
by
Hal Sirowitz
Weems
, December 19, 2020
These poems are totally effective. They make their point, they have that comic sense of sadness underneath, you can read one and get its point and move on. Not sure any of these are going to haunt me, though, and wake me up in the middle of the night.
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Song
by
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Weems
, December 19, 2020
I'd seen Kelly read, but this is the first time I really sat down to read a full collection of hers. No doubt, there's been a lot written already working off the title of this book, the way she can take an image (the severed head of a goat, a bird in the ear of a statue of a child urinating into a fountain, three cattle walking in a circle) and compose a deep dive into that image, its surrounding images, into a spell that somehow seems to touch on everything else good and horrific in the universe. Even Kelly's style of entering a poem sets you into another dimension: "The little white throat has his head in the boy's ear"; "the sun only a small bird flitting." Phrases that might not make full sense at first but soon do, as long as you are willing to go along with its music. Kelly challenges you in your reading, but doesn't alienate you. Her poetic voice is not above you but also trying to make sense of things, and this is what really engages those deep dives into the soul through such an odd little image, and the souls of people who may be casually cruel (to animals, as well as people) but also with their arms wide to the rising moon. I went back and reread several of these again to earn their just reward.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Weems
, December 19, 2020
Adichie is the kind of writer who will be noted and discussed and referenced for decades, and for good reason. Her books are educational and important. Might be dangerous to call a novel educational, but Adichie lets us know what we need to know of realms beyond our borders, not only geographic but outside the white supremacy of Western literature. This book is already something of a staple in international curricula, and though I am more a fan of Americanah personally, these are two magnificent tomes to choose between, which makes for nothing less than a magnificent resume already.
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Girl in the Flammable Skirt
by
Aimee Bender
Weems
, December 19, 2020
Hear me out on this one, that reading an Aimee Bender story is like watching a Bad Lip Reading video. Admittedly, I had binged a few of the latter in an interim of reading the former, but after a few vids and jumping back into the book, I did find myself marveling at a similar feeling of being somewhere familiar yet just slightly off-putting, but in the best moments being able to follow and appreciate the logic. On my second read I found myself less enamored of the more overtly speculative stories like "Marzipan," where one of the premises is of a man who wakes up with a hole in his midsection (a gap, really, that his insides have redistributed themselves around) feel more functional, going through motions to be story-like but never quite satisfying by the end (for even an inconclusive ending can be satisfying). The stories that most satisfied me were the ones without overt magic in them, but still challenging the idea of mundanity, nonetheless, a story like "Quiet Please," where a librarian has a sudden bout of virility and starts exploiting the librarian fantasies of male patrons. When Bender's story-world is just slightly off-kilter, but not jumping fully into gems that stain the ocean or hands made of fire, I think she pulls off finer work.
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The Memory Police
by
Yoko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder
Weems
, December 19, 2020
I hate the association, but nonetheless I had a Murakami effect while reading this book. While there is an interesting premise here, of an island that regiments and enforces the forgetting of objects, I soon found the progress of the book less and less engaging, much like Haruki Murakami's lesser works (which include pretty much everything since Kafka on the Shore). The narrator's struggles with the loss of her mother and the protection of her editor, both of whom resisted the policing of memory, became elements spoken of but less and less convincing. Overall, I found the book more about its assertions and less about acting on them. Though I must admit I found the final pages intriguing and acting on a tone the book as a whole would have benefited from.
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Stranger Things Happen
by
Kelly Link
Weems
, December 19, 2020
The early stories in this collection are definitely among the best I've read from Link, "The Specialist's Hat" probably her very best. But Link also seems to create a quickly spiraling time effect with her Donald Barthelme meets Amy Hempel style. She has a good ear for rhythm and sentence juxtaposition, but some of stories quickly fizzle and left me checking the number of pages left, and when that number was more than ten, I just wanted to flip forward to the next story rather than bear through.
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Split Tooth
by
Tanya Tagaq
Weems
, December 19, 2020
If you know Tagaq as a singer, you know she is a unique presence in vocal music: gorgeous throat-singing that is deep and cold and avant-garde. So why should a novel by such a talent be anything closer to the boring typical? Tagaq's coming-of-age novel breaks into poetry as we follow the horrors and ecstasies of a young girl as she grows and comes into her nature, which involves the humans around her but also the spirits and the past. And with sentences that will stun you into an immersive silence. A mighty book.
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Twelve Moons
by
Oliver, Mary
Weems
, December 05, 2020
I wasn't totally thrilled by this collection at first. Obviously, a not-so-thrilling Oliver poem can be far superior than many people's entire oveur, but while I found some of the earlier selections observant and wise, they didn't snap with emotion in the way her best poems do. But the second half, including the magnificent "Aunt Leaf," brought me back to that sheer pleasure.
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Complete Poems 1927 1979
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Weems
, November 29, 2020
When so much poetry today is lousy with ‘voice,’ thick with poets too eager to make themselves the spotlight to hide their quaking knees as they fear obscurity, Bishop’s work is so refreshing: full of persona, but not busting us over the head with it. Notable exceptions remain, of course, but I love how she contains her emotive moments for maximum impact. Take the classics “One Art” and “The Armadillo,” for example, poems that use their form to show us the eventual, panicked breakage of their form. While when reading any full collection of anyone’s full body of work, you’re going to come across those you wish you hadn’t seen, and in this case maybe struggle more with the early works before she really hit her stride, but as it is always refreshing to see an already talented writer bloom more and more, this volume is definitely worth a good, slow read.
