Tag Archives: poetry

Literary Wives Club: Sea Wife by Amity Gaige

By Rebecca Foster on September 4, 2023 | 25 Comments

My sixth read with the Literary Wives online book club (see also Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews), and favourite so far!

{SPOILERS}

Amity Gaige’s fourth novel, Sea Wife (2020), places the protagonists’ relationship in the ultimate pressure cooker: a small sailboat where they will live and travel with their two young children – Sybil, 7, and George, 2 – for one year. Michael and Juliet Partlow’s marriage was in trouble even before they set off for Panama in the yacht Juliet. The voyage seems equal parts second chance and doomed swan song.

Narration alternates between the spouses, as Juliet in the present day sits in a closet reading excerpts from Michael’s ship’s logbook. The latter are in bold font and right-aligned to distinguish them, though his voice would be enough to do so: Juliet is a cynical poet and failed PhD candidate, while Michael is a commonsense financier. Issues of money and politics have come between them. But Juliet’s trauma from childhood sexual abuse and subsequent estrangement from her mother, who disbelieved her, is the greater problem.

Gaige has rendered these two voices very effectively, and maintains tension about what will happen when the Partlows leave Colombia for Jamaica and storms brew. Early on, Michael is warned that changing a boat’s name is bad luck, and it doesn’t take long to confirm that maritime superstition. Michael may think he’s doing it as a sweet tribute to his wife, but you have to wonder if he’s actually replacing her, or admitting that he’s lost her in real life.

Enhancing the epistolary nature, Gaige includes transcripts from an interview and some of Sybil’s therapy sessions (in which she sounds too young; would a seven-year-old seriously say “loveded” as a past participle?), fragments of Juliet’s unfinished dissertation on Anne Sexton, and so on. I think I would have omitted the final section of documents, though. Still, this was a darn good read: literary but suspenseful, and fitting the Literary Wives brief perfectly for its claustrophobic focus on a marriage. (Birthday gift from my wish list)

The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

A marriage changes a lot over the years. A project embarked on with the best of intentions can falter for any number of reasons. A person you once thought you could rely on might let you down. I feel Juliet internalized impossibly high standards for an ideal wife and mother that set her up for failure – it must be difficult for someone who has been a victim to do anything but go through life wounded.

Both protagonists explicitly reflect on their marriage and acknowledge that they have not known how to love or be there for each other, and so have felt alone.

Juliet: “I realized that the loneliness was not new at all. That, in fact, I had been lonely for a long time. Because my husband and I did not know each other. We did not know how to help each other or work together. And yet our fates were bound. By a theory. I mean our marriage. The arrangement was illogical.”

Michael: “Have I lied to her? Sure. I lied to her the moment I represented myself as someone she could count on for a lifetime. … We can’t seem to love each other in the same way at the same time.”

Next book: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell in December (a reread for me)

Posted in: Fiction Reviews | Tagged: Amity Gaige, Anne Sexton, boats, Colombia, epistolary, Literary Wives, marriage, Panama, poetry, sailing, therapy

August Releases: Bright Fear, Uprooting, The Farmer’s Wife, Windswept

By Rebecca Foster on August 30, 2023 | 18 Comments

This month I have three memoirs by women, all based on a connection to land – whether gardening, farming or crofting – and a sophomore poetry collection that engages with themes of pandemic anxiety as well as crossing cultural and gender boundaries.

My August highlight:

Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan

Chan’s Flèche was my favourite poetry collection of 2019. Their follow-up returns to many of the same foundational subjects: race, family, language and sexuality. But this time, the pandemic is a lens through which all is filtered. This is particularly evident in Part I, “Grief Lessons.” “London, 2020” and “Hong Kong, 2003,” on facing pages, contrast Covid-19 with SARS, the major threat when they were a teenager. People have always made assumptions about them based on their appearance or speech. At a time when Asian heritage merited extra suspicion, English was both a means of frank expression and a source of ambivalence:

“At times, English feels like the best kind of evening light. On other days, English becomes something harder, like a white shield.” (from “In the Beginning Was the Word”)

“my Chinese / face struck like the glow of a torch on a white question: / why is your English so good, the compliment uncertain / of itself.” (from “Sestina”)

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, wondering whether to label their work poetry, nonfiction or fiction (“The novel feels like a springer spaniel running off-/leash the poem a warm basket it returns to always”).

The poems’ structure varies, with paragraphs and stanzas of different lengths and placement on the page (including, in one instance, a goblet shape). The enjambment, as you can see in lines I’ve quoted above and below, is noteworthy. Part III, “Field Notes on a Family,” reflects on the pressures of being an only child whose mother would prefer to pretend lives alone rather than with a female partner. The book ends with hope that Chan might be able to be open about their identity. The title references the paradoxical nature of the sublime, beautifully captured via the alliteration that closes “Circles”: “a commotion of coots convincing / me to withstand the quotidian tug-/of-war between terror and love.”

