Reading Ireland Month: Seán Hewitt, Maggie O’Farrell
Reading Ireland Month is hosted each year by Cathy of 746 Books. I’m wishing you all well on St. Patrick’s Day with this first of two planned tie-in posts. Today I have a poetry collection that sets grief and queer longing amid nature, and my last unread novel – a somewhat middling one, unfortunately – by one of my favourite authors.
Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (2024)
The points of reference are so similar to his 2020 debut collection, Tongues of Fire, that parts of what I wrote about that one are fully applicable here: “Sex and grief, two major themes, are silhouetted against the backdrop of nature. Fields and forests are loci of meditation and epiphany, but also of clandestine encounters between men.” Perhaps inevitably, then, this felt less fresh, but there was still much to enjoy. I particularly loved two poems about moths (the merveille du jour as an “art-deco mint-green herringbone. Soft furred little absinthe warrior”), “To Autumn,” and “Alcyone,” which likens a kingfisher to “a rip / in the year’s old fabric”.
In “Two Apparitions,” the poet’s late father seems visible again. Many of the scenes take place at dusk or dark. There’s a layer of menace to “Night-Scented Stock,” about an abusive relationship, and the account of a slaughter in “Pig.” But the stand-out is “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn,” based on the 1982 murder of a gay man in a Dublin park. Hewitt drew lines from court proceedings and periodicals in the Irish Queer Archive at the National Library of Ireland, where he was poet in residence. He voices first the gang of killers, then Flynn himself. The trial kickstarted Ireland’s Pride movement.
More favourite lines:
Come out, make a verb of me, let
my body do your speaking tonight —
(from “A Strain of the Earth’s Sweet Being”)
awestruck, bright,
a child in the bell-tower of beauty —
(from “Skylarks”)
Love, the world is failing:
come and fail with me.
(from “Nightfall”)
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
My Lover’s Lover by Maggie O’Farrell (2002)
I was so excited, a few years ago, to find battered copies of this and After You’d Gone in a local charity shop for 50 pence each, even though it appears a mouse had a nibble on one corner here. They were her first two books, but the last that I managed to source. Whereas After You’d Gone is a surprisingly confident and elegant debut novel about a woman in a coma and the family and romantic relationships that brought her to this point, My Lover’s Lover ultimately felt like a pretty run-of-the-mill story about two women finding out that (some) men are dogs and they need to break free.
Lily meets Marcus, an architect, at a party and almost before she knows it has moved into the spare room of his apartment, a Victorian factory space he renovated himself, and become his lover. But there’s an uncomfortable atmosphere in the flat: She can still smell perfume from Marcus’s ex, Sinead; one of her dresses hangs in the closet. We, along with Lily, get the impression Sinead has died. She haunts not just the flat but also the streets of London. It becomes Lily’s obsession to find out what happened to Sinead and why Marcus is so morose. Part Two gives Sinead’s side of things, in a mix of third person/present tense and first person/past tense, before we return to Lily to see what she’ll do with her new knowledge.
As in some later novels, there are multiple locales (here, NYC, the Australian desert, and China – a country O’Farrell often revisits in fiction) and complicated point-of-view shifts, but I felt the sophisticated craft was rather wasted on a book that boils down to a self-explanatory maxim: past relationships always have an effect on current ones. I also found the writing overmuch in places (“the grass swooshing, sussurating, cleaving open to her steps”; “letting fall a box of cereal into its [a shopping trolley’s] chrome meshing”; “her fingertips meeting the ceraceous, heated skin of his cheek”). However, this was an engrossing read – I read most of it in two days. It’s bottom-tier O’Farrell, though, along with The Distance Between Us and Hamnet – sorry, I know many adore it. (If you’re interested: middle tier = The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Instructions for a Heatwave, her two children’s books, and The Marriage Portrait; top tier = After You’d Gone, The Hand that First Held Mine, This Must Be the Place, and I Am, I Am, I Am.)
I’ve gotten in the habit of reading one of Maggie O’Farrell’s works per year, so I will just have to reread my favourites until we get a new one. I’m already tapping a foot in impatience. (Secondhand from Bas, Newbury) 
Have you read any Irish literature this month?
Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest: Dylan Thomas Prize Blog Tour
Divisible by Itself and One is Kae Tempest’s 14th book, its title referring to the definition of prime numbers. I’d read one of their previous collections, Let Them Eat Chaos, and enjoyed the performance poetry rhythms. There is a similar feel here – urban settings; internal and end rhymes – but more experimentation with theme, style and tone. Often the poet crosses casual speech with a formal approach: “Body” is composed of two nontraditional sonnets, while “The loop” is a villanelle. I also noted a repeated phrase as a fulcrum between the two stanzas of “Do it for the joy.”
The prose piece “Swear” features a heartbroken nonbinary god in the wreckage of the Garden of Eden: “Groaning in the empty garden in a moment that lasted till now, the almighty swore they’d never love again. And the words of the oath were famine, pestilence, genocide, flood.” It’s not the only biblical allusion; “Flood” references Noah and one epigraph is from Isaiah. Climate breakdown is a source of background dread, with “Even the youths shall faint and be weary” a sarcastic response to people’s relief at young people’s engagement with the environment – “Manaic adults peddling hope. Surely / the kids will sort it.”
“Wind in the tall trees” takes on a rough tree shape on the page. There are a couple of apparent break-up scenes, but a tentative new relationship fuels tender, mildly erotic love poems (“Flight” and “Fig”). The alliteration in “Pride” evokes a gradual coming to grips with gender identity: “Pride by degrees. It’s relative / I’ve carried my shame / like a drunk friend dragged / through the days of my life. / Damn dysphoria.” “Cocoon” envisions a transformation, which comes to fruition in the final poem, the LGBTQ manifesto “Love song for queens, studs, butches, daddies, fags and all the other angels.” Here the poet hymns queer heroes, then joins them. “You are the strongest ones among us. Daring as you do to live. Wholly as you are. While the rest of us go straight // to pieces for what we can’t bear to admit we carry.” What a fantastic tease that enjambment is.
I found more variety than cohesion here, but Tempest is likely to attract readers who wouldn’t usually turn to poetry. This is one I’d recommend to fans of Surge by Jay Bernard and Some Integrity by Padraig Regan.
More favourite lines:
“Why not stick it out with this insane human being, rather than dig it all up just to replant yourself in a parallel hole.” (from “Absurd”)
“life’s a chance to do.
It’s all been done before. We make it new” (from “Morning”)
With thanks to Picador and Midas PR for the free copy for review.
