Small Things Like These / Claire Keegan / 2020

Small Things Like These / Claire Keegan / 2020

A snappy, crushing and quietly inspiring novel about a man whose frustrations with his brutal working class Irish life are put into perspective when he encounters a victimized orphan girl who reminds him of his mother.  The novel details his radicalization, one can say, as he decides whether and how to best intervene.  It's a cruel and difficult book about love and what it demands of us. I'll cherish it as an excellent work of realism and the meanings of bravery and heroism, all done with a sharp and vivid style that does justice to the difficult material.  4/5

Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences / Richard Pryor / 1995

Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences / Richard Pryor / 1995

I'm utterly confused by the doting and glowing reviews of this book online. Richard Pryor, while a comedic genius, perpetrated so much violence against women and did so little to repair his relationship to gender that I hardly feel bad for him as he describes the horrors of MS and lighting himself on fire. I literally listened thinking, ah God is trying to humble this man and make him slow tf down and elicit an ounce of empathy from his soul for the women he uses and sees as less than human, and even with all the chances he's been given he's still making jokes about pedophilia, domestic violence, and his abuses.  Pryor begins with a Richard Wright-esque description of his early life in whore house, including moments of abandonment and being sexually assaulted by a local man who later reappeared in his life when he was famous and had Richard sign an autograph for his kid.  In an ars poetica like moment, Pryor describes how once he slipped in shit and made people laugh and that he's been doing that his whole life.  Reading this book gave me insight into its historical moment, especially in terms of how some folks may have engaged with the Black Radical Tradition, as well as the way the industry will elevate a so-called genius and pimp him for his ability to make them money, at the expense of his victims and himself.  Pryor never seemed to learn the lesson, thinking the cliche and flat wisdom about humankind all being one (especially in terms of our need for pussy) and needing to bask in sunshine every once in a while is somehow profound. I'm appalled at how a man can live so much and learn so dramatically little. While the book has its moments of humor, it was hard to enjoy them when he had just finished describing firing gunshots at an intimate partner. He narrates his acts of abuse with an unabashed shame, repeatedly claiming there was nothing he could do to improve his behavior, face his drug addiction, and so forth.  Utterly tragic and sickening.  1.5/5 

Frontier / Can Xue / 2008 in Chinese / 2017 translated into English

Frontier / Can Xue / 2008 in Chinese / 2017 translated into English

Anushka and I began reading Frontier in Shantiniketan, continued it on our front porch in Chicago, and finished it over the phone while i lay sick with covid.  Frontier is a book that demands to be reread, occupying a strange place between dreamlike surrealism, dystopian literature,  and horror.  The plot devices and narrative structure that define traditional Western fiction fall flat in describing what makes Frontier so captivating.  I would frequently find myself laughing, cringing, and doubling back to track the meandering narrative.  Soon, I realized trying to understand the components and logic of the plot was actually distracting me from the moment by moment magic of the story.  It literally feels like you're in a dream, where the most insane and irrational possibilities are taken without doubt and the narrative pace can sink in for a while before suddenly snapping to other wild or strange possibilities. The only thing that raised my eyebrows was the treatment of a Black character in the book, who definitely is exoticized, which on one hand would be a realistic portrayal of the Black experience in China but on the other hand its impossible for the novel to treat very ethically bc all characters seem to lack an interiority. This isn't a psychological drama bc the reasoning of  characters is perturbed by this dream logic. Overall, the racial awkwardness contributed to the uncanny, unsettled feeling. Because narrative matters less, the book sinks into purer emotion and sensation somehow.  It's truly a marvelous strange disturbing novel that I'll twirl in my head for years in sure.  Reminded me most of Red Ants by Pergentino Jose. 4.5/5

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

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

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

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity / Julia Serrano / 2007

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity / Julia Serrano / 2007 

A sweeping overview of trans feminism from a time before queer language had ossified into the shape of the contemporary LGBTQ+ lexicon, Whipping Girl is a memoir and manifesto by writer who first found their celebrity in the poetry slam circuits. Serrano’s style is blunt, thorough, and thoughtful, utilizing personal experience as well as providing insights on queer theory and sexuality research hitherto unspoken. Whipping Girl would function as an excellent introductory text to trans feminism for an undergraduate classroom. It clarified my understanding of myself again. 3/5 

