Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Marco and I traded books during the Trinacional festival de poesia in Chiquimula, where he wore #BlackLivesMatter and Pride shirts in even the most conservative settings, where he was told not to read the poem about the war criminal who funded one of the private schools. Most poetry collections I have read primarily about death sink into the sentimental. You can read the minor scale in the writing, the moaning grief. Coz writes about death with a punk’s stoicism and probing eye. In “Oda al Arbol” or “Ode to the Tree,” he laments the “cowardly act of writing,” wrestling with the fear of expression in the aftermath of a dictatorship. In “Ultima Voluntad” or “Last Will,” he reflects upon the visions of his dying father. Coz is a chapbook for those unafraid of looking the world in the eye, of noticing the cadavers they prefer we ignore. 5/5 

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

I traded books with Jessica when I visited Oneonta in October. The American Gun is a cutting chapbook about gun violence in the United States. I can’t say the collection taught me anything new. We have lived through and remember each of the mass shootings and massacres described in this collection. The collection doesn’t make me look at them in a new light. Femiani doesn’t aestheticize the loss. Rather, reading them altogether, spoken so plainly, really hammers in the incomprehensible amount of violence we have allowed to become normal. Femiani’s chapbook attempts to un-numb the US soul. I read it by a pond reflecting the red and yellow autumn leaves, after having a challenging conversation with a guilt-ridden Zionist who thanked me for teaching a poem by Black Jewish poet Aaron Samuels during a workshop. I, like Femiani’s book, don’t have clear answers to how to defeat the newest wave of fascist-terrorist violence. I struggled with my numbness as I read the collection. I thank Femiani for making me struggle against it. 3 out of 5. 

Inventario de mis musas / Laura Ruiz / 2022

Inventario de mis musas / Laura Ruiz / 2022

These poems are written under the pressure of undocumented motherhood and you can feel it. Lines race to the edge of the page as poems burn through difficulties and desires. It feels reminiscent of America is in the Heart or sad girl poems. Standout poems like Spanglish manage to tie themselves up cleanly, but this is a messier, rawer collection that doesn’t have time for that nonsense. 3 out of 5. 

addiction is a sweet, dark room / amanda corbin / 2024

addiction is a sweet, dark room / amanda corbin / 2024

With a voice as clear and gentle as a sun shower, addiction is a sweet dark room artfully guides the reader through a young woman’s coming-of-age, as well as her struggle overcoming alcoholism. Here, we do not get a gritty performance of degradation that voyeuristic readers demand from writers of addiction. Rather, corbin provides a surefooted rhythm, whose careful pace reads in part as a guard against former missteps. We get a clear-eyed diction that—like all the best poetry—will stretch your vocabulary, mostly by showing you the hidden pockets inside of even familiar phrases. While Hemingway encouraged aspirants to write drunk, corbin has crafted a soulfulness within an aesthetic of sobriety, and it is in these sober reflections where the collection sings at its best: as in “longevity,” where the speaker and her grandmother share a moment of light within the darkness of addiction, or “welcome wagon,” where the drama of the early days of the pandemic loses its punch when compared to what corbin has already survived. addiction is a sweet dark room is a testament that recovery, even in its smallness, its lack of glamour, and its imperfections, is worth it.

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. 

The Secret Room: A String Quartet / Kazim Ali / 2017

The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017) by Kazim Ali.

Presented as a novel written as a musical score for a string quartet, The Secret Room by Kazim Ali follows four characters as they navigate a numbing onslaught of longing and frost, death and red lights. Each story is told simultaneously, as if each voice were a different instrument on a musical score. If read as a traditional novel, the reader will alternate between two or more voices in most of the sections. Part contrapuntal, part free-form lyric narrative, the novel may not always read seamlessly in a traditional front-to-back manner, but the poetic connections and tensions make each page erupt with meanings and emotional nuances. The Secret Room is a book I revel returning to because of the deftness with which Ali exploits the potential of this one-of-a-kind form.