I’ve reviewed Dylan Thomas Prize-longlisted poetry in several previous years as well:
- Eye Level by Jenny Xie
- If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
- Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
- Phantom Gang by Ciarán O’Rourke
I’ve now read three books from the longlist (the others are Bright Fear and Penance). The shortlist will be announced on 21 March, and the winner on 16 May. Look out for other bloggers’ posts between now and the 20th.
Miscellaneous #ReadIndies Reviews: Mostly Poetry + Brown, Sands
Catching up on a few final #ReadIndies contributions in early March! Short responses to some indie reading I did from my shelves over the course of last month.
Bloodaxe Books:
Parables & Faxes by Gwyneth Lewis (1995)
I was surprised to discover this was actually my fourth book by Lewis, a bilingual Welsh author: two memoirs, one of depression and one about marriage; and now two poetry collections. The table of contents suggest there are only 16 poems in the book, but most of the titles are actually headings for sections of anywhere between 6 and 16 separate poems. She ranges widely at home and abroad, as in “Welsh Espionage” and the “Illinois Idylls.” “I shall taste the tang / of travel on the atlas of my tongue,” Lewis writes, an example of her alliteration and sibilance. She’s also big on slant and internal rhymes – less so on end rhymes, though there are some. Medieval history and theology loom large, with the Annunciation featuring more than once. I couldn’t tell you now what that many of the poems are about, but Lewis’s telling is always memorable.
Sample lines:
For the one
who said yes,
how many
said no?
…
But those who said no
for ever knew
they were damned
to the daily
as they’d disallowed
reality’s madness,
its astonishment.
(from “The ‘No’ Madonnas,” part of “Parables & Faxes”)
(Secondhand purchase – Westwood Books, Sedbergh) 
&
Fields Away by Sarah Wardle (2003)
Wardle’s was a new name for me. I saw two of her collections at once and bought this one as it was signed and the themes sounded more interesting to me. It was her first book, written after inpatient treatment for schizophrenia. Many of the poems turn on the contrast between city (London Underground) and countryside (fields and hedgerows). Religion, philosophy, and Greek mythology are common points of reference. End rhymes can be overdone here, and I found a few of the poems unsubtle (“Hubris” re: colonizers and “How to Be Bad” about daily acts of selfishness vs. charity). However, there are enough lovely ones to compensate: “Flight,” “Word Tasting” (mimicking a wine tasting), “After Blake” (reworking “Jerusalem” with “And will chainsaws in modern times / roar among England’s forests green?”), “Translations” and “Word Hill.”
Favourite lines:
(oh, but the last word is cringe!)
Catkin days and hedgerow hours
fleet like shafts of chapel sun.
Childhood in a cobwebbed bower
guards a treasure chest of fun.
(from “Age of Awareness”)
(Secondhand purchase – Carlisle charity shop) 
Carcanet Press:
Tripping Over Clouds by Lucy Burnett (2019)
The title is a setup for the often surrealist approach, but where another Carcanet poet, Caroline Bird, is warm and funny with her absurdism, Burnett is just … weird. Like, I’d get two stanzas into a poem and have no idea what was going on or what she was trying to say because of the incomplete phrases and non-standard punctuation. Still, this is a long enough collection that there are a good number of standouts about nature and relationships, and alliteration and paradoxes are used to good effect. I liked the wordplay in “The flight of the guillemet” and the off-beat love poem “Beer for two in Brockler Park, Berlin.” The noteworthy Part III is composed of 34 ekphrastic poems, each responding to a different work of (usually modern) art.
Favourite lines:
This is a place of uncalled-for space
and by the grace of the big sky,
and the serrated under-silhouette of Skye,
an invitation to the sea unfolds
to come and dine with mountain.
(from “Big Sands”)
(New (bargain) purchase – Waterstones website)
&
The Met Office Advises Caution by Rebecca Watts (2016)
The problem with buying a book mostly for the title is that often the contents don’t live up to it. (Some of my favourite ever titles – An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam – were of books I couldn’t get through). There are a lot of nature poems here, which typically would be enough to get me on board, but few of them stood out to me. Trees, bats, a dead hare on the road; maps, Oxford scenes, Christmas approaching. All nice enough; maybe it’s just that the poems don’t seem to form a cohesive whole. Easy to say why I love or hate a poet’s style; harder to explain indifference.
Sample lines:
Branches lash out; old trees lie down and don’t get up.
A wheelie bin crosses the road without looking,
lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling its knowledge.
(from the title poem)
(New (bargain) purchase – Amazon with Christmas voucher)
Faber:
Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown (2020)
The title signals right away how these linked autobiographical essays split the ‘I’ from the body – Brown resents the fact that disability limits her experience. Oxygen deprivation at their premature birth led to her twin sister’s death and left her with cerebral palsy severe enough that she generally uses a wheelchair. In Bologna for a travel fellowship, she writes, “There are so many places that I want to be, but I can’t take my body anywhere. But I must take my body everywhere.” A medieval city is particularly unfriendly to those with mobility challenges, but chronic pain and others’ misconceptions (e.g. she overheard a guy on her college campus lamenting that she’d die a virgin) follow her everywhere.
A poet, Brown earned minor fame for her first collection, which was about historical policies of enforced sterilization for the disabled and mentally ill in her home state of Virginia. She is also a Catholic convert. I appreciated her exploration of poetry and faith as ways of knowing: “both … a matter of attending to the world: of slowing my pace, and focusing my gaze, and quieting my impatient, indignant, protesting heart long enough for the hard shell of the ordinary to break open and reveal the stranger, subtler singing underneath.” This is part of a terrific run of three pieces, the others about sex as a disabled person and the odious conservatism of the founders of Liberty University. Also notable: “Fragments, Never Sent,” letters to her twin; and “Frankenstein Abroad,” about rereading this novel of ostracism at its 200th anniversary. (Secondhand purchase – Amazon)
New River Books:
The Hedgehog Diaries: A Story of Faith, Hope and Bristle by Sarah Sands (2023)
Reasons for reading: 1) I’d enjoyed Sands’s The Interior Silence and 2) Who can resist a book about hedgehogs? She covers a brief slice of 2021–22 when her aged father was dying in a care home. Having found an ill hedgehog in her garden and taken it to a local sanctuary, she developed an interest in the plight of hedgehogs. In surveys they’re the UK’s favourite mammal, but it’s been years since I saw one alive. Sands brings an amateur’s enthusiasm to her research into hedgehogs’ place in literature, philosophy and science. She visits rescue centres, meets activists in Oxfordshire and Shropshire who have made hedgehog welfare a local passion, and travels to Uist to see where hedgehogs were culled in 2004 to protect ground-nesting birds’ eggs. The idea is to link personal brushes with death with wider threats of extinction. Unfortunately, Sands’s lack of expertise is evident. This was well-meaning, but inconsequential and verging on twee. (Christmas gift from my wishlist) 
#ReadIndies Catch-up: Ansell, Kinard, McNaught, Ponce, Toews and Vara
At last, my first dedicated selections for Read Indies month, two of which have been languishing on the shelf since 2022! A few more indie titles will appear in my February roundup tomorrow. I’ve got a huge variety here: an extended essay comparing life among the unhoused in London in the 1980s with the freedom of the open road and the island of Jura; gospel-saturated poems of queer African American life; an exposé of spiritual abuse in a Pentecostal church with branches in England and Nigeria; an Ecuadorian novella obsessed with bodies and sex; a funny yet heartbreaking novel about a zany family trying not to fall apart; and short stories about siblings, adolescence, memory, death and much more. I name the publishers and other books I have on the docket from each one.
