Rummage / Ife-Chudeni O. Aputa / 2017

Rummage (Little A, 2017) by Ife-Chudeni O. Aputa

“Brave” is a word commonly overused when describing contemporary poetry, but in regards to Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa’s debut collection Rummage, “brave” is an understatement. Rummage is not a book of easy answers. “For me, the poem is not for a space to make arguments or come to definitive answers or full stops,” Oputa told Pen America in a 2017 interview. “For me, the poem is a space for questioning, exploration, and sitting with the unknown.” True to her word, Oputa’s explorations of desire, heartbreak, and trauma do not shy away from the truth for the sake of the speaker or the reader. Rummage challenges readers to create space for a speaker who has wrestled with violence and has not always left the mat blameless.

But in this ugliness, Oputa continually finds grace. “Ode to Shame” and “Kwansaba for my Mother” are particularly stunning for their ability to draw strength and wisdom from some of the speaker’s most debilitating moments. Both the ode and the kwansaba are poems of praise, and in both cases, emerge from events many do not find survivable, much less praiseworthy. In “Ode to Shame,” the speaker asks Shame for forgiveness for all the harm she’s done in its name.

I wanted

to be a weapon, a forest, a city that burns 

one hundred degrees and more

and never turns to ash. (4)

These lines precisely describe the agony of shame and the hunger for self-punishment and vengeance that come with it. In “Ode to Shame,” shame may not be completely expelled or overcome, but by acknowledging the ways we misuse shame to hurt ourselves and others and by refusing to continue to do so, its harm is limited and its lessons are accepted. As the first poem in Rummage, “Ode to Shame” sets up the collection as one ready to work through whatever shame has to offer without letting it consume the speaker.

Sometimes this shame is relinquished, sometime it sits fierce but surmountable at the bottom of the page, sometimes it passes, and other times, it is bonding. A kwansaba is an African American form that celebrates family written in seven lines with seven words each where no word exceeds seven letters. In “Kwansaba for my Mother,” for example, Oputa describes a moment where the mother’s body is violated in front of the speaker. The title of the poem sets us up to expect a warm, heartfelt poem about the mother and the body of the poem reverses those expectations and asks the reader, what does it mean to try to find meaning in these moments of harm? If read as a traditional kwansaba—that is, if we attempt to read the poem in search of something to praise or be grateful for—the title would seem to exult the mother for her strength to overcome the harrowing ordeal, and likewise, the last line would seem to celebrate the mother and the speaker for their joint survival. “My heart glows dark with our silence,” the speaker tells us (emphasis mine, 9). The silence here seems to bond the speaker and mother, a secret kept and disclosed with care, a heart that witnesses and burns heavy with its empathy. For many communities of survivors, silence and isolation are shared experiences, ones that Oputa masterfully uses to build spaces of sharing and understanding. Oputa’s work honors the sacrifices and losses too often kept silenced for survival, and in doing so, she makes the celebration of survival possible.

Oputa’s kwansaba is in direct conversation with one of the greatest contemporary poets to ever touch the pen: Lucille Clifton. In Clifton’s tenth collection, Mercy, the title poem discusses another sexual assault in terms of mercy, gratitude, and fury with a form as compact as a kwansaba. Oputa’s kwansaba asks us as many difficult questions as Clifton’s short poem. For Oputa to gift the reader a poem with the concision, the precision, and the brutal wisdom of Clifton’s “Mercy” in their debut collection is a testament of her poetic prowess and promise.  

The measure of any collection of poetry is its ability to give words to the unsayable. In Rummage, different silences haunt the collection like a web. As if in perfect symmetry, the only other word that seems to appear as frequently as “silence” is “mouth.” Throughout Rummage, the speaker’s mouth violates and is violated. It is the place in which a group of bullies can “disappear” to escape punishment (11). And it is also the vehicle through which some of the power of these violations can be undone. Oputa’s caliber as a poet is proven by her ability to confront these silences and siding with the truth, no matter how harrowing.

If to “rummage” means to make a clumsy search through a subject, Oputa’s collection is so carefully knitted it undercuts the title. Each of its sections are tightly focused, weaving layers of meaning that make the poems remain fresh with each new read. And as if Oputa’s lush language wasn’t enough to hypnotize any reader, the collection also features two long poems (including one cutthroat contrapuntal and something I want to call a quadruple sestina) which could kick the legs out from beneath even the most seasoned poets.

The word “rummage” appears only once throughout the collection: In “Portrait of Memory with Shadow,” the speaker is a collective of seven-year-old girls who take turns straddling and kissing a smaller and reluctant seven-year-old boy, hidden from his mother: “He learned obedience swiftly, / parted his lips and let us rummage” (11). The title of the collection thereby directs us to one of the speaker’s most searing moments of shame and references the way love and sexuality warp throughout the collection.

The second poem of the collection, “We are sitting around discussing our shame,” features another haunting confession of youthful sexual trespass. In this way, Rummage does not feign to be something it is not. After the cathartic “Ode to Shame,” where the speaker provides the reader with a healthier approach to shame, the mettle of this approach is put to the test. By the second poem, you know what sort of collection you are stepping into: a collection brave enough to present shameful acts for discussion in an attempt to overcome them.

Both “Portrait of Memory with Shadow’ and “We are sitting around discussing our shame” fill me with fear. I fear for those harmed by similar violences, and also, I fear for the speaker. Through experience and conversation, I know moments of maladroit sexuality in childhood are not unusual, but at a time where there’s a general expectation for narratives to be ethically seamless, I fear these confessions will be shouted back down into silence, where they will fester and go unaddressed. For me, these two poems were healing, if only for the reminder that I’m not alone in being forced to muddle through similar shades of violence throughout childhood.  

I want to live in a world where the forms of shame discussed in Rummage are not silenced, where the confessions of Oputa’s speaker can be met with something other than social death. Throughout the collection, the arc of each gut-dropping section resolves with a form of community, a form of self-knowledge, or another form of care, where the isolation of shame is vanquished, where vulnerability is rewarded with a certain kind of peace. Search and the diligent reader of Rummage will find a “version of you not as loneliness, but better—… a new myth all your own” (53).

