Elements

When we attempted fire we were stubborn
in carparks making amends with our rings on     our tongues 
out I could tell you how I got here but I am instead intent
on telling you how I am planning to leave      the fire is only
one way out     when we attempted earth we failed
the landscape held my heel like a moor victim until I heard only
a lecture about how you were the victim how your mother
burned your hands with tea water when you were three how you are
the way you are because of this     I must love you you say
despite or perhaps because of this     but when we attempted
water I stood on a bridge atop dead cerulean water with blossoms
blinding me so that I could not see the pathway out 
just as I could not see you as you     the minister sang something
out of a hefty book of magic or of misunderstanding 
I say the things you want me to say because I think
I feel them but when I assayed the air I realized I lacked
the ground     the roots dregs dirt from which to ascend jump escape
and so I felt the ring thrust on my finger and I slipped the ring
on your marred one just so that we matched     but I knew the air
would have me in the end for I was meant to ascend
not languish in carparks with my tongue out my palms raised
to you like you were some lunatic god     weeping incessantly 
as if you had known the grit of Gethsemane as if I should
carry you burden of mine to the end of this rancid world
when the wind and the sky and all that I could not see
when you had bound me to you was my destiny     and so
when we attempted solitarily to resurrect from the ashes 
the bodies were unfortunate but necessary casualties 
auguries even so that  I might see so that I might see 
your hold on me and say no no no in order to finally and
ultimately know

Subduction by Kristen Millares Young

Subduction by Kristen Millares Young
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

subduction: n, the action or process in plate tectonics of the edge of one crustal plate descending below the edge of another

Subduction is a truly impressive debut, with controlled, poetic prose, and an almost mannered way of depicting tradition, marginalization, and the human longing to belong.

Claudia is a forty-year-old Mexican-American anthropologist, whose husband has left her for her sister; on a trip to Neah Bay, Washington, to continue her research on the Makah tribe’s penchant for storytelling and song, her path crosses with the black sheep Peter, her subject Maggie’s son, who left the reservation some twenty years earlier after discovering his father’s dead body.

Kristen Millares Young pulls this off without any flair or melodrama; in fact, some of the fairly graphic sex scenes are among the most violent in the whole book. Instead, Young’s prose questions who has the right to belong, how stories unite family units and whole communities, and also how outsiders—as both our main characters feels themselves to be—are viewed by a Native American tribe clinging to its identity, while having lost so much of it as each generation passes (“Anything claimed by one was lost by another”).

Subduction also contains some of the most evocative prose about the natural world that I’ve read in some time, with passages like this:

Rocks below the tide-line held in their wakes braided rivers of outflow whose patterns replicated flood-furrowed land east of here, ravages of the last ice age.

As Christian Keifer puts it in his review in The Paris Review:

The title of the book refers to the geological phenomenon of one tectonic plate sinking under the influence of another, during which both subsumed and overriding plates are wracked by distortion and disruption. In Young’s novel, the answer to which is which is left beautifully unclear.

And this is resoundingly true. Even the structure of the novel is controlled yet racing toward an inevitable collision; in a less talented writer’s hand, Subduction would have veered off into explications, tangible either/ors, but Young keeps her novel’s focus so taut and almost cosmological that it’s not only a gem, but it’s a near masterpiece of now, and a haunting case study of longing and belonging:

Who is at peace with the daylight between who we are and who we thought we’d be?



Highly recommended: this marks the beginning of a literary career well worth following along.

4.5 stars, rounded down

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for Mexican Gothic, given I’ve always been a fan of the Gothic novel; while Moreno-Garcia does use Gothic tropes—especially in the first third of the book—the novel soon devolves into a supernatural horror, a genre I’m definitely not a fan of.

Socialite and spoiled socially privileged Noemí Taboada travels from 1950s Mexico City to Hidalgo, where, from the crumbling mansion High Place, her cousin Catalina has written cryptic letters to Noemí’s father suggesting that her husband, Virgil, is poisoning her and that she hears and sees things in the walls. As an ambassador of sorts, a term she often applies to herself, Noemí is sent to ascertain the gravity of the situation, but soon gets caught up in the tangled web of decay, power, and control at High Point.

This premise would make for a very interesting book; here, however, Moreno-Garcia is constantly bringing in textual reminders and literary allusions to Gothic tales of yore: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights get mentioned many times, and when Noemí recalls the Catalina she knew during adolescence, she is always reading fairy tales and getting lost in those mythic worlds. These allusions occur in virtually every chapter of Mexican Gothic, making it obvious that Moreno-Garcia is attempting to situate her own book within such traditions, but perhaps also in an attempt to remind herself that she’s doing just that, so as not to lose the thread… which she does, because, in the end, the book goes on a downward spiral to nowhere.

This is currently the number one bestseller on Amazon under the genre of magical realism; it certainly isn’t that, but the novel is also certainly not Gothic—not in the Radcliffe way, not in the Burke-infused way (with all things sublime and beautiful), and not even in the more feminist Gothic vein of, say, Gilman or Du Maurier. The supernatural elements in true Gothic novels get explained, rationalized away; in Mexican Gothic, it just goes deeper and deeper into one of the most ludicrous, nonsensical supernatural plots I’ve ever read, where dreams are intended to enlighten the reader about the past, but end up confusing them instead since these scenes are not executed well. It appears, too, that there is some social commentary and critique at work in Mexican Gothic, with the mention of the Mexican Revolution and its ongoing repercussions, the way women are treated as objects to be possessed by men, and so on… but these are never treated with the depth they deserve to be fleshed out fully and made to bear on the novel as a whole.