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Poems
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Weems
, November 29, 2020
When so much poetry today is lousy with ‘voice,’ thick with poets too eager to make themselves the spotlight to hide their quaking knees as they fear obscurity, Bishop’s work is so refreshing: full of persona, but not busting us over the head with it. Notable exceptions remain, of course, but I love how she contains her emotive moments for maximum impact. Take the classics “One Art” and “The Armadillo,” for example, poems that use their form to show us the eventual, panicked breakage of their form. While when reading any full collection of anyone’s full body of work, you’re going to come across those you wish you hadn’t seen, and in this case maybe struggle more with the early works before she really hit her stride, but as it is always refreshing to see an already talented writer bloom more and more, this volume is definitely worth a good, slow read.
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A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed
by
Jason Brown
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Frankly, I might have gotten into these stories a shade more than I did if the collection hadn't been touted (at all...see comment to come) as a linked collection, for the added overview of the family, and the dates, proved to me a burden that I simply had little gumption to wade through. Not that this is the first book to post up a family tree or overview in the opening pages, but here the pile of information felt heavy and distracting. I have a couple of stories I am probably going to put into personal storage to look at again later, but by halfway into the collection I was making myself fully cognizant of how much I still had to go. The linked story aspect of this book brought a little too much expectation as opposed to the thematic links in a collection like Dubliners, something the intro to this book touts as being nearly just as good. Which brings me to another deflation this book brought me, which was that introduction, which doesa disservice in their extravagant comparisons to Nobel Prize winners and, in this case, a classic short story collection like Joyce's. I'm all for a publisher being excited about their releases, but going to such lengths to PROVE the worth of their selections, which brings in an undertone of deflecting a reaction such as mine to an apparent lack of understanding of literature.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Had to admit I had a hard time with this for a while. Maybe not hard so much as not driven. I’d read, enjoy, but not feel compelled so much to dive back in. Tokarczuk’s narrator is an intriguing presence, but overall the book wasn’t calling me to get back in, so my progress for a while was halting, staccato. Perhaps there’s a thread very rooted in a place whose tensions I am not as much familiar with, the setting offered in a village between Poland and Czechoslovakia, where names and languages and cell phone towers tread both borders. A few deaths look like possible murders, our narrator convinced animals are taking revenge on the people. She herself is an astrologer and a part time translator of William Blake, a recluse with either a tenuous grip on reality or one more profound than we could hope for. Her voice and insights were nicely toeing an internal logic, but at times I didn’t see the thrust to keep me moving forward. But like Flights, this book grew on me, it’s last fifty pages an intriguing confrontation of our place in nature, and nicely treading reason and absurdity. Now, the book comes together for me, an investigation of the borders between things, but scarier, perhaps the lack of borders altogether. I came out of this book quite impressed.
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Bright Dead Things Poems
by
Ada Limon
Weems
, November 29, 2020
There is something utterly sublime to me about poetry that can range through topics and moods, from heartbreak to joy, from political to personal, and maintain a solid, unwavering method that always digs at pure honesty. Limon unveils so much sincerity here, embarrassingly so, that my usual metaphor of reading a poetry collection (that you are walking through a museum, not expecting every piece to wow you, but well worth the visit if you find a handful that sweep you up to study closely and make the guards nervous) doesn't quite hold here. Because so many of these poems just wowed me and made me go back to the beginning to watch it unfold. A really, really, really impressive collection (did I say really impressive?).
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The Scar Saloon
by
Sholeh Wolp�
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Wolpe infuses powerful subject matter like bombings, racism and misogyny with a kind and human eye, looking past the political and obvious to the human, characterizing the truly affected lives with sudden clarity, so poems like “Butcher Shop” and “See Them Coming” have that quick shock of recognition, but I was more drawn to the developed works like the title poem, where Wolpe carries through with her ideas further, taking an initial observation and twisting it, reconsidering it, taking us even further.
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Star Spangled Banner
by
Denise Duhamel
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Duhamel does what I probably like best about ‘confessional’ poetry, though I find almost any category self-negating. She dives deep into experience, presumedly her own, the challenge her own reactions and reach into ideas that are so worthwhile to find, revelations and challenges to easy conclusions. Of course, many of her poems traipse along with ‘taboo’ subjects, not just to shock, except maybe if we need to be shocked, but to play with our sensibilities that say this is not a subject for poetry. As Sekou Sundiata so wisely put it when the overriding white voices were denouncing the appearance of The Roots at a Dodge Festival (an error that the Dodge Foundation replicates festival after festival by continuing to avoid such a circumstance again), “If you were offended, maybe you needed to be offended.” Duhamel puts up a mirror to our embarrassment so we can hopefully find it as funny as she does. Not that she is superior to it, I don’t think, but that she is at least willing to examine it. These poems go through exquisitely structured ramblings that suddenly plunge you into a history of sadness, or laughter, the way an interesting figure at the bar or a party makes you suddenly glad (or later glad) you decided to mosey up and make a motion towards empty chatter that she quickly disavowed the notion of.
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by
Richard Flanagan
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Sad to say that I just lost momentum with this book. Aside from what felt like a really long tangent on a pre-war affair, the redundancies of descriptions, even among the atrocities of being in a POW camp, just kept yanking me out of any direct experience of the scenes. So I stopped. Maybe I’ll be ready another time.
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What the Dog Saw & Other Adventures
by
Malcolm Gladwell
Weems
, November 29, 2020
The Gladwell I am most interested in is the explorer Gladwell, the Gladwell Who is furiously curious about a topic or a person and just wants to investigate the hell out of it. The Gladwell I am less interested in is the debater Gladwell, the one who wants to make an argument and will sometimes overstep his own logic to make that argument – if you know his Revisionist History podcast, I’m talking about the Gladwell who argues to free Brian Williams, or wants Pat Boone in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That Gladwell appears a couple of times in this collection of pieces from The New Yorker, but you will more often see the Explorer, who wants to get at the heart of the success of Ron Popeil, or the body movement of Caesar Millan, even the distinction between panicking and choking. While yes, his argument about the worth of plagiarism reeks a little of that Debater, Gladwell is probably at his finest here in this collection and also feels less dated than his notable books. I was more impressed with this read, now in 2020, than the books that put him on the map, which have ideas that have been processed and run through in so many ways now that show how much he innovated getting prevalent ideas out into the public mind, but still prove much less meaningful now.
