There’s no denying that this has been an exceptional year for poetry. Throughout 2022, we’ve read intimate, lyrical, political poetry that has experimented in all areas of craft, most notably form. But what has been, perhaps, most exciting, has been the return of many of our most well-loved masters, all of whom have managed to reinvent themselves for an ever-shifting world. Exploring themes like grief, the apocalypse, and crossing over into the spirit realm, this year’s poetry collections transported and transformed us, and we will never again be the same.
Chen Chen’s much-lauded second collection is precise and timely, exploring what family means as a queer Asian American living through a pandemic, a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and the legacy of Donald Trump through the inventive figure of a switchboard operator, picking up calls. In Chen’s hands, grief ripples with anger and humor, carving space for an intertwining of emotions that matches his formal versatility. Read his conversation with Austin Nguyen about the politics of grief and making angry art here.
Current U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón’s highly-anticipated sixth poetry collection is about the connectedness of everything—past and present, human and animal, self and other. A cry for coming together in dark times, Limón frames this not as new knowledge, but as something deep we’ve known all along. As Limón said in her conversation with Angela María Spring, “I think so much of our lives are spent searching. I think if this book is saying anything, if it’s saying anything to me and saying anything to my readers, it’s that: we don’t need to look, it’s already there.”
Grief is both form and content in Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection, Time is a Mother, which follows his success as both a poet and novelist. Vuong’s poems search for meaning, wondering what poems can offer in the waves of grief after his mother’s death, and aren’t afraid to go to the limit of meaning. These poems are raw and dark, following the aftershocks of loss, but still offer snatches of light: beauty, sex, humor, and joy all emerge within the darkness, part of not just grief, but life.
Saeed Jones’ newest collection, Alive At the End of the World, centers on the danger and ordinariness in the white supremacy and time of precarity we are living in. The grief he writes is intimate and personal, but Jones also insists that there’s a collective grief, one he marks with pop culture allusions and a keen attention to the artifice of America. His poems remind us that we live in the apocalypse, but they force us to remember—at least we’re alive.
Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds, from her distinct long sentence rhythm to a central section of poems called “Amherst Balladz,” a tribute to Emily Dickinson. She opens with a section of quarantine poems, a song of collective grief, but the whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America.
Novelist and memoirist Akwaeke Emezi’s debut poetry collection, Content Warning: Everything, centers a bold and spiritfirst perspective on the world. Emezi’s poems center the irreducible essence of the self that survives, morphs, and above all, desires.
Customs centers the bureaucratic checkpoints of America, the strictures of both the nation state and the English language. Sharif’s collection asks what it means to exist in the liminality of the arrivals terminal, to find yourself limited by the space and its imaginative possibilities, and writing towards freedom.
Safia Elhillo’s poems explore Muslim girlhood and shame, exploring her own history alongside the larger cultural legacy of violence against women. Girls That Never Die looks at the violence and trauma of growing up as a girl in patriarchal society, but Elhillo imagines a world of rebellion and autonomy right alongside these pains.
In the Hands of the River, a debut collection by Lucien Darjeun Meadows, shows the wildness of growing up in Appalachia and subverting our dominant narratives of the region. Meadows plays with poetic forms to show a queer boy of Cherokee and European heritage coming of age, reckoning with personal and collective trauma, and showing how interconnected both human and environmental identities can be. Check out Meadows’ list of writers who find queer kin in the natural world.
Nina Mingya Powles’ debut collection Magnolia pushes the limit of poetry to explore the memories and experiences of a mixed-race girlhood. Powles draws from a wide archive, from movies like Mulan or In the Mood for Love to theories of translation, showing the many facets of a person, and the nuance needed in language to preserve that complexity. Read Powles’ reading list of books about multiracial experience, written by biracial Asian writers.
Elisa Gabbert’s fifth poetry collective is playful and perceptive. Her poems have fun with language, juxtaposing the ordinary and the metaphysical, interrogating a phrase until its meaning completely changes. Normal Distance is delightful, surprising, and totally thought-provoking.
In her third poetry collection, Lynn Melnick reckons with a legacy of anti-Semitism and misogyny, writing with her signature wit and candor. Refusenik highlights pain and beauty together, showing the collectivity of grief and the need for fiercely feminist narratives. Refusenik was featured in our reading list of 7 Feminist Poetry Collections About Gender and Identity.
InSmoking the Bible, Chris Abani moves between his Igbo ancestry and his migration to the United States through poems that show the personal story of two brothers, one memorializing the other through writing. Abani’s poems are arresting and commanding, showing a spiritual reckoning and the story of a man in exile.
Cat Fitzpatrick’s genre-bending “novel in verse” about queer (mostly trans) women is an homage to the Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but set in contemporary Brooklyn. The weapon at these women’s disposal is a charged one–the internet call out, a symptom of cancel culture. At stake is the precarity of a marginalized community, a picture developed in dark and hilarious rhyming form.
Jenny Xie’s latest collection showcases the bleed of memory, what traumatic and joyful experiences cross the boundaries between past and present. The Rupture Tense begins with poems that respond to photos of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the collection ends with an elegy to Xie’s grandmother, who died after the end of the revolution. In deft and formally ambitious poems, Xie shows us the ruptures and aftershocks of history that continue to affect us.
Su Cho’s debut poetry collection follows a coming-of-age in the middle of America. The lyrical and vivid poems in The Symmetry of Fish examine the inheritance of language, particularly in immigrant families. In Cho’s collection, language and memory never get lost, but continually remade—dwelling in the details we might otherwise brush aside.
In her latest collection, The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang plays with form, mostly the Japanese form of “wakas,” shaping each poem by pattern and count, and borrowing titles from W.S. Merwin’s poems. But the strict constraints of these poems point to more than Chang’s inventiveness. Despite the forms and structures of these poems, what emerges is an appreciation for the wildness of the mind, the freedom of a wandering mind and memory.
Franny Choi’s third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, begins with the proposition that for people of color, the apocalypse has already happened. These poems interrogate and imagine how to live in this ceaseless dystopia, spinning backwards and forwards in time to imagine opportunities for connection in the midst of grief and distance.
This highly praised debut collection from nonbinary poet and drag performer Wo Chan highlights moments of queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness centers on Chan’s memories from the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant to a family deportation battle against the State, weaving in letters in support of their family’s immigration effort. Chan’s daring and original poems show the necessity of survival, even when confronted with the precarious and destructive powers of the nation-state.
We haven’t gotten new Sandra Cisneros poems in almost 28 years, and Cisneros’ return to the genre with the collectionWoman Without Shame makes it worth the wait. These reflective poems are candid and unapologetic. Cisernos blends English and Spanish to reflect on aging, sex, and politics with precise and lyrical attention.
Tis the season for some literary pageantry and Electric Literature is hosting our third annual “Best Book Cover of the Year” tournament. You, our beloved readers, will decide a winner amidst a sea of book covers that published in 2022 via an interactive poll on our Twitter and Instagram stories starting today. We encourage you to embrace the competitive spirit by downloading the full bracket and fill out your predictions for the tournament.
Click to enlarge
The following details all 32 designs in 16 pairs for the first round, and you can vote for each of your favorites on our Twitter and Instagram stories throughout the week, with round two on Wednesday, quarterfinals Thursday, semifinals Friday, and the final face-off Saturday.
Now that the World Cup is over, the true competition begins!
Left: Cover design by Anna Kochman Right: Cover design by Katie Tooke
As a poet, Hafizah Augustus Geter understands the power of language to shape places, lives, and possibilities.
In her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin, she stands on a precipice, gazing out on the story she lives inside of—a “story begotten by White America.” That story, of course, is painted over another people’s history, and is rife with obscurations, lies, and erasures which threaten Geter’s survival as a Black queer woman. But, she writes, “scrape the picture back with one of my father’s palette knives, and the world becomes splashed in color again.”
Through her father’s artistic example, her mother’s love, the care and nurturing of her communities, and lessons drawn from history, Geter is on a mission to resurface, revise, and reimagine her world. The result is a work of aching beauty, formal innovation, and radical vision. Geter and I spoke about beginnings, abolition, the Afro-future, and the practice of hope.
Nadia Owusu: I wanted to start with a question which throbs throughout the book—the question of origins. You ask, where does a history start? What is the origin story of this book, and how does that story connect with the spiritual and political journey it chronicles?
Hafizah Augustus Geter: My first book was a book of poetry called Un-American and it was also about grief and origins. When I came to nonfiction, I was trying to do things I couldn’t do in poetry because they required more space. I was asking what else I could do with language. I wanted this new book to be a hybrid, collaged, kind of thing because no one, but especially not Black people, can live in memoir alone. Our lives are political historical, spiritual. My book talks about being raised by a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black man from the South. I wanted to understand the way disability runs through Black and African families. I was trying to understand my own queerness. We all have many complex stories, but we’re often told that we have to pick just one, and that leaves us in a position of alienation. In reality, we’re constantly simultaneously in the present moment, remembering the past, and thinking about the future
When I came to this book, I was tired of being sad. My mother had been dead for over a decade. I’m out of the closet. I’m married. I’m at an age where I have no choice but to confront things—about my body, the past, my grief. There’s a chapter in the book that examines the way Islamophobia impacted my beliefs about grief.
My mother died two years after 9/11. The hysteria that followed made it feel like you couldn’t grieve a Muslim life without being a traitor. And it made it complicated for me, especially living in South Carolina and going to high school near the largest military training base in the country. And so finding space to grieve was hard. Even people who loved me would say, “Well, your mother’s not going to go to heaven.” So I came to understand that grief is a political condition. Now, with COVID, I think more people understand what that means. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Prison abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba talks about how one of the purposes of organizing is to show us who we’re supposed to be mad at, and part of writing this book was me asking, where did all this shame come from? Shame is one of the tools of white supremacy.
NO: The book opens at the Grand Canyon, with you contemplating the bonds between Native and Black American people. This starting point seemed to be a gesture against historical erasure, against further theft and separation. And you build on these themes throughout the book, shedding light on systems of inequity and how they impact communities of color, queer people, and differently abled people. You write about how our liberation stories are connected.
HAG: This book is very concerned with the idea of time. At the Grand Canyon, you’re looking at time. You can see the beginning of the earth and that is fantastical to me. It’s one of the most miraculous things. But, widen the aperture, and you see that part of why it’s so beautiful is because the government protects it from pollution. But, who is being protected and who is not being protected? How wide can your aperture go?
