illustration by Ester Eriksson
I arrogantly recommend…by Tom Bowden is a monthly column of small press and books-in-translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’
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I arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden.
A New Orthography
Serhiy Zhada (John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, trans.)
Lost Horse Press
What do we mean when we say joy?
What are we comparing it to?
Doomed by our midnight resolutions,
resolved against the evil of this world,
we know the names of trees,
know the names of birds,
but we don’t know what to call this mood
when a wire thread stitches
through your breath
because you see the thin
and shadowed line of someone’s shoulder
in the morning light.
—From “A New Orthography”
Russia’s war against Ukraine has been going on since 2014, when Russia took over Crimea, then Donbas, both Ukraine territories. Many of the poems in this collection, A New Orthography (which presents excerpts from three of Zhadan’s poetry books), address the human devastation and resilience of these battles. It also includes an introduction by Zhadan written for this edition.
Born in 1974, in Ukraine Serhiy Zhada came of age as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared its independence from the Union. This means he has lived through Russia’s—specifically Putin’s—ongoing hostilities against his home country. What I’ve noticed among the vast majority of contemporary European poets compared to their U.S. counterparts is that European poets earnestly want to be heard, understood, and argued with, while many poets in the U.S. bemoan “unknowability” and “inability to communicate” coached in terms requiring a secret decoder ring to parse out the usually trite message: life is hard, and I feel sad and lonely.
The imminence of death seems to both concentrate the mind and focus it on moral imperatives. Zhadan the poet wonders, “How can poetry matter during a time of war?”
Poets come to die
in empty libraries.
Libraries don’t become
popular this way.
Seemingly dismissive of poets, of his vocation, Zhada notes that
Poets with precise rhymes
can’t be mistaken.
They always offer solutions.
They always comfort you when you’re down.
One of the first missiles
fell right on the library.
Books flew across the street
like torn pillows
and letters hung in the June air
like the dust of burnt synagogues.
Poetry didn’t help much.
The poets kept quiet.
No one chose the precise rhyme
for the name of the blown-up school girl
who ran there in the morning
to return the books she’d read.
During times of war, even God seems irrelevant:
He recalled the city he’d escaped from,
the scorched terrain he searched by hand.
He recalled a weeping man
saved by the squad.
Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
He should have returned a while ago.
What could happen to him, exactly?
What could happen?
The patrol will let him through,
and god will forgive.
God’s got other things to do.
Anybody with a friend or family member working out PTSD after serving in war will no doubt empathize with the following lines from “We’ve Been Talking about War for Three Years”:
A friend of mine volunteered.
He came back six months later.
Who knows where he was.
He won’t say what he’s afraid of.
But he’s afraid of something.
Sometimes it seems
he’s afraid of everything.
He left a normal person.
But he talked too much.
About everything in this world.
About everything he came across.
And he came back
completely changed, as if
someone took his old tongue
and didn’t leave him a new one.
So he sits in his bed every day
and listens to the demons in his head.
Yet, talking about the war “doesn’t have any effect on the number // of people killed anyway.”
Zhadan’s poetry is of the moment but for all times, places, and people who have unjustly suffered yet remained defiant.
Voices from the Radium Age
Joshua Glenn (Ed.)
MIT Press
Is this cool, or what? Proto-science fiction from a century ago, edited by Joshua Glenn with cover illustrations by Seth, from MIT Press. Seth and Glenn have worked together three times before, to my knowledge, with a third partner, Mark Kingwell, on their books, The Wage Slave’s Glossary, The Idler’s Glossary, and The Adventurer’s Glossary, all of which exemplify the ideal that books should entertain and instruct. For some time now (15 years or more?), Glenn has also run the HiLoBrow.com website, devoted to a broad range of cultural topics, practices, and materials, to which Glenn applies his semiotic analysis, including to his long standing love of adventure stories and their variations.