Take this excerpt from the introductory section of the novel, for example, aptly titled “theme.” The first voice and protagonist of Ali’s novel-in-verse is Sonia Chang. Sonia is a concert violinist, one of those majestically disciplined people who practices for hours, lost in darkening rooms, swallowed within an intimacy unknown to an unfortunate majority of us. Here, Ali provides a glimpse into her devoted practice. The rewards of her dedicated meditation are described in language that evokes both the spiritual and erotic, in the Platonic and carnal senses. If we read Chang’s voice in isolation, it reads like this:

She has never felt in her life / this way: / when music fills her / she feels lost. / And filled. / Remember the temple-pools. / She’s adrift now / halfway between sleep and the sound of ocean. / How can she open her self to the sky— / It’s a delirium, she thinks. / It’s a sort of fever (19-20)

On the page, however, Chang’s story is intertwined with the stories of three other characters, as in this image of page 19. Positioned as the opening notes of Ali’s string quartet, the quoted description of Sonia’s practice serves as a sort of ars poetica to The Secret Room’s biochemistry. Like much music, Ali’s The Secret Room has the power to make you feel lost and full at the same time. Voices interlock and slip away deliriously. Even when you cannot outline the exact shape of the narrative’s geometry, you will feel it. It’s not that Ali’s string quartet lacks structure or obscures itself through imprecision. Each narrative is told clearly on an individual level and combine to create one unified voice. Rather, the experience of shifting from voice-to-voice so swept me away in the swell and tide of the music that the traditional expectations of linear forms and plotlines became subordinate to the demands of lyric and prayer.

I realize this image in isolation can make the novel seem labyrinthine. I confess, I flipped through the first twenty pages of the introductory “theme” five times over: four times following one of the four protagonists in isolation and a final time reading them all together. If this sounds tedious, it wasn’t. First of all, this didn’t amount to much reading because each character only has four lines per page at most. More importantly, however, Ali’s sense of rhythm and tension is so keen it was absolutely captivating. After developing a familiarity for the voice and the narrative conflict of each individual character, it became not only easy to follow if I read them altogether, but magical. In the same image from page 19, for example, Chang’s voice combines with the voices of Rizwan Syed, a yoga instructor. When music makes Chang “[feel] lost. / And filled,” and she “[r]emembers the temple pools,” Syed’s section follows with a resonant description of the practice of yoga: “In these quiet moments the empty spaces of silence open wider still.”  A few lines down, when Chang is “adrift now / halfway between sleep and the sound ocean,” Syed recalls, “the “Temple-pool” position” where “students breathe, become bowls.” Ali has not merely placed four different narratives side-by-side. He has arranged them so they parallel and contradict one another, so sentences almost flow completely into one another.

There is little doubt that this potentially intimidating form has limited The Secret Room’s readership. Of the three scanty reviews online (two of which are less than 120 words and on Goodreads), each points to its formal innovation as a sort of deformity, an experimental fetish “not for everyone,” lauded with five stars but noted as a deterrent. It wounds me to see such painstaking craftsmanship and poetic form dismissed by some readers, as works of literature that marry form and content so masterfully are so rare. 

Genre and reception aside, The Secret Room’s value lies not merely in its undeniable technical brilliance, but in the heart of its concerns: each character struggles to create meaning in a life severed from their mother country, spurred by the demands of two, at times diametrically opposed, cultures. With the focus and exertion of a true artist, Sonia Chang prepares for her upcoming concert, “suspended against logic and her fear” (115). Meanwhile, Rizwan Syed, a yoga teacher and aging bachelor, is broken by the death of family members; years of isolation, cultural disconnection, and familial alienation flood in, forcing him to break his personal silences. Jody Merchant, on the other hand, is a social worker whose life beyond the redundant labor of motherhood and her career has come to a halt; like the traffic, it is “nearly unmoving,” as Merchant struggles to rekindle her faded passions (25). Lastly, Pratap Patel grapples with the trauma of losing his younger brother to cancer as a child in India and the paradoxical meaninglessness of his successful life in New York.