I’m at an age where I have no choice but to confront things—about my body, the past, my grief.
The community that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—the Havsuw ‘Baaja—are the first people documented in North America. If you allow yourself to see, there are all these layers of stories. But we live in a country where people say, that’s not my story, what happened here is not my fault, not my problem. I don’t see connection as a burden, though. Being obligated to something isn’t a burden. I wanted to really grapple my own complicity as someone who lives on stolen land.
Behold: Beauty and violence. Let’s hold both. We seem to be so afraid of history. The more I looked back, the more violence I found, yes. But also, with every step of that violence, you see people pushing back and working towards a different world.
NO: This seems connected to your notion of the “Black Period.” You describe it as a “a state of mind, a position, a duration.” Can you speak about what a “Black Period” is, and how it relates to Afrofuturism?
HAG: One of the books’ preoccupations is naming. In order to tackle anything, you have to give it a name. So, in search of an alternate origin story, I needed to name what I was searching for. I came to the name through Goya’s Black Paintings, which my father loves. They’re terrifying, but my father said, “Do you know how hard it is to paint in blacks?” So he sees something miraculous in the series of paintings that are, essentially, an exploration of the dark heart of man and the things that plague us. For my father, there was light in that darkness. And that’s what I’m looking for. That’s how, not just Black people but communities of color, raise their kids. You eventually have to make sure that your child knows that the world is trying to kill us. But, what communities of color have in common is the way we attend to our loved ones, our elders, and our history. And so, what can we do with that?
The Black Period is where we live in possibility. It’s where we keep creating new futures. I definitely see my work as Afro-futurist. I see my father’s work as Afro-futurist in so many ways.
NO: Throughout the book, you give examples of how you saw the Black Period modeled by the people in your communities, and particularly by your parents, who I really loved getting to know through the book. You write movingly about how their dreams, love, and imagination gave you and your sister possibilities that America tried to deny you. And, your father’s art is featured in the book.
HAG: This book allowed me to see my parents as people, to see how radical they were. I grew up in the 1990s, 30 years after the Civil Rights Act. My sister and I were the first generation that that could participate in a world with white people and not have to clean it or be subservient to it. My parents didn’t have a roadmap, but we celebrated Kwanzaa. They used art. They gave us community. I think this also speaks to the ingenuity of Black people—just constantly making it work.
Shame is America essentially testing how long its history can last.
The book contains 66 of my father’s artworks. I knew they had to be there from the beginning. I grew up with art everywhere because of him. I don’t even know how to begin to tell a true story of my life without including the art because I can look at certain of his paintings or drawings and remember what house we lived in, what my mother’s hair cut was. I can remember so much of the quality of my life through his work.
NO: In addition to your parents’ example, you argue that creating a world without violence requires police and prison abolition. What does abolition mean to you, and how do abolitionist ideas inform your vision of the Black Period?
HAG: Everyone should read Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. It’s absolutely amazing. Abolition is rooted in building. We all want to feel safe, but right now, the only option we’re given for safety is a hammer, and that’s the police. But a hammer breaks everything. And abolition is saying that instead of a hammer, we want health care, we want education, we want food security. Those things make us safer than the police do because the police create violence. We don’t have all the solutions yet. The point is to try everything because we know that what we have isn’t working. What abolition asks of us is to work in community to understand all the things that are possible.
NO: I want to return to what you said about shame. You write about how trauma accelerates the biological clock, and how shame contributes to that. Part of your journey toward the Black Period is claiming the fullness of yourself including your queerness and you write, “It was near impossible to fight for anyone from inside a closet, especially myself.” I thought that was such a powerful way of phrasing it and then you also quote Angela Davis” “We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives.”
HAG: We are constantly being surveilled and policed, by our phones, our jobs, people in our lives, the state. Shame becomes a self-surveillance. Shame is America essentially testing how long its history can last.
Around queerness, shame is tied to a patriarchal heteronormative agenda to promote capitalism. Because when you police people’s sexuality, you get to decide how people participate in the workforce. It’s all connected. So, we have to ask, Who is my shame in service of? Do I feel shame because I did something or because I just feel wrong?
One of the tenets of abolition is creating a world where people have everything they need, including beauty and the conditions for beauty.
Internalized homophobia and anti-Blackness, for example, can be deadly. Through shame, you’re essentially allowing yourself to be deputized by the state for policing, and you’re policing yourself, so they can essentially run this machine on automatic. And then, when you have so much shame, you’re also willing to punish others. And so, part of writing the book was trying to see how shame is a political condition too.
NO: To me, the work you’re doing in this book—the undoing, the revising—is profoundly hopeful. You write that Black hope is deadly to racist capitalism.
HAG: Yeah, it’s so easy to just say that this is the end of time and there’s nothing we can do. But that’s not true because the fact that the world is not over already—that we’re still standing—is a testament to the work people of color are always doing. When you look at all these oppressions, it seems overwhelming. There are just so many things coming for us, but they are all tentacles of the same head. And so that means that every little action we take is chopping away at that same monster. I think that is a very hopeful space.
One of the tenets of abolition is creating a world where people have everything they need, including beauty and the conditions for beauty. And, when you think about, for example, the period in which Black people were enslaved: From the very first day to the day we were freed, every single day someone believed we would get free. I mean, that is just a wild sense of hope. That kind of hope is a map because, when you hope in community, it forces you into action, and then it starts changing the world. And so, I try to use my writing to help communicate the messages that are coming from activists. I try to be a mouthpiece for the movements.
At the beginning of her reading, this lifestyle memoirist announced that she was struggling to quit vaping and, thus, would be chewing nicotine gum that evening. It was clear that her efforts were not going well, however, and during the presentation she fondled her blister pack of Nicorette like it was an opium pipe. When she began chewing her fourth piece, she also lit a yellowing cigarette she said she found beneath a couch cushion. Her final act of transcendence, however, came during the Q&A when a participant asked a question about her mother’s storied political career. The author stood up, disappeared from view, returned with her vaping device, and then smashed it to pieces with a bronze statuette of the Eiffel Tower.
In an astounding example of online disorientation, this so-called language poet forgot that his monitor was not, in fact, a mirror, and picked his teeth on screen for ten minutes as an author discussed her new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interestingly, three months later, the Hopkins scholar published a somewhat influential article advancing an idea she was labeling “Obligational Privacy,” or the notion that readers have a fundamental right not to know about the personal lives of poets.
This poet surprised everyone by giving himself a manicure during his lecture on enjambments. His fastidious nail care was mesmerizing to all of us, but the bigger surprise came at the end when he swept the clippings off his desk and onto the rug below. There was a clear gasp from the invitees and, remarkably, when he realized the origins of the reaction, he attended to the problem by stepping on the clippings and rubbing them deeper into the rug with his foot.
At the book-talk of a colleague, this YA novelist spent the entire hour lighting things on fire. He seemed extremely curious about the flammability of the objects on his desk and tested everything from his computer keyboard to a Saul Bellow novel. After he ran out of objects, he turned to his body, performing what seemed to be a meticulous examination of pain thresholds of different parts of his hand. His upper wrists, just where they met the hand, couldn’t endure a second of the flame. His fingers, however, seemed impervious to the pain of fire, even when, at one, point, one of his fingers began to smoke.
For fifteen minutes, this writer of historical novels poked an unknown object floating in her mug. There was speculation in the side chat about what the drink and object were. “Marshmallow/hot-chocolate” and “ice-cube/bourbon” were the most popular choices, although several people suggested “insect.” Amazingly, “insect” was the correct choice. It was a mayfly, which we discovered when she pulled it out, discarded it, then swallowed the mug’s remaining contents. It was agreed by everybody that this last act was clear confirmation of the bourbon theory.
This anthropologist was most famous for a book that advocated “knife games” as one of many ways for young thrill seekers to avoid the dangerous enticements of the online world. He was hated by almost everybody, and his behavior during a Zoom panel seemed to be a kind of visual rebuttal to his critics. Near the end of the hour, he stopped playing his so-called knife game, unmuted himself, and said, “See, totally fucking fine, so fuck you.” He then abruptly logged off the meeting, which was a great relief to everyone.
The poems in Michael Chang’s latest collection, Almanac of Useless Talents, are punk jazz or noise hip hop—avant-garde and anarchist. Intertextual and reality. Surreal and real. Ugly and pretty. Crystal-clear and obscure. Confident and confessional. Serious and absurd. I speak in binaries, but Chang’s poems are anything but. They deconstruct binaries. Poetry is often the art of containment. Chang’s poems cannot be contained. They bust through barriers and borders, defiantly.
After reading Almanac of Useless Talents, readers will want to be friends with Michael Chang. While many will initially be drawn in by Chang’s witty and daring critiques and comebacks, they’ll stay for what Chang calls “radical candor.” But with Chang’s poems, honesty doesn’t sacrifice complexity. They use an array of techniques—fragmentation, disparate forms (confession, list, anecdote, observation, manifesto), sampling, multiple languages (English, Chinese, French, and all of the languages of their everyday life via text, social media, and interactions with friends, lovers, and haters)—to display a complex, authentic self that readers feel connected to and curious about.
With their juxtaposition of high art and pop culture, confidence and vulnerability, reading Almanac of Useless Talents is a communal experience. Chang may invite you into their club, but they reject the cultural capital that comes with being in the know, which keeps readers on the hook and keeps them from getting too comfortable. Chang’s maximalist, rhythmic phraseology creates mystery, resists defining, resists a solitary takeaway, which teaches readers that a lot more homework, multiple readings must be done to fully “get it.” With each reading, something new is discovered, a hidden vulnerability juxtaposed with an unapologetic declaration. Yet, they resist the idea that everything we say is supposed to have meaning, is supposed to follow an arc. This is, after all, an almanac of useless talents. It isn’t a forecast for the future, but a record of the range of human emotions, the ways we hurt each other, and the ways we get to know each other better. From what those in power may deem useless and disregard, comes Chang’s “gutter poetry / for dirty minds.” I invite you to giddily bask in the grit.
Always an air of performance, always a good time, ultimately, Chang’s speakers seek connection and meaningful relationships. I met Chang in a workshop with Hanif Abdurraqib. We’ve been friends since. It’s been a pleasure seeing their speakers evolve with each collection of campy literary magic. I anxiously await their next rendition in their upcoming collection Synthetic Jungle. We reunited over Zoom to discuss Almanac of Useless Talents.