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Platte River Three Novellas
by
Rick Bass
Weems
, November 29, 2020
There is a bombasticism of character, extremity of situation, that borders the speculative but doesn't trip itself into that wide country. In "Field Events," for example, two behemoth brothers who can carry around their Volkswagen Bug when bored come across and even larger behemoth, a man who like to carry cows around on his shoulders. Strange, but seemingly plausible. But also, Bass keeps his characters amazingly positive. Mahatma Joe, the title character of the first story, is a Christian zealot in a small town in Montana but has a true joy about him. But the third and title story starts with a couple who rather violently break up on a regular basis until Harley is bidden to visit a friend of his to speak to his class, and the story takes quite a turn into something a little less stylistic but more immersive. It was then that the previous stories had lacked full visual power for me, that Bass had wowed me with the prospect of people carrying cows on their shoulders, or skating on melting ice, but I hadn't fully been there with him, while in "Platte River" I was SO present on the story's central fishing trip. Yet, the title story fell completely flat for me at the very end, where it took almost a quirky-independent-film route, jumping off into a future well off the timeline to a resolution that felt exterior to everything. I scooped up some more collections I had clearly overlooked over the years, but I am wondering if Bass ever finds a way to balance these extremes.
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Facts About the Moon
by
Dorianne Laux
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Many poets have their preferred subject areas (nature, parental relationships, romantic, etc.), areas that their talents seem to hone and explore. For the better poets, this limit doesn't prove redundant, as their talents are so immense in those subjects that they are well regarded for good reason. But Laux amazes me for the way that her work spans such an array of subject areas: painful childhoods, domestic bliss, the marvel of nature. Though the collection as a whole is cordoned off into thematic sections, each poem is in a way and exploration of what subject matter or persona she is taking on this time. There is certainly a trend of femininity, its power over men, its vulnerability, its connectiveness to emotions and other pain in the world. But these poems create their own universes of thought and experience, which is a level of mastery that just impresses the hell out of me.
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Lucifer at the Starlite
by
Kim Addonizio
Weems
, November 29, 2020
I was quite thrilled when I first read some Addonizio poems in the wild, but when I started picking up her collections, I found myself less and less thrilled. The stylings make the poems not predictable but unsurprising, with requisite extremities and turns. A couple of poems held me through, but certainly not enough.
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Scald
by
Denise Duhamel
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Duhamel may be setting herself up as an important poet of our age, and she may be heralded as such, if not already. There have been a couple public skirmishes with controversy, and her poetry, in this book especially, that have pop references and current events, and clearly she has fine, intelligent things about patriarchy and the power structure that is thankfully under fire. But these elements felt a little too crammed into the poetry for me. A poem here, for example, that begins and ends on Lady Gaga felt quite obligatory and not highly central to the poem itself, and all too often I kept having the same reaction. These poems don't read like essays, but they left me more with the feeling of having gone through the experience of an essay than a poem.
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Orchard
by
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Weems
, November 29, 2020
Kelly's poems are so thick, with meditations from nature, from dreams, that just spiral through joy and horror and song, leaving you a little out of breath with each read, but one of those breathing sessions after a well-needed, brisk walk in the cold, your nose running, having just given yourself a long-put off action. The title poem, for example, is probably one of the most exquisite dream poems I've ever read, so thoroughly engaging in its dream logic and sensoral immediacy.
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Flying to America: 45 More Stories
by
Donald Barthleme
Weems
, November 28, 2020
Only a few previously uncollected stories in here, as the bulk of this come from various short story collections, but some of the stories that were published elsewhere and hadn't previously found their way into a book are wonderful. But any act of completion of almost any artist’s work is going to feel a little underwhelming, I fear.
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Fun Being Me
by
Jack Wiler
Weems
, November 15, 2020
Ever listen to Wesley Willis? The chronic schizophrenic rapper? Willis made an absurd amount of music, mostly utilizing the same Casio beat, riffing out praise for McDonald's, Alanis Morisette, and the occasional instruction to put one's mouth over certain parts of animals. But then you come across a song of his like "Chronic Schizophrenia," a simple song about how cruelly he's treated while riding the bus, and your heart just breaks. Such is reading Wiler. There's a manic nature, rivers of profanity, but also a deep, thorough sadness. Donald Barthelme told his students, when their stories started becoming absurd, that it was time to break people's hearts. Wiler writes about sickness, about loneliness, about being broke, while he entertains you with toilet humor, profanity, and sheer honesty about what makes us suck (and wonderful) as a country. Thanks, Jack. God's speed.
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Speak No Evil
by
Uzodinma Iweala
Weems
, November 15, 2020
Speak No Evil has a lot of important things to say about race relations, especially with police, gay rights, religious-based hatred, etc. But this book more dramatizes than fictionalizes, as the stretches of internal conflict feel stretched out, trying to get to the result rather than explore the intricacies of character among those issues.
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Tormented Mirror
by
Russell Edson
Weems
, November 14, 2020
I generally find reading a poetry collection is like walking through a museum. There's a lot of sauntering by, every now and then getting absorbed into a work. Reading this Edson collection, that came out well after Edson had earned his chops, was like walking through a museum that had only surrealist or cubist work, where the absorptions were more absorbing, but fewer of them, and the others felt like getting numb on overkill. Edson has made his mark, that's for sure, but this book felt like it was trying to make up for the years that Edson was changing the world and the more upscale publishers weren't taking much note.