The Devil’s Highway: A True Story / Luis Alberto Urrea / 2004

The Devil’s Highway: A True Story / Luis Alberto Urrea / 2004 

The Devil’s Highway is a Latino classic that launched an already well established poet and novelist into literary stardom. Written in vivid language that mixes the scientifically specific, journalistic, and vulgarly hyperrealistic, The Devil’s Highway’s tone is reminiscent of Charles Bowden. I mean this in a good way in that it is attention-grabbing, as well as the bad way in that it indulges in a very masculine vulgarity and includes racist hangovers, such as the use of the word “illegal” throughout the text. Urrea of all people should know better than to use such dehumanizing language. At one point, Urrea snickers with migrants who hear the word “Chicago” and hear “I piss shit” in Spanish. Urrea mostly manages to balance the range of perspectives he includes in The Devil’s Highway in a way that probably leaves people across the political spectrum feeling discomfited at different moments. This feels like Urrea’s attempt to look at the border issue with a depoliticized objectivity. It succeeds in what it set out to do just fine, but is disappointing coming from a Latino literary star, as a greater political clarity and savvy is urgent. (2.5/5) 

Revólver/ Josué Andrés Moz / 2024

Revólver/ Josué Andrés Moz / 2024

Moz outdid himself here, his words cutting with broken hearted clarity into the political turmoil of Bukele’s Salvador.  Written in a language just as rich and calculated as his early work, Moz’s articulation of his griefs and passions find subjects worthy of its dramatic flair. With criticisms to the political buffoonery of some of his peers, as well as heartfelt poems about unfulfilled desire, Moz butts his head against the worst of our era and gives it a deserving language. 4/5 

Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica / eds, Laura E. Matthews & Michael R. Odjik / 2012

Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica / eds, Laura E. Matthews & Michael R. Odjik / 2012 

A necessary volume of essays on the history of indigenous conquest especially in Mexico and Central America, I recommend this book to anyone interested in better understanding mestizaje and indigenous and Latino identity in the Americas. Banished are the white supremacist myths of Cortes and the Spanish defeating the Mexica on their own, as well as progressives’ lingering romantic flattening of Native Americans as purely vanquished and victimized. I first encountered this book in grad school and I’m glad I returned to it. While the chapters got more redundant and less interesting as Matthews and Odjik’s arguments became more and more solidified, they remained fascinating in their particularity and the underlying mysteries. 4/5 

Reimaging National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in Global Context / Robin Maria / 2014

Reimaging National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in Global Context / Robin Maria / 2014 

A foundational text in Central American studies, RNB is an anthropologist’s take on postwar El Salvador that succinctly provides introductory political clarity. It captures the consequences of the ARENA’s years in power on education and national history, as well as the failures of justice and political accountability. I recommend this book to every undergrad and grad Salvadoran because DeLugan’s approach is the first idea many of my friends had when conceiving their research projects carried into fruition by a professional. It also provides clarity on how mestizaje has played out in a contemporary context.  4/5

Does Your House Have Lions / Sonia Sanchez / 1997

Does Your House Have Lions / Sonia Sanchez / 1997 

A hypnotic song of grief, love, and loss, DYHHL will heat your heart the same way a sad earworm of a tune will wreck you no matter when and where you hear it. Sanchez delivers a rhyming blues with a mastery and charge worthy of her reputation. 4.5/5

Dracula / Bram Stoker / 1897

Dracula / Bram Stoker / 1897

An addictive novel written in the epistolary form, the language of Bram Stoker’s classic aged like fine wine, capturing the introspective intensity of the era with delightful turns of language. Like a good rollercoaster, Stoker lets you watch a character’s doom approach without sacrificing any of the delight in the story when they plunge. It provides an interesting glimpse into the racial and class biases of the era with elements that should interest folks in the medical humanities, ethnic studies, and horror fanatics alike. Stoker’s Christian overtones were a little goofy but fine. I would love to discuss with a solid feminist about the portrayal of Mena and Stoker’s intentions there, as to me the sexism of the men proves to be the greatest weakness in their strategy to defeat Dracula. The novel has the men sideline Mena, a thorough and thoughtful organizer and strategist, because she is a woman in a way that seems aware of the foolishness of the move. The novel then still plays Mena out as the ideal victim and deferent woman, even after she’s reinstated into the team by necessity. Either way, I deeply enjoyed this book. 5/5 

