Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers, which will be published by BOA Editions on April 8, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with. In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.
Here is the cover, designed by Sandy Knight, art by Vivian Greven:
Author Keetje Kuipers: “If you’ve ever had sex in front of a mirror, you know that the sex you’re having in your mind is often not the sex you find yourself having in your reflection. The wet mouths, the quiver of flesh—sometimes it’s less sexy than you thought, and sometimes it’s actually a whole lot hotter. Locating the equivalence between the inside and the outside can be a gymnastics of the mind (not just of the sweaty body), and book covers can work the same way: what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside are very much in the eye of the beholder.
My new collection of poems, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, is, for me, a deeply sexy book. And while it deals in plenty of themes that wander far beyond the bounds of the bedroom—including forgiveness, humility, and grief—more than anything else it is an embodied book. So I wanted an embodied cover to go with it, something female-forward, sensual without being clichéd, sexy without being porn.
But finding a piece of art that felt both embodied and also subversive, playful, and empowered quickly revealed itself to be an impossible task. Every image I found either objectified the bodies it contained or attempted to undercut their sensuality with violence. There were cherries popping from full lips, bondage scenes, and what looked like nude robots wearing stilettos—it was essentially a collection of all the tropes I had tried to craft my poems to push against.
Luckily, a friend pointed me towards a series of paintings by the German artist Vivian Greven, whose Greco-Roman sculpture-influenced work is often rendered with the crispness of a photograph and the electricity level of a live power line. As described on her website, Greven’s paintings ‘transcend traditional depictions of intimacy by capturing the vulnerability of metamorphosis.’ Whether writing about death, love, shame, or sex, this excavation of vulnerability—and its ability to change us—is always what I hope my poems are working towards.
And part of the vulnerability of metamorphosis is in the question of what we’re willing to reveal in that moment of change—both to others and to ourselves. As I write in the book, ‘I hadn’t yet / learned the difference between a shadow cast / in the shape of my desire and the contract a body / makes with its own hunger.’ BOA book designer Sandy Knight got this instantly, and designed a cover around Greven’s ‘) ( XI’ that balances the earthy embodiment present in my poems with the simultaneous neon glow of self-revelation. The completed cover for Lonely Women Make Good Lovers honors how difficult it is to reconcile how we see ourselves inside and outside, and to not only feel but allow ourselves to witness the shudder of one body’s need pressed up against another’s.”
When the ominous appears in fiction, it increases anticipation and deepens empathy. As readers watch a character struggle with a feeling of unease caused by people or events, it offers them the pleasure of intimacy. Like the character, they have, in their own lives, questioned if something that urges wariness is real or imagined. As the matter is resolved for the character, the reader will feel catharsis.
Sometimes readers meet unease in the opening chapters, and sometimes it appears throughout, never lessening until a final, breathtaking finish as in the three stories on my list, ‘Audition,” “Solo Works for Piano,” and “Bartow Station.” But regardless of how often or where unease descends, it’s a powerful magnet for readers who come to fiction not only for the enjoyment a well-made story or novel provides, but to find company in the loneliness caused by a troubling darkness in their own lives.
In my novel, The Causative Factor, the ominous makes its appearance in the first chapters. Rachel and Rubiat meet at art school and become inseparable, both surprised by their intense mutual passion. That passion is soon tested, however, when Rubiat gives in to a reckless, self-destructive impulse that sets him adrift and unaccounted for. Rachel manages to resume her life and her studies, but she’s uncertain whether he’s alive or dead. As she looks back at that day in the park when Rubiat disappeared, she feels deep disquiet and with hindsight, everything seems ominous.
That feeling of foreboding is different from heart-pounding fright; it’s more subtle, softly buzzing underneath action and dialogue, always changing but never diminishing entirely. Its lack of visibility is what makes it potent. Readers have only clues and hints, and because it’s secretive and mostly hidden, shame is often a part of it. In this way, the eight titles below will deliver foreboding, but not fear.
In this novel about caretaking relationships and the making of art, the source of unease is the fledgling friendship between Jean, a retired office worker who spends her time welding metal sculptures in her living room, and Elliot, the 19-year-old unemployed kid next door who helps her with the physically demanding tasks her art requires. Elliot is always on the verge of sliding back into his old life with a shiftless crowd of users and trouble-makers while Jean negotiates her own risky desires, sometimes managing to alienate her new friend and sometimes managing to give him exactly what he needs, but always walking a tightrope through his unpredictable moods.
Most of the action in this novel takes place in a large and successful Chinese restaurant in a small midwestern city where Leo Chao, owner and employer, maintains a tense environment, verbally abusing family and staff. The ominous is evoked not only by this tyrannical father and employer but also, and more dramatically, by an outdated freezer room in the basement of the restaurant. Bribes have allowed it to pass inspection, and the reader learns in the beginning of the novel that its major defect is a door that tends to lock the unsuspecting inside. That is why a key is always kept on an interior shelf. When tensions escalate and emotions run high, the reader suspects the freezer will become a weapon.
In the way that Hitchcock made those gentle, feathered creatures that sing to us from tree tops ominous, Goldbloom does the same for a married woman’s pregnancy. Surie is a fifty-seven-year-old Chassidic mother and grandmother when she discovers she’s pregnant. In her religious tradition, it is shameful for a couple their age to have intercourse, so Surie, who is a large woman already, hides the pregnancy under roomy dresses and tells no one, not even the husband she loves. But as the clock ticks and the fetus develops, Surie conflates the loss of her gay son who left their community and committed suicide, with the baby growing inside her. Soon the pregnancy will be visible to all and though she yearns to share her feelings, her husband refuses any mention of their lost child.
The Book of Lost Light by Ron Nyren
This is a novel about a son’s struggle to gain independence from his widowed father. Arthur Kylander is a photographer and like his mentor, Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer famous for revealing the secrets of animals in motion, he has a similar project: to reveal the movement of time. The narrator tells us how it works in the novel’s first sentence: “From the time I was three months old until I was nearly fifteen, my father photographed me every afternoon at precisely three o’clock.” It is an unusual kind of possessiveness and as the narrator ages, the routine becomes more and more troubling. But Joseph can’t stop it, because mixed in with his desire to escape, there is also a son’s unwillingness to destroy his father’s lifelong project.
Schwartz’s novel centers on a long married, middle-aged couple, Reuben and Ardith. When Ardith has an affair with the town’s beloved doctor who is also a family friend, the stability of their lives is threatened. In this novel, the ominous makes its appearance in the peacefulness of the doctor’s finished and orderly house. Compared to the house Ardith lives in with Ruben and their two sons, its lack of chaos is seductive. Arden and Ruben are in the midst of a renovation they will never have the money or time to complete, so tools, stacks of wood, and ladders furnish their living spaces. Could the doctor’s house alone threaten the love Ardith has for her husband and family?
“Audition” in American Short Fiction 23.72 by Denne Michele Norris
I read “Audition” in 2020 and it has stayed with me. Here the ominous saturates the point of view. The reader is placed in the mind of the Reverend Doctor Preston McKinsey, a widowed man who lives with his teenage son, Davis, a boy he no longer can abide after the Reverend finds him having sex with another boy in their pergola. He tries to throw his son out of the house, but Davis refuses to leave and under the shadow of the Reverend’s biblically inspired judgment, they continue to coexist in a state of mutual disrespect. The tension grows until they arrive in New York for Davis’s audition at a prestigious music school and it doesn’t break until an event on a subway platform changes everything.
“Bartow Station” is from Witness, the most recent collection of short fiction by Jamel Brinkley. We meet the narrator in the locker room on his first day driving for U.P.S.. As he gets ready, a fellow driver tells him he should get himself better shoes or his feet will suffer. But the shoes he wears have a sentimental value that seems to be wrapped up with the narrator’s deceased cousin, Troy. The reader understands, from the first time the name is dropped, that Troy haunts everything the narrator does and as our curiosity about what happened builds, so does our foreboding.
“Solo Works for Piano” is one of eight stories about Korean Americans living in the United States. Albert Uhm seemed to have a brilliant musical career before him, yet rather than traveling the world as a great classical pianist, he has ended up teaching at Hofstra University on Long Island. Sasha, another former student from Albert’s class, has given piano up entirely to devote herself to the project of raising her daughter, a young but entirely undisciplined musical prodigy. This wild child not only has disrupted Sasha’s life, but as soon as she sits down at Albert’s piano, we realize that the delicate equilibriums of Arthur’s carefully maintained existence will collapse in the tornado of this mother and child.
It is perfectly understandable that many people would feel trepidation about having a writer in the family. What private foibles and peccadilloes might be used to define a fictional protagonist; which family secrets will be revealed in a memoir?
Novelist Kristopher Jansma’s grandmother, a survivor of the Hunger Winter of 1944, had a different attitude, hoping that her talented progeny might one day tell her story and bring attention to an under-studied area in WWII history: the Nazis’ occupation of Holland, and the famine their blockade caused during the final year of the war.
Her aspirations were realized this summer with the publication of Jansma’s fourth novel, Our Narrow Hiding Places, which, according to the author, is based directly on his grandmother’s experiences growing up in Holland during the war. As a work of fiction, though, there is room for narrative embellishment and elements of magical realism. The sections set in the ‘40s are framed by chapters in the present-day, in which Will Geborn (a stand-in of sorts for Jansma) confronts his own sense of self while listening to the stories his grandmother, Mieke, tells him.
History buffs will come to Hiding Places for the beautifully detailed sections set in the past, but the novel’s central subject—the genetic, cultural, and emotional inheritance from Will’s ancestors—lies within the novel’s back-and-forth structure, and enriches what could otherwise have been a mere history lesson.
Sating the appetites of his most ardent fans, Jansma now brings forth yet another book, his first essay collection, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers. The pieces in this book—which should prove of interest to anyone curious about the creative processes of canonical novelists—serve as pep talks aimed at young writers intimidated by the inimitable genius of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, and others. By analyzing their unpublished or unfinished works, Jansma demythologizes these giants of literature without diminishing their greatness. He shows how, through the input and assistance of spouses and editors, rigorous revision, and repeated failure and rejection, they created the works they’re rightly known for today.
I met Jansma during his stint teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, and caught up with him near the beginning of his book tour for Hiding Places. We talked via video call about how his real family history informed his novel, his research into Dutch culture and folklore, and his column about unfinished business.
Seth Katz: A couple of years ago you published an essay in Tablet discussing your conversion to Judaism, whether that made you a “Jewish Writer,” and what that was supposed to mean in the first place. At one point, you say it felt odd, as a previously non-religious person, to convert from “nothing” to “something.” In Our Narrow Hiding Places, Will thinks of his Dutch ancestry as, likewise, “nothing.” Was part of your work in writing this book to find out what it means, also, to be a Dutch writer?
Kristopher Jansma: Yeah, absolutely. I love that connection. Will gave me a chance to voice some of the things that I had always felt about being Dutch growing up, which never meant a whole lot to me. I had an awareness—not of it being “nothing,” but of it not being the same as what it meant to other people I knew to have the heritages that they had. Italian friends would invite me over for the feast of the Seven Fishes, and I had a Jewish friend when I was young who invited me to a Passover seder. I had this constant feeling growing up that other people have these cultural things that they get to turn to when things are hard or when they’re looking for meaning in life, and I just didn’t really have that.
I started working on this book early in 2020 during Covid, and that was also when I decided that I wanted to convert to Judaism. At the same time, I was talking with my grandmother about our Dutch past and trying to connect with what she had to share. And interestingly, when I first met my wife, Leah, who is Jewish, my grandmother mentioned offhandedly that we have Jewish relatives from generations ago. I finally got a chance in this process to dig through some of her files. She has a family tree that goes back to the 1600s, and we do have a Jewish relative named Jacob DeWitt, who emigrated. I think the story is that he fled Portugal during the Inquisition and came to Holland, which was a fairly common thing at the time, as Holland was one of the few places that would accept Jews. And so, it seems as if it died off there; he either stopped practicing or converted, or something else. But during my conversion process, I had to pick a Hebrew name to use, and I went with Jacob, in honor of my ancestor. Jacob was also the name of the Jewish character in my second novel, Why We Came to the City.
SK: One way that you explore Dutch culture in the novel is through folktales. When did you start exposing yourself to Dutch folktales and how did your interest in folklore inform your vision for the novel?
KJ: I went looking for it because I knew that might be a way to connect to something further back. And when I teach magical realism in my classes, often we’ll talk about how some of the elements that seem magical to us may be more familiar in the culture where the stories are coming from because they’re drawing from myths or legends or folklore. So I started looking around for these older Dutch folktales and found a collection online, and then later I was able to find an actual book of them. And they’re wonderful. One that comes up in the book a couple times is a story about a boarwith fiery tusks that inadvertently shows the early Dutch citizens how to plow the land for farming purposes. The tusks leave these giant ruts in the ground, and then things start growing from the mounds of earth, and this becomes the key to an agricultural society. I just loved that idea. So I started reading them all and pulling little bits out that I wanted to reference in the story. I did ask my grandmother about it eventually, and she said, “Oh, I’d never read any of these,” and she said she grew up on Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. By the time she was growing up those had taken over.
SK: With this being your fourth published novel, are you able to look back and see any connective tissue in all of your work? It seems to me that there is almost always an element of storytelling built into each novel. In this case, you have Mieke telling her grandson stories about her childhood under Nazi occupation. At first these sections seem to be flashbacks, but eventually it becomes clear that she’s narrating these episodes to Will. And of course, eventually, we learn who authored the eely folktales.
It’s always a question for me when I’m reading: who’s telling this story? Why is it being told to me?