After spending three days in the hospital after almost attempting suicide, I did not expect to ever find a piece of writing that could gracefully encompass the extent of the shame and heartache I felt and continue to feel because of my own traumas. Sometime in February, I opened the collection once again on the bus and became so absorbed not only did I miss my stop, by the time I looked up the bus had completed its route and I was back at home again, the book of poems trembling in my hands. In March, I learned one of my most important friends had killed herself. A victim of many of the same violences described in Rummage, I wish I could have shared the collection with her to offer her a small piece of the relief and salvation Rummage gave me. Thank you, Oputa, for giving me a collection to help me work my way through my own pain and forgiveness. Rummage has been my balm, my salve, a buoy for when the storm threatens to drown me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracing the Horse / Diana Marie Delgado / 2019

Tracing the Horse (BOA Editions, September 2019) by Diana Marie Delgado

I had the blessing of reading multiple drafts of Tracing the Horse, the debut collection by Californian poet and playwright Diana Marie Delgado. There are few creatures as strong and majestic as horses. One of the most important things I know about horses in the United States, however, is that they belong to people who have way more money than Diane Delgado and me. In Delgado’s work, desire is a horse.

We first see these horses in “The Sea is Farther Than Thought,” a poem that contemplates distance and failure: “As a girl I kept suede horses / and a hairbrush inside a blond toy-box… / I kneeled every time I opened it” (19). The horses here can be read as an escape from the tumultuous environment surrounding the young girl. The girl’s kneeling almost gives the horses a sense of reverence. I also cannot help associating the horses with whiteness because of the color of the toy-box.  In “The Kind of Light I Give Off Isn’t Going to Last,” the horses become a symbol for jealousy when an estranged lover’s girlfriend has horses: “I was jealous. His girlfriend had horses (and what girl doesn’t want to come home and ride horses?)” (36). Given the fact the girlfriend can afford horses, I’m also willing to bet she’s white. Later on, the prose poem “Horses on the Radio” likewise associates horses with troubled gender dynamics in heterosexual romantic relationships (39).

Perhaps the most significant mention of horses in the entire collection, however, comes from the title poem, “Tracing the Horse”: “Maybe Mom’s the horse / because aren’t horses beautiful, / can’t they kill a man if spooked?” (23). Here, the horse signals not only womanly beauty, but also womanly strength and resistance against patriarchal violence. This assortment of horse images suggests that in Tracing the Horse horses can symbolize an idealized womanhood: one that manages to be strong, beautiful, and desirable and also one able to make itself invulnerable to the racism and machismo surrounding it. As the title of this poem and collection suggests, however, the speaker in these poems can only trace this womanhood, never quite making it incarnate.

“I like the lady horses best / how they make it all look easy,” beams Ada Limón in “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” one of the United States’ most beloved poems. Limón’s poem is one of the many examples of what prize-winning Salvadoran writer Alejandro Córdova called US poets’ Beyoncé complex. Our chest-thumping poetics of triumph, our intoxicating performances of survival, and especially our expectations of flawless womanhood. As Córdova and I zigzagged through the streets of San Salvador on his moto, we jabbed about how much we admired and emulated such fiery spunk and clapback. The high of its freedom. To be unbothered, your power undeniable. But survival rarely looks like it does in the Grammys. I listened to Lemonade every day for at least a year, but I lived “Amiga,” one of the short prose poems from Tracing the Horse:

We were in front of Kmart when I called your boyfriend

an asshole for beating you up and you told me if I said

anything bad about him again, you’d never speak to me.

Here, there are no baseball bats against the windshield, no goddess-like vengeance against the men who harmed you—there’s not even a hint of accountability. Neither the vengeance and healing found in Lemonade, nor the ease and swag of Limón’s poem are possible for Delgado’s speaker.

Tracing the Horse is cut with similar snapshots of life in La Puente, California. Throughout the collection, Delgado shows us images of the city’s want: lines where mothers wait with their children for free cheese and butter, dumpsters where cousins are caught smooching, churches where boys have so much light “plants grow towards them” (18). We find traces of her father’s addiction to heroin—another stupefying horse. One of the greatest blessings of this collection is that we as readers get to witness the speaker grow into their own in this sometimes treacherous community. “I’m older / no longer afraid / my voice, water / from a well,” says the speaker near the end of “Bridge Called Water,” a poem that captures the loss in a breaking home (33). In “Lucky You,” Delgado gifts us one of the tenderest love poems, made all the more touching by the men it has survived. In three swift sections, Delgado paints us an alternative model of survival, a sort of coming-of-age story for a young woman who never had the luxury of being young.

One of the most impressive aspects of Tracing the Horse is Delgado’s ability to create moments of intimacy across distance. In “Correspondence,” Delgado gives readers a glimpse at the adolescent snail mail between her and her brother while he was incarcerated: “Remember when the yard froze / white and Mom tied plastic over our shoes?” (54). Here, it is Delgado’s words that serve as the plastic, the fragile barrier between a loved one and the cold. “I hope you get this letter / before lights out… or have you learned to read in the dark?” writes Delgado as a touching signoff to her brother (54). Tracing the Horse is collection for those who—through necessity—learned how to read in the dark, for those who must carve moments of intimacy through the bars of a jail cell or through the walls at the border.

It may be useful to delineate Delgado’s strengths as a poet by comparing her to another woman of color poet of equal strength who writes in similar veins. In When My Brother Was An Aztec, Natalie Diaz draws scorching supernatural imagery of a drug-addled brother, all laden in metaphor and delivered with breathtaking shifts in form and virtuoso. Diaz’s work cuts like a knife. In Tracing the Horse, Delgado does not adorn her language in spectacular metaphor or braided forms; she provides snapshot after snapshot of her neighborhood and its mundane violence in a language cut clean to the bone, the glistening skeleton of a horse. You would have to look far and wide to find another collection published recently as concise, blunt, and evocative as Tracing the Horse. Particularly effective is Delgado’s use of the prose poem for short difficult scenes, where the reader is asked to grapple with the violence ubiquitous in our communities.  Delgado’s work hits like a hammer. When you read Diaz, you are listening to a calculated, dagger-eyed wordsmith. When you read Delgado, you are listening to a homegirl talk to you on her front porch on a summer night with too many moths, holding a near-empty can of cerveza. Delgado’s poetry is a phone call with a friend you have not talked to in over a year, whose voice tells you as much as her story.