Deer Island by Neil Ansell (2013)
My last unread book by Ansell (whose Deep Country, The Last Wilderness, and The Circling Sky I’ve loved) and one that had been out of print for many years, so it was great to hear that Little Toller was reissuing it. Ansell has visited most countries; pressed for a favourite place, he names the Scottish isle of Jura. In memory he returns to a place he hadn’t been in over 20 years. In the early 1980s he lived in London and volunteered with The Simon Community, a homeless charity, for three years. Later that decade, he found himself in the same situation as those he served, squatting in chaotic multi-occupancy London properties. But in between he’d had a magical jaunt to Jura by hitchhiking and motorbike with a girlfriend. And later, when his only sentimental keepsake was stolen from his squat bedroom, he left that lifestyle behind and fled to Jura, haunt of golden eagles and otters; refuge for George Orwell, who experienced his fair share of squalor – Down and Out in Paris and London gets a mention, but Ansell doesn’t belabour a comparison he more than earns. It’s a shame this is so short, but it’s a carefully crafted slice of life, and illustrates a sobering truth: “Security is an illusion.”
With thanks to Little Toller Books for the free copy for review. Deer Island came out in paperback on 27 February.
Little Toller
Also read recently: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe
Currently reading: The Long Field by Pamela Petro
Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III (2023)
At a confluence of Southern, Black and gay identities, Kinard writes of matriarchal families, of congregations and choirs, of the descendants of enslavers and enslaved living side by side. The layout mattered more than I knew, reading an e-copy: often it is white text on a black page; words form rings or an infinity symbol; erasure poems gray out much of what has come before. “Boomerang” interludes imagine a chorus of fireflies offering commentary – just one of numerous insect metaphors. Mythology also plays a role. “A Tangle of Gorgons,” a sample poem I’d read before, wends its serpentine way across several pages. “Catalog of My Obsessions or Things I Answer to” presents an alphabetical list. For the most part, the poems were longer, wordier and more involved (four pages of notes on the style and allusions) than I tend to prefer, but I could appreciate the religious frame of reference and the alliteration.
Two favorite passages:
Ma taught me how to change a tire
the fall before it got real cold one October,
on the plot of dirt the pole beans we call Babel
spiral from, where our boozy station wagon
sat after hobbling home & passing out
in the backyard
(from “Work”)
I left before the door was closed.
I built myself of drowning hymns.
I stole every one to fly.
(from “Icarus Confesses”)
With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.
Alice James Books
Also read recently: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Immanuel by Matthew McNaught (2022)
“Immanuel was the centre of the world once. Long after it imploded, its gravitational pull remains.” McNaught grew up in an evangelical church in Winchester, England, but by the time he left for university he’d fallen away. Meanwhile, some peers left for Nigeria to become disciples at charismatic preacher TB Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos. It’s obvious to outsiders that this was a cult, but not so to those caught up in it. It took years and repeated allegations for people to wake up to faked healings, sexual abuse, and the ceding of control to a megalomaniac who got rich off of duping and exploiting followers. This book won the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. I admired its blend of journalistic and confessional styles: research, interviews with friends and strangers alike, and reflection on the author’s own loss of faith. He gets to the heart of why people stayed: “A feeling of holding and of being held. A sense of fellowship and interdependence … the rare moments of transcendence … It was nice to be a superorganism.” This gripped me from page one, but its wider appeal strikes me as limited. For me, it was the perfect chance to think about how I might write about traditions I grew up in and spurned.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the proof copy for review.
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Currently reading: Intervals by Marianne Brooker
Up next: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce (2020; 2024)
[Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker]
Like other short works I’ve read by Hispanic women authors (Die, My Love, September and the Night, In Vitro), this Ecuadorian novella is intense, fragmentary, and obsessed with the female body and psyche. The unnamed narrator, a woman separated from her husband and freed from inhibitions, gives in to her substance and sex addictions – “For me, anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention. That giddiness from proximity or bodies”. I was reminded of A Spy in the House of Love in that she flits compulsively from one lover to another, but Ponce is much more explicit than Nin. At least at the start, the sex scenes are almost constant and described in graphic detail. The narrator meets her lovers in warehouses and caves. Literal holes/orifices and blood are profuse, but also symbolically weighty, with fear of pregnancy also featuring heavily. I was impressed at how Booker rendered the stream-of-consciousness approach, which involves several-page paragraphs and metaphors of moths and moss. I wouldn’t say this was a pleasant book to spend time with, but the style and vocabulary made it worthy of note.
With thanks to Dead Ink for the free copy for review. Blood Red was first published in English by Restless Books in the USA in 2022.
Dead Ink
Up next: Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis
Fight Night by Miriam Toews (2022)
I knew from All My Puny Sorrows that Canadian author Miriam Toews has a knack for combining humour and heartbreak. I can’t believe it took me since 2015 to read another of her novels. Once again, there seems to be a strong autobiographical element and suicide in the family is part of the backstory. Although abandonment and failure haunt these three female generations, we see everything through a child’s point-of-view, which turns life into a jolly adventure. Swiv’s mother, an underemployed actress, is heavily pregnant with “Gord”; her father is out of the picture. Swiv has been expelled, which gives her plenty of time with Grandma Elvira, who makes friends with everyone she meets but, alas, is crumbling physically. Luckily, Swiv knows just how to keep her going with nitro spray and compression socks and pills rescued from the floor. Before Gord arrives, Grandma wants one last adventure: a flight from Canada to Fresno, California to see her remaining family. Their trip is a disaster, in hilarious ways. Child narrators are tough to pull off, so kudos to Toews for making eight-year-old Swiv almost completely believable (though a bit too precocious). These characters are all foul-mouthed fighters, with a quick wit and the determination to make their stories matter. You’ll laugh and cry.
With thanks to Faber for the proof copy for review.
