Though a newcomer to the genre, Bay Area author Cécile Barlier shows a mastery of the form with this visceral and eclectic debut. In stories that span from the harrowing and macabre to the outlandish and amusing, she turns everyday situations into playgrounds for literary experimentation.
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In a 2019 interview at Lunch Ticket, Allison Joseph said the following about her emotionally abusive father: “Only after his death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language. That’s why so many of the poems in that book are formal—those forms gave me a way to control and confront the ‘character’ of my father as presented in the book … I needed formal tools to achieve that confrontation.” The meticulous quatrains in her poem “Dinner Hour” in Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen, 2019) offer a cooling habitat for such seething sentiments. I mention this for two reasons — first, I’m still hooked on this collection even as her new book, Lexicon, calls for attention, and also, Joseph’s restless search for and reliance on form extends through Lexicon — where the looming figure of the harsh father reappears:
Hoagland’s lyrical but convoluted debut novel (after the collection American Grief in Four Stages) follows the children of Redfield, a polygamist cult living in a remote Southwest commune. After 16-year-old Jeremiah and 12-year-old Emma are caught having sex, Jeremy’s father, Josiah, drives him toward the nearest town, Pine Mesa, and abandons him on the side of the highway, then takes Emma as a wife.
In “How It Can Happen,” one of the first poems in this fine new collection, the narrator imagines death as Shakespeare’s “other country.” She writes, “I go with you, / but not all the way to your destination. / I wait in a dark house while you are taken / to a secret location. / We knew this could happen.”
The last line is instructive because it hints at a foreshadowing which haunts so many of these poems. In poem-after-poem the narrator is never sure of what’s across the river, but she’s certain it’s bad. A bridge will suddenly give way. Flood waters will rise too quickly. The villagers at the next exit won’t be friendly.
The stories and essays of Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit: Living in a Sentient World form a beautiful tapestry of communications across species and consciousness. From grateful dragonflies to fatherless strawberries to companionable stones, poet and activist Judy Grahn details meaningful connections from her own experiences of the sentient world. Throughout her firsthand accounts, she weaves in histories of ecological philosophies and spiritualities including those of North American Indigenous cultures, South India, ancient Europe, and Grahn’s own Scandinavian ancestors who interacted with spirits in rock and water. Both a study and a questioning of consciousness, Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit is a buzzing network of stories that connect with one another in the loving way that Grahn herself connects with the cats, ants, trees, and microbes in their pages.
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I was new to the seventh grade when Ms. Rossi routinely refused to acknowledge me. Though my hand stabbed the air in response to questions she posed, Ms. Rossi never called my name. “What d’ya think, Hillary?” or “Rebecca, you give it a go!” Each time Ms. Rossi’s eyes roamed over my hovering wicker-brown arm and landed on a white girl’s freckled face, her lesson, reserved for the few Black girls in her “gifted” class, was reaffirmed—keep your hand down and mouth shut.
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Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir is the story of a young woman’s coming of age and how she separates her own identity from her family’s. She recalls comedic and painful situations from her young childhood to teenage years.
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Cooley (The Archivist) examines the unexpected aftermath of a lottery win in her sharp latest.
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Many in our culture are fascinated by polygamy, a popular topic of reality TV, dramas, and news media coverage. It is hard to look away when these stories focus on the most shocking details; almost everyone has seen images of women and young girls in long, buttoned-up dresses and old-fashioned, almost otherworldly hairstyles, their uniformity perceived as a sign of coerced submission. Sadie Hoagland’s mesmerizing novel, Strange Children, follows a group of young people from a fictional polygamist cult called Redfield, in Utah. Hoagland stitches together the past and present of this fundamentalist religious community through eight first-person narrators. The novel’s structure and rotating narrators gives voice to those still in the community, those banished, and speaks to the outside world’s perception of them. The story is told with compassion and intelligence that sheds light on the complexity of this topic — the abuse and indoctrination, the lasting impact of trauma, and also the bonds formed in a shared community.
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Synopsis: In 2011, the family of Sebastian Matthews was in a major car accident. They were hit head-on by a man in the throes of a heart attack. It took three years to recover from their injuries, and a couple more to deal with the aftereffects of trauma.
When Sebastian finally returned to the world as father and husband, friend and brother, writer and citizen, it became clear that our society was in its own traumatized state — reeling from the string of police shootings of unarmed African Americans, stunned by yet one more mass shooting. The people around him were displaying all the signs of PTSD (jumpiness, irritability, numbness) and, concordantly, his own interactions out in daily life were becoming more dysfunctional, at times downright hostile.
Us against Them. Red vs. Blue. Black vs. White. Rich vs. Poor — he found himself living in a progressive town inside a conservative county in the Mountain South that only made things more volatile. Sebastian decided that if we were all living in a fractured society no longer recognizable, then it was up to him to re-engage in it. He would enter into encounters with people as conscious as possible of the potential divides and misunderstandings between him and others. He started with my neighborhood and town, then moved out into the counties around him, and then traveled further out into the country. His goal was to connect, to heal and be healed.
Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, published in April 2021 by Red Hen Press, is poet Khalisa Rae’s debut collection, following her 2012 chapbook, Real Girls Have Real Problems. Rae is a poet, queer rights activist, journalist, and educator in Durham, North Carolina, and a graduate of the Queens University MFA program. She is Managing Equity and Inclusion Editor of Carve Magazine, Consulting Poetry Editor for Kissing Dynamite, Assistant Editor for Glass Poetry, the Writing Center Director at Shaw University, and writer for NBC-BLK and Black Girl Nerds.
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Alaskan Inupiaq poet Marie Tozier’s new collection Open the Dark challenges—but also aligns with—western notions of linear time. Early on, the collection announces a cyclic, wheeling view of time as it unfolds in successive waves across the land. In one poem “An abandoned snowmachine / Sunk last spring, sits exposed near the far shore,” while another asks, “What’s inside / The space / Between laughter / And the memory / Of those you laughed with?”
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Nikki Moustaki’s debut collection of poetry captures this divide and dissociation while establishing themes of darkness and light within the difficult narratives of suffering and abuse. These poems juxtapose the divine and the mundane, and situate pieces of Christian and Greek mythology side by side. Moustaki surpasses a meditation of the presence of beautiful within a world of ugliness, and says, “Where the beautiful mingles with the common, it is the beautiful thing that suffers.”
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Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is like a newborn scream that’s been held in for eons. Sharp, strong, unapologetic, beautiful, and angry, the writing in this collection is a celebration of language and rhythm, and the words on the page run like the blood from a wound caused by racism.
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