#ReadIndies Wrap-Up: February Releases (Jukes, Spence) & Review Catch-Up (Buttery, Foust)
Good riddance to February, which added insult to injury on its final day when my in-laws’ neighbour reversed into the car we were borrowing from a book club friend and smashed the driver’s-side window. The blue skies and crocuses of recent days have been most welcome. The best I can say for the month just departed is that I managed to review 15 books for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge. These came from 10 splendid publishers: Atlantic Books, Backbone Press, Carcanet Press, Counterpoint, Elliott & Thompson, The Emma Press, Faber, Icon Books, Saraband and Sort Of Books.
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes
When she found out she was pregnant, Jukes (author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings) lost herself in research, looking for parallels in the natural world. A friend had told her that “childbirth puts you more in touch with your animal side.” Her daughter was born at the start of the pandemic and so early motherhood was perhaps more than usually isolated and emotionally challenging for her. She had an unexpected C-section after the placenta failed to nourish her daughter sufficiently, and then struggled to breastfeed. “I was, I realised, a little afraid of the baby. I’d expected to feel a sense of recognition – to see in her face some sign of familiarity,” but that wasn’t the case. “She was so … other.”
The long thematic chapters present Jukes’s experiences in parallel to those of other mothering creatures with pregnancy, birth, lactation, making a home (nesting) and enlisting the help of the community. Peppered throughout are trivia she shares with boyfriend, baby and readers. Such as that burying beetles lay eggs on a carcass so their babies feed on carrion from day one. That bonobo females attend births, acting as midwives for each other. That Madrid’s storks have started eating and lining their nests with what they find in landfill instead of migrating to Africa. The “Did you know?” litany quickly becomes precious. The details are not that interesting in themselves, and not sufficiently synthesized to be meaningful. The same factoid about leopard tree iguanas is repeated seven pages apart. A significant amount of information comes from Bitch by Lucy Cooke, which I would recommend instead.
As hybrid scientific memoirs of motherhood go, Lucy Jones’s Matrescence can’t be beat. For its social and political engagement, Jennifer Case’s We Are Animals is a valuable companion. Jukes’s offering pales by comparison because her story – not having the delivery she wanted, struggling to connect with her baby, her relationship with the father falling apart – is all too common, and she doesn’t have the scientific bona fides for readers to accept her as a valid source of zoological facts.
I would make an exception, though, for the central chapter, “Forever Milk,” which might be condensed and published in a big-name newspaper as a Rachel Carson-like exposé about endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals. Like any mother, Jukes wants nothing more than to protect her daughter, but how can she when household products (waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, cleaning sprays) contain toxic chemicals and her breastmilk is sure to be contaminated? Add in microplastics and the situation is bleak. We don’t know singly, let alone collectively, what these pollutants are doing to species in the long term, but most likely they interfere with reproduction and alter behaviour. The central message of this chapter, and the book as a whole, is that animals are amazing but vulnerable. “What is this world if nowhere is separate – nowhere safe?” If you think about this stuff much, you can’t bear it. Yet it’s a truth we all have to live with. It’s a brave author who dares sit with the unthinkable.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Daughter of the Sun by Rachel Spence
The Emma Press has published poetry pamphlets before, but this is their inaugural full-length work. Rachel Spence’s second collection is in two parts: first is “Call & Response,” a sonnet sequence structured as a play and considering her relationship with her mother. Act 1 starts in 1976 and zooms forward to key moments when they fell out and then reversed their estrangement. The next section finds them in the new roles of patient and carer. “Your final check-up. August. Nimbus clouds / prised open by Delft blue. Waiting is hard.” In Act 3, death is near; “in that quantum hinge, we made / an alphabet from love’s ungrammared stutter.” The poems of the last act are dated precisely, not just to a month and year as earlier but down to the very day, hour and minute. Whether in Ludlow or Venice, Spence crystallizes moments from the ongoingness of grief, drawing images from the natural world.
The second part of the book, “Medea’s Song,” is looser in style and more dispersed across the page. It’s a feminist reinterpretation that refuses to make of Medea a simple murderess, instead redeeming her as a wise woman. “Do not call them seers or sisters // They are the owls of history // nightfliers outliers”. I’m not drawn to Greek myth updates but I expect this would be rewarding for fans of similar projects by Fiona Benson and Anne Carson. Some of the specific vocabulary from the first section recurs, linking the two in a satisfying way.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
I’m also catching up on two 2024 releases from indie publishers that I was sent for review:
Knead to Know: A History of Baking by Neil Buttery
Not only the pun-tastic title, but also the excellent nominative determinism of chef and food historian Dr Neil Buttery’s name, earned this a place in my 2024 Superlatives post. In not quite 240 pages, it achieves the improbable, producing an exhaustive history of baked goods through miniature essays about every conceivable subcategory. Although the focus is on British baking, the story begins in ancient times with the first grains and the earliest cooking technique of making griddlecakes on a hearthstone. (Speaking of which, make sure you’re prepared for Pancake Day, aka Shrove Tuesday, this week!) Across multi-part chapters about bread, biscuits and cakes, pies and puddings, and patisserie, Buttery spotlights regional specialties, many of them familiar (Cornish pasties and Eccles cakes); a few have fallen into obscurity (Gloucester pancakes and Yorkshire Christmas pyes). Some dishes’ origin stories are apocryphal, while others can be traced back to historical cookbooks.