Kate Carmody: I love the cover! Could you just tell me a little bit about it? You’ve mentioned before that you’re involved in the art direction of the covers of your collections.
Michael Chang: The press works with a really good illustrator who lives in Spain and does all of their covers. I wanted a departure from his usual style, which is kind of a heavy, darker, more gothic vibe. I wanted something lighter and refreshing. I wanted something with a fox that wasn’t just a straightforward animal situation. With my last collection, Boyfriend Perspective, the cover is a play on perspectives using fish imagery. With this one, I wanted something that had levity, but was also visually interesting that you can look at again and again because that’s the way I think about my poetry—you read it and whatever you need to get from it, you get. If you come back half a year later, you take something different away.
In terms of the cover, I said the palette I wanted, and then we jointly decided on the image from Asian mythology of the fox spirit holding the fox, but they’re also a fox. So, it’s a play on identity and how you have the speaker, but then you have all these other layers.
KC: Something that people might say doesn’t belong in poems is gossip. What role does gossip play in this collection? And what makes gossip so pleasurable?
Poetry is an interesting medium to work in because it’s very insular.
MC: Poetry is an interesting medium to work in because it’s very insular. With the mass market fiction titles, you get almost a sanded-down version of what an author’s true representation would be. But with poetry, if you’re working in this medium, you have the advantage of knowing that most of the people reading it are going to be poets. That’s a limitation on the commercial stuff, but on the artistic side, there is a vast amount of freedom because you can talk in a way that’s clubby and clique in a good way, but also tell people what you’re about. It’s a balance of knowing that this world is very small and we know each other—that cliqueness—but also having your own independent voice, brand, and personality that’s unique, so you’re not writing the same poems as other people in your friend group.
What makes desire a subject that you are continually interested in exploring and what aspects of desire or maybe questions about desire were you interested in tackling in Almanac of Useless Talents?
MC: Desire, whether you’re a writer or not, is very common in the sense of we understand it or try to understand it. But I think of it like making a perfect pant. There’s no one perfect khaki. Right? We can talk about the color, the cut, the inseam, the details. It’s this amalgamation of what makes a good khaki. Part of the fun is that there’s no right answer. The other part of the fun is that it’s always shifting. It’s a constant refinement with the times. What is a good khaki now is not what’s going to be a good khaki five years from now. I think it’s constantly working at this thing and really trying to get a handle on how we think about romance and desire to make it feel timely, of the moment, and something we should look at so it never feels tired or stale.
It’s an evolution of how I feel about desire and how other people feel about it. I was at a reading with a colleague of mine and they said that the highest honor is being a love poet. In many ways, that’s true because you can write about political issues, but at the end of the day, I think what really speaks to people is the romance, the storytelling, and how these different pieces fit together.
KC: Your poems showcase and celebrate queer love.
MC: I think that’s true. I also think my poems make it such that queerness isn’t really a thing. Queerness is kind of like the default. It’s not: Hey, look at this thing on this podium. It’s just a given. I guess is the easiest way to put it.
KC: It’s your everyday life.
MC: Yeah. These assumptions that we have going into it as a reader or as a poet are almost erased. In my poems, at least in the world that I try to develop in these poems, queerness is just there rather than some kind of spectacle. A lot of queer poets feel the need to make a big deal out of something that I think the speakers in my poems take for granted. Queerness is almost taken for granted. It’s very fluid. Everyone in my poems seems to be happy, tries to be, or is getting there. And I think there’s this overwhelming sense that this is the world.
My poems make it such that queerness isn’t really a thing. Queerness is kind of like the default.
Recently, there have been a lot of titles about the end of the world. I’m not interested in apocalyptic narratives. When I read those poems, I think, Okay, it’s the end of the world and there’s this rage. Great. But what are you doing about it? Why do we care? My poems have a tone of celebration versus defeat. I think that’s a difference. Another difference is, like I’ve said before, other people’s poems are getting angry, but mine are about getting even. My poems are very clear-eyed and honest about what we’re facing, but we’re also very optimistic about the gains that we’re going to make and where things are going. I’m never about the end of the world; that doesn’t even factor in.
KC: Your poems are conversational and confessional—we know what the speaker wants, who they want, who they’ve slept with, who they love, who they hate, who’s broken their heart, et cetera—yet they find a way to still be mysterious.
MC: It’s like the veil, right? Like I’ll show you a little ankle. How that plays out practically is that you feel in the clique, you feel invested, and you’re involved. But there’s also more to figure out, more to suss out. And the mystery comes from our natural complexity as people. But I also think the overt coyness and this I could tell you what I’m about, but why would I do that? And why would I do that all at once? which creates tension or this push-pull. I’m very honest and vulnerable and I can be very forthright, but I also want you to be into it. I want you to be interested and open the box. There’s that calculation going on—this balancing between radical candor and the desire to be elusive and hard to grasp, almost like a gas.
KC: In “Internet Boyfriend,” the speaker says, “rob me / steal from me / take all my money / sell all my possessions,” so in some ways, they use capitalism as kink. How does capitalism affect love?
MC: In a lot of modern permutations of how relationships go, especially in New York City, lurking in the background is always this question of do I just want somebody to share rent with? And this kind of thin dom, sugar baby situation. I think it’s just a reality of modern life. We know we don’t like it, but this is the world, this is the system that we’re dealing with.
How do we situate ourselves in a way that makes the most sense to us and the people around us so we come out okay? How do you bridge some of these differences between class and social hierarchies and the kinds of jobs that you’re in and your partner’s in? When it comes to this reliance on somebody’s financial security, is being with this person going to allow me to work on these projects, or does it mean I have to work two or three jobs just to survive? It’s ever-present—this unholy connection between commerce and romance.
KC: You use a lot of food imagery. What about consumption interests you?
MC: I think for a long time, I felt this enormous sense of guilt about using food for imagery because it’s often used in poetry by both the dominant class and the people being dominated to other and exoticize. It took some time to figure out how to use food in a way that doesn’t do that. I landed on using food imagery as an anchor. Many of my references may be obscure or out there depending on the circles you travel in, but everybody, hopefully, knows what meatloaf is or mac and cheese. I use food regardless of “where it’s from” to serve as these lights that can guide you someplace. Obviously, there’s a bias that’s baked into using Western food (you know we just have to say it), but I also talk about Asian food. Readers might not get the obscure movie reference or lyric, but if I’m talking about these food-related memories or images, there is some sense of logic which allows them to feel comfortable and grounded. And then, of course, the next line will disrupt that and make them feel very uneasy and lost.
KC: In “SORRY IN ADVANCE,” you write, “that is how they want me to write / instead i write about timothée chalamet.” What kind of pressure is there on BIPOC writers, queer writers, or writers in general to write a certain way, and how do you resist it?
MC: Regardless of who you are, there is always an impulse of wanting to be accepted or part of the crew. What I was talking about in the poem is that poets of color, queer poets, et cetera, are supposed to write about their immigrant journey or how they were subjected to racism or the unfairness of institutions. These systems are terrible, obviously, but there is a reflexive demand on the part of editors and even casual readers to make poets who identify with these groups talk about their trauma all the time and how they were victims of these oppressive regimes.
We have legitimate claims and complaints of varying degrees of severity. But many poets fall into this trap where they think that to be successful, they need to write about political oppression in their home country when they maybe have never even been to their home country. They fall into this vicious cycle of thinking, Okay, we’re going to churn out the Tiananmen poems, we’re going to do the censorship poems, and then we’re going to do this strand of Uyghur camp poems. It’s important to call attention to these issues, and I’m not minimizing the importance of these issues, but I think that when you play into what they want you to be doing, that doesn’t serve your purposes. By doing that, you’re perpetuating these racist views of your “backward country” in China or wherever.
In terms of my work, because I understand that impulse, I’ve always written against that, kind of like what I was saying about queerness being taken for granted in a positive way. I don’t play up to stereotypes, and I try to do it in a way that’s palatable to “the majority” reading populous. It starts from a conversation more than, for example, telling readers about all these people that died. In politics, you don’t want to repeat your opponent’s critiques of you. I’m going to be honest about my portrayal of China or some of the human rights abuses, but I’m not going to perpetuate stereotypes. I’m not here to play into those racist talking points and propaganda in order to be published. I want the freedom that other people feel that they can write about whatever. I want people to feel that they can write about whatever. Ultimately, that’s the takeaway, regardless of what you identify as, you should feel like you can write about what you want to write about.
KC: I feel like I can share your poems with my writer friends, but I also can share them with my non-writer friends.
MC: I don’t write my poems to be hard to understand. I’m about meeting people where they are, but I’m also about my point of view. If you’re not getting through to people, you should rethink your approach. A lot of poets talk at folks, but I’m very interested in talking with them. Even if you haven’t been to these places or you have no idea how New Yorkers live, you’re interested and curious. I think most people are curious. I think the vast majority of people are willing to have a conversation. That’s the beauty of it; people are willing to talk to you if you approach it the right way. And I spent literally all my time in my professional life and in my personal life thinking about how to approach these sometimes thorny issues in a way that gets the best results. I’m not interested in preaching. My politics are clear. I don’t think anybody is questioning my politics. In terms of the work and how the art is conveyed, I’m very interested in having a conversation and broadening the types of people that read poetry. Poetry is for everyone. I’m not interested in academia necessarily, which is not everybody else’s approach, but that’s my approach. If I wanted to talk to New York City poetry crew who have at least a master’s degree, I could easily do that, but I’m not interested in doing that. I’m more interested in talking to people who casually pick up a poetry book, attend a reading, or see something online.
One of our favorite things to do around the holidays is take a closer look at the writing we’ve published over the course of the year. We’re coping with difficult, tumultuous times, and inevitably, EL’s content reflects our larger context. In a year that began with a nearly rabid Covid variant, it was difficult to believe that 2022 held anything but more bad news. It was nearly impossible to see that, in fact, by the end of the year, we might be somewhere on the road to recovery. Our most popular list pushes the boundaries of horror, just as it seemed life was. Our most read essay is about the rarely spoken risk of working as a public librarian, addressing the bigger question of latent danger in spaces that are generally understood as safe. Our most popular interview centers on the collective decline of health, and a health care system that operates on a crisis care model. But what’s become abundantly clear is that some measure of optimism has survived, and even trickled its way into our writing. Hope touches so many of the essays, lists, and conversations we’ve published, and our wish, as we review the most popular posts of the year, is that each piece, in some way, amplifies that hope.