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley / 1818

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley / 1818

Shelley has this delightful Russian doll of a narrative style where one narrator tells the story someone else told them, who in their story will tell the story someone else told them, and so forth. The primary narrators, Captain Walton and Victor Frankstein, are remarkably like one another, both shame-ridden, earnest and ambitious men, searching for approval and success. Captain Walton’s pitiful inferiority complex and lack of worldly knowledge is as funny as it is foreboding and worrisome. It’s easy to hate Frankenstein as has such a poisonously guilt-ridden narration. The foil between these characters provides fodder for conversations about stigma, racialization, shame, and nurture vs nature. This is an absolutely curious text racially, as the monster feels like a pretty obvious stand-in for a colonized other. The plot runs pretty tight, it’s just feels incredibly stupid at times because all Frankenstein had to do was open up to the right people or really anyone and a lot of the turmoil of the conflict could’ve been resolved radically differently and better for him. I was a bit disappointed to find that the monster basically talked like a 19th century gentleman, although it was hilarious to get the scene of the monster philosophizing about the impact Paradise Lost had on the development of his consciousness. 

4/5

O, Body / Dan “Sully” Sullivan / 2024

O, Body / Dan “Sully” Sullivan / 2024

I somehow ended up at the Green MIll Poetry Slam last Sunday, the original poetry slam hosted by Marc Smith, and lo and behold, a long lost friend Sully was featuring. It was a joy to see him in his element, getting ruckus with an audience for tender poems about fatphobia, family, and Chicago. I wouldn’t reduce the poems in O, Body to tavern poems, however. What’s awesome about the range of Sully’s craft is the same poem that might be a real loud one on stage can also be a sweet, gentle one on the page. O, Body offers a rich field to folks interested in writing about fat and masculinity. The poems slide between moments of insecurity and moments of deep presence within the body. In O, Body, Sully wields craft without taking himself too seriously, sidestepping the main character syndrome of so much contemporary poetics for poems that focus on family and the home we create for ourselves. In this way, Sully helps me laugh, not take myself so damn seriously, and focus on things that matter most. 4 out 5. 

Bread and Circus / Airea D. Matthews / 2023

Goddamn. Matthews has both childhood trauma and academic poetic muscles at intense levels. There’s a poem where a therapist asks the speaker to talk about a moment she didn’t regret and the speaker talks about helping her father shoot heroin once. I would completely understand it if a poet with this extreme of a memory bank to draw from spent their whole lives writing sobbing confessional poems, just trying to bear witness and heal. Matthews manages to do so much more than that. There are erasure poems of economic theory (Adam Smith and Guy Debord) that make the reader consider the ways the speaker’s womanhood, and in turn the trauma the world has given her, has been commodified and the violence therein. While some of the erasure poems aren’t mindblowing, they do an excellent job of teasing out how violent public systems create these intense personal traumas. To read Bread and Circus is to sit with someone who has extraordinary life experience AND has done an incredible amount of work to contextualize and think critically about it. 4 out of 5. 

I Ching / David Hinton / Ancient to 2015

I Ching / David Hinton / Ancient to 2015

In an effort to familiarize myself with the Eastern canon and Daoism better, I listened to the I Ching. It was dramatically apparent that listening to the I Ching front to back is a wrongheaded approach to engaging with the text. Traditionally, readers roll dice that add up to a hexagram and flip to the corresponding page. Once there, they read a mix of symbols, images, and sometimes didactic, sometimes mysterious aphorisms. In this way, the practice feels like a cousin to tarot. It’s up to interpreters to figure out how to apply the meaning to their own lives. Drawing from the depths of millennia of Chinese culture, the texts frequently uses natural and feudal imagery. It’s also poetry, as in the original Chinese, one line may be read eight different ways, a tool that obviously works brilliantly for an interpretative, fortune-telling text. I prefer this practice to contemporary astrology and tarot, which requires one to either acquire a whole set of new vocabularies to play with or find a charismatic practitioner to really get something interesting. I like the I Ching because it gives me a poem to play with, and since its wisdom is generally Daoist, I typically find something that more or less aligns with my sense of values anyway. In any case, here’s an online version if you are desperate enough to reach towards the supernatural these days: https://www.ichingonline.net/ The I Ching can only get a 5/5, rational thinkers stay mad!

