Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

I read this book at the recommendation of a former colleague for a Utah-related project of mine. From the author and subject of Black Klansmen, the book and the film, we have a follow-up project fleshing out his career as a gang unit police investigator and the so-called hip-hop cop in (drumroll) Utah of all places.

Stallworth begins this memoir with a hamfisted rebuttal of Boots Riley. For those unaware, when the BlackKklansmen rollout began, Riley released a forceful critique of BlackKklansmen as revisionist history, copaganda, and pointed out Stallworth’s history of infiltrating radical Black organizations, including the one Riley’s father was a part of, as part of COINTELPRO. Stallworth fixates one aspect of Riley’s blistering and effective critique: turns out, Stallworth was too young to have participated in COINTELPRO. He definitely DID take part in infiltrating radical Black organizations, just not under the behest of the FBI. Stallworth lambasts Riley for this factual inaccuracy, completely missing the thrust of Riley’s critique. Everyone I love and care about would consider this a minor hiccup in Riley’s critique, since Stallworth did in fact break up radical Black orgs. 

For his part, Stallworth justifies infiltrating these organizations using explicitly anti-communist rhetoric and claiming they were a threat to national security. To the surprise of no one, a cop is a cop. What was mildly surprising and thoroughly entertaining was Stallworth’s confession to physically assaulting Riley at a dinner, where he boasts of squeezing his hand too hard and holding him hostage by squeezing a pressure point on his neck. Later on, he describes patting Riley’s back and telling him he just used the bathroom and didn’t wash his hands. He literally brags about making Riley “my bitch.” The moments reveal just how disgusting, insecure, and brute Stallworth’s masculinity is. What a weird little clown! 

The first bit of Stallworth’s memoir details his rise in the police department and the emergence of his “Black consciousness.” We see Stallworth refuse to tokenize himself in moments and opportunistically tokenize himself in other moments. He’s clearly a bullheaded person with a high tolerance for external criticism and disapproval as both his Black community and the officers on the force didn’t really like him much, it seems. He relates to Malcolm X, but never bothered learning the history of policing or thinking critically about solving societal problems, so he’s completely bought into the prison industrial complex as our best option it seems. 

There are two worthwhile histories described in this book. The first is the history of the JobCorps in Utah. Stallworth focuses in on this federal program, which took low-income, high-risk youth from major cities like LA and brought them to suburban Utah for job skills training, because JobCorps brought gang culture to Utah. Utah officials were in denial of this, because JobCorps stimulated their economies with fat federal checks to administer the program. In my opinion, the JobCorps also likely increased the racism of Utahns by making some of the few people of color visible in their communities, some of the poorest and in need in the country. Of course, their presence brought social problems that proliferate among any historically oppressed working class and racialized youth. For his part, Stallworth provides a sturdy critique of how the program was administered that actually shows a deep concern for these youth. It’s hilarious to learn more about white, Mormon gangsters of Utah committing petty crimes and aggravating to learn about the Pacific Islander Mormons swept up into gang culture as a reprieve from a racist society. Stallworth rebuts criticisms of his profiling of youth of color by providing anecdotes of families crying racism when they had proven gang ties and never by describing actual data and letting us know what his profile looked like. Overall, this is socially complicated territory, where actual racism is certainly at play, as well as actual violent criminal activity in some communities of color at the time. Stallworth’s voice and bias here is useful, even if I disagree with him, in painting the larger picture of what was happening in Utah’s lower income community at times. For his part, Stallworth genuinely went out of his way to do what he thought was right in revealing the way JobCorps was failing both youth  of color and the communities these youth were brought to. 