Faber
Also read recently: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Currently reading: Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown
This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara (2023)
The epigraph is from the two pages of laughter (“Ha!”) in “Real Estate,” one of the stories of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Vara shares Moore’s themes, which are the stuff of literary fiction generally – adolescence, friendship, ageing, memory, romantic relationships – but also her tone of dark comedy. The death of a sibling recurs. In “The Irates,” teenage Swati, whose brother died of cancer, and her friend Lydia get phone sales jobs through the Chinese restaurant where they go for egg rolls. In “I, Buffalo,” Sheila tries to hide her alcoholism when her sister Priya comes for a visit with Sheila’s brother-in-law and niece. “The girl” in “You Are Not Alone” is delighted to spend her eighth birthday in Florida with her estranged father, but less so when she learns there’s a stepmother figure in the picture. The women of “Sibyls” look after an elderly neighbour with dementia. The querulous child in “Unknown Unknowns” reminded me of Good Talk by Mira Jacob. My two favourites were the title story, about building a Noah’s Ark replica, and “What Next,” about a woman accompanying her teenage daughter to meet her father for the first time. A few stories didn’t stand out, and while I liked the writing, this didn’t necessarily feel like a cohesive collection.
With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review. This Is Salvaged came out in paperback in the UK on 1 February.
Grove Atlantic
Up next: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, Home/Land by Rebecca Mead, We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman
Have you discovered any new-to-you independent publishers recently?
New Poetry Releases by Phil Barnett, Victoria Kennefick and Rachel Mann
I was slow off the mark this month, but finally managed to finish a first batch of review copies. The rest from January will be coming up soon.
Birds link the first and second poetry collections below, and the trans experience the second and third. Other themes include chronic illness, miscarriage, motherhood, history, prayer and praise.
Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett
What an evocative title – reminiscent of last year’s You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber – and powerful image of how nature has bolstered the author through chronic illness.
The title phrase comes from the poem “Trepanning,” which imagines different species keeping him company in pain. If they’re sometimes held figuratively responsible, they’re also part of the solution; openness to experience means vulnerability, but also solidarity:
a woodpecker bored my skull
in trepanation
drummed a hole and wasps flew out
goldcrests’ needle-calls put punctures
all along the kidney’s line
swallow’s flightlines skywrote my ill
when thrushes sang it out loud
I appreciated the alliteration, the out-of-the-ordinary verbs, and the everyday metaphors. When spring finds Barnett unable to go further than his garden, the birds come to him, inviting him into “a prosecco world, still all winter / stirred in March, shaken in April”. There is highly visual and aural language throughout the book. In “Unsprung,” a dead heron becomes, in an echo of T.S. Eliot, the “still point at the centre of a wheeling world”. Though a pretty niche collection, it’s a lovely little one that nature-lovers should take a chance on.
With thanks to Arachne Press for the free copy for review.
Carcanet have set the bar high for 2024 poetry with these next two releases:
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick
I was blown away by Kennefick’s 2021 debut, Eat or We Both Starve, which I described as “audacious,” “fleshly,” and “pleasingly morbid.” Her sophomore collection is just as strong, with motherhood and the body continuing as overarching themes. The speaker is, by turns, pregnant and mother to a daughter. She experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own (see my recent post on matrescence), while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. This is not actually the first book I’ve read about the changes in a marriage precipitated by a spouse transitioning, and the welter of emotions that it provokes; there’s also Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley in memoir and Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins in poetry.
As in Barnett’s collection, bird metaphors are inescapable. “The Wild Swans at the Wetland Centre” must be a nod to W.B. Yeats (his were at Coole). Here, the recurring chickens and swans are the poet’s familiars, and their eggs her totems – ideal vessels, but so easily broken. The same is true of “Cup,” whose lines form the shape of a teacup perched on a saucer. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is a lot of self-deprecation and dark humour in the poem titles (“Victoria Re-Enacts the Stations of the Cross,” falling and spilling coffee all over herself) and one-line poems that act as rejoinders. (“Orientation: A Tragedy” reads “I am so straight I give myself paper cuts.”)
If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further. I doubt I’ll come across a better collection this year.
More favourite lines:
I get sad as earth becomes sea. I get sad
that in showing you this sinking world
I teach you how to say goodbye.
(from “On Being Two in the Anthropocene”)
I want people
to know me, and to hide.
(from “Le Cygne, My Spirit Animal”)
I want to write down the names of all my dead relatives.
How are they not here anymore? How are yours absent too?
What do we do with them, their names? Is there a box for grief?
(from “Census Night Poem”)
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review. Coming out on 29 February.
Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann
This is Mann’s second collection, after A Kingdom of Love. In reviewing that book I remarked on the psalm-like cadence, the anatomical and allusive language, and the contrast of past and present. All are elements here as well. The first long section was inspired by Eleanor/John Rykener, a 14th-century seamstress and sex worker whom some have claimed as a trans pioneer. Little is known about her life or self-identification, so Mann does not attempt biography here, but rather is thinking alongside the character. “Construct me weird and kind, leave it to me / To strip off when I’m ready. I shall run wild, / Naked as I dare, out into sober streets.”
Three later poems share the title “A Charm to Change Sex,” each numbered and in two columns – you have a choice of whether to read them across or down the page. Either way, they land somewhere between a spell and a prayer (and there are many other prayers in the table of contents): “Hidden: transfix / Invisible made visible … oh so holy, words lead everywhere / inside become out”. Bodies are as provisional as speech (“All text is stitched, / Body too only subset of making, a stored magic”), and inescapably frail, as evidenced by a father’s illness and death, the subject of several poems.
Repetition and wordplay (“razed/raised”) sometimes tail off into faltering phrases – “#TDOR” is most notable for this. And “Seven Proof Texts on a Transitioned Body” is, by itself, worth buying the book for, with alliteration and slang pushing back at medical and scriptural vocabulary. Mann is an incredibly versatile writer: I’ve read a memoir, a work of literary appreciation, and an academic thriller by her as well as her published poetry. And while I found less that resonated in this collection, I still admired its rigorous engagement with history, theology, and the facts of a life.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
Best Books from 2023
Keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: the 24 (or, actually 26) current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings; anything from my Best of First Half that didn’t make it through can be considered a runner-up, along with The Librarianist.)
Fiction
The New Life by Tom Crewe: Two 1890s English sex researchers (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) write a book called Sexual Inversion drawing on ancient Greek history and containing case studies of homosexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s trial puts everyone on edge; not long afterwards, their own book becomes the subject of an obscenity trial, and each man has to decide what he’s willing to give up in devotion to his principles. This is deeply, frankly erotic stuff, and, on the sentence level, just exquisite writing.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff: Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel.
Counting as one this thematic trio of women’s true crime pastiches; I liked the Makkai best.