KJ: I think that’s probably the biggest through-line between all the things I’ve written. When I went to the Johns Hopkins writing workshop, it was steeped in a postmodern ethos. The program was founded by John Barth, and one of my professors was Stephen Dixon. With one of my earliest workshop professors, actually—this was at a summer program at Brown—we looked a lot at stories within stories and things like that. It’s always a question for me when I’m reading: who’s telling this story? Why is it being told to me? If there’s a narrator, are they trying to confess something, or are they trying to be forgiven for something? If it’s written in the third person, where is it supposed to have come from? Those are big questions that I always have as a reader, so they find their way into what I’m writing.
But this one was really different for me in a way. All three of the other books are really about friendships, or people finding family among friends. I’d never written something about an actual family, and this is very much about someone grappling with who their family is and what they’ve inherited from them. Some of that comes from my own discomfort in writing about specific people in my life. If I’m writing a story and there’s a mother in the story, people are always going to look at that and think that’s my mother, right? I always have reservations about writing about people without their permission. Other writers don’t seem to have this problem. But in this case, I felt really good about it because I knew my grandmother wanted me to write this story about her. And then the other members of the family that come up in the intermediate generation are very different from my parents. When I gave them the book, I was worried that they were going to be upset about it, and I was relieved when I heard back from them that they liked it.
SK: That’s actually a great segue, because I wanted to ask you about something that you mentioned at the book launch in Brooklyn last August. You said that you visited the Netherlands with your grandmother while you were working on the book. That must have been an extraordinary experience.
KJ: I wanted to go there from the start, but because of Covid, I had to keep putting it off. Every time I thought that I had a window where I could travel, Covid cases would tick up again. The situation in Europe was shifting all the time. Holland was in a lockdown phase for much longer than we were here. And then finally, by 2022, about two years after I started writing the book, the manuscript was mostly finished. I was thinking to myself, well, maybe I don’t really need to go. I managed to get a lot through research. And I’d been to The Hague before, a couple of times, and remembered it pretty well, and I felt like the descriptions had come through.
But then I decided I’d fly out there, spend a week, visit a couple of museums, and I wanted to walk around in The Hague and go to some of the places that my grandmother had described. When I called my grandmother to let her know that I was going, she got very quiet, and she was like, “Oh, good for you.” And then a couple days later, I got a call from my mother: “Oma bought a ticket. She’s going to go.” It had never occurred to me that, at 85 years old, she would want to hop on a plane during Covid when she was as nervous as anybody about just leaving the house to go to the grocery store. But she wanted to go and be part of it.
So I met her in The Hague. She stayed with a childhood friend of hers there, and the two of us drove down to the apartment building where her family had lived during the war. We stood in front of the building and she told me all about it. If I hadn’t stopped her, she probably would have just started buzzing until somebody let her in. She was quite emotional to be back there again, and memories started coming back to her while we stood there that she hadn’t described to me before. She pointed to a specific window in front to show me which apartment was hers. And then she pointed to some places where the brick still had little chips in it, and she said that was from when she was by the window one day and saw a soldier on the other side of the street. She waved to him, and he just lifted his gun up and started shooting. We had talked at that point for weeks and weeks over the phone, and I’d never heard that story before.
SK: And that’s in the book! One of the most horrifying moments.
KJ: Yeah, I was able to then go back and revise some things, and I added a bunch of other details that I found while I was there. But I was able to put that scene into that section of the novel because I just couldn’t believe it.
SK: Now that we’ve discussed the genesis of your novel, let’s talk about Revisionaries—which, with its focus on the writing process and inclusion of writing prompts for the reader, is very much aimed at young writers. Is there one of these chapters that speaks most to your own insecurities as a writer? Whom do you relate to most here?
KJ: I started writing these as columns for Electric Literature called “Unfinished Business.” I was actually having lunch with former EL editor Michael Seidlinger, at one point, and I was telling him I had always wanted to teach a class where all we would read were unfinished works. And he suggested that I write these columns about them instead. But I never lost the idea that there was something instructive about these books—there’s some reason why I, as a writer, keep going back to them. Eventually I was able to figure out what that was. Looking at the unfinished or lost work of these writers shows us their mere-mortal nature.
The first one in the book is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and that may be the closest to my fears as a writer. In high school, I loved The Great Gatsby, thought it was a perfect novel. I tell the story in the book about being in college and sneaking into this graduate class on Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, and reading Gatsby again and being more impressed than ever at how perfect it was. But then, reading Tender Is the Night, which I hadn’t read before, I was even more blown away. The deeper I got into it, the more depressed I got, because now I was appreciating how good these books are on a level that I hadn’t been able to before. When I was first reading them, I had this feeling that I could write something like that. Right? Maybe. And I think this happens to a lot of us: the deeper our appreciation grows for the writers we love, the more inhuman and immortal they become in our minds. We start realizing, well, I just can’t ever live up to that.
And then we read The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was the final book that we were going to read for Fitzgerald. It’s not finished, but even the parts that are there are terrible. I was really stunned coming off of Tender is the Night. Reading those hundred some-odd pages of this book, I was like… this is kind of awful. The main character’s name is really corny, the writing’s not great, there are weird errors in here. I was really sad about that at the time because I thought this was what alcoholism and depression did to Fitzgerald: he lost his talent. But then as I looked into it more deeply—I write about this in the chapter—I realized actually that he was coming out of all that and regaining his abilities, and he was working really hard for the first time in a while and staying sober. He was keeping himself on task and relentlessly plotting the whole thing out. It’s just that he died before he got to make it really good.
When you look closely at his other books, you see that they also went through these early stages where they were pretty bad. And he had a lot of help from both Zelda and then later his editors—they were the ones who really pushed him to turn them into these amazing books. And so that was what I suddenly realized: it’s not just this one genius figure who creates a flawless book out of nothing. There’s a process that you go through where it starts off bad, and then it gets better and better and better. Fitzgerald was a relentless reviser, which I had never known before. And none of that jibes with the myths around Fitzgerald as this freewheeling, heavy-drinking party guy in the Jazz Age. And that’s okay. But I do want people, particularly writers, to know that. He was that guy, but he also banged out short stories to pay the rent and would revise things within an inch of their life. He had these insane outlines, giant charts with multiple layers going through all the themes and every character and exactly what happens in each part of the book. All that hard work that you don’t ever get to see on the other end.
SK: One theme that comes up repeatedly in these pieces is the contributions of editors, collaborators, and other people in a writer’s life. That comes up for Kafka and Woolf, as well as Fitzgerald, as you were just saying
KJ: Fitzgerald never knew how to punctuate dialogue. His own editor says that in the notes at the beginning of The Last Tycoon. It’s the mistake I correct on all my freshmen’s papers. Like, where does the comma go? And now you’re able to go to Princeton and see Fitzgerald’s typed drafts, and you can see all the little mistakes and stuff like that that he’s making everywhere. He forgets how to spell the name of one of the characters in the book.
SK: Which of these unfinished works do you think holds up the best as it stands, and which one do you most wish had been brought to completion?
KJ: Let me start with the second part, the book that I think could have been great. I’m a little torn between Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote, but I’ll go with Capote’s Answered Prayers. Some parts of it got published while he was still alive, and publishing those little excerpts may have ruined everything, because the people he was writing about started to shun him from society when they realized they were in his book. That worsened his spiral of despair. But what I love about Truman’s story is that he couldn’t admit that he was giving up on the project, even though I think he knew it was over. He would continue to pretend that he was writing it, and apparently would show up at parties with a manuscript that was like 10 or 12 printed pages of an excerpt from one of the stories that was finished, and then a whole bunch of blank pages. And he would even give readings from it, but he would either just be reading pieces that were finished or making things up on the spot. No one actually knows how much more of it he ever wrote because there are no copies that still exist. He claimed that he left it in a locker in the Greyhound station in Los Angeles and never went back for it. And there’s still a piece of me that wishes somebody would find it, even though I think that building has been destroyed.
I think The Pale King by David Foster Wallace is one I enjoyed reading the most, because there is so much to that novel that even though it doesn’t really get where it’s going, after hundreds of pages. The parts that you get along the way are really developed and wonderful. And, you know, it’s frustrating because you never quite see how they’re all going to connect. But the experience of reading those fragments… I think it’s probably the most satisfying of all of them—it’s some of the most beautiful writing he ever did.
David and Marco, my two youngest, walk into the forest and return with wounded animals, branches that resemble people, leaves in the perfect shape of a star, colorful rocks for which they invent fantastical stories. If we’re lucky, Pedro, who turns fifteen next week, will consider them childish and simply ridicule them. More often, he’ll snap the branches, crumple the leaves in his fist, throw the rocks as far as he can, and should the animal die, I worry that David and Marco question if their older brother isn’t partly responsible, if there isn’t a lesson they’re meant to learn.
Today, though, David and Marco enter the forest and return with a soldier.
Or—I think he’s a soldier. He wears no uniform but flame-bathed clothes soiled by dark, indefinable stains. Textures that make me swallow hard. He’s likely out of rations and starving. Whatever fight he survived, it must have been several days from here. After two years, the war has finally discovered this pocket of the Spanish map.
The soldier’s rifle is strapped across his chest. It troubles him not to grip it in his hands, one of which is badly wounded.
Our house sits alone in the woods. My husband built it: my wedding gift. He doesn’t trust me, so I had supposed this—more than a desire to live amid nature—was why he moved us so far from others: nobody would have an opportunity to steal me away. Later, I assumed it was because he didn’t trust himself. Far from the village, he’d be far from drink. Now, though, I’m convinced he knew all along he would beat me and didn’t want the villagers to lay eyes upon my bruises.
The soldier frowns at my black eye, my split lip, the fingerprint marks along my neck. I set my needles down to receive him. He had approached the clearing seeking help, but seeing my bruises his posture stiffens. So that’s the order of things—a battle-torched soldier sunken-eyed from hunger should pity me. He slides the rifle so he can quickly sling it off his shoulder, glances at David and Marco. They wail when my husband is atop me as though they’re the ones receiving his fists. But afterwards, with their father gone, you’ve never seen two happier boys. They live for the respite. The soldier considers the lightness in their step, their unburdened shoulders, how this picture might come together.
“No need to be afraid,” I tell him, perhaps foolishly. My voice is raspy. Will be for several days yet. It was only yesterday my husband returned from the village reeking from drink. Increasingly, a more common occurrence, ever since the fascists severed Catalonia from the rest of Spain two months ago. When Vinaroz fell and all of Aragon with it, not once did we hear a muted thud of an explosion. No rifle reports. No puffs of smoke. Nothing. Even this patch of sky above didn’t interest the fascists. The moon seemed closer than Vinaroz. You wouldn’t have guessed it from my husband. He behaved like a hunted man, as though he was the main prize the fascists sought, as though the world now expected him to keep them from Catalonia, as though the world had ever expected anything of him. “Come in. We have a soup over the fire. Some clean clothes, too.” Where there’s one soldier, there are bound to be others. Something is set to begin.
My boys sit near him as he hunches over his bowl. Even Pedro.
What is it like, they want to know. The war. How exciting? How dangerous? What pulled him into it? Where is he from? Did the fascists destroy his home?
“Nothing’s ever happened in my village. You could drop a thousand shells onto it and not one would detonate.” Despite what he’s telling them, he says it playfully, even a touch tenderly. The hard, apprehensive edges of his countenance are rounding the more time he spends with us.
Have you killed anyone? What happened to your clothes? To your hand?
I shush and scold them, but he smiles away my concern and answers, “I’ve been given the opportunity to stand up for what I believe in.” His eyes are bright mossy green. The way the skin crinkles at their corners when he smiles, it’s like a beckoning finger. He’s probably ten years younger than me. Probably closer in age to Pedro.
“Our father is a soldier,” Pedro says, staking some ground. His shoulders aren’t pulled back. For his tone, they might as well be.
The soldier returns to his soup, face relaxed, but I see the question he’s asking himself: if her husband is away, who has done this to her? “Which regiment is he with?” he asks Pedro. “Maybe we’ve crossed paths.”
“He’s a Freemason.”
“And the regiment?”
“He fights with the Freemasons,” Pedro says, angrily this time.
The soldier understands: the child will perceive each question as a challenge.
“Brave that he should give himself for such a noble cause.”
David and Marco smile at this. Pedro only nods, setting his jaw as his father does—lips pursed, chin out ahead of the rest of his face, each tooth below battling those up top. When his father was younger, someone must have convinced him such an expression radiated seriousness, even danger. To me, it always made him look powerless—the squeaky bark of a small dog—and, at the start, I loved him for it. But that was a long time ago.
“Will you be staying the night?” Marco asks. Most questions he shouts, and this one’s no different.
David joins in. “Will you?” He grabs the soldier’s knee when he asks it. He is a tactile boy, always with a hand on one of us, as though being the middle child requires him to bridge Pedro and Marco.
The soldier laughs through his nostrils. A gentle smile, no menace behind it. “The fight’s still out there,” he says to my two youngest. “I just have to find it.”
“It will be there tomorrow,” I say. I’m doing this for my boys, I tell myself. They need to see—even Pedro, especially Pedro—that there are other ways for a man to be. “You won’t last but an afternoon off that soup. Stay the night. We’ll send you off with a full stomach.”
Pedro ignores him. Through his impotent fury, he wants us all to do the same. David and Marco notice this, but they’re too excited by the presence of a guest to bend to Pedro. I watch how freely they move about the soldier when they realize they need not predict his next mood and movement. It breaks my heart that half a day passed before they truly relaxed.
David takes his hand. Marco doesn’t hesitate holding the wounded one. Together, they weave around and enter the thickening trees with him. Their father often yells at Marco to collect the viscera of the animal he’s skinning, with a fist, not your fingertips! He’s still a gentle boy and doesn’t understand why he can’t remain so. Yet, as they disappear into the forest, the nubs of the soldier’s hands over Marco’s, I see no hesitation in my youngest.