The second history tied into this one is the rise of gangster rap and its influence on youth. During the hysterical pearl-clutching of the Ice T, NWA, and Tupac era, Stallworth gained a reputation as a so-called “hip-hop cop,” where he would rap and breakdown rap lyrics in universities and serve as an expert witness in the “Gangster Rap Made Me Do It” cases. I listened with troubled curiosity about how Stallworth claims to have learned the “G-code” by listening to gangster rap. He became a fan of 90s gangsta rap, falling hard to Tupac’s consciousness in songs like “Dear Mama’ and “Brenda’s got a baby.” During this era, Stallworth became a N-word-whisperer for scared white people and elites. His representations of hip-hop culture were sympathetic, as he saw gangster rappers as expressing the genuine concerns of an oppressed community. He defended hip-hop culture in courtrooms and warned politicians against culture wars that simply made gangster rap cooler. While I agree that Stallworth’s experience as a cop, a Black man, and a fan of hip-hop, who self-studied sociology and ethnic studies to better understand the culture, give him some insight in the gang culture and communities of color, I believe these experiences gave him too much confidence. He acts as if hip-hop culture can substitute actually getting to know people. His relationship with community remains antagonistic, even in his somewhat believable anecdotes about former gang members saying he was the only positive male role model in their life. Even if these anecdotes were true, a handful of anecdotes hardly compare to the many other lives he likely ruined and made much more difficult in his role.  

Even when Stallworth is dead wrong, he still manages to be entertaining. 3 out of 5.

Golden Ax / Rio Cortez / 2022

Golden Ax / Rio Cortez / 2022

I'm kicking myself for not reading Rio Cortez sooner and am somewhat stunned we never crossed paths as young poets of color in Utah. Golden Ax forges a rooted Black identity in Utah in a way that feels deeply familiar in the odd and only way Utah is familiar. Golden Ax is an eco-poetics that feels dramatically different than most of what I've read of Utah environmental writing.  Perhaps it's in Cortez’s willingness to embrace her historic relationship to the land, to find joy and connection to it in a way that doesn't at all feel romantic of the past, present, or future, or perhaps as viscerally angry or stormy as me or most other writers of color who I’ve happened to read. Golden Ax is a Black feminist counterpoint to (slave) master narratives of Utah and nods to Brigham Young and Sun-Ra, the Broad Ax, and other historic touchpoints to elbow her way into a fully realized Utah Blackness. The poems are full-bodied, lyrical, and thoughtful in a way that made me feel like I just had an amazing dinner convo with Rio, complete with music recommendations, Utah upbringing stories, and soulful contemplation of our racial and environmental predicaments. 4/5

West: A Translation / Paisley Rekdal / 2023

West: A Translation / Paisley Rekdal / 2023

Check out the website here: https://westtrain.org/

West is a gorgeous tour-de-force interrogating the history and legacy of the American railroad as a fraught symbol of nationality for the US empire. Reading either the poetry collection, published by Copper Canyon, or its accompanying website alone does not suffice, as they complete one another in useful ways. Ideally, these projects are read in conversation in my opinion, and I hope the NBA readers reviewed both thoroughly before longlisting the project. The project as a whole bases itself one of the two poems a Chinese migrant left on the walls of his cell on Ellis Island before dying by suicide. 

