In part one (titled “Suitors”) of Rivkin’s sharp debut, a long poem in sections cataloguing his mother’s appalling boyfriends, the speaker recalls one priceless specimen who, for Halloween, dressed as a pimp in blackface: “His shoe-polish skin, her fever dress,/ our family on the front lawn.” Another “suitor” sells Amway products from his Buick, imparting sales advice: “He said dream a lot. Dream big!” Still another sleeps on the roof, his benign strangeness invoking a boy’s desperation: “I wanted him to stay.” This direct, moving poem is followed by a long prose meditation on the intent of actions, in which the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Fritz Haber (who invented fertilizers and explosives) is compared to the writer’s father, who abandoned his family in the name of science.
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Reema Rajbanshi’s debut novel-in-stories Sugar, Smoke, Song collects its thematically linked pieces into three clusters with recurring characters.
The first group, starting with “The Ruins,” centers on beautiful Indo-Burmese identical twins, Maina and Biju. Their intimacy is altered when Biju’s face is slashed and scarred by a knife-wielding stranger in a New York City subway, just after 9/11. Another set concerns Assamese American dancer Jumi and her on-again/off-again relationship, complicated by skin tone and class, with a Chinese and Indian American, Walter. The final three stories, starting with “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughter,” feature Nirmali, the daughter of impossible-to-please immigrants. Nirmali has also suffered from violence, and has scars on her hips. Later, grown up, she finds herself in a relationship with the darkerskinned Yusuf, an artist who tells her, “Never forget you are not black.”
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A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter.
Alternating between Jamaica and Brooklyn, NY, she is disappointed again and again, until seventeen years go by and she happens to see the photo of the man who took her baby. Now he is a priest. In beautiful, wrenching prose, Hemans’ Tea by the Sea (Red Hen Press) tells an unforgettably moving story of family love, identity, and betrayal.
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Ellen Meeropol’s last name is famous among those of us who still recall the tragic case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were put to death in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. Their two young sons, Robert and Michael, were adopted by a couple named Meeropol, and the author is married to Robert. “Her Sister’s Tattoo” (Red Hen Press), Meeropol’s engaging and compelling new novel, is not about the Rosenbergs, but the case casts a long shadow over the book.
The story Meeropol tells in “My Sister’s Tattoo” opens in 1968, a time when Americans took to the streets to protest war, racism and poverty. Esther and Rosa Levin, sisters raised by progressive parents, are chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Horse-mounted cops are wielding billy clubs, and tear gas is in the air. But Esther is thinking of her 5-month-old daughter, Molly, who is back home with a babysitter, and she is torn by the contradictory roles she feels called upon to play: “If she were stronger or braver, maybe she could do everything: be an activist and a mother and an artist.”
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“CAN’T JUST GO. Can’t, more to the point, just arrive, land. You must prepare yourself,” writes the poet Elizabeth Bradfield, in Toward Antarctica, a marvelous book of prose, poems, and photographs that document her tenure as a naturalist there. More precisely, the book traces Bradfield’s circumnavigation of a polar place that’s hard to linger in, impossible to inhabit, and whose majesties can be glimpsed in partial ways, no matter what longing they inspire before or after.
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A young mother goes on a quest to track down the father of her child, who abducted their baby daughter shortly after her birth.
When Plum Valentine is in high school in Brooklyn, her immigrant parents plan a seemingly routine visit to their native Jamaica. Once there, however, the parents insist that Plum stay behind, leaving her at a strict boarding school to keep her from getting into trouble. As it turns out, trouble manages to find the pretty 17-year-old anyway. After Lenworth, a 25-year-old chemistry lab assistant, tutors Plum, the two end up having an illicit relationship. As the novel opens, Plum is in the hospital, recovering from having given birth to their daughter, when she discovers that Lenworth has abducted the baby. Plum realizes she has been abandoned yet again. But that pain pales in comparison to the yawning emptiness she experiences at the loss of her child. Traveling back to Brooklyn, Plum tries to set her life back on a path to normalcy. Determined to find her daughter, however, she sets off repeatedly, over the course of more than a decade, to track her ex-lover and their little girl. Hemans delivers a cat-and-mouse chase that brings Plum back to Jamaica over and over again even as she leads a parallel life in the United States. The taut storyline sacrifices character development with the net result that both Plum and Lenworth come across as caricatures, their motivations and desires one-dimensional and murky till the end. Lenworth’s sudden embrace of spirituality as he realizes his profound error of judgment also feels forced. By concentrating mostly on the minutiae of the chase, the narrative misses mining the deeper emotional range it could have achieved had it addressed Plum’s grief with more nuance. A tightly knit story about a mother’s loss that too often veers into melodrama.