Each character must exchange a pound of their souls for survival. Sonia gives up on her dreams of traveling to Kerala and studying South Indian classical music; Jody abandons her name; Rizwan does not speak to his family for years; and Pratap chooses to bear his burdens alone, alienating even his wife. In this way, The Secret Room models and undermines a variety of strategies for healing—from death, from burnout, from migration. Just as Patel begins finding solace in yoga, for example, Syed begins to feel disenchanted with the practice. Ali’s genius lies in the way he shows that each of these fragmented narratives and shattered lives is connected, pulled together and parallel like the strings of a violin. Images from one voice will reappear inverted in another. Characters encounter one another in surprising ways, revealing the intimacy possible within a yoga studio or concert hall, the lightyears between people in the same offices and beds.

Ali has one of those voices that can make the most complex compositions feel lucid. And he manages it all while chiseling jaw-dropping lines that can stand alone, no form or narrative necessary. For the past weeks, I have walked around the following line like a sculpture in mind: “At some point in the barely seen seam between noon and Sonia, a bell rings” (68). Readers will undoubtedly feel their own lives braid into the threads of each narrative until there is no seam between them and Jody’s utter devastation. Until there is no seam between the reader and Pratap’s salvation.

August to March Round-Up: 27 Books!

Hello world,

August 2020 to October 2020, my only real goal every day was getting through my workday. My therapist specifically had me working on not caring how productive I was each day, so I can base my self-love and self-worth on something other than my productivity. I appreciate my therapist for the revolutionary challenge and change she sparked in me and my sense of self. It really helped connect me to a truer, more peaceful version of myself. Anyway, personal growth aside, I managed to keep reading a lot, but fell very behind on the book reviews. In late March 2020, I made the goal of writing a book review for every book I read throughout a year. In a desperate attempt to keep by my personal goal, here’s a round-up of 27 books I read that I didn’t get around to writing a complete blog post for.

Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas / Roberto Lovato / 2020

One of the most comprehensive books on the contemporary Salvadoran migrant experience ever written. I hope it becomes a classic in Central American and Latinx studies. It’s all here: 1932, the civil war, migration, understanding gang violence, and one man’s reflections and making sense of it all. It’s a book I wish I would have read when I was 13. Lovato is one of our fiercest and sharpest voices. With the swagger of a once-gang member, once-born again Christian, and once revolutionary, Lovato writes in searing, lucid prose. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Latinx and Latin American histories, international politics, memoir, war literature, or gang literature. 5/5

The Book of Delights / Ross Gay / 2019

Written during the Trump era, Ross writes blunt, poetic observations of his daily life, in an attempt to flesh out the delight. In doing so, Ross opens our senses to the wonder and deliciousness, sometimes quotidian, sometimes spectacular, always somehow ubiquitous. Listening to this book is one of the most healing things I’ve done and practiced in the past month. This is not a book without its share of sorrow and loss, but a practice in staying present in the moment and finding the stars in the darkness. I recommend this book to everyone, but especially think it provides a valuable contribution to Black studies, as it focuses on Black joy rather than Black suffering. 5/5

Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way / Lao Tzu, rendered by Ursula Le Guin / 2019

I first discovered the Tao Te Ching through a poetic rendition of it in my local library in 8th grade. It was about the same time I discovered The Gospel of Thomas and The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom, two books that rattled my sense of self and the world. At the time, it provided me with a larger sense of meaning and spirituality when my then-Mormon worldview began to fray at the edges.

When I saw that literary powerhouse Ursula Le Guin had a rendition, I got my hands on it immediately. I worked my way through this book in the mornings and re-discovered some of the hardest earned lessons of my life, elucidated in pocket-sized stanzas in a language clear as water. They served as important reminders in a world constantly trying to distract us and convince us of other urgencies and priorities. Le Guin’s rendition is by far my favorite. It includes helpful—not distracting or pedantic—footnotes that help you wrestle with the meaning of the text. The notes includes critiques, etymologies, competing translations, Le Guin’s own wrestlings with the difficult language and sometimes obscure meaning.