Later, the boys sit near the house and direct the soldier as he attempts to whittle a dog from a chunk of wood. It’s Culito they’re trying to recreate. The mixed breed we once had, so named because of its disproportionately large backside. My husband had brought him home as a puppy two years ago. I need to know you’re safe when I’m not here. But then he threw open the door drunk one night and the dog wouldn’t stop barking for what he was doing to us.
David and Marco bounce the figurine about the dirt, tilt it so it urinates an imaginary stream on one tree after another. Culito had a system. He would awake determined to empty his bladder onto every tree that encircled the house. He was a patient and diligent gardener—little here, little there, what’s the rush.
“Thank you,” the soldier tells me. We’re standing side by side. I feel the heat off his body, a body that’s trying to learn again how to relax. “I hadn’t realized how much I needed this.”
“David and Marco, too.”
“It feels so familiar. Like it’s out of a dream or a memory.” He says it tentatively. “The next time I blink, you’ll disappear.”
“If only.”
He faces me. “Will your husband return soon?”
There’s a flurry above us, a rush of feathers, a dance between two birds right before they come together. We both lower our heads.
“Wherever he goes after his drunken nights, he’s gone for days.” When he does repentantly return home, it isn’t until my bruises have turned a ghostly blue. You could fool yourself they were never there, or at least never that bad.
“Is he really a Freemason?”
“He carries the card because there’s no other way to get paid for a job around here, and he needs money to drink.”
“Haven’t you tried running off?” The birds are not being quick about their business. Pine needles drift down between us.
When he does repentantly return home, it isn’t until my bruises have turned a ghostly blue.
“It’s my husband’s greatest obsession that I’ll pack what I can and take the boys.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’d be sentencing us to death.”
That night, we make a fire outside. It’s David and Marco’s idea. Together, they and the soldier gather large stones to border the pit. In the shape of Culito’s rear, David insists. Pedro remains near the house, sulking, while his brothers laugh for what they create.
Around the fire we eat soup and chew on strips of meat their father dried. Pedro is sure to tell the soldier so. He says it as though the man has taken food off his father’s plate. “He must be a great hunter,” the soldier says.
“He is.” To all our ears, it sounds like a threat.
“The seasoning is impressive, too.”
“I don’t like you wearing his clothes.”
“Pedro,” I say, admonishing him.
“When he returns,” the soldier says, “please express my gratitude.”
“I’ll let him know you were here.”
The fire leaps about Pedro’s eyes, then he shifts and they go black.
“Perhaps,” I say to the soldier, “you can share a story with us. My father used to require it of his guests. Your grandfather,” I tell the boys, “had a bad leg and an even worse pair of lungs. But also a desire to see the world. Everyone in the village knew, if a stranger was passing through, point them to Justicio Vallarte’s door. He’d travel through their stories.”
“Is that how you met Papa?” Marco asks.
“No. Your father was always just there. So,” I say to the soldier now, “what’s happening beyond the trees?”
“A story from out there?” He’s scratching his chin with his wounded hand, searching the treetops. “I’d have to change every ending.”
“About your home then.”
“That I can do.” He repositions himself on the log, sets down his bowl. Before he starts, he palms his mouth to catch a sneeze. I’m touched by this courtesy. My husband cackles like the schoolyard’s menace for how we jump and tense when he sneezes. “Like Marco, I’m the youngest of three boys. The difference in age is the same, as well. Once, at this exact time in our lives, when I was nine and Xabier was ten and Aitor fourteen, the three of us stole a boat. Somebody had seen a whale, and I convinced my brothers this was our moment. We each had a knife no bigger than—David, hold out your pointer finger. Well, slightly bigger than that. The plan was: hunt the whale, get rich off its meat. A good plan, I’d say. Turns out sailing isn’t as easy as the old fishermen make it look.”
David asks, “So what happened?”
“Something my village talks about to this day. We managed—”
He stops, turns to peer into the impenetrable night. I’m about to ask what he’s heard when, over the crackling of the fire, I suddenly hear it, too. Voices and the snapping of branches. At least a dozen men not trying to hide their approach. The soldier says to me, “Nobody knows I’m alive.”
I keep my voice calm for my boys’ sake. “In their bedroom you’ll find a half-made chair. Behind it is a loose panel in the wall. My husband hides his bottles there. It’ll be tight.” He drags his foot about where he sat and takes his bowl with him. I whisper to my boys, though it is specifically for Pedro’s sake, “Those are the fascists out there. Just be respectful. If they enter the house and find your father’s papers, they’ll hunt him. But they won’t go in there, will they? Because we’re not going to give them any reason to.”
The men must see or smell the fire. One by one their voices drop and others shout lowly for them to quiet. There’s the quick slide of rifle bolts, bullets shucking into chambers. “If we remain calm,” I say, “they will, too.”
From out of the forest’s darkness comes a gruff voice, a command. “Who’s out there?”
“Me and my sons,” I call.
Movement in the night, then the fire’s faint glow slips over the fascists’ shapes. They’ve fanned out, more than twenty of them. Each bends their knees as a predator on the hunt, their rifles against their shoulders. A few lower their weapons when they see that my sons are only children. The officer in the middle, the one with the gruff voice, asks, “Who’s in the house?” To his men he orders, “Aim at the windows.”
“Feel free to search it.”
“And we won’t find your husband cowering under a bed.”
“He’s in someone’s bed, but not mine.”
Now they see my bruises. I’d forgotten about them this past hour.
“Your husband do that to you?”
“Does it bother you he did?”
The officer’s lips curl into a derisive smile—another woman who’s yet to learn her place. “How does it work here? The man needs a little break so makes sure nobody’s tempted to run off with you while he’s gone?”
“Ask him when you get to town. Look for the one who’s filled himself to the brim.”
It feels good speaking this openly about my husband before his sons, but Pedro’s chin is out in front of his face again.
The officer pays this no attention. He studies the house, squints at the windows. “It’s tilted.”
“And that he built sober.”
He levels a grocer’s eye on my boys. To Pedro he says, “We’ll be back in a few years for you.” He then signals to the others—a sideways jerk of his head—and they blend into the forest once more. The four of us maintain a steady watch on the night as though the fascists might yet leap from it. When I’m certain they’ve gone, I reach over and squeeze Pedro’s knee but he slaps my hand away. “You did so well,” I tell them. Marco is smiling at the praise, shakily. His lips are determined to turn down. “It’s over,” I assure them. Their father’s been yelling at the walls about fascists for over two years, since before the war began. “After all this worrying, and for what?”
David and Marco want the soldier to sleep between them. He assures them he will, but the excitement of the day has exhausted them, even Pedro, so they’re asleep while the soldier and I sit at the lopsided dining table passing back and forth a dust-covered bottle of neglected grain alcohol. We haven’t touched flame to candle should the fascists return.
“I knew I was putting you at risk.”
“No more than is typical for us.”
He rubs down a splintered divot of the table’s edge. It’s probably the drink, but I’m focusing on his hands as though they provide an answer. But to what? Long dormant parts of my body tingle their response. He says, “I can remain here until your husband returns.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll leave my rifle then. Hidden away should things ever get too bad.”
“You’re going to need it.”
“Our side has more rifles than men now.”
“My husband knows every corner of this forest. He gives a second glance when a leaf’s out of place. Besides, I’ve had every opportunity to poison him. I’m incapable of it.”
“How can you be so resigned?”
“Maybe before—while my father lived and Pedro was a kinder child—I could have run off. Too late now. He’d kill us if I tried.”
He’s shaking his head. In disbelief, perhaps disappointment.
“You’ll see,” I say. “Live long enough and life empties you out so you’re only a vessel for others.”
“And not for hope?”
“I have hope. I hope my boys don’t become my husband. That they don’t make the mistakes I did.”
The soldier passes me the bottle. I put my hand over his. With my thumb I stroke the uneven nubs of his missing fingers. The slightest tensing in his muscles carry into his hand. “It’s been so long since I’ve been touched with any tenderness,” I tell him. “I’ve forgotten how that feels.”
“I can’t give that to you. I’m sorry.”
“A wound?” There are, I think, other things we can do. Still with my hand on his, I scoot closer until my leg presses against his. That slight change in warmth moves through me. But when I find his eyes in the dark, I see pity in them.
“I’ve promised myself to another,” he says. For my sake, he adds, “Otherwise…”
I stop him. “There’s no need.” I let go of his hand but remain where I am. Out the window, the fire’s embers are a pure red against the black. With each breath they fade. “What’s she like?”
“Mariana?”
I nod.
“She’s a fighter.” He probably means nothing by it. I feel the thorn, nevertheless.
“A soldier?”
“No, a writer.” I wait for more, so he adds, “She is Erlea.”
He expects a reaction.
“You’ve never heard of her?”
I open my arms to show him my world.
“She’s a political writer,” he says. “She helped me put words to my ideas.”
“Which are?”
“Not my brother’s.” He considers a high corner of the room, then waves at the window. “They killed him, my brother who believed there existed something salvageable in everybody, even the worst of us. They hung him in a cemetery.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t stop imagining his murder. It’s different every time. Yet I always see him forgiving his killers before he thinks to forgive himself. Me, I can’t.”
I don’t say anything. I know enough to know there exist no saints among us. Even my father would be hounded from time to time by his personal set of demons.
“Mariana was right,” he says. “She was always right. This ends only one way. We must rid the world of them entirely. There can be no peace until we do.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to be so confident. “I envy her.”
“She’d laugh if she heard someone say that. She and her children are refugees in their own country.”
Though she has children, I imagine she’s his age, that she still possesses her youth. Mine passed me by—the world, too—while I was trying to keep my husband from getting upset. “I’ve never had any luck with this life. What I look forward to is the next one, of getting to start again.”
“But this is the one you were born to.”
“And the one I brought my sons into.” I stand. “You’ll still stay the night? I haven’t driven you away, have I?”
The faint light outside etches kind lines around his eyes. “I told David and Marco I’d wedge between them.”
“Terrible to be jealous of your children.” I take the bottle and finish the rest of it. Like swallowing one of the embers.
The morning sky is a creamy blue, the color of a starling’s eggs, and just as delicate. It could crack from our breaths spilling upon it. Pedro awoke sullen and left before breakfast, saying he was going to check the traps. I manage to convince the soldier to stay for lunch. It will be fish, David promises. So he and Marco lead the soldier to the river with their poles. He takes his rifle with him. At no point can I remember him not having it within reach. I keep thinking of his offer. The rifle has kept him alive this long, yet he believes I need it more than him.
The rifle has kept him alive this long, yet he believes I need it more than him.
The trees sliver their shapes as the three recede. Then I’m alone. It often occurs so abruptly. One minute my sons are clinging to me, my husband jealously observes my every step, I feel like my head is being held under water, and then everyone is gone and I have more air than I need.
This morning, I remain outside, sitting where I did last night. The ashes from the fire have drifted over the stones that remain in the outline of Culito’s rear. His coat was silver-black. The ashes thinly dusting the grey rocks evoke it. I’ll have to point it out to David and Marco. To this day my husband has blamed us for the dog’s death. Often, when the boys make a mistake, he’ll yell at them. And you think you deserve another dog? But even at their most playful or lonesome they’ve never asked for another.
Looking still at the rocks, my focus shifts. Boot prints in the ashes. They could be Pedro’s, though I don’t remember him walking in this direction when he left. Would the soldier have been so careless? And then I recognize the shape of the boot.
My vision swings left to right, behind me, back in front—the trees blur, the world spins. He’s here, somewhere. I hold in a breath to calm myself, search the gaps in the trees. “Arturo?” I call. Best my husband comes now, with the soldier and his rifle far away. “Arturo, show yourself.” The thing is, I never know exactly how it will go, what he will be capable of, so my heart clogs my throat when I see a figure through the trees. Then there’s another figure and another and more yet, all of them in the fascists’ dark blue uniforms. And at the front, leading them to the house, is Pedro.
“No,” I cry. Something in me breaks. It stops my breath. I clutch my stomach. A surprise: there are other ways yet to be hurt.
The officer from last night walks alongside him. “O sea que…” He’s smiling, draws the words out, practically sings it. “So someone was in there after all.” He flicks a finger at the house. Several of his soldiers look anxiously at one another. “Go,” he commands. One charges in, obligating others to follow. Were David and Marco inside, they’d have been shot on sight. If Pedro understands this, it doesn’t register on his face. He wears a hardened expression, as if all this is my fault. “I suppose,” the officer says, “you did tell me to search it.” I’m not worried they’ll notice my husband’s papers. They’ll pass right over them hunting for the soldier.
“You won’t find him,” I say. “He left hours ago.”
“She’s lying,” Pedro says. His voice cracks with a truculent note.
I want nothing more than to grab Pedro and hold him to me. Perhaps I haven’t lost him for good—not yet—but he’s at the officer’s side like a devoted adjutant, and I discover I’m pegged to the log.
“Where are your other two?” the officer asks.
“Foraging for mushrooms.” Yesterday, before the soldier’s appearance, we had spoken of doing so. The officer judges the possibility of this from Pedro’s tight lips that curl inwards.
Inside the house there’s a brief shout and the crash of glass. This perks the officer’s posture, but a moment later the soldiers file out, shaking their heads, while one holds the broken pieces of the frame that held my father’s one photograph, contrite, on the verge of offering an apology. With another flick of his fingers the officer orders him to toss it to the side. He then draws a tight circle with his finger. “Search the perimeter. He could be hiding nearby.”
“I already said, he left this morning.” The photograph of my father has been gashed by broken glass. It sits in the grass, nearly severed in two, about to be trampled by the soldiers. I try for a quick inventory: does anything of my life before my husband remain?
“If we find him, you’ll be wishing it was your husband’s fists you were contending with.”