Although Flèche still has the edge for me, this is another excellent work I would recommend even to those wary of poetry.

Some more favourite lines, from “Ars Poetica”:

“What my mother taught me was how

to revere the light language emitted.”

“Home, my therapist suggests, is where

you don’t have to explain yourself.”

With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.

Three land-based memoirs:

(All: )

Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden by Marchelle Farrell

This Nan Shepherd Prize-winning memoir shares Chan’s attention to pandemic-era restrictions and how they prompt ruminations about identity and belonging. Farrell is from Trinidad but came to the UK as a student and has stayed, working as a psychiatrist and then becoming a wife and mother. Just before Covid hit, she moved to the outskirts of Bath and started rejuvenating her home’s large and neglected garden. Under thematic headings that also correspond to the four seasons, chapters are named after different plants she discovered or deliberately cultivated. The peace she finds in her garden helps her to preserve her mental health even though, with the deaths of George Floyd and so many other Black people, she is always painfully aware of her fragile status as a woman of colour, and sometimes feels trapped in the confining routines of homeschooling. I enjoyed the exploration of postcolonial family history and the descriptions of landscapes large and small but often found Farrell’s metaphors and psychological connections obvious or strained.

With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.

The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks

I fancied a sideways look at James Rebanks (The Shepherd’s Life and Wainwright Prize winner English Pastoral) and his regenerative farming project in the Lake District. (My husband spotted their dale from a mountaintop on holiday earlier in the month.) Helen Rebanks is a third-generation farmer’s wife and food and family are the most important things to her. One gets the sense that she has felt looked down on for only ever wanting to be a wife and mother. Her memoir, its recollections structured to metaphorically fall into a typical day, is primarily a defence of the life she has chosen, and secondarily a recipe-stuffed manifesto for eating simple, quality home cooking. (She paints processed food as the enemy.)

Growing up, Rebanks started cooking for her family early on, and got a job in a café as a teenager; her mother ran their farm home as a B&B but was forgetful to the point of being neglectful. She met James at 17 and accompanied him to Oxford, where they must have been the only student couple cooking and eating proper food. This period, when she was working an office job, baking cakes for a café, and mourning the devastating foot-and-mouth disease epidemic from a distance, is most memorable. Stories from travels, her wedding, and the births of her four children are pleasant enough, yet there’s nothing to make these experiences, or the telling of them, stand out. I wouldn’t make any of the dishes; most you could find a recipe for anywhere. Eleanor Crow’s black-and-white illustrations are lovely, though.

With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands by Annie Worsley

I’d come across Worsley in the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons anthologies. For a decade she has lived on Red River Croft, in a little-known pocket of northwest Scotland. In word pictures as much as in the colour photographs that illustrate this volume, she depicts it as a wild land shaped mostly by natural forces – also, sometimes, manmade. From one September to the next, she documents wildlife spectacles and the influence of weather patterns. Chronic illness sometimes limited her daily walks to the fence at the cliff-top. (But what a view from there!) There is more here about local history and ecology than any but the keenest Scotland-phile may be interested to read. Worsley also touches on her upbringing in polluted Lancashire, and her former academic career and fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Her descriptions are full of colours and alliteration, though perhaps a little wordy: “Pale-gold autumnal days are spliced by fickle and feisty bouts of turbulent weather. … Sunrises and sunsets may pour with cinnabar and henna; dawn and dusk can ripple with crimson and purple.” The kind of writing I could appreciate for the length of an essay but not a whole book.

With thanks to William Collins for the free copy for review.

Would you read one or more of these?

Posted in: Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Annie Worsley, Canongate, Chinese, chronic illness, COVID-19, Eleanor Crow, Faber, farming, gardening, Helen Rebanks, Hong Kong, James Rebanks, Lake District, Lancashire, lesbian, Marchelle Farrell, Mary Jean Chan, memoirs, motherhood, Nan Shepherd Prize, Oxford, Papua New Guinea, photography, poetry, recipes, Scotland, Trinidad, Wainwright Prize, William Collins

#WITMonth, Part II: Wioletta Greg, Dorthe Nors, Almudena Sánchez and More

By Rebecca Foster on August 23, 2023 | 19 Comments

My next four reads for Women in Translation month (after Part I here) were, again, a varied selection: a mixed volume of family history in verse and fragmentary diary entries, a set of nature/travel essays set mostly in Denmark, a memoir of mental illness, and a preview of a forthcoming novel about Mary Shelley’s inspirations for Frankenstein. One final selection will be coming up as part of my Love Your Library roundup on Monday.