This is what I admire most about Delgado’s work: her poems have no pretensions. It paints survival in colors I can recognize. There are no fireworks, no epiphanies, no awards for making it through the grisliest years of your life. Delgado knows survival does not make you special. Her collection traces the horses of her youth, the stampedes that trampled many.

3 Children's Books: Call Me Max / Carl and the Meaning of Life / Julian is a Mermaid.

Julian is a Mermaid / Jessica Love / 2018

One of Utah’s banned books, I expected a spicier narrative from Julian is a Mermaid. Spoiler Alert, here is the entire plot: a young Black takes down a shower curtain and pretends to be a mermaid. His mother catches him and thinks it’s kinda weird, but later takes him to where there are other mermaids who vaguely resemble drag queens. That’s it. Most of it is expressed visually. There is no explicit gender play besides some mild gender non-conforming but completely normal behavior for a young boy. I loved the rich and tender visuals sure to bring out your inner femme. Nathan was surprised by how shortness of the book but enjoyed the visuals. He wants to be a mermaid, too. 5/5

Carl and the Meaning of Life / Deborah Freedman / 2019

I am always surprised what books Nathan and Chino grab. Carl is a worm going through an existential crisis after a bug asks him why he eats and poops dirt. Carl goes about asking all the creatures about his purpose and being dissatisfied by their answers until he realizes he is an important part of the ecosystem and everything would collapse without him. The art was rich and humble as dirt. 5/5

Call Me Max / Kyle Lukoff / 2019

This is the banned book at the center of the Murray school district scandal in 2019. The book includes the definition of transgender and dares to depict the stress that trans children undergo when they can’t find a bathroom that fits or otherwise have gender imposed on them. I read the book with an eight-year-old and they could reiterate what it meant to be trans to me afterward. This book is at times clearly didactic and includes scenes that are perhaps not crucial to the storyline but provide an illuminating moment on gender. The particle scene that irked me a bit in this regard is when the white protagonist meets a gender non-conforming lack boy in a dress who tells him clothes isn’t what makes gender. The Black character isn’t given anymore airtime which feels weird because Max clearly already undergoes bullying for his behavior and he’s less of a target than a Black boy in a dress for sure. 4/5

I recommend each of these titles for folks interested in children’s literature with substance or with LGBTQ+ themes.

Lorem Ipsum / Hossannah Asuncion / 2008

Lorem Ipsum / Hossannah Asuncion / 2008

I borrowed this book from my friend and am now pretty sure she’s never getting it back. I asked her if I could borrow it while helping her move during a particularly dark and troubling time in her life. Packing her books in a room full of cigarette smoke and the noisy clatter of a rock song clashing against different South Asian song, the cover stood out for its minimalistic design and clearly underground aesthetic. It’s a small chapbook, held together with a tiny binder clip. The chapbook looked like the sort of thing you would never find in a bookstore, but instead tucked in the corner of some bibliophile’s bookshelf. Its origin story checks out: my friend was gifted the book by legendary poet Jeffrey McDaniel, who selected it specifically for her based on her undergrad aesthetic.

The book is full of images drawn from a Google search using “the terms ‘patent’ with ‘pen,’ ‘typewriter,’ or ‘keyboard.’ As random as the images are, they feel essential to the book. There is a nitpickiness about the images that matches the sort of obsessive attention, sometimes frivolous, but undeniably beautiful that seems to stalk quirky artist types. Think Ikea instructional guide with plenty of numbers and arrows.

The title “Lorem Ipsum” refers to the latin phrase for dummy text, literally filler, used in design models. Not the highbrow title we would expect from a published literary collection, but rather something that gives the collection the feel of something like a mixtape. Don’t let it deceive you about the quality of the poems though. There is something lyrically haunting, utterly mundane, and needle-sharp about these poems. Check out these small throwaway lines for example:

1) “A person, / steps onto the elevator. You / smile. It’s an accident.”

2) “You are forgetting the taste / of smog, you hope it is not forgetting you.”

3) “you don’t / realize the strain of your thoughts: / they are so matte you squint / to understand them.”

Magical, right? So inside of its own head, eyes sore with weariness, throat parched with longing. I sit with this collection and feel my humanity stuck in my throat. By humanity, I mean either love or sorrow.

I recommend this collection for poets and weirdos especially. Everyone else should read it too, but honestly, I don’t think it’s for you.

PS - Doesn’t this author have the coolest name? Doomed to be a poet with that glorious, haunted name.

May Round-Up ft Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Yesika Salgado, Safia Elhillo, and more

I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World / Kai Cheng Tom / 2019

I read this book as a follow up to We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown. Here, Tom makes similar arguments, asks similarly difficult questions. I am left with nothing but the reassurance that we owe one another more than a carceral system. That the work of transformative justice will take sacrifice and resources if it will ever be more than an activist’s pipe dream. Interlaced with meaningful poems against about relationship dynamics, self-care, and love, these essays read fluidly, perfect for audiobook reading. Tom’s activist persona sometimes takes some getting used to, largely because it feels like the persona of someone who is a minor celebrity in activist circles. She also uncomfortably fits the traumatized social justice warrior stereotype at times. Even so, I appreciated the weight this book attempted to carry. 4/5