Pedro shifts at this. The officer doesn’t seek to assure him. He must figure there’s little more he can get from my son. I turn back to the firepit, my husband’s boot print in the ashes—deal first with the soldier, then it’d be my turn. “You won’t.”
After completing their sweep, the fascists gather around the officer. I hear him sigh. He stands directly in front of me, trampling the print. “Normally, I’d make an example of you. But who would tell the story? The trees? I’ll entrust your husband with the honor.” To Pedro, he says, “You’ll let him know.” Pedro gives an uncertain nod. Much of the fight has left him. “If the soldier returns, you know where to find us. I promise we’ll spare your mother.” With his toe, he taps mine. “So, which way did the red go?”
I motion behind me.
“We came from that direction.”
“He’s a soldier. He’s searching for the war.”
The officer considers this, doesn’t appear convinced. He smiles while studying my bruises. His vision drifts to Pedro, the pieces of the picture frame, then the teetering house. “What else could I threaten to do to you?” I don’t acknowledge this or his final derisive chuckle. To his men he says, “He’s somewhere in the forest.”
They move away with all the discretion of a marching band, every footfall snapping branches. Pedro’s head is down. When I approach him, he steps back. Angry tears streak his face.
“My boy.” I open my arms to him. “You need to know: I’ve never been more hurt. But not for anything you’ve done to me.” Again, he steps back. “Please,” I say. “I need to know you’ll be able to forgive yourself.”
“I heard you,” he yells. “Last night. With the soldier. What you wanted to do with him. You’re lucky I didn’t tell the fascists.”
“I’m sorry you heard that.”
“I heard it all.” His arms are down and he’s crying openly. Finally, I can bring him to me, but the moment I touch him, he pushes me away and runs off. I watch him go and wait, wait for the sounds of him to disappear, wait to see if the silence might deliver my husband. When it doesn’t, I start running, too.
In a few months, the snowmelt will turn the creek into a wide, uncrossable river, further penning me in. These early summer days, the frigid and swiftly moving water comes only to my knees. It rushes between large stones and hurtles against the creek’s sharp bends. I listen for shouting while I run along its bank, until, finally, further ahead I see David holding Marco. The two are pressed against a tree, their expressions terror stricken, eyes fixed on something near the creek, a carve in the earth I still can’t see. I run towards that, not my children, fearing the gruesome scene I’ll find.
But the soldier is still alive. His face is scratched and he’s bleeding from his mouth. As I come up the bank, I see he’s kneeling on my husband’s back, hogtying him. My husband’s complexion is ashen from drink and mottled bright red with fury. He twists as he yells at David and Marco to untie him. Neither child moves. They only press harder against the tree. All goes still—my husband’s attempts to thrash himself free, even, it seems, the noisy water—when my husband spots me. It’s a jackal’s smile. “There she is,” he yells. “There’s the slut.”
I ignore him and crouch next to David and Marco. “I need you two to go home. Don’t run. Walk as casually as you can while collecting mushrooms. There are soldiers nearby. The same from last night. If they find you, say you’re foraging. Whatever you do, don’t run. And when they ask, the soldier left this morning headed for town. Our lives depend on this story. Now go, but slowly.”
They start. David turns around first, then Marco. They look at me, their father. He shouts, “Tell Pedro where I am.”
I smile warmly at them. “A casual pace. Collect every mushroom you see. I’ll be back soon.”
I don’t turn until long after they’ve vanished from sight. My husband is laughing at me. Snarling laughter. “Even when you try to give yourself to a man,” he says, “he won’t take you.” I walk down to the bank, wondering where he got that bit from. Not Pedro. And had my husband watched us through a window last night, he would have broken down the door. No, he’s just guessing at this fact. He’s always been able to sense my vulnerabilities. “How you tried to convince me otherwise. All those wasted years worrying.” Drink has deadened his tongue. Bloodshot squiggles his eyes. He’d probably been driven out of town by the fascists’ presence and thought, when he saw the soldier leave the house this morning with our two youngest, that he could best him.
The soldier extends the rifle. I think of the woman he promised himself to. She’d probably take it. I wave it off. A shadow passes over the soldier’s face, a coldness. Like the season changing to winter, I feel the warmth bleed out of him. It will be on him to kill my husband. My eyes go to the trigger. What force does that curve of metal exert on him? It is there for one distinct purpose. I signal for him not to do it. All this my husband misses. He’s still laughing. “No wonder we’re losing,” he says. “Our side’s so amariconado they get the women to do the killing for them.” To me, he orders, “Now release me.”
“Shush.” I kneel and search through his back pockets worried I won’t find it but, no, there it is. He tries glancing over his shoulder. “What are you doing?” I pull his Masonic party card from his pocket.
“Roll him onto his side,” I say. “Get him against this rock.” The soldier does, and I put the party card in my husband’s front shirt pocket so it pokes out. “Bitch,” he barks and spits at me. It mostly dribbles across his chin. He thrashes wildly now. Blood seeps from his wrists, further sinking the rope binding him. “Fucking whore!”
He tries to bite the card, then reach it with that chin.
I stand. “Leave him for the fascists to find.”
“You’re going to kill me,” my husband shouts.
“No,” I say. “Not me.”
He shouts for help, screams Pedro’s name. “Call the fascists to you,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He’s apologizing not to me but to the soldier. “We’re on the same side. We have the same enemies. The fight needs every one of us.”
The soldier doesn’t acknowledge this but slings the rifle over his shoulder. He says, “Was it Pedro?”
“He heard me last night.”
My husband is yelling over this that he’ll change, he’ll never lay a hand on me again. All he wants is to love and protect me.
“I knew you’d kill me one day,” I tell him, “that it was only a matter of time, so I stopped caring about myself. Our boys, though. I had no other way to keep them safe.” If I caressed his mud-streaked cheek, a final goodbye, he’d try to bite me, so I turn up my hands and grimace.
He’s screaming at us while we walk away. “I’ll kill you. I’ll slit your throats.” The soldier turns back from time to time, as if trying to puzzle out a riddle—we can leave these brutes to destroy themselves. Then, my husband must accept there’s no saving himself, but he still has a chance to be buried with company. He shouts, “A red! Come quick, a red!” He’s shredding his vocal cords for the effort.
I point to the west. “They’ll be arriving from this direction.”
The soldier looks off to the east. I try imagining what awaits him there. He must, too. His body’s stiffened. Those kind lines around his eyes and mouth are gone. His time with David and Marco was but brief relief. He is, once more, the leery and troubled young man they brought to our house. I want to tell him to let go of that person and remain with us. But in what world would that be possible? Fascists prowl this forest. Mariana is out there. So are his brother’s killers. Turning back to me, he asks, “Will you be all right?”
“For the first time in a long time, I don’t know. It’s an improvement.” I lean toward him and kiss his cheek, one side then the other, holding my lips there. “Thank you.”
I watch him cross the creek. Only when the trees on the other side begin to conceal him do I turn, heading for the north, re-entering the forest’s cool and fragrant shadows. A bird sings nearby. Above, the branches whoosh and rustle. I can still hear my husband’s shouts when I bend for my first mushroom, grabbing it by the base and wiggling it from the earth’s soft clutch.
Do you remember it? When you changed? Or, stranger still, when you were between one thing and another? I do. When my breasts started to show beneath my T-shirt—buds, they called them, but it never felt like a flowering. In the dictionary under buds, it explains: in certain limbless lizards and snakes a limb bud develops. That’s more like it.
Girlhood can be brutal. Your body swells, hair sprouts haphazardly, and then you bleed from between your legs while everyone behaves as if it’s perfectly normal. Perhaps it’s the bleeding that sets the men upon you, like the wolves of fairy tales, because that follows soon after. But there’s power in this new body, too, if you know how to find it.
In writing my debut novel, Amphibian, I wanted to conjure a girlhood like this, as I had felt it: hyper sensorial, rich with fledgling desires and fraught with new social rules—and, at times, frightening. My 12-year-old protagonist, Sissy, feels her body changing, except she’s not changing like the other girls. “Puberty is vicious,” her mother says, brushing her worries away. Obsessed with stories of how other women’s bodies have transformed before her, and judged by a chorus of ribald girls in her head, she and her best friend Tegan depart from the make-believe woods of childhood to find themselves somewhere new and terrifying.
Fabulism offered me a vehicle for this feeling—of crossing uncharted terrain. The following list of books, while all literary fiction, also borrow from the toolbox of magic realism and horror to convey the experience of girlhood in all its delight and barbarity.
Ren Yu is a mermaid. She tells you so on the first page. She doesn’t come from the tradition of red-haired shell-breasted singing mermaids; she is ripped, disinterested in humans, particularly men, and, by the climax of the book—she’s bloody. Ren narrates the story of her self-determined transformation starting from her life as a young competitive swimmer, so addicted to the water and the race that she licked the chlorine from her skin when she missed the pool. But as the pressure to win, and to prove herself by getting into an Ivy League college mounts, along with cruelties from her crew of fellow swimmers, she starts to pursue her longing to be a mermaid with a near holy embrace of physical pain.
First published in 1963, it’s considered a classic of Norwegian literature, but, I find, too few people have read it. Siss, the leader of the pack at school, is fascinated by Unn, the reclusive yet defiant new arrival in their rural community. One night, they share their feelings for each other in a scene simmering with strange tension. The next day, Unn, embarrassed by what passed between them, skips school to visit the Ice Palace, a frozen waterfall in the Norwegian fjords transformed every winter into a fantastical labyrinthine structure. Unn never returns; and Siss is left to make sense of her loss. Fragmentary and hauntingly poetic, the horror here is all below the surface—apt in this world of ice and snow; it’s in the mark on Unn’s body, the mysterious “other,” apparitions and night terrors, and in her secret that’s never told.
“We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage,” says the pack of girls (and one queer boy) who serve as our first-person plural narrator for much of the book. They speak and move collectively, as obsessive in their adoration of some as they are wantonly cruel to others: the titular brutes. The swampy Florida town in which these eighth graders live sends its young people into the clutches of a seedy talent scout, one of its Technicolor cast of characters, with the book opening on the disappearance of the famous televangelist’s daughter, Sammy. The narrative occasionally flashes forward to the girls’ adult lives written in the first person singular, to demonstrate how fully the bonds of girlhood can break. But while the story tracks the shocking events of one summer, its preoccupation is elsewhere: in the depths of their loyalty, in the oppressive power of the small town, and in the sinister pull of whatever lurks beneath the surface of the lake.
Cecilia was the object of Seven’s obsession during their school days together. When a chance encounter at the chiropractor’s office where Seven works as a cleaner puts the two now adult women back in each other’s orbit, it prompts a stream of sensorial memories for Seven. Unmoored by the power of her past desires, she—and us by extension—loses her grip on the present, flung back to a girlhood full of poetic grotesqueries: eye sockets sucked of their juices, so many slugs, crows everywhere, bodily fluids of every ilk, a breast bitten “off like a bulb of blood,” and a longing so deep and misunderstood that Seven can only envision its fulfillment as violence. This surreal novella packs a punch.
“Are you really a mermaid or does it just feel that way in the awkward body of a ‘teenage girl?’” the unnamed narrator asks herself in The Seas. It’s little wonder that mermaids recur on this list, adored by girls for their shimmering beauty and feared in folktales for their untamed sexuality, an apt contradiction. Our unnamed narrator is stuck in a coastal fishing town, sad and outcast, holding vigil for her long-lost sailor father and in love with Jude, an older man returned from the Iraq war broken. She holds onto what her father once told her: that she is, in fact, a mermaid. In prose so wildly original and spare it’s staggering, our narrator falteringly pursues her two passions—Jude and the sea—but as her slippages between fantasy and reality become more frequent, we, too, depart on a different sort of tale.
Another polyvocal entry, this historical fantasy is told mostly by a group of five teenage Jewish girls obsessed—as was the rest of Atlanta in 1915—with the real life lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan. This public trauma is experienced through their adolescent lens, and Frank is mythologized as an object of the girls’ hungry desires. Urgent and lyrical, the novel is as much about this crime—with all its relevance today—as it is about girlhood and the power of devotion. Determined to keep his memory alive, they use dirt from the garden to create a golem in his image, but then––brilliantly––their golem starts to speak.
The bookopens with Fernanda tied to a chair in a cabin having been kidnapped, not by some sinister creep, but by her teacher, Miss Clara. We track back to learn how Fernanda and her best friend Annelise (“the inseparables”) like to gather after school with their six-girl clique in an abandoned building. Here they indulge in humiliating dares, rituals to the rhinestone-encrusted, drag queen God of their imaginings. The novel plays on the line between pleasure and pain, fear and desire—or, in Annelise’s thinking, between horror and orgasm. The tone is ominous, propulsive, and wholly befitting its teen subjects in its fevered twistedness.Of all the books on the list, Jawbone is perhaps most specifically about the horrors of adolescence and how becoming a woman can be a horror story itself.
Early in noam keim’s debut collection of lyrical nonfiction, The Land is Holy, they awake panicked from a dream where they are running away from disaster, carrying only what is in their pack. They realize they have been called to do ancestral work, to unearth their family’s lineages, even as they are now estranged and in exile. “I have lost my way from home,” they write, “And I am trying to learn which way it is again.”
How does one heal from trauma, both personal and ancestral? What stories do we get to hear? Which ones aren’t ours to share? These are among the many questions keim asks in The Land is Holy. A queer Arab Jew, born into a settler family in occupied Palestine, keim explores their personal and ancestral past as well as what it means to build a home in an often inhospitable world. Taking joy in blooming lindens, cactus fruit, the migration of the stork, and other aspects of the natural world, even as the climate is collapsing, keim reminds us how nature itself can be restorative and can provide a shift, “a release of sorts.”