Many of the translations of the Tao te Ching lose its humor, its fluidity and its clarity, reveling instead in obscurity and literalism. Le Guin makes Lao Tzu feel human. I recommend this book to everyone, especially martial artists, philosophers, the religious, and anyone going through traumatic experiences. 5/5

Letters to a Young Brown Girl / Barbara Jane Reyes / 2020

I was first introduced to Barbara Jane Reyes through Soleil David during my MFA program. I am incredibly indebted to her as Reyes is—or at least should be—one of the most important voices in poetry land, especially when it comes to women of color. Written mostly in prose poetry, Letters to a Young Brown Girl reads with the clarity and down-to-earth-ness of Yesika Salgado and the blade of Natalie Diaz in my opinion, a great marriage of staple content and razor sharp form. Anyone looking for music recommendations will be grateful to see a series of poems inspired by songs important to Reyes coming of age. If you are trying to raise a young woman que no se deja, with as much metaphor as passion in her eyes, you want to pass along this book. If you are trying to raise a human who honors the grit and wisdom of the women in their lives, pass along this book. While aimed at a younger audience, it is not without maturity and wisdom. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Filipinx literature, Asian studies, YA literature, and contemporary poetry. 3/5

Summerlost / Allie Condie / 2016

I should begin this quick review by admitting, I was very resistant to liking this book. It’s about Cedar City, a place where I worked overtime almost every week, basically had zero friends, was suffocated by whiteness and conservativism, and where I was incredibly lonely. Condie’s attempts to portray the place in a wistful, poetic, and even beautiful light were not welcomed by me!

Condie’s middle-grade novel covers the story of a young biracial (white and Asian) girl who has recently lost her father and younger brother to a car accident. Written in short, micro-fiction sized chapters, the book moves along quickly while somehow still capturing the smell-the-roses pace and atmosphere of life in rural Utah. Grief, especially at such a young age, is difficult to capture. Yet here, with tenderness, Condie renders the healing of a young girl, who finds ways to treasure and remember those she has lost, while developing new relationships and memories to push her forward. I'm also heartened—and I should say it, impressed!—to see the inclusion of a biracial Asian American character without letting racial issues subsume the rest of the book. The protagonist is a fully developed character and not merely a microcosm of larger race issues.

I recommend this book for everyone, especially 1) children dealing with grief and death, 2) white people trying to learn how to write POC characters, 3) people who need an easy read that will nurture and warm them and won’t demand your work brain to be on without sacrificing craft. This is a book you can cozy up to after a difficult day. 5/5

Appropriation: A Provocation / Paisley Rekdal / 2021

Writing about cultural appropriation usually makes me wanna pull my hair out. Even when I agree with the authors of the think pieces and hot takes, it’s a hard thing to talk about without sounding like you are too woke, foaming at the mouth, the champions of so-called “cancel culture.” Here, Paisley steps into these troubled waters with the grace of a dolphin who knows choreographed swimming routines. She manages to talk about these thorny issues with a clear-eyed precision, compassion, and without become belaboring. The fear of offending someone and clumsily crossing a line haunts many contemporary writers, so it is especially apt and touching to see this collection of essays written to an imaginary student, wrestling with insecurities and difficult subject material, who is asking for advice. This book should be required in every creative writing curriculum, and it should have been required decades ago. It would have saved many a young writer from the grief of muddling through these complicated issues on their own. It would have saved quite a few from getting their work trampled for sloppy renditions of cultures they didn’t know enough about.