On the website, readers are greeted by a transcription of the poem in Chinese characters. If you hover over the characters, you are greeted by a literal translation of the character into English and a poem written by Rekdal inspired by the character. The poems include a range of voices from that of political leaders, such as Presidents, Brigham Young, and union leaders, to that of the workers and the passengers of the railroad, including “What Day,” a tender poem in the voice of a queer Chinese worker and “Vainly,” which borrows language from manuals of etiquette and politeness for women. On the website, its muted black and red tones give the project a sense of mysticism. Poetry as a medium contributes to this sense of mystery, because even in a poem written in straightforward language, its form and context creates a trapdoor that absconds the reader into the mysteries of history. Perhaps a simpleton or an orientalist reader would be tempted to believe the website gives them access to a concrete and uncontested history, but even if so, the sheer range of voices here would create such a cacophony in the heads of the readers, I doubt they could keep such a simplistic reading straight in their heads. The website especially thrives on the auditory and visual elements of the short video poems, where Rekdal reads the poems to a backdrop of photographs, paintings, landscapes, and film from the era and relevant regions. Rekdal is an impressive performer, taking on her subjects’ voices with a presence that animated and emphasized aspects of the poems that were less exciting for me on the page. Perhaps this is a shortcoming on my part as a reader for not knowing or caring to animate the text with my own flesh and tongue, but the strength of the visual and auditory components of the website is that whatever shortcomings I may have as a reader are kicked to the side as I’m forced to grapple with the vibration of a poem spoken aloud with all the girth and tension of its human emotion and knowledge. Nowhere is the power of this effect more clear than in the performance of “This.” On the page, the line “this is the sound of a train” merely repeats itself over and over until the text overlaps itself repeatedly. Visually, this can be interesting on the page, but not terribly so. If the reader fails to read the poem aloud, they might miss the point entirely. Your voice reading the poem--that is the sound of a train. The reader, especially if they are situated in the US, especially if they, like me, have spent substantial time in the American West, are the outcome of this great wave of history. On the website, the poem is read aloud by the descendents of the Chinese railroad workers.They are the consequence of the railroad and they too are the sound of a train. What I love most about the website is its embedded pedagogical usefulness. The video poems with their archival imagery and Rekdal’s intonation will likely help students parse difficult history, material, and poetic form. It can teach students how to angle their way into poems and how to creatively imagine history. This is an invaluable teaching tool. The website ends with a translation of the original Chinese poem left on the wall. 

Now onto the book incarnation of this project. It is split into two sections. The first half of the collection includes all of the poems on the website. The second half includes prose poems or essayistic meditations on the same Chinese characters, sometimes providing additional context for the poems but not in a boring scholarly footnote sort of way. Rather, these essays wring the material anxiously in their hands. Here, you can sense Rekdal’s eye tracing primary sources and wrestling with the muck of history, the weight of trying to depict a convoluted moment of our nation and empire’s growth. The bewitching power of the website with all its music, audio engineering, and video work cannot overwhelm the reader here in the sublime of the moment. Instead, the bare voices gather one on top of the other and the impossibility of the project becomes more apparent in the process. What voices are included and why? What personally motivates Rekdal to tell these histories? As I’m in a particularly zealous moment of my own study of history through Marxist perspectives, I wrestled with the question of who Rekdal’s project would serve. Was it ultimately still a statist project supporting some sense of the region’s nationalism and appropriating these voices in service of an American identity? 

These are difficult questions. While I’m not sure I landed on a clear answer, I want to congratulate Rekdal on her political slyness here. As poet laureate, she was given the task to write a statist poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad with  the additional awkwardness of the implicit or perhaps even explicit--hey, you got some Chinese blood, why don’t you write something that celebrates the Chinese in particular, yeah? What she gave them was something much more beautiful and complex. Where a more cowardly or  simple poet may have given them an elegant enough poem celebrating the marginalized subject and supposing to “give voice to the voiceless,” Rekdal delivers a polyvocal contradictory project that appropriates the voices of white supremacists, governmental forms, etiquette manuals, as well as attempting to voice or describe the condition of orphans, minoritized groups, and more. Doing so lays the mores of the era and the racist scaffolding of the US empire bare; however, she does this in a way that clinches so tightly to primary historical sources that it would be hard to fault Rekdal as politically biased. The project maintains its air of objectivity through its overwhelming cacophony of voices. Simply put, Rekdal makes it impossible to view the railroad, and thereby the US empire, in a flattened simplistic way typical of these projects. While a reader (read: I) might be dissatisfied that Rekdal isn’t angry or critical enough at moments or doesn’t find a way to incorporate yet another marginalized voice forgotten in the silences of the archive, Rekdal is also dodging bullets in a state that wouldn’t hesitate to cut her poet laureate funding or ban her book. How effective is the project as a pedagogical tool? Is it reaching younger audiences and providing nuance to how they might view these moments of US history?  Perhaps those are more apt questions that are beyond the scope of a book review. The fact Rekdal is now leading the American West Center as director suggests that this project at least succeeded in providing her with a leg into this position. In this role, she might effectively apply the same critical eye or diversify what is represented by the Center and Utah at large. There’s few scholars in Utah I’d trust more in this role. 

