Finna / Nate Marshall / 2020

If you have yet to discover the work of Nate Marshall, you should know he’s one of the most important poets of the 21st century, period. Those already familiar with his work, in particular his debut collection of poetry Wild Hundreds, will find more of the Nate Marshall we know and love. In his new collection Finna, Marshall retraces formative experiences growing up in the Wild Hundreds of Chicago, again there’s a handful of heartbroken love poems, even another Harold’s Chicken Shack poem. All are delivered in his distinctive style: frequently dodging capital letters, the use of numbers rather than the spellings of numbers, the easy comfort of his hometown tongue, a Chicago African American vernacular. Each poem still knocks with forms that will make you flip the book upside down (literally) and ghazals with Chicago slang.

The collection is framed by two quotes. One from Chicago poet Malik Yusef, from “Crack Music,” a song he is featured on in Kanye West’s sophomore album Late Registration. In the song, West illustrates how the same forces of misery, violence, and oppression that have created the crack industry and addiction in Black communities are the same forces that have shaped Black music. Both West and Yusef draw -parallels between the crack game and music game. The song is forceful ars poetica that argues against the whitewashing of Black language and experience. It insists you wrestle with the gravity of history, warts and all, rather than sanitizing and commodifying it, as Black culture is often repackaged for the consumption of non-Black folks. The line Marshall borrows is “this dark diction has become america’s addiction.”

The second quote comes from Thomas Jefferson, who Marshall rightfully refers to as “some white boy”; it’s from his “Notes on the State of Virginia”: “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” Dig a bit further into this text and you’ll see that Jefferson was particularly interested in discrediting the work of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American author of a book of poetry, whose work often engaged Christian themes. If you are new to her work, read this, then this. Marshall’s book is a direct response to the Jefferson quote, as Finna is very intentionally rooted in the poetry of the Black vernacular.

Being rooted in the Black vernacular means more the incorporation of words like finna. Rather, Marshall is interested in interrogating the way Black language has been used, as a means of comfort and as a weapon, and exploring how far it can be pushed. Poems like “landless acknowledgement” and “the valley of its making” look at home our language becomes our home. Poems like “my mom’s favorite rapper was Too $hort” and “the homies ask if i’m tryna smash” look at the ways patriarchal violence is embedded in language. Poems like “Finna,” “Aubade for the whole hood” and “what it is & will be” dream of better worlds and the language that it would take to get there.

I don’t think I got much more to say about the book other than its a relief to know poets like Nate Marshall exist in the world. His work is a testament to the fact that as an artist there are ways of creating without compromising yourself or your soul.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in poetry and hip-hop.

On These Magic Shores / Yamile Saied Méndez/ 2020

Yamile Saied Méndez is quickly carving out a space for herself as an author of books for young people and children. A proud Latina, she is marketed as a contemporary of Elizabeth Acevedo and Erika Sanchez, and it’s a worthy comparison. Méndez’s middle grade novel On These Magic Shores tells the story of a Latina girl whose mother mysteriously disappears for a few days, leaving her and her younger sisters to fend for themselves. I was drawn to the novel because I am curious about how authors for young readers grapple with the everyday violence people of color face in this country. The novel summary raises the specter of immigration enforcement perhaps being responsible for the mother’s disappearance. How do we share these very important stories of trauma and systemic oppression to our young in a loving and caring way?

Méndez responds by calling on the strength of the eldest daughter. Especially in Latinx families, the eldest daughter bears a huge responsibility, partially raising her younger siblings with a high level of expectation and control from her parents. In On These Magic Shores, Méndez conjures a Latina girl, who is ambitious, sharp, and like many of our eldest daughters, unbelievably strong. “Peter Pan was an idiot,” Minnie begins, “Only an idiot would wish to be a child forever.” Minnie quickly sets herself off as a no-nonsense girl with big dreams of eventually becoming the president of the United States. Minnie’s first conflict is her desire to be cast as the lead female in Peter Pan, as it fits into the plans' of her slow but sure ascent to the highest office in the country. This move on the path of Méndez is brilliant, because it allows her to critique and play with Peter Pan. Minnie’s frequent challenges to the teachers and adults around her provides young readers with a model of how to advocate for themselves, especially when the adults in their lives may not have the skills to advocate for them. It gives them the space to process the racial tensions in a lot of canonical literature. At times, this tendency towards societal critique felt a little heavy-handed, leaving me seriously impressed with how woke and informed Minnie is throughout the novel. That said, I think the presence of such a socially conscious character is important to introduce younger readers to conversations about privilege and difference; Minnie’s observations and remarks throughout the novel are less jarring the less you underestimate our youth.

