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.

A History of Kindness by Linda Hogan / 2020

Coming in at a whopping 137 pages of poetry, Linda Hogan’s latest collection A History of Kindness looks like a daunting read. Any expectation of density or convolution that contemporary poetry is notorious for swiftly fades away as your ear rests on the clarity and cadence of Hogan’s words. In many ways, A History of Kindness feels like a majestic book, both in its length and its sweeping perspective. Hogan’s words are laden with a history that gives monumental weight to the simplest of images. In “We Used to Have Pearls,” look at how much meaning is given to pearls in the first three stanzas:

I once asked Old Mother what became of the pearls / that decorated our oldest roofs.

She said the Spanish stole them in bags too heavy / to carry. Some of our pearls spilled over.

But in truth it was their own souls they carried. / No longer did they shine.

In three short stanzas, we get an images of ancient ancestral pearls, the historic trauma of conquest, and a reinterpretation of what humanity and dignity mean in the face of loss and defeat. The Chickasaw kept their souls through their defeat, the Spanish did not in their victory.

Hogan’s words find strength in softness. Whether remembering a joyful moment wading in the water with loved ones (as in “Recuerdo”) or interrogating the moment when a police officer kills yet another Black man (as in “Tulsa”), Hogan asks the reader to slow down, to embrace the pace of her line breaks, all of which break on moments of breath at logical points in the sentence. In contrast to the explosive bombast of Natalie Diaz’s work, Hogan’s poetry isn’t pretentious or enamored with its own form.

Hogan’s documentation of the kindness, that of loved ones and animals, is a much needed medicine for the present moment. In a time dominated by grief, illness, chaos, confrontation, and catastrophe, Hogan reminds of not just of the sacrifices and strength of our ancestors, but also their joy and love for life. In her poem “A Need for Happiness,” Hogan shifts from describing the havoc wreaked by Buffalo Bill, the trauma of starvation and the near extinction of buffalo, to remembering “Those great leaders, even with grief, / they laughed together at night / when the light-bearded man left. / They talked and laughed together. // They still loved life, / so why don’t you?”

This book held me through many days when I needed an embrace to hold back the hopelessness and fatalism. I worked my way through this book slowly, much slower than I usually read poetry books, which is voraciously. There is a spaciousness to Hogan’s language, a matriarchal authority in her voice, that can’t be crafted, only gifted after years of wonder and worse.

I recommend this book for fans of Ada Limon, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, and Alberto Rios. I recommend it to those interested in Native American literature, environmental literature, and contemporary poetics.

The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History / Darren Parry / 2019

Did you know that the largest massacre of Native Americans in the United States happened in Idaho? If you, like me, answered no to that question, you should pick up The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry. This book is a palpable act of love and an attempt to heal a Utah still suffering from the aftermath of this massacre.

Parry begins with a chapter about his grandmother Mae Timbimboo Parry, a Shoshone historian who instilled in young Darren the importance of their cultural heritage and implanted in him the stories he shares in this book. Those wanting a critical scholarly historiography of the events should turn elsewhere. Parry’s style is much more akin to a testimony meeting than an academic essay. A six-generation Shoshone-Latter-Day-Saint, his particular perspective is both a boon and a burden to the narrative. It provides an intimacy with the material and a moral authority very few can deliver. At times, however, Parry’s own gentleness and Christlike turning of the other cheek is suffocating to someone as young and angry as me. My suspicion is that this gentleness is perfect for coaxing the fragility of non-natives and conservatives, as they grapple with the blatant injustice experienced by the Shoshone. Published by Common Consent Press, a non-profit publisher dedicated to producing affordable, high-quality books that help define and shape the Latter-day Saint experience, I hope the book finds an audience of non-native latter-day-saints ready to wrestle with the legacy of white supremacy and settler colonialism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. The book is extraordinarily kind to the non-native (or culturally assimilated native) reader, providing a whole chapter on what amounts to Shoshone anthropology. As a bonus at the end, Parry even includes his grandmother’s notes on traditional Shoshone food sources and uses, complete with handwritten descriptions and drawings of plants! The book strives to not just provide readers with a historical account of the Bear River Massacre, but an overview of the plight and condition of the Northwestern Shoshone. I would compare it most to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois in that regard. Teachers, please, this book is begging to be used as an educational text!

A hunter-gatherer civilization, the Northwestern Shoshone were largely peaceful in their interactions with the encroaching latter-day-saint settlers. Scuffles between other Shoshones/native peoples and the white settlers, however, blew back on the Northwestern Shoshone, including a November 25, 1863 attack that left two Natives and two white men dead, which served as a pretense for the massacre because racist white people can’t tell people of color apart. Even the gun-shy, Darren Parry notes, “Again, the Indian men involved were not from the Northwestern Band, but to the white authorities and settlers, Indians were Indians, and there was not much inclination to distinguish between the local Natives and those from other bands” (42). This attack, among others, led Patrick Edward Connor to eventually massacre at least 400 of the men, women, and children of the Northwestern Shoshone. Connor was a Northern commander in the Civil War sent to Utah to “protect overland routes from attacks by the Indians and quell a possible Mormon uprising” (35). Parry gives the impression that Connor was restless, eager to put his skills to use subduing Southern rebels, rather than “babysitting” the latter-day-saints. Whatever the case, because of Connor, Parry and his people were raised with stories of the massacre, of family members escaping by ingenious methods, of babies suffocated to prevent giving away their location, of many other heartrending tales Parry graciously provides.

Following the devastation of the massacre, Chief Sagwitch chooses to attempt to assimilate his people into the latter-day-saint way of life. Parry closely follows the perspective of Chief Sagwitch, the Shoshone chief responsible for converting most of his community to the LDS faith and bridging the cultural divide between latter-day-saints and Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. So the story goes, Sagwitch received the revelation that:

“There was a time when our Father who lived above the clouds loved our fathers who lived long ago. His face shone bright upon them and their skins were white like the white man. Then they were wise and wrote books and the Father above the clouds talked with them. But after a while our people would not hear him and they quarreled and stole and fought until the Great Father got mad and turned his back on them. By doing this, He caused a shade to come over them and their skins turned black. And now we cannot see as the white man sees, because the Great Fathers face is towards him and His back is towards us. But after a while, the Great Father will quit being mad and He will turn his face towards us. Then our skins will become white.” (58-59)

Parry offers this story with surprisingly little commentary to unpack the internalized racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy in this revelation, other than pointing out that this story fits cleanly with others from the Book of Mormon. I’m not sure what to do with this positionality yet. It is clear from Parry’s accounting that there were other voices in the Northwestern Shoshone community that felt like the Book of Mormon was only for white men (58), but their perspectives are marginalized in the text. Surely, there must be another path to the Northwestern Shoshone to remain faithful to their chosen latter-day-saint faith and still reckon with the racist attitudes of their forefathers. Thanks to Sagwitch’s leadership, however, most of the Northwestern Shoshone converted to mormonism, even if the syncretized their practices, as is common with many natives who converted to some form of Christianity.

What followed were several collaborations by native and white latter-day-saints to build a native settlement, working hard to convert a hunter-gatherer culture to an agricultural one. There are many obvious challenges to this, one of which seems to be the mismanagement by white leaders of their settlements. Parry notes that “often the Indians were only paid through food and supplies,” which usually is referred to as slavery (74). For many reasons, these settlements largely failed, harboring resentment in native communities. Despite that, natives still donated over 1000 hours to the building of the Logan temple, a fact Parry belabors in the book, and eventually built a successful community in Washakie.

In Washakie, however, the Northwestern Shoshone faced another monumental setback as after a while white latter-day-saints received orders to burn down the houses of their native neighbors while they were gone visiting family or running other errands. In the appendices, Parry includes the testimonies of many natives who lost their property, including sacred belongings in the fire. These acts of arson form another psychic wound on the Shoshone imagination that informs their current positions and outlooks.

