What happens when the world as you know it changes course? When your seemingly rock-solid life suddenly becomes thin and porous? Such is the case for Claudia, a Latinx anthropologist based in Seattle, who is the complex protagonist of Subduction, a debut novel by Kristen Millares Young. Committed to a long-term research project documenting song and story sharing of the Makah people, the book begins with an image of Claudia on a ferry pulling away from Seattle, a city that holds her personal and professional struggles. She is heading for Neah Bay, the most northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula, and Young offers luminous descriptions of this distinct passage to the coast. “Eagles and vultures wheeled through the gloaming over razed forests and colossal silvered stumps that sprouted frail versions of themselves.”
News & Review Type: Review
Empty Mirror: Hope Amidst Uncertainty: Subduction by Kristen Millares Young, reviewed by Jessica Gigot
Library Journal reviews Subduction
VERDICT Gorgeously, toughly written, this book dares to be open-ended yet leaves readers with a satisfying sense of how life really unfolds. Cultural clash matters here, but personal differences and desires even more. For any fiction reader looking beyond the obvious. [See “Winter/Spring Bests,” LJ 4/20.]Reviewed by Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal , Apr 03, 2020
The Seattle Times: Storytelling in Neah Bay forms the fault line in brilliant debut ‘Subduction’ from Seattle’s Kristen Millares Young
In the gray autumn of Seattle, Claudia, an anthropology professor, is on edge.
Her marriage is over after she found out her husband and sister were having an affair. She’s reflecting on her perennial grief over the loss of her mother and her Mexican childhood with her, and how she moved to the U.S. to live with her white father as an adolescent. And she’s heading out to Neah Bay, where she’s been working on a record of Makah culture, mainly by interviewing an elder named Maggie.
Meanwhile, Maggie’s son Peter is returning to his home for the first time since he fled as a teenager, following his father’s mysterious death. Having built a nomadic life as an underwater welder, Peter feels adrift, in many ways ready to return home for closure, but in other ways still wracked with his own grief and fear around doing so. When he arrives home, Maggie’s hoarding and her dementia are a harsh reality he must face while back in the house where his father died.
The Washington Post: In ‘Subduction,’ an anthropologist observing a remote fishing village becomes part of the story
What was it the anthropologist said? Claudia wonders as she types up her notes. “Oh, yes. ‘An observer is under the bed. A participant observer is in it.’ She doubted he foresaw her situation.” Because in “Subduction,” Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Claudia is in it, in a big way. She has just left the embrace of Peter, a member of the Makah tribe she’s ostensibly observing.
Claudia has recently fled to Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the Pacific coast, to salve her wounded heart with work after her husband left her for another woman — her own sister. Claudia aims to conduct an anthropological study of Makah culture focused on one village elder, Maggie. Complicating the picture, Maggie’s prodigal son, Peter, has just returned to tend to his mother after 20 years away.
The Book Slut Reviews Body of Render: Poems by Felicia Zamora
This moving collection of poetry by Felicia Zamora covers a range of topics from love, politics, identity, addiction, and the natural world. On one level, Body of Render explores a political theme—the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the author’s navigation through that event from campaigning to the presidency. But on another, the poems deal with the reckoning of life itself: love, body, constellations, universe, and identity all combusting together. The book is broken into four sections: At the Hand of Other, Raw Deliberation of Circumstances, No Apologies to America Anymore, and Infinite Design of a Mouth, Open.
The Paris Review: Staff Picks Subduction
Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel Subduction takes as its subject a subtle clash of culture in the Pacific Northwest. The novel’s protagonist, Claudia, is an anthropologist fleeing the remains of her marriage by reengaging with her most recent research project, the songs and traditional culture of the Makah people in Neah Bay, Washington. Claudia, a Latina, is mostly blind to her own privilege within the context of the reservation and balks when she is referred to by the Makah people as “white.” Even while she blurs the boundaries between the personal and professional, the Native peoples of this novel are Claudia’s subjects, and Young is a skilled enough writer to explore the various problems inherent in that point of view. The title of the book refers to the geological phenomenon of one tectonic plate sinking under the influence of another, during which both subsumed and overriding plates are wracked by distortion and disruption. In Young’s novel, the answer to which is which is left beautifully unclear. —Christian Kiefer
Midwest Book Review recommends Lifesaving for Beginners
TBT! In a mid-April review, Midwest Book Review recommended Anne Edelstein’s memoir Lifesaving for Beginners. The recommendation reads, “It is no surprise that Lifesaving for Beginners is an deftly crafted, engagingly presented, intensely personal memoir that is a truly riveting read from beginning to end, and an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections.”