Inaugurating the series, Voices from the Radium Age avoids being yet another oldies act recycling the stories any casual fan of science fiction already knows about. Instead, Glenn uses this series as an opportunity to re-assess the pre-history of science fiction, especially in terms of revisiting the notion of science fiction itself, which was, essentially, codified by the enormously influential editor, John Campbell. Thus, rather than cull examples of SF before Campbell in terms of criteria Campbell would later have applied, Glenn looks at SF in its nascent state, when the idea of speculating on future events hadn’t been swept into a small corner of formulaic genre, and writers willing to speculate came from backgrounds and interests wide and far.
Thus, Voices from the Radium Age includes stories by men and women from America, Europe, and Asia, recognized litterateurs and low-budget hacks: Arthur Conan Doyle, W.E.B. DuBois, Jack London, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, William Hope Hodgson, and Neil R. Jones. Some stories deal metaphorically with contemporary themes (such as feminism), some predict future dystopias based on current obsessions with technology, others tell unsettling campfire stories involving fungi and/or tentacles.
In addition to being fun to read, the stories also offer opportunities to assess the assumptions and prejudices of the time during which they were written (between 1900-1935, Glenn’s designated “Radium Age”), why certain assumptions were held and the evidence that invalidated them, and what we now need to do to avoid dystopia. Other books in the series currently include A World of Women by J. D. Beresford, The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, and The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle. I just found out about the series, so I haven’t yet had a chance to read them (although a Penguin edition of The World Set Free has been on my shelves for the past 40 years).
The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson
Kristina Sigunsdotter (Julia Marshall, trans.), with illustrations by Ester Eriksson
Gecko Press
Our narrator and illustrator is 11-year-old Cricket Karlsson, who has three problems: a perpetually sighing mother, a depressed aunt (who is also an artist like Cricket), and a BFF, Noa (a girl), who no longer acts like her BF—so much for the second F.
Cricket is a likeable girl with the rising self-consciousness and -doubt that contributes to making adolescence such a miserable time of life: waiting for her period to start, monitoring the growth of her breasts, forming cliques and thus a sense of “in” and “out” among social circles, and so forth. Add to this mix Cricket’s budding lesbianism, which either Cricket doesn’t yet recognize, or which is so accepted in her (Swedish) society that it’s a nonissue among the kids. (Late in the book at a school dance, two girls are described as kissing all night, with nary a reaction on the part of Cricket or her school mates.)
Just as Cricket is missing an important part of her life when Noa avoids her, so are her mother and aunt, for different reasons. This is a sweet book about love, need, and care in friendships.
White Shadow
Roy Jacobsen (Don Bartlet and Don Shaw, trans.)
Biblioasis
White Shadow is the second novel in a trilogy that includes The Unseen and the forthcoming Eyes of the Rigel. The first novel, The Unseen, concerns a family, the Barrøys, that have inhabited since at least the 1830s one of Norway’s 55,000 small islands scattered across its coastline. The first volume ended sometime after World War I, when more and more people—including the Barrøys—were leaving the islands for steadier, better-paying work on land—seemingly ending a century of subsistence living.
At the start of White Shadow, one of the family descendants, Ingrid, returns to the abandoned family island. Now in her early 20s, she returns to the patterns and vocational skills she learned growing up there. And when she returns, World War II is in full swing, with Norway caught between Nazi and Soviet forces, and the town across the bay under Nazi control.
One day, ragged clothing begins washing ashore and dead bodies appear scattered across the island and floating in various of the island’s crevices and bays. One body is alive, skeletal, with damaged hands. Ingrid rescues him, takes him back to the house, and slowly nurses him back to life. His name is Alexander. A German troop carrier nearby had been sunk, with large loss of life.
Alexander and Ingrid begin a romance. The Nazis suspect Ingrid is not alone, even though she has taken them to all the bodies that washed up on shore, those she fished from the December waters, and one in her barn loft. There are consequences for Alexander’s and Ingrid’s behavior, of course, some expected, some not—including the months’ long stay in a hospital for Ingrid, during which time she discovers a secret about her deceased father.