To her credit, Rekdal lays her cards out pretty bare in the essay “Homeward Facing,” where she writes: “The work of the railroad is the work of empire, and for America to rise again and again, it must reinvest in its fantasy of itself as renewable, progressive, flexible. We are all servants of empire one way or another; I do not exclude myself in this. The extravagance of this poem I have produced reveals that I, too, am empire’s scribe. That in my attempt to critique the achievement I have also celebrated it; that it would be dishonest not to celebrate what inspires, at its root, a kind of wonder. For if I do not choose, also, to commemoration, do I further erase the workers? I refuse to abandon all fantasies of my nation.” (bold emphasis mine) I had an immediate repulsion to the portion in bold. I just think Rekdal is flatout wrong here. This is a rather extreme example, but I would point to the atomic bomb as a clear example of something that inspires great wonder, awe, and terror that there’s good reason not to celebrate. Given the latest Oppenheimer craze at the box office, it’s likely that US nationalism is dead set on seducing us with the romance of her technological advancements, regardless of their consequences, the unnamed dead they pile on. There’s a way of respecting your enemy, feeling the sublime of their achievements, without celebrating them. During the first year of her graduate studies in the environmental humanities program, my ex once talked to me about the sublime she felt looking into Kennecot’s Copper mine. This was not the sublime of celebration. The workers’ subjectivities do not hinge on celebrating the railroad. It hinges on finding ways of representing their subjectivities as faithfully as possible, as fraught of a project as that is. I agree with Rekdal that we’re all servants of the empire. Living and working in the US means having your tax dollars, your economic interests, and the labor you need to survive tied to US power structures. Unlike Rekdal, perhaps, and like June Jordan, I aspire to be a menace to my enemies and I do consider the United States, simply put, my enemy. The fantasies of the US have betrayed me and mine far too consistently and for too long for me to be otherwise.  

Lastly, I want to draw attention to the last essay-poem in the collection “Translation” because I think it is of interest to anyone who identifies as a part of a diaspora or for anyone whose family is in the process of losing a heritage language. Here, we find Rekdal being transparent and vulnerable about the potential shortcomings of her project and her relationships to the work. I don’t take issue with most of Rekdal’s methodology for the project, because mostly, I’m just in awe of the intense energy, dedication, and care she took in bringing these voices together in a website and book. Rekdal’s attention and hustle justifies and protects her work to a certain extent because it’s undeniable that Rekdal pulled off a difficult project with more grace and nuance than many could’ve mustered. I cannot imagine someone else doing much better. There are a couple of lines however that are touching in their painful ellisions: “I do not know Chinese. And since so few people in my family speak it, I know I will never learn. My family’s loss of language means my own exclusion from their past. Does this matter?” Here, we see a biracial poet and scholar grapple with the loss of their heritage language and what it means for her positionality in this larger project and relationship to her own history. Moments of tension like these abound throughout West with gorgeous poems like “Heart” and the wince in “Body.” In this particular citation, I wanted to gently unwind two points 1) The loss of a language, while driven by a complex of social factors, is still a choice. There is a world where Rekdal learns fluent Chinese, where I am a better speaker of Spanish and even learn nawat, where indigenous comrades do not surrender their native tongues and 2) To a certain extent, we are all excluded from familial past. Language is only one barrier. Unmarked graves, burned libraries, limited archives, gentrification, the death of elders in our communities are other material barriers. So much of our work as historians or storytellers is an attempt at ethical trespass. I mention these things because as diasporic people, we have a choice about how much we struggle to regain our non-American selves. The work of reaching back is inherently messy, but worthwhile. The whole Xicano movement is a case-in-point of how fruitful, ugly, useful, and difficult such a process can be. I don’t hold any judgment for Rekdal for how she’s navigated her biracial identity and I’m mostly moved and touched by her vulnerability and openness about it in her work. I’m bringing this up because I’m passionate about the necessity of reaching back, and as a whole, I’d argue West reaches back remarkably well, allowing us as readers, as Utahans, as Westerners, to see some of the histories erased in K-12 curricula, these histories that allow to better contend with who we are and who we have been and better imagine who we may become. 4.75/5 Hats off to Rekdal. 