Here are the most popular interviews, book lists, and essays, starting with the most read:
In our most popular interview of the year, Carli Cutchin spoke with Megan O’Rourke about her timely and critically-acclaimed memoir, The Invisible Kingdom, in which she deftly portrays the loneliness of chronic illness, the onslaught of Long Covid and its impact on an already overstretched health care system, as well as the author’s beautifully rendered quest to find healing.
“When you are looking at patients whose bodies are at the edge of medical knowledge, we need a more flexible kind of medicine.”
Halimah Marcus, EL’s Executive Director, spoke with Elif Batuman about Either/Or, the highly anticipated sequel to her debut novel, The Idiot. In Either/Or, Selin continues to forge a connection to her now-graduated crush, Ivan, by analyzing their past interactions. She blooms—sexually and otherwise—while engaged in this process, ultimately emerging from his shadow and growing into an impulsive, more curious, more ambitious Selin—a fully-realized young woman “dazzling in her flaws and contradictions.”
“The temptation is to think of yourself as having been really stupid, and yourself now as knowing a lot more. I’m just as stupid now, I just have better information.”
Chelsea Davis begins her interview with Kathleen J. Woods about her recent novel, White Wedding, by asking Woods what attracted her to writing porn. What becomes clear is the sense of reading as a sensual, and sensuous experience, placing the reader more erotically in their own body, as well as rethinking more traditional representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and more.
“To enact confusion on the bodily level of the reader; to engage in a way so that their senses are actually engaged and immersed; to make them discomfited by their own responses to what they’re reading.”
In Deirdre Suguichi’s interview with Caits Meissner, author of The Sentences That Create Us, PEN America’s new writing handbook, she specifically and intentionally asks Meissner about the challenges and complexities that are unique to writing while incarcerated. We learn that chief among them are finding privacy, quiet, and personal and physical safety, and are reminded that for some, getting the writing done is harrowing, dangerous work.
“I had a great deal of anxiety when the book came out about some of the authors being targeted by their administrations, being put into solitary confinement, being seen as a threat for exposing harm, being dropped from jobs or programs.”
An intimate portrait of a lifelong friendship, this conversation between Halimah Marcus and Alice Elliott Dark about her new novel, Fellowship Point, illuminates the ongoing evolution of two old women with different worldviews, different personalities and lived experience, but intense love for each other. In close proximity as the last remaining caretakers of a small community of summer homes established by wealthy Quaker families decades ago, their lives are distinct, and yet tightly woven,
“I think there’s always an erotic element of friendship, but I didn’t want to explicitly bring that out because they wouldn’t have explicitly brought it out. They just didn’t grow up that way.”
In our most popular list of the year, Brian James Gage recommends stories that will terrify you. These books abound with bold, daring new voices and paradigm shifting terror while calling upon the traditional—monster scares, psychological horror, and Gothic tales—to ground them in their chosen arena. Check out Gage’s latest novel, The Nosferatu Conspiracy: Book Two, The Sommelier.
“My young mind was convinced whatever horrors lurked behind those monolithic and terrifying covers would surely emerge from the pages.”
This year EL had the opportunity to publish this much-anticipated list, written and researched by Michelle Hart, and we couldn’t be happier. Updated by season, our readers proved yet again that Electric Literature is a home for authors, and most importantly readers, who are writing, and looking for, diverse, groundbreaking stories. In addition to all the books on this list, be sure you read Hart’s debut novel, We Do What We Do In The Dark.
“His work was rejected for being both too explicit and too subtle; stating that ‘the familiar is more threatening than the exotic’”.
A mainstay in our digital pages, R.O. Kwon’s much-loved list elevates the most anticipated forthcoming books written by women of color. It’s become a favorite among legions of EL readers, as well as the larger literary community, its reach informing syllabi, criticism, and even consideration for book prizes. By highlighting women of color, we have the opportunity to help more readers find increasingly more vast books and voices to love; simultaneously, the necessity for such a list is a powerful statement about the book industry’s shortcomings.
“I continue to hope that publishing and American Letters will become so fully inclusive as to render this effort obsolete. We’re not there yet.”
Not every woman is capable of being the woman her community expects her to be. Anne Heltzel, author of Just Like Mother, recommends seven wondrous novels about women who are doomed to be the black sheep in their families, but must carry on.
“As an adult she cobbles together a flimsy existence that appears normal on the outside but conceals her profound loneliness and inability to connect.”
The damp mossy woods of the coast, the high desert, and the snow jagged mountain ranges dividing the two—these are part of what makes the pacific northwest big and messy, and fertile ground for literary work. Leyna Krow, author of Fire Season, recommends novels that take place in Oregon, Washington, and Canada because she, like many readers, appreciates a different kind of Western novel.
“I like the surprise of it, and the thought of people buying the book assuming it is about rugged men on the range with their guns and instead getting a future-seeing woman in a city, armed with only her considerable wits.”
In the year’s most popular essay, Oliver, a former librarian, debunks the romanticization of libraries—both what they are, and whom they serve. While public libraries are culturally understood to be warm, safe spaces for intellectual and artistic exploration, many have become safe havens for marginalized, and often unhoused communities—reflecting the larger cultural neglect that vulnerable populations feel across America.
“How many times had I been called a bitch that week? Five times? Ten? I knew meeting aggression with aggression rarely ended well, but here I was.”
Over 100 years ago, Bengali Muslim writer Rokeya Hossain wrote about a world run by women and fueled by solar power. In this essay, Tanya Agathocleous examines both the personal circumstances that shaped Hossain’s worldview, and the contemporary socio-political context.
“Her father had four wives, favored education for his sons but not his daughters, and imposed purdah: a Muslim practice, also employed in some Hindu communities, where womenlive in separate quarters to conceal themselves from men.”
A novel and a TV series bearing the same name also happen to tell similar stories about capitalism. It’s a tale as old as time as Rebecca Ackermann weaves her personal journey moving beyond life as an overworked, underappreciated dead-eyed corporate worker. Such is life for so many, under capitalism, but it’s imperative that we remember that life is better when we manage to make work work for us—not the other way around.
“There are infinite reasons to leave a job, but I remember the collective turning point as the day my coworkers and I stepped out of our friendly work personas and into our full humanity.”
When Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Red (Taylor’s Version) came out only 3 weeks after Lauren Hutton’s boyfriend broke up with her, blindsiding her after four years, Hutton found solace in the lyrics—darker, angrier, more scathing—and in the new understanding Swift seemed to carry about a relationship that was never really healthy.
“This original version, before it was made palatable for radio playtimes and social discourse, contained all of Taylor’s hurt. It let her lay the blame in the open and present a fuller story, one that’s more complicated than a singular disappointment or the sting of goodbye.”
Like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Brian Lin plumes the pain of lifelong silence before putting words to unspeakable things between family members. Equal parts love letter to the film and part family portrait, this essay asks both its writer and its reader to confront the limitations of what it means to be known and loved by family.
“Thanks to Everything, my sadness about Ma, pooling in me for years, has taken the form of questions, things I can ask her one day.”
This has been a particularly powerful year for Latinx and Caribbean poetry. While perusing these ten collections, two vital things made themselves abundantly clear: this first is just how strongly interwoven our community truly is. Many of the poets in this list reference each other, whether through poem dedications or in the acknowledgements pages or forewords, which makes absolute sense since they are editors and teachers and have created spaces to amplify and shelter us, while simultaneously producing their own groundbreaking work.
The next is that for those of us from Latinx and Caribbean diasporas in the United States, our bodies are so often oppressed, repressed, and used as political tools (or pawns), it makes it impossible to separate our individuality from politics, thus rendering all our poetry “political.” There can be no more room for the white-supremacist diminishment or separation of the “political poem” in contemporary poetry. Let us banish the idea that any poem, written by any poet, is not political. Silence from anyone, but especially from those who hold the most privilege and have the most proximity to whiteness within the Latinx and Caribbean communites, is no longer an option. June Jordan’s poem “Calling on All Silent Minorities” encapsulates this perfectly, calling us to action: “HEY/C’MON OUT/WHEREVER YOU ARE/WE NEED TO HAVE THIS/MEETING/AT THIS TREE/AIN’ EVEN BEEN/PLANTED YET”
Mi gente, we must plant the tree. Now let us celebrate these poets who are planting right now.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is a force in contemporary poetics whose influence in the Latinx and Caribbean poetry community is pivotal. From his own writing to anything he feels the need to highlight for his social media followers, his is a voice we all should heed. Garcia is the publisher of Get Fresh Books, which has given many talented BIPOC poets a home for their own books, and his poetry is, as far as I’m concerned, Latinx/Caribbean diaspora canon, so when I heard FlowerSong Press was publishing his collected works, I rejoiced. Key selections from each of Garcia’s three collections are compiled together and whether he’s unpacking the concept of melancholia in the most beautifully devastating ways and paying homage to the revolutionary Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca or interweaving James Baldwin through his examination of anti-Blackness within his Dominican family and culture, Garcia’s words wrap themselves around your mind and soul, changing you in the most fundamental ways.
Jasminne Mendez has been a writer to watch since her 2018 debut book Night Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Essays and Poems. I’m always comforted to find fellow Caribbean diaspora writers in the Southwest (Mendez resides in San Antonio) because we are a whole culture unto ourselves, only made even more special when delve into specific islands. I knew her latest book would be good but City Without Altar made my jaw drop to the floor in awe. The heart of the book is a lyric play based on the 1937 “Parsley massacre,” where Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in an evil act of anti-Blackness, ordered the army to use machetes to butcher Haitians in and around the northwestern frontier, leaving thousands dead and those who survived were brutally dismembered. Wrapped within this horrifying and heartbreaking narrative is the narrator’s traumatic journey of her own finger amputation due to a chronic illness.