The novel managed to maintain a rather realist outlook even while introducing the occasional miracle of magic and even a fairy or two. The magic acts appear at moments when Minnie or her sisters would have otherwise suffered immense loss or harm and exist in a field of uncertainty at first. There is no way of writing about fairies without a bit of mush and glitter, but the mush and glitter are couched well, delivered from the unconstrained perspective of Minnie’s younger sister Avi, who sees the fairies and interacts with them most directly.

Minnie shows incredible wit and resilience in the face of unfair, dire circumstances. I most appreciate this book for the way it encourages the young to see and appreciate the labor of this eldest daughter, for centering her dreams without sugarcoating the obstacles that stand between them and Minnie.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in middle grade novels and YA, especially those that feature marginalized voices.

Seeing the Body / Rachel Eliza Griffiths / 2020

There is something ineffable about Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ voice that I’m have a hard time pinning down, so let us begin with the facts. Seeing the Body is a collection of poems that wrestle with the fallout after the death of the poet’s mother. The collection is split by a series of tender yet haunting black-and-white photographic self-portraits, where the poet’s body frequently echoes an aspect of the landscape or setting, managing to be both strikingly individual yet part of the whole. None of these photos gives us a clear shot of the poet’s face, although we do get some blurry glimpses at hair and shadow and in one photo we get her profile. This defacing that occurs in the photographs feels less like an evasion or shy attempt to shield her ego from scrutiny and feels more like a literal defacing caused by grief. In fact, Griffith’s body—caught in contortion, in motion, sometimes naked, in fetal position, on the floor—is painfully and powerfully vulnerable. Her body is shrunk by the landscapes and settings, the immensity of them, the fullness of their blank space. In the last photo of the series, for example, she is dwarfed by an immense tree. She stands with her knees bent, her gaze looking up at the leaves and branches, as if in supplication. The tree is in full blossom, a commonplace symbol of life and age, and here it seems to spiritually invoke the lost mother. The photos have a way of quieting the spirit, asking the viewer to listen to the silence, the absence, to melt into the landscape, the moment.

And from this emptiness springs Griffith’s voice, bursting like a hot spring, so crystal sharp, clear, and fluid, sometimes scalding, sometimes rejuvenating to the touch. I have no eye-popping analysis of these poems, though I’m a sure a more deft reader and writer would have something to say of the forms and strategies she employs. Instead, let me share with you a few of my favorite poems from the collection and why I love them. Selecting poems was a difficult exercise because literally every poem packs a punch, but here are my faves.

“Chosen Family”: At a time of extreme isolation in my life, this poem makes me feel less lonely. It invites me to hope for the new kin I will fine, rather than mourning the kin I’ve lost. The anaphora of “when you find your people” echoing throughout the poem makes the discovery of your chosen family destiny, not possibility. Much like Danez Smith’s Homie collection, this poem reminds me what makes friendships holy. This poem will hold you until your new kin finds you.

“Color Theory & Praxis”: One of the things that impressed me the most about Rachel Eliza Griffiths when she ran a poetry workshop at the Frost Place was her ability to critique with love. When white colleagues brought racially problematic poems, she found a way to tenderly hold their insecurities yet forcefully challenge them to improve. The same ethos and tenderness is found in this duo of poems, forcefully responding to a white artist’s notorious painting of Emmett Till.

“My Rapes”: This is likely the most painful poem in the collection. Here, Griffiths starts by analyzing the ways “rape” poems get talked about in creative writing classrooms. “A teacher pulled his prize-winning teeth across the shoulders / of my poems. ‘I gave you a hard critique,’ he said, / then offered to save me from becoming / a terrible poet.” Further on, “A woman I loved told me / to use a clear verb. ‘Was it actually Rape? Like Rape-Rape?” Griffiths focuses on the jaded, tactless mistakes people make when holding such a deep part of someone’s pain. This strikes me because creative writers often like to pat themselves on the back for how much their work helps others humanize and understand different people. Here, creative writing culture does the opposite: the skills and techniques we’ve been taught actually make us more likely to dehumanize our fellow writer and treat them callously. I’ve been in the room when “rape” poems were discussed and been crushed by the overly literary perspective of the workshop facilitator. For that alone, this poem is one that needs to be taught more often. To teach us to undo the most disconnected parts of our pedagogy and relating with one another.