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You & Yours
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
Weems
, November 08, 2020
It's been such a pleasure to dive into what is now my third Nye collection, after enjoying the heck out of samples read at the Dodge Festival. Nye of course has something to say about war and other forms of hatred, but her work is also joyful and sad and sentimental in just the right way, with objects and direct experience, not vague platitudes and vagaries that pretend depth. In "I Feel Sorry for Jesus," for example, on religious despotism, she rights, "They want to be his special pet. / Jesus deserves better. / I think He's been exhausted / for a very long time." Such marvelous simplicity addressing hypocrisy and a more genuine godliness. And the poem from where the book title emerges as a sign off to a letter written, as the title suggests, "During a War," the speaker asks, "where does 'yours' end?" Such profound humor and a fascination with the world: how we immerse ourselves in it, and how it horrifies us.
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Kudos
by
Rachel Cusk
Weems
, November 08, 2020
It's generally awfully hard to explain what one likes in any convincing fashion. Blurbs may be the worst for this. While in the previous titles, I did myself a tad impatient at times, paging forward to see when I could take a break. Kudos is a little more challenging, as it has very few chapter breaks, but I minded that less this time. Cusk has a marvelous way of capturing dialogue not as authentic but as exploration, through a narrator that ultimately seems to exist in others. Reviews, as reviews sometimes go, get silly and bombastic, so I never quite keyed in to the highest praise that the blurbs and user-imitators offer, but the trilogy as a whole proves to be an intriguing dive into human perspective and the way we circle through ourselves to find out where we really stand on things.
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Magic for Beginners Stories
by
Kelly Link
Weems
, November 06, 2020
I think my biggest issue with the stories from this collection was timing. Granted, I had about as bad an introduction as you can get to reading this: I had been shown "The Specialist's Hat" from Stranger Things Happen, which is a phenomenal story, so what's worse than starting with someone's best and then going to other things? But even that aside, I must admit that I found myself saying (and jotting) "Stop!" while reading. Link does have a good ear, but it seems to be at a sacrifice to movement in the story. There was a lot here that made me think of what makes Amy Hempel so good (quirky characters, background events that hardly ever breach the surface except for their affect on everyone concerned) but while Hempel takes you to the edge of explication and then subtly diverts you away, Link just keeps spiraling around the point, or lets it recur over and over again, so that I would just wish she would move on. Oddly enough, the story I probably liked best, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans." This was the story I got the most engaged in, but the spirals of repetition (fairer to say redundancy much of the time) really got on my nerves. Soon, though, I will backtrack into Stranger Things Happen and have a much more positive response.
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The Father: Poems
by
Sharon Olds
Weems
, November 05, 2020
This collection works on an important, personal subject (the decline and death of a parent), written competently and with the ability Olds has long proven herself capable of. And no doubt this book has gotten a lot of praise, and for a lot of good reason. I just wish I had been able to get over the wall I kept running into, of finding this book important in the way that important books make themselves important, and just simply not punching me in the gut. This is an entirely personal view, and I may even come back to this book at some later time and wonder how stupid I was during this first reading, but there it is.
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American Primitive
by
Mary Oliver
Weems
, November 02, 2020
If you're going to like poetry, then the only way to describe what makes for great poetry, and great nature poetry, is to simply read a book like this. Oliver had such a talent for writing in a way that seemed wholly contradictory: to give us in words what is a visceral experience. But isn't contradiction a tag of great literature? Where else do we challenge the truth of things by showing us one thing we believe and another thing we believe and show them to be wholly incompatible with each other (and yet they are compatible because we can believe both)? Oliver shows us the pain and joy of how simple things seem to be in nature, the pain arising from the romantic ideal that we cannot live in such simplicity, but unlike the Romantics, Oliver's poetry is not an overly frontal-lobed pining, lounging in philosophy and unaware of its own irony. No, Oliver strikes us deep with her verbs to bring us into the moment, like that of a caught fish that "flailed and sucked/at the burning/amazement of the air." And whether her moments are caught in the act of love, or joy, or exploring an old brothel, this book smacks you in the face needfully with every page.
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Friday Black
by
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Weems
, November 02, 2020
What an absolutely astounding book! In truth, there are a couple of stories towards the end that revisit some earlier situations of the collection and just don't offer the same delivery that other stories do, but these two clunkers really do nothing to dim the light of these stories overall. It's utterly fitting to have a blurb from George Saunders on this book, because Adjei-Brenyah is a mix of the absurdity and immediacy of Saunders, with the dystopic feel of Black Mirror and some of the righteous rage of Amiri Baraka all thrown together to create a whole new being of literature. Yes, we're put into speculative situations like a homicidal Black Friday stampede, or a theme park where white people can shoot people of color with impunity, places that are technically speculative but essentially true, but Adjei-Brenyah also thwacks us hard with emotional and family situations, all in an incredibly spare writing that brings to mind Donald Barthelme thrust out of the 70s and put on the front lines of a police brutality protest. I'll be pushing this book on people, and I kinda hope I make some enemies in the process.
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Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
by
Carmen Maria Machado
Weems
, October 20, 2020
Upon a second reading (a compliment itself), I found three stories in this collection that really, really clung to me: "The Husband Stitch," “Real Women Have Bodies” and “Difficult at Parties." Two others, "Inventory" and "Especially Heinous," I found interesting but not long term residents. And though the remaining stories came to the verge of tiring me out, I still found the collection as a whole noteworthy and impressive. At her best, Machado takes amazing risks with content, genre and form, and while a 60-page reinvention of the first several seasons of Law & Order: SVU has a lot of inventive moments, the mixture didn’t quite settle together as much as I hoped. The stories I named at the opening are incredible, dealing with a plague of disappearing women and how the women themselves respond, and the final story, which is a brutal and fascinating plunge into post-traumatic stress, and on these alone I am willing to get on a soapbox for Machado, look for more and feel confident she’ll be putting out more stuff that will enthrall me with every syllable, to go beyond the cycle of MFAs and residencies the lesser stories seem to placate and let piece ring with acrid intensity. A good start for someone I hope to see eventually as a great writer.