There are twists and turns throughout this well-paced volume. But there are also some significant threads left hanging at its end that I wonder will be treated in the third volume (based on the principle related to a pistol hanging on a wall in Act One) or if they’ve simply been dropped. Ingrid’s sister Barbro eventually joins her on the island, and then a group of refugees the Nazis have assigned to Barrøy. Ingrid develops further into being a largely silent but shrewd thinker whom few seem to like but all respect. And just as she seems poised to become matriarch of the Barrøys, World War II ends and her brother Lars also returns.
As the book ends, the Barrøy clan is reunited, family members added to, their farming and fishing abilities enhanced, and the return of a pair of refugee boys to the island imminent. Ingrid is mother to a baby daughter, and the fate of the daughter’s father, Alexander, remains uncertain.
In the Eye of the Wild
Nastassja Martin (Sophie R. Lewis, trans.)
NYRB
A young anthropologist mauled by a bear while doing research in a remote northern area of Russia, Nastassja Martin recounts—in ways combining memoir, essay, and anthropology—what happened and its spiritual significance in terms of animism and a worldview that makes most sense to her.
Most of the physical damage by the bear to Martin’s body resulted from the bear biting her from the top of her head to the bottom of her jaw. For reasons Martin doesn’t understand, the bear stopped biting (maybe because Martin had stabbed it with an ice ax) but not without tearing out part of her lower right jaw and two teeth that its teeth had lodged into.
The rest of the book concerns her physical and—more importantly in the context of her work—psychological mending and readjustments. Accounts of multiple surgeries, infections, and months in an out of hospitals and clinics mingle with Martin internalizing the experience in much the same way as do the various remote clans and tribes she studies: Her spirit is now half-woman half-bear, which only increases the level of disdain with which she holds she holds civilizing norms, which presume to reduce human experiences to charts, numbers, and a narrow definition of what counts as rational thought and behavior.
Part of understanding her transformation to herself comes from her need to return to the place she lived when the bear attacked, to be among the rhythms of the seasons, the hunting and other daily efforts required to merely get by, as well as the area’s plants and animals. Living that close to the edge of alive or dead daily requires the ability to both feel deeply, first, to understand, second, the interconnectedness of everything and the awareness of that fact by all living things in their own ways. Martin spends the entire book trying to determine what she—and the bear—have gained from their violent encounter in which each balanced on the lines separating bear from human, life from death.
Ivan Moscow
Boris Pilnyak (A. Schwartzman, trans.)
Sublunary Editions / Empyrean Series
Originally published in 1927 (this translation is from 1935), Ivan Moscow is the story of a third-generation syphilitic (Ivan) who turns his skills toward digging, refining, and finding uses for uranium to improve the quality of life for all Russians. (Returning the favor to Pilnyak, the Russian government had him executed in 1938 for purportedly plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin, which also would have improved the quality of life for all Russians.)
Ivan tells us that the syphilis he’s inherited has malformed his internal organs but has left his brains intact; thus, he chooses to sacrifice life with a woman and child to a greater cause, despite the grief it causes him and the woman who loves him, Alexandra. The lovers part, but not before consummating their love, even though Ivan pretty much drips with radiation poisoning. Russian society too is poisoned ten years into its revolution, and the streets of Moscow are rife with criminals and petty thieves.
After Ivan and Alexandra take their leave of each other, Ivan encounters a 3,000-year-old mummy in a friend’s house that reminds him of Alexandra (it glows with radiation) that he dances with, caresses, and kisses. Ivan Moscow may easily be read as a veiled attack on the goals and hypocrisy of the Communist Revolution given that its putative hero adds to his disfiguring legacy handling toxic minerals to improve his country’s future. Putin’s Russia certainly demonstrates that the poisonous heritage remains firmly rooted in the country.