(20 Books of Summer, #13)

Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg (2014)

[Translated from the Polish by Marek Kazmierski]

I loved Greg’s Swallowing Mercury so much that I jumped at the chance to read something else of hers in English translation – plus this was less than half price AND a signed copy. I had no sense of the contents and might have reconsidered had I known a few things: the first two-thirds is family wartime history in verse, the rest is a fragmentary diary from eight years in which Greg lived on the Isle of Wight, and the book is a bilingual edition, with Polish and English on facing pages (for the poems) or one after the other (for the diary entries). I’m not sure what this format adds for English-language readers; I can’t know whether Kazmierski has rendered anything successfully. I’ve always thought it must be next to impossible to translate poetry, and it’s certainly hard to assess these as poems. They are fairly interesting snapshots from her family’s history, e.g., her grandfather’s escape from a stalag, and have quite precise vocabulary for the natural world. There’s also been an attempt to create or reproduce alliteration. I liked the poem the title phrase comes from, “A Fairytale about Death,” and “Readers.” The short diary entries, though, felt entirely superfluous. (New purchase – Waterstones bargain, 2023)

(20 Books of Summer, #14)

A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (2021; 2022)

[Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight]

Nors’s first nonfiction work is a surprise entry on this year’s Wainwright Prize nature writing shortlist. I’d be delighted to see this work in translation win, first because it would send a signal that it is not a provincial award, and secondly because her writing is stunning. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Aldo Leopold or Peter Matthiessen, she doesn’t just report what she sees but thinks deeply about what it means and how it connects to memory or identity. I have a soft spot for such philosophizing in nature and travel writing.

You carry the place you come from inside you, but you can never go back to it.

I longed … to live my brief and arbitrary life while I still have it.

This eternal, fertile and dread-laden stream inside us. This fundamental question: do you want to remember or forget?

Nors lives in rural Jutland – where she grew up, before her family home was razed – along the west coast of Denmark, the same coast that reaches down to Germany and the Netherlands. In comparison to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, two other places she’s lived, it’s little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular – Nors is persona non grata for at least a year and a half simply for joking about locals’ exaggerated fear of wolves.

Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes with Signe Parkins (the book’s illustrator), the year’s longest and shortest days … I started reading this months ago and set it aside for a time, so now find it difficult to remember what some of the essays are actually about. They’re more about the atmosphere, really: the remote seaside, sometimes so bleak as to seem like the ends of the earth. (It’s why I like reading about Scottish islands.) A bit more familiarity with the places Nors writes about would have pushed my rating higher, but her prose is excellent throughout. I also marked the metaphors “A local woman is standing there with a hairstyle like a wolverine” and “The sky looks like dirty mop-water.”

With thanks to Pushkin Press for the proof copy for review.

Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez (2021; 2023)

[Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore]

This is a memoir in micro-essays about the author’s experience of mental illness, as she tries to write herself away from suicidal thoughts. She grew up on Mallorca, always feeling like an outsider on an island where she wasn’t a native. Did her depression stem from her childhood, she wonders? She is also a survivor of ovarian cancer, diagnosed when she was 16. As her mind bounces from subject to subject, “trying to analyze a sick brain,” she documents her doctor visits, her medications, her dreams, her retweets, and much more. She takes inspiration from famous fellow depressives such as William Styron and Virginia Woolf. Her household is obsessed with books, she says, and it’s mostly through literature that she understands her life. The writing can be poetic, but few pieces stand out on the whole. My favourite opens: “Living in between anxiety and apathy has driven me to flowerpot decorating.”

With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.

And a bonus preview:

Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout (2021; 2023)

[Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson]

Anne Eekhout’s fourth novel and English-language debut is an evocative recreation of two momentous periods in Mary Shelley’s life that led – directly or indirectly – to the composition of her 1818 masterpiece. Drawing parallels between the creative process and motherhood and presenting a credibly queer slant on history, the book is full of eerie encounters and mysterious phenomena that replicate the Gothic science fiction tone of Frankenstein itself. The story lines are set in the famous “Year without a Summer” of 1816 (the storytelling challenge with Lord Byron) and during a period in 1812 that she spent living in Scotland with the Baxter family; Mary falls in love with the 17-year-old daughter, Isabella.