In the heart of the poem, Griffiths asks, “Why will we try to praise a mutilated world & leave / our mutilated women in the margins to fend / for our worth beneath moonlit headstones? / I want to believe I am urging survival, / that I live the same impulse of the great poets / to praise suffering, to feel the merciful world shimmering / in spite of its injury, but women everywhere / face our executioners, however kind or coarse.” Here Griffiths takes a hard look at the reality of what healing means and what poetry can offer. She goes on to wrestle with her mother’s responses to her experiences later in the poem and wrestles with those just as fiercely and honestly as well. For this poem alone, this book is worth its weight in diamonds.

“Husband” : This poem wrestles in the sticky tensions between the ideal of love and love in practice, the ways we fail to measure up in ways we hoped in our most important relationships. I love this poem for the space it creates for brokenness. “Forgive the hours you waited in our ruin / of happiness. We always knew I was wild, wrecked,” the poem begins. As someone whose circumstances have given my partner more than her fair share of grief, I I am grateful for the honesty of this poem, the way it redeems our aching love.

“Mirror”: In this short dagger of a poem, Griffiths riffs off of Sylvia Plath for a poem about a mirror. “You immaculate bitch of glass,” it begins, with a line the cut straight to the heart of your self-hate. There’s a wrestling with the self, with the shiftiness of it here that hits me like a deep breath of air, massaging the heaviness in my shoulders.

“Father” : Griffiths is particularly masterful at long, one-stanza poems. You can feel her line breaks in your throat while you read. There’s a resoluteness, tenacity and vulnerability in this poem that is exemplified throughout the whole collection. Here, the poet begins with a memory that makes us care for the father and his well-being before moving to a painful interaction with the father. This juxtaposition of these two moments feel hot in my face. What I appreciate most about many poems in this collection is that they teach me how to grieve my dead: bravely, embracing as much as I can of their complete selves and honoring them that way. In this collection, you won’t find any empty platitudes about how time heals all wounds or the countless other lying things people will attempt to comfort you with when your mother dies. Instead, you’ll find a sister willing to sit in the storm with you—through every cloud and thunderclap.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in poetry, black feminism, anyone who is grieving, anyone interested in the interplay between photography and poetry. Seeing the Body is fierce and powerful as crystal.

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 Women's War / Robert Evans / March 2020

Radio journalist Robert Evans is one of my problematic faves. His claim to fame is his equal parts horrifying and hilarious history podcast Behind the Bastards, where he and a comedian delve through the tangled and twisted backstories of the worst people in history. His podcast includes deep dives into Saddam Hussein’s erotic novels and the astrologer who managed the Reagan presidency, for example. Evans’s journalistic style is penetrative and cynical in the same way Charles Bowden is penetrative and cynical, only what Evans lacks in poetry he makes up for in bitter humor. The show’s forays into the worst that mankind has to offer is deeply educational, teaching me more about history and humanity than my high school history classes ever did. On a personal level, I appreciate a solid analysis on difficult parts of history because it’s darkly comforting to see my life in perspective. My problems can seem so big until they are placed on a larger landscape.

That said, sometimes Robert isn’t the best narrator for a given story. His episode on “The Complete Insane History of American Border Militias” is case in point. I listened to the episodes begrudgingly sifting the useful information on border militias while gagging on the hacked, hackneyed ironic liberal jokes that left an icky feeling in my stomach. The comedians on the show have no easy task—they literally have to spin jokes out of genocides and the like. But the smarter guests either find a way to forge genuinely hilarious perspectives of the dark material or somberly/soberly realize they should stop kidding around.

Evans’s latest podcast The Women’s War steps on similarly difficult territory. At best, it is a fraught and probing introduction to Rojava, the feminist anarchist stateless region in northeast Syria, known to most Americans as simply the Kurds. At worst, it is a piece of war tourism that spreads misconceptions about one of the most complicated regions of the world. For The Women’s War, Evans joined a british journalist on a trip to Rojava to learn whether Rojava is truly the anarchist feminist revolutionary stronghold it is portrayed as in some leftist media.