As Parry narrates how these histories impact the present, he balances holding the church accountable with being optimistic about the ways assimilation has impacted his people. On one hand, he states, “things cannot be made right, although we should continue to [try]” (89). Lines like these show his understanding of how acute and permanent some of the damage has been. On the the other hand, he states, “Through assimilation, we have been blessed.” This quote follows another anti-black quote about God making native skins dark because of their sin (90).

My own indigenous Salvadoran ancestors likely took the route of cultural assimilation as well, after La Matanza of 1932, where over 30,000 indigenous peasants were massacred. After the killings, indigenous peoples frequently abandoned their traditional ways of dressing and their language. The pain of these massacres is still palpable in the Salvadoran cultural imagination and is one of the many factors leading to the Salvadoran Civil War. I mention this because I want to be clear in stating that I am not judging Sagwitch or his community for making the decisions they needed to in order to survive. The duty of the surviving generation, however, is to heal and reckon with the full weight of the past. The Bear River Massacre is a great first step in that direction that will hopefully open the door to more radical and diverse perspectives within the Native community.

On page 53, Parry includes (and critiques) the text of a plaque that still stands in Franklin County monument site that reads, “Attacks by the Indians on the peaceful inhabitants of this vicinity led to the final battle here on January 29, 1863….” Such a disgusting revision of history still lives in many Utah schools and communities. May Perry’s book bring us a step closer to listening to the voices of those murdered that January day.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Native American history, American history, and creative non-fiction.

In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids / Travis Rieder / 2019

In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids by Travis Rieder is an infuriating read. In a slick, blunt style, Rieder, an ethicist and professor, describes the fallout of a motorcycle accident that led to his dependence on opioids for a brief but harrowing couple of months. In crystalline detail, Rieder breaks down the way the US healthcare system failed him—from treating him with suspicion when he desperately needed pain relief to failing to create an adequate plan to wean him off opioids once they were prescribed. At one point, Rieder narrates how the doctors literally told him to simply get back on the drugs when the withdrawal symptoms were too much for him to bear. This is a problematic solution, as it would only forestall the inevitable pain of withdrawal and deepen his brain’s dependence on opioids.

The book is made all the more infuriating when you realize how wildly privileged Rieder is: he is a cisgender, heterosexual white man working as a professor in a prestigious university. Many of his colleagues even work in the healthcare system! He had a strong family support, including a bad ass wife who really held him down throughout his slow and painful recovery. If the most white of white people isn’t safe from opioid dependence, if the most white of white people doesn’t receive adequate care from the health care system. what hope do trans people, do people of color, do poor people have? Rieder’s harrowing account makes it painfully obvious why so many authors fall victim to opioid dependence and addiction.

Rieder, ultimately, does a decent job navigating his privilege as he shares his story. Early on, he notes that people of color, especially Black people, are frequently under-prescribed pain medicine because doctor’s assume that they don’t feel as much pain as white people. Later on, Rieder narrates a moment where his colleagues point out his immense privilege to him. In the moment, his university colleagues ask him why he didn’t share his challenges with them earlier, later pointing out the immense strength of stigma surrounding opioid dependence. None of these reflections does much to soften the blow, however, and I found myself gritting my teeth in frustration as I learned the disappointing shortcomings of our healthcare system specifically when it comes to opioids.

In Pain is a bit of a oddball when it comes to reading. I would compare it most to Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. Rieder shifts between emotional memoir style writing, easily the most compelling parts of the book, to a medical history of the use of opioids, outlining its major challengers and proponents. True to the ethicist in him, it includes philosophical breakdowns of the difficulty of measuring pain and the difference between dependence and addiction. Early on, it becomes clear that Rieder is one smart cookie, well equipped to tease out the issues at stake and how his experience illuminates aspects of the opioid crisis. Taking a even-handed approach, Rieder argues against the outright expulsion of opioids from medicine, instead advocating for more careful use and better pain education for medical professionals.

On a personal note, I deeply appreciated Rieder’s narration of his trauma. Those who have undergone immense trauma will hear echoes of their own stories in Rieder’s, no matter how different. Trauma is time-consuming. It’s incredible how on fire one’s world can be, while the rest of the world moves on carelessly. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming to read about how much one’s family (or friends) will sacrifice to keep the victim sane and afloat. Survivors will recognize Rieder as one of their own.

I recommend this read for anyone interested in our healthcare system, medical humanities, the war on drugs, memoir, and philosophy.

Savage Conversations / LeAnne Howe / 2019

Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe is a historical and psychological dive into the mind of former first lady Mary Lincoln. Turns out she ended her life in an insane asylum, the Bellevue Place Sanitarium, for “nervous derangement and fever in her head.” In particular, she reported repeated visitations by an Indian who “[slit her] eyelids and [sewed] them open, always removing the wires by dawn’s first light.” The apparition of an Indian figure is significant, because years earlier in 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of thirty-eight Dakota martyrs for participating in the Dakota War against white settlers “who had first stolen their lands, then their rations, and raped their women.” As a Choctaw writer, Howe immediately connected the dots between Mary’s hallucinations and her husband’s war crimes. This explosive inspiration led Howe to pen a slick, acerbic 104 page—er—play? poetry collection?

Formally, the text is written like a play—in scenes, that is, complete with characters and stage directions. The micro-scenes come in rapid fire succession, rarely lasting more than two pages, sometimes not lasting more than one line. There are three characters: Mary Todd Lincoln, the Savage Indian, and The Rope. Throughout the play, the audience watches Mary poetically bemoan her situation, hiss about her son’s betrayal (he testified against her), weep for her husband, and contemplate her isolation. The Savage Indian, the ghost of one of the thirty-eight men martyred that fateful day, retorts, scalping Mary, contemplating the condition of his people, and singing songs of healing. In that fraught and sparking tension between Mary and the Savage Indian, one finds heartbreaking passages about loneliness, incisive commentary on contemporary police brutality, and more.

Howe did a marvelous job conceptually and formally executing this incendiary material. Her work makes visible the presence, indeed even the prominence, of Native Americans through traditionally white-washed versions of history. Abraham Lincoln is celebrated for freeing enslaved African-Americans, but his massacre of the Dakota is rarely noted in traditional educational settings. In Savage Conversations, Howe shines light on this suppressed moment in history, indicting Abraham Lincoln through his wife’s tormented conscience.

I recommend this book to people interested in drama, poetry, form, American history, Native American literature, and ethnic studies.

A Black Women's History of the United States / Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross / 2020

A Black Woman’s History of the United States .was everything I could have hoped for and somehow more. I dreamed of a book that would give me the history erased in so many classrooms. What I received is a book that managed to be insightful every step of the way, even when recounting oft-repeated stories of the middle passage and the civil rights movement. I was grateful and surprised to find that the book prominently features lesbian and trans Black women, as far back as the times of slavery. What follows is my messy attempt to share some of the coolest women I learned about and some of my musings regarding choices in the text. Learning about these figures is an ongoing process and this blog post in itself is an attempt to further cement this history into my brain.

1) Here are two fascinating pieces of nuance about the civil war: a) many Black women also hated Union soldiers because they would steal food and at times violate Black woman. While the racism of the north is obvious, the violence it would cause Black women when they were being “liberated” by Union soldiers is not talked about. b) Rebel soldiers sometimes used Blackface to trick Union soldiers. I find this shocking and disgusting on so many levels, and didn’t know about that piece of history before.

2) Black women were part and parcel of civil war efforts. They made up 36% of the nurses during the war. They also literally would use the movement of clothes on clotheslines as a secret code to giveaway the position of rebel military leaders and armies.