Penance by Eliza Clark: A compelling account of teenage feuds and bullying that went too far and ended in murder. It’s a pretty gruesome crime, but memorable, not least because it coincided with the day of the Brexit vote. I loved Clark’s portrait of Crow-on-Sea, a down-at-heel seaside town near Scarborough, and the depth of character that comes through via interviews and documents. She also nails teenage dialogue and social media use, podcasts, true crime obsession and so on.
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll: An engrossing story of a Type A sorority president whose perfect life goes askew when a serial killer targets the house and kills two of her friends. She and the domestic partner of one of his previous victims are determined to see “the Defendant” brought to justice. 1970s Florida/Washington were interesting settings, and I liked the focus on the victims. The judge in the Defendant’s case lamented that such a bright young man would come to grief; think of the bright young women he extinguished instead.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: When an invitation comes from her boarding school alma mater, Granby, to teach a two-week course on podcasting, Bodie indulges her obsession with the 1995 murder of her former roommate. Makkai has taken her cues from the true crime genre and constructed a convincing mesh of evidence and theories. She so carefully crafts her pen portraits, and so intimately involves us in Bodie’s psyche, that it’s impossible not to get invested. This is timely, daring, intelligent, enthralling storytelling.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain: In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love. Grief is a resonant theme in many of the stories, with pregnancy or infant loss a recurring element. At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain.
Mrs S by K Patrick: Patrick’s unnamed narrator is an early-twenties Australian butch lesbian who has come to England to be a matron at a girls’ boarding school. Mrs S is the headmaster’s wife, perhaps 20 years her senior. A heat wave gives a sultry atmosphere as hints of attraction between them give way to explicit scenes. Summer romances never last, but their intensity is legendary, and this feels like an instant standard. Not your average coming-of-age story, seduction narrative or cougar stereotype. It’s a new queer classic.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Through her work as a writer for a sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live, Sally Milz meets Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks. Plain Jane getting the hot guy – that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma… As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown existence endeared her to me. Could this be called predictable? Well, what does one want from a romcom?
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng: In 1921, “Willie” Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover, Gerald, stay with old friends Robert and Lesley Hamlyn in Penang, Malaysia. Willie’s marriage is floundering and he faces financial ruin. He needs a story that will sell and gets one when Lesley starts recounting the momentous events of 1910: volunteering at the party office of Dr Sun Yat Sen and trying to save her friend from a murder charge. Tan weaves it all into a Maugham-esque plot with sumptuous scene-setting and atmosphere.
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain: At age 15, Marianne falls in love. She imagines her romance with Simon as a grand adventure (and escape from her parents’ ordinariness), but his post-school life in Paris doesn’t have room for her. Much changes over the next 15 years, but never her attachment to her first love. This has the chic, convincing 1960s setting of Tessa Hadley’s work, and Marianne’s droll narration is a delight. It put me through an emotional wringer – no cheap tear-jerker but a tender depiction of love in all its forms.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: Heartstopper on the Western Front; swoon! Will Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt both acknowledge that this is love and not just sex, as it is for so many teenage boys at their English boarding school? And will one or both survive the trenches of the First World War? Winn depicts the full horror of war, but in between there is banter, friendship and poetry. Some moments are downright jolly. This debut is obsessively researched, but Winn has a light touch with it. Engaging, thrilling, and, yes, romantic.
Nonfiction
All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett: A lovely memoir about grief and gardening, caring for an ill child and a dying parent. The book is composed of dozens of brief autobiographical, present-tense essays, each titled after a wildflower with traditional healing properties. The format realistically presents bereavement and caring as ongoing, cyclical challenges rather than one-time events. Sitting somewhere between creative nonfiction and nature essays, it’s a beautiful read for any fan of women’s life writing.
Monsters by Claire Dederer: The question posed by this hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism is “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” It begins, in the wake of #MeToo, by reassessing the work of film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. The book is as compassionate as it is incisive. While there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance. Dederer’s prose is forthright and funny; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish.
Womb by Leah Hazard: A wide-ranging and accessible study of the uterus, this casts a feminist eye over history and future alike. Blending medical knowledge and cultural commentary, it cannot fail to have both personal and political significance for readers of any gender. The thematic structure of the chapters also functions as a roughly chronological tour of how life with a uterus might proceed: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, labour, caesarean section, ongoing health issues, menopause. Inclusive and respectful of diversity.
Sea Bean by Sally Huband: Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects, and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding vibrant beachcombing cultures. In many ways, this is about coming to terms with loss, and the author presents the facts about climate crisis with sombre determination. She writes with such poetic tenderness in this radiant debut memoir.
La Vie by John Lewis-Stempel: The author has written much about his Herefordshire haunts, but he’s now relocated permanently to southwest France (La Roche, in the Charente). He proudly calls himself a peasant farmer, growing what he can and bartering for much of the rest. La Vie chronicles a year in his quest to become self-sufficient. It opens one January and continues through the December, an occasional diary with recipes. It’s a peaceful, comforting read that’s attuned to the seasons and the land. Lewis-Stempel’s best book in an age.
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer: In 2019, Vollmer’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Months later, his father reported blinking lights in the woods near the family cemetery. Although Vollmer had left the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in college, his religious upbringing influenced his investigation, which overlapped with COVID-19. Grief, mysticism, and acceptance of the unexplained are resonant themes. An unforgettable record of “a collision with the ineffable.”
Otherwise by Julie Marie Wade: Nine intricate autobiographical essays reflect on risk, bodily autonomy, and poetry versus prose. A series of meditations composed across Wade’s thirties arranges snapshots of her growing frustration with gendered stereotypes. In particular, she interrogates her rosy childhood notions of marriage. As she explored feminism and accepted her lesbian identity—though not before leaving a man at the altar—she found ways to be “a secular humanist by day and a hopeless romantic by night.” Superb.
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh: This autobiographical essay tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Stunning.
Poetry
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty: In this debut collection, the fact of his alcoholic father’s suicide is inescapable. The poet alternates between an intimate “you” address and third-person scenarios, auditioning coping mechanisms. His frame of reference is wide: football, rappers, Buddhist cosmology. The word “suicide” itself is repeated to the point where it becomes just a sibilant collection of syllables. The tone is often bitter, as is to be expected, but there is joy in the deft use of language.
Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan: This follow-up to Flèche takes up many of the same foundational subjects: race, family, language and sexuality. But this time, the pandemic is the lens through which all is filtered. At a time when Asian heritage merited extra suspicion, English was both a means of frank expression and a source of ambivalence. At the centre of the book, “Ars Poetica,” a multi-part collage incorporating lines from other poets, forms a kind of autobiography in verse. Chan also questions the lines between genres. Excellent.