Those who expect strict objectivity and professionalism from their journalists will likely be disappointed by Evans’s antics throughout the show. Fans of Evans’s will get more of his wry down-to-earth observations and self-deprecating style. He openly discusses getting drunk and being hungover during parts of his trip, for example, and even commemorates the trip with a tattoo on the podcast. One of the most disappointing moment, however, came when Evans’s talked about feeling most frustrated by borders when he got caught up at a border stop for a few extra hours. It’s an obvious point of privilege if your greatest frustration with a border is the few hours it has taken from your day, rather than family separation or the lost life of your loved one.

Faux paus and disclaimers aside, the podcast is profoundly moving, as it successfully simplifies the complicated backstory behind Rojava for listeners who aren’t political theorists or global studies scholars. Evans’s narrates a complicated gender landscape, full of women wearing niqabs, women packing heat, sometimes at the same time. Underpinning the experiment in Rojava is the belief that the first form of totalitarianism is man’s subjugation of women, which began in the formation of the first city states. Evans’s fixer, Habat, is an inspiring woman, whose liveliness, tenacity, and sharp eye are evident in the various clips they include of her perspectives and observations. I particularly appreciated an analysis of the Venus of Willendorf as an anatomically correct figure of a pregnant woman used by ancient medical professionals. Male scholars had reduced the artifact to a mere erotica.

Most inspiring is the region’s attempts at restorative justice. The maximum penalty for anyone in Rojava is 20 years in prison. It’s moving to see people attempt to create a system that truly believes in socially reforming people most of us would rather exile or cast aside as criminals or terrorists. Here, Evans’s critical eye is especially appreciated, as he questions and considers this ideological stance thoroughly, even ending his podcast with a predictably frustrating conversation with Isis brides imprisoned in Rojava. It is incredible that the only people in the world who seem willing to experiment/execute some of the most complex and hopeful forms of justice are literally under siege by Turkey, Isis, among other groups, and drastically under-resourced compared to many nations across the globe.

Lastly, I appreciated Evans’s situating his podcast in a longer history of anti-imperialism. He shapes the emotional landscape of the project by alluding to two revolutionary songs in particular:

Bella Ciao:

Go Home British Soldiers:

For those unaccustomed to the grisly details of war and subjugation, listening to this podcast will be difficult. I recommend it for anyone interested in global studies, anarchism, feminism, and the Middle East. For those who would prefer to learn about Rojava without a white american man filtering the information, Pratik Raghu, a doctoral candidate in Global Studies at UCSB recommended the graphic novel Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria by Zerocalcare, A Small Key Can Open a Large Door, and Burn Down the American Plantation by the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (AK Press).

The Bitch is Back by Roxanne Shanté

The Bitch is Back / Roxanne Shanté / 1992

Roxanne Shanté is simultaneously a controversial and overlooked figure in hip-hop history. She is most remembered for “Roxanne’s Revenge,” a diss track she recorded at the wee age of fourteen. For those unfamiliar with this episode of classic hip-hop history, emerging rap group UTFO made the now regrettable decision to sidestep Fly Ty, Marley Marl, and Mr. Magic, going to a rival radio station to drop their single “Roxanne, Roxanne,” released in 1984. UTFO backed out of a show with the hip-hop pioneers when Marley Marl and the crew were in desperate need of money, and to add insult to injury, it was Mr. Magic who identified “Roxanne, Roxanne” as a crowd-pleaser and made it a hit in the first place. Without Mr. Magic, who knows if UTFO would have ever found their audience.

The otherwise unmemorable track is a diss record to a woman named Roxanne, who rejected the rap crew’s advances. In essence, it’s a whole song degrading a woman because she wouldn’t fawn over them and stroke their egos. At the young age of fourteen, Shanté sniffed out the misogyny in their lyrics and penned a fierce rebuttal. She approached Marley Marl, Mr. Magic, and Fly Ty and asked them to let her rock a diss track against the backstabbers. Mr. Magic leapt the opportunity and soon they were recording “Roxanne’s Revenge.”

“Roxanne’s Revenge” is striking for the directness of its barbs delivered in the Shanté’s childlike high-pitched voice. Her flow hopscotches all over the beat with a flat yet energetic intonation. While the music video above illustrates just how green Shanté’s performance skills were at the time, her upbeat nonchalance and jabbing lyricism evince the unmistakable signs of a young genius. “Roxanne’s Revenge” exploded onto the hip-hop scene, embarrassing UTFO bad enough they even sent a cease-and-desist letter to Roxanne Shanté’s team. Shanté’s track was too popular, however. The controversy Shanté cooked up inspired over eighty known tracks revolving around a so-called Roxanne, by this point elevated to mythical status. “Roxanne’s Revenge” would set the tone for Shanté’s career—full of battles and blowouts with the biggest emcees of her day. It is here where her legacy deserves more shine.