3) The scholars narrate the extraordinary stories of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins and performers, who were repeatedly violated by medical professionals, kidnapped, and regarded as “freaks of nature.” I first learned of the McKoy sisters from Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection Olio where he magnificently captures their stories in a series of interlocking contrapuntals. Jess’s retelling of their story manages to turn tragedy to triumph, so I appreciated the scholars for their sobering account of the difficulties the women faced.

4) Black women’s hair was literally policed by the Tignon laws in 1784. Black women incredibly responded by creatively expressing themselves through beautiful headscarves.

5) Sara Jane Woodson Early was the first Black person to serve on the faculty of a university. She later moved down South to dedicate her life to educating Black girls.

Sculpture by Mary Edmonia Lewis

6) Mary Edmonia Lewis was a Black and Chippewa lesbian, abolitionist, and sculptor of note who moved to Italy to escape the American racial politics. She had international acclaim as a sculptor during slavery times!

7) The radical history of Lucy Parsons was included, an American labor organizer, radical socialist, and anarcho-communist! Too often the story of Black intellectuals begins with WEB Du Bois and Booker T Washington, when there were in fact many, many figures, including those taking radical leftist positions.

8) Gladys Bently is an American blues singer, lesbian, who cross-dressed and sometimes was back up by a chorus of drag queens. This was during the Harlem Renaissance!

9) Rosa Parks used to work as a detective as a young woman and was especially important in building cases against white rapists of Black women. Read more here: https://www.history.com/news/before-the-bus-rosa-parks-was-a-sexual-assault-investigator

10) Alice Sampson Presto was a Black suffragist, who again is barely ever talked about.

11) The trickiest part of this history for me is the way it navigated indigeneity. Earlier on, the authors make a key distinction between slaveholders (Blacks) and enslavers (non-Blacks): “The term slaveholders is deliberately used to represent African-Americans who held other African Americans in bondage. The term enslavers refers to someone who forces people into the system of slavery. The term slaveholder refers to someone who holds another person in slavery without the full power of a system to support the practice.” This seems fair enough, except that Native Americans get pinged as enslavers, as if they had “the full power of a system to support the practice [of slavery.].” I am willing to believe the authors are correct in setting Native Americans on the same level as white people, but as someone unfamiliar with the complicated histories of Native Americans and Black folks when it came to slavery, I just wish they would have bothered to make their argument. Elsewhere, another quiet alarm went off in my head when they began narrating the history of Black women who joined European expeditions to the Americas. The scholars referred to them as “explorers” rather than “conquistadores,” even though the missions were clearly colonial in their aims. This is complicated territory no doubt. I just wish the authors would have tumbled in the weeds a bit more here.

12) Pauli Murray was a bad-ass genderqueer lawyer, women’s rights activist, and poet, whose perhaps best known for talking about Jane Crow, or the way Jim Crow laws affected women.

13) Ann Petry, author of The Street, became the first African-American female novelist to sell more than a million copies of her book.

14) Shirley Anita Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress and she became the first Black candidate for a major party’s nomination for the President of the United States.

15) Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female, a foundational text I’m frustrated I only now am learning about it.

This blog post is little more than a treasure trove of trails for me to further study and learn about. I’m grateful these scholars undertook this major book that made this learning possible for me.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in Black history, women’s history, or the history of the US.

The Marrow Thieves / Cherie Dimaline / 2017

As the line between realist fiction and dystopia becomes blurrier and blurrier, it is natural for writers to turn to dystopia and science fiction to analyze the present. Every people has their catastrophes, but few are as apocalyptic as the histories of our first nations. I was eager to read The Marrow Thieves for that reason. I wanted to see what a skilled Native American fiction writer would do with the tropes of dystopia and science fiction.

The premise of The Marrow Thieves is simple and magnetic: climate change has nearly destroyed the world and everybody but native people have lost the power to dream. Government forces have turned to harvesting natives’ bone marrow and natives everywhere are either on the run or collaborating with government forces. The novel begins with an epigraph from The Road by Cormac McCarthy, an obvious model and inspiration for Dimaline, as The Marrow Thieves follows a ragtag group of native youth under the leadership of their elders, an elderly woman named Minerva and a gay man named Miig, all of whom scavenge and trudge their way through a wasteland of abandoned cities and wildernesses, avoiding strangers and heading toward the ever mythical North, where they hear they will be safe from the bone-harvesting white people. The action in the tale picks up rather quick, as the first scenes narrate the kidnapping of Mitch, the brother of our protagonist, Frenchie by government forces.

If the metaphor of white people stealing dreams from native peoples seems heavy-handed, perhaps it is. I have no problem with it because it’s too true to resist.

One of the things I appreciate most about The Marrow Thieves is for its unabashed lingering on moments of joy, no matter how temporary. Take the opening lines of the book, for example: “Mitch was smiling so big his back teeth shone in the soft light of the solar-powered lamp we’d scavenged from someone’s shed. ‘Check it out.’ He held a bag of Doritos between us — a big bag, too.” This opener rejects the oft-repeated dictum that writers ought to begin their stories immediately with conflict. Instead, Dimaline grounds us in the wholesome and juvenile joy of Doritos. Elsewhere, the tender joys of adolescent love make Frenchie wisely wonder, “How could anything be as bad as it was when this moment existed in the span of eternity? How could i have fear when this girl would allow me this close? How could anything matter but this small miracle of having someone I could love?” During times as revolting and fatalistic as now, this gem can provide much needed comfort to those whipped and whittled by today’s challenges.

At the same time, the traumas in this story are not easily overcome. One of my favorite moments, indeed, one of the most skillfully wrought moments is a scene where a member of their group rediscovers a long-lost family member. Although the reunion is joyous, it’s also incredibly painful and continues to be, as the characters process their grief and loss.

Though the story mainly follows Frenchie, it is narrated in a shifting first-person perspective and includes first-person narration from Miig and Wab. Miig’s portions especially read like oral histories, shared around a hearth, filled with encouraging histories of native resilience to inspire the youngsters to keep on pushing. Here, I did wish Dimaline would have done more to differentiate her characters’ voices, but at least on a content level, I have nothing to complain about. In time, I began to grow close to the cast of characters, turning pages easily and churning my teeth with anticipation.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in YA literature, Native literature, science fiction, and dystopia.

Em and the Big Hoom / Jerry Pinto / 2012

I have loved many people who have tried and sometimes succeeded in killing themselves. I still remember the drunk calls a friend used to send me, where all they would do is repeat my name, sad but happy to be in the company of my voicemail. This friend used to sing me musicals, hilariously off-key. These are cherished memories now. The last time I visited them in an in-patient facility we were both shouldering sorrows too large for either of us to express. I encouraged them to keep weathering the storm but encouragement is little comfort when all else seems to have betrayed you.

Em and the Big Hoom is a story about loving a mentally ill mother through her mania and hallucinations, through her bitterness and cruelty, through her laughter, joys, and pain. The novel is written in a hypnotically melancholic voice, playfully free associating between topics in the way only a broken mind can. Written in 13 ominous chapters from the perspective of a son, the novel reads like a haunted prose poem. The son dutifully investigates his mother and father’s histories, trying to make sense of the catastrophe of his lineage. The narrator son even dips into his mother’s diaries and letters, looking for clues to solve the mystery of his mother’s condition. One senses that he is narrating a story with a bad ending, which is why he must probe their histories so diligently: to find a way to redeem the ending.

Sifting through my dead friend’s poems, I found myself doing the same. I attempted to find a narrative that would allow them to speak to us from the ashes, rearranging their poems into different arcs, different narrative conclusions. I couldn’t arrange my way to a happy ending. And I love that about Em and the Big Hoom. It isn’t a story that tries to redeem the mother through victory over her disease. Halfway through the mother’s treatment, the narrator raises the question: “What is a cure when you’re dealing with the human mind? What is normal?” Wellness can be such a hard subject to define, especially for people who have suffered incredible loss or who exist outside what is considered normal. I am finding ways to honor the grief in my life. Instead of fighting it, I am trying to make space for it on the ride.