Coming out on 3 October from HarperVia. My full review for Shelf Awareness is pending.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Aldo Leopold, Almudena Sánchez, Anne Eekhout, bilingualism, cancer memoirs, Caroline Waight, Danish, Denmark, depression, diary, Dorthe Nors, Dutch, family memoirs, Fum d’Estampa Press, Germany, Gothic, HarperVia, historical fiction, Katie Whittemore, Laura Watkinson, literature in translation, Lord Byron, Mallorca, Marek Kazmierski, Mary Shelley, mental illness, nature writing, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Matthiessen, poetry, Pushkin Press, Shelf Awareness, Signe Parkins, Spanish, summer reading, The Netherlands, travel books, Virginia Woolf, Wainwright Prize, William Styron, Wioletta Greg, Women in Translation month

20 Books of Summer, 11–12: Gillian Clarke Poetry and Ross Gay Essays

By Rebecca Foster on August 16, 2023 | 19 Comments

It might not look like I’ll finish the 20 Books of Summer challenge in time, but I’ve got it all planned out and should be reviewing the last few on the final day! My initial foodie idea has turned into a micro-theme that joins only about six of the titles in total. I’ve swapped in various other things along the way, such as a couple of poetry collections and novellas (note to self: always include at least a few very short books!), but the focus has been on getting through stuff from my own shelves, especially recent acquisitions and work by women.

Today I have an excellent poetry collection infused with the language of gardening and geology and reflecting on two crises of the early 2000s, and a book of mini-essays about noticing the small pleasures that make life worth living.

Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (2004)

I look out for black-and-white Carcanet spines whenever I’m scanning the poetry section in a secondhand bookshop. Clarke’s was a new name for me (the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016, she’s now 86) but the blurb attracted me and this ended up being exactly the sort of poetry I love: full of colours and nature imagery, profuse with alliteration and slant rhymes, relishing its specialist terminology, and taking on the serious subject matter of manmade disasters. Several medium-length sequences are devoted to gardening (“The Middleton Poems” and “Nine Green Gardens”) and geology (“The Stone Poems”); some earlier pieces are ekphrastic, or dedicated to particular poets.

Clarke remembers the delight she took as a child in the unfamiliar vocabulary of the Bible, “a narrative of spells / in difficult columns on those moth-thin pages, / words to thrill the heart with a strange music.” The book teems with animals – though, alas, many of them are dead (as in “Adders” and “Taxidermy”). The title sequence, indeed is about the foot and mouth disease outbreak that decimated the UK livestock population in 2001. Farmers were forced to cull their flocks and news footage showed mountains of carcasses burning. She hovers over the catastrophe, imagining herself into the minds of family farmers, gossiping onlookers, and a traumatized vet. Just as one crisis was coming to an end, September 11 came – another unforgettable tragedy, commemorated with “The Fall.” A very affecting collection, all told. I’ll be sure to read more by Clarke. (Secondhand – Bridport Old Books, 2023)

A favourite passage, from “The Yew Tunnel in Winter”:

Listen to sap rise, unstoppable flood,

for all the centuries as the tap-roots grew,

pumping through branches to the stirring bud

from deepest earth. In graveyards they say a yew

sends a root into the mouths of all the dead.

Here, sense all that power snowed in and still,

shut in the dream of winter and history

at the end of a muffled lane

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (2019)

“Perhaps delight is like after the great cosmic finger has pointed at something, and that something … appears.”

Gay is better known as a poet, with several collections to his name, and teaches at Indiana University. This book project started as a challenge to self to write a daily essay about something that was good in his life, quickly and longhand. He started on his 42nd birthday (August 1) and continued for a full year; there are 102 micro-essays here, so he managed one every few days. They are about everything or nothing much, depending on how you look at it: an adored foodstuff or piece of music, a dream, a surprise encounter with a stranger, what was growing in his garden at the time, etc.

One essay is titled “The Jenky,” about the crooked and makeshift. Gay watches the birds enjoying a dead tree in his (deliberately neglected) yard, and notes a sign reading “Caution: Bees on Bridge” and thereby making space for nature. A few of the more memorable incidents involve plane travel. One time he flies with a tomato seedling in his lap and finds that people treat him more kindly. He gets an unexpectedly enthusiastic response from a security guard when he mentions that he’s on his way to read poems and realizes later that, by some quirk of regional American accents, the man thought he’d said “reading palms.”

Although I enjoyed the book more as I went along, something held me back from loving it. There weren’t enough sentiments that I recognized, and the loose, informal style wasn’t always for me. While you get glimpses into his upbringing and travels, I tend to prefer a memoir. It may also be that Gay and I are just different personalities. The delight he takes in other people’s oddities suggests he might be an extrovert; he truly enjoys being spoken to, or even touched (on the shoulder, for instance), by strangers, whereas I don’t particularly. Part of this is about minority group bonding for him: he writes of the “Negreeting” exchanged between Black people passing each other on a street. There were also a few too many mentions of him peeing into bottles or in his car.