There Should Be Flowers / Joshua Jennifer Espinoza / 2016

An excellent first collection of poems by Latina transwoman, written in a lucid, confessional style. Even though this poetry is sad, often brought down by the weight of transmisogyny and other oppressions, Espinoza reaches for joy with every bit of her strength. Fans of Danez Smith and Christopher Soto will get lost in this book. I recommend this book to anyone interested in trans lit, LGBTQ+ lit, feminism, Latinx lit, poetry, confessional poetry, and anyone who needs a book to help them slow down and absorb the world, whether it be painful or pretty. 5/5

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest / Craig Childs / 2007

Craig Childs is the perfect author to read via Audiobook. His smooth, breeze-like sentences nestle easily into your ear. The content is not so complex that you’ll need to rewind frequently to make sure you caught everything if you are doing your dishes or driving. This book succinctly and impressively creates a narrative of thousands of years of history of the Ancestral Puebloan, the ancestors of the Hopi, Ute, and other groups, via their pottery, archeological sites, Native rock art, and more. Those with a liking for mystery novels will probably be hooked. Desert rats who love tales of “becoming one with nature” will love this book, especially if they understand “becoming one with nature” is a dangerous activity that will attempt to kill you. I appreciate this book because it taught me a lot about wilderness survival, especially as someone who is unwilling to put myself at risk in the desert. It taught me that the term Utahans use for ancient indigenous groups, ”Anasazi,” is actually a Navajo slur meaning “enemy ancestors.” It taught me about the astrological alignments for ancient sites, the intergenerational migration patterns of humans in the Southwest and how it is evident through changes in pottery, architecture, and cave art. It taught me about the technological significance of the art, how it was likely used to signify ethnicity, historical spots in oral histories, how flames on mountaintops were likely used as long distance morse code system, about communication throughout the Pre-Columbian Americas. If you live in the Southwest, this book will introduce you to the challenges of grappling with our histories, especially as we try to honor sites now. I recommend this book to everyone who lives in the Southwest, and anyone interested in lit about Native history, archeology, the environment, and just damn good non-fiction prose.    5/5

Hermosa / Yesika Salgado / 2019

Here Yesika does what she does best: poems about heartbreak, self-love, odes to home, and pieces exploring diasporic identity. Follow her IG if you haven’t yet, and decide if you want a book of that. I’m looking forward to teaching some of these pieces later. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Latinx lit, feminism, Salvi lit, and love poetry. 3/5

Green / Laura Vacarro Seeger / 2012

A lush colorful book for those who want their children to grow a love for the natural world, learn their colors, while also learning some basic words. There are holes in the pages that create some fun transformation and color crossover in the book. I loved it. I recommend this book for anyone with children. 5/5

Together We Walk / Peter S Seymour / 1971

I found this book while visiting Dreamscapes in the Gateway with poet friends. Instead of exploring the first exhibit, I read the entire book. The fantastical, dreamy environment stimulates and dazzles the senses, and such an environment was actually the perfect setting for reading this calm children’s book about nature and growing up. This book feels like a forgotten gem of children’s literature, not saturated in the gloss and high tech images of today’s books, but organic, sweet, and calming. I recommend this book to everyone. 5/5

Home is not a Country / Safia Elhillo / 2021

Safia Elhillo has gifted us a collection of poems that creates a novel, a so-called novel-in-verse. I’m unsure whether this is just a clever reframing and marketing for a collection of poetry and how blurry/clear the lines of genre are here. The poems do an amazing job building the character, even if as individual pieces, they are at time underwhelming. This book needed to be in poems because I don’t think it could have pulled off its supernatural elements in prose without getting corny. In the story, Nima, named a nostalgia monster by her friends, longs for the homeland, presumably in Sudan (like the author). She creates an alter-ego of herself without her perceived shortcomings named Yasmeen, a version of herself with stronger connections to the homeland, who has a father, who is better at being a young girl. Yasmeen ends up coming to life and the both battle in a struggle to control the timeline and not obliterating Nima from existence. It’s a heavy handed metaphor for the struggle of diasporic identity, but in this set of poems it largely works and leaves the reader with a fulfilling sense of peace. I recommend this book for folks interested in the line between fiction and poetry, Black lit, feminist lit, diasporic lit, and YA. 3/5    

The Fine Balance / Rohinton Mistry / 1997

A lower caste family attempts to improve their station by becoming tailors. Taking place during The Emergency, the third-person narrator delivers the story of their tribulations and eventual downfall to becoming beggars in a blunt, factual style. The reader watches helplessly as they face eviction, amputation, forced sterilization, and worse. I deeply admire the author’s restraint and his reluctance to aestheticize or lyricize the violence. I also admire his ability to follow the main characters clearly while capturing the busyness of India. This book does an excellent job capturing its time, the pressures of modernization, the attempts of poorer families to rise in status. It broke my heart over and over again. 5/5

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts / Rebecca Hall & Hugo Martínez / 2021

Part memoir, part graphic novel, Wake attempts to flesh out the history of women-led slave revolts. The scholarly work supporting this book is painstaking, and the novel does an excellent job elucidating the challenges of reading the suppressed clues signaled in the archives. Here, we hear the author express the toll the work takes on her, a familiar tale for anyone whose graduate studies focused on oppression of marginalized groups. Most importantly, we learn the crucial role women played in many slave revolts. Hall uncovers that women were responsible for the slave revolts on most ships, largely because they were left unchained by really misogynistic and stupid enslavers. I strongly recommend this book for high school students learning about history. This book would pair great with books like Persepolis, Maus, and Nat Turner. I recommend this book to those interested in memoir, Black history, Feminist lit, and LGBTQ+ lit. 5/5

April Round-up ft adrienne marie brown, Dayna Patterson

WE WILL NOT CANCEL US / adrienne marie brown / 2020

What a challenging, compassionate book! I’m glad our social justice movements are amplifying voices as brave and nuanced as brown’s. I read this book in one sitting, and it took maybe two or so hours, carried through by her lucid and urgent writing, her asking the questions we need to consider to continue to grow the abolition movement.