Winner of the 2022 Megaphone Prize by Radix Printing and Publishing Cooperative, judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, Keim’s collection explores finding freedom despite imprisonment, finding one’s identity outside of binaries, finding healing through nature. “We will win freedom for all, in the shape of forests of trees…in the fields of green leaves…We will win freedom for all, and erect structures of connection. Together, after all.”
A trauma worker, medicine maker, and flaneur freak, keim has been awarded numerous fellowships and awards. We met last year at the Sewanee Writers Conference, where they astounded me with their reading from a different work. We spoke recently by phone, and followed up with questions by email. We discussed rooting one’s writing in nature, the freedom found in estrangement, and how walking influences their writing practice.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: You introduce yourself in the opening chapter saying “I was born on Christmas Day in the desert of Palestine, the settler child of Fernand and Hassida…” Can you explain what a settler is? How has this identity shaped you and given you perspective on the current destruction taking place in Gaza?
noam keim: A foundational truth about my life is that I would not have been born without the existence of Zionism: my parents met in the Zionist State where they both lived at the time, even though this wasn’t their ancestral land. My family made a life on a land that was violently taken away from other people: that’s what being a settler means.
My father was raised in France, the son of Holocaust survivors, and my mother was born in the Zionist state from Moroccan parents. I grew up in France, as we moved when I was a baby, and every summer when I’d go back there, I would experience the whiplash of the Zionist society. I have believed in Palestinian freedom and self-determination for as long as I remember (even though my politics refined themselves over time), and as someone whose family shaped the violence inflicted on people indigenous to the land, it means a responsibility. A responsibility to write this book, to engage with the violence of my lineage without shying away from its truths.
As we enter almost a year of genocide in Gaza, my internal landscape has shifted: I am angry, I am devastated and I am clearer than ever that we will see a free Palestine in this lifetime.
DS: What first attracted me to your writing is how you address the collision of climate collapse and ancestral trauma. Can you discuss this, your call to do ancestral work, and how you see our (collective) ancestors’ actions impacting our present-day environment?
My family made a life on a land that was violently taken away from other people: that’s what being a settler means.
nk: I started writing The Land is Holy in late 2021, at a time when I was experiencing deep grief, from my job working with people impacted by the carceral state, from the pandemic, and from living on Turtle Island. We were experiencing floods in the city where I live, and I was watching our accelerating climate apocalypse feeling hopeless. My body kept telling me to run away, and, as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and the grandchild of people who survived internment camps, I am deeply aware of the ways my own DNA has been shaped by the trauma of my ancestors. I felt the need to go back, uncover their stories, as a way of making sense of what was unraveling in my own body. I needed to ground myself in the past to start seeing sparks of hope for the future: my people have survived apocalypses before, so, I can too.
By rooting myself in plants, animals, and the natural elements of my ancestral lineage, I was able to heal a lot of the wounds I was carrying, and to start imagining a life of joy and abundance, even in a time of deep loss and destruction.
DS: How does bird-watching, and other forms of paying attention to nature, shape your writing?
nk: I spend a lot of time playing with the metaphor in my head, and the book is organized in 15 essays that each examine some kind of natural element to make sense of my own experiences. The book deals with heavy subjects: sexual assault, interpersonal violence, prison, genocide.
Thinking about ideas and memories through metaphor allows me to access feelings that are not always readily available to me. Focusing on the small, on the detail of a bird, a leaf, a water source, makes it easier for me to tell stories that I would otherwise keep secret.
Being around trees and flowers and birds also takes me out of my own ego: there is a vast world that existed before me and that will continue to blossom after my time on this plane. It allows me to write about my own trauma, without (hopefully) falling into the trap of navel gazing.
DS: I love lyrical memoirs, and I love your writing, but part of the attraction for me in reading this book was to further my understanding of the creation of Israel and the ensuing conflict in Palestine When you write about your grandparents’ migration from Morocco to Israel, you say “They were both part of a moment in history when Arab Jews were manipulated to leave their homelands and populate the lower echelons of the Zionist State and justify the rejection of Arabness as a whole.” Can you elaborate?
nk: Let me start by naming clearly that I am an Arab Jew, whose people came from one of the largest Jewish communities in North Africa. There used to be 300,000 Jewish people living in Morocco and their influence on Moroccan identity is palpable in every corner of the country. Most Jewish people left, including my grandparents.
When the Zionist State was built, it simply did not have enough bodies to sustain itself: the European Jews who were the architects of the State needed to build a critical mass in order to fully settle the land. This is when the idea came to bring in the Arab Jews, from Moroccan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, via propaganda or fabricated antisemitic violence (look up the bombing of the Baghdad synagogue). Once they migrated, they were put first in ma’abarot, transit reeducation camps before being relocated to the less desirable parts of the country, including the “buffer zones” with historical Palestinian communities. There’s many great resources to learn more about it, including Ella Shohat scholarship on Mizrahi Jews (Jews from the Orient) and their place in the racist nation in which they live. Emily Benichou Gottreich wrote some excellent books on the history of Jewish people in Morocco but I am partial to Aomar Boum’s book Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco.
In my childhood home, using the term Arab to describe ourselves was not allowed, even though this was how we were read everywhere in the French city I grew up in. We also did not learn darija, Moroccan Arabic, which was the language my grandparents used daily to converse amongst themselves. Worse, I did not learn about the ma’abarot until I was an adult, sitting with my grandmother late at night.
I am not an academic or a historian of the Zionist State, and I don’t intend my book to be didactic. However, I wanted to tell stories that allowed American readers to understand a reality that is often described as “too complex” from the lens of personal archives of someone instead of scholarship.
DS: One of the threads of this book addresses your estrangement from your parents, particularly from your mother, who was violent. “I don’t think you ever move on from leaving a life behind,” you write, but at the same time, you also note how, by leaving your life, you have the freedom to become who you are, and even to embrace your trans identity. Can you expand upon the freedom gained by leaving/ setting boundaries?
nk: I am a strong believer of holding multiple complex and often contradictory truths at once and my relationship to freedom is very much centered around diverging and equally important realities: I regret moving to the United States and I would not have built a life for myself without going into exile. To be honest, everybody I know who is in exile shares that sentiment. I have gained incredible freedom and have been able to heal so much of my childhood wounds and I would do anything to be able to settle back into a version of my old Parisian life.
I grew up in a very violent household, a violence enacted by both my parents. It wounded me, deeply. When I became estranged from my family, I felt deep shame. There’s something monstrous about having to walk away from caretakers who could not love you and raise you and I believed it pointed to all the ways I was broken.
Part of the project of The Land is Holy was for me to examine “What does it mean to be free?” and for me to reckon with the sacrifices that personal freedom requires. I also wanted to question how much my personal freedom was rooted in my commitment to collective liberation. I wanted to release the shame of walking away.
I am now in community with a lot of people for whom estrangement was the only path forward and I am grateful for every single brave one who decided to walk away.
DS: I feel like so much of my writing practice is influenced by walking. Can you discuss the impact that walking has on your writing practice?
nk: Hmmm, I could write an entire book dedicated to walking (I kinda did), but I am a compulsive walker.
I grew up on a pedestrian street and spent my childhood walking everywhere. As an adult, I have refused to learn how to drive and I am terrified of two-wheelers, so I walk and take public transportation (and get driven by my kind kind friends). The pace of walking is important to me, and I think is reflected in my writing: it’s slower, more attuned to the details, more permeable to what is around.
I often develop my thoughts during my daily 90-minute walk. I’ll take an idea I am trying to develop for myself, and ruminate. It’s very meditative for me and my writing is really impacted by the way the idea unfolds at the pace of my feet.
Email, we can probably all agree, is generally a bummer. At the moment, my inbox is a jumble of stressful news stories and tasks I’m behind on jammed alongside emails from friends I really do want to answer and sales on things I don’t need but will definitely spend some time scrolling. (I’d bet I’m not the only one who’s felt a little zing of happiness on reading a “you’ve been chosen!” subject line, only to discover it’s not a writing prize but a sale at the Gap.)
Here’s one way to make email a little more fun: a selection of newsletters to spark your creativity, and, hopefully, inspire you to step away from your screen and back to your notebook or the natural world. Below, you’ll find newsletters from artists, writers, and thinkers that might just bring some joy back to your inbox.
You don’t have to be an artist to love Wendy Mac’s Draw Together—and I find, in fact, that freeing myself from the expectation that I’ll make something “good” is really part of the joy of the Draw Together Newsletter. I’ve used her exercises, like blind contour portraits, in my writing classes as experiments in cultivating our attention, and I got a kick out of my attempt at the 30-Day Drawing Habit at the beginning of this year. Draw Together combines MacNaughton’s expertise as an illustrator with her interest in mindfulness, as in this post, Take a Breath, which offers two drawing exercises designed to help manage stress and overwhelm. Paid subscribers get access to the Grown-Ups Table (GUT), which includes a weekly post with an art assignment, tips, guest interviews, and more. If you don’t want to spring for a subscription just yet, you can scroll back in the archives and find some treasures, or you can check out the Draw Together podcast.
Writer Suleika Jaouad started her newsletter, The Isolation Journals, at the beginning of the pandemic, as a way to “turn that isolation into creative solitude and connection.” Her Sunday Prompts feature a writer or artist who offers a brief essay and a journaling prompt. My favorites include Carmen Radley’s invitation to “create an inventory of your loves” and Susan Cain’s prompt to “write about a time when something you loved and lost returned in a different form.” (I recently wrote my own Sunday Prompt, which was grouped with a lovely essay by Elizabeth Gilbert under the shared title “Unreasonable Love.”) More than anywhere else I’ve seen on Substack, Jaouad’s readers engage with these prompts and share their writing in the comments. If you’re looking for a little shot of inspiration each Sunday and the sense of community that comes from seeing how a whole group of people from around the world respond to the same piece of writing, you’ll find it here.
In her newsletter, Heretic author Jeanna Kadlec, describes astrology as a counterpoint to productivity culture and a path into more mindfulness in your writing process. Free subscribers get a new moon and full moon newsletter each month, as well as regular author interviews; paid subscribers also get a Sunday emailed called The Week Ahead which offers “a detailed breakdown of the week’s astrological events with advice on what writing/creative activities are best (or are to be avoided),” as well as access to a Discord community, first dibs on booking astrological readings with Kadlec, and extra newsletters for major transits, like Mercury Retrograde. Writers who are already interested in astrology will find a lot to love here—but I don’t think you have to be immersed in the language of astrology to find meaning in Kadlec’s newsletter. I know only that my October birthday makes me a Libra, and I’ve come to really appreciate Astrology for Writers as a way of thinking about time and as a means of helping me reflect on what’s happening around me and how that might impact my writing life. A recent piece on the Full Moon, for example, considered what it means to be “in the messy middle of process” in our lives and our writing and offered a series of writing prompts to encourage reflection about how our environment, health, and relationships might be shaping our relationship to creativity at the moment.
Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks, writes his twice-monthly, free newsletter, The Imperfectionist, about “productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.” If you, like me, are allergic to the productivity bro hustle that’s an ubiquitous feature of most writing on time management literature but are still weirdly compelled by the hope that maybe there’s a better system out there somewhere, I bet you’ll love Burkeman’s writing. Each issue of The Imperfectionist contains one little gem of an idea or a way to reframe how we think about productivity, work, and time. (Some of my favorites include his assertion that “You can’t hoard life,” the reminder that “There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” and a recent musing on “Kayaks and Superyachts,” an excerpt from his new book Meditations for Mortals.) Burkeman’s writing manages to always feel both practical and refreshingly human.
Madelleine Müller, a Danish writer and musician, describes The Bed Perspective as “a newsletter about navigating chronic illness and creativity from a feminist and anti-ableist perspective.” Every second Wednesday, subscribers get an article on the experience of sustaining a creative practice while living with chronic illness, informed by Müller’s feminist and anti-ableist perspective. Müller also shares short meditations aimed at helping readers navigate health challenges, and she hosts community chats every other Friday. If you are living with chronic illness or trauma or love someone who does, I think you’ll find lots here to comfort and inspire you. Even writers without those particular challenges, though, will find the self-compassion and wisdom about creative practice Müller shares valuable. I particularly like her piece on tiny creative acts, like a word dump, lyric diary, dream diary, or more, to help you stay creative in difficult times.
Like Draw Together, See You, the newsletter created by artist and illust-writer Carolyn Yoo, focuses on drawing and visual journaling, but you don’t have to be a proficient artist to benefit from Yoo’s work. See You offers a great mix of exercises, like this post on visual journaling, and smart ways of thinking about sustaining a creative practice, as in her argument that instead of feeling like we have to make art (or write) every day, we should identify our minimum and maximum creative time. Free subscribers get access to weekly creative advice and glimpses of Carolyn’s artistic practice, review of art materials, monthly roundups, and interviews with other artists and illustrators; a paid membership gets subscribers access to the “Ask CYOO” advice column and archived sketchbook and process posts.
Writer and editor Sarah Lyn Rogers’s newsletter Curiosity and Ritual follows a publishing schedule guided by the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. Against the creative writing workshop imperatives to write every day or just get your butt in the chair, Rogers’s newsletter focuses on “the ebbs and flows of the seasons and creative energy.” Each newsletter closes with a ritual or experiment to help you in your creative practice. The vibe is a little witchy and wryly funny, as in an August newsletter marking the halfway point between summer solstice and autumn equinox, which was titled Well, are you having a brat summer? (a traditional Lughnasadh question) and featured Shrek alongside Charli XCX and the encouragement to consider “How can I invite more ‘brat’ into my life?” A newsletter from late September, titled Another hermit girl autumn: desert hermit edition, offered readers prompts for “eclipse-themed journaling,” asking “In this season, what would you like to let go of? Or what were you shown it’s time to leave behind?” Even as someone who has to think hard to remember the difference between a solstice and an equinox, I find that Rogers’s newsletters, with their rituals and probing questions, always reach me at just the right time.