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The Diezmo
by
Rick Bass
Weems
, October 10, 2020
It’s now official: all fond memory I had of Rick Bass’s writing when I read his first story collection when it first came out is gone. He is prolific and has many accolades to his resume, so dislike from a shlub like me he has no reason to fret over (or even notice). Here is where we part ways. I made the effort, and found a distasteful machismo throughout that makes his writing smack to me more of a throwback mythology than a writer with something new to offer. On a sentence level he can be interesting, but the sums of those sentences only remind me why there need to be a higher diversity of faces at the publishing table.
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Scald
by
Denise Duhamel
Weems
, October 04, 2020
Duhamel may be setting herself up as an important poet of our age, and she may be heralded as such, if not already. There have been a couple public skirmishes with controversy, and her poetry, in this book especially, that have pop references and current events, and clearly she has fine, intelligent things about patriarchy and the power structure that is thankfully under fire. But these elements felt a little too crammed into the poetry for me. A poem here, for example, that begins and ends on Lady Gaga felt quite obligatory and not highly central to the poem itself, and all too often I kept having the same reaction. These poems don't read like essays, but they left me more with the feeling of having gone through the experience of an essay than a poem.
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Transit
by
Rachel Cusk
Weems
, October 04, 2020
I am enjoying this trilogy, but I must admit I'm not wholly embracing it in the ways I've heard others praise it. I wonder right now if the appeal is something akin to the hub-bub that went out about Milan Kundera. There may be some parallels: Cusk's two books so far have been of a narrator being somewhat present but mostly listening and encouraging others into deep explorations of themselves. But while Kundera's philosophies felt heavy-handed, Cusk's characters are quite intriguing, even when unlikeable. The conversations feel sometimes a tad manipulated (a character we've already heard from leaves the room and opens the door to conversation with a sidekick who had previously been reticent), but I enjoy them just the same. As to whether this is a book full of enlightenment and a rule-breaking narrative, I have yet to decide.
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Painting the Christmas Trees: Poems
by
Joe Weil
Weems
, September 26, 2020
This collection really held on tight end wouldn’t let me get away very long. There are many semi adequate poets who work really hard to show you how impressive it is that they came from white trash backgrounds, or rough childhoods to write poetry. But Weil’s sensibilities remind me more of Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa, whose movies delve into the deepest chasms of misery and depression, once said that his aesthetic came down to the question, “Why can’t people just be happy?” And I feel Weil’s poetic journey is similar, looking for the sublime in the rising of homeless drunks at dawn, or a father’s mangled fists, or a dying mother’s face, “the lurid, unreasonable joy / that sometimes overwhelms you / even in a hole like this,” the title poem tells us. Weil is a poet of that joy, a scribe of our miseries, a true adventurer out to reveal our deeper drive towards honesty.
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What We Carry
by
Dorianne Laux
Weems
, September 26, 2020
In reading other Laux books, I was wowed by the way every poem constructs its world, that other poets can at times depend on a style, or common subject matter, or (for the bland ones) the generic spirit of Poesy for each poem to engage its machine gears, but Laux makes each poem its own bubble of existence. This talent of hers is quite evident in this, her second collection, and this time I was duly impressed that she continued to do so in the last section of of the book, where all the poems revolve around love. Even there, each poem delves into carnality, or vulnerability, or even the everyday contentment of familiarity (or all of the above) with a fresh take. Laux's talent for repetition without redundancy is an absolute marvel to behold.
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In Persuasion Nation
by
Saunders, George
Weems
, September 12, 2020
George Saunders is magnificent at alienated characters who scream us, though I must admit I am most moved when his characters are purely heartbreaking, which isn't so much the case here as in December or Civilwarland. Consumer Culture is clearly a target here, and Saunders hopefully will be one of our archeological remnants to let posterity know who we were, but in this collection I didn't find his speculative works as poignant and endearing as elsewhere. The story "Bohemians," which tests the boundaries of extremity, was probably the one that stuck most fast with me, while the title story seemed more mechanical than spiritual, as it posed itself to be.
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella
by
George Saunders
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Saunders still carries a mighty impact with me, though I must admit that I felt I had more of a behind-the-curtain peek with this one and some of the technique that makes his magic work: some ghosts, and using a kind of theme-park setting to set up characters as freaks or outsiders, to name a couple. Saunders has a confident hand in painting characters who are stuck under an ocean of misery, inflicted on them from within and without, though the method made the stories in this collection feel a little too similar for me. This collection culminates into a novella of a US where the deformed have been tagged and may even be sold off into slavery, its narrator on a quest to save his sister, a kind of Huck Finn enmeshed in The Road, but ultimately felt a little too episodic for me, tempting me to downgrade the collection as a whole, but the stunners here, namely "Isabelle" and "The 400-Pound CEO," are so heartbreaking, and the title story so competent, that my overall impression remains a strong one.
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Pastoralia
by
George Saunders
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Saunders delves deftly and without compromise into the human mind. Though his characters are extreme, they smack of familiarity to those who admit to the pits of self-doubt and angst Saunders can conjure. But the stories in this particular collection come to inevitable conclusions that seem more obligatory than discovered, the exception being "Sea Oak," a quite magnificent story that extends like the best Saunders stories do, taking you to surprising depths and ending somewhere so profoundly emotional you'll have no idea you've been caring the hell out of these characters all along. While the title story is well imagined, it comes in at a far second for its exploration of work politics, but something he captured to greater extent in "The 400-Pound CEO." But there is never any doubt how well Saunders can string a sentence together. This is from "The Barber's Unhappiness": At home old-lady cars were in the driveway and old-lady coats were piled on the couch and the house smelled like old lady and the members of the Altar and Rosary Society were gathered around the dining room table looking frail. That's a magnificent set of words! Just wished I'd been more taken by surprise by where these stories went.