So I liked this, but maybe not enough to try more by Gay, though I should probably see what his verse is like. I was glad to have read it, especially when I realized I can only think of about 20 books I’ve read by Black men. Ever. Yikes. (New – Christmas gift, 2022)

Posted in: Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: 9/11, essays, farming, foot and mouth disease, gardening, geology, Gillian Clarke, poetry, Ross Gay, summer reading, taxidermy, Wales

Books of Summer, 6–8: Elizabeth Berg, Patricia Lockwood & Wendy Mitchell

By Rebecca Foster on July 22, 2023 | 7 Comments

Although I have foodie lit as a background theme for the summer’s reading, my main goal is simply to read books that I own, especially recent acquisitions and long-time shelf-sitters (whereas last year, in slavish conformity to a theme, I substituted in a bunch of library books, review books and e-books). My latest batch includes a slightly twee novel, an outlandish poetry collection, and an uneven nonfiction swan song.

The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg (2005)

From the cover, I was expecting this to be more foodie than it was. The protagonist does enjoy cooking for other people and reading cookbooks, though. Betta Nolan, 55 and recently widowed by cancer, drives from Boston to the Midwest and impulsively purchases a house in a Chicago suburb, something she and her late husband had fantasized about doing in retirement. It’s the kind of sweet little town where the only realtor is a one-woman operation and Betta as a newcomer automatically gets invited onto the local radio show. She also reconnects with her college roommates, tries dating, and mulls over her dream of opening a women’s boutique that sells silk scarves, handmade journals, essential oils and brownies.

While Berg is true to the shifting emotions that accompany grief, and gives Betta plenty of cute opportunities to make friends across the generations – with Lydia, the nonagenarian former owner of her house, now in a nursing home; Matthew, the fickle young man who does some odd jobs for her; and Benny, the next-door neighbor’s nine-year-old boy – I found the subplot about Matthew’s messy house and relationships silly, and Betta’s “What a Woman Wants” shop idea is so stereotyping I could feel myself rolling my eyes. Still, Berg’s novels, of which this was my fifth, are always reliably light and pleasant reads in an Anne Tyler vein. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood (2014)

One of the more bizarre books I’ve ever read. I loved both Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This, but had no idea what to expect from Lockwood’s poems. They’re somewhere between absurdist monologues and thought experiments, often choosing an object or abstraction to animate (“A Recent Transformation Tries to Climb the Stairs”) and generally sexualized to the max (“Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It”). Though they’re in stanzas, they aren’t heavy on poetic techniques. Some tangential topics are Bambi, Canada, basketball, waterfalls, King Kong adaptations, American poetry, Shirley Temple, and childhood hobbies like Animorphs, Egyptology and Magic Eye puzzles.

But really, her poetry is only “about” things in the loosest sense; the repetition, wordplay and snark are paramount. If you’ve heard of one, it’s likely to be the lengthy “Rape Joke,” which went as viral as it’s possible for a poem to and is, ironically, probably the sincerest entry here. Presumably based on her own bad experience with a teenage boyfriend, it is heartbreakingly banal: “The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student … The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. … The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say?”

A couple of my favourites were “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” and “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center”; “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics,” in which a resurrected Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman swap genders, had some of the more outrageous lines: “Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after giving birth to American Poetry.” Not really like any other poetry I’ve ever read. (New purchase with Christmas money)

One Last Thing: Conversations on Life, Death and Assisted Dying by Wendy Mitchell with Anna Wharton (2023)

“We talk so often about prolonging life, but we are actually prolonging death by not discussing the suffering part of it.”

Wendy Mitchell’s first two books, Somebody I Used to Know and What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, are valuable peeks into daily life with young-onset Alzheimer’s. She has been a dedicated activist and educator in the nine years since her diagnosis, and I admire the work she’s done to get dementia services into the public eye.

The problem with her final book is that I’ve read so much about preparations for dying and the question of assisted suicide and she doesn’t bring much new to the discussion – apart from the specific viewpoint of someone deciding when and how to end their life when they don’t know what the future course of their illness looks like. Mitchell believes people should have this choice, but current UK law does not allow for assisted dying. A loophole is voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), which she deems her best option. She stopped attending assessments in 2017 and has filed forms with her GP refusing treatment – her nightmare situation is being reliant on care in hospital and she doesn’t want to become that future, dependent Wendy.

Like Henry Marsh’s farewell book, And Finally, this gives the impression of having been written in a hurry and rushed into print, and so could have been edited more. As it is, it’s fairly scattered, repetitive and unpolished. The interviews could all be streamlined and tidied up, and the one with Kathryn Mannix is split up in a confusing way.