Mentions of Jung and Freud (the latter of whom Noemí—or Moreno-Garcia—entirely misreads) also abound, which would make for a nice pull back to the Gothic genre and how it speaks (as in Poe, for example) to human psychology and the uncanny; but these also feel like name-droppings peppered throughout a text that meanders, doesn’t truly build its own characters, has a very cliched and haphazard love pairing, and has some very awkward writing. As an example of the latter, despite being written in a fairly straightforward manner to keep the reader’s interest piqued, there are times when Moreno-Garcia is in need of better editing, e.g., when she overuses or underuses commas; when she uses antiquated syntax and/or clauses that are more akin to Henry James or Marcel Proust. I’m a huge fan of these two writers, of course, and take no issue whatsoever with work that pays homage to their prose styles, but a sentence like the one below just pops out of nowhere from time to time, in the midst of otherwise banal ones:

The sitting room, in the daytime, once she peeled the curtains aside, seemed much less welcoming than at night.

Clumsy phrasing, to be sure, and clumsy characterization and plotting as well. In addition, while the novel is set in the 1950s, and mentions of the Revolution (c. 1910-20) and its legacy are crucial to much of the plot, the action could be taking place in any time, in any place. The only grounding in the historical period are an over-emphasis on Noemí’s fashions, but perhaps this is also because High Place exists outside of time. For that, I will give the author at least some credit, though it’s unclear why the 1950s setting exists to begin with, since it isn’t really felt by the reader apart from the above mentioned descriptions of fashion or the sociocultural position of women.

I almost abandoned this at 70%, something I never do, but I kept plodding along, hoping that a truer Gothic plot would reveal itself; I ended up just flabbergasted and extremely disappointed. This will be the sort of book that some people love—the writing seems almost like it would suit YA audiences, but I’m not sure if that’s the intended demographic or not (something tells me no)—but I will definitely take a pass on this author’s previous (and future) books, and, unless you’re a fan of supernatural horror, I might urge you to do the same. It’s perhaps a good beach or airplane read, if nothing else.

Names can be deceiving, and, despite the lovely cover of the book, that hackneyed phrase rings true: don’t judge a book by its cover… or its title.

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Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Holy fuck.


Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated. You drop your guard for a second and they’ll crush you, Clarita, so you better just tell that fuckwit out there to buy you some clothes. Don’t you be anybody’s fool, that’s what men are like: a bunch of lazy spongers who you have to keep rounding up to squeeze any use out of them…

From 1993 to 2005, there were more than 370 female murders (femicides or feminicidios) in Juárez; in Mexico more broadly, between 1986 and 2009, there were an estimated 34,000 female homicides. And this number is likely much higher: although the far-from-reputable UK Sun estimates the Juárez total to be around 1,500, this number is likely somewhat accurate: as The Guardian reported in February 2020: there were “119 homicides in the city [of Juárez] during January this year, and 46 to date in February. Last weekend alone counted 18 murders.”


With frenzy, darkness, and unimpeded rage, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season dissects Mexico’s culture of—as one narrator puts it—“the full, brutal force of male vice,” after a figure known as “the Witch” is murdered in a small, impoverished village. Melchor’s prose is heady, dizzying, and incredibly brutal, depicting how men speak both to and about women, how boys are raised from a young age to feel their superiority over women and “poofs”—in addition to the femicide statistics above, far more than 1,000 documented cases of homophobic violence in Mexico have been recorded—and also how women talk to other women, knowing their body is both currency and yet also what makes them a target in a world where the government and the police care more about money than justice.

Melchor follows the aftermath of the Witch’s murder through fragmenting the narrative, showing us seven unreliable figural narrators who have some part of the backstory to lend to our understanding of what happened. And even that understanding, that “truth,” shifts, becomes buried beneath misogyny, male privilege, homophobia, and a culture that glorifies violence as evidence of machismo. It’s also a culture that buries truths quite easily beneath superstition and local mythologies: “the black magic rituals and superstitious beliefs which, to the town’s shame, abounded in that place.”

Hurricane Season is a brave, unflinching book, but certainly not an easy one to stomach; all the same, it is essential reading to begin to understand and to give voice to the thousands of women who have been killed by men in Mexico. Melchor’s prose is akin to Bolaño meeting Krasznahorkai in conversation with Faulkner, and the darkness here is the darkness of men breeding violence among each other.

Melchor’s book is an angry cry against a culture that praises men for being pigs, drug addicts, drunks, and “spongers”; a culture whose victims are forgotten and forever rendered silent; and a culture in which women–who have also internalized this male violence—need to instruct young girls about the violence they will surely encounter in a world one wishes were a nightmare, not the reality that it is.

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The Current by Tim Johnston

The Current by Tim Johnston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Because it was only girls… In the river. It’s always been only girls.


The