Pack my box with five liquor jugs
Tom Jenks and Catherine Vidler
Penteract Press
The hero of this novel is the set of constraints authors Jenks and Vidler set for themselves, resulting in a book of 26 chapters of 26 sentences each, each sentence containing each letter of the alphabet. The novel’s actions begin when the Queen’s blimp becomes unmoored.
The fun in reading this kind of book comes from seeing and mentally hearing the authors (whose anagram is Jock Ravishment) fulfill these requirements, the kind of sentences they write and word choices they make, especially given that they must have words with “z” and “q” in each sentence. The results are comically clunky sentences, rhythmically off, cacophonous, and usually verbose to ensure that every letter has been used.
Here’s an excerpt from the book’s Preface, which purports to tell the story of Jock Ravishment, the novel’s alleged author:
Unhappily, little information exists about Jock Ravishment, fez-wearing writer and Highland aquatint artist. Known mostly for being unknown (and for his unquenchable fascination with twig-lichen), this relatively boozy man of letters and etching regularly enjoyed a relaxing tipple. Ravishment’s headquarters was a clapboard gazebo, his desk flanked by exhausted demi-johns.
As we eventually zoom in, let us not refrain from imagining the existential sting, both quick and elongated, of Jock’s isolation on an especially ordinary Wednesday. Muzzy, sleep-deprived, plagued by grotesque nightmares, Jock felt extremely low. With neither textuals or picturesques feeling even remotely available to his reach, he proceeded (still in his pyjamas) to pour himself a kick-ass tumbler of Ouzo.
I always enjoy a well-crafted Oulipo-lian exercise—and Pack my box is one of them—and then marvel at the amount of time and skill devoted to creating a bauble whose only meaning is to provide pleasure at seeing a difficult challenge well met.
Paresis
Isabelle Nicou (Katie Shireen Assef, trans.)
Amphetamine Sulphate
Paresis is Nicou’s first novel, a tale of erotic obsession to the point of Sadean self-abasement. The narrator is a 30-something woman with a strong, seemingly mutual, attraction for a man who paws her with the lust of a predator, but then walks away without having sex. The man otherwise ignores her, which only inflames her desire more: A sadistic sexual relationship in which sex never happens. Despite her eagerness for sex, the man tells her of a previous heartbreak that seems to have left him impotent. (Please.)
At the novel’s beginning the love object has already left, with the psycho-physical after-effect being the narrator’s right side draws into a state of paresis. (Her arm really isn’t paralyzed but she can’t control it either from doing other than hang at her side.) She spends the chapters mulling over what they did together—and what they did not do together that left her doing it alone. One thing they did together was for him to slap her face and she to enjoy it.
And even if you were this vile creature who makes me suffer to satisfy his ego, it’s this vile creature that I love.
No better or worse than you, only the tails to your heads. My evidence is in the marks left by your slaps, our impossible osmosis in my shame. A shame that’s none of their business. . .
And:
Your shadow spreads over the right side of the bed; words drift toward me, they speak of pain and its consolation, of the two intertwined, and how I can endure everything if I know that in the end, I’ll feel your breath on the back of my neck.
(As an observation, I find it difficult to imagine an American Leftist intellectual publicly admitting to such predilections, let alone condoning them. Is this a form of self-censorship?)
While separated from this man, she has angry sex with a woman and a man (separately) and engages in self-mutilation by cutting and burning herself: “From the nuances of deflections something beyond speech wells up desire or its absence, the ancient joining of bodies, the urges we did or didn’t act on, the oscillation between with and without, between what’s missing and what’s lost.”
Erotic lust towards this man exists only as over-stimulus: it simultaneously hurts as it elates—there is no psychological-physiological balance. “[S]exuality, like any relation to otherness, is as impossible to the body as it is useless, but not unknown, and if it understands the desire to embrace it and refuses the gesture, it’s because the mad, empathetic embrace is precisely what makes it burn.”