The Gravedigger’s Archeology / William Archila / 2015

The Gravedigger’s Archeology / William Archila / 2015

Another haunting collection by Archila, exploring exile and war through a bluesy voice. This time, Archila employs longer sentences, like a repeated splash of piano keys, that sometimes wash over the reader. It’s harder to pin down this violence, almost like the more one digs the less earth one is standing on. It’s a worthy follow-up to the Art of Exile and fans of that will likely have more to love. 4 out of 5. 

The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels / 1848

The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels / 1848

I picked up the Penguin edition, which was front loaded with a ton of critical material that was useful to understanding the reception of the text, the history of its ideas, and Marx and Engels as figures. I skipped the last half of these essays, as I wanted to get to the legendary manifesto already, although after listening to the manifesto, I realized the essays would have served me better and proved more informative. While I can appreciate the manifesto, especially as it lays out its principles, and its biting humor about false socialisms and the bourgeoisie, a lot of its key revolutionary ideas I’ve already encountered updated in other texts. I don’t know if I’m ever going to read Das Kapital, but for now, I’m moving onto Lenin and others in my quest to better understand Marxism. 3 out of 5. 

The Souls of Black Folk / W.E.B. Du Bois / 1903

The Souls of Black Folk / W.E.B. Du Bois / 1903

I’ve read chapters of this book during my degrees and decided I had to return to read the whole thang to understand the Black Radical Tradition better. Du Bois pours his soul into every word of the text, diving between astute economic and historical truth-telling, musical criticism, and personal essays on Atlanta and the lives of everyday Black folk in the Jim Crow south. It’s all the more painful to see Du Bois’s legacy so under-talked about and misrepresented as a mere counterpoint to Booker T. Washington. It was painful to read his chapter on education, which might as well be about contemporary under-funded schools in the US. This round of reading helped really color in the picture of just how fucked the South was economically before and after the Civil War, especially during the Reconstruction period. Du Bois’s thoroughness is so earnest and unearned by this country. Amerikkka did not and does not deserve souls as beautiful as Du Bois. 5/5 

Handbook of Restorative Justice / edited by Gerry Johnstone and Daniel V. Van Ness / 2011

Handbook of Restorative Justice / edited by Gerry Johnstone and Daniel V. Van Ness / 2011 

I’m so grateful for this book. At over 600 pages, it goes through chapter by chapter tackling critical issues in restorative justice, from its philosophical underpinnings, its history, the rationale of its procedural variations and its evaluative criteria, and more. The wisdom in this book is through the roof and articulated with a clear-eyed thoughtfulness, chapter after chapter. Contemporary pop abolitionists frequently point to the terror of mass incarceration and its impact without adequately drawing a picture of what a world without mass incarceration would look like. Restorative justice has well thought out plans and answers in this regard that, yes, do need more experimentation, but do offer viable alternatives. I especially appreciate its philosophical wrestling with the need for coercion in cases of persistent violence and its focus on the lack of rehabilitative services for victims, as a part of its vision. Beyond the rhetorics of marxism and decolonization, the books on restorative justice that I have read are the ones that have provided me with the greatest sense of clarity and hope about the future I want.  

There’s only two larger shortcomings with this collection I think are worth quibbling with: 1) The first is minor. They include a chapter on Christianity that misses the mark entirely imo, as it spends time going back and forth with different interpretations of the Bible and its forms of justice, losing itself in the debate. This sidesteps what is most interesting about Christianity’s relationship to restorative justice: a) Christians have led the way in many places in developing restorative justice. The authors acknowledge this and use this as justification for including the chapter, but they never talk about WHY that may be the case. My suspicion is that few religions have circled the ideas of sin and forgiveness than Christians. Through Christ, EVERYONE can be forgiven and I think this sincere belief gives ordinary people the strength to do the work of restorative justice. I’m curious how other ordinary people develop this strength, but anyone who spends time in prisons knows that Christians are some of the few people who dedicate themselves to serving the incarcerated. Many of the incarcerated, especially those who have committed heinous crimes, rely on Christianity to survive mass incarceration and forgive themselves. Under extreme duress, many humans reach towards the supernatural, of course. But I am hungry to read something that unpacks the layers here about the role of Christianity for both practitioners of RJ and victims of the system and how ordinary non-Christians can develop some of the muscles that best Christian RJ practitioners seem to have. 

