Mosab Abu Toha, _Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear_

 I PICKED THIS up in the Barbara’s Bookstore outpost at O’Hare Airport. My flight had been cancelled the night before, my rebooked flight was going to be delayed four hours, and I had finished reading everything I had brought along, so I was feeling sorry for myself as I browsed for more reading material. 

I might have passed this book up had I not recently read a poem by Toha in the most recent (and final, apparently) Best American Poetry, but since I was impressed by that poem (“Two Watches”), I thought, well, this is probably a good bet. As it happened, I finished it before my flight took off.

It’s not only a fine collection, but also a quick cure for any self-pity, or at least the self-pity of someone whose worst problem is a cancelled flight. Most of Toha’s poems are about living in Gaza, as his family has since 1948, and the problems of living in Gaza after having been dispossessed of one’s home and forced into exile make even the worst of my problems seem hardly even to deserve the designation “problem.”

And the book was published in 2022–that is, well before the horrors of the last two years.

The book includes an interview with Toha. The interviewer does not ask him why he writes poetry in English rather than Arabic, but we do learn he began studying English at an early age and was much influenced by such classics as Marlowe, Shelley, “Kublai Khan,” and The Waste Land. I wonder if he writes poetry in Arabic as well; bi-lingual poets are rare but not unheard of (e.g., Amelia Rosselli).

The book obviously qualifies as “poetry of witness,” but is also better-than-usual poetry. Toha uses anaphora effectively (see “Home,” “To Ibrahim Kilani,” and “To My Visa Interviewer”), and the longer poems—“Palestine A-Z” and “The Wounds”—are extraordinarily well sustained. 

Richard Ayoade, _The Unfinished Harauld Hughes_

 I AM GOBSMACKED, to use a British phrase, that the typically staid New York Review of Books let Richard Ayoade write a first-person appreciation (as the fictional "Chloë Clifton-Wright") of the  British playwright and screenwriter Harauld Hughes (also fictional). I imagine this is the NYRB's indirect way of endorsing Ayoade's The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a novel that masquerades as a journal about the making of a documentary film about Hughes. "Clifton-Wright" dismisses The Unfinished Harauld Hughes in a curt footnote.

Not only has the august NYRB been persuaded to participate in Ayoade's guerrilla campaign of creating an aura of reality around his fictional playwright and screenwriter, but the just as august Faber and Faber publishing house has been so persuaded as well, for they agreed to place ads for Harauld Hughes's (fictional) books on the back cover and back pages of Ayoade's novel.

The novel does not quite match the ingenuity of the guerrilla campaign, in my opinion, but is nonetheless hilarious and entertaining in a Waugh-ian vein. Ayoade, as the planned documentary's presenter, drags the filmmaking crew from one interviewee to another, each more prickly and uncooperative than the last. The El Dorado of the documentary is to figure out what Hughes's final, unfilmed screenplay, O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, was about, but just as Ayoade is winning near the goal...well, no spoilers.

Ayoade seems to be a well-known and popular television presence in the UK, which means we might start seeing more of him here. I hope it works out better than it did with Russell Brand. Judging from novel, it is bound to do so.

Paul Tran, _All the Flowers Kneeling_

THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION on the back cover calls All the Flowers Standing "a profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse," and as publishers' descriptions go, that one is uncannily on the money.

Tran juxtaposes his mother's experience as refugee from Vietnam with the sexual assault he himself lived through when what seems to have been a relatively ordinary sexual encounter took a terrible turn (or so I am interpreting--it seemed comparable to the story told by Édouard Louis in Une histoire de la violence.)

This intersection of personal trauma and historical trauma, it occurred to me,  appears elsewhere in Vietnamese-American literature. Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Diana Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer all deal in intimate trauma multiplied by the devastations of colonialism. 

Hardly surprising, given Vietnam's history and the USA's role in that history, but it got me thinking. Other instances of personal trauma intersecting with historical trauma come quickly to mind.

Given that Japan was for many years a colonizing presence in Korea, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko might serve as an additional example, or Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony.

Tommy Orange's novels could serve as examples, too, even though the colonizing mainly occurred generations ago; Wandering Stars in particular suggests a kind of subterranean connection between the violent empire-building of a hundred and fifty years ago and psychological instability in the present. Then think of the relatively recent books reflecting the long-term reverberations in the present of enslavement in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming and Roger Reeves's Best Barbarian could start a long, long list.