In 1985, Shanté took battle rap to new levels of aggression. Before Shanté, battle rapping was a competition in rocking the crowd. Shanté was the first to make direct attacks on your opponent popular—and she was duly punished for it by rap legend and battle rap judge Kurtis Blow, who complained about not wanting to see the culture head in such a negative direction.

Roxanne Shanté’s first album “Bad Sister”—released in 1989, five long years after “Roxanne’s Revenge”"—features Shanté’s adolescent flow and boldness, full of intonations geared to freestyle ciphers and stage performances. The album includes songs about female empowerment like “Independent Woman” and the sex-positive track “Feelin’ Kinda Horny.” Lovers of the Notorious BIG might be interested in the fact Shanté samples the Isley Brother’s “Between the Sheets” in “Feelin’ Kinda Horny,” the same smooth bass lines that Biggie would later make iconic in his club-banger “Big Poppa.”

While her debut album is fun, it’s her second album “The BItch is Back” that I think hip-hop heads would do well to revisit. By the time “The Bitch is Back” dropped in 1992 hip-hop was past Roxanne Shanté. New queens named Latifah and Monie Love, JJ Fad and the Oaktown’s 357, Salt n Pepa and MC Lyte were dazzling audiences with their innovative takes on hip-hop culture, some with pop beats and dance moves, others with razor-sharp lyrics and unforgettable flows. Always down for a fight, Shanté positioned herself against these new emcees, attacking them all on “Big Mama.” When Kendrick Lamar dissed everyone in his “Control” verse, hip-hop heads celebrated him for energizing hip-hop and carrying on a long bold tradition of namedropping in battle rap. They pointed to rappers like 50 cent and Tupac Shakur, who built part of their careers on their aggressiveness and namedropping on the mic. These same hip-hop heads should have been pointing to Roxanne Shanté, who was dissing fools by name at fourteen and who never backed down from a battle, no matter how popular the foe.

“The Bitch is Back” features solid 90s boom bap production and daggering flows that remind me of Nas on Illmatic. That comparison is not made lightly. Both Nas and Roxanne Shanté came out of the Queens housing projects. Whoever doubts me should compare Shanté’s flows on “Deadly Rhymes” ft Kool G Rap with Nas’s flow “Live at the BBQ.” Compare Shanté’s verses on “Big Mama” to Nas’s verse on “Back to the Grill.” Conversations about Illmatic frequently point to rappers like Rakim and Slick Rick as precursors to Nas’s succinct and image-loaded storytelling. Why don’t they point to Shanté when Nas was clearly borrowing from her weaving rhyme schemes and brash shocking delivery in his early work?

“The Bitch is Back” starts with a female emcee hyping up Roxanne Shanté, as the “woman who pulled herself up by her bra straps and known to let them down occasionally.” It starts out strong with a muscular back-and-forth between Kool G Rap and Shanté on “Deadly Rhymes.” Shanté follows that up immediately with the fiery and controversial “Big Mama.” Shanté’s style has clearly matured by 1992. You no longer feel like you’re listening to a teenager. Her verses are thick with internal rhymes that smack you when you least expect it. The album ends with the fiery and feminist “Brothers Ain’t Shit,” calling out men on all their bullshit.

By 1992, hip-hop was booming with dozens upon dozens of classic albums being released. Heads were growing weary of Shanté’s antagonistic antics, whether it was dissing their favorite new acts or fabricating stories about having her record label pay for her PhD (contrary to the widespread rumors, Shanté does not have a PhD). I shouldn’t fail to mention that by 1987 KRS-One made Shanté’s name equivalent with “Steady Fucking.” Being put on blast by one of the greatest emcees ever would definitely do something to your rep. That alone would make it understandable why Shanté’s sophomore project did not take off as much as it deserves. “The Bitch is Back” is definitely worth a re-listen, however, especially in the moments where the radio keeps us hungry for lyrical, message-driven hip-hop.

I owe a lot of the information in this review to Kathy Iandoli’s new book God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop. A glowing review is on its way once I make my way through the whole book. It’s going slow because Iandoli has me discovering and revisiting many emcees from the Golden Age of Hip-hop. It’s been fun. I recommend this album to anyone interested in golden age hip-hop, feminism, battle rap, and boom bap.

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.”