Douglas Kearney, _Sho_

 I READ THIS just prior to reading Optic Subwoof, thinking it would help me to read Kearney's recent poetry before reading (and reviewing) his lectures on poetics. Help me it certainly did--in fact, I think I ended up reading Optic Subwoof through the lens of Sho.

The poem "Sho" acts as a kind of intersection for several of the collection's energies. It is a torchon--a form I had not previously heard of, but which seems to involve a cycling-through of end words, like a sestina, but in a more particular pattern, derived from lacemaking (Kearney credits Indigo Weller with creating the form). Kearney is ingenious with form--that's one energy. At the same time, "sho" is how the BAVE pronunciation of "sure" is often orthographically rendered; the poem quotes an example, "'Sho / gwine fix dis mess.'" "Sho" also homonymically summons "show," as in the business of performance, with its high forms like tragedy and its popular forms like the old chitlin circuit.

            Rig
full o' Deus. "Sho
gwine fix dis mess." Spit

In tragedy's good
eye! "This one's called...."Jig
ger gogglers then bow

housefully. They clap.
"...be misundeeeerstoooood!"
Hang notes high or deep,

make my tongue a bow--
what's the gift?! My good
song vox?

We are at the intersection of Blackness and performance,  but also at the intersection of American Blackness and violence: "Bloody / inkpot of Body, // I stay nib dipped, show / never run dry!" Reading the poem and then hearing/seeing him read it on YouTube is a good preparation for diving into Optic Subwoof.

Not every poem in Sho is the rapid fire tour de force that "Sho" is, but the whole volume continually surprises. It's often funny ("Eulogy for a Pair of Kicks"), but the humor can sit right next to anger ("Promissory Note"), or right next to family feeling ("Close"), or right next to spirituality ("Fire"). Kearney moves fast. It takes some readerly quickness to keep up with him, but he's worth it.

 

Douglas Kearney, _Optic Subwoof_

I REVIEWED THIS for a more legit blog a while ago, but I have a few further notes.

1. The Bagley Wright Lecture series seems to get some real heavy hitters. Ange Mlinko. Fred Moten. Srikanth Reddy. Timothy Donnelly. Rachel Zucker. Tyehimba Jess. Don Mee Choi. Do you have to be a Wave Books author to get an invitation? Maybe. But Wave Books has a great list.

2. The editors of the blog for which I reviewed the book did not want me to go into the topic of minstrelsy, and I see their point, but it's at least interesting that the topic comes up not only here but in the work of Tyehimba Jess and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. A lot of Kearney's book is about the aesthetics and protocols of the contemporary American poetry reading--a richly idiosyncratic species of performance. Since Kearney is Black, and since a great many poetry readings in the U.S. have close-to-all-white audiences, the topic of performing Blackness, of Blackness as spectacle, hence minstrelsy, is bound to come up, and Kearney has some chillingly insightful things to say about it. My editors were right that I am not well-positioned to address Kearney's analysis of the the topic, but I hope someone who is well-positioned does so.

3. I think it would be a great thing for Wave to publish everybody who participates in the series. A few have been published, but I would certainly like to get a look at the Mlinko, Reddy, and Donnelly lectures, and I would rather have the books than video clips. 

Stephen Marche, _The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future_

 STEPHEN MARCHE WROTE one of the most ingenious novels I have read in recent years, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (see post of July 2, 2008), a novel in the form of an anthology of the literature of an imaginary country. It was a normal-length book, but provided some of the satisfactions of an old-school multi-generation historical novel, without the months of immersion (the months of immersion can be pleasurable in their own way, I realize).

The Next Civil War is also a knuckleball, not-exactly-a-novel kind of novel. It has settings, episodes, and characters from what could have been a set-in-the-near-future fiction about the red state vs. blue state divide turning into armed conflict and secession. Integrated with the novelistic elements, though, are more journalistic sections summarizing the research Marche (a Canadian) did into the United States' growing self-division.

Given the preponderance of what-might-soon-happen novels to be about climate change or (in my youth) nuclear destruction, it was refreshing to read a book based on an entirely different variety of anxiety. The journalistic sections were skillfully presented: informative and well-focused.

How one finally feels about a what-might-soon-happen novel, though, depends not on its execution but on how credible one feels the prediction is. This prediction...I think not. The United States will certainly not break up into the four countries Marche presents in a map on p. 219, at least. The terrible events he imagines--the standoffs, assassinations, breakdowns of order--well, maybe. But our polity has great reserves of resilience, too. 

Things feel slightly more stable after the 2022 elections. The fever has not passed, I know, and it could be goaded back into a rage again. And I know there is always going to be a part of the population ready to kill to achieve a White Christian U.S.A. But I think the greater part of the country is more sane than that.

Jamil Jan Kochai, _The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories_

 I KEPT THINKING of Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties as I read this, for all sorts of admittedly superficial reasons. As in So's book, the narrative voice of most of these stories is echt Young American Male in vocabulary, sensibility, and preoccupations, but, again as with So's book, these young American males have parents whose lives were burned and bent by historical traumas that turned them into refugees in a country they do not much understand and never much wanted to be. The circumstances of So's Cambodian refugees in California do differ from those of Kochai's Afghani in California, certainly--they differ religiously, for one thing, and in the amount contact they have with family back in the old country, and in the role U.S. policy played in what happened back home. Nonetheless, it's easy to imagine any algorithm leading you to the one book soon leading you to the other.

One difference: Kochai sometimes veers towards magical realism. The basic frame for each story is realistic, but events occur that border on the supernatural from a post-Enlightenment perspective, although within the realm of the possible from a more traditional perspective. These events usually have to do with the dead. There's a bit of a spiritual tingle.