I recommend this book to every creator, writer, and artist. It should be a staple of ethnic studies. It should win a grammy too. 5/5

Hood Criaturas / féi hernandez / 2020

féi deserves a spot in poetry right next to Danez Smith and Christopher Soto. Nonbinary, undocumented, and 100% magical, their debut collection of poems has an explosive use of form from the guttural anger of the prose poems “dontcomeformyhood” and “Brunch” to the slick quatrains of “When They Leave, a Pantoum.” While the collection deals with the very real traumas of PTSD and migration, it also celebrates and fights for its joy in poems like “first real nations of nations”. féi has so much soul and punch. I am grateful to get to peer into their light. I recommend this book to anyone interested in undocu literature, LGBTQ+ literature, Latinx literature, “political” poetry and contemporary poetry. 4/5

American Grief in Four Stages / Sadie Hoagland / 2019

14 stories in 155 pages, each with their own seductive sadness. I found myself sinking deeper into my seat, lowering into the sofa breathing this one in deep. These are inglorioIus struggles: a military veteran half-heartedly attempting to kindle a romantic relationship, a teenager trying to make sense of the suicide of his bright and popular little brother. The only reason I’m not giving this five out of five is because a few stories didn’t jump as high as the others, including “Fucking Aztecs” which repeats unfortunate stereotypes about natives. I especially dug stories like "Dementia, 1692”, which takes us back to witch hunts in Puritan America with a glass melting rhythm and sorrow. I recommend this collection to anyone interested in short fiction. 3.5/5

The Beethoven Sequence / Gerald Elias / 2020

I didn’t finish this political thriller. I stopped on this passage and realized all my suspicions that The Beethoven Sequence was, in fact, a bad book, and not simply a book that I wasn’t really interested were true. I especially hated that this book used the really politically fraught story of a man falsely accused of sexual violence as a mere plot device. Here is the passage that made me finally give up on reading, admittedly a couple of hundred pages too late:

“I’ve got this Mr. Clean fantasy,” she says, kissing the top of his head. “I have this thing about bald men. Have I ever mentioned that?”

“Even bald sex offenders?”

“They’re the best kind.”

His hand is inside her bathrobe, and he stands up to make it easier for her to find his zipper. He hasn’t been with a woman since the nightmare started eleven years before. Before his wife left him. Before he spent nine lonely years in prison. He can’t wait any longer. He presses his mouth against hers and she presses back. He pins her on her back on the kitchen table. She tears at his jeans and underpants and grasps his penis, pulling it insider her. He unties her robe and squeezes her breasts, hard. Eyes closed and her head back, she supports herself on her elbows, wrapping her legs around Whitmore’s waist. Her right hand falls into Whitmore’s dinner plate. As he presses into her, she grabs a handful of potato salad and coleslaw and smears it over his face and stuffs it into his mouth. Covering his lips with hers, the two of them tongue the food back and forth from one mouth to the other.

“You like chicken?” she whispers as she licks his face.

“What kind of question is that?” he pants. “Yeah. I suppose.”

“Good. Me, too.”

Feeling behind her for the remains of a chicken drumstick, she clutches it and slowly slides it into and then out of his mouth, as far as it will go, both of them licking at it, sucking on it. She wraps an arm around his neck as he rides her, his body spasming out of control. His wraps his arms around her back, pulling her toward him. He wants it to go on forever, but it has been such a long time. He shudders as he empties himself into her. He sinks onto her chest, panting, laughing, and crying at the same time.

“House confinement has its rewards,” he says, when his breath returns.”