I’ve grown a distaste for some of the prison abolitionist communities I’ve known, only because some seem to know much more about what they’re against than what they’re for. Sometimes they too gleefully launch obvious critiques against our current system while not actively seeking to build up alternatives to carceral justice. There are abolitionists who don’t give people in their own communities the resources and time to work through conflict or harm. Abolition demands that we build systems that truly care for and protect people, which means we need to get used to giving our time and mucking through the yuck of our comrades decision-making, traumas, and so forth to gain enough clarity to understand what needs to be healed, because that’s the only way to prevent violence instead of simply exiling it to another community.

I give this book a 5/5. I recommend it for anyone interested in social justice, social work, Black studies, feminism, and queer lit.

If Mother Braids a Waterfall / Dayna Patterson / 2020

Perhaps feeling limited by all the stereotypes and connotations of bitterness and fury that ride along with ex-Mormon, Patterson coins a new terminology and in doing so carves out a new space for herself in what she calls the post-Mormon. Becoming post-Mormon is a process of grieving, where Patterson writes letters to her ancestors in attempts to honor or decipher their legacies, where poignant moments in Mormon history are unfolded from their origami shapes, and where Patterson finds not only sorrow but relief. My favorite poems are “Still Mormon,” “Our Lord Jesus in Drag,” “When I Beach,” “Thirty-Three Reasons Why: A Partial List,” and “I Could Never Be a Jehovah’s Witness.”

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Mormon studies, the West, religion, and genealogy through verse. 3/5

The Desert Hides Nothing / Ellen Meloy and Stephen Strom / 2020

This book is precious for the way it helps others appreciate and understand the beauty of the Southwest in all its hot, sandy, and dry beauty. Quick vignettes of Meloy’s startlingly poetic prose seduce readers into the landscape with odes on flowers, remoteness, liquid silence, ancient sea beds and more. As someone who somewhat grew up hating our desert, Meloy’s words invite me in, tell me what to look for, help me see the richness where my eyes once only saw thirst and sunburn. Strom’s photographs invite deeper meditation and contemplation, at once realist and abstract. Anyone living in the Mountain West knows it’s immensely difficult to capture the beauty of this place on camera. Strom’s photographs have a detail and breadth that lulls your eyes to meander over its pixels. I’m grateful for this book and will be using it to help my friends understand the beauty in this stark, dehydrated place.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in landscape photography, the West, environmental literature, and poetry. 5/5

Index of Haunted Houses / Adam O. Davis / 2020

Fans of John Sibley Williams rejoice! Here comes another moody lyricist with an eye capable of seeing in the darkness. These poems read bullet-fast if you let them, passing by like ghosts, leaving you shifted—troubled and intrigued at the same time. There’s an interesting wrestle with the hauntings of racism in “Pacific Americana,” where the poet moans “Forgive us, History. We orphan everything we touch.” Those curious of whether or not they’d vibe with the poetics and imagery of this book, here’s a litmus test: Can you appreciate the haunted stillness of this image from “Ghost Story, 2020”:

The Earth a blue penny in a black pool.

My biggest beef with this collection is that when I interviewed Adam O. Davis for the Utah Book Festival in 2020, he seemed to imply that he didn’t really believe in ghosts. As someone who regularly communes with the religious, psychics, poets, spiritualists, and mystics, it seems clumsy to write a whole book using ghost as a lyric metaphor for your grief if you have not been haunted. The ghost seems boiled down to something abstract, rather than something visceral here.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in lyric poetry, contemporary American poetry, or someone who just needs something moody to play in the back of their skull.

The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros / 1984

Shoutout to all the Latinx writers who have yet to finish A House on Mango Street. I learned about this book in high school, even had my wonderful teacher Mrs. McCandless teach us a few passages from the book, even worked my way part of the way through it—then totally slept on it for more then ten years. I even attended Sandra Cisneros’ Macando retreat without having fully read it! (For the record, I’ve read a healthy amount of her other work and fallen deeply in love with it.) Usually when I find a book this magical, I get mad about the erasure of our literature from mainstream discourses and blah blah blah, but damn, with Mango Street I don’t event have the excuse.

Written in short flash fiction snapshots, Cisneros follows a Latina kid named Esperanza and tracks how working class neighborhoods like Mango Street defined her, frequently in limiting ways but ultimately in ways she appreciates. There’s a way these vignettes are sometimes portrayed as quaint or colorful in the interpretations of some of our teachers. The fact my teacher even suggested the book made me think it was safe and “positive.” I realize now that my teacher might have been trying to plant a seed, to give me a book to teach me a thing she couldn’t teach me about. My teachers didn’t share with the class and me the vignettes that more directly touched on gendered violence, sexual violence, and the degradations working class immigrant communities bear, even though they are critical aspects of the narrative, these so-called “adult” experiences we are not supposed to talk about with children.

I hold this book tenderly now, feeling foolish. Sometimes God puts a glass of water in front of us and we simply stare at it, complaining of our thirst, complaining of God’s cruelty. So much about this book is about power, autonomy, being able to forge a path beyond your circumstances, especially if you’re a young woman of color. Sandra Cisneros teaches us in the last chapter that the best way to love and honor a place sometimes is to leave it behind.

I recommend this book for everyone, but if you’re interested in Latinx lit, Feminist literature, or flash fiction, bump this to the top of your list. It will take you three hours to read if you’re slow. It’s the perfect book to read one chapter of each morning, letting the natural rhythms of your life to stretch out the narrative, so it feels like you’re almost moving at the exact same slow space of a child. But it’s mostly the perfect book for the morning, because the book focuses heavily on finding autonomy, freedom, an act that ultimately requires self-love, a self-love large and wide enough to sustain you when the world doesn’t.