Founded by writer and editor Sherisa de Groot, Literary Liberation describes itself as “a companion space to Raising Mothers, focusing on our writing, our wellness and our parenting practices.” Literary Liberation focuses on writing by the Global Majority and members of marginalized communities, and in just over six months, the newsletter has already featured an amazing array of workshops and interviews. Featured writers and workshop leaders include writers Elizabeth Acevedo and Emily Raboteau, agent Cherise Fisher, and more. Free members get access to all class and event offerings and occasional additional posts; Sarah Dalton’s about learning to make birth art during her second pregnancy and the related workshop, After Birth: Postpartum Narratives, is one example of a really valuable free offering. (Workshops range from $100 to $275, depending on the number of sessions; payment plans and scholarships are available.) Paid members get access to Literary Liberation prompts, interviews, private writing sessions, and more. If you could use more community and inspiration in your writing life, Literary Liberation is a great place to start.
Whether we like it or not, literary history tends to follow a known path. In high school, we read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and we are told this is the definitive book about The Dust Bowl. In college, we are introduced to T.S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land” and told that this work is an example of high modernism. But what if I told you that The Grapes of Wrath is not a Dust Bowl novel after all and that “The Waste Land” is actually a confessional poem about T.S. Eliot’s long-lost muse, Emily Hale? The books in the following list challenge the reception of well-known figures in literary history like Steinbeck, Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lewis Stevenson and, in some cases, add in new historical literary figures who have nearly been erased.
Although assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school, the difference for me was that my family had come over from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl, so this book really struck me. After I read it, I rushed home to call my grandmother to tell her about it. But my grandmother wasn’t impressed. Instead, she told me Steinbeck got it all wrong. I was confused by her reaction. Why was she so upset about this great author’s work? My teacher told me it was a classic. I had no idea how right my grandmother’s reaction was.
When I first stumbled upon and read Sanora Babb’s novelWhose Names Are Unknown, written in the late 1930s while she was volunteering with the Farm Security Administration, which built resettlement camps for Dust Bowl refugees, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Babb’s was a story that humanized the experiences of those who had suffered through the worst natural disaster the United States had ever faced thus far, a version where we got to know the characters before the worst days of their lives, when they had to flee to California to find work. Here was a book that told a version of the Dust Bowl story that aligned with the one my grandmother had told me. So, why were we reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school and not Babb’s book? Turns out it’s because Steinbeck borrowed and appropriated material from Babb’s notes, and because of this, her book, which was under contract with Random House at the time, was dropped by the publisher and wasn’t released until she was on her deathbed in 2004. When I finished reading Whose Names Are Unknown, I was fascinated with Babb and knew that she had to be my next biographical subject. And now, five years later, my biography about Babb,Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babbwill hopefully set this record straight.
My biography aims to correct the record by returning to the archives with the intent of writing Sanora Babb’s name back into the canon that has forgotten her. The life of Sanora Babb teaches us something about how to better understand the story of American Literature. Hers is the story of a strong woman who was not deterred by those who wished to tell her story for her, or by those who would not let her tell her own story. From an impoverished childhood living in a dugout farming broomcorn in eastern Colorado to trying to pursue a life as a writer in California during the Depression, Babb’s story relates to her on-the-ground reportage of the Dust Bowl. Later, Babb was in a writing group with Ray Bradbury for over forty years and had an intimate relationship with Ralph Ellison. She defied “miscegenation” laws in California and lived with the cinematographer James Wong Howe until they could legally marry, and she was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy Era. She wrote two novels, a memoir, poetry, and short story collections, and published her work in national magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Seventeen.
I’m not the only writer who challenges popular literary history to find the truth. In each of the eight books listed below you’ll find a different take on literary history, where you’ll not only see the literary elite you thought you knew differently, but you’ll also discover new figures.
On January 2, 2020, 1,131 sealed letters held at Princeton University Library Special Collections from T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale were finally opened after fifty years. And the two women who wrote these biographies: Lyndall Gordon and Sara Fitzgerald, were waiting at the archive doors. They wanted to be the first to discover who the mysterious Emily Hale was–the woman who inspired T.S. Eliot as he wrote his famous poems. And, Indeed, what we discover in Gordan’s The Hyacinth Girl and Fitzgerald’s The Silenced Muse is that the correspondence Hale saved between Eliot and herself has forever changed the narrative that Eliot so carefully crafted. In these letters, Eliot reveals the confessional nature of his poems. How Hale was the “hyacinth girl” in “The Waste Land” and “a rose of Memory” in the Four Quartets. As Gordan tells us in her introduction, “to read Eliot’s letters to Emily during the thirties and early forties is to enter poems in the making.” In Fizgerald’s carefully crafted biography of Emily Hale, The Silenced Muse she traces the life of this previously unknown woman and brings her back to life.
By the time I entered college and grad school, my mostly male professors told me that Slyvia Plath was just a young woman’s poet, as Emily Van Duyne writes in Loving Sylvia Plath, “a phase to pass through and grow out of in order to be taken seriously.” Van Duyne also reminds us how “Plath’s suicide is frequently presented as a capricious choice of a spoiled girl seeking revenge, rather than the culmination of a mental health crisis.” In her critical biography, Van Duyne fearlessly takes on the tired narrative that’s been cemented around Plath’s life and challenges it to include the sexual and physical violence Plath endured while married to Ted Hughes, along with how Hughes managed to control the narrative about Plath for decades after her death. This refreshing narrative takes on the immense task of finding our way back to the person Plath really was.
Thomas Travisano’s biography Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop broke the mold found in previous biographies about Bishop, where she was often made out to be the woman who was abandoned (both by her parents and her lovers) and who thereby became an alcoholic. In these works, Bishop’s grief and isolation were cherry-picked and displayed on a pedestal as if she were being picked apart: broken piece by broken piece. She became a muse of sorrow, blazoned. In Travisano’s biography Bishop is given the voice of authority. She isn’t picked apart into tiny fragments. Instead, what emerges through this careful study is the complex life experienced by one of America’s greatest poets.
In this new biography about Robert Lewis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Van de Grift by Camille Peri, we get to know the woman who helped shape one of the world’s most beloved writers. We learn that Fanny was a tomboy who after leaving her home Indiana for the Silver mine boom towns in Nevada, traveled to Europe with her daughter and two sons to escape her cheating husband. It was at an artist retreat in France in 1876 that Fanny and Robert first met. A meeting that according to Peri fueled both of their lives and sent the two on adventures around the world. Fanny, who was also a writer, short stories and colorful accounts about their life together, even contributed to helping her husband write the novels he is famous for. It’s about time that someone took on telling the story of this unique, and powerful literary partnership.
In these two biographies, the form of biography is reinvented so that it can be used to tell the story of two renowned literary figures whose lives had been lost from the archives. Both books not only bring back two lives, but share the nearly impossible journey both writers took in order to recover their stories.
In Traces of Enayat, Mersal takes us with her as she travels to Egypt in search of Enayat al-Zayyat, a brilliant young novelist who took her own life at age 27. In Egypt, Mersal finds that not only does no one know who al-Zayyat is, but those who do know her suppress what they know. What follows is a harrowing journey into al-Zayyat’s hidden life.
In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofarecovers the life of the 18th-century noblewoman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose story was preserved through the poem she wrote about her husband’s murder, “The Keen for Art O Laoghaire.” Ní Ghríofa wraps this biography in her autobiography, describing her archival journey in trying to find the poet’s life between her busy life as a mother. By sharing the difficult journeys they both took, Mersal and Ní Ghríofa not only bring these forgotten writers back to life but they also show us the difficulties one faces when one tries to recover what has been lost.
This final selection is the OG of revolutionary biographical form. “We have stopped, or we have pretended to stop, the flow of time, and all the lesser lives with which we are here concerned are collected for the introduction.” So begins Johnson’s 1972 biography where she breaks the form of biography in order to tell the story of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith whose life had been overshadowed by the life of her famous husband, the Victorian writer, George Meredith. Johnson found Meredith’s letters tucked in Vera and Cliff Whiting’s house, letters that helped her unlock the life of the mysterious woman who was the model for George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways. A woman who had been written off as an adultress, a woman who “got what she deserved” when she died young and alone a few years later. Johnson begins her biography at her vision of what Meredith’s lonely funeral would have been like, and at it she gives Meredith agency, even in ghost form, to lead us toward the story of her life.
September 25, 2022. It is a 40 minute walk from the nearest train station to the spot along the water in Queens where Nick died, two years ago today. There are two bridges to cross on the way there and the sky is a sullen gray like an ice rink after heavy traffic; the air is thick with mist. I have sunglasses on, my hood up, and an umbrella, and I feel as if I am traveling into the past. If I see a bag on the ground that’s a sign and I’ll do it. If I run into one of the people I owe money to around here it’s a sign. Of what? In prior weeks, against the dizzying heat of a distended summer, I began to retreat from life as the familiar horizon of grief again advanced. All around me, the world has become very strange, indeed. I feel I am seeing things through a series of layered transparencies—street signs and storefronts and park benches surrounded by spectral counterparts drawn from separate memories, each slightly warped or askew.
In a poem, To Charles Williams, written in honor of his late friend, C.S. Lewis writes about loss disrupting the integrity of the self. He says, “Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard / To see plainly or record truly”. This death has unmoored him, made the familiar dubious, turned him everywhere into a mere visitor, his own life a foreign country. “Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning?” He asks, “Or the cold of spring?”
The closest street address to where it actually happened is a Department of Sanitation Building in an industrial part of Maspeth, Queens. In the cul de sac, a profusion of wildflowers obscures what was once the entrance to a small creekside encampment. I push through the undergrowth. Gone are the shack, the tents, and the shopping carts. On a sliver of rocky beach, a balled-up tarp is studded with orange caps, aluminum cans, and chip bags. New growth has obscured the old contours of the embankment and I am, jarringly, returned to the alien present. Confused, I search for evidence of the cabin’s foundation, for the saint candles I lit on this date last year. No luck. I look across the water at the Kosciusko Bridge, I stare through the mist at the concrete factory, I listen for that strange bugle call, expecting to hear my name in his voice.
From the beginning, Nick was a secret within a secret.
From the beginning,Nick was a secret within a secret.I first saw him late one night in Chinatown—spring 2017—stumbling up Mott Street past seafood markets fronted with sodden wooden troughs, the last of their ice dumped to melt on the curb. He leaned on his bike like a walker, hair long and dreading, eyes all but closed. I was wary, having heard of him through a pair of troubled rich girls I knew he was ripping off, selling them dope at an extraordinary markup. I had recently reentered bona fide heroin addiction after a few agonized on-and-off-and-on-again years, and was still able to maintain a plausible daylight existence at the expense of a family kept at arm’s length. Everything about the man repelled me—his hands like fossilized mitts, the colorless skin of his face that sagged like boiled meat from the bone. When he stopped beside me and spoke, his eyes were fluttering slits but his voice was calm and conspiratorial, surprisingly soft. I leaned towards it. “She not picking up her phone for you either?”
Junkies love to demonstrate their mastery, their medical expertise. Some of their sacred folk medicine: the cold water extraction; ascorbic acid, lemon juice, or white vinegar for shooting crack; using table salt to scrub the film off the inside of a lightbulb; red grapefruit juice; micron filters; ice cubes on testicles and in assholes; bioavailability; binding efficiency… When someone would miss a shot and blow up their shit, you’d sometimes hear another scabby, nodding junkie begin a lecture about using a hot compress to try and prevent abscesses from forming, or to relieve them once they arrive. I might say something like, you just have to cover it in Neosporin, a lot of it, and soak a towel in boiling water then press it down and towards your wrist like you’re rolling out pizza dough. Personally, I’ve never tried it.
Recovery circles propose that for the active addict, the drug fulfills the same role, metaphysically, that the Higher Power is meant to serve for the sober addict—a constant companion and a locus of comfort. In recovery, though, the intended sense of belonging in the world is accessed through communion. In addiction, the longed-for fantasy is of perfect solitude, the obliteration of interrelation. I craved certainty and resolution, I reveled in the crippled physics of my shriveled universe. Time was punctuated by intervals between hits; the ideal day was the undifferentiated one. High or with the mere promise of a high in the foreseeable future, it became possible to endure the busiest shift, trek through a blizzard, rob any loved one or love any stranger, all in service of justice. What is just for the addict is comfort, and what is unjust, evil even, is being uncomfortable. The sick junkie, upon hearing that his dealer is around and holding, miraculously begins to feel well, marginally high even, on the strength of this faith alone, long before ingesting the substance.
Nick and I were not fast friends. We traveled separately in the orbit of a girl we adored, the daughter of celebrities, Jane, who’d recently been introduced to heroin and who we professed to want to keep from harm. At the time, I saw myself, in this triad, as a good angel, Nick as the devil. In reality, we were both enabling and exploiting her, all three of our habits growing steadily more dire. When Jane disappeared suddenly for rehab, Nick and I continued on, in the darkness of winter, bound by the shared loss and the need to combine resources. It began tentatively. Every night between seven and nine, I would tell my roommate (to whom the severity of my addiction was a secret) a transparent lie, walk out into the cold and meet Nick at the Graham Ave station. Together, we would pool our money and go meet his connect, who lived closer to me, had the good dope (not the strongest, admittedly, but the most trustworthy), and who Nick initially refused to let me meet. In return, I would surrender one extra bag to him before he hopped on his bike and disappeared. In all, this took about 25 minutes, and we did it every night. Gradually, as weeks turned into months, I began to let him use in my apartment before departing for the evening, first only in the stairwell, then only if my roommate was gone, until finally, even that boundary dissolved.