I don’t recommend this book. 0/5

Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype / Clarissa Pinkola Estés / 1989 & Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men / James Sollis / 1994

I read Women Who Run With Wolves because it was recommended to me my many women of color in my life and even my therapist. I read Under Saturn’s Shadow, similarly, because men of color close to me found this title powerful. Both these books strengths are also their greatest weaknesses. Namely, they both essentialize and flatten men and women a tad bit too much to fit into the archetypes they are interested in. As someone whose gender identity and expression doesn’t fit neatly into femininity or masculinity, I struggled a lot to see myself in either book, although I felt pieces of both deep inside me. Women Who Run With Wolves is especially for women who have had to repress themselves under the pressure of racism and patriarchy. Under Saturn’s Shadow is especially for men with a lack of father figures in their lives. Both have deep poetic moments that will sweep you off your feet—it just might not be the norm. If you aren’t into Freudian and Jungian psychology, these probably aren’t for you. I give both 2.5/5.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise / Gene Luen Yang / 2012

I stepped into the Avatar comic series tentatively. I read them for free online, even watched a couple dubbed on YouTube. At the time, I was dreadfully depressed and needed something to just get me to the next day. So I binged, escaping into the world of Avatar. I was impressed by how good the comics are! It’s hard to keep the integrity of such a beloved and masteful series, but Gene Luen Yang pulls it off! Here tensions between Avatar Aang and Fire Lord Zuko emerge as Zuko begins to negotiate with the Earth Kingdom over colonized lands. The plot creates a powerful snapshot of some of the complex cultural mixing that happen during colonization and lived up to my hopes and dreams for the series. I recommend this to all youth and anyone interested in children’s literature. 5/5

Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Search / Gene Luen Yang / 2013

One of the greatest mysteries in the Avatar series is what happens to Zuko’s mom. This comic rewards fans’ patience and curiosity and doesn’t fail to deliver a powerful, coherent story, covering this important mystery in Avatar lore, doing a great job of capturing the struggles of women in oppressive marriages. I recommend this to all youth and anyone interested in children’s literature. 5/5

Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Rift / Gene Luen Yang / 2014

This comic is especially good for talking with children about the complications of modernization and the importance of environmental stewardship. Avatar Aang fails to create balance in this issue, prioritizing friendships over peace between humans and spirits. This is a fraught decision, and Yang handles it well. 4/5

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Smoke and Shadow / Gene Luen Yang / 2015

This comic rewards us with the return of our favorite villain Azula, and she is somehow even more mad, reckless, and bone-chilling. She goes to ghastly extremes to disrupt Zuko’s reign in this one. Zuko learns hard lessons about the dark side of power and the importance of freedom. 5/5

Avatar: The Last Airbender: North and South / Gene Luen Yang / 2016

This series is especially good for talking about intracultural colonization and conflict. Katara and Sokka have to navigate not only coming from a defeated culture whose knowledge has largely been destroyed by war, but also trying to figure out power dynamics with sister tribes with more power. It is a little heavy on the politicking in my opinion, but a decent contribution the Avatar world 3/5

The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars / Michael Dante DiMartino / 2017

Again, I was impressed by how they sustained the integrity and the feel of the TV series. So, I enjoyed and was annoyed by all the same aspects of the comics as I was of the TV series. That said, I deeply enjoyed the way the series navigated the Korra and Asami’s lesbian relationship, creating believable conflict in a supportive family. The new villain is a logical outcome of the spirit world intermingling with the human world. 3/5

The Legend of Korra: Ruins of Empire / Michael Dante DiMartino / 2019

Here, DiMartino tries to create a redemption arc for Kuvira and deals with election stealing. It may have been the less-than-graceful attempts to reconcile Kuvira’s crimes and create a transformed character. It may have been the fact I was reading this alongside endless news about the US election. But this one had me as dissatisfied with it as I was with the Kuvira arc. 2/5

Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal / Ben Sasse / 2018

As I live in a red state, I follow conservative Reddit, am a registered Republican, and now read conservative books to try to understand how to best do cultural and social justice work in this state. Sasse is an interesting figure in the Republican party, voting to impeach Trump but otherwise your run-of-the-mill small-town Republican with a love of pickup trucks, fear of porn, and belief in small governments. I profoundly disagree with Sasse’s romanticization of US history. In one passage, for example, he strains, arguing that the US is exceptional for abolishing slavery, ignoring the fact that plenty of Latin American and European countries abolished slavery before us. Abolishing slavery is a low standard for “exceptional” behavior and even in the scheme of the rest of the world, we were mediocre at best. If you can get past the warped and idealized renditions of US history and tearful patriotism on occasion, you might feel the empathy Sasse has for people navigating the digital revolution and the love he has for community building. Sasse might get a little preachy about building an authentic meaningful work and family life and about avoiding the toxicities of social media, but the majority of Sasse’s observations are hard to disagree with. I recommend this book to anyone trying to understand contemporary US conservatism and contemporary American politics. 2/5