I was fascinated by the evolution of traditional holiday bakes. “The long tapering shape of the stollen is supposed to represent the infant Christ wrapped in His swaddling.” In general, there is just the right amount of chemistry, and while in places the writing is shaky or at least poorly edited (“populous” instead of populace!), there are good quips, too: “dried fruit haters do have a miserable time at Christmas to be fair.” I read the book in bites across a number of months, which felt appropriate because it’s more a reference text for the kitchen shelf than a narrative to read straight through. Good for picking up now and then over a cup of tea.
With thanks to Icon Books for the free copy for review.
You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems by Rebecca Foust
Foust’s fifth collection – at 41 pages, the length of a long chapbook – is in conversation with the language and storyline of 1984. George Orwell’s classic took on new prescience for her during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a period marked by a pandemic as well as by corruption, doublespeak and violence. “Rally Insurrection” is a clever erasure poem illustrating how a propagandist might rebrand the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021: instead of “a mob came to Washington to / disrupt the peaceful transfer of power,” the Ministry of Truth bulletin would read “a crowd came to Washington to fight / for their country”. “Language Matters” insists that “language / is the most dangerous weapon in any totalitarian arsenal” and warns “A dictator / might do these things, but surely not // a president.” How much more strongly does this resonate in 2025.
The second and third sections engage directly with the story of Julia and Winston – the collection takes its seemingly inapt subtitle from Foust’s appreciation of 1984’s “idea of love as a subversive act affirming free will, expression, and personal privacy”. Her bold verse also confronts the repeal of abortion rights (“Breaking News”) and toxic masculinity (“Consent: A Primer”). There are some internal rhymes and slant rhymes, as well as a few end rhymes all the more striking for their rarity. I only wish this had been published a few years sooner, when its message might have seemed timelier – though, unfortunately, it is still apropos.
Some favorite lines:
“How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?”
“2016, dark year / of the ascension / of our Lord the Mad Clown”
“It’s happening now, / somewhere. Not here, // not yet. But so long as Big Brother is out there— / & he will always be out there—it could, // & one day, maybe it will.”
Published by Backbone Press in the USA. With thanks to the author for the e-copy for review.
Which of these appeal to you? What indie publishers have you read from recently?
20 Books of Summer, #1–4: Alexis, Haupt, Rutt, Tovey
I was slow to launch into my 20 Books of Summer reading, but have now finally managed to get through my first four books. These include two substitutes: a review copy I hadn’t realized fit in perfectly with my all-animals challenge, and a book I’d started earlier in the year but set aside and wanted to get back into. Three of the four were extremely rewarding; the last was somewhat insubstantial, though I always enjoy reading about cat antics. All have been illuminating about animal intelligence and behavior, and useful for thinking about our place in and duty towards the more-than-human world. Not all of my 20 Books of Summer will have such an explicit focus on nature – some just happen to have an animal in the title or pictured on the cover – but this first batch had a strong linking theme so was a great start.
Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis (2015)
In this modern folk tale with elements of the Book of Job, the gods Apollo and Hermes, drinking in a Toronto tavern, discuss the nature of human intelligence and ponder whether it’s inevitably bound up with suffering. They decide to try an experiment, and make a wager on it. They’ll bestow human intelligence on a set of animals and find out whether the creatures die unhappy. Apollo is willing to bet two years’ personal servitude that they will be even unhappier than humans. Their experimental subjects are the 15 dogs being boarded overnight at a nearby veterinary clinic.
The setup means we’re in for an And Then There Were None type of picking-off of the 15, and some of the deaths are distressing. But strangely – and this is what the gods couldn’t foresee – knowledge of their approaching mortality gives the dogs added dignity. It gives their lives and deaths the weight of Shakespearean tragedy. Although they still do doggy things like establishing dominance structures and eating poop, they also know the joys of language and love. A mutt called Prince composes poetry and jokes. Benjy the beagle learns English well enough to recite the first paragraph of Vanity Fair. A poodle named Majnoun forms a connection with his owner that lasts beyond the grave. The dogs work out who they can trust; they form and dissolve bonds; they have memories and a hope that lives on.