That's what we see if we zoom out. If we zoom in, we see that Tran is an extraordinarily deft and fluent poet. The publisher's copy gestures in this direction ("innovative poetic forms") but definitely seems more interested in the psychological or therapeutic ("rediscovering and reconfiguring  the self").

But consider the sequence at the collection's center, "I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us." Each of the sequence's thirteen sections has thirteen lines (a truncated sonnet that Tran dubs a "Hydra"), the thirteenth line always having thirteen words. Then too, "The first word of the last line in section X becomes the first word of the first line in section Y," as Tran explains in the notes at the end of the book, and there are additional constraints as well. 

That Tran imposed upon himself a fiendishly byzantine set of rules and further indulged himself in any amount of verbal jonglerie (e.g., "Seeded? Yes, Like a plot. Ceded? Absolutely not") yet still produced a confession/accusation/self-examination so fearful and fierce, so near the bone even as it aims for transcendence...well. It's quite a poem. Tran seems to be both a writer of his cultural-historical moment and a very distinctive poet of Merrill-like versatility.

Terence Winch and David Lehman, eds., _Best American Poetry 2025_

 IT SEEMS SO strange that this is the last one, but if what I read on the internet is true, it is. 

I can understand David Lehman being ready to be done with it, but wouldn't someone else (Kevin Young?) be willing to take it on? I'm using it sells at least reasonably well, since every year it shows up in  bookstores that do not carry much other poetry. I mean...what gives?

I did not recognize Terence Winch's name when I saw it on the cover, which was a little surprising--the  guest editors tend to be a relatively famous poets. It turned out, though, that I must have seen his name at least a few times, since he has had poems in BAP several times and has been very involved in the BAP Blog. 

His selections tend to the mainstream, I suppose we could say--mainly in conversational language, mainly about readily recognizable experiences and observations, mainly the sort of thing that turns up abundantly in the reviews (Kenyon/Southern/Georgia/Massachusetts/Threepenny et alia),  mainly by people with established careers.

It would have been nice to go out with a bang, I think, stir in a few things from Zyzzva or Oversound or Conjunctions, but, well, no. It's an enjoyable read, but more of a plunk than a bang.

At least Heather Christle is in it.

David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (2 of 2)

 THE "SELECTED" SECTION of this generous (almost 500 pages) "new and selected" collection has its own title, "Dear Prudence," and the poems are arranged in chronological order, each with the year of composition noted--a very satisfactory way to proceed, I thought. 

Trinidad's books started appearing in the 1980s, when he was in his later twenties and earlier thirties. I don't remember exactly what new poets I was reading at the time, but I wish I had been reading Trinidad instead. "The New Formalism" was getting attention at the time, and I must have read some of that, but none of it has stuck with me; Trinidad's "Playing with Dolls," however, a sestina about being a boy playing with Barbies, would definitely have made me a fan for life. 

I could say the same for "Fluff," with its syllabic verse about a short-lived addition to the Barbie line, or "Monster Mash," a catalog of movie monsters in a Shakespearean sonnet, or "Chatty Cathy Villanelle," or the quatrains of "Evening Twilight," or the terza rima of "Garbo's Trolls," or the list of early 1960s top 40 hits in "In My Room," or "Every Night, Byron!", a long poem from the point of view of Trinidad's dog, its title a nod to Jacqueline Susann. 

And I may as well mention Trinidad's extended pantoum about the Bette Davis film "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" and its epigones (which Trinidad titles "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been," which was the title of Mad magazine's parody of "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"--I remember it well). 

Trinidad has a near-Wildean genius for treating trivial things seriously and serious things with a sincere and studied triviality. If that doesn't sound like your sort of thing, well, there's always Robinson Jeffers.

The high point for me was "A Poem Under the Influence," about fifty pages long and under the influence, I am going to guess, of James Schuyler. Schuyler was one of the American poets who figured out how to be modern without being a Modernist, and the whole of contemporary American poetry is in his debt. Trinidad's is a fitting tribute.

Nicolás Medina Mora, _América del Norte_

 IF A NOVELIST invents a new name for the character whose circumstances map closely onto his own, does that make the resulting book an "autobiographical novel" rather than "autofiction"? I don't have a literary taxonomist handy to answer the question, so I will just note that the narrator of América del Norte, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, shares with his creator (a) Mexican citizenship, (b) an undergraduate degree from Yale, (c) a stint as a long-form journalist in New York City, and (d) study in the nonfiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I don't know whether Medina Mora, like his protagonist, grew up in the none-more-elite Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, nor whether his family is as wealthy and powerful as Sebastián's, nor whether his ancestors are Spanish with virtually no admixture of indigenous DNA, but I suspect all that is likely the case as well.