For Boricuas on the archipelago, the devastation of Hurricane Maria has now been eclipsed by Hurricane Fiona, which recently ripped through our isla, which has been crippled by the United States’ callous colonization and the Jones Act for decades. My people have overthrown one corrupt governor and I, like many in diaspora on the “mainland,” echo Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s fierce call for independence. To Love An Island is both balm and trumpet call for our people to take up the cause and unshackle our isla from the brutal grasp of our colonizers. Every poem shakes with fury and love but I cannot get the very first one out of my head because it cuts straight to the heart of the lie of colonization, that our isla cannot do for itself, we cannot grow our own gardens and crops and we must be at the mercy of imports from the U.S. In “Strawberries,” the speaker asserts they had been told strawberries couldn’t grow on the island because they didn’t have the climate, then a farmer shows her the sweetest little strawberries. “I’d always been told freedom would never come/for Puerto Rico. We didn’t have the climate,” Brimmer writes. “I ask the farmer about the strawberries. Son silvestres,/he responds, and points to their beautiful excess.”
If you’re sensing a Caribbean theme, you’re right—2022 has given us collections from some of our most beloved and talented Caribbean diaspora poets such as Raina León, founder of the formative Latinx literary journal The Acentos Review, never disappoints. León, who is who is Black and Afro-Boricua, is la madrina of Latinx creative writing, she has published and nurtured so many of us who publish today. Like Garcia, I consider her work canon, and her latest collection, black god mother this body is stunning. An experimental dive into the insidiousness of anti-Black patriarchy enacted through close family members, the harrowing process of conceiving to term, followed by a Black mother’s love and deep fear for her son in this country. León’s use of language and the physical page are always affective and powerful but she also includes a series of mesmerizing art collages that I cannot stop looking into, like falling down into several worlds at once.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read a poetry collection where the intention and form are perfectly clear but somehow still makes me wonder what the hell is going on—in the best way, of course. Angel Dominguez has penned a series of imaginary epistolary poems (letters, y’all) to Diego de Landa, Spain’s bishop of Yucatán in the 16th century, who Raquel Salas Rivera perfectly describes in the book’s foreword as the “murderer, pillager, and rapist” and to which I will add only enslaver and sadistic torturer. De Landa was almost fully responsible for destroying the Mayan culture and language and leaving behind only his colonized account. Dominguez, who is of Yucatec Maya descent, pours their howling gales of grief, rage, desire, and despair of being an Indigenous person whose inherited cultural and ancestral legacy is one of theft, violent suppression, and disappearance. If ever a book reads like the poetry version of Rage Against the Machine, it is Desgraciado, Rage Against the Colonizer. Dominguez is provocative, evocative, rebellious, and defiant. I thank them for birthing this insurgent text into the world.
The river that runs through José Angel Araguz’s Rotura is deep, long, and profound. Araguz is the editor-in-chief of Salamander, from Corpus Christi, Texas. He has an elegant touch with his language as he writes about the broken promises of safety in a country that continues to hunt down those of Latinx heritage and break our bodies, break apart our languages, break our hearts again and again. But it’s the haunting image and metaphor of that river that tantalizes me, it is the same river I live so close to in my hometown of Albuquerque, the Rio Grande, which looms large for all of us in the Borderlands. I particularly love Araguz’s “Four Dirges,” which is in conversation with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where he writes, “Mr. Eliot, before I was born/you wrote about a strong brown god/but what are gods when there is water/in rivers who have nothing to do/with what isn’t already part of them?/If the river is within us, then why/did I fear it killing those I cared for?”
I first opened Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body to a random page and laughed to find myself looking at her poem “Chasing Duende,” which I certainly took as a good omen. If you follow Latinx poetry Twitter at all, you’ll know Montilla’s second collection was incredibly well received by the community and I’d been keen to get my hands on a copy. Montilla’s voice is singular and explosive and she gives us a manifesto against whiteness and the anti-Black colonizer in all their seductive and violent forms, from racism to physical desire. Her Muse poem series is twofold, both unfolding as the title poem in a series revolving around the Afro-Latina speaker and then individual Muse poems such as “To Pimp a Butterfly as Muse” and “Muse Found on Tinder,” where Montilla wields language as a whipsmart and witty weapon.
Once upon a time, I did a stint as a beat sports reporter for a newspaper in northern New Mexico, which since I find both sports and people’s stories fascinating, was a fun learning experience. I even covered a local boxing match, which was sweaty and breathless and weird. I grew up with Johnny Tapia and Danny Romero, boxing is fairly deeply engrained in New Mexican culture, so I was more than intrigued by Eloisa Amezcua’s new collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, centers the relationship between 1980s boxer Bobby “Schoolboy” Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. Ginn eventually committed suicide after asking Chacon multiple times to quit boxing and Amezcua writes poems from each point of view. What I found most interesting was how Valerie in the poems becomes more and more a ghostly figure, less substantive, throughout her poems while Chacon is a bit beastly in his desperate and self-centered earthiness. This is definitely a fascinating, haunting collection.
Aline Mello’s More Salt Than Diamond is a beautiful lament of the double life of the immigrant in her new country, in this case the U.S., and how displacement carries over no matter how long you are in a new culture. The longing for the familiar is an incredibly powerful thing, it brings a sense of nothing fitting quite right around you, like too-tight or too-loose clothes. Speaking Portuguese rather than Spanish is another barrier for Mello along with English, but while she writes hungrily for her Brazil, she also creates an ideal new country for us all in her poem “And So Let Us Imagine a New Country”, one without borders and instead where “We will meet where everyone drinks lakes of juice,/sit by blossoms, watch the/sun sink low. The moon returns/and reminds us there is still time.”
In his debut collection, J. Estanislao Lopez writes stirringly about growing up in Texas in a migrant family with the Latinx patriarchal expectations of machismo and heterosexuality locked like shackles around his wrists and also the seemingly small, but reverberating, humiliations immigrant men often endure, such as in “The Contract,” where the speaker’s father completes a day of hard labor on a handshake agreement and the employer refused to pay. Lopez also probes larger topics such as God and faith, the science of space in tandem with nature’s smallest creatures, and the clever tricks and intricacies of language, which Lopez delights in playing with so very adeptly. This is a deceptively quiet collection with its interiority and big concepts but you’ll be surprised many of these poems will stay with you.
From reanimated skeletons to the manic dispatches of a roofing association president, The Commuter is our home to bite-sized and experimental flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives. Sign up for The Commuter’s newsletter to receive our latest burst of awe-inspiring poetry and prose every Monday, and read below for our top ten issues of the year, starting with the most read.
Written in the form of a beauty tutorial, our most popular story of the year follows an aging celebrity, who, following her murder at the hands of her husband, applies foundation, blush, eyeshadow, eyeliner, and mascara to her incorporeal form as she prepares to attend a gender reveal party with the man who killed her.
Surreal, existential, and utterly transfixing, “The Complex” follows a woman who realizes that, one by one, alternate versions of her and her family have begun moving into the neighboring units of her apartment building. Our protagonist becomes obsessed with observing these look-a-likes from their balcony, a hobby which she cannot convince her husband to partake in, as, “for [him], we are people to avoid.”
Exploring the contours of a Manhattan break-up, this deeply felt short story was chosen by Min Jin Lee as the winner of the 2022 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and was performed live as part of the 2021-2022 edition of Tales of Fatherhood with Denis O’Hare. Each sentence exploding with ideas and teeming with life, this story questions the impossibility of truly building a home with another person.
Featuring critiques and archetypes that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever stepped foot in a creative writing workshop, this comedic flash piece explores what happens when God themself attempts to workshop the Old Testament. The results? Performative one-upmanship, complaints about a narratively redundant number of plagues, and a whole lot of smiting.
“I don’t know how long I had been dead when the girl found me,” opens “The Bone Friend,” an adolescent love story with a supernatural twist. Unable to remember anything about his previous life, our protagonist falls in love with the girl who finds him, and, in doing so, risks an entirely different sort of death.
Taking place shortly before the titular rapture, these three excerpts from Stohlman’s noveleerily evoke what it feels like to be alive in 2022. “In the end, we did it to ourselves,” reflects our narrator, exhausted by tragedy and flummoxed by the absurd indignities of modern life.
Taking place in the not-too-distant future, this haunting flash story follows a couple who plan a trip to the moon. Our narrator thinks that her partner might be getting ready to pop the question, but his actual intentions prove to be far more sinister.
“You don’t know I know / you’re trying to arrange memories / into an order that makes them disappear,” says the speaker of Laura Villareal’s “Tetris,” a line that captures the melancholy and wit of these two devastating poems.
Pushing back against the perceived anti-roofing sentiment expressed by Pharrell, Macklemore, and other musicians, the Roofing Association of America attempts to change the narrative by writing and distributing pop songs of their own in this wildly funny epistolary story.
These two poems by Qiang Meng aren’t afraid to ask the big questions—even if the individual posing them happens to be a philosopher iguana. “Desolation echoes. My porch light / long broken. Mailbox unchecked, / and I bike to work,” Meng writes in “The Frond,” reflecting on a rundown coconut leaf. “Summer is eternal.”
David Leo Rice’s newest novel paints an unlikely and often uncanny portrait of the artist as a young man. In The New House, that young man is Jakob, the only child of promise in a family of Jewish outsider artists living in isolation in a surrealist approximation of rural New England. When they’re not taking Jakob on blindfolded trips to Trader Joe’s or lecturing him over Wheaties on the Jewish visionary tradition (Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Chagall, etc.), Jakob’s parents are engaged in elaborate, iconoclastic projects of their own: his mother constructs a neon “graveyard of dead futures” on the outskirts of town, while his father tinkers in the basement on a sprawling, undefined masterwork that recalls the maniacal patriarch from Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. Soon, Jakob embarks upon an artistic career all his own involving found sculptures made out of roadkill and anthropomorphic miniature replicas of the town where he lives. The “Art World” welcomes Jakob as one of its own.
But when Jakob comes under the influence of his reclusive and possibly homicidal grandfather Wieland, whose unorthodox artistic techniques have done as much to lionize as ostracize him in the town’s mythos, he begins on a path into the soul of his own creativity that strikes at the heart of all he loves. Written in the tradition of Schulz and Kafka, with a visual aesthetic that recalls David Cronenberg and the Quay Brothers, The New House is a singular, disquieting novel that explores the fringes of Jewish diaspora and the limits of artistic transgression.
Over the course of several weeks, Rice and I talked virtually about Judaism’s shadow-side, the outsider artists of the literary world, and how writing is the act of “gambling with repression.”
Adrian Van Young: The New House, which is about a family seeking an intangible paradise they call the “New Jerusalem” through the intensity of their art pairs moments of extreme Jewishness with moments of extreme uncanny-ness and terror. You aren’t the first Jewish artist to recognize or explore this relationship. In your view, what is the connection between Jewishness and the uncanny?