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection delves into the reality of sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Guns are insidious, used for hunting or mass shootings. Trauma lingers. “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” The collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. In elegies and epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), Crowe honors family ties that bring solace. The collection has emotional range: sensuality, fear, and wonder at natural beauty.
A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon: I was drawn to this for its acknowledged debt to D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Snakes, bees, bats and foxes are some of the creatures that scamper through the text. There are poems for marine life, fruit and wildflowers. You get a sense of the seasons turning, and the natural wonders to prize from each. Dixon’s poetry is formal yet playful, the structures and line and stanza lengths varying. There are portraits and elegies. The book is in collaboration with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson. A real gem.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris: This debut collection addresses the symptoms and side effects of breast cancer treatment at age 36, but often in oblique or cheeky ways – it can be no mistake that “assistance” appears two lines before a mention of hemorrhoids, for instance, even though it closes an epithalamium distinguished by its gentle sibilance (Farris’s husband is Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky.) She crafts sensual love poems, and exhibits Japanese influences. (Discussed in my review essay for The Rumpus.)
The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly: Kelly is half-Danish and has single-sided deafness, and her second collection engages with questions of split identity. One section ends with the Deaf community’s outrage that the Prime Minister’s Covid briefings were not translated into BSL. Bizarre but delightful is the sequence of alliteration-rich poems about fungi, followed by a miscellany of autobiographical poems full of references to colour, language, nature and travel.
Hard Drive by Paul Stephenson: This wry, wrenching debut collection is an extended elegy for his partner, Tod Hartman, an American anthropologist who died of heart failure at 38. There’s every style, tone and structure imaginable here. Stephenson riffs on his partner’s oft-misspelled name (German for death), and writes of discovery, autopsy, sadmin and rituals. In “The Only Book I Took” he opens up Tod’s copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – which came from Wonder Book, the bookstore chain I worked at in Maryland!
Okay, twist my arm … if I had to pick my overall books of the year, I’d concur with the Times in picking The New Life. In nonfiction: Monsters. In poetry: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive.
Have you read any of my favourites? What 2023 releases do I need to catch up on right away?
The 2024 Releases I’ve Read So Far
I happen to have read eight pre-release books so far, all of them for paid review; mostly for Shelf Awareness, with one for Foreword. (I also have proof copies of upcoming novels by Tania James, Margot Livesey, Sigrid Nunez and Sarah Perry on the shelf, but haven’t managed to start on them yet.) I’ve given review excerpts, links where available, and ratings below to try to pique your interest. Early in January I’ll follow up with a list of my dozen Most Anticipated titles for the coming year.
My top recommendations so far:
(in alphabetical order)
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali [Jan. 16, Alice James Books]: In this poised debut collection by a Muslim poet, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by matriarchs. Ali’s ambivalence towards faith is clear in alliteration-laden verse that recalls Kaveh Akbar’s. Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language. 
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley [Feb. 27, MCD]: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss. Investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj [Jan. 16, HarperVia]: Darraj’s second novel-in-stories is a sparkling composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s. 
The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton [April 9, Scribner]: Many use the words “habit” and “ritual” interchangeably, but the Harvard Business School behavioral scientist argues convincingly that they are very different. While a habit is an automatic, routine action, rituals are “emotional catalysts that energize, inspire, and elevate us.” He presents an engaging and commonsense précis of his research, making a strong case for rituals’ importance in the personal and professional spheres as people mark milestones, form relationships, or simply “savor the experiences of everyday life.”
Other 2024 releases I’ve read:
(in publication date order)
House Cat by Paul Barbera [Jan. 2, Thames & Hudson]: The Australian photographer Paul Barbera’s lavish art book showcases eye-catching architecture and the pets inhabiting these stylish spaces. Whether in a Revolutionary War-era restoration or a modernist show home, these cats preside with a befitting dignity. (Shelf Awareness review forthcoming)
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo [Feb. 13, Henry Holt/Quercus]: Choo’s third novel is steeped in Chinese folklore, like her previous work, this time with a focus on tantalizing stories related to foxes, which were often worshiped at village shrines in China. Two tandem searches ramp up the level of suspense: in the winter of 1908 in Manchuria, in northeast China, a detective investigates a series of unexplained deaths; at the same time, a fox-woman masquerading as a servant plots vengeance against the man who murdered her child.
The Only Way Through Is Out by Suzette Mullen [Feb. 13, University of Wisconsin Press]: A candid, inspirational memoir traces the events leading to her midlife acceptance of her lesbian identity and explores the aftermath of her decision to leave her marriage and build “a life where I would choose desire over safety.” The book ends on a perfect note as Mullen attends her first Pride festival aged 56. “It’s never too late” is the triumphant final line. (Foreword review forthcoming)
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le [March 5, Knopf]: A fearless poetry debut prioritizes language and voice to explore inherited wartime trauma and expose anti-Asian racism. Each poem is titled after a rhetorical strategy or analytical mode. Anaphora is one sonic technique used to emphasize the points. Language and race are intertwined. This is a prophet’s fervent truth-telling. High-concept and unapologetic, this collection from a Dylan Thomas Prize winner pulsates. (Shelf Awareness review forthcoming) 
Currently reading:
(in release date order; all for Shelf Awareness review)
God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne [Jan. 4, Oxford University Press]: “traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped—and continue to shape—conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism.”
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, A Graywolf Anthology [Jan. 23, Graywolf Press]: “Graywolf poets have selected fifty poems by Graywolf poets, offering insightful prose reflections on their selections. What arises is a choral arrangement of voices and lineages across decades, languages, styles, and divergences, inspiring a shared vision for the future.”
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl [April 30, Random House]: “When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual gift: a one-way plane ticket, and a note reading ‘Go to Paris’. But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure … When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.”
Will you look out for one or more of these?
Any other 2024 reads you can recommend?
That’s it for me until later next week when I start in on my year-end round-ups (DNFs, miscellaneous superlatives, books of the year, and final statistics). Merry Christmas!
December Releases: Rebecca, Not Becky & You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
The last month of the year is generally thin on the ground for new books, but here are two December U.S. releases I reviewed early for Shelf Awareness. One is a fun and timely novel about race relations and the other an autobiographical poetry collection about asexuality and chronic illness. Below are excerpts with a link to the full text for one. Both:
Rebecca, Not Becky by Christine Platt and Catherine Wigginton Greene
Two women navigate the nuances of racism in their affluent Northern Virginia community. Rebecca Myland shed the nickname “Becky” when it became cultural shorthand for clueless white ladies. She desperately wants to do the right thing, including making the perfect home for her husband and daughters and being a model white ally, leading the school’s diversity committee and antiracist book club.