Imaginary Borders / Xiuhtezcatl Martinez / 2020

Imaginary Borders / Xiuhtezcatl Martinez / 2020

In 63 short pages, Martinez attempts to convince everyone, but especially youth and perhaps especially especially youth of color, to get involved in the environmental activism. What drew me to the book was Martinez’s blunt, no bullshit language and the hip-hop lean in his voice. What kept me there was his clear-eyed understanding of the challenges facing our planet, the solutions available, and the facts and research to back things up. In particular, Martinez writes a sharp argument for the urgent need to include people of color on the front lines of the movement. As someone who has spent the past year understand what intellectual traditions keep people of color out of environmental canons and programs and how writers and artists of color have contributed to the fight against climate change, I deeply appreciate Martinez punchy contribution. Written with urgency and in a casual conversational tone, Imaginary Borders is a perfect text for distracted and disillusioned teenagers. I recommend this book for environmentalists, young adults, and anyone interested in hip-hop activism.

I give this book a 3.5/5

As a side note, Xiuhtezcatl also raps. Their latest album is worth a listen and their discography fits cleanly alongside folks like Rebel Diaz, Logic, Flobots, Frank Waln, and other rappers joined by positivity and wokeness.

Ask Baba Yaga: The Audiobook Collection / Taisia Kitaiskaia / 2020

Ask Baba Yaga: The Audiobook Collection / Taisia Kitaiskaia / 2020

A fascinating cross between poetry, magic, and self-help, Ask Baba Yaga transforms one medium’s advice column into a rich book of prose poetry, tackling the complex contours of contemporary society with both classic questions like “how do I get over this breakup?” and some funny-ass curve balls like, “how do I stop falling in love with everyone I meet?” I especially appreciate the dives into deeply relatable 21st century questions like “How Do I Deal with Climate Change?” and “How Do I Live in Peace as a Trans Woman?”

I especially recommend this book for lovers of tarot and magic, but on the real, we all need this kind of medicine on occasion. If I were you, I’d buy an illustrated hard copy and read some advice out of it every morning. The advice is frequently heavily poetic and metaphor, taking cues from the cliches and phrases in the inquirer’s question and fleshing them out with fantasy and grit. There are plenty of cryptic bits like sticks of cinnamon to chew and suck. Baba Yaga’s wisdom has cold, glittering eyes, but sometimes snow angels are closest we’ll ever get to heaven. I give this book a 5/5.

Special thanks goes to RJ Walker and Elle Alder for introducing me to this book in their podcast Mancy. To check out Mancy, go here: https://www.mancypodcast.com/

Cure for the Common Universe / Christian McKay Heidicker / 2016

Cure for the Common Universe / Christian McKay Heidicker / 2016

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

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

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

March 2020 to March 2021 Book Review Outcomes

Here are some quick stats for my reading for 2020 to 2021. I read 67 books, which feels like a low number, so my goal for this upcoming year will be to try to break that record by at least 10.

Benchmark 1: Utah vs Non-Utah: It looks like I’m reading enough Utah authors for my work.

Benchmark 2: Genre: I should read more theatre, but otherwise, it looks like my reading habits are pretty even.

Benchmark 3: Gender: I need to read more women.

Benchmark 4: Ethnicity: I’m not reading enough Latinx or Black literature!!!

Benchmark 5: International lit vs US lit: I definitely want to be reading more literature in translation. I’ll try to double this number, I think.

Benchmark 6: Sexuality: It looks like I have a healthy amount of queer folks.

August to March Round-Up: 27 Books!

Hello world,

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

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

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

The Book of Delights / Ross Gay / 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summerlost / Allie Condie / 2016

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

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

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

Appropriation: A Provocation / Paisley Rekdal / 2021

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

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

Hood Criaturas / féi hernandez / 2020

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

American Grief in Four Stages / Sadie Hoagland / 2019

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

The Beethoven Sequence / Gerald Elias / 2020

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

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

“Even bald sex offenders?”

“They’re the best kind.”

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

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

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

“Good. Me, too.”

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

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

I don’t recommend this book. 0/5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Only Good Indians / Stephen Graham Jones / 2020

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

Calvin and Hobbes: Volume 1 / Bill Watterson / 1987

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

Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi / 2016

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

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

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

Terroir: Love out of Place / Natasha Sajé / 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disparates / Patrick Madden / 2020

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

Memorias from the Beltway / Mauricio Novoa / 2020

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

Girls Lost / Jessica Schiefauer, trans. Saskia Vogel / 2011, trans 2020

Girls Lost / Jessica Schiefauer, trans. Saskia Vogel / 2011, trans. 2020

I bought this Swedish book for its queer and quizzical premise: three teenage girls and besties discover a plant that magically transforms them into teenage boys; while two of the girls use the plant recreationally for a bit, one of them gets addicted to the experience of masculinity, causing a riff in their relationship. The premise obviously steers into the territory of trans experiences and issues, but the thing is, I cannot find any evidence that the author is in fact LGBTQ+. I opened the book out of curiosity about how the experience of trading genders was managed. I kept reading because the translation is written in absolutely intoxicating, poetic prose. On average, the chapters are about 3-to-4 pages, making for a snappy and rewarding read. Schiefauer is boss at these flash fiction sized chapters.

Like most teenage stories, the logic of this one only works if you assume parents and teachers were somehow severely disconnected and not present in the teenagers’ worlds, yet somehow leading otherwise quite normal lives. The girls first experience the effects of this magical plant during a sleepover, but need to sneak out on subsequent nights to play with the plant. Schiefauer does an excellent job of capturing the exhilaration these girls must have felt, experiencing a man’s strength and lustfulness for the first times. Their social interactions with other young boys contrast immensely with their experiences in a female body: “We encountered boys. Made eye contact for a fraction of a second, then they sort of just looked past us, past our eyes. It was strange. No slick, slippery looks, no desire, no grins, nothing that crept under our skin and sank its teeth in.”

Despite being familiar with the impacts of toxic masculinity, Kim quickly falls in love with its embodiment in Tony, a young, but older man Kim befriends. Tony leads a small group of teens through rebellious activities: drinking booze and smoking, breaking into junkyards to rev up cars. The group follows a strict pecking order based on his discretion, where Kim competes for attention with other young men. Girls Lost ultimately rejects toxic masculinity once Tony crosses a line and Kim responds violently. Time gets really weird during the end of the novel, expanding and contracting, as Kim spends a number of years in hiding.