The Only Good Indians / Stephen Graham Jones / 2020

I fell in love with Stephen Graham Jones when I first read Mapping the Interior last February. Jones is literary without pretension, popular for his horror and fantasy that draws heavily on Native lore, social issues, and intergenerational trauma. In the first story, racism is just as threatening of a force as the fantasy monster, as he is chased by both bigoted white men and an elk-monster. In general, his characters are Native men at various levels of stuckness, trying and failing to gain a better grip on their social and economic circumstances. It’s absolutely chilling to see some of them descend into madness, narrated in a brilliantly eerie voice and turn. His characters speak like real people of color, swearing, throwing shade on white folk, and navigating fraught cultural heritages. I recommend this book to anyone interested in horror, fantasy, Native literature, and fiction. 4/5

Calvin and Hobbes: Volume 1 / Bill Watterson / 1987

My partner bought me this book for Christmas because I never really read Calvin and Hobbes much and the comic strip was an important part of her childhood and is a fundamental part of her humor. While these comics didn’t often make me laugh out loud, they are incredibly charming. I particularly enjoyed watching how the comics played with gender, sometimes even subverting some masculine expectations for a tickle. C&H is wholesome, pure playfulness is a world that seems to very interesting versions of that. 4/5

Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi / 2016

Following a well-worn path in Black literature, this novel covers the story of a family in a Ghanaian village, eventually torn apart by the slave trade. It alternates the perspectives of the family left behind in Ghana, as well as the part of the family that will become African American and carries us all the way to the present. I especially appreciated the African portions of the novel, as they traced less familiar terrain (to me), including 1) the story of family that did business in the slave trade and the conflict it created between relatives 2) the story of a queer son in Ghana, navigating African leadership and social pressures of the slave era, and 3) the story of a woman condemned for witchcraft and the death of her child. Deeply lyric and wounding, Gyasi’s writing is carefully carved, chiseled sharp and penetrating. I recommend this book to anyone interested in multiple perspectives in fiction, stories about intergenerational trauma, and Black literature. 4/5

My Woman Card is Anti-Native and Other Two Spirit Truths / Petrona Xemi Tapepechul / 2016

A transgender woman, language worker, actor, poet, playwright, model, and the Artistic Director of Angel Rose Artist Collective, Petrona Xemi Tapepechul is a beauty and joy we don’t deserve. She works with ANIS to preserve the Nawat language in Central America. This collection centers on identity development, especially in fraught politicized contexts. You can critique it for its bluntness, use of form, and the centering of its stanzas, but if you’re reading it for polished literary craft, you’re here for the wrong reasons. This is an enunciation of self, creating space in a world trying to kill you, and doing it with finesse. Xemi is a force. 3/5

Terroir: Love out of Place / Natasha Sajé / 2020

I should start this off by saying I am absolutely the worst person to review this book. Natasha Sajé has been my mentor, former professor, letter of recommend writer, and has—like any teacher—shaped me for better and worse. As a young slam poet, I troubled her office hours with my dreams of becoming a great writer, and she carefully, albeit brutally honestly, provided me with feedback, excellent opportunities, and a place to work out my relationship with writing. I got my feelings hurt a couple of times, some of which I blame on my own arrogance and naivete, and other times due to my own frustrations that Natasha was not the hip-hop-fluent, Spanish-speaking, Central American mentor I really wanted. Our relationship has evolved from one of student-teacher, to colleague-colleague in some ways. I would not be anywhere near where I am today without Natasha, and I’m indebted and grateful for her mentorship. Needless to say, however, our relationship is rich and complex.