De’Andrea Whitman reluctantly gave up her law career and Atlanta support system to move to Rolling Hills. It’s the best place for the family, given her husband Malik’s new job and the proximity to his mother’s top-notch dementia care facility. However, she is painfully aware that their daughter, Nina, may be the only Black student at the private school. De’Andrea’s therapist, Dr. Jones, challenges her to try to make one white friend.
The two protagonists have more in common than they realize. When the diversity committee’s controversial pet project of getting a statue of a Confederate general removed from the local park makes national news, the resulting ruckus threatens their fragile friendship. It’s a hugely enjoyable novel reminiscent of Terry McMillan and Curtis Sittenfeld that nonetheless takes a hard look at prejudice and performative allyship.
(And I love the title because my mother and one aunt always tried to call me Becky, but I hate that nickname!)
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber
The poet feels marked by “failure to want” and by recurring medical complaints—severe Crohn’s disease and menorrhagia, initially dismissed by a doctor as menstrual cramps. In “Blood Firsts,” she compares her first period with the later coming-of-age moment of realizing she was asexual. She describes herself as a teenage wallflower, aware of a same-sex pull but unsure what, if anything, to do about it. The series of lyrical attempted definitions in “Queerplatonic” show her in love with a female friend. Anatomy and nature supply the book’s interlocking metaphors. Animals appear frequently, but often as roadkill or taxidermied trophies. The structure varies, with prose paragraphs, columns, and text moving up the page. The rich stylistic palette (rhetorical questions, footnotes, second person, a call-and-response format) and sonic arsenal (alliteration, wordplay, anaphora) make for a courageous, unforgettable collection. (Forthcoming)
Review Catch-Up: Monica, Bibliomaniac, Family Meal, Fudge & More
I’m catching up with reviews of the many October releases I read, including these four sent by publishers…
- a genre-bending, Technicolor graphic novel in the form of short comics
- a book-addict’s memoir of an ambitious Covid-times tour of Britain’s bookshops
- an understated novel about queer men of colour coping with death and mental illness
- and a quirky contemporary poetry collection I read in one sitting.
Followed by a bonus list of October books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness, similarly varied in genre: autofiction, flash fiction, horror-tinged historical fiction, graphic memoirs and more.
Monica by Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.
At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.
To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain by Robin Ince
Do you know anyone who can buy just one book? Do you know anyone who leaves a bookshop only with what they walked in to buy?
I understand that Robin Ince is a radio personality and comedian who, though holding no formal qualifications, often delivers presentations about science. He was meant to undertake a stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox in the autumn of 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home – he comes across as driven, antsy; positively allergic to boredom – he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops (the oddest venue was a Chinese restaurant; he was speaking to the Plymouth Humanists), over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many favourite places such as Hay-on-Wye, Hungerford (my local indie) and Wigtown. The topic of his previous book was curiosity, which gave him free rein to feature anything that interested him, so no two talks were the same and he incorporated lots of ad hoc book recommendations.
Ince is not just a speaker at the bookshops but, invariably, a customer – as well as at just about every charity shop in a town. Even when he knows he’ll be carrying his purchases home in his luggage on the train, he can’t resist a browse. And while his shopping basket would look wildly different to mine (his go-to sections are science and philosophy, the occult, 1960s pop and alternative culture; alongside a wide but utterly unpredictable range of classic and contemporary fiction and antiquarian finds), I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines:
“A bookshop with a proximity to an interesting graveyard is a fine combination.”
“I like charity bookshops, because I can delude myself into believing that I am committing an altruistic act by purchasing too many books. I am not satisfying my consumer lust – I am digging a well in Uganda.”
“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
He’s also refreshingly open-minded, determined not to become a white male dinosaur: he once spent a wonderful year reading only women authors, and gratefully accepts the gift of a Black queer feminist work – at which he knows a younger version of himself would have scoffed. I took lots of notes on shops I hadn’t heard of, but also appreciated the witty asides on British ways and on the rigours and coincidences of the tour. If you liked White Spines, this will be right up your street, though to me this was universal where the Royle was too niche. And it didn’t matter a jot that I was previously unfamiliar with Ince as a public figure.
Bibliomaniac came out in paperback on 5 October. My thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
I read this over a chilled-out coffee at the Globe bar in Hay-on-Wye (how perfect, then, to come across the lines “I know the secret of life / Is to read good books”). Weatherhead mostly charts the rhythms of everyday existence in pandemic-era New York City, especially through a haiku sequence (“The blind cat asleep / On my lap—and coffee / Just out of reach” – a situation familiar to any cat owner). His style is matter-of-fact and casually funny, juxtaposing random observations about hipster-ish experiences. From “Things the Photoshop Instructor Said and Did”: “Someone gasped when he increased the contrast / I feel like everyone here is named Taylor.”
The central piece, “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support Nov. 17, 2018,” descends into the absurd, but his four hours lost on the phone are reclaimed through his musings on a sport he once played (“I had begun to find meaning in art and music / I was always too cerebral a player anyways … That feeling—of perfect grace and equanimity— / must be what we’re all searching for in this life”) and on life in general. This is poetry that doesn’t feel like poetry, if that makes sense. I have a hunch that it might appeal to readers of David Foster Wallace.
Published by Publishing Genius. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Flowers of Provence by Jamie Beck (Gift books feature): A gorgeous book of photographs, perfect for gardeners, romantics, and armchair travelers. Her still lifes are as detailed and colorful as medieval paintings.
Edith Holler by Edward Carey (forthcoming): A dark fairy tale about a precocious girl confined to her family’s theatre in Norwich, England yet driven to reveal the truth behind her city’s child disappearances. Reminiscent of Dahl, Dickens, and Shakespeare at their goriest.
I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast: A laugh-out-loud-funny tour through her dream journal as well as a brief introduction to dream theory. Delightfully captures the randomness of dream topics and dialogues.
Tremor by Teju Cole: A kaleidoscopic work of autofiction that journeys between the US and Nigeria as it questions the ownership and meaning of Black art. The sophisticated structure is a highlight of this elegant study of art criticism, suffering, and subjectivity.
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Review and Q&A): In her ninth collection of mostly flash-length stories (a whopping 143 of them), an overarching theme is the mystery of human communication and connection. A real cornucopia of genres, structures, and voices. [Only available via Bookshop.org and independent bookstores.]
Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez: Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Each Spanish-language card is allotted a one-page poem in a creative, poignant recounting of his Mexican American family history.
Glass Half Empty by Rachael Smith: The British comics artist third graphic memoir is a refreshingly candid account of her recovery from alcoholism after her father’s death. In some panes, her adult self appears alongside her younger self, offering advice.