David Leo Rice: The uncanny, as defined by Freud in his 1919 essay, centers on the discomfort of the past coming back into the present, whether it’s one’s personal past—the perspective of childhood filtering into that of adulthood—or humanity’s past—the ancient, superstitious world filtering into whatever we call disenchanted modernity. This is extremely compelling to me, both as an artistic approach and as a description of how I observe my life playing out. Many experiences are uncanny to me, so much so that it forms the bedrock of my spirituality with the sense that there’s always something haunted or supernatural afoot, but rarely in a clear enough way to form any dogma about it. I distrust formal dogmas for this reason, but that includes the dogma of atheism. I see the job of the writer being to flesh out these intimations and entertain various forms of “what if all that I sensed abstractly were concretely real?”
The Jewish condition is always that of something from the past that has neither been absorbed nor annihilated by history. Jews exist therefore in a permanently “un-dealt-with” state, never vanishing altogether nor reaching full harmony with the larger world. This is uncanny in that we’re haunting the places we inhabit, whether in a cultural sense in Europe and America, or a military sense in Israel. We’re always everywhere and nowhere, a crucial voice in what it means to be, say, Polish or American, yet also a voice that is seen as undermining those identities.
AVY:I love what you say about Jews throughout history “haunting the spaces they inhabit,” which I think speaks equally to the way Jews view themselves (as ghosts in their own historical narrative) and how Jews are viewed (as a wandering people, as social outsiders). Interestingly, what you say also harkens to the Jewish notion of the afterlife itself, Sheol, which usually manifests in Jewish holy texts as a sort of in-between state or limbo. Can you talk a little about the family of Jewish outsider artists at the center of The New House in this same context? How do they haunt the faux-New England town they inhabit?
DLR: I’ve always been drawn to searchers, so my characters, whether in the Dodge City books, the Angel House universe, the stories in Drifter, or here, roam a blighted but also enchanted landscape, often an American one, in search of some form of deliverance. Here it’s the “New Jerusalem,” the fabled “end of wandering” that spurs the wandering onward.
It’s important that this deliverance feel possible but never quite within reach—that’s the beauty and tragedy of America, whether in the early days of pilgrims coming to the East Coast, or in the later days of setting out for the West. The possibility of deliverance, whether in the material terms of “striking it rich” or the spiritual terms of being born again, has to be real in order for the American Dream to continue, yet it also has to be denied in order for it to remain a dream.
The family in this book are looking for an afterlife within this life. They don’t believe in the Christian idea of a life of suffering followed by a life of bliss, but they also don’t accept that “this life is all you get.” They’re determined to seek something transcendent within this world, and to bring it to light and, for better or worse, take credit for it in the eyes of others. Their artistic ambition is infused with a messianic ambition.
AVY: I’m interested in the way you approach the topic of Jewish spirituality in The New House. Did you conceive of the characters as being spiritual in an institutionally religious sense, or only as it relates to their art? Are they practicing Jews or “cultural” Jews?
DLR: They chart a middle path between practicing and cultural Judaism. This middle path is that of the “visionary Jew,” which does tend to manifest through art—Pinter, Jodorowsky, Cronenberg, all my heroes —but it doesn’t have to. It can manifest through any practice that involves making it up as you go along, rather than signing up for an extant program, like being a member of a synagogue, or putting it behind you entirely and saying “my Jewishness is irrelevant.” The visionary path is by necessity a solitary one—the family is thus doubly exiled, both from Gentile and from Jewish society—but it can also be an extremely productive one, because there’s no way to “be” in the Good Book . . . you have to constantly “do.”
AVY: The family at the center of the novel is certainly up to some transgressive mayhem all their own. It’s not unlike you in your own career, maybe. You’re an experimental writer. You could be called transgressive. (I remember you telling me once that Jack Ketchum, the late “extreme” horror writer, was an early mentor of yours.) Do you consider yourself to be an outsider artist of sorts in the literary world? Is that a designation of necessity or choice?
DLR: I used Jakob’s conundrum as a form of self-reflection. He’s torn between the committed outsiderness of his father (whose rejection of all dogma becomes a dogma of its own), and the worldly ambitions of his mother, who secretly instills in him the desire to “take the Lincoln Tunnel into New York City.” I feel just like that—torn between wanting to truly do my own thing, to an aggressively anti-mainstream degree, and craving mainstream recognition in a way that is perhaps shameful, but is therefore necessary to admit. It’s the condition of wanting to have your cake and eat it too, of wanting to be, like the Quay Bros., or the Chapman Bros., or Joseph Cornell, both genuinely immersed in your own obsessions and also feted by the fancy powers that be.
Jack Ketchum was an incredibly important mentor for me early in my NYC years. He nurtured the strangest and most depraved aspects of my early work, but also helped me infuse it with humanism. He stressed the importance of what he called “real” characters, people who truly lived and breathed on the page, rather than ciphers in a parable. He also taught me to have fun with my work.
In terms of publishing, there’s an exciting movement afoot today with many new independent presses starting up to promote the kind of work that is being ignored by the consolidating mainstream houses. I feel “saved” to have discovered this world, and its readers, and thus to see that it isn’t necessary—as I once deeply feared it would be—to force myself to become a different kind of writer in order to play a role in the public square. I almost can’t believe my good luck at having received the message from the world that I can and should go ever deeper into my own obsessions, rather than needing to “put childish things behind me” and learn to write for Netflix or whatever. If a larger press is ever interested in that, I’d certainly be interested too, but it’s not something I’m actively courting the way it once was.
AVY:That notion of going “ever deeper into [your own] obsessions” seems particularly apropos, not only in terms of your work as a writer but also when it comes to the protagonist of The New House, who in the novel’s climax, under the dissociative posthumous influence of his grandfather, goes off on a kind of maniacal vision quest. It’s vivid and disturbing. Not to mention the fact that this neurotic creative obsessiveness seems to me ubiquitous to the Jewish artistic psyche more generally–you see this same tendency in a lot of Roth’s artist characters, Grace Paley’s, Zach Lazar’s. Famously, Bruno Schulz’s. How do you view this tendency in your characters—in your own life as a writer? Is it an unhealthy yet necessary part of their/your craft? Or is it the kind of thing where in order to realize your vision, you have to sacrifice yourself to it on the altar of your own relentlessness?
The Jewish condition is always that of something from the past that has neither been absorbed nor annihilated by history.
DLR: I made a note recently, in a massive doc called “Goals for Art” that I’ve been keeping since I was a teenager, that said, “Writing is gambling with repression.” What I meant is that you have to be a somewhat repressed person to be a writer—you have to be conscious of tamping a lot down, and feeling it stewing in the center of your own earth—but then you also have to be cognizant of “unsealing” those tamped-down reserves when you’re writing. You hope that you can engender controlled chaos, blasting out these toxic chemicals onto the page in a way that, if successful, is doubly successful because it both relieves the toxic buildup in you and creates something dynamic and alive for the reader. If you fail at this, you either repress too much and become sickened with it (unproductively neurotic), or else you unseal too much and find that you can’t render what you’ve dredged up into a coherent piece.
AVY: You recently became a father. Like, a few weeks ago recently. To what degree are you able to feel parenthood beginning to work on the “humaneness,” as you call it, of your craft? What form do you feel your “gambling with repression” taking even at this early stage of balancing the artist’s life with Dad life?
DLR: I have indeed felt my recent fatherhood impacting my writing. The stakes in the gamble with repression are higher now, as the goal has to be to find a balance between my relation to my child and my relation to my work, hoping to mystically overcome the inevitable tension, on the level of hours in the day, between the two, to say nothing of the third axis of going out into the world to make a living.
Ideally, my developing relation with my daughter will enrich the ways in which I’m woven into the human fabric, while my relation with my writing will in turn continue to make me a more fulfilled and actualized person, which will make me a better father, even if it will also use up some of the time that I might otherwise spend with her.
It’s totally coincidental that The New House, my only book so far to deal with fatherhood on a literal level, came out the same summer my child was born, but it’s hard not to feel like the coincidence has deeper meaning. The book—written before we even considered having a child—is definitely a reflection on how not to be a father, though it’s also an examination of psychic inheritance in ways that aren’t all bad. It’s a story about how to grow up in the world, accepting that your parentage is what it is.
AVY:The father in The New House is uniquely terrible! In fact, as I was reading his sections in the novel, I kept thinking about how the book frames him, with self-awareness, as this “great man.” He subordinates his wife’s promising artistic career to his own endless tinkering and, in certain non-traditional ways, rules the house with an iron fist, but he also manages to cloak some of his more patriarchal tendencies with divinely inspired neuroticism and self-pity. I sensed a bit more modern purpose in how you frame the character and wondered to what extent you intended to push back against the “great man” trope ? How do ideas of Jewish patriarchy and masculinity present themselves and lend themselves for critique, today?
DLR: I’m so glad you brought this up, as it’s an aspect of the book that I thought a lot about but haven’t discussed before. It goes back to the idea of humanizing the surreal. I don’t want to write in a purely realist vein, but I also don’t want the figures or events in my books to feel weightless. I want there to be real terror and pathos, and to consider the unstable nature of masculinity in a serious way.
In 2022, the archetype of the Jewish man is doubly different than he was in the 1920s—he has both endured and caused unimaginable suffering to such a degree that he is irrevocably “in the world,” no longer ensconced in his own neuroses. Maybe this is the essence of our moment today, as Jewish writers: to look back at the last century and begin to see all this clearly, while, as Americans, also standing outside of it.
How permanently have we dodged the bullets that defined Jewish life in both Europe and Israel in the 20th century?
I wanted to play with the Americanness of the father’s self-pity as well, insofar as he’s the only one who experiences the direct impact of what he calls Nazism: the son is taunted by local bullies, but only in the father’s tales do Nazis continue to haunt America, leaving both mother and son to decide whether these warnings are true or if they’re yet another facet of the father’s egomania. This leads to the son’s own metaphysical flirtation with Nazism down the line, like an awful self-fulfilling prophecy.
In America in the 2020s, this feels like a salient question: how permanently have we dodged the bullets that defined Jewish life in both Europe and Israel in the twentieth century? On the one hand, I’ve never experienced direct anti-Semitism here, so it would be glib of me to refuse to give America credit for that. On the other hand, there’s an undeniably dark mood afoot—the question now is whether it will “blow over” or make contact in a more consequential form.