Real Queer America / Samantha Allen / 2019

Real Queer America / Samantha Allen / 2019

This memoir is a trans woman’s love letter to queer America, living in the red states, starting with Provo and traveling to Texas, then Bloomington, and ending in Atlanta. Allen writes with a chip on her shoulder, casting shade at queer communities in big liberal cities like San Francisco and New York and defending us rural and red state queers with a zeal that might romanticize our communities a tad too much and poke at any wounds you may carry as these red states literally outlaw our bodies. Her story is very much worth telling and her arguments, whether completely convincing or not, expand queer-normative narratives of the LGBTQ+ community and challenge us to be more inclusive of whose stories we tell. As anyone living in a so-called third world or developing nation will tell you, there’s more to our communities than the traumas we have to shoulder and there is beauty in communities, even or perhaps especially when forged by the fire of a shared need for survival and understanding. One of my biggest frustrations with this book, however, is how incredibly white it is. I don’t believe a person of color could have written this book and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t have taken people to Bloomington. Even so, it was nice to see Utah and Indiana reflected through Allen’s mirrors, places I danced in and people I hugged are included in this book. Their documentation and celebration is deeply meaningful, even through Allen’s rainbow-colored glasses, pun intended. This book made me weep a couple of times and shared the stories of LGBTQ+ activists in some of the most precarious states, including an interesting come-up story for Troy Williams and plenty of cogent legal and logical defenses for LGBTQ+ communities. It helps that Allen is a journalist that literally writes on LGBTQ+ legislation all the time. 4/5

My Kitchen Table / Pilar Pobil / 2007

My Kitchen Table / Pilar Pobil / 2007

This book is horribly marketed as a coffee table book of an old woman's charming stories and paintings. Its cover, while a good painting by Pilar, is too pedestrian for such an energetic, catty book about aristocratic life in the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and fascist Spain, as well as the bougiest Mormon circles of Salt Lake City. There are moments when I was heartbroken for girl Pilar, breaking out into laughter at her pettiness, and then forgivingly embarrassed for some of the classist attitudes in the book. Pilar is genuinely so charming I don't mind the white upper class perspective no amounts of self awareness and education can entirely undo, even when it's positively socially flawed for today's era, which happens occasionally but not too unforgivably. The book is marked by truly monumental encounters with historic figures, as well as feminist determination necessary for any independent woman of this era. It was such a pleasure to read. 4.5/5

When She Woke, She Was An Open Field / Hilary Brown / 2017

When She Woke, She Was An Open Field / Hilary Brown / 2017

There's a surprising amount of 5/5 poems in this short chapbook by a disabled poet with ties to Utah. These short pugilistic poems will knock you out with one stanza by bearing testimony to the sometimes agonizing experience of disability. There's a blurb by Natalie Diaz and having met this poet, I'd add their presence carries a gravitas as sharp and heavy as their verse.