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner: The final installment – after The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem – in an intimate, autobiographical trilogy. Love is presented as the key to surviving bereavement and wartime trauma.
September Releases by Chloe Lane, Ben Lerner, Navied Mahdavian & More
September and October are bounteous months in the publishing world. I’ll have a bunch of books to plug in both, mostly because I’ve upped my reviewing quota for Shelf Awareness. There’s real variety here, from contemporary novellas and heavily autobiographical poetry to nature essays and a graphic memoir.
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane
I reviewed Lane’s debut novel, The Swimmers, a black comedy about a family preparing for an assisted suicide, this time last year. It seems there’s an autobiographical setup to the author’s follow-up, which focuses on a couple from New Zealand now living in Florida with their young son. Narrator Georgie teaches writing at a local college and is having an affair with Jason, an Alabama-accented librarian she met through taking Finn to the Music & Movement class. She joins in a volunteer-led controlled burn in the forest, and curiosity quickly turns to horror when she discovers the decaying body of a missing student.
There’s a strong physicality to this short novel: fire, bodies and Florida’s dangerous fauna (“To choose to live in a place surrounded by these creatures, these threats, it made me feel like I was living a bold life”). Georgie has to decide whether setting fire to her marriage with Dan is what she really wants. A Barry Hannah short story she reads describes adultery as just a matter of arms and legs, a phrase that’s repeated several times.
Georgie is cynical and detached from her self-destructive choices, coming out with incisive one-liners (“My life isn’t a Muriel Spark novel, there’s no way to flash forward and find out if I make it out of the housefire alive” and “He rested the spade on his shoulder as if he were a Viking taking a drinks break in the middle of a battle”). Lane burrows into instinct and motivation, also giving a glimpse of the challenges of new motherhood. Apart from a wicked dinner party scene, though, the book as a whole was underwhelming: the body holds no mystery, and adultery is an old, old story.
With thanks to Gallic Books for the proof copy for review.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
I’d read fiction and nonfiction from Lerner but had no idea of what to expect from his poetry. Almost every other poem is a prose piece, many of these being absurdist monologues that move via word association between topics seemingly chosen at random: psychoanalysis, birdsong, his brother’s colorblindness; proverbs, the Holocaust; art conservation, his partner’s upcoming C-section, an IRS Schedule C tax form, and so on.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try. (Read via Edelweiss)
Sample lines:
“When you die in the patent office / there’s a pun on expiration”
“the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, / shuttling between the you and I. … Form / is always the answer to the riddle it poses”
“It’s raining now / it isn’t, or it’s raining in the near / future perfect when the poem is finished / or continuous, will have been completed”
This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian
Mahdavian has also published comics in the New Yorker. His debut graphic novel is a memoir of the three years (2016–19) he and his wife lived in remote Idaho. Of Iranian heritage, the author had lived in Miami and then the Bay Area, so was pretty unprepared for living off-grid. His wife, Emelie (who is white), is a documentary filmmaker. They had a box house brought in on a trailer. After Trump’s surprise win, it was a challenging time to be a Brown man in the rural USA. “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” was the kind of question he got on their trips into town. Neighbors were outwardly friendly – bringing them firewood and elk kebabs, helping when their car wouldn’t start or they ran off the road in icy conditions, teaching them the local bald eagles’ habits – yet thought nothing of making racist and homophobic slurs.
I appreciated the self-deprecating depictions of learning DIY from YouTube videos and feeling like a wimp in comparison to his new friends who hunt and have gun collections – one funny spread has him imagining himself as a baby in a onesie sitting across from a manly neighbor. “I am shedding my city madness,” Mahdavian boasts as they plant an abundant garden and start learning about trees and birds. The references to Persian myth and melodrama are intriguing, though sometimes seem à propos of nothing, as do the asides on science and nature. I preferred when the focus was on the couple’s struggles with infertility and reopening the town movie theater – a flop because people only want John Wayne flicks.
This was enjoyable reading, but the simple black-and-white style is unlikely to draw in readers new to graphic storytelling, and I wondered if the overall premise – ‘we expected to find closed-minded racists and we did’ – was enough to hang a memoir on. (Read via Edelweiss)
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Enright’s astute eighth novel traces the family legacies of talent and trauma through the generations descended from a famous Irish poet. Cycles of abandonment and abuse characterize the McDaraghs. Enright convincingly pinpoints the narcissism and codependency behind their love-hate relationships. (It was an honor to also interview Anne Enright. You can see our Q&A here.)
When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser
This lyrical debut memoir is an experimental, literary recounting of the experience of undergoing a stroke and relearning daily skills while supporting a gender-transitioning partner. Fraser splits herself into two: the “I” moving through life, and “Ghost,” her memory repository. But “I can’t rely only on Ghost’s mental postcards,” Fraser thinks, and sets out to retrieve evidence of who she was and is.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
(Already featured in my Best of 2023 so far post.) Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel.
Zoo World: Essays by Mary Quade
A collection of 15 thoughtful nature/travel essays that explore the interconnectedness of life and conservation strategies, and exemplify compassion for people and, particularly, animals. The book makes a round-trip journey, beginning at Quade’s Ohio farm and venturing further afield in the Americas and to Southeast Asia before returning home.
The Goodbye World Poem by Brian Turner
The lovely laments in Brian Turner’s fourth collection (a sequel to The Wild Delight of Wild Things) dwell in the aftermath of the loss of his wife and others, and cultivate compensatory appreciation for the natural world. Turner’s poetry is gilded with alliteration and maritime metaphors The long title piece, which closes the collection, repeats many phrases from earlier poems—a pleasing way of drawing the book’s themes together. (My review of the third volume in this loose trilogy is forthcoming.)
And a bonus review book, relevant for its title:
September and the Night by Maica Rafecas
[Translated from the Catalan by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall]
A new Logistics Centre is to cut through Anaïs’s family vineyards as part of a compulsory land purchase. While her father, Magí, and brother, Jan, are resigned to the loss, this single mother decides to resist, tying herself to a stone shed on the premises that will be right in the path of the bulldozers. This causes others to question her mental health, with social worker Elisa tasked with investigating the case. Key evidence of her irrational behaviour turns out to have perfectly good explanations.
Certain chapters alternate Jan’s and Anaïs’s perspectives, recreate her confusion in a psychiatric hospital, or have every sentence beginning with “There” or “And” – effective anaphora. Although I didn’t think Jan’s several romantic options added to the plot, this debut novella from a Spanish author was a pleasant surprise. It’s based on a true story, though takes place in fictional locations, and bears a gentle message of cultural preservation.
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 