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Tenth of December: Stories
by
George Saunders
Weems
, September 12, 2020
I haven't read a collection of stories that engaged me so much in a long time. As proof of my engagement, I must admit that I wasn't wholly thrilled when reading the first three stories, but when I got to "Escape from Spiderhead," my antennae got cranked up to 11 (Also, I must admit this is my first Saunders [for shame, for shame, I know]), and when the rest of the collection stunned me consistently onward from there, I went back and read the first three stories over again, feeling that I must have missed something. Rarely does an author's confidence and authority have me rethinking my own initial reactions so quickly. And I proved myself right. I HAD indeed read the first few with nowhere near the level of attention these stories deserved. Saunders is not only a master of creating sci-fi worlds that insist to us that they must be familiar, but he is wondrous at the dual- (or tryptic-) perspective to show us the truth of characters, as sorrowful or laughable as they may be. "Spiderhead" was by far my favorite, but there is no doubting the power of ANY story in here. I'm sold.
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Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
by
George Saunders
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Original is a pale adjective in the face of Saunders.No one has constructed such a fresh and vivid storyscape since Donald Barthelme. One walks into a seeming alien tundra that is simultaneously horrific and hilarious and utterly human and heartbreaking. Saunders' first novel is set at the death of Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie, and the subsequent internment into a graveyard where the inhabitants are still quite astir. Yes, there are echoes of Dante, and do you think Jesus will make an appearance (and I don't mean John Turturro)? But these will be mere echoes, for Saunders wholly reinvents the afterlife to reflect its sorrows, for the dead hope that their state is not permanent and that the living will not forget them...which the living of course do. But will Mr. 5-Dollar Bill act in kind? There is a wonderful thread that works through this book, that of unintended consequences, or the way a person's actions can have multiple reads. The format of this book can prove disarming for some, for Saunders presents us with cascades of seeming quotes from historical sources, and even our protagonists (a couple of denizens of the graveyard out to mentor the Lincoln boy) are presented with their own attributive text, but Saunders takes care of you, reader. Once you read his narrative logic, he will not be unkind to you, merely surprising at times. Lincoln in the Bardo takes big risks that I was happy to go along with in a novel I tore through in a matter of a three days.
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Flights
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Reading this book was like watching an episode of Bob Ross. For the first few minutes or chapters, you’re watching the pieces of something start collecting on the surface: a haze of aqua, observations of people made during travel, some rough, straight lines, a sudden focus on a father lose his wife and child on a Greek island. Then suddenly, POP! The pieces of landscape crystallize into a mountainscape seen through trees, and a traveling narrator explores for us the limits and extensions of what we can call ourselves, our loves, our history and future. These observations twist through the various stories of people trying to define themselves, or redefine themselves, as they ponder human bodies preserved in plasticine, or meeting the ends of their own lives, only to find that they don’t know what made them distinctive in the first place. Once the scope of Tokarczuk’s book grabbed me, I was insistent on plowing through the book as steadily as I could, not to skimp on things but follow her threads, and delighting in the momentary insights along the way, the exploration of the act of writing itself, but even the momentary observations of people, of our descriptions of things, that really made this book a pleasure.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
by
Olga Tokarczuk
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Had to admit I had a hard time with this for a while. Maybe not hard so much as not driven. I’d read, enjoy, but not feel compelled so much to dive back in. Tokarczuk’s narrator is an intriguing presence, but overall the book wasn’t calling me to get back in, so my progress for a while was halting, staccato. Perhaps there’s a thread very rooted in a place whose tensions I am not as much familiar with, the setting offered in a village between Poland and Czechoslovakia, where names and languages and cell phone towers tread both borders. A few deaths look like possible murders, our narrator convinced animals are taking revenge on the people. She herself is an astrologer and a part time translator of William Blake, a recluse with either a tenuous grip on reality or one more profound than we could hope for. Her voice and insights were nicely toeing an internal logic, but at times I didn’t see the thrust to keep me moving forward. But like Flights, this book grew on me, it’s last fifty pages an intriguing confrontation of our place in nature, and nicely treading reason and absurdity. Now, the book comes together for me, an investigation of the borders between things, but scarier, perhaps the lack of borders altogether. I came out of this book quite impressed.
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Red Suitcase
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
Weems
, September 12, 2020
I’d heard Nye read, and through the frumpy egos that waddle about the Dodge Poetry Festival, her humor and authenticity shone like tacos on a silver plate (if you’ve read the book, you’ll get the reference). For some reason, I hadn’t taken the step of actually reading any of her books. Maybe I worried that her work, which rang so genuine, just wouldn’t translate on the page. Maybe because my wife would buy her books and then take them to school for her students to use, and I just didn’t feel the need to buy additional copies. But maybe I should have. This book is utterly wonderful. Poems that challenge us to identify not by position or nationality but to just find a human rhythm, commonalities about eggs and children crossing the street and the deaths of love ones that just stuff dust into our throats. A friend of mine called these poems magical. I have absolutely no disagreement with that.
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Fuel
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Good god, is Nye’s poetry magnificent! Not only does her work have that power of exploration, of taking a detail like an abandoned playhouse and examining it to find the very heart of sadness, but to vary her topics and approaches, from parenthood to teaching to identity to poetry, and all with a solid sense of questioning, of finding the nature of the world rather than lecture about it, and clearly loving it all, its magnificence and pains. Turning a page of this book is its own journey into mystery, but not in a scary way. Naomi Shihab Nye offers the comfort of being on that journey with her, even if it’s a journey with some sorrow at the end of it. But you’ll be better for having uncovered it.