There are episodes in my time with Nick that I want to manipulate endlessly, hold like loose gems up to the light, trying to find the angle on which the prism refracts most beautifully. I want some alchemical miracle to change the tenor of memories without disturbing their content. But my obsessive excavation of the past produces no new revelations, no redemptive artifacts. I probe the sites of memory too often, infecting them with the grit and oil of the present. Nick is dead and I am alive. The dead stay put, changeless—we grow unrecognizable to them. Am I trying to change him? I am trying to keep his life suspended, exercising our history to stop it from resolving into slack sentimentality, to keep it from passing from meaning into mere meaningfulness.
I try flattering interpretations or cynical or academic ones. I might remember our later, failed sex as attempts to rejoin the world, to resurface and prove we still had working, useful bodies. And I could remember the failure on its own, the limpness and numbness, and decide we meant to prove ourselves heterosexual.
I could reconfigure his kleptomania as a symptom of love. And that he resisted stealing from me as proof of devotion. I was, incidentally, the recipient of ugly jackets and designer wallets, tee shirts in the wrong size, polaroid film (though I had no camera) and paints I’d never use. It was symbolic, of course; everything would turn into drugs.
Eight months into our friendship, a hot summer day, waiting waiting waiting for our dealer, Simon, to respond, Nick and I walked up Graham Avenue from the BQE to the subway station. We stopped in each smoke shop and grocery store, on a mission to find cucumber-lime Gatorade. He chatted constantly at me, buzzing from shelf to shelf, whipping open refrigerators, juggling unripe avocados. We’d probably shot coke or ketamine or popped Xanax or some combination before venturing out, I’m not quite sure. There was no cucumber-lime Gatorade in stock anywhere. Every time we’d leave one store for the next he’d wink at me and open his tote bag, displaying pints of ice cream he’d stolen. The bag filled up with different flavors and brands as we approached the station. He liked Van Leeuwen the best—the mint chip and cookies n’ cream. At the final grocery store on Graham and Metropolitan, I found the right Gatorade. As I was paying, Nick stumbled out the door behind me, tote bag bulging cartoonishly. The cashier yelled something, hopped the counter, and sprinted out the door after him. I took my Gatorade, glanced around the corner, and ran in the opposite direction.
We reunited a few blocks west, behind a granite and tile warehouse. He was grinning. Everything amused him. Simon texted. As we walked to pick up, he sorted through his bag and tossed the ice cream pints into various trash cans, saving only one. When we got home, he popped the container in the microwave until the ice cream was liquid—warm even, more a soup than a milkshake—and slurped it down.
The medications available for treating opioid dependence are blunt instruments.
On October 1, 2018, Nick left early in the morning and never returned, picked up by the police doing graffiti and, having several outstanding warrants, sent to Rikers. In a letter he sent me from prison, he talks repeatedly about trying to get off dope and methadone. He says, “After being off almost a month, I was still feeling like shit and I was always chasing it and wasting my money. I had to get back on and especially things have been pretty hectic recently and I can’t put myself in danger by being all sick and tired and weak. This isn’t the time or place for anything like that. I really wanted to get off. I just couldn’t do it right now. Honestly that makes me pretty sad. I didn’t want to come out with a habit and have to go to a clinic on my first day out…”
The medications available for treating opioid dependence are blunt instruments.Methadone and Buprenorphine are maintenance opioids, powerful narcotics that people may be dependent on for the rest of their lives or may use to taper gradually off—a protracted withdrawal that ultimately leaves them weakened for weeks, even months. Naltrexone, originally used for alcohol dependence, is an opioid blocker, which occupies the receptors, rendering them unable to initiate the euphoric, high-inducing effects of opioids. It is a pill that needs to be taken orally once a day. Vivitrol (naltrexone in Extended-Release Injectable Suspension) was approved in 2010 for the treatment of opioid dependence and blocks the effects of drugs like morphine, heroin, and synthetic opioids for a period of 30 days following intramuscular administration. To receive Vivitrol or Naltrexone, an addict has to be completely detoxed from opioids for a period of eight to fourteen days, depending on the drugs used. For addicts unable to enter a detox unit or without the time and resources to successfully detox themselves, this is a nearly impossible task.
“Let me do it, let me do it, it’ll be easier,” Nick said. We were showering together, about a month before he went to jail, made momentarily hyper-alert by the extraordinary, bell-ringing shots of cocaine we’d just injected. I felt individual crystalline droplets exploding against my skin. The rumble of water battering the tiles was like artillery, and the sound itself a kind of rising atmospheric pressure. The initial 30 seconds of white light and divine heat following injection had subsided and the frigid horror was again upon me—a feeling of otherworldly dread, unimaginable fear, one I knew with mathematical certainty would arrive and yet felled me every time. There was a terrifying tightness growing in my chest, something badly off. My heart raced faster than it ever had before, despite my perfect stillness. 140, 180, 200 beats per minute, I saw numbers in my periphery, I heard scratching at the door. Colors reached out to touch me: yellow, orange, red, strobing…
I was thin enough to observe the flesh in the upper left-hand corner of my chest pulsating wildly. Transfixed, I expected at any moment to feel the final pop—in my chest, in my neck, my head. I was going to die, I was already dead, I had killed myself. Nick continued to talk at me as I lowered myself to the floor of the shower. He was blessed with a profound, almost distasteful sense of calm, one I’d never encountered before or since—an apparent immunity to panic, to psychosis.
“You said you weren’t going to do this again,” he said, shielding his face from the spray. “You promised.”
“It’s different this time, it’s real, you have to call someone,” I whispered, sure that if I spoke at full volume, my heart would explode. “I’m having a heart attack.”
He didn’t say anything, just stepped out of the shower. An alarming shimmer was now seeping in from the edges of my vision; I was at the bottom of a bright white well.
“Wait, don’t go, can you hold my hand and count breaths with me?” I moved my lips very carefully. They were gray and shingled with fluttering rinds of dead skin. I couldn’t hear myself. An invisible halo of noises had descended around my head, a shriek like a jet engine, like train brakes, wailing metal on metal. Nick returned holding a syringe of smack the color of Aunt Jemima’s and turned off the water. He knelt down. I could see in his eyes I’d fucked his high. He was burning up inside. Roughly, he looped and tightened the belt around my upper arm, shoving the end in my mouth to hold taut without a word.
“You owe me a bun,” he said. His face was stony, disinterested even, but his fingers, probing my forearm for a bulging vein, were gentle and precise. When, finally, crimson darted into amber and he lowered the plunger, the plug was pulled and insanity rapidly drained out of me. I was restored, I was reborn. I couldn’t feel my heart at all; it might as well have stopped. The icy tundra of psychosis had thawed and reasonableness, rationality bubbled up in its place.
I have been getting regular injections of Vivitrol, the opioid blocker, on and off for the past six years. Every few months, my insurance acts as if it’s the first they’re hearing of this medication and threatens not to cover the next dose. Then, my doctor and I have to wait around as we’re transferred from robot voice to robot voice until finally someone somewhere obliges. Without insurance, the retail cost of Vivitrol is around $1,738 a month.
Two days after getting Vivitrol in August 2022, a month before the 2nd anniversary of Nick’s death, I started having pain at the injection site on my buttcheek. I have heard from other recipients about soreness and redness for days after, to the point of having difficulty sitting comfortably, though I myself had never experienced a reaction. On the third day after the shot, my left butt cheek was noticeably swollen and tender, by the fourth day the pain was so bad I was limping. In the colorectal surgeon’s office I stripped half naked and bent over a table while he shoved a thick needle into the affected area. Fuck, he said and showed me the syringe, now full of a putrid, spam-colored fluid. He scheduled me for surgery the following day at a nearby hospital, where he’d put me under and drain the infection.
The trials of loving an addict as a helpless bystander are well documented. I loved Nick while we used together and continued to even after our paths diverged. When he was arrested, I didn’t have time to cry and shake my fist at the sky, nor did I have the resources or wherewithal to bail him out. It was just over. Without a single handhold left in the living world, I fell and fell. My body was in tatters. I used drugs for two, liquidating everything, determined to leave no trace. I would die just like they promised. I overdosed twice, my dick dripped nonstop bloody piss, my legs were cratered with skin ulcers. Jails, institutions, or death, they say in AA, the ends are always the same. But I balked at death. I fled the city for institutions, and I got sober; Nick continued to the bitter end. While he was still alive I often wished he would die and sometimes acted as if he already had. These are thoughts I am sure members of my family had about me, too, though I have never asked.
Because Vivitrol blocks the effects of opioids, and because of my well-documented medical history of substance abuse, the doctors and nurses at Mt. Sinai West took turns regretting to inform me that I would have to take ibuprofen following the procedure, and that it might be moderately to severely painful. The worse news was, because of the nature of the infection, and the size and placement of the incisions being made, the wound would have to be kept open with drains for several months following the surgery.
In his 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the process of mourning as cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that…culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. In mourning, there is a turning inwards, a morbid narcissism, the world has become impoverished. In contrast, melancholia is described as grieving for something that has not been lost—a love object that is still within reach, but has changed meaning irrevocably. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.1The addict is the terminal melancholic, suffering from a ceaselessly famished ego, one sated—though barely—by the miraculous effect of the substance, and in the romantic relation of addict to substance, which supersedes all others as the primary intimate relationship.
In the time between my getting sober and Nick’s death, certain meanings changed irreversibly. The drugs I could never touch again and all the touchstones and rhythms of life that attended them had become apocalyptic and remote, and Nick, himself emblematic of a chapter closed, stood chief among them. Opioid dependence is a kind of Schrodinger’s cat state of threshold experience. The dope addict is always in oscillation between wakefulness and perhaps-permanent oblivion, life and death indefinitely deferred. He is only a part-time resident of hell, and a perennial tourist in the land of the living.
Reentry into the waking world, the working world, was difficult. I found myself on first dates struggling to explain away the wasted years, to valorize myself, to make light of, dodge, or outright lie. On one occasion, I spoke at length about being an end of life caretaker for my ailing grandparents, on another I was solemn and reticent about the brutality of basic training as a marine. In a dark club, a guy put his hand down my pants and felt the smooth, circular depression on my crotch—the scarred remains of an abscess resulting from a missed hit. Nail gun accident, I blurted out. The urgent, solitary mission of finding and acquiring more drugs was a deep-sea pressure holding the other, incidental parts of my life together, and, having come to the surface, my identity collapsed, had become shapeless and muddled.
After the surgery, my left butt cheek continued to bulge abnormally, now due to the thick dressing required to soak up the constant discharge of pus, blood, and tissue. Bands of plastic and suturing wove in and out of the flayed skin, quilting it like a poorly tied roast. Having to rinse and redress the incisions multiple times a day, the skin around the area became livid and blistered from the bandaging adhesives.
For a few weeks, the dripping gashes took on mystical properties. Daily, I was at the mercy of a body turning inside out. The narcissism of self-pity transfigured a medical mishap into a myth of sainthood. I was being punished for having gotten well while others continued to suffer and die; I was being branded for past crimes I had yet to make right. Upon waking, a lurid brown stain bloomed through the fitted sheet and into my mattress pad. In the shower, dark gobs of blood and gray ribbons of tissue conjured images of continuous miscarriage. My addiction, a once-cherished and carefully nurtured child, now rotten and forcefully expelled.
The perpetual anxiety of bursting, of spillage and overflow held hostage my erotic attention. Laying in bed with the man I had been seeing, Tony, I dreamt of his thrusting penis drawing back from my asshole and piercing instead the wet, forbidden abyss of my surgical wound. We had been having numerous problems in our relationship—failures of communication, games of denial and withholding. I was leaving the door open on a dream of a world that no longer existed and spent all my time loitering on its threshold. Are you still in love? Tony asked me repeatedly, a blanket accusation. Still in love with Nick? No longer in love with him? I didn’t know. Peeling back the bandages, the overwhelming stench of putrefaction would fill the room. The smell of a veterinary office, a zoo.
Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story. In the autumn of 2020, roughly two years into sobriety and two years since I’d last seen him, I finally relented and responded to a text inviting me to participate in a photo shoot he was doing for a magazine. It was disturbing to see him. I wanted to feel the same kind of narcotized adoration—the bliss of infinite postponement, of collapsing into someone, draining into them like a river into a swirling estuary. Instead, when he hopped into my car and hit the crack pipe, I felt I was meeting him again for the first time. I was afraid of being ripped off, no longer a co-conspirator; I was outside the joke.
Recounting the timeline of my relapse, I tell people that when Nick killed himself by filling his shack with carbon monoxide a week after our reunion, the anguish activated a dormant reflex and I was high before I could even register the loss—like a sleepwalker suddenly coming to, knife in hand. People of all ages shake their heads and touch my shoulder, glassy eyed and sympathetic. I hide inside the legibility of this story. The logic all checks out; who wouldn’t be felled by such extreme upheaval? It is an untouchable alibi. I am granted clemency. The truth is I shot heroin the day of our reunion. I wanted to be close to him again, to huddle around the same flickering fire, the sustenance provided by once more sharing a secret. I said, “I drove you around all day, you owe me a bag,” and he gave me two.
The bleeding was continuous, requiring constant care. I lost sensation in the upper outer region of that buttcheek. My relationship with Tony collapsed. I could think only of myself, of monitoring the extremes of my body, afraid of what might escape those crusting vents that seemed to breathe on their own, threatening speech. I courted pity wherever I went. The undressing, lavage, and redressing a kind of retreat to private worship, the wound a surrogate child. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud writes, By taking flight into the ego, love escapes extinction2. Could I reach into the infected pocket and pull out his name?
The scars that remain from my surgery are permanent—three dark puncture wounds, sunken and hard like tufting buttons. They interrupt the erotic act, punctuate it, demanding a pause for address. Repeatedly, I am put on trial, asked to either reveal myself or deliberately retreat. These areas of scarring—striations, ridges, tracks not just on my butt but all over my body—are monuments, promiscuous exhibits of history, demanding a claim or disavowal of authorship.