For readers new to the topic, however, this could be a useful introduction to the issues. It’s up-to-date in that Mitchell attends a Death Café, meets an end-of-life doula, and talks through the different forms (power of attorney, advance directive and so on) with experts. I also thought the epilogue was a lovely touch: after going for a ‘wing walking’ airplane adventure, she imagines that, having taken a bus into York, she sees her pre-diagnosis self and tells her everything she would want her to know, good and bad, about the challenges to come. (Proof copy from Hungerford Bookshop Summer Reading Celebration) [Different subtitle on finished edition?]

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Alzheimer's, Anna Wharton, Anne Tyler, assisted dying, assisted suicide, death, dementia, Elizabeth Berg, Emily Dickinson, Henry Marsh, Illinois, Indiana, Kathryn Mannix, Patricia Lockwood, poetry, rape, summer reading, Walt Whitman, Wendy Mitchell

The Best Books from the First Half of 2023

By Rebecca Foster on June 30, 2023 | 26 Comments

Yes, it’s that time of year already! It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year list, but for now, these are my 20 highlights. Plus, I sneakily preview another great novel that won’t release until September. (For now I’m highlighting 2023 releases, whereas at the end of the year I divide my best-of lists into current year and backlist. I’ve read 86 current-year releases so far and am working on another 20, so I’m essentially designating a top 20% here.) I give review excerpts and link to the full text from this site or elsewhere. Pictured below are the books I read in print; all the others were e-copies.

Fiction

Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman: In 16 sumptuous historical stories, outsiders and pioneers face disability and prejudice with poise. The flash entries crystallize moments of realization, often about health. Longer pieces shine as their out-of-the-ordinary romances have space to develop. In the novella Casting Grand Titans, a botany professor in 1850s Iowa learns her salary is 6% of a male colleague’s. She strives for intellectual freedom, reporting a new-to-science species of moss, while working towards liberation for runaway slaves.

The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland: Moving at a propulsive pace, Beanland’s powerful second novel rotates through the perspectives of these main characters – two men and two women; two white people and two enslaved Black people – caught up in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 (one of the deadliest events in early U.S. history) and its aftermath. Painstakingly researched and full of historical detail and full-blooded characters, it dramatizes the range of responses to tragedy and how people rebuild their lives.

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.

Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt: (Yes, another historical fire novel, and I reviewed both for Shelf Awareness!) This engrossing debut explores the options for women in the mid-19th century. Metaphorical conflagrations blaze in the background in the days leading up to the great Nantucket fire of 1846: each of three female protagonists (a whaling captain’s wife, a museum curator, and a pregnant Black entrepreneur) holds a burning secret and longs for a more expansive, authentic life. Tense and sultry; for Sue Monk Kidd fans.

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.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Oprah’s 100th book club pick. It’s a family story spanning three decades and focusing on the Padavanos, a working-class Italian American Chicago clan with four daughters. Julia meets melancholy basketball player William Waters while at Northwestern in the late 1970s. There is such warmth and intensity to the telling, and brave reckoning with bereavement, mental illness, prejudice and trauma. I love sister stories in general, and the subtle echoes of Leaves of Grass and Little Women add heft.

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?

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.

A bonus:

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead/Hutchinson Heinemann, 12 September): 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. (Review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness.)

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 droll; 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.

Marry Me a Little by Robert Kirby: Hopping around in time, this graphic memoir tells the story of how the author and his partner John decided to get married in 2013. The blue and red color scheme is effective at evoking a polarized America and the ebb and flow of emotions, with blue for calm, happy scenes and concentrated red for confusion or anger. This is political, for sure, but it’s also personal, and it balances those two aims well by tracing the history of gay marriage in the USA and memorializing his own relationship.

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.”

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.

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.

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 haemorrhoids, 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. (Review forthcoming at 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, nature and travel.

What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?

What 2023 releases should I catch up on right away?

Posted in: Book lists, Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: 2023 releases, alcoholism, Alice Winn, Alzheimer's, Ann Napolitano, bereavement memoirs, breast cancer, Claire Dederer, COVID-19, Curtis Sittenfeld, deafness, essays, fungi, gardening, gay marriage, gay rights, Genanne Walsh, graphic memoirs, grief, gynecology, Havelock Ellis, historical fiction, homosexuality, Ilya Kaminsky, Iowa, Joe Carrick-Varty, John Addington Symonds, Jolene McIlwain, Julie Gerstenblatt, Katie Farris, Lauren Groff, Leah Angstman, Leah Hazard, Lisa Kelly, Matthew Vollmer, Melissa Crowe, memoirs, mental illness, motherhood, Nantucket, nature writing, Oscar Wilde, Parkinson’s, poetry, poverty, Rachel Beanland, Rebecca Makkai, Richmond, Robert Kirby, romance, Sally Huband, Shelf Awareness, Shetland, short stories, sisters, suicide, The Rumpus, Tom Crewe, true crime, Victoria Bennett, women's health, women's memoirs, World War I

June Releases by K Patrick, Brandon Taylor and More

By Rebecca Foster on June 28, 2023 | 16 Comments

These two sensual, campus-set queer novels were perfect additional reading for Pride Month. As a bonus, I read a recently reissued postcolonial poetry collection.