Another: Kochai likes to play with form a bit more than So did. For instance, we have a story here that adopts the format of video game instructions, another that is a take on the form of the job résumé. Surprisingly enough, even though the form of both stories is somewhat experimental, they were the most revealing and the most moving of the book. 

Kochai did not get the National Book Award, I see, but I hope just being nominated wins the book some of the attention it deserves. 

Fred D'Aguiar, _Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020_

FIVE YEARS AGO, just about to the day, I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. I had surgery the following April, and it was successful--no sign of recurrence so far, knock wood. 

In 2017-18 there was plenty to read about prostate cancer, but it was of the practical variety, How to Survive Prostate Cancer, and so on. Useful, obviously, but as a reading kind of person I was hoping for something like Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals or Anne Boyer's The Undying--i.e., something about the experience of having it written by a person who could really write.

I wanted this book, basically, and now here it is. 

D'Aguiar is a novelist and poet, "born in London to Guyanese parents," as it says in the jacket copy. He grew mainly with his grandparents in Guyana, came back to England a a young man, and has been resident in the USA for quite a while; he teaches creative writing at UCLA. I haven't read any of his books before this one, although I have seen occasional pieces by him in Conjunctions. 

It's not a practical guide sort of book--it does not explain what your Gleason score means, for instance, or how laparoscopic surgery is performed, or how to obtain an erection with a vacuum pump, or anything of that sort. 

It's excellent, though, on all the topics that the practical guides ignore. What is it like to have a potentially mortal illness that has no symptoms--to have a hostile familiar dwelling inside you that you know about only because a doctor has told you that you have it? What is it like having the operation that will deal this hostile familiar, an operation that will utterly change the circumstances of your life, but during which you will  be perfectly unconscious, after which you will  have no memories? How do you manage the three months before they check your PSA again, the three months during which you will not know whether the operation made a difference for not? 

D'Aguiar had the added fillip of going through all this during the COVID lockdown months. I did not have  to deal with that, praise the Lord. But reading this book was like reliving one of my life's strangest episodes. I never thought of myself as a "cancer survivor," but I did have cancer, and I am still here, so I guess I am one, and this book was what I needed to get me to shake hands with that identity.

Sasha Steensen, _Gatherest_

 FROM 2017--NOT her most recent (that would be Everything Awake, 2020), but the first of her books I have read, and I was impressed. Three long poems or sequences, with two based on elements ("Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made") on either end of "I Couldn't Stop Watching," a montage of short essays and heterogeneous documents.

"Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made" are about water and fire, respectively, but also seem to be about faith and spirituality, and about writing, and about family--Steensen's daughters are a presence in "Waters," her parents in "Aflame" (the fire that destroyed their home is the poem's occasion). 

"Waters" is subtitled "A Lenten Sequence." It was composed, one poem a day, during Lent of 2012. The subject matter is sometimes religious--

taking up

what no one

else wants

to carry

this is its own 

kind of worship

faith 

is the substance

of faith

the difference

between air

& water

--but by no means exclusively, as the poem also takes up events of the moment like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Adrienne Rich. The quoted poem (# 11 of the sequence) is reasonably typical of "Waters": pared down, well-balanced between the concrete and the abstract, seemingly surrounded by a deep quiet.

"Aflame, It Itself Made" was my favorite--an odd thing to say, it occurs to me, since a lot of the poem is terrifying. It carries an epigraph from Eliot's "Little Gidding"--"redeemed from fire by fire"--but it reminded me more of another poem written during the London Blitz, H.D.'s Trilogy. And sure enough, what should Steensen mention on p. 110 but "H.D.'s burnt tree," with its prophecy that fire not only destroys, but renews.

"I Couldn't Stop Watching" works as a link by not trying to be a link. Is it somehow Earth and Air, with its ruminations on syntax and prosody and its tributes to predecessors both famous (Catullus and Dante) and all but forgotten (Jones Very)? Or the workshop out of which the other two poems came? Not sure I could quite make the case for any such argument, but the piece does seem to belong where it is, a bricolage tugboat bobbing along between the two visionary flights, somehow responsible for getting them out in the wider spaces that is their proper haunt, well out, beyond.

Kevin Wilson, _Nothing to See Here_

 AFTER THIS AND The Family Fang, I'm ready to admit Kevin Wilson to the club of Novelists-Whose-Next-Novel-I-Will-Always-Plan-to-Read. 

Now, it's true that a novelist's being in that club does not mean I will get around to it right away. I still haven't read that Jennifer Egan novel about the scuba diver although...you know...I plan to. But Wilson now has a track record with me, having written two novels that were smart, funny, moving, and deft at such novelistic tricks as establishing point of view, switching among time frames, and nailing the narrator's voice.

Narrator Lilian's life is at loose ends when she is contacted by old friend Madison, who makes an attractive offer to look after her step kids. Then Wilson fills in some background. Lilian's family was hard up, Madison's wealthy. They were friends in college, both stars on the women's basketball team, but when Madison's illegal drug stash was discovered in their dorm room, Madison's rich dad paid off Lilian's hard-up mom so that Lilian would take the fall. (The payoff is to enable Lilian to continue her education elsewhere, but Lilian's mom ends up spending most of it on herself.) Madison has stayed in touch, sort of, but she is now married to an intensely ambitious politician, so there has been drift. Until now.

Oh, and the step kids? They spontaneously catch fire. Hence the offer.

Amazing premise, no? The development does not disappoint, with witty and insightful dramatization of the challenges of raising children, of navigating class differences, and of the hypocrisy acrobatics of politicians, who have to appear to be normal-family-types while pursuing a career that requires their utter absorption 25 hours a day. (Wilson renders Jasper, Madison's husband, as a character one loves to loathe.) The denouement is utterly satisfying in a Horton Hatches the Egg sort of way. 

And a new Wilson is just out, it appears. I'm on it.