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The Plumber's Apprentice
by
Joe Weil
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Go beyond the hallowed halls of the Dodge Festival and academia, and the curve of poetry appreciation plummets off the continental shelf. And the world of Poesy is as much to blame, if not more, with highly touted poets who sit atop of pile of referential material that needs a correspondence course of the history of verse to make any sense. But Poesy continues to construct its own irrelevance with its self-proclaimed Blue Collar poets, those who tout their minimum wage pedigree and white trashiness. For some relief, read Joe Weil. Weil's poems are thick with experience of the world, a level of honesty and willingness to tout failures as well as moments of ecstasy with equal fervor. Weil's poetry comes from the church, from dirty rivers, from overnight shifts that people rarely pay much attention to. Bethlehem may be a slum, but that slum is someone's home, and Weil brings us heartily into the pulse of that mindset. The love and despair and awe of the power to create and destroy in this world is comforting, if only to know that there are poets who have little interest residing in the crow's nest of the ivory tower but are far more comfortable singing at its base, a spot that is surprisingly comfortable, even if a little uncomfortable at times.
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Thick: And Other Essays
by
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Weems
, September 12, 2020
An astounding collection of hard-won, hard-hitting essays that are scholared but not academic, that drive forward and plow you into the wall if you need it. Foregoing the dry sludge of academia, this tome of black experience and the sociological haze of systemic racism should get through your thick, willingly blind skull in a heartbeat.
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Pecking Order
by
Nicole Homer
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Homer offers up the kind of intense emotionality that may make some people squeamish about poetry, as it can too easily scream the angsty, ambiguous and cliche ragings of beginning writers, but Homer's method shows us what those beginners may be aspiring towards. With mostly close-knit works that muse on motherhood, race and identity, and how the three are eternally linked, Homer rails against the hateful and casually racist, exalts (through tears) of the lesson her blue-eyed son must witness, and shows us poetry that is wonderfully messy on the page, constructed to take us through the wild turns a life of meaning can have. Quite a book.
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Such a Fun Age
by
Kiley Reid
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Reid's book is of course especially relevant in 2020, with focus once again on the continuing problems of how white people and the police behave towards people of color. I also like the power fiction has with addressing such issues, as opposed to an editorial, for example, or even a wonderfully researched, hard-hitting treatise like Carol Anderson's White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Fiction can bring us INTO the issue rather than discuss it, which possibly makes fiction such a threat to those in power who oppose a truthful discussion of such issues as privilege and white supremacy.
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Dragon Hoops
by
Gene Luen Yang
Weems
, September 12, 2020
There's a lot of good stuff to this book: a history of basketball and an address of prejudice, even interesting meta-moments about writing comics vs. 'real life,' that in many ways plays out in the book as a whole, which revolves around competition and the intricacies of history and a person's goals. But I must admit I was let down by the ending, that jumped to something expected rather than really surprising me retroactively.
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Stags Leap
by
Sharon Olds
Weems
, September 12, 2020
This is a highly composed, thoughtful and well structured book that goes through the process of a marriage ending: the pains of the breakup itself, the struggles of letting go, and even in the portion about the final letting go, there is still the honesty of the pain that comes with that growth. The book goes through seasons to show us the evolution of the speaker, the stages of this personal journey through this process. What kept me from a slightly higher rating was that the deliberate composition and structuring made the work feel a little less potent for me. Perhaps I was hoping for a little more messiness, a little more acid, a little more chaos to the composition here. Obviously, the Pulitzer committee disagreed with me and gave this collection the acknowledgment of topping their list of candidates, and I don't disagree with that, though I feel that Olds has given us more powerful and raw work, work that didn't get such high honor yet lingers with me far longer than this book does.
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Whereas Poems
by
Stephen Dunn
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Stephen Dunn is just so good at philosophy that resists being philosophy, and realizing that contradiction. One of Dunn's strengths has always been to explore the less than magnanimous aspects of human nature and relationships. Not to say that Dunn promotes selfishness and disregard of others. Far from it! If anything, he takes the more self-centered view, in a way that is protective and at least a little contrary and, yes, loving.
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Between the World and Me
by
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Toni Morrison said, "This is required reading." Coates offers a magnificent perspective of the damages of racism and white supremacy that reach out for literally centuries, but also the hope one can have for a child to be able to move forward from that while simultaneously fearing that he may not be able.
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With Animal
by
Carol Guess
Weems
, September 12, 2020
The first handful of stories are utter powerhouses, about a propensity for forgetting one's baby, a parrot who may be (or may simply be the delusion of the mother) a girl who suddenly transformed into one, etc.. These stories have a wonderful way of sculpting every paragraph sentence by sentence.
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The Neighborhood
by
Kelly Magee
Weems
, September 12, 2020
In her opening story, "The Merm Prob," Magee sets a wonderfully high bar with an amazing story of a town with a mermaid infestation. That problem proves multi-layered, of course, and Magee delves to deeper and deeper degrees and reconsiderations of her premise, which is clearly one of her strengths as a writer. She takes her conceits and studies them an re-examines, often to great success in stories both absurd (like "The Stepmothers" with its hordes of visiting fairytale villains) and shockingly of this world (like "You're Not Going to Die," about an ex-husband's costume wake and resulting carnival). The depth she'll take her imagination to is admirable and fun.
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Sky The Stars The Wilderness
by
Rick Bass
Weems
, September 12, 2020
The myth of the wild.
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In The Loyal Mountains Stories
by
Rick Bass
Weems
, September 12, 2020
Stories that show you what was popular in literary fiction in the 1990s, but also to show you why it got left behind in the 90s. Men being such Men, they might as well be drumming and grunting praise to their Saint RB.
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Platte River
by
Rick Bass
Weems
, September 12, 2020
The first two novellas worked well, but the third left me wanting.