I love the powerless love, the useless love, the lost love portrayed in Em and the Big Hoom. A love that fails to save the one you love but tries anyway.

I recommend this novel for anyone interested in fiction, intergenerational trauma, and India.

Children of the Land / Marcelo Hernandez Castillo / 2020

When I picked up Children of the Land, I knew to expect a book both poignant and painful, riddled with the traumas of the undocumented experience. I knew Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s mother, for example, had experienced domestic violence at the hands of his father. I knew that same father would be deported and eventually kidnapped by the cartels. I expected a critical analysis of the undocumented condition. Hernandez Castillo is a prominent activist and undocumented figure, advocating for undocumented students on college campuses and nationwide with his UndocuPoets campaign. My first year of grad school, I organized to have him visit Indiana University. His work inspired my own work supporting undocumented communities in Bloomington, Indiana and led to some meaningful changes in the Indiana University system. In his poetry, Hernandez Castillo excels at lyric confessionalism dense with enigmatic imagery. This is the mountain of expectation I brought to Hernandez Castillo’s work.

His memoir surprised and crushed me in other ways, however. Gone is Hernandez Castillo’s suffocatingly tender lyric surrealism. In its stead, we have a raw and bare-boned testimonio style voice, patiently yet bitterly detailing the ways the undocumented condition of his family shaped their histories in ways that are unavoidably tragic, even if overcome. His memoir becomes a testament to all that human beings can survive, sort of. This is not a feel-good story of immigrants overcoming against all odds. Hernandez Castillo excruciatingly details the ways the immigration system with its panopticon of laws and its irrational processes fucks up your self-image, fucks up your family, fucks up your relationships. Hernandez Castillo’s willingness to make his own neuroses and shortcomings bare were uncomfortable to read. Take for example Hernandez Castillo’s survivors’s’ guilt. It becomes so burdensome that halfway through the book he describes feeling guilty taking showers because migrants crossing the border do not have water. There are moments like this throughout the book, where we witness just how deep the trauma of our immigration system can dig its nails into the human psyche.

Especially compared to his poetry, the memoir is extremely accessible. He even took the time to translate basic Spanish, like mijo, into English. For these reasons, I hope this book becomes a must-read for those unfamiliar with the struggles of the undocumented community. As someone with undocumented people in my family, as someone who studied and worked beside undocumented students, I was not surprised by anything in the memoir. This disappointed me at first. But in time, I came to accept the book’s need to narrate its story. Stories like Marcelo’s are essential to scribe out in excruciating detail if this country will ever come to terms with all the wrongs of its immigration system.

While Yosimar Reyes uplifts the undocumented community by promoting UndocuJoy, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo does the necessary work of documenting the pain. While art is frequently given the role of healing oppressed communities, Hernandez Castillo narrates a story where healing does not seem possible, especially not in a neat or clean way. What is the role of art in the face of irreversible trauma then? Perhaps to show what a worthwhile life can look like when common notions of healing are impossible.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in memoir, the undocumented condition, queer and Latinx literature.

God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-hop / Kathy Iandoli / 2019

Raised on a steady diet of bars and breakbeats, I take pride on my knowledge of hip-hop. As a rapper and teacher of the poetics of rap, I take myself to be more than a casual listener. I picked up God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-hop hopeful to have my understanding of hip-hop history challenged and my playlist blessed by a batch of new-to-me female emcees. On both counts, the book didn’t disappoint.

Acclaimed hip-hop journalist Kathy Iandoli shows how women were central to the story of hip-hop from the start: It was Kool Herc’s sister, Cindy Campbell, who came up with the idea to throw hip-hop’s first party to raise funds for her back-to-school wardrobe. Women also lay claim to the first hook in hip-hop on “Funk You Up” by The Sequence, an accomplishment usually attributed to Kurtis Blow on “The Breaks.” In the early chapters, I most appreciate Iandoli for introducing me to Sparky D, Monie Love, JJ Fad, Oaktown’s 357, Queen Pen, and Us Girls; I appreciate her for re-introducing me to Roxanne Shanté, who I’ve subsequently fallen in love with, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Yo-Yo, Ladybug Mecca, and Salt N Peppa. Here, I especially appreciate how Iandoli outlines the way Roxanne Shanté transformed battle rap at the age of 14. By my estimation, Iandoli’s greatest blunder in these early chapters describing the birth of hip-hop and female rappers of the 80s is her failure to include anything about female gang culture in New York at the time. Hip-hop was in many ways a response to gang culture of New York, a story frequently dominated by boys and men, although there were also female cliques with their own histories.

As the book started to dip into hip-hop history more familiar to me, into the eras of Rah Digga, Lil Kim, and Foxy Brown, and Da Brat, I was disappointed by Iandoli’s over-emphasis on numbers, how many hit songs the women managed to produce. While commercial success is a laudable accomplishment and an important landmark in hip-hop history, I appreciated the moments where the book dove into the personal stories of emcees, as it had with Roxanne Shanté. Otherwise, the brief sprinkling of biographical detail makes the personal feel more tabloid-ish than analytical, historical, and political. In the 90s and early 2000s, Iandoli focuses her attention on Gangsta Boo of Three 6 Mafia, Missy Elliot and of course the incomparable Ms. Hill. As someone raised in the “Stay Fly” era of Three 6 Mafia, I appreciate Iandoli for reintroducing me to their dark and melodic earlier music.

Iandoli successfully breaks down how the hip-hop industry limited women, placing them in either a sex kitten or Nubian goddess binary early on, before pressuring all their female acts into the sex kitten category by the emergence of Lil Kim. Throughout these conversations, it was strange not to hear an invocation of Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Perhaps this is a place where Iandoli’s perspective as a white woman falls short a little.

Once the book entered eras of hip-hop I was more familiar with, the number of insights I experienced went down significantly. Although I still encountered a plethora of new-to-me names, including Amanda Blank, Audra, the Rapper, Bahamadia, Charli Baltimore, Amil, Kid Sister, Lady Luck, Nyemiah Supreme, Invincible, and Sister Souljah. I was most excited by Sister Souljah, who became a member of Public Enemy and whose fiery rhetoric is raw and ragingly woke.

noname

This book’s greatest sin is its exclusion of Noname. Other female emcees inexplicably left out of the conversation include Doja Cat. Nitty Scott, Princess Nokia, CHIKA, cupcakKe, Ill Camille, Blimes, Mystic, Yungen Blakrob, Gifted Gab, Gavlyn, and Reverie. This happens because Iandoli wrote a mainstream-centric book, which is a shame considering the plethora of female emcees doing truly groundbreaking work right now. No one needs to read more about Nicki Minaj and Cardi B when there’s so many other female emcees doing genre extended work.

There are two more significant criticisms I have of the book: 1) It’s emcee-centric, trailing the stories of female emcees almost exclusively. Hip-hop is more than just rapping. An Essential History of Women in Hip-hop should talk to us about our female deejays, producers, b-girls, graf-writers, fashionistas, and poets. 2) It is US and English-centric. Hip-hop is a global phenomenon. It is shame that the book could not make room for our legendary Latin American raperas, such as Ivy Queen (who has rapped on stages for complete days while pregnant!), La Materialista, Rebeca Lane, y innumerable otras, whether they speak Spanish, French, Zapotec, or whatever else.

Ivy Queen performing pregnant in 2013.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in feminism, women’s history, and hip-hop.

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste retrieves the stories of female Ethiopian soldiers fighting against Italian imperialism during the second world war. Frequently overlooked, the resistance in Ethiopia and the contributions of women take center stage here. Brutally so. Be warned, the novel narrates several rape scenes, a gang rape, and an attempted castration. These are all part and parcel of war. As a Salvadoran, war literature like this is particularly seething and really strikes a nerve. While artful, Mengiste doesn’t play down the violence of warfare. The upshot of this is we see how powerful the main women are, how much they overcame, what incredibly difficult decisions they had to make.