Overall, I’m interested in the question of what masculinity is today, and how (and if) it can continue to exist in a healthy fashion. This gets at the “Great Man” notion you mentioned, and the ways that Jakob and his father variously subscribe to and question it. Father and son represent opposite forms of Jewish masculinity here, but part of the work of the novel was to draw them together in the figure of the grandfather, since sons always realize, usually too late, how much like their fathers they really are.
AVY:Well, at the risk of spoiling anything, I will say that the “unstable nature of masculinity” certainly goes ass-off-the-rails in the book’s final moments! Yet The New House is also one of those novels whose ending felt like a beginning to me in many ways; there’s a sense of uncanny repetition and/or eternal return there, and throughout, that propels the reader’s imagination beyond the novel’s close, into new uncertain territory. Did you envision a future for Jakob beyond the story’s conclusion? Any plans to return to the world of The New House in a subsequent book?
DLR: I hadn’t thought about it, but I’d love to do a Jakob in the City novel that covers his years between where we’ve left him and where he “ends up,” even though, as you say, The New House has an uncanny repetition structure where the ending is already prefigured and in some ways surpassed at the beginning. I’d have to think about how to get the next round of time loops to function, but that would definitely be a worthwhile challenge.
I also want to write my first urban novel, as all my novels so far have taken place in small towns, with mythic reference to distant cities, as in “The Art World” here. I’d like to add a major city to the map on which I see all my books as being connected, so sending Jakob as a young man to make his way in that city would be the perfect occasion to do so.
“The Frozen Finger” by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
She opens her eyes.
Darkness. Pitch black. Like someone has dropped a thick veil of black over her eyes. Not even a pinpoint of light to be seen.
Has she gone blind?
She tries moving a hand in front of her face. There does seem to be a faint object there. But nothing she can clearly discern.
After a few more attempts at this, she gives up. The darkness is simply too dense.
What hour could be so dark? And where in the world . . .
She extends her arm and probes the space before her.
A round thing. Solid.
A steering wheel.
She slips her right hand behind the wheel. The ignition. Her keys are still in it. She turns them. No response. The engine is dead.
Her left hand prods the left side of the wheel. It grips something that feels like a hard stick. She pulls it down. The left-arrow on the dashboard should have lit up. No light to be seen. She pushes it down. Still no light. She feels her way to the tip of the lever and turns the headlight switch. And of course, the lights do not turn on.
What has happened?
She tries to remember. But her memories are as dark as the scene before her.
“—eacher.”
A woman’s voice, thin and frail. She looks up. The voice calls for her again.
“Teacher.”
Craning her head toward the voice, she strains her ears attempting to determine where it’s coming from. But the voice is so thin that its direction is unclear.
“Teacher Lee.”
“Yes?” she answers. She can’t make out where the voice is coming from, who is speaking—or whether the voice is in fact calling for her. But the sound of another person’s voice in the darkness is such a relief that she finds herself answering before she can stop herself.
“Are you there? Who are you? I’m over here!”
“Teacher Lee, are you all right?” The voice is coming from the left. “Teacher Lee, are you hurt?”
She tries moving her arms and legs. No pain anywhere in particular. “No.”
The thin voice, still coming from the left, says, “Then come out of the car, quickly.”
“Why? What happened? Where am I?”
“We’re in a swamp,” the thin voice patiently explains, “and the car is sinking, little by little. I think you better come out of there.”
She tries to get up. The safety belt presses down on her torso. Tracing the belt to her waist, she presses the release and the safety belt disengages. She turns to the left and gropes around for the door handle. There, the glass pane of the window. More prodding, downward.
“Teacher, you must hurry.”
The door handle. She pulls it. The door doesn’t move. She pushes it.
“Teacher Lee, hurry!”
“The door won’t open.”
She doesn’t know what to do.
The thin voice commands, “It’s locked from the inside. You must unlock it.”
Feeling around the door handle again, she can feel the protrusions of buttons; she presses them, one by one. At the third button, she hears a clunk. The brief vibration felt through the door is as welcome as the Savior Himself.
She pulls at the door handle again. The door seems to open little by little. But it’s blocked by something.
“The door won’t open,” she says, pushing it with her shoulder.
From right beside her, the thin voice says, “That’s because the car is lodged in mud. Let me help you.”
Someone’s finger brushes against her hand that’s pushing the door. The door opens a little more.
“Quickly. Get out of there,” says the thin voice.
Doing as the voice commands, she brings her left leg out of the car first before suddenly remembering something.
“Wait . . . wait a second.”
She crouches down in the seat and starts to grope around beneath the steering wheel. The long thing on the right is the accelerator, the wide thing on the left is the brake. She stretches her right hand into the space below the pedals. She can feel the scratchy mat and the mud smeared on it. Of the thing she is searching for, nothing.
“What are you doing? You must get out of there immediately!” The thin voice is getting anxious.
“Just wait . . .”
Extending her hand even further beneath the seat, she feels a long, thin steel rod. It’s probably the lever that adjusts the driver’s seat, moving it back and forth. She feels underneath it. Again, just the mat and mud, plus a little dust.
She can feel her left leg, the one that made it outside the car, slowly start to rise. The car door begins to close with it, putting pressure on her left leg.
The voice shouts, “Teacher Lee, hurry! I don’t know what you’re looking for, but just leave it and come out!”
“But . . . but . . .” She can’t bring herself to say it.
“But what? What is it?”
“Something very important . . .” Her voice trails off.
She touches her left hand with her right. There’s no ring on her left ring finger. Her hands feel about the driver’s seat where she’s sitting, then the passenger side.
“What could be so important? What is it?” the thin voice asks again.
Her left hand grabbing the frame of the car, she stretches her right arm as far as she can to beneath the passenger-side seat.
“A ring . . .”
Her hand can’t reach as far as the other seat; all she can grasp are the gearshift and handbrake. She manages to stretch her arm a little further. There’s no one in the passenger-side seat. Perhaps because of her odd posture, her hand can’t quite reach the bottom of the other seat.
The finger from before touches her left hand again.
“This. Is this what you’re talking about?”
A small, round, and hard object against her skin. Someone’s fingers slip it onto the ring finger of her left hand.
She sits up and touches her left hand with her right. It’s still impossible to see, but the smooth touch and the slightly uncomfortable thickness pressing against her fingers feels familiar.
“Is this it?” asks the thin voice.
“Yes. How did you—”
“This is it, right? Come out, quick. It’s dangerous,” says the thin voice urgently.
With her right hand, she pushes the slowly closing door. She barely manages to squeeze the left side of her body out the door.
“Be careful,” warns the thin voice. “The ground outside isn’t solid.”
Her left foot lands on the ground with a plop. She shoves the car door with her left hand and the car frame with her right, slowly getting out of the car.
With every step, her feet sink into the ground. It’s hard to keep her balance. Just as she’s about to stumble, the frozen fingers grab onto her left hand.
“Be careful. One step at a time, slowly.”
Doing as the voice instructs, she takes one tentative step at a time, moving further and further away from the car.
Suddenly, she stops.
“What’s wrong?” asks the voice. “Did you . . . hear something?”
“Hear what?” the voice asks again.
“Someone . . . I thought there was someone there.”
The thin voice is silent, as if pausing to listen. Then, it says,
“You’re mistaken. There’s only the two of us here.”
She listens again.
The sound is vague. Somewhat far away in the distance, or right by her ear, something like a human voice, or the wind . . .
The sound withers into silence.
“I’m so sure there was someone there—”
“There’s no one here except us,” the voice says adamantly. “If you think you heard something, it might have been wild animals.” The fingers gripping her left hand give a squeeze. “I think . . . we should run away from here.” The voice sounds afraid.
Fear seeps from her fingers through her hand, moving up her arm and into her heart.
Fear seeps from her fingers through her hand, moving up her arm and into her heart.
Wordlessly, she begins to walk.
Her feet occasionally sink into the unstable ground, almost making her fall. Whenever that happens, the fingers, gripping her left hand so hard that it hurts, hold her steady and help her find her balance.
There is no way of knowing where they are going. Nor of determining where they are. But the thin voice sounds as frightened as she feels, and the fingers that grasp her left hand feel dependable. And so, she decides to believe in the voice and fingers as they walk together over the pitch-black ground into which their feet sink, going further into the unknown.
“Ah, here we go,” the voice says, reassured. “The ground is firmer here.”
That moment, her left foot lands on firm ground. Then, her right.
“It’s so much easier to walk,” says the voice, delighted.
“Shall we rest a bit?” she suggests. Walking endlessly through mud into which her feet keep sinking was exhausting for both the body and soul.
Without waiting for an answer, she sits down on the road. The owner of the thin voice sits down next to her. She can’t see her, but she can sense her sitting down.
“That ring. It must be very important?” the thin voice asks carefully.
She fondles the round, hard, and smooth object on the ring finger of her left hand.
“Well . . . yes.”
The thin voice asks again, still careful. “Is it . . . really that important?”
“Well . . . I mean . . .”
Her hand keeps touching the ring finger.
A large, warm hand, memories of that hand wrapped around her own, a familiar face she was always glad to see, such pleasure, such happiness . . . Something like that. An important, precious something, like . . .
But the more she tries to recall these memories the fainter they become, and like the last rays of the setting sun, they disappear leaving just a trace of their warmth behind. The only thing left in her mind is that which has ruled her and surrounded her since the moment she opened her eyes: the darkness.
As she keeps silent, the thin voice apologizes.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry—”
“Oh . . . it’s fine.”
She is beginning to feel like something is wrong.
“I just . . . I can’t remember . . . My mind is so dark—”
“Oh no. Are you hurt?” The thin voice sounds worried.
“But . . . I’m not sick at all.”
“Let me see.”
She can feel the fingers touch her forehead and scalp.
“Does this hurt?” asks the thin voice.
“No.”
The fingers tap her temples. “What about here?”
“It’s fine—”
“Oh no . . .” The voice sighs lightly. “We should get out of here quick and go to a hospital as soon as possible.”
She touches her own head and face. There doesn’t seem to be any wounds, and she doesn’t feel any bleeding. There is only the darkness that permeates her mind.
“Um . . . excuse me,” she says after touching her face and head for a bit. “Where . . . where are we? What happened to us?”
“Oh my, you don’t remember?” The voice seems surprised.