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This skillful twist on the addiction narrative is worth a look.
In the essay that caps his latest poetry collection, After Rubén, Francisco Aragón traces his relationship with the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). From the initial gift of a handful of Darío lines recited by Aragón’s mother, to the long poem, “Los motivos del lobo,” which Aragón describes as his “inheritance” from his father, to the discovery of Darío’s queerness–evidenced by love letters Darío wrote to Mexican poet Amado Nervo– Darío evolves from literary inspiration and family touchpoint for Aragón, to queer, Latinx forefather. He becomes, in Aragón’s words “my Rubén.” This strong claim, which Aragón furthers by reinterpreting some of Darío’s poems, gives Aragón a platform from which to examine family, politics, and his poetic inheritance.
Many readers of this review may or may not be aware of the rasa theory, but it is maintained that classic works of literature created within the boundaries of what is today known as South Asia engaged, as the narrative progressed, with the essences of nine moods known as rasas. Reema Rajbanshi’s very well-crafted Sugar, Smoke, Song attempts something similar though, perhaps, in a post-modern or her own way. Although I am not suggesting there’s an exact mapping of the text and theory here, the titles of the nine stories included in the collection seem to correspond to the emotion being explored more than an event or idea in the story. The first three stories — Ruins, BX Blues, and Orchard Beach — revolve primarily around Maina’s emotions, unresolved, relating to pain and loss resulting from tragedies outside anyone’s control, jealousy, and misunderstanding. As Maina wanders through the ruins of her memories, the reader tries to digest how a random knife attack scarring Maina’s sister’s face on a BX (the Bronx) subway can turn a pleasant place such as a beach into a horrible bonfire of anguish. The loss of parents further sharpens a sense of alienation surrounding the main character’s mood.
The best memoirs invite us into the interesting minds of writers, carry us into territories we might not have tread ourselves and leave us with new perspectives on life. Some can even fill our hearts with joy. In this series of spirited essays drawn from her singular life, Alaskan Mary Odden proves to be an exceptional writer, offering up portraits of the people and places that have shaped her wise and loving view of the world.
Water flows over and through the pebbles on the cover of Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North. Water connects. Mary Odden, a long-time resident of rural Alaska, has graced us with this collection of essays written over the course of her many years in various regions of rural Alaska. Built upon each other with love, these anecdotes articulate connections between people, animals, land, sky, water, music, and memory. It’s an intimate book, and not a skimmable one. Nuggets of humor and irony randomly appear like brown sugar in the most unexpected places, and you won’t want to miss them.
In the South Asian archipelago known as the Andaman Islands, aboriginal tribes thrived for 60,000 years before the onset of British colonialism nearly wiped them out. Best selling novelist Aimee Liu struggled for years to set a book there, but got nowhere until she finally had the opportunity to visit the islands and learn of the part they played in World War II. The result – “Glorious Boy,” an epic yet intimate portrayal of love and war that, as Publishers’ Weekly says “upends the cliches of the white savior narrative.”
Aimee Liu’s fourth novel, Glorious Boy — a family drama set against the backdrop of World War II and the rumblings of Indian independence from British colonialist rule — is big, ambitious, sometimes messy, and consistently stunning.
This novel tugged at my heart in all the right ways. I got teary explaining to my husband why I’d cried the night before, when I’d stayed up until two in the morning finishing the book. As her characters’ journey becomes increasingly fraught, Liu walks the emotional tightrope perfectly, never swaying into sentimentality but also never shying away from heartbreak.
This is a powerful story of political activism, family betrayal, allegiance and love. When two sisters get arrested during a Vietnam War protest in 1968, they must decide where their loyalties lie. In Her Sister’s Tattoo (Red Hen Press) by Ellen Meeropol, politics and family are important for both Rosa and Esther, but they each must stand up for their personal priority; their futures depend on it.