The novel follows two women soldiers (Aster and Hirut), Aster’s husband Kidane, a cruel Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, Fucelli’s Ethiopian sex worker, Haile Selassie, and a Jewish Italian photographer and soldier Ettore Navarro. Navarro’s narrative is especially fraught, as he compromises his ethics following orders as a soldier at the same time as he is coming to terms with his prosecuted Jewish identity in Italy. The novel takes its name from the stand-in king, a literal Haile Selassie lookalike, the Ethiopian military used to inspire citizens to resist after Selassie was forced to flee the country.

Mengiste’s writing is so stunningly poetic that The Shadow King really reminds me of The Iliad. Part of what makes the unbearable traumas Mengiste narrates digestible is the beauty with which she renders it. This is one of the most skilled novels I’ve read in my life. The sort of book that will make an emerging writer question their capabilities with awe.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in historical fiction, war literature, African literature, Ethiopian literature.

Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker

I decided to read Dr. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep for two reasons: 1) to continue stretching beyond my comfort zone and exploring science writing and 2) to see what it had to say about the relationship between trauma and sleep. While I rarely remember my dreams, it turns out I twitch a lot in my sleep, disturbed. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with my mind racing and my feet clenched. What work is happening in my sleep, I wondered.

It turns out the body processes memories during sleep. During sleep, the brain processes and organizes new memories. The first evening of sleep after learning information is the most important night for retaining that information. So if you study for a test two days before the exam, but get bad sleep the night after you studied, you won’t retain the information as well as if you had gotten good rest. You can’t “catch up” on sleep later. When it comes to learning, sleep is an all-or-nothing game. Dr. Walker’s writing also suggests that REM sleep is important for processing memories, taking the sting out of traumatic memories and retaining the wisdom in them.

The book does a convincing job arguing that sleep is an undervalued and crucial part of our health. While many people know we’re supposed to get eight hours of sleep, it’s revealing to read how much we lose when we give up a night of rest. A lack of sleep shoots down your work productivity. It leads to dementia, cancer, heart disease, among other health issues. It even increases your appetite, making you more likely to munch, nibble, and gorge throughout your day.

The book includes damning critiques of the United States’ school system, the US military’s use of sleep deprivation as a form of torture, and the medical school residency requirements. We senselessly deprive adolescents of the proper amount of sleep, and we’ve known it for decades now. Waking adolescents up at 7am for school is the equivalent of waking adults up at 4 or 5 am. It’s incredibly frustrating the United States keeps sticking to archaic systems like early bird school schedules and inches, feet, and so forth. When it comes to sleep deprivation, Dr. Walker convincingly argues that it’s a form of torture, ineffective in drawing reliable information from suspects. Perhaps most insanely, when it comes to med schools, Dr. Walker relates how the person who designed residencies for med students was literally addicted to cocaine and built an absurd system that robs many med students of proper sleep, literally causing deaths through medical mistakes. Our body has spent millions of year optimizing its sleep patterns, Dr. Walker argues. It is ill-advised to attempt to break out of our bodies natural rhythms.

The book includes excellent tips for getting better sleep, some of which you’ve probably heard before: stick to a consistent sleep schedule, even on weekends, don’t drink caffeine in the afternoon, don’t exercise before bed, don’t look at electronics before bed. Others are more surprising: 1) heavily drinking alcohol robs you of REM sleep and might mess with your breathing at night.

The book was cleanly and thoroughly executed, although not all the information was incredibly engaging. I recommend the book for anyone interested in neuroscience or sleep.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love by Dani Shapiro

I had the blessing of participating in a book group made up of medical professionals for work and consequently binge-listened to Dani Shapiro narrate her memoir Inheritance on Audible. Shapiro earnestly narrates the rupture she experienced after a genetic test made her realize the father that raised her is not her biological father. Hailing from a very traditional Ashkenazi Jewish family, the discovery carries an atypical amount of cultural consequence. The memoir narrates Shapiro’s journey tracking down her biological father, an aged, accomplished doctor who was promised anonymity when he donated semen as a medical student. Shapiro also spends the bulk of the memoir unpacking the spiritual and psychological “trauma” (Shapiro’s word) she experienced as a result of the test results.

If that last sentence sounds like an overstatement of the psychological fallout of discovering you have a different biological parent at age fifty-four, most of the medical professionals agree with you. It’s hard not to side-eye when Shapiro talks about her “trauma” as a matter of “survival” several times throughout the text. Shapiro doesn’t help herself by being rather harsh and misunderstanding of her biological father’s initial reluctance to invite her into his life. Many in the group, me included, felt as if Shapiro was rather myopic, failing to see things from other perspectives, be it her mother’s, social father’s, or biological father’s. It’s not that discovering a family secret that morphs the matter of your identity wouldn’t be painful, difficult, and disruptive. It’s just that Shapiro taxes her readers patience by belaboring the issue and failing to approach the new information with curiosity rather than aversion.

It’s not even as if Shapiro didn’t have good people supporting her throughout her journey. Her mother’s surviving friend wisely told her, regardless of biology, “your father is still your father.” A rabbi tells her she could choose to view the test results as a form of cultural exile and unbelonging or as finding an additional home. Shapiro glides over these attempted interventions into her identity crisis, instead choosing to continue to ruminate over her innate sense of being different and not belonging.

While there are great moments of humor in the written version of the text, Shapiro’s earnest delivery sucked the joy out of those moments in the audio book. At one point, Shapiro describes how her childhood photo was used in a Christmas ad, which many found hilarious (including members of her family) because she comes from a very traditional Jewish family, for example. It wasn’t until the book group that realized how funny that moment was, because of Shapiro’s delivery really dampened the effect.

A frustrating narrator isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a book or group discussions, however. It can give a group something to pick apart.

The power of this text lies largely in the conversations it opens in regards to medical ethics and family history. The facilitator of our group mentioned that when she teaches this book to undergrads they erupt with stories of familial scandal. This book can help open discussion about non-traditional parentage, which is much more common than we think yet often secret and unspoken. The book also is a great conversation starter about medical ethics, including the recent artificial insemination fraud scandals that have received national coverage. It is disappointing that Shapiro chose to narrate her personal journey without including a more journalistic and researched history of artificial insemination and other related practices. This book is more about Shapiro then it is about medical ethics to a fault.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in memoir and medical ethics.

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo

John Murillo’s monumental debut collection of poetry Up Jumps the Boogie is one of the most important, influential books of poetry in my personal canon. While Murillo certainly was not the first poet to imbue his poems with a hip-hop aesthetic, Up Jumps the Boogie definitely marks a turning point. I am not sure if anyone managed to crystallize a hip-hop aesthetic, put it in conversation with the American and English poetic tradition, marry it to some of the most challenging contemporary forms, and then do all that for an entire book before Murillo. I don’t mean to overstate ya boy’s accomplishments. I know that folks like Adrian Matejka, Terrance Hayes, and many more deserve their head nods in this conversation. For me at least, Up Jumps the Boogie provided me with the most detailed blueprint about how to do this poetry shit while staying true to your roots in hip-hop.