This is where the biggest critique of Girls Lost comes in: Girls Lost is written in a way that makes it seem like the author was unfamiliar with trans and queer community in ways that would have substantially changed the narrative. For example, after Kim ages, she never considers simply taking testosterone and it’s never even presented as an option. The young girls never find queer community and culture. Despite moments of homoeroticism between Tony and Kim, despite a strange heterosexual encounter between Bella and Kim, Girls Lost largely dodges discussions of LGBTQ+ community and how people felt about queer issues in their community. According to Wikipedia, Sweden is one of the most socially progressive countries in the European Union when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. I’m not sure how that translates to the queer communities lived experience, but this novel—which was a hit in the country—suggests that sexual and gender minority communities might still be woefully misunderstood or spoken over.

As harsh some of my critiques seem, this is one of the most fun books I read all year and I would absolutely love to teach it one day.

I recommend this book for those interested in YA, international literature, translation, and the representation of LGBTQ+ groups.

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

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

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

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

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

Now in Color / Jacqueline Balderrama / 2020

Now in Color / Jacqueline Balderrama / 2020

Jacqueline Balderrama is a Latina poet who will expand the boundaries of Latinx writing beyond stereotype. Now in Color dances around the issue of authenticity. Featuring a series of definition poems in Spanish, the collection attempts to build a more intimate relationship with a language that is connected yet alien to Balderrama as she wasn’t raised speaking it. As a native Spanish speaker, I don’t see myself reflected in these poems, and I don’t necessarily relate. Some of the pronunciations even feel off to me: take “ES-pear-AHN-sah” for esperanza and “ohs-COO-ro” for oscuro. But that’s besides the point. These poems are about finding magic in the Spanish language as someone who is learning it, as someone who needs the language to access parts of their home. My favorite poem in the collection is even one of these definition poems, “panza”:

After four children, her shape is lonely

for the time she is most happy.

She practices locating her core in dance—

hula and flamenco at the Senior Center

where, the youngest of the elderly, she feels like a teenager

again. In performances, my sisters and I fold back

into the ocean waves of her fingers, her hips, her shore.

Balderrama excels most in these snapshot images that slowly drip off the page. They are some of the hardest poems to write without losing your audience in a yawn. In “Some Horses,” Balderrama describes the moment when incarcerated people first meet the horses they are to care for. I never thought the city boy in me would ever find the image of “sweet-smelling blocks of hay dry in gated fields” so moving! But it is.

Throughout the collection, Balderrama tackles a series of poems about the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border. While Balderrama’s voice probably shouldn’t be centered in these conversations above the voices of folks like Javier Zamora and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, I appreciate her series of poems revolving around immigration. Poems like “Water, 2014” are especially well-wrought and deserves to be included in the pantheon of borderlands literature.

I recommend this collection to anyone interested in poetry, Latinx literature, and writing about immigration.

Play For Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

Play for Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

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

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

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

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

SUFFRAGE / Jenifer Nii / 2013

Suffrage / Jenifer Nii / 2013

It is absolutely wild to me that a non-Mormon Asian woman who didn’t even grow up in Utah managed to write one of the strongest, most compassionate portrayals I’ve ever seen of polygamist women. While Utah culture paints polygamists as backward outcasts, while the LDS church dodges and distorts its polygamist history, frequently throwing once-faithful LDS polygamists under the bus, Jenifer Nii manages to dramatize the tensions and tenderness between sister wives at a critical point in history. Unfolding during the suffragist movement, during Utah’s vying for statehood, and most significantly during the LDS church’s transition from a polygamist to sort of monogamous culture, SUFFRAGE tells the story of Ruth and Frances.

Ruth, in her 20s, is the 4th wife in the family. A natural outspoken leader she butts heads not only with the patriarchal culture of Utah and the US at large, but also with Frances, the second wife of the family, who is in her late 30s it seems. Frances and Ruth function as perfect foils. While Ruth spends her time busy politically organizing and fighting for women’s rights, Frances troubles herself most over the well-being of her family, criticizing Ruth’s idealism in favor of practicality—and survival. Without Frances, the children would have likely starved. While contemporary culture would likely view polygamous women with the same myopic lens it views hijabi women, SUFFRAGE does a great job of illustrating the power these women had and how they chose to wield it.

A two-person play, I was stunned by Nii’s ability to craft archaic dialogue so seamlessly. The language bounces like it’s alive, moving the plot forward. Never does it feel like a stale philosophical conversation between two opposed concepts. Every word builds the tension, reveals an important piece of the character. Craft-wise, I was most impressed and engulfed by the parallel scenes Nii constructed. That is, two separate scenes Ruth and Frances act out simultaneously. The dialogue from the scenes would intermix, like a contrapuntal, creating powerful juxtapositions and connections in distinct narratives. These juxtaposition helped build the tension between the two characters, between their religion, and between men and women.

If you’re interested in viewing an excellent live reading of the play, along with a Q&A with the author, the original cast, and historian Lindsay Hansen Park, please follow this link.

I recommend this play to anyone interested in Mormonism, Asian American literature, minimalistic theatre, feminism, monologues, and Utah history.

A Burning / Megha Majumdar / 2020

A Burning / Megha Majumdar / 2020

A Burning is a gripping albeit intensely fraught novel obliquely commenting on the current political turmoil and persecution consuming India. It follows the perspectives of three characters—Jihan, PT, and Lovely—to effectively critique the lunatic rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, its political party the BJP, and the stronghold it has inside the political and judicial system. Majumdar does this slyly, however, never mentioning the BJP by name and instead creating an alternative India with fictitious parties, perhaps in an attempt to avoid putting herself in the BJP line of fire. Majumdar’s most critical contribution is her clear-eyed confrontation of state terrorism.