4/5

Cure for the Common Universe / Christian McKay Heidicker / 2016

Cure for the Common Universe / Christian McKay Heidicker / 2016

This book is hilarious. Especially if you have the sense of humor of a teenage boy and don’t mind curse words too much. I’m impressed by how many ways Heidicker managed to make Jaxon’s self-deprecating man boob jokes funny. Sophomoric jokes aside, I appreciated the emotional journey of the protagonist Jaxon on this one. While the majority of the plot tackles Jaxon’s cross-eyed infatuation with a teenage girl he had a five-minute (if that) encounter with, the novel successfully unravels Jaxon’s romantic naivete, family baggage, and teenage myopia. The conflict is this: Jaxon finally has a date on Friday, but on Monday, his parents force him to go to a video game rehabilitation center. Jaxon has four days to prove he’s well enough to leave the center and make it not only to his first date, but potentially his only chance at love in the universe. The rehab center features plenty of unexpected surprises, both within its bizarre programming and in the genuine wisdom teens learn at the facility. In my favorite scenes, Jaxon is called out for his privileges by a blunt queer fat Vietnamese teenage girl gamer, who despite facing racist bullying at the rehab center, manages to come off as more than a stereotype and one of the most fleshed out characters among the gamers. Much less can be said of Soup, a child Jaxon bullies and although he ultimately deeply regrets his behavior, Jaxon (and thereby the reader) aren’t afforded a glimpse into Soup’s full humanity.

Gamers will find a plethora of deep cut references to scratch their nerdy bones, but even if your gaming knowledge is limited, you will still find plenty to hang out to with this book.

Please gift this to a teenager in your life, especially if they have a doofus sense of humor. I recommend this book for anyone interested in YA, video games, masculinity, and fiction. I give this a 5/5.

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

I first encountered the work of Craig Childs at Star Hall in Moab, Utah. The room was packed with locals hanging on his every word, especially as he described the rapturous beauty of flying through a virga. My partner was so impressed by his passion that she bought a copy of his book. While she was getting it signed, she mentioned she was a PhD student in Literature and a bashful Childs told her he wrote the book very, very hastily and to please not judge him too harshly. After reading Virga & Bone, all I have to say is if this isn’t Childs in top form, then Child’s other books must be bomb-ass. A true romanticist, his writing swells and sighs over our landscape. A snappy read, the language glides beneath your eyes like a magic carpet. Childs speaks with the voice of someone eroded, but not hardened by desert. He speaks with a blunt wisdom about its dangers and risks, but also with undeniable and infectious love. At the event, Childs talked about how his real aim in writing is not to make people read, but to make people go out to reverently, ecstatically experience the wonders of the Southwest on their own. His books are only supposed to hold you down while you wait for your next excursion, as most of us can’t live a nomadic life backpacking across our sparse, sparkling deserts.

Another aspect of the book I appreciate is Child’s understanding of the history of the land. He weaves in bits of Navajo language and culture without stereotyping or exoticizing. Neither does it feel like he is speaking over or for Navajos or other indigenous groups. Reflecting on his relationship to the land, he argues, “If there was ever an illegal alien, I felt like one. I was walking over histories as if the earth was the only history, an error of arrogance and blindness I didn’t know I had… I’d been speaking it thinking myself a prince, an explorer. Now I was exploring the trenches of a canyon looking for the way out.” While I cringed at the word “illegal alien,” I appreciate his gesture of acknowledging how his whiteness shaped his relationship with the land and how part of the work of knowing this land is knowing its history beyond European colonialism. Later on, Childs speaks of the Southwest as an “exchange route”, a “Silk Road of North America.” In describing the history of the landscape, he names the atrocities, the “children in cages,” “murdered women,” and “concentration camps.” Childs uses the Southwest’s history as a counterargument against harsh and strict immigration policy. “Ask any shell trader a thousand years ago and they’d tell you that blocking the flow in a place like this will be a problem,” Childs reminds us. For someone who manages to stay otherwise politically neutral, I deeply appreciate these clear-eyed gestures.

If you love the outdoors, you’ll love Childs work.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Utah, non-fiction, environmentalism, and deserts.

Play For Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

Play for Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

Paula Jane Mendoza puts the hip in hypnotic. Play for Time is a collection of poetry brimming with eros, longing, and fire. Think Natalie Diaz’s diction and rhythm tempered with Traci Brimhall’s slow soothing lyric. Typically, I am skeptical of literature with absurdly obscure or “long” words, but Mendoza finds a way to make words like “aphasic,” “maugre,” and “salamandrine” absolutely succulent . That said, you might need your dictionary handle.