Murillo’s sophomore collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry had a lot to live up to. It delivers. The collection largely features poems that comment on the buzz words of contemporary poetic discourse from the perspective of a sharp-eyed, East Coast outsider. Poems with titles such as “On Confessionalism,” “On Metaphor,” “On Negative Capability,” “On Lyric Narrative,” “On Epiphany,” and “On Prosody” abound. These are all terms the talking heads of poetry discuss ad infinitum. Murillo manages to punch new life into them by approaching the terms sideways with the raw material of life, rather than an explicit head-on conversation with poets and their thoughts. (The exception to this is “On Prosody,” which is probably my favorite poem in the collection.) “On Confessionalism,” then becomes a poem that talks about a time the speaker almost murdered someone. “On Negative Capability” becomes a poem about the recklessness of a group of young teens smoking blunts, pumping the gas pedal to thumping speakers. “On Prosody” becomes a poem about the rhythm of the voices fighting and howling in the neighboring apartment. My biggest beef with the collection is that Murillo cut what may have been one of the strongest poems from the manuscript, this jawbreaker of a poem published in Kweli Journal, entitled “Ars Poetica.” The poem clearly fits the themes of the manuscript, commenting on a traditional form from an outsider perspective. Featuring seventy pages of poetry, however, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is respectably slim, especially during these times when poetry collections seem to be getting longer and longer, unnecessarily so.

At the heart of collection lies a fierce series of sonnets, entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, By Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” meditating on police violence against communities of color and, importantly, the dilemma of resistance and retaliation. Murillo wrestles against the romanticization of violent resistance. “You dream of pistol smoke / and bacon, folded flags—and why feel shame? / Is it the dream? Or that it’s only dream?” Murillo pens. The title poem in the collection, likewise, critiques the vapidness of contemporary poets, pedantically discussing whatever is buzzing poetically while on the television “the muted news of another boy / shot dead and black in some city / now burning…” What these poets demonstrate is a divorce from the reality and conditions many communities in contemporary Amerikkka shoulder. The collection revolves out from this point, critiquing by means of brutal and vital truth-telling.

In this collection—which literally centers a conversation about police violence against communities of color—Murillo places an equally incisive eye inward. The first poem in the collection, “On Confessionalism,” most notably, includes a speaker confessing to pulling a trigger in the mouth of a rival three times only to have the gun jam: “I pulled the trigger—once, / twice, three times—then panicked / not just because the gun jammed, / but because what if it hadn’t, / because who did I almost become…” This confession is so deeply troubling, so painfully human, and literally opens the collection. Much in the way that Kendrick Lamar calls himself a hypocrite on “The Blacker the Berry” “when gang banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?”, Murillo frames his meditation on police violence within a larger conversation about the the petty and monumental ways violence plays out in our communities.

I can’t end this review without mentioning this collection also features a poem dedicated to Yusef Komunyakaa—”Dear Yusef,” which is a darkly playful elaboration of the Nas line “I drank Moet with Medusa, give her shotguns in hell / From the spliff that I lift and inhale, it ain't hard to tell.” The collection ends with “Variation on a Theme by the Notorious B.I.G.”. Playing off of “Juicy,” Murillo details his come-up in the poetry game and hang-ups, a pointed, poignant (if ludicrous) way to tend the collection.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in hip-hop, contemporary poetics, police violence, Nuyorican poetics.

After Rubén by Francisco Aragón

Foremost among the writers whose work has showed me the most about intimacy and pace is Francisco Aragón. You cannot read a Francisco Aragón poem in a rush. As someone raised on slam, hip-hop, and the beats—you know, on a verse known to Howl—I needed a writer like Aragón to teach me how to slow down and really pay attention to a moment.

In After Rubén, Aragón braids his careful reflections with lo-fi remixes of Rubén Darío poems. I say, lo-fi, because Aragón’s English translations of Darío poems don’t try to preserve the rhyme and rhythm that make the poems magical in Spanish, but rather frequently breaks up stanzas and even lines to make you linger on each phrase. This gives the poems an intimate, relaxed lo-fi quality. Aragón’s “Symphony in Gray,” for example, begins:

Like glass

the color of mercury

it mirrors the sky’s

sheet of zinc, the pale gray

a burnish splotched

Whereas the original poem begins with the noun “el mar,” letting you know that Darío is describing the sea, here we do not get an explicit hint of the sea, until the fifth stanza, where “leaden waves crest / collapse—seeming / to groan near the docks.” In the translation, we are too close to the object to see the whole; note the short lines, really breaking each image down piece by piece. The effect is to create an almost hyper-real version of the original, which in this case compliments the intent of the original: to draw the reader through hypnotic shades of gray.

The collection generously includes the Spanish versions of Darío’s work in the back of the book, allowing word nerds to flip between the English and Spanish versions and savor the different nuances between form and diction, as well as a non-fiction essay discussing his relationship to Darío’s work. In the essay, Aragón explains how his mother and father had, despite their limited education, memorized Darío poems from their schooling in Central America, which they cherished and passed down to Aragón. This collection is Aragón’s way of preserving Darío’s work for another generation of Latinx writers and re-introducing him to the English canon. While I have known about Darío from my forays into Spanish literature, I deeply appreciate Aragón’s ability to take his dramatic, virtuosic voice and make it seem down-to-earth and plainspoken. Aragón has offered me a completely new window into his work.

Aragón’s own work doesn’t play second fiddle to Darío’s in this collection, either. Rather, Aragón carefully sets Darío up as a queer Central American elder and by the end of the collection, the relationship between them feels spiritual. Darío and Aragón strengthen one another in this collection. Whereas Aragón mines aspects of Darío’s life, line, and legend to speak to the present, he also uses his own openness about his queerness to open up this once silenced aspect of Darío’s life and work. In “Winter Hours”/”De Invierno,” Aragón transforms an image of Carolina into an image of Amado, and in “I Pursue a Shape”/”Yo Persigo Una Forma…”, Aragón transforms an image of Venus de Milo into an image of the David. Darío was closeted during his lifetime. As Aragón writes in an essay in Glow of Our Sweat, he himself was once shy about his sexual orientation, but has moved towards highlighting and being open about his queerness as a way of denouncing homophobia. These on-and-off-the-page moves on Aragón’s part are acts of inter-generational healing, creating a path for future queer artists of color to authentically present themselves to the world and define themselves on their own terms.

Lets put it another way: In my favorite poem in the collection, “Nicaragua in a Voice,” Aragón writes,

More than the poems

—the fruits that sang

their juices; dolls, feverish,

dreaming of nights,

city streets—for me it was

the idle chat between the poems:

cordial, intimate almost…

like a river’s murmur

as if a place—León,

Granada—could speak,

whistle inhabit

a timbre… as if, closing

my eyes, I had it again

once more within reach:

his voice—my father

unwell, won’t speak.

In After Rubén, Aragón finds a way to retrace many voices that were once crushed, once silenced, whether they belong to his father or one of the greatest Latin American poets in millennia. And that is a reward worth “more than the poems.”

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswa

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows / Balli Kaur Jaswa / Morrow/HarperCollins / 2017

I picked up Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows per the recommendation of a Chicana gender studies professor I met in passing. I am immensely grateful for her recommendation. Like “Jane, the Virgin,” the novel toys with genre in genius and hilarious ways. Whereas “Jane, the Virgin” plays with the tropes of romantic comedies, romance novels, and telenovela, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows plays with tropes of romance novels and—you guessed it—erotica. In doing so, it elevates erotica as a genre and engages in some good old-fashioned postmodern meta-analysis of erotica as a genre.

Before I go further, let me give a plot teaser. Nikki, a feminist law school dropout and British Indian, applies for a job teaching a woman’s writing workshop in Southall, UK’s little Punjab. She is bummed to find out rather than teaching creative writing, she was bait-and-switched into teaching a literacy class for a group made up largely of middle-aged widows. In one of the first few classes, Nikki accidentally leaves behind an erotica novel meant as a gag gift to one of her friends. When she returns to class, she discovers one of the widows reading the stories aloud for the rest of the group. Hilarity and drama ensue.

