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.
Read the full review at The Nonconformist Magazine here!
I’ve never lived in New York City, though I’ve always loved it from afar. Visits to friends in Brooklyn, a few work jaunts into Manhattan, a research trip one summer to the UN. The subway and sidewalks were always crowded, the department stores a wreck of frenzied humanity, and the streets in August reeked of garbage, sewage, sweat, relentless sunshine, and the peculiar humidity that rises from concrete. My young daughters once saw rats the size of large housecats running along the subway tracks, and in that same afternoon, they tasted Korean food for the first time, ran through rain puddles at Rockefeller Center, and asked the whys and hows of people who slept on park benches.
REVIEW BY CATE HODOROWICZ
Reading poet Elizabeth Bradfield’s latest collection, Toward Antarctica: An Exploration, may not be as dramatic as actually visiting the continent, but it will likely be as close as many of us will get. Thanks to Bradfield’s diverse skills as poet, photographer, and naturalist, we gain unique vantage to the elusive continent as she gives us not just an adventure epic but a revealing, complex meditation, a portrait of the “lost continent” that is elegiac, wide-ranging, and intimate.
Mia Heavener, now living in Anchorage, grew up fishing in Bristol Bay, where she absorbed stories her mother and other women told between tides and over tea. Her lovely debut novel set in a village near Dillingham, “Under Nushagak Bluff,” draws upon those stories and her own knowledge of the region, its history, its Yup’ik people, and the fishermen and cannery workers who came and went with the salmon runs. It is a compelling narrative, rich in its evocations of a time and place largely unrepresented in our literature — and a welcome addition to it.
Seagulls swoop and dive, crying in the salty air. The waves of Nushagak Bay crash on sandbars and rocky shores. Machines rattle the warehouses on the cannery side of the village “where the beach flattened and the boardwalks grew tall.”
So many sounds; so many stories. Yet as I page through Mia Heavener’s new novel Under Nushagak Bluff under the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the novel’s subtle and steady investigation of silence that most captivates me.
A champion of contemporary Latinx poetry, Francisco Aragón returns with his third collection, After Rubén (Red Hen Press). A scholar, translator, and the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, Aragón draws inspiration from the life and work of Rubén Darío, building lyrics around responses to the latter’s legacy. The result is a brilliant hybridity, filled with erasures, riffs, and interpretations of the maestro’s lifework. Of especial import to Aragón is a romantic relationship between Nicaraguan hero Darío and Mexican poet Amado Nervo, which surfaced recently and elicited backlash from traditionalist academics caught off guard by the revelation. Aragón answers the rebuttals in a tender personal essay, “My Rubén,” and crafts lines of intimate authenticity, at once embracing a buried Nicaraguan literary heritage and extending that lineage to the United States. The collection also includes ten Darío poems in the original Spanish and copious notes that provide scholarly and artistic context. The book’s been ten years in the making, and it will enrapture generations of future readers.
In her moving debut collection, poet Didi Jackson creates a poetics of grief to cope with the suicide of her husband.
Moon Jar is a testament to resilience. Split into three parts, the book follows the poet’s journey from devastation to rebirth. The first section deals poignantly with the suicide and what seems an irreconcilable loss. “I will expose old scars and breast feed/ a shadow of myself,” the poet declares in “kill lies all.” Jackson at first writes in a spare style as she processes grief. In these early poems, figurative language bleeds through the spareness like light filtering through a gloomy room. In “After the Suicide,” the “throat/ of our home fills like gardenias in bloom.” In “Directions for My Son on His 19th Birthday,” pieces of song are “melting from the speaker.” One of the best poems, “A Poem in Reverse,” imagines time rewinding to before the suicide.
1942: Clair and Shep Durant, along with their mute four-year-old son, Ty, wait for evacuation to India before the imminent Japanese invasion of the remote Andaman Islands. Shep, a doctor, and Claire, a budding anthropologist, scramble with last-minute tasks while Naila, the thirteen-year-old island girl who has taken on the role of nanny, tends to Ty. But when the time to board arrives, Ty and Naila cannot be found. Shep forces Claire to sail on the boat for Calcutta and remains in Port Blair to find his son. A few days later the Japanese seize the Andamans before Shep and Ty can evacuate.
Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in 1936. They dive deep into their work: Claire, an anthropologist, is studying the language and customs of the Biya tribe; Shep, a surgeon, is collecting orchid specimens, hoping for significant medicinal applications. Claire’s plans change when she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Ty, whose ability to speak never materializes and whose bond to Claire and Shep seems weaker than his attachment to Naila, a household employee. When the war escalates, the Andamans become a target, and the Durants prepare to evacuate–but Ty goes missing. Against her will, Claire goes on without her son and husband. The search for Ty is fraught with more danger than Shep could have ever imagined, and Claire must figure out how she can help from her new post in Calcutta. As the war churns on and hope dwindles, the entire family—biological and otherwise—will be forced to question their allegiances and obligations, and to determine what place is, for them, truly home.
ON THE FRONT COVER of Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy there is a palm-lined cove under a twilight sky. Unspoiled by modernity, this looks like island escapism, with no indication this is a story about wartime. Countless stories have already been told and retold about World War II, but here the setting is unusual — a colonial outpost in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal during World War II. Still, the most captivating narrative within it could be set in any time or any place.
Channeling some past classics also skeptical of the colonial enterprise, Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter theatres of the Asian half of the War.
Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing power of indigenous plants, and the American Claire, a would-be anthropologist without an official degree—arrive in 1936 in the remote Andaman Islands in India’s Bay of Bengal. Ty is born into their near-idyllic paradise, colonial as it is, and is beloved by all. But his closest attachment is to the servants’ daughter Naila, who is eight years older. For his first four years, the silent Ty trusts only Naila to be his voice. By 1942, war threatens even the most remote shores and all (white) ex-pats are ordered to evacuate the islands. Hours before departure, Ty and Naila disappear, leaving Shep search after frantically thrusting a forcibly drugged Claire onto the final rescue ship bound for Calcutta. Reunion is the only goal that keeps Claire alive: Absolutely nothing—even code-breaking-and-creating and impossible reconnaissance (go, girl!)—will prevent her from finding her husband and son.
VERDICT A riveting amalgam of history, family epic, anticolonial/antiwar treatise, cultural crossroads, and more, this latest from best-selling author Liu (Face) is a fascinating, irresistible marvel.
A newly released novel, “Her Sister’s Tattoo” by Ellen Meeropol, was brought to my attention and it struck a soft spot I thought was long buried.
Like so many of you, as a child of the ’60s, the Vietnam War touched my life in many ways. The only thing I knew for sure was that I had dark, mixed feelings about what was happening on the other side of the world.
My boyfriend was drafted into the Army and it broke my teenage heart. My neighbor’s brother was a POW held in a prison camp for six years in North Vietnam and it sent my head spinning. I worked for his release, trying to get signatures on a petition demanding that the North Vietnamese honor the treatment of prisoners as outlined in the Geneva Convention. (They never did.) Fortunately, both men eventually came home.
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Consider the cover image for Deborah A. Lott’s memoir Don’t Go Crazy Without Me (Red Hen Press): a chubby adult male dressed in blue velvet shorts and jacket, ruffled cream shirt, black leather doll shoes and white socks, carrying a teddy bear. The peculiar image is of Ira, Lott’s father, and the impish grin on his face while wearing what he calls his “little boy suit” foretells of the dark humor—and family dysfunction—that unfolds in the pages that follow. Near Ira stands a dark-haired little girl, a young Lott, her presence symbolically overshadowed by his outlandish appearance. Lott’s coming-of-age memoir recounts her growing-up years with her Jewish family in La Cresenta, California, and her lasting love for a sometimes charming, other times wildly inappropriate, and, as the years pass, tragically mentally ill father.
Subduction is most of all a story of displacement and dislocation: for Claudia, whose Latina heritage lies over a border and whose sense of family lies beyond the betrayal that broke it; and for Peter, whose tragic fractures from family and community instill an “inner nihilist.” But Subduction is also a story of healing, through both traditional cultural practices and the kind that transcend politics and place—namely the love two people feel for each other. At heart, Subduction is an optimistic novel, for out of the mess of politics and power imbalances and cultural confusion, love indeed creates the way for a new kind of life—even if the people involved stay “coiled inside this illusion” and “glad of the mask.”