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Smoke
by
Dorianne Laux
Weems
, September 06, 2020
Every poem is like reading a short story, in a way, in that Laux takes the time to let us in, get a feel of how she is approaching this poem, as opposed to the others (which can be fault of those who hover too closely to a particular subject matter, in that they sometimes fail to let us in and presume instead we are familiar with their subject, as they are so thoroughly introduced themselves).
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What Is This Thing Called Love
by
Kim Addonizio
Weems
, September 06, 2020
Poetry is an act of resistance, at the very least the resistance of easy conclusions. At first blush, Addonizio‘s poems in this book, centering around desire and Eros, nicely twist and turn, mixing pain with love, birth with murder, etc. But when going through several poems at a stretch, those methods of resistance feel a little predictable, like how contemporary horror movies try to offset jump scares by making them happen a moment or two after the tension buildup, which in of itself becomes another formula that makes them just as predictable as the predictability they’re trying to get away from. Explaining this analogy undermines the poetry itself somewhat, so I’m not saying that this book gets tedious, but to me the method started to feel a little too overt.
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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by
Matthew Desmond
Weems
, September 06, 2020
My rating is not so much for the ideas behind this book, which are thoughtful and necessary, but really just about the style. I completely appreciate the narrative section of this book, which gets into the stories of landlords and tenants are struggling with the problems of renting property and evection and the cycle of poverty that ensues, but I must admit that the utter and clear distinction between the narrative and the commentary just gets to be a drag. Again, the commentary here is one that should be at the center of the discussions about poverty and the lack of escape plan for the poor and the RIGHT to housing, but this book's method was simply less compelling than I'd hoped, sorry to say.
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A New Hunger
by
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Weems
, September 06, 2020
The long poems, in particular, that start off this book are quite potent. Bosselaar does great work with the fanciful exploration of a detail or image, winding out and coming back, to make every moment we live a culmination of every other moment we've lived, so our joys and regrets and terrors all subsist within the same moment of time.
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Twin Study
by
Stacey Richter
Weems
, September 06, 2020
There are some stories in this collection I liked a lot ("The Cavemen in the Hedges," "Christ, Their Lord" and "The Land of Pain"), but many others reminded me too much of reading TC Boyle, or watching a Tim Burton movie, in that the stories set out clear premises or conceits and act on them in a very clear way with competent writing and a strong sense of story arc, but ultimately those premises feel functional rather than artful, a mere proposition for a story rather than a story in and of itself.
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The Visit: A Tragicomedy
by
Friedrich Durrenmatt
Weems
, August 08, 2020
What a play! A town that has fallen into poverty is visited by a woman who used to be one of its residents, now a billionaire. But her visit has a clear purpose. She was wronged by a longtime citizen of the town, and she has a proposal, a solution to everyone’s woes, if they are willing to make a sacrifice. This play is absurd and chilling. Funny and horrifying. Right up my alley.
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Visit A Tragi Comedy
by
Friedrich Duerrenmatt
Weems
, August 08, 2020
What a play! A town that has fallen into poverty is visited by a woman who used to be one of its residents, now a billionaire. But her visit has a clear purpose. She was wronged by a longtime citizen of the town, and she has a proposal, a solution to everyone’s woes, if they are willing to make a sacrifice. This play is absurd and chilling. Funny and horrifying. Right up my alley.
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Humiliation: Stories
by
Paulina Flores
Weems
, August 08, 2020
Sorry to say that I enjoyed only one story in here, "Aunt Nana." I am guessing the appeal to others is rooted maybe in the 'dirty realism' of the stories? Or perhaps the praise comes more from the book in the original Spanish? I regret jumping to translator-blame, but there were a few stories, like the title story, that left me feeling flat, where I'd gone through and followed the situation and events, but felt little impact from them in the end. And I couldn't help wondering if there was something in the original language, some nuance that isn't easily translated to English, that upticked some of these stories in a way that was getting lost in this edition. Obviously, it's also possible that this was a collection that simply didn't resonate with me. I tend to need realist fiction to not just report the happenings of the world, but to offer insight, otherwise the stories can feel like journalistic dramatization. Maybe a time will come when I will look at the book again and smack my present self in the back of the head. Anything is possible.
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Sister
by
Nickole Brown
Weems
, August 08, 2020
I have to admit, this book read to me like a textbook approach to themes of abuse, incest, etc. Sadly, this is a book of poetry, which made me feel that the art here was not so much an exploration into the deep complications of such material, but framing it all in a way that publishers will like, which distanced me more and more from the poems themselves.
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The Reckless Remainder
by
Carol Guess
Weems
, August 08, 2020
In my efforts to read the entire Kelly Magee bibliography, here's The Reckless Remainder, a sequence of prose poems co-authored with Carol Guess. I tore through this book for the way Magee and Guess delve through a tornado of attraction, obsession that easily turns to rejection, and the lingering effects, which makes the relationship as much about the speaker's own wildness as much as it is about another woman. Powerful language use that works up in exponents, each sentence bringing us to a boil, sometimes plunging us into cold water. A thoroughly magnificent book.
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In America
by
Diana Goetsch
Weems
, June 25, 2020
Diana Goetsch's poetry has always thrived on its directness, the way it lays out its subject matter quickly, sans obfuscation, to then open up the opportunity to deepen, to show us how context matters, or how the subject of a good poem always needs to be re-evaluated. Whether the subject is a transwoman Instagramming her name on the side of Starbucks cup, or a patient suddenly given a diagnosis of a month to live, Goetsch shows us the joy in small victories, or the challenge of deciding what's most worth your remaining time. Notable of course, for those who have known Diana's work for a long time, is her coming out, which may give these poems an added level of joy to them, and without doubt the keen eye that we've come to expect.
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