The workshop format allows for some great commentary on the tropes of erotica. There are hilarious sections where Nikki complains about the widows tendency to compare every phallus to a vegetable. It is fascinating to read the differences between the smutty, tawdry erotica, as created and narrated by the widows, and the steamier bits of the novel written in the elevated and more subtle tone of Jaswa’s narrator. The erotic provides powerful avenues into discussions of intergenerational trauma, gendered violence, femicide, gender relations, and modern vs tradtional lifestyles. It is awe-inspiring to watch Jaswa use erotica of all things to open up these conversations so naturally. There is a great amount of healing had, as Nikki’s writing workshop becomes a space for these women to process their grief and the injustices widows and women sometimes face in traditional Punjabi communities. The women value this opportunity to take pleasure in their stories and articulate their desires so much they are willing to risk the disapproval of powerful members and organizations of their community.

There is a very cinematic quality to the writing. This is at once one of the most fun aspects of the novel and perhaps also its greatest weakness. The dialogue is so witty and on cue, the scenes so snappy and brilliant, you may be too swept up to be annoyed by what may perhaps be a lack of realism. The transformation of Kulwinder, the novel’s antagonist, may happen a little too smoothly, so much so that it feels a bit like a movie. That said, I am immensely surprised this novel hasn’t been turned into a sitcom yet. It’s a goldmine! Someone needs to get on that.

What I might appreciate most about the novel, however, is that while it may draw readers in with a steamy promise of sexual content, a solid chunk of the narrative focuses on violence against women and a femicide in the Southall community. The novel shows a community grappling with the femicide, the power relations between the families involved, and prompts the reader to think of the not-so-uncommon femicides in our lives. If the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and the #sayhername movement has taught us anything is how widespread and interwoven into the fabric of modernity gendered violence is. The erotica workshops end up empowering the women to use their voices in a way that directly challenges the authority of the patriarchal men in the community and those complicit in the femicide.

I loved this book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gender and sexuality studies, feminism, postcolonialism, diaspora, narrative pacing, and postmodernism.

The Poet and The Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery

The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery / Simon Worrall / 2002

Sometime in fall of 2019, I became fascinated with the story of Mark Hofmann, a Mormon forger and murderer whose work blurred the line between truth and fiction, between history and fantasy. The story of Mark Hofmann should be a key part of any Mormon or historian’s education. Briefly, the story goes like this: a young bibliophile and rare books dealer forges dozens of historical documents, fooling both historians and the leadership of the LDS church. In his forgeries, he provided “evidence” that Joseph Smith dabbled in folk magic (which is ultimately true) and necromancy (which is true if you consider baptisms for the dead necromancy, but not true any other way). His strategy was to sell these embarrassing “historical” documents to the church for large sums of money (tens of thousands of dollars) so they may suppress them, then leak their contents to the press to embarrass the church. Hofmann ultimately forged the handwriting of 129 different historical characters, including Martin Harris, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and others!

Hofmann, however, bit off more than he could chew. He churned out so many rare, impossible documents he was bound to get caught eventually. His problem is that he kept going for more and more ambitious forgeries. As the scrutinizing eyes of his debt collectors and manuscript dealers began to close in on him, he went on a bombing spree that resulted in the deaths of two people. He eventually confessed to his forgeries, although scholars and the public alike are suspicious. Can we trust a pathological liar to tell us about all his forgeries? What if he’s lying about how much he forged to brag and bolster his legend? Hofmann sold both legitimate and illegitimate documents, so just because Hofmann touched an artifact doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a counterfeit. My heart breaks for all the poor historians whose work got mangled by his crimes.

For those interested in learning more about Hofmann and his crimes, The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall might be a good place to start.

Be warned, Worrall is not an excellent writer. Sometimes, he mangles his sentences. Other times, he revels in inappropriate allusions and similes, both of which are connected to other blind spots in his work. Check out this bizarre comparison, for example: “Among some African tribes boys are separated from their mothers at the age of fourteen and sent into the bush, where they learn to become warriors. Similarly, young Mormon men are taken from their families and sent out into the world to become warriors for God”. Not only are these two rites of passage extremely dissimilar, Worrall’s depiction of a generic African tribal society reduces a culturally specific practice to a stereotype.

Worrall’s treatment of Mormon history is thorough, but dismally biased. This particular comparison Worrall utilized will show you what I mean: “These local community organizations are the eyes and ears of the Church, funneling reports of disobedience and dissent up through the system in much the same way that local party officials in Communist China keep tabs on local neighborhoods.” This claim is made too flippantly and does little to reveal the true nature of church organization. Instead, it relies on the reader’s xenophobia and fear of communism to villainize the church. At another point, Worrall writes, “Mormons also learns from a young age to recognize each other by means of a series of signs and symbols known only to them.” This line made me laugh out loud. As someone raised Mormon, I was surprised to hear so.

Unfortunately, like many books in the true crime genre, Worrall also ultimately romanticizes Hofmann, and once again, Worrall’s similes provide a few clear examples. When describing Hofmann’s forays into hypnosis, Worrall writes, “like a Zen master, Hofmann would eventually gain almost total control of his mind and emotions. It was these extraordinary psychic powers that enabled him to control and manipulate others.” Comparing a sociopath to a Zen master is simply inappropriate. Moves like this happen throughout the text.

Where the book succeeds and what makes it worthwhile is its contextualizing of Hofmann’s work within a tradition of Mormon forgery. Once I learned of Hofmann’s story, I was struck with its parallels to Joseph Smith’s life. Early church leaders, including Joseph Smith, forged money or worked closely with Mormon forgers like David McKenzie and Peter Haws. Worrall succeeds in showing how Hofmann is a particularly Mormon villain who in some ways is just like Joseph Smith—that is, a brilliant, charismatic con man who knew how to make people believe what he was saying. Ultimately, I found The Poet and the Murderer satisfying because it did a great job highlighting this tradition and Hofmann’s parallels with Joseph.

Worrall also provides snappy narration about aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life, the story of the poor librarian who fundraised 24k to unwittingly purchase Hofmann’s forgery of a Dickinson poem, and the larger history of forgery in general. The text is sprawling and a reader will definitely feel bumps in the road between chapters, as Worrall awkwardly dances between Hofmann’s story and Dickinson’s. That said, it was an enjoyable enough read.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in forgery or Mormon history.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.

That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.

When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.

When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.

As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.

I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.

In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.

I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.

On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.

I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

‘I started graduate school when I was twenty-two. According to some of my professors and peers, this meant I was yet incapable of depth and genius, at least in comparison to my peers older than twenty-five: the age when humans begin to think with their prefrontal cortex (the rational part of their brain) more than their amygdala (the emotional part of their brain). Never mind the fact I felt less insecure and published more than some of my older peers, the fact of my biological development meant more to them than the muscle of my work. Not surprisingly, my twenty-fifth year came without any out-of-the-ordinary growth or major epiphanies, despite the developmental milestone.

While I do not want to dismiss the importance of the prefrontal cortex’s maturation and its significance in changing human behavior, one of the more fascinating insights of Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teach Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” was it argued that the rigidity of the mature, older brain could, in fact, stifle genius and creativity necessary for innovation. Our minds, according to modern neuroscience, functions a bit like artificial intelligence, taking in information from our senses, then making educated guesses to fill in the blanks or shape the material in the window of our mind. Our senses are not transparent windows to an outer world, it seems; everything we experience is an interpretation of our minds. As we age, our interpretations may become less and less flexible, making us unable to see problems or experiences from new angles. Psychedelics, Pollan argues, can disrupt the rote patterns of an experienced mind, opening people to new insights into problems and perspectives on the world.

