after Käthe Kollwitz
I heard they no longer sew eyelids of the dead shut.
At the morgue, I busied myself counting
the lacerations on my husband’s neck and wrists.
I wore sunglasses and a light jacket
and pressed my palm to his wrapped chest.
After the dried blood was wiped from his face, his jaw was set
with a piece of string. They tried to leave a natural appearance.
I wanted to smooth his clothes; I wanted to clean his hair.
His throat was a village, my palm an iron of matrimony.
I wanted to burn the holding room, jar and sell the ashes.
At home, the hours layered like moths.
I didn’t eat and slept some nights. This was my way
of waging war. There was nothing left for me.
I carried him on my back and over my shoulders. I carried him
across my forehead and between my shins.
But it didn’t matter; he was going right into the fire.
I should have been the one to have prepared his body.
Major Jackson: I’m fluctuating between abject fear and inexplicable optimism.
Mitch Wertlieb: That’s poet Major Jackson, who lives in South Burlington. And you may have heard a bit of laughter in the background from his wife, Didi Jackson, who is also a poet. The two are quarantining together at a house in Rochester, Vermont, currently. And you might think, you know, the writing life lends itself to self-isolation even in normal times. So how difficult can that be?
But as Didi Jackson says …
Didi Jackson: What is difficult, though, is knowing that we can’t just pick up and get to family and friends, particularly if we feel like they need us. I have a lot of family in Florida. My son’s there, I feel like I can’t get to him super easy. And Major just had a loss in his family, and there’ll be a funeral that I don’t think he’s going to be able to go to.
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy in her care. The girl, local to this island, knew the boy’s parents would not take her with them. She was hiding out of equal parts jealousy and spite. Only when the noise outside died down would she and the child emerge to find the streets abandoned, spectral plumes of smoke rising in the distance, and the little boy’s parents gone. Only then would the girl realize what she had done.
Aimee Liu talks about GLORIOUS BOY, the excruciating process of writing, creating a memorable silent character, her shapeshifter dad, and so much more.
Some 30 years ago, an established nonfiction writer and a screenwriter decided to write their first novels. They met in a fiction writing class, and have been friends ever since, with eight books of fiction now between them.
Those two writers are Aimee Liu and me.
What we never anticipated was that we would both have books coming out in the midst of a global pandemic.
Aimee’s new novel, Glorious Boy, will be released on May 12. My short story collection, Vanishing, came out in March.
Both of us now find ourselves sheltering at home and woefully contemplating a social and commercial landscape that is forcing booksellers, publishers and authors to reinvent the very definition of a book launch.
Since Aimee is still in the process of planning her book launch, I wanted to chat with her (virtually, of course) about her book and what’s changed in the month since my tour simply—well—vanished.
Featured mentioning of Percival Everett’s Colonel Hap Thompson!
Presented in five poetic sequences, the poems in Hold Me Tight by gay poet Jason Schneiderman focuses the reader’s attention on the subjects of anger, real and metaphorical wolves, the work of the late artist Chris Burden, art and technology, and, finally, a series of “last things.”
At 15, Plum Valentine is banished from her Brooklyn home and sent back to Jamaica by parents nervous about the pernicious effects of the American lifestyle. Once there, her trust in her parents shattered, she turns to her chemistry teacher, Lenworth Barrett, for solace. Soon, she is pregnant and planning a life with Lenworth.
In the bedroom of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, there’s a mural depicting a well-dressed crowd at a cocktail party pasted to the wall. Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, points to small black lines that outline the teeth of some in the crowd: a handful of them, chest-high or so, the only faces Shaun could reach when she “enhanced” the mural as a child. The artwork was installed to cover the random lists and thoughts that her poet grandmother habitually wrote on the wall. To get to the upper level where the family sometimes entertained, guests walked through the master bedroom; concerned about what visitors might think about the scribblings on the wall, Spencer agreed to have the mural installed. Shaun smiles as she points out the features of people in the crowd and names Harlem Renaissance figures she thinks are depicted in the painting.
Family relations can be fraught in the best of times, even when people care deeply for one another.
So what happens when you throw those family members into a situation as charged and divisive as the Vietnam War — and then force them to choose between family loyalty and personal beliefs when making a critical decision?
In Ellen Meeropol’s newest novel, “Her Sister’s Tattoo,” two sisters in their early 20s, Rosa and Esther Levin, take part in an anti-Vietnam War rally in Detroit in the volatile summer of 1968. Rosa, the older of the two, is dedicated to stopping the war any way she can. Her sister, Esther, opposes the war as well but also has an infant daughter who’s become the new focus of her life.
It’s Detroit, 1968. Sisters Rosa and Esther march against the war in Vietnam with their best friend, Maggie.
As they reached the rally site, double rows of blank-faced National Guard troops lined the wide avenue, sunlight bouncing off their helmets. Rooftop cameras mounted on panel trucks with television station logos swiveled to catch the action. Esther smiled and waved to the soldiers.
“Don’t wave.” Rosa’s lips pinched into a thin line. “They’re the enemy.”
“No, they’re not. They’re Danny.”
On this episode of Rekindled, Andrew Altschul is in conversation with Ellen Meeropol. Andrew Altschul’s third novel, The Gringa, was published the day before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus crisis a pandemic. Ellen Meeropol’s fourth novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, comes out next week, as three-quarters of US citizens are sheltering in place. Both writers have focused on political conflict and matters of social justice in their work, as in their lives; their new books share an interest in such issues, as well as thematic examination of America and Americanness, and questions about the relationship between literature and real life. They spoke on April 1 about the challenges they confronted in writing these novels, and in introducing them to a world in crisis.
Kathryn interviews Creative Writing and Literature teacher at Antioch University, Los Angeles Deborah Lott, author of “Don’t Go Crazy Without Me.” More than just the tragicomic coming-of-age story of a girl growing up under the magnetic spell of her outrageously eccentric father, she tells the story of an era. Lott’s memoirs, essays and reportage have been published in the Bellingham Review, LA Times and more.
The meaning of the intriguing title of Lott’s courageous and endearing memoir snaps into sharp focus. “My father and I were not ordinary,” she writes. “Oh no, we had formed an alliance around being extraordinary.” Even as a 4-year-old, she recalls, her mother used the Yiddish word tummel to describe “psychic commotion” that characterized her father, “noise and hilarity, noise and calamity.” Yet, she was fascinated by her “shape-shifting” father – “would-be actor, teller of dark truths, funhouse amusement, sexy gorilla, and his favorite role: lay rabbi of the La Crescenta Valley Jewish Community Center.”