Mrs S by K Patrick

Like Tom Crewe’s The New Life, this was one of the Guardian’s 2023 debuts to look out for, and both are seriously sexy. Patrick’s unnamed narrator is an early-twenties Australian, shunned by her family, who has come to England to be a matron at a girls’ boarding school. No other characters are named, either, with The Girls discussed in aggregate and the whole institution – a tradition-bound place that issues a classical education – in thrall to the memory of “the dead author,” an Emily Brontë-like figure whose genius is both inspiration and burden.

The narrator is butch and wears a binder, and in fact, we soon learn, is not the only lesbian on staff. She and the Housemistress become drinking buddies, even venturing into the nearest large town to frequent a gay bar. But there’s also Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, perhaps 20 years her senior, whose attention initially seems maternal – as they tend the rose garden, lead an art lesson together and fill in for a play performance – but gradually becomes more erotic when they go wild swimming and meet in the kitchen during a dinner party.

A heat wave gives the novel a sultry atmosphere as hints give way to explicit scenes. The Girls’ little dramas (one punches a boy and breaks his nose at a campus party; one group gets drunk while another gets high on mushrooms) pale in comparison to the steamy secrets. Summer romances can never last, but their intensity is legendary, and this feels like an instant standard of the type. Given the pre-Internet clues, it likely dates to the 1990s, and Mrs S and the narrator are on different pages about gender roles; had it been today, the narrator would surely have been frankly nonbinary like Patrick.

Her heterosexuality, public-facing. Its cosy violence. Who does she want to be? If I ask her that, she might fall apart. If I ask her that, I must be willing to live through the answer. … She is trying to be two people, I am not. Maybe I was. Not anymore.

The author takes the no-speech-marks thing to another level, the dialogue all in paragraph form with no new lines for each speaker. That and the under-punctuation are deliberate choices that make this somehow hyper-contemporary and a throwback to the Bloomsbury modernists all at once – what with the metaphors of propagating roses and garden fecundity, I couldn’t help but think of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Mrs S isn’t your average coming-of-age story, seduction narrative, or cougar stereotype. It’s a new queer classic.

With thanks to Europa Editions for the free copy for review. Released in the UK by Fourth Estate.

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

I was a huge fan of Taylor’s debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted Real Life, and also admired his follow-up linked story collection, Filthy Animals. This third book falls somewhere between the two in style. Although it’s been marketed as a novel, the nine close third person chapters are so discrete as to be more like short stories, all orbiting a group of students at the University of Iowa: many BIPOC, most gay; lots of them current or former ballet dancers.

Seamus is the subject of the opening title story and “Gorgon’s Head,” so he felt to me like the core of the novel and I would happily have had him as the protagonist throughout. He’s a spiky would-be poet who ends up offending his classmates with his snobby opinions (“her poems were, in the words of a fictional Robert Lowell in an Elizabeth Bishop biopic, ‘observations broken into lines’ … she lacked a poetic intelligence”) and funds his studies by working in the kitchen at a hospice, where he meets a rough local named Bert and they have a sexual encounter that shades into cruelty.

Other characters include on-again, off-again homosexual couples Fyodor and Timo, and Ivan and Goran. Their fundamental differences account for why they so often spar: Fyodor works in a meat-packing plant, while Timo is vegetarian; Goran lives off family wealth, whereas Ivan has to get by on his own, and starts making amateur pornography for money. Noah, too, has the misfortune to get involved with Bert; most of the men, in fact, sleep with one or more of the other men. It’s hard to believe in the durability of this incestuous group. They’re all facing transitions as their studies come to an end, looking for jobs or internships, sometimes switching fields and deciding whether to leave relationships behind. Two late chapters from the perspectives of women, Noah’s neighbour Bea and dancer Fatima, who experiences sexualized shaming, were refreshing. Overall, I’m torn: Taylor’s writing can be stunning:

Iowa was a kind of cultural winter—they had all come to this speck of a city in the middle of a middle state in order to study art, to hone themselves and their ideas like perfect, terrifying weapons, and in the monastic kind of deprivation they found here, they turned to one another. Every dying species sought its own kind of comfort.

They were all posturing all the time. Everything they did was a posture, defensive or offensive, meant to demonstrate something to the outside world, perhaps that they were worthy or good or all right, perhaps to imply that they were in on the joke, that they were nothing and all they had were these crude choreographies of the self.