The organization of PFT can feel a quizzical if you if you are used to poetry collections with a linear narrative. PFT consciously writes against the linear narrative, opting for a narrative that contorts itself, is more scrambled. The section headers for example are “First,” “So,” “Then,” “Beginning,” and “Middle” with a poem called “Alternate Ending 1” in section “So” and a poem called “The End” in section “Then”—both in the middle of the book. Some poems are glibly titled “Lyric,” “Narrative Poem,” and “Sentimental “Poem,” drawing attention to their genre. Rather than detracting, these titles get fun: 1) “Lyric” sketches seductive imagery, trying to capture the ineffable sensation of eros, both as in love and a lust for life: “I have been wanting to write outside / of thinking…” Mendoza croons, “I’m stupid with spring / and impatient with those / that refuse to burst, too stubborn / to purple such sudden luxury / out the ground.” 2) “Narrative Poem” Rather than a poem that scribes the A-B-C narrative of a heartbreak, this poem centers the poet’s resistance to narrative, the desire to be removed from it. It’s very Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even alludes to it in the prose poem. 3) “Sentimental Poem”: God knows too many woman have been called sentimental, but how else do you write a love poem to your long distance partner? I chuckle when the speaker bashfully notes, “If I am being honest, romantic comedies are my jam.”

There is the heartbreak of a Yesika Salgado poem, where the reader throws on a novela, perrea sola, and downs some ice cream to cool the ache. Then, there is the heartbreak of a Paula Mendoza poem, where it feels more like crying in front of the bathroom sink as you try to love yourself enough to brush your teeth and fail. “I / can’t for the line of me extract any more / than I am / tired. I am tired / of myself when I think / of you and nowhere we are / headed towards, the last word / always / the first, again. Again.” If line breaks were wrist locks, readers will be wearing casts for weeks. Her poems pace and punch silence like clothesline to the neck. Take “Engineer,” for example.

Lastly, erotic poetry is notoriously difficult to write without feeling cheap. Mendoza’s erotic poems in this collection must be expensive because they stupefy. Here’s some videos if you don’t believe me. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Filipinx/Pinay literature, Asian literature, poetry, sequencing collections, erotica, feminism, and Utah.

The Heart Keeps Faulty Time / Siân Griffiths / 2020

The Heart Keeps Faulty Time by Siân Griffiths is a perfect bedtime read, for those who need something to wind down in the evening or wind up in the morning. In this snappy collection of micro-fictions, Griffiths plays with magic and fantasy. Her stories will keep your imagination on edge with their sheer strangeness. Aliens, mermaids, dragons, and clowns abound. Some of these stories build up details slowly, as in “You Were Raised by a Dragon, What Was It Like?”, where the reader is bombarded with provocative questions detailing a child’s potential upbringing in a dragon’s nest. The exercise of creating a whole story out of questions was a fun, unexpected way of creating detail and possibility.

A lot of my favorite flash fictions stick with me because of an emotional note they manage to nail or a concept they skillfully unravel. There’s a sort of breathlessness a great piece of flash fiction leaves me with, because they are charged with creating an emotional stirring in so few words, so quickly. The story that most successfully shifted the matter inside me is “Everyone Fails.” The story is about a female superhero who is passed over by a superhero agency, not because she isn’t talented or skilled, but because she fails to perform the femininity and stereotypes of a female superhero. Maybe I liked it because the character is easy to relate to, what with her naivete crushed by the cold injustice of the world. There’s something very endearing about her idealism and her desire for the world to be meritocracy.

Perhaps my greatest criticism of the collection is that the some of these stories, though polished and well-written, feel like exercises, as if they were born from writing prompts, which according to Griffiths herself, some of them were. However, even in the stories that may feel like they are lacking an emotional core or concept to resonate from, there’s always enough details to make the experience of reading tactile and impressive. Take “The Persistence of Geese,” a strange story about waking up attached to a goose and needing to go to the butcher's shop to get it chopped off your body. Written in four short paragraphs, it’s vivid and descriptive, even if it doesn’t seem to reach for a greater meaning.

I recommend this book to folks, especially writers, interested in micro-fiction or Utah writers.