It’s a fascinating and inventive novella, and a fond treatment of the relationship between dogs and humans. When I read in the Author’s Note that the poems all included dogs’ names, I went right back to the beginning to scout them out. I’m intrigued by the fact that this Giller Prize winner is a middle book in a series, and keen to explore the rest of the Trinidanian-Canadian author’s oeuvre. 
These next two have a lot in common. For both authors, paying close attention to the natural world – birds, in particular – is a way of coping with environmental and mental health crises.
Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (2009)
Lyanda Lynn Haupt has worked in bird research and rehabilitation for the Audubon Society and other nature organizations. (I read her first book, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds, quite a few years ago.) During a bout of depression, she decided to start paying more attention to the natural world right outside her suburban Seattle window. Crows were a natural place to start. From then on she took binoculars everywhere she went, even on walks to Target. She spent time watching crows’ behavior from a distance or examining them up close – devoting hours to studying a prepared crow skin. She even temporarily took in a broken-legged fledgling she named Charlotte and kept a close eye on the injured bird’s progress in the months after she released it.
Were this simply a charming and keenly observed record of bird behavior and one woman’s gradual reawakening to the joys of nature, I would still have loved it. Haupt is a forthright and gently witty writer. But what takes it well beyond your average nature memoir is the bold statement of human responsibility to the environment. I’ve sat through whole conference sessions that try to define what nature is, what the purpose of nature writing is, and so on. Haupt can do it in just a sentence, concisely and effortlessly explaining how to be a naturalist in a time of loss and how to hope even when in possession of all the facts. 
A few favorite passages:
“an intimate awareness of the continuity between our lives and the rest of life is the only thing that will truly conserve the earth … When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter.”
“I believe strongly that the modern naturalist’s calling includes an element of activism. Naturalists are witnesses to the wild, and necessary bridges between ecological and political ways of knowing. … We join the ‘cloud of witnesses’ who refuse to let the more-than-human world pass unnoticed.”
“here we are, intricate human animals capable of feeling despair over the state of the earth and, simultaneously, joy in its unfolding wildness, no matter how hampered. What are we to do with such a confounding vision? The choices appear to be few. We can deny it, ignore it, go insane with its weight, structure it into a stony ethos with which we beat our friends and ourselves to death—or we can live well in its light.”
The Seafarers: A Journey among Birds by Stephen Rutt (2019)
In 2016 Rutt left his anxiety-inducing life in London in a search for space and silence. He found plenty of both on the Orkney Islands, where he volunteered at the North Ronaldsay bird observatory for seven months. In the few years that followed, the young naturalist travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles – from Skomer to Shetland – courting encounters with seabirds. He’s surrounded by storm petrels one magical night at Mousa Broch; he runs from menacing skuas; he watches eider and terns and kittiwakes along the northeast coast; he returns to Orkney to marvel at gannets and fulmars. Whether it’s their beauty, majesty, resilience, or associations with freedom, such species are for him a particularly life-enhancing segment of nature to spend time around.
Discussion of the environmental threats that hit seabirds hardest, such as plastic pollution, makes for a timely tie-in to wider conservation issues. Rutt also sees himself as part of a long line of bird-loving travellers, including James Fisher and especially R.M. Lockley, whose stories he weaves in. This is one of the best nature/travel books I’ve read in a long time, especially enjoyable because I’ve been to a lot of the island locations and the elegantly evocative writing, making particularly effective use of varied sentence lengths, brought back to me just what it’s like to be in the far north of Scotland in the midst of an endless summer twilight, a humbled observer as a whole whirlwind of bird life carries on above you. 
A favorite passage:
“Gannets nest on the honeycombs of the cliff, in their thousands. They sit in pairs, pointing to the sky, swaying heads. They stir. The scent of the boat’s herring fills the air. They take off, tessellating in a sky that is suddenly as much bird as light. The great skuas lurk.”
My husband also reviewed this, from a birder’s perspective.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the proof copy for review.
The Coming of Saska by Doreen Tovey (1977)
I’ve read four of Tovey’s quaint Siamese cat books now; this was the least worthwhile. It’s partially a matter of false advertising: Saska only turns up for the last 15 pages, as a replacement of sorts for Seeley, who disappeared one morning a year earlier and was never seen again. Over half of the book, in fact, is about a trip Tovey and her husband Charles took to Edmonton, Canada. The Canadian government sponsored them to come over for the Klondike Days festivities, and they also rented a camper and went looking for bears and moose. Mildly amusing mishaps, close shaves, etc. ensue. They then come back and settle into everyday life with their pair of Siamese half-siblings; Saska had the same father as Shebalu. Entertaining enough, but slight, and with far too many ellipses. 
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 