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The narration in particular demonstrates Levé’s artistry. The book’s speaker addresses his friend, recounting a wide range of events, conversations, and thoughts that took place before the suicide. But wait—he, the narrator, is recounting incredibly specific details about his friend’s life, quoting conversations, explaining worries and trains of thought that his friend, not the narrator, experienced.
The stories in Sentence thrive in the midst of foreclosed freedoms, a confining environment but never without a sense of curiosity and interest. Sentence may forego periods for the brief spaces allowed by commas, but the narratives are well-structured, darkly humorous, nostalgic, investigative in regards to the surreality of trauma, survivor guilt and paranoia.
Bequeath is a project of probing questions from the past and reifying them in the present through the burden of worry Wolff inherited in girlhood from her mother and felt, but never completely understood, even in adulthood. Her essays are the incarnation of that “delicately durable circuit” established in childhood sending into her “consciousness each day the sanctity of memory.”
Gold Digger is a bristling invitation. A challenge and a call to attention. It demands an opening of the eyes and ears to lives lived vivid and vital despite the social context in which they are lived. This is a collection as galvanising as it is refreshing, and I congratulate Lisa and Gazebo Books on its publication. If you identify as a woman, you will feel seen in these pages. If you neither identify as a woman nor have spent any of your life socialised as one, prepare to have your eyes unpeeled.
As her poetry and prose articles indicate, she is concerned about the little-known risks of the wireless boom and works to build awareness of the dangers. While her recurrent theme is the threat posed by modernity to the rhythms and solace of nature, her poems are not overly didactic nor depressing. They are uplifting and also reader-friendly; she includes footnotes to explain potentially unfamiliar terms.
Often in this gorgeous collection, I found the theme of death to be that of decay: dead birds, dead spiders, pears rotting; the kind of death that winter brings. In the poem, “In the Small Hours,” Simmons writes of dead spiders, “their brittle petals,/their dull pigments/their spiders/in diapause, because in the belly/of the dead it is always winter.”
Hamby’s ideas flow like a person talking to herself, and we get to listen in. Her free-association stream-of-consciousness is exactly the stuff of dreams, as alluded to earlier, so it’s no surprise that so many of the odes involve dreams. “Ode on the Rilke Metro Stop in the Paris of My Dreams” is one (“In this dream we’re in Paris, driving around in a car, / which is a nightmare…”).
The Voice of Blood is an eye opener. (A vein opener, too.) Read this book and you will fly with Quetzalcoatl, in a Cinco de Mayo replete with myth, fable, monsters, and current events. The illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada accompanying each story, are nothing short of outstanding: stark engravings, appropriately stylized, of winged creatures, witches at the stake, demons.
The Drop Off takes these notions of play, irreverence and art, and utilises the tools of poetry – redaction and silences, puns, the language of public discourse, rhythm and structure to lead the reader, almost by stealth, into sudden moments of intense vulnerability.
Indifferent Cities raises compelling questions about the nature of family, of generations, of how we may reach a point in our lives when, regardless of whether our parents are living or deceased, we become, psychically, parents to our own parents and perhaps also children to our own children. Indifferent Cities, in inspiring the reader to consider these paradoxes, is anything but indifferent. On the contrary, it is poignant.