Sebastián/Nicolás's own term for people of his class--"Austro-Hungarians"--is a complex joke based on that class's vanity about their being descended exclusively from Spanish colonizers. The Hapsburgs were the longtime royal family of Spain who happened also to be the royal line of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so Mexicans without any indigenous ancestors are...Austro-Hungarian.

The configuration of Sebastián's identity is a crucial ingredient of the novel. It is set during the first couple of years of the first Trump administration, and Sebastián is sometimes in Iowa City, sometimes in Mexico City visiting family, sometimes in New York City hanging out in his old stomping grounds. 

In Mexico, he is the son of a Supreme Court justice, beneficiary of family wealth and of an elite education abroad, someone who gets (and needs!) a bodyguard. In the United States, though, he is a Mexican, object not just of longstanding xenophobic hostility but now also of state policy, a target for ICE.

Medina Mora stirs into the novel some historical vignettes of Mexican-U.S. relations and of creole-indigenous relations, so we meet the cadets of Chapultepec, Sor Juana, Alfonso Reyes, Jose Vasconcelos, and a good many writers and thinkers as well as many characters that (I am guessing) would be quickly recognized had you been hanging out at the Fox Head Tavern circa 2017.

The question hovering before Sebastián is whether to make his career in the United States or Mexico. He is fluent in both Spanish and English, so he could work in either country. In the U.S., he would have to deal with Trump and Trumpery. In Mexico, he would have to deal with the ascendancy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, who seeks to once and for all undermine the long-standing power of the class to which Sebastián's family belongs. To complicate things, Sebastián's mother is dying, and his girlfriend is Anglo. 

We don't find out, exactly, which way he is going to go. In the final scene, he is in an airport, watching planes depart. Most of the book is written in English, but the chapter titles and a fair bit of dialogue is in Spanish. As if that weren't ambivalence enough, consider this: the book's final sentence is in what looks to me like Coptic. 

América del Norte is a big, cranky, ambitious, witty, brilliant, brimful of attitude novel. And a great read.

Min Jin Lee, _Pachinko_

"SWEEPING MULTIGENERATIONAL SAGA" is the phrase that recurs in the reviews excerpted on the paperback edition's cover and opening pages, and it is true enough. The phrase got me wondering: do novelists still go in for multigenerational sagas? There were more around, I think, a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty years ago or so--Mann's Buddenbrooks, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude would count, certainly, but I am having a hard time thinking of more contemporary examples. 

The main family in Pachinko is the Baeks, represented in Part One (of three) by two Korean brothers, both Christian converts. (The family name is a fairly common one in Korea, "also often spelled Paek, Baik, Paik, or Back," according to Wikipedia). The main action begins, however, with Sunja, daughter of a couple that keeps a boarding house in Busan (also spelled "Pusan"), who is seduced and impregnated by a Korean businessman, Hansu, visiting from his main base of operations, Osaka, in Japan. The businessman is married with children and won't leave his wife for Sunja, but the younger Baek brother, Isak, selflessly does offer to marry her. Together they move to Osaka, where Isak's older brother Yoseb lives with his wife, Kyunghee.

And so it goes. Isak and Sunja have two boys (including the one fathered by Hansu), who grow up, have children of their own, and so on, and as chapter follows chapter we soon have a multi-generational saga. A key thread to this saga is the difficulties of being Korean in Japan, which turns out to be not much easier for the second and third generations than it was for the first, owing to what seems like a deeply-entrenched Japanese prejudice against gaijin, foreigners, even when the "foreigners" were born in Japan, are native speakers of Japanese, and have no intention of living anywhere else.

The family establishes itself and becomes prosperous thanks to pachinko parlors. This game is never explained in the novel, but apparently it is rather like pinball, but with slot-machine-style payouts (the house always wins in the long run, of course). Pachinko is legal but a little disreputable, since (as with legal gambling in the USA) organized crime (the yakuza) has a history of getting involved. The Baeks stick with it, however.

Pachinko turns out to be a thematic thread of its own, since playing a game that always ends up favoring the house is a bit like being Korean in Japan: that is, the odds are always a bit against you, and disappointments will be frequent. We do want the Baeks to pull through, though, and by and large they do, difficult though it has been. The novel's final scene, in which Sunja, now a grandmother, visits her husband Isak's grave, is very affecting.