“How to Change Your Mind” is a fascinating piece of non-fiction. Part historical overview of psychedelics, part memoir, part lay-person literature review of contemporary psychedelic research, Pollan manages to provide a captivating and coolly narrated introduction to almost anything a neophyte would want to know about psychedelics. Eschewing the evangelistic and impassioned, or even feverish, tone popular in familiar iterations of psychedelic writing, Pollan’s narration is dominated by a sober, rational tone and a clear line of argument. This tone is definitely necessary in order to make Pollan’s writing credible and more persuasive for anyone suspicious of psychedelic exuberance. At times, however, it does seem to make Pollan’s interior life as somewhat devoid of the spiritual. As someone familiar with the emotional explosions of spiritual revelation and poetry, he can seem a bit stiff at times.

In particular, I wish Pollan would have shaken off the observational tone in places where race was central to his narration. Take Pollan’s narration of white people’s discovery of the “magic” mushrooms of the natives of the Sierra Mazteca. Maria Sabina, an indigenous Maztecan, provided the mushrooms to two Americans for the first time, so the story goes, and inadvertently ended up triggering a cultural revolution, as these two went on to spread the word, eventually leading to the famous feature in Life Magazine “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”. The magazine feature led thousands of tourists to swarm the once remote indigenous village, drawing the unwanted attention of law enforcement. The mushrooms became scarce. Sabina was ostracized from her community. The violation of an indigenous community’s environment and way of life is an crucial, unavoidable part of the history of psychedelics. And while Pollan competently narrates the history, there were times I just wish he would bare his teeth a little more and strike at some of the toxicities part and parcel of Western culture.

Perhaps the only major shortcoming of the work is Pollan’s treatment on race. I left the book being able to tell someone much more about American and European research on psychedelics, rather than the millenia-spanning history of indigenous practices. For a book concerned with the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, “How to Change Your Mind” glossed over the curandera uses of the velada and other indigenous practices, which probably merit chapter of their own. I imagine some of this information must be difficult to access, but if Pollan can go through the trouble of finding the underground community of psychonauts and therapists illegally using psychedelics, of pummeling his way through contemporary neuroscience, and of imbibing psychedelics himself, surely he could go through the trouble of familiarizing himself with the indigenous communities who preserved this practice despite extreme repression from Christian authorities.

Another sticky and tricky unexplored racial tension in the work is some researchers and enthusiasts tendency to use psychedelics as a way of “eating the other,” in the bell hooks’ sense of the phrase. Why do these psychedelic trips seem to encourage the orientalism of some of the researchers and enthusiasts? In moments like these, an observational side-eye is warranted, if not a more direct criticism.

Pollan does an amazing and thorough job of reporting the advancements made via psychedelics, although not all the advancements are as new as the title of the book implies. As Pollan himself acknowledges, much of the new research is retracing the ground researchers trekked in the 50s and 60s before psychedelic research became taboo. While the book didn’t necessarily change my mind about psychedelics—I was already inclined to believe they could be useful in psychotherapy—it did provide me with a robust set of arguments to advocate for their use in treatments for depression, addiction, and the existential dread of dying common in terminally ill patients. It has also guided me into an understanding about the safest way to use these drugs. Prior to reading the book, I assumed my C-PTSD would make any trip especially unpleasant for me, if not dangerous. Although its not legal yet, a trip guided by a shaman or psychotherapist could actually prove to be a transcendental experience, even for the severely traumatized.

My reading of “How to Change Your Mind” is informed by my own research into C-PTSD and Internal Family Systems Therapy, as well as by my EMDR and Brainspotting therapy sessions. Internal Family Systems Therapy “is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system.” According to my therapist, this form of therapy is inherently spiritual. EMDR and Brainspotting, on the other hand, both use free association to heal unconscious, somatic wounds. Suffice to say, I have had plenty of material to evolve my understanding of the self, the limits of human perception, and how to heal my mind. One of the most energizing aspects of scientific research into psychedelics is that many users experience something inherently spiritual, forcing science to wrestle in unfamiliar territory. Pollan does an especially great job asking the right questions when it comes to expanding the bounds of science.

One of my favorite aspects of “How to Change Your Mind” is the expansive ways it asks you to consider perception. I have spent a lot more time engaging in the humbling experience of pondering other forms of consciousness, such as that of plants and animals, in an attempt to better understand my own limits and strengths. The book allows you to vicariously experience psychedelic trips, in a sense, and even that experience is rife with power.

“How to Change Your Mind” is a thoroughly enjoyable read, intelligent without being opaque or jargon-laden, personal without being indulgent. I recommend this book to anyone studying neuroscience, religion, Buddhism, the war on drugs, philosophy of the mind and self, psychology, mental illness, and mental wellness.

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile / Edited by Kalani Tonga and Joanna Brooks / Feminist Mormon Housewives / 2019

In a recent interview with RadioActive on KRCL, I was asked the gigantic question: how do you define poetry? After a few minutes of scribbling, I came up with this: prayer and blessing through story and song. Prayer I believe points to desire and to an attempt to access greatness. Blessing is product of my own goodwill, as a poem can certainly be a curse. In either case, it is a wish to transform the other. Story points to the need for meaning. Song points to the need for meaning beyond the literal words.

We Hold Your Name is an open mic, a hearth of women gathered in vigil, a collection of poetry written largely by unpublished and non-professional poets. If what you’re looking for is mind-blowing imagery or deft line breaks, this collection is not for you. What you may find, instead, is a home, a community to weather with you your doubt and exile.

Gina Colvin

The collection was written and gathered in preparation for Gina Colvin’s December 2018 excommunication court. For months, it looked like Colvin, a prominent and fierce Mormon feminist personality, was going to go down the same route as other Mormon intellectual icons and critics of the past decades and be excommunicated. Colvin’s community, the international coalition of women she helped organize, nurture, and connect to Heavenly Mother, came through for her with letters of support to Colvin’s bishop and poems to help strengthen Colvin during her difficult trial. The poems they sent were collected and presented in We Hold Your Name. For those unfamiliar with Colvin’s work, this interview is pretty good.

The poems range widely in tone and purpose, a reflection of the breadth of Colvin’s Mormon community, even a reflection of how wide and varied the Mormon experience is in the 21st century. There are sharp little barbs, like Kate Kelly’s poem, “Fuck the Patriarchy, A Poem”:

F

u

c

k

t

h

e

p

a

t

r

i

a

r

c

h

y.

Amen.

There are priesthood blessings like Kathryn Elizabeth Shields, which opens with the snarky and touching lines mimicking and inverting LDS priesthood blessings: “O Woman, / having been given no authority, / Neither from on high or by man, / I give you a name and a blessing.” There are also simple offerings of peace, such as Jami Kimball Baayd’s poem, which describes a sacred space Baayd has visited, one where Colvin would never be excommunicated from for speaking her truth.

The power of We Hold Your Name is its ability to represent, and thereby create, alternative ways of being Mormon with different relationships to the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There’s a chance that if I had known of the Mormon Feminist Housewives and the intellectual class of Mormon thinkers in my teenage years, I would have found a path for staying inside the church. Because leaving the church did require letting a believing part of myself shrivel up, these poems offered a profound relief for that choked limb, allowing it to feel the blood of love and the possibility of belonging again. I found myself so moved in my first sitting with the collection that I read through more than half in one sitting. The poems read easily and won’t belabor you in search of their meaning. That’s not the intention of this collection. Rather, it’s to create a community in the absence of approval and acceptance from those with the so-called authority. As Sara Hughes-Zabawa put it in her poem, “…it is in our un-belonging we found you, and that has been the greatest gift. Following your insight, it was the map to belonging to ourselves for the very first time.”

The act of empowering and comforting a silenced community is poetry at its finest.

A close friend asked me today, “Do you think you’ll keep up this relationship with Mormonism your whole life?”—this relationship where I keep returning to its literatures, histories, and scriptures, wrestling with their meaning. The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know I believe in the literary power of Mormonism, in the ability of its metaphors, imagery, and histories to reveal profound truths about human nature and the divine. That is enough for me for now.

I recommend this collection for anyone interested in feminism, religion, and Mormon studies.