As much as I got a small window into her academic presence and felt like I knew her, I knew extremely little about her life and what shaped her. My first year of grad school I read a short essay by Natasha online and was stunned to learn that Natasha was once married to a Black man and that he died tragically and that I likely first met her when she was in the throes of her mourning.

Terroir is an uncomfortable book for many reasons. It deals with the grief of losing her husband and her journey of growth as a white person on racial issues. There are some sticky moments, as when describing her father’s racism, Sajé writes out the N-word, among other slurs her father used. She describes people of color using the clichés of chocolate and food. And while I’m sure that there are a number of moments in the book that will make some people of color cringe, its value comes in Sajé’s willingness to be vulnerable and acknowledging her past mistakes. This is hard work, but as far as white people processing race issues goes, it’s a worthwhile effort.

My favorite parts of the book were the bits that described her queer coming-of-age and her lesbian marriage. Natasha did a great job capturing the beauty of her relationships, whether its with her late husband, current partner, or childhood caregiver. I recommend this book for anyone interested in reading up about relationships, memoirs, and white perspectives on racial issues. 2/5

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA / Luis Rodriguez / 1993

A predecessor to Unforgetting above, Always Running tells the gritty tale of Luis Rodriguez’s turbulent coming-of-age, including the sex, drugs, gang life, and racism he experienced as a kid. It serves as a powerful map of his way out violent behavior, including the social and school programs that provided important outlets and space for Latinx youth to process issues important to their lives. Always Running includes a fiery argument in favor of ethnic studies courses in high school and the importance for youth of color to see themselves represented. Rodriguez highlights the young women who led his high school activism and the young girlfriends that were good influences on his life.

This book broke into my soul. It covers race riots, murders, drug addiction, the too often unacknowledged scars communities of color suffer generation after generation. It is a required read in LA county I heard, and it should be a required read everywhere in North America. 5/5

The Shadow of Kyoshi / F. C. Yee / 2020

Kyoshi’s conflict with Kuruk, her efforts to create effective change rather than petty vigilante justice, and her conflict with Yun create a tense path for her to follow. While I’m usually not a fan of the politic heavy aspects of certain Avatar storylines, Yee manages to make them interesting by portraying them through Kyoshi’s unique perspective as an orphan turned Avatar and her general clumsiness as Avatar. We get to share her frustration and confusion at the elaborate social rituals of the Fire nation for example. This book was the entertaining, adventurous, emotional read I was hoping for. I recommend it to anyone interested in Fantasy, Asian literature, LGBTQ+ relationships in literature, martial arts, and YA lit.

Disparates / Patrick Madden / 2020

in Disparates, Provo Writer Patrick Madden is purposefully frivolous, tacking in his essays tangential musings whose charm is found in their quirkiness, their dorkiness. This can be really tickling and clever if you are into the vibe, but in general they are the dad jokes of an erudite English professor. I recommend this to anyone interested in seeing the range of forms used in contemporary non-fiction essays. 2/5

Memorias from the Beltway / Mauricio Novoa / 2020

This is a hard-hitting poetry collection with lines that will dagger and snipe like a battle rapper. An heir to the styles of John Murillo and Quique Aviles, Mauricio Novoa reps DC Salvis well. With references to Romero and Roque, poems that are raps with an easygoing fluency in rhyme, this book is everything I love about poetry. Here, Novoa writes about his upbringing in the Beltway, rapping about basketball, police violence, poverty, yes, but also touching poems about his father’s tenderness on Novoa’s first day of school or “Muthafuckin’ Trees,” which is a city boy’s ode to nature. I’m especially grateful for this gift and look forward to tracing Novoa’s sure to be exciting literary career. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Salvi lit, Central American lit, Hip-hop, contemporary poetry, rhyme, and men of color. 5/5