Two Bolts
Matt Broaddus
Ugly Duckling Presse
Two Bolts is the second chapbook by Matt Broaddus, a young Black American poet who works as a librarian in Colorado. He writes of everyday life and moments of beauty and pause while connecting those experiences to something bigger. For instance, in “Pamphlet of Lightning” the narrator metaphorically presents the company he’s leaving as a “Submerged wreck. Coral suited” with
Polyps plop plop for a hand
to touch, to cut,
and liquefy. Coworkers
offer mysterious hugs
when I say I’m leaving. I’m leaving
the surface, scooped into sky.
Amalgamated. Shell shed, shell
scooped rough from sand. Unseen
adornment for sky. Skull shed
left wide open. Boogieing on
wind, brain circulates. Spirals.
Demanding a body. To be iridescent.
A shell. Arcing.
It’s unusual image for re-birth or escape, as a rise from the refuse or flotsam of a sorry enterprise. But the image is embedded in that tradition that takes us from the Platonic cave of a “submerged wreck” to a place brighter with truth yet still lacking completion because merely human.
“Pilgrim” too plays with this image of physical rising as a state of improved wisdom, a yin-yang-like understanding of benefits and consequences: “A ferry lifts me into clouds / conspiring with baboons, // to the hill where two bolts / hold up the sky. // The shiny one sizzles, / a bright whip. // The other swings open its black mouth, / consumes the visitors gathered at twilight.” Shiny seems to be a good quality, but if that same quality can be likened to a sizzling whip, is it still good?
On the playful side, Broaddus occasionally plays with onomatopoeia and rhythm together, matching sound to image and movement. In addition to the “Polyps plop plop for a hand,” quoted above, there’s also the beginning of “Paul Loves Beautiful Equations “—
Little bulbs wiggle.
Wiggle little bulbs.
—which gets bonus points because both sentences use the same words, and I can easily imagine a gardener stooped over his garden bed, weeding it out, and chanting those lines, while also imagining cartoons of flower bulbs wiggling to the sun’s soundtrack.
Because Broaddus’s own final words are so good, I might as well them to end this review as well. From “My Feet Vanish”:
. . . To learn to
be a fish, glide
through
an open cosmos. Find
a hand to guide a hand.
I Should Have Known Better
William E. Jones
We Heard You Like Books
I Should Have Known Better is Jones’s second roman à clef, this one focusing on the two years of an MFA program and the friendships that develop among three gay men and a woman. Jones has said that he wanted to write a novel in the tradition of something Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press would publish, something as literary as it is smutty. And I think he succeeds: Art theory meets Crisco-coated fist fucking (spoiler alert!) and intelligent salaciousness and caprice. If the 19th-century ideal for books was that they entertain and instruct, I was certainly entertained upon learning there exists a condition euphemistically called “clown pocket” (because everything fits into it).
There’s more discourse than intercourse in this book, however, and some real-world art heavies stop by campus—Cal Arts—to lecture and evaluate portfolios. Names are named, their work and opinions assessed (and often found wanting), described in terms of disappointment, dismissal, or adoration. Even without knowing anything about the ‘90s-era LA art scene—which I don’t—I’m sure a person could construct a score card of the time from the gossip bandied about by the novel’s friends, the parties and galleries they attend, and the type of curriculum they practice.
Jones’s story-telling skills stumble, however, when he describes one character’s Balkan-Serbian-Croatian backstory. When he does so, a (metaphorical) lengthy throat-clearing stops the novel’s momentum as the narrator gets readers up to speed. Backstories can be difficult to work in a story, especially on a subject one can’t assume the general reader will know anything about. Not that this book is for the “general reader.”
I confess to knowing nothing about Jones’s video art or his essays. The novel stands on its own, although for those in the know, those able to connect the dots and read between the lines and whatever clichéd metaphor of cognition I’ve overlooked, there are probably more knowing nods to people and events than I can spot.