2) There’s a chapter on the role of police in RJ. The authors ultimately conclude that there’s no data that suggests that police participation in RJ is more harmful than not. Just as some folks feel alienated by police, others feel safer, and the authors ultimately conclude that it’ll depend on the community, relationships built therein, and there’s no reason to rule it out entirely. I’m sure they didn’t misread their data, but here’s a place where ideology and the history of policing in the US at large do have tremendous insights and why that isn’t a good idea. The role of police officers and the tools they have would need to be completely reimagined under RJ and it was strange to encounter a chapter that basically opened the door to intersecting with traditional justice systems without challenging some of the fundamental issues of power and relations that exist between community members and traditional police forces. How cool would it have been to have a chapter that used RJ to reimagine what services would exist in lieu of police or how coercion would operate under RJ in necessary situations. 

While not exactly reflected in this little book review, my takeaways were ultimately largely positive and an immense sense of gratitude for having found a community of people approaching the work with the right spirit. 4.8/5

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022 

I first learned about Wovoka in Our History is Our Future by Nick Estes and was moved to learn of a Paiute prophet so central to Native American history, because the Paiute are particularly marginalized and humiliated in Native American history. Sold to the Spanish as slaves by both the Utes and Dine, they weren’t particularly renowned for their military skills. Their own original story pokes fun at this hierarchy, humbly and humorously claiming their people were brown because they were made out of shit. I’m drawn to Wovoka’s story because it gives Paiutes a pretty central role in US Native history. Charles Rivers Editors did an excellent job contextualizing Wovoka’s teachings within a global indigenous context, drawing parallels in Africa and the Pacific. Essentially, in the face of genocide and a dramatic change of lifestyle, there’s a strain of indigenous thought that conservatively retreats into tradition, claiming that if indigenous folks dig their heels into their spiritual practice, the gods will vanquish their colonizers for them. In Wovoka’s case, this is the spirit dance and ceremony. The spirit dance promised a decolonized future, where the relationship between humans and nature were restored and white men were wiped off the face of the earth. The stomps in the spirit dance were sometimes literally supposed to be stomping the white man under the earth. The spirit dance inspired Natives across North America facing genocide and gave them the hope to continue resisting, rather than dying and/or assimilating. This contribution changes the course of US Native history in two dramatic ways: 1) First, it inspires the resistance of the Lakota Sioux, one of the most resistant indigenous nations of North America, who interpreted Wovoka’s teachings in a way that inspired violent resistance. The book does an excellent job here delineating between Wovoka’s teachings and differing between varying Paiute, Lakota, and federal white man interpretations of them. The Lakota Sioux popularized the spirit dance the most and led a resistance movement to be crushed but not vanquished at Wounded Knee. 2) Because the dance was associated with anticolonial indigenous movements, the US government outlawed all Native dance, ceremonial, and religious practices. The US also anglicized the name as the Ghost Dance to give it a spookier, more terrorist edge. These are two pivotal moments of North American native history where Wovoka played a critical role! On top of all that, there is some speculation that Wovoka’s teachings were somewhat inspired by Mormonism. Wovoka incorporated Christian theology into his teachings in ways that aren’t entirely clear to me, but Wovoka clearly occupies a similar mystic and revelatory lineage of the era, which includes Joseph Smith. The LDS (Mormon) teaching that Jesus visited the Americas and that Natives are a Jewish, Biblical people was apparently sometimes interpreted by some Natives to mean Jesus was Native and some went as far to identify Wovoka with a reincarnation of Jesus. I wish I could talk about this history with my former students in Cedar City, as there’s a lot of layers here. If folks have recommendations on more reads relevant to Wovoka, please let me know. 5/5