The confluence of wanting help and being able to get it is usually brief.
September 25, 2020. Later on, after I’ve left the riverbank, I receive a call from a friend of Nick’s, an emissary from the past. She says she has ten hours before she can be admitted to detox the next morning. Around the country, dope fiends lie dead in the aisles of supermarkets and in parked cars and at picnic tables. I pocket waterproof surgical tape at CVS and walk out without paying. I wish her luck, knowing she won’t make it. The confluence of wanting help and being able to get it is usually brief—a flare falling across the sky, then gone.
Earlier in the summer, a good friend of mine, Harry, overdosed and died in his childhood bedroom during a visit to see his parents. His mother asked if I thought he killed himself. I didn’t know what the good answer was, if there was one that might bring his death into coherence, if I could make him heroic. The funeral was packed, which shocked me. I’d assumed I was his only friend, but I was really just his last. Two months from now, in November, another friend, Luke, sober for years longer than I have ever been, will also relapse. He will die the same night. Here is what I’m saying: There is no justice. I saw his body; I saw his black mouth. I will learn that he was the father of three little kids with dark skin and white blonde hair. I will meet his wife for lunch. I will learn that for a year he only washed his hair with tree sap, that they owned a parcel of woods upstate with a small creek running through it. It turns out they’d been planning to leave the city for good. It turns out I barely knew him at all.
Note: Some names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.
Freud, S. (1972). Trauer und melancholie =: Mourning and melancholia: 1917. Merck, Sharp & Dohme. ↩︎
Freud, S. (1972). Trauer und melancholie =: Mourning and melancholia: 1917. Merck, Sharp & Dohme. ↩︎
One of the first forms my creative writing students adopt is the list. I love a list for its generosity and promiscuity, its non-hierarchical logic and stochastic lineation, its tendency to produce itself: to advance—accumulate—through coincidences and association and proximity, reassembling under the approximate logic of adjacency and wish fulfillment. Anyone can write a list and no list is complete; each item, like one site among a constellation, points us to other things or other futures. This list, too, is not meant to be an exhaustive inventory of poetry books about digital life or even an inventory of poetry books about the internet. Like media artist and curator Marisa Olson, who used the term “postinternet” in 2006 to describe a growing canon of art under the influence of the internet—work that described and critiqued nascent conditions of production and distribution; emerging social relations structured by obscured power dynamics—I think of the books on this list as work that observes and interrogates norms that we associate today with new media and networked capitalism, mining and miming the markup languages and polyphonic rhythms of the internet for glitches that might re-write the programmatic whole. Since at least 2017, when poet and digital poetics theorist William Lessard and The Brooklyn Rail described me as “Frank O’Hara traveling the hyper-connected contemporary landscape via iPhone” (“Adventures in Self-Voyeurism”), my work has been increasingly treated through its engagement with persona curation, surveillance cultures, glitch aesthetics, and the dislocative cadences of migration and passing.
With my latest book, a full-length collection of poems called Windows 85, I use address and apostrophe to kink the generative fictions of screen play, channeling the epistolary affect of digital interactions to clarify the melting point of incommensurable copresence; a form of wanting that has nothing to do with fulfillment or even pleasure—the redemption of an intimacy actualized through distance, blur, and withdrawal: “… how I want to be close to you / because I feel this way but I wouldn’t feel this way / if we were together.” The encounters that occur in Windows 85 appear and evaporate with a simultaneity that I want to liken to any streaming, always-on interaction, where the urge to join (with) another person in an indeterminant “here” or “now” doesn’t just muddle a spatial-temporal order but the border between bodies, without which one can just as suddenly become the other.
One of the questions that prompted me to make this collection was: can I adapt my media theory to verse? There are so many great examples of novels in verse; maybe Windows 85 is theory in verse. Like the books on this reading list suggest, collections of poetry installed in digital cultures have a tendency to straddle or evade formal markers and generic categories, challenging readers to broaden our notions about what poetry looks like; what a poem does.
With quick wit and earnestness, u know how much i hate being alone in social situations skims the everyday insecurities and traumas of being human, or part human, on again off again, amidst the cringe rituals of office share interactions and work emails, the theater box of Twitter, the spectacle of health and wellness, and the anomalous soundtrack brought by haphazard public transit—the almost imperceptible transition from person and persona, one’s inner world and the instantaneous public, a changeover collapsed by the fact of being always online. Stephon Lawrence’s poems harness the abridged spelling and slang of chatspeak and a polychromatic array of emojis in service of a self-aware address to an audience that is often imagined and always implied. Shifting from unsent voicemails to unfinished HTML script to celebrity rendezvous and dreams within dreams (within dreams), Lawrence’s speaker navigates heartache and clickbait with playful aplomb and deep vulnerability.
As our relationship with the internet continues to update, reflected by the metaphors—network, swarm, multitude, assemblage—we deploy to understand “collective intelligence,” Vincent Toro’s Hivestruck traces a trajectory of media with punchy lyricism, anecdotal storytelling, and relentless experiments in form, reanimating a life that can be measured by the screens one has possessed or been possessed by. Toro’s code-switching, polysemic verse looks out as much as it looks in, detailing the zombification of watching and being watched in the “panopticonfederacy” with mic-drop parody and solemn observation. Hivestruck’s poems, organized into three sections, shift between ballads to braided haibuns to the Latin American décima to cleave poems to the crab canon—an invention of Toro’s which, in reversing the language of a poem’s first half, recreates the effects of a mirror on the bottom. Others take the form of persona poems in which Toro ventriloquizes machines and content moderators and, elsewhere, digital content itself, inverting lenses to address the reader-user: “I am an icon. My profile/page when double-clicked updates you/on my status. One million views … .” With its diffuse structure and theoretical concentration, Hivestruck reminds us of the possibilities both obscured and precipitated by the limitations we impose, whether or not we know it, on ourselves.
A poetry collection that serves as a counterarchive, The Rendering attends to the historical ledger that has not merely been omitted from the record but resists conventional representation. With no desire for “the whole picture,” these poems, many of which offer multiple pathways of reading through Anthony Cody’s use of annotation and enjambment, also upend the archival urge for totality. Cody combs digital public domains to collage historical ruin with contemporary ecocide, manipulating photojournalist Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the Dust Bowl, U.S. Weather Bureau reports, transcripts of UN climate change panels and interviews with Dust Bowl refugees with graphic design software to create a visual-verbal communication that, at times, resembles a galaxy of command prompts. The Rendering’s transgenerational scope reminds readers that environmental and economic precarity and mass displacement and migration must be understood as mutually constituted under the design of consumer capitalism, now as in the past.
Reps, like its title suggests, is a collection of poetry as a triptych, each part exercising the formal structure and thematic organization expected of a poetry collection. Kendra Sullivan diverts often, moving from the ventriloquism of machine-learning in “Exercises Against Empathy” to the repetition of an origin story in “A Typology of Possible Biographies,” whose poems all open with the expository mantra: “A story about.” Sullivan’s poems are observational, abbreviated, curious, and attentive, imbued with a self-reflexivity that allows her speakers to question the terms of their own representation, as well as the conditions of expression and production. Though it isn’t until the book’s third section, “Margaret, Are You Grieving?” where an unbroken narrative emerges: a young artist’s coming of age at Ground Zero. Like other books on this list, Reps edges the territories of the digital world and the very material ecological world to insist on an ethics of reparation, for our natural world and to one another.
Cecilia Corrigan’s Titanic, which was awarded the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize by Lisa Robertson in 2013, was the first book I’d read that felt digitally native, in the sense that reading Titanic—an epistolary romance, a pitch for a TV show, a script for reality … all of these—felt like being on the internet: more virtual than cyberspace. Father of AI Alan Turing plays Corrigan’s protagonist, a man on the run, escaping love (and death) for the digital dreamscape of disembodied consciousness within a book of poetry interspersed with chatboxes and pop-up ads, correspondences between William and Alice James, appearances by Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry, transcriptions of late night talk shows and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,declaring that all of these, too, are poetry. In Titanic, as on the internet, everyone is playing a character, and maybe even themselves.
Another recipient of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize (awarded by Jennifer Moxley in 2011), Throng investigates ruins of the present in the aftermath of limitless horizons: the catastrophe of experience and knowledge brought by the consummation of absolute access; that anything and indeed everything can be accumulated, seized, sorted, sold back to us, as us. The collection’s poems, many of them written in neat couplets and tercets, glimpse a narrative that can only look back, that can only sift through fragments, without any attempt to restore or redeem. Jose Perez Beduya’s hushed tones drape his matter-of-fact lyric cycles in a vaporous lullaby that haunts and disorients, mirroring the speaker’s hunt for an identity premised on simulation, a sense of subjectivity absent individuation, in which narrative relation is often constituted by the re-citing of a collective “we”: the anonymous throng of the title. But Beduya’s book is not an examination of self and community so much as it is a reenactment of the patterns by which selfhood is continuously negotiated inside “the bright wheel” that acts as Throng’s leitmotif.
Pixel Flesh by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington
Pixel Flesh (Carne de Píxel, literally “pixel meat” in the Spanish original), is a love story that substitutes plot for the information overload of media saturation. Like the small square of data belonging to its title, the book exploits its streaming prose form—presented in dual Spanish-English, as translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington—while embedding its series of breakups with found texts lifted from Spanish periodicals alluding to science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, scraps of quantum theory and the flotsam of code unmoored from an operating system: enmeshing the net/work of art and science. Agustín Fernández Mallo, whose background is in experimental physics, tests the limits of a pixel’s inherent drift toward reproduction and displacement—each pixel, after all, is just a sample of an original image, and Pixel Flesh’s story does not advance so much as iterate, collecting, in each successive sequence, fragments of memories that may or may not be the speaker’s own, a love that is endlessly displaced and thus endlessly desired.
Years before OpenAI normalized conversational generative artificial intelligence with ChatGPT, which would become, two months after its launch, the fastest-growing consumer software app in history, programmer and poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram was already adapting Python, JavaScript, and Perl programming languages to produce poems that counter dominant narratives of Black lives while critiquing the assumed neutrality of science and algorithmic objectivity. In Travesty Generator, Bertram pays heed to an ongoing history of Black erasure and the racialized surveillance and securitization that shapes and is shaped by biased technology, including the predictive analytics of search engines. Bertram’s collaborative permutations are incantatory and haunting, their versions and reversions channeling the lives and deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner—“People also search for: Emmett Till”; “People also ask what was Harriet Tubman’s life like?”—serving as both an elegy and the inauguration of a Black futurity. The ambiguity of most repurposed language divested of context is here reconveyed with urgency and social-political agency; Bertram’s self-reflexive poems interrogate the atrophy of cultural memory under an attention economy and, moreover, their own formal structures through a relation of violence that is implied and inevitable. But by recasting last words and returning a voice to Black bodies, restoring them to legibility and subjectivity by writing, as Bertram does in the early 14-part sequence, “Counternarratives,” from their point of view, Travesty Generator’s collaborations serve as a call to witness beyond the distancing gaze of science and social media.
Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s 2022 debut collection explores empire’s extant processes of racialization and colonialism with honesty and humor and a scathing playfulness that speaks to the poet’s use of mimicry as subversion. Like its title suggests, MissSettle is interested in unsettling the structures of language and logic, our assumptions about knowledge, literacy, belonging, and bodies, their institutionalized inscribing and cultural co-opting. Hilliard’s roving gaze sights transcultural practices, hyper-linking distant subjects, encounters, and histories with a stream-of-consciousness verve and vibe that wants to turn the paper into a screen and the act of page-turning into the dégagé scroll of social media, plus the offhand interjection that all of this is being composed on the go. “I don’t even want reparations/yet !” Hilliard’s speaker insists. “First , I will take a #3 combo/bc i’m hungry and a #2 pencil ,/not cause negros remain unprepared/for ontological warfare—but bc/I need to jot all this down.” Though it flaunts a velocity that mimics our contemporary cascade of content abundance, the book resists quick reading. Instead, Hilliard’s frisky and provocative asides and grammatical idiosyncrasies require we look back (look again) at the ways in which syntax and citizenship undergo interrogation, derangement, and revision in these poems salted with self-aware exclamation and dramatized ellipsis, the interlude necessary for a poetics of reconstitution.
Cross-genre and multidisciplinary, The Kármán Line rims perimeters, layers, boundaries both bodily and virtual, internal and public, geopolitical and extraterrestrial in pursuit of a novel epistemology, a thinking and a writing “in service of a togetherness.” Daisy Atterbury’s hypnotic narrative converges systems thinking and environmental studies with childhood anecdotes and often obscured histories of colonization, militarization, and securitization across interconnected sequences addressed to a lover, moving without signal from ruminative prose to the glitchy enjambment of verse amidst the insidious specter of radioactive fallout, from the galactic Zone of Avoidance to Sushi King and Spaceport America, from the coded come-ons of Tinder to the collected notes of Wittgenstein and cartographic recreations that reinscribe unequal realities. Along the way, readers witness the nascent encounters and non-encounters through which a love begins to take shape, never without Atterbury accounting for the potentiality of disaster or crisis, the etymological turning point when something irrevocably changes. Atterbury’s scope is generous; her voice tender, speculative, and mindful of the body undergoing various operations of dis/placement and re-embodiment across digital spaces and the dream of deep space—everything orbiting the motoric hub of desire, the necessity of being undone in order to be remade, together with another, gleaming what Atterbury calls “a radical softness,” a being (in touch), which is beyond descriptive narrative, beyond territorialization or metrics, beyond the regulatory divisions signaled by her debut collection’s title.
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