The story of Jihan is ultimately a tragic one. She is accused of taking part in a terrorist plot because of outspoken but ultimately harmless social media posts. In the course of the novel and Jihan’s incarceration, we learn a lot about her backstory and through that learn a lot about the plight of impoverished Muslims. Majumdar is not Muslim, however, and Urdu and Muslim literati have taken issue with her portrayal. Irfam Ahmad offers a rather pointed critique in this regard, noting that while Majumdar successfully pivots the public discourse to talk about state terrorism, she fails to capture “the depth of cultural experience of what it means to be projected as a Muslim terrorist.” While this is somewhat true, my Bengali partner argues that this is partially because Jihan is a non-hijabi and a woman. There are many ways to be Muslim and the difference in Jihan’s experience can be accounted for. That said, she argues that Jihan’s cultural identity is blurry—it’s unclear whether she is Bengali or not, what particular identity she holds in the mix of Indian ethnic identities. Ahmad also shares his frustration that Urdu narratives are centered in these conversations. Jihan’s story, while captivating and empathy-building, still doesn’t read as trustworthy as the stories wrought by the pens of actual Muslims. At the same time, only a heartless reader wouldn’t fall in love with Jihan and her ideals. A Burning fiercely critiques the injustice done to Jihan. Her story becomes a parable for India, meant to galvanize anger and resistance against the abuses of the state.

PT is a frighteningly charming character at first, bumbling, shortsighted and easy-to-poke fun at as an ex-gym teacher turned politician. His old uncle wiliness quickly gets submerged with his political descent, spinelessness, and addiction to attention and power. My partner believes Majumdar nailed this voice the best. I, on the other hand, was definitely more taken away by Jihan and Lovely.

The parts I most loved about the book are also potentially the most fraught. My favorite character was Lovely—a hijra who is learning English from her tutor Jihan and who testifies in support of Jihan in court. Majumdar makes it easy to cheer her on in her journey of self-discovery. Lovely boldly carries her marginalized gender identity and dreams of becoming an actress despite repeated incidents of hatred, violence, and discrimination. In one particularly harrowing scene, Lovely narrates the castration of a fellow hijra and how it shaped her identity. According to my Bengali partner, however, Lovely’s English in A Burning, which is largely in the present tense, is not particularly educated or realistic. Rather it seems symbolic of the personality of the character. It’s hard for me to speak on this, as I’m not South Asian, a hijra, or a scholar familiar with the literature of both groups. However, it seems to me Majumdar’s depiction might be most easily critiqued because there are so few depictions of hijras. As a non-hijra, Majumdar has granted visibility to an oft erased narrative, but she has also assumed control of that narrative. No matter how compelling the writing, no matter how insightful the vision, A Burning carries that baggage. In particular, Majumdar dances between many stereotypical portrayals of hijras in South Asia. Westerners would not be privy to these, and as such, I didn’t notice them. Until I learn more about hijra culture and their depictions in literature, I think emotionally I’ll be unaffected by the critiques when I read Lovely’s narrative, even if intellectually I understand I should be feeling more tension.

According to my Bengali partner, the voice actors were likely diasporic Indians who botched the regional pronunciations of many words. This I also didn’t pick up on, as a Westerner.

Because of all the shortcomings when it comes to representations of the most marginalized groups, it’s hard to determine the value of a text like A Burning. It at once uses incredibly deft, addictive narrative storytelling, reliant on stereotype, and potentially misrepresents its most vulnerable communities. At times, it may feel like each character is a political tool given life. Even then, it is hard to deny the power of Majumdar’s prose.

I recommend this novel for anyone interested in South Asia, international literature, multiple perspectives in fiction, appropriation and marginalized narratives.

The Beauty of Your Face / Sahar Mustafah / 2020

The Beauty of Your Face / Sahar Mustafah / 2020

For those of you immediately put off by the title, you should know it’s a reference to a Palestinian folk song:

“Maghrib has come, the sun went down,

The shine is left on your face.

Maghrib has come, your face

shines more beautiful because of the sun.

I would like to warm myself

in the beauty of your face.”

The song is one our protagonist Afaf’s mother-in-law sings to her grandson as a lullaby. Sahar Mustafah notes that it’s a song from a country she fled. The Maghrib is one of the five mandatory prayers, and technically the first of the day, as an Islamic day starts at sunset. As a title, this reference draws our attention to the comfort and beauty Palestinian and Islamic culture offer Afaf and her community. It is an allusion to the resilience of the community in the face of warfare, migration, and systemic racism.

The Beauty of Your Face is a profoundly American book. Mustafah ambitiously covered the history of Afaf’s family from 9/11 to the present day, where an all-girl Muslim school suffers a mass shooting by a white supremacist. At the same time, Mustafah does not pander to a non-Muslim audience. Islamic terms and practices remain unexplained and untranslated: all of it is easily found on Google anyway. While many popular coming-of-age stories about Muslim teens tend to center on youthful rebellion against the religion and assimilation into white culture, TBOYF centers the perspective of a devout Muslim woman and balances her perspective with that of her agnostic brother and mother. They foil one another effectively, as well as capture realistic family dynamics in contemporary religious households.

In a way, the TBOYF feels designed to teach non-Muslims about Islamophobia and invites the reader to more deeply engage with the way Islamophobia and intergenerational trauma impacts family dynamics, identity development, and communal behavior within some Muslim communities. As much of the narrative becomes a review of the ways Muslims are oppressed in the US, it also shows how community members draw strength and resilience from their traditions. TBOYF feels like the story of how Afaf becomes a woman strong enough to serve as a principal of an all-girl Muslim school and face down a white supremacist terrorist. In this way, the book is also a map for young Muslims to figure out what to cherish most about their cultures.

The text dips into the white supremacist’s backstory a bit, but his story serves more as a plot device to build tension as he inches closer and closer to the school, rather than revealing anything new or profound about white supremacists. This feels appropriate here. This is a story about Muslim resilience and beauty, not about white ugliness and hate.

As an ex-Mormon and child of Salvadoran refugees, I relate deeply with the family dynamics as portrayed by Mustafah. I am so glad this book exists. I recommend this book to anyone interested in feminism, Islamic or Middle Eastern literature, and writing about the American dream.