Praise for What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison
Camille Dungy shares with us in this manuscript her sharp, clear and honest ear and her unswerving commitment to the voice of life. She is a brave poet writing true poems and I salute the music and courage of her work.
–Lucille Clifton, author of Blessing the Boats and MercyCamille Dungy has a garden of verses that spring up with the sunshine or hide with you in the dusk. “Cleaning” best sums up What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, an amazing poetry collection, when Dungy pens “understanding clearly/what is fatal to the body./I only understand too late/what can be fatal to the heart.” Take an ice tea and sit on the veranda or take a glass of wine and prop up in bed but whatever way you like your poetry, this book is a must.–Nikki GiovanniIn the title sequence of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, Camille Dungy invites her readers to “taste/what the world has to offer.” It is a tall order and the author herself leads by example and fulfills it marvelously, offering a stunning first collection that is both sweet with the richness of life and laced with the bitterness of knowledge. Through lyrics, portraits, narratives, and monologues, she explores the intricate relationship between her own family and the human family, personal history and American history, the human world and the ways humans have treated the Earth. What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, is a work of sweep, breadth, and abundance–a major and magnificent book.–Stuart Dischell, author of Evenings and Avenues
New Letters admires Gary Dop’s work for Father
Child
A conversation between Cynthia Hogue and Sari Broner on ‘The Incognito Body'”
Sari Broner’s interview with Cynthia Hogue about The Incognito Body, which was then in-process, was published in the “work/book” section of the avant-garde literary journal How2 1:5 (March 2001).
The Mindful Word reviews CIRCADIAN
Many thanks to The Mindful Word for this lovely review of Chelsey Clammer’s CIRCADIAN, noting “Clammer is swift with language, intelligent and funny. She’s lyrical, poetic and sometimes mesmerizing in her prose. She doesn’t miss a beat.”
Fred Gardaphe, rave, FRA NOI
Fred Gardaphe, in the October, 2008, FRA NOI (48/10), raves about Earthquake I.D.:
“A well focused plot tightly wound… Enough mystery to keep the pages turning while telling a contemporary story that can touch us all…. Naples, above and underground, is rendered in exciting detail.”
Mike Ruppert at FTW’s Act 2 Blog: BOOK REVIEW “Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film”
Publishers Weekly, September 22, 2008
Realistic absurdity ties together the short stories of Sanders’s intelligent and funny collection. Throughout, unsuspecting protagonists become entangled in bizarre (and yet vaguely believable) situations. There’s Nadya, the Moscow-based freelance translator narrator of “Choco” who adopts a circus bear; Alan, who, in “Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude,” visits an old college friend in the woods and discovers that rumors of a wandering robot might be true; and the anonymous insurance filer in “The Gallery” who finds a portal of rebirth triggered by an erotic sculpture. Between boring jobs and sexual depravity, it seems at first blush that the characters are doomed to unfulfilling, pitiful lives, but, upon closer inspection, it appears there may be something redeeming about them after all. Skillfully narrated and concisely written, this collection of short stories is at once comical, cringe-worthy, relevant and weird. (Sept.)
Publishers Weekly, January 2009
The passionate, yet controlled, third volume from Paschen (Infidelities) pursues the likenesses between human beings and other sorts of beasts: Paschen watches domestic animals, visits zoos and backyards, and records the instincts that animate her, as lover, mother, daughter and citizen. Husband and wife “share a wedded habitat”; a mother breastfeeding her daughter “would like to buzz/ into the orchid of your ear,” while a manatee looks to the poet like “a mistaken mermaid,/ on the brink of vanishing from sight.” Paschen offers sonnets, villanelles and even a ghazal, in which butterflies in an exhibit “invent a sky beneath the dome.” Readers might remember not the moments of pure description, but the difficult emotions Paschen describes in her poems about marital love, motherhood and finally a daughter’s grief. The urn with her father’s ashes dominates one poem, and her mother’s career as a ballet dancer takes over another: “Mother, when I was young, I watched/ you from the wings and saw the sweat,” Paschen writes, saw “your gasp/ for breath. I thought it was your last.” If we are animals, Paschen suggests, we are the animals who look hard at one another, the animals who remember and who mourn. (Jan.)