“Not a thing,” she answers listlessly.
“We went to Teacher Choi and her new husband’s housewarming party and got into an accident on the way back . . . You really don’t remember?”
“No.”
Nothing, she remembers nothing. She turns the inside of her head upside down, looking for something. All she finds is darkness and yet more darkness.
“Uh, Teacher . . .” The thin voice sounds uncertain. “Then you . . . you don’t remember who I am, do you?”
She hesitates. She wants to cry. “I don’t.”
“Oh my, what are we to do . . .” The thin voice becomes even thinner, as if sapped of strength. “I’m Teacher Kim . . . in the class next to yours, Grade 6 Class 2 . . . You don’t remember?”
“I’m not sure.” So “Teacher” meant elementary school teacher, she thinks to herself.
The thin voice becomes urgent. “Teacher Choi, she taught Grade 5 with us, and then quit after getting married . . . She followed her husband out of Seoul. You were invited to their housewarming, so you came along. . . You really don’t remember?”
“I don’t know.”
“This really is serious.” The fingers touch her left hand again. Like before, their grip is firm. “We should get up.”
“What?” She is up on her feet before she knows it.
The thin voice is adamant. “Teacher Lee, I think your injuries are more serious than we realize. We shouldn’t waste any more time—we should get up and find a hospital.”
“Oh.”
“Are you very tired?”
“What? Oh, no, not—”
“Then let’s go.” The fingers gently tug at her left hand.
She begins to follow.
As she walks, she asks, “So, how did we get into this accident?”
The thin voice sighs. “I don’t know either . . . I drank too much, which is why you were driving.”
“Oh.” Her guilt blocks her words for a while. After a pause, she asks again. “Then that . . . that car. Is it yours, Teacher Kim?”
The voice doesn’t answer.
Feeling rebuffed, she stops asking questions.
But after walking in silence for a moment, she can’t help asking again. “Where . . . where can we be, do you think?”
“Well . . .” The voice seems reluctant to answer.
She persists. “Teacher Choi’s house, where is it exactly? Is it close to here?”
“Well, the thing is, I don’t know either . . . I fell asleep as soon as we left . . .” The voice’s answer trails off.
She thinks a bit more.
She asks, “Do you happen to have a phone?”
The voice does not answer for a moment. Then, “A phone? No. Do you have one, Teacher Lee?”
“I don’t either.”
The voice asks, “Did you not look for it when you were searching for your ring?”
Sensing a shade of reproach, she answers, “There was nothing in the front seats . . . What about the back?”
“It was too dark to look. It could’ve flown out the window.” But the voice seems uncertain.
The conversation stops again.
She has no idea how long they’ve been walking since leaving the car behind. All around them, it is still complete darkness. No risen moon, no stars. How long do we have to wait until daybreak, she wonders.
“Where . . . where exactly are we going?” she tentatively asks.
The voice doesn’t answer.
She asks again. “Do you. . . do you even know where we’re headed?”
For a moment, the voice doesn’t speak. Then, instead of answering her question: “Teacher Choi, I feel sorry for her.”
“Excuse me?” She’s taken aback.
The thin voice mumbles as if it isn’t meant for her to hear. “So happy when she got married, like the whole world belonged to her, but then divorced within a year, quitting her job at the school . . .”
She waits. But the voice does not continue.
So she asks again. “Um . . . what are you talking about?”
The thin voice mumbles again. “It’s not her fault that her husband had an affair . . . Don’t you think it’s unfair? They say a teacher must always set an example, but she’s a woman, after all. A divorced woman, at that . . .”
“What are you talking about . . . Didn’t you just say Teacher Choi was a newlywed?”
The thin voice laughed a thin laugh. “I suppose she is, if it was only a year ago she got married—”
“But, just now, you said Teacher Choi just got married, we were at their housewarming party . . .”
“Oh Teacher Lee, you must’ve hit your head rather hard.” Patiently, the thin voice explains. “Teacher Choi got divorced, went alone down to the countryside, and we were visiting her in her new room, as both a housewarming and consolation. . .”
After a moment of silence, the thin voice starts mumbling again. “Living alone turned her into such a lush, all that drinking she did . . .”
She is flummoxed. “But, but—”
“You really don’t remember anything?” says the thin voice. Then, muttering, “Oh my goodness, we really ought to take you to the hospital, quick.”
The words make her shut her mouth.
There are no more words as they keep on walking.
She stares at the sky as she walks. It is so dark that she has no idea whether what she is looking at is, indeed, the sky. She thinks of how she has never known such a darkness before in her life. If she has indeed been in a car crash, that would mean she’d been on a road, but how can there not be a single streetlamp?
Where is she? And where is she walking to?
“Teacher Choi, such a shame . . .” The thin voice, walking in front of her, is speaking again.
She doesn’t answer.
“Her mother, she kept crying . . . She was so young, and to die so horrifically—”
Interrupting sharply, “What are you talking about?”
The thin voice sighs. “You saw it, too, Teacher Lee, at the funeral . . . Oh, right, you said you don’t remember.”
Hearing a mocking tone at the trailing end of the voice’s reply, she fiercely counters with, “Why are you talking about a funeral? You said it was a housewarming, earlier—”
“You really must have hit your head hard.” The thin voice tsk-tsked. “I understand if you like someone for a long time, but to kill yourself over a crush . . . So young at that, the poor family—”
“Didn’t you. . . didn’t you say Teacher Choi was married?” she says, forcing her trembling voice to sound firm. “That her husband had an affair, that she got divorced . . . Isn’t that what you said?”
The thin voice lets out a thin breath.
“Whew . . . What on earth are you going on about . . . You should know better by now.”
“But you said so earlier. You said it was Teacher Choi’s housewarming as a newlywed, then it was her room . . . You said she was married, then she was divorced . . .”
“Teacher Lee, you’re talking in circles. Does your head hurt a lot?”
She shuts her mouth.
“Teacher Choi . . . such a pathetic tale, don’t you think?” mumbles the thin voice after a pause. “Even with those rose-colored glasses of hers, you would think she’d seen how blatantly her man was getting it on with the teacher in the next class. The whole school knew about it, but she was really stubborn in her denial . . . Then when that other woman stole her man, she quit teaching and kicked up that whole fuss about killing herself . . .” The thin voice briefly pauses.
She waits.
“Then she really killed herself . . .”
She can’t tell whether the thin voice is suppressing a sob or a laugh.
She feels a sharp pain as the brief but intense trust she felt for the thin voice is torn in two. Fear digs into her heart. Carefully, she steps aside a little to the right. The thin voice from her left keeps mumbling as if she isn’t there.
“Life, really, is so unfair. Everyone is born the same way, but some steal husbands, others are sucked dry and spat out like used chewing gum . . .” She doesn’t answer.
The thin voice keeps talking. “Isn’t it funny? Two people are in the same car accident, but one lives to tell the tale, the other dies on the spot—”
“You. Who are you?” She cannot suppress the shaking in her voice anymore.
The thin voice casually goes on. “Don’t you think it’s so unfair? Alone when alive, and still alone when dead.”
“Where is this place?” she shrieks. “What’s happened to me?!”
The thin voice on her left gives a thin cackle. “People, you know, they’re so funny. Don’t you think? Just because they’re afraid, they go about trusting in any old voice they hear around them, even when they can’t see for the life of them.”
“What are you?” She is shouting now. “Wh-where is this? Where are you taking me?”
The thin voice continues to cackle. “Following a strange voice around in a strange place, just because it pretends to be kind . . .”
She cannot stand it anymore. She begins to run.
The voice keeps cackling behind her and mumbling. “She doesn’t even know who she is, or where she’s going . . .”
She runs. She doesn’t know where she’s going but feels some relief at how the voice seems to be getting farther away, and so she keeps blindly running.
She runs. She doesn’t know where she’s going but feels some relief at how the voice seems to be getting farther away, and so she keeps blindly running.
The ground beneath her feet suddenly caves in. She stumbles momentarily. After a bit of flailing she rights herself, and a bright light suddenly fills her vision. Her eyes, so used to the dark, lose all their function in the sudden glare. She freezes in the flood of light.
For a brief second, she sees clearly straight ahead—her own self sitting in a car that’s lost control, barreling toward her, her expression frozen in fear, her hands ineffectually grasping the steering wheel where a third set of five fingers, mockingly casual, are holding the wheel between her two hands.
Then, darkness again.
“—eacher.”
A woman’s voice, thin and frail. She opens her eyes. The voice calls for her again.
“Teacher.”
It’s the voice again. She tries to turn her head to the direction the voice is coming from. Her neck, however, doesn’t move.
“Teacher Lee.”
Before she can speak, a familiar voice answers.
“Yes?”
Hearing her own voice answer the thin voice, she feels like her whole body is convulsing underneath the car. But her body doesn’t move. A slimy mud, or something that is like mud but nothing she can ever know for sure, is making its sticky, stubborn, and ominous way over her ankles to her knees, thighs, stomach, slowly but ceaselessly crawling up the rest of her body.
She can hear conversation from afar.
“Are you there? Who are you? I’m over here!”
“Teacher Lee, are you all right?”
She tries with all of her might. Her right arm is pinned down beneath a wheel. She just about manages to free her left hand. It grips the bumper. Trying to pull herself from underneath the car, she puts all her strength into her left arm.
Suddenly, cold fingers touch her left hand. She makes a fist. But it’s too late. The cold fingers have wrested the round, hard, and smooth ring from her hand.
“No . . .” She tries to shout it. But her voice has crawled down her throat.
The thin voice whispers into her ear, “You’ve been hurt badly, you really shouldn’t move. Tea. Cher. Lee.” It cackles softly as it moves away from her ear.
She feels slight vibrations from the car that covers her. “Be careful. One step at a time, slowly.” It’s the thin voice, from a distance.
She opens her mouth. With all her strength, with all the fear and rage and despair pooled in her heart, she screams.
“What’s wrong?” she can hear the voice ask. “Did you . . . hear something?”
“Hear what?” the voice asks again.
“Someone . . . I thought there was someone there . . .”
She can just about hear heavy footsteps coming down on soft ground. The conversation becomes more and more distant.
The car sinks. She hears the sound of bones breaking somewhere in her body. Strangely enough, the sound makes her realize she no longer feels pain.
All she can feel is the enormous weight of the car as it drags her down into the unknown abyss.
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