But it can also be laughable:

There was a resinous, burning taste in Noah’s mouth, and he wondered if it was from the semen or the cigarette or the pepper on the trout at dinner.

And even when it’s sublime, it feels a bit wasted on repetitive stories of meaningless hook-ups, assault, and resentment. This ended up being something of a disappointment from my Most Anticipated list. After three books about angsty homosexuals at midwestern universities, the author is in real danger of being perceived as a one-trick pony. I hope he’ll stretch himself and try something different with his next book.

With thanks to Jonathan Cape for the proof copy for review. Released in the USA by Riverhead.

And a bonus:

The Fat Black Woman’s Poems by Grace Nichols (1984)

I discovered Grace Nichols a few years ago when I reviewed Passport to Here and There for Wasafiri. One of “Five Gold Reads” to mark Virago’s 50th anniversary, this was the Guyanese-British poet’s second collection (the reissue also includes a few poems from her first book, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman).

The title character is a woman of pleasures, jovial and sensual, but not without cliches (“Come up and see me sometime // My breasts are huge exciting / amnions of watermelon”). I preferred the later sections of the book about childhood memories and the expat’s dilemma: what you miss haunts you, even if what you gained in leaving was objectively better.

In London

every now and then

I get this craving

for my mother’s food

I leave art galleries

in search of plantains

These islands

not picture postcards

for unravelling tourist

you know

…

Poverty is the price we pay for the sun

The patois reminded me of work I’ve read by Bernardine Evaristo and Jackie Kay, and I might recommend the collection as a whole to readers of Fire Rush or Cane, Corn & Gully. But it didn’t spark much for me compared with Nichols’ more recent poetry.

With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Bernardine Evaristo, Brandon Taylor, campus novels, Emily Brontë, Europa Editions, Fourth Estate, Grace Nichols, homosexuality, Iowa, Jackie Kay, Jacqueline Crooks, Jonathan Cape, K Patrick, lesbian, linked short stories, nonbinary, poetry, postcolonial, Pride Month, queer, Riverhead, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Tom Crewe, Virago, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West

Recent Writing for BookBrowse, Foreword, Shelf Awareness, Shiny New Books, and the TLS

By Rebecca Foster on June 7, 2023 | 20 Comments

I’ve compiled excerpts from some reviews I’ve contributed to other websites and publications this year. I link to the full text where available. (When writing a paid review, I seek to be balanced but positive. Ratings reflect my personal response.)

BookBrowse

The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel: In Ausubel’s offbeat third novel, a widowed scientist and her two daughters embark on a rogue plan to make history by resurrecting the woolly mammoth. There is a quirky combination of cosmic and domestic concerns here. A winsome sister duo is at the heart of the unusual and timely story, with priority given to the points of view of teenagers Eve and Vera, whose banter is a highlight. Ausubel has wisely chosen not to dwell on the scientific details of de-extinction, yet that means that this becomes more like speculative fiction or a fairy tale. Ironically, the fabulist-leaning novel is best when most realist, documenting struggles with bereavement, sexism and parenting teens.

The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore: Moore’s hard-hitting novella is based in part on the memoir Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity. In Moore’s version, Sarah, 25, leaves her baby behind when she flees an abusive husband, and once in Minnesota Territory marries John Brinton, who becomes a doctor on a Sioux reservation. By 1862, Sarah is friendly with the Native women. Although the Civil War is unfolding, the greater threat here is of revolt by the starving Indigenous residents. There is much of anthropological and historical interest, but Sarah’s flat storytelling, which may represent a pastiche of period style, means threatening or climactic scenes lose some of their potential gravity.

Foreword

My Mother Says by Stine Pilgaard (trans. from the Danish by Hunter Simpson): After breaking up with her zookeeper girlfriend over their age gap and their conflicting takes on motherhood, the heroine moves back in with her father, a pastor who’s obsessed with Pink Floyd, and her stepmother. Her mother visits often, nagging her to finish her thesis. The line between her conversations and internal thoughts is thin. From her mansplaining doctor, she learns that the brain’s hippocampus is named for its seahorse shape. This inspires “Monologues of a Seahorse,” interludes of stream-of-consciousness association. Experimental and whimsical, this delivers deadpan narration of everyday woes.

In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata (trans. from the Spanish by Robin Myers): A Mexican poet probes the enduring mysteries of pregnancy and birth in a memoir in fragments that travels from fertility treatment through to the early weeks of pandemic-time motherhood. The clinical language of a gynecological history—late menstruation, polycystic ovary syndrome, eighteen years on the pill, and infertility—and the embryo transfer process contrasts with Zapata’s mystical thinking. The microessays integrate family stories, history, and artistic explorations. This resolute account of a personal metamorphosis alchemizes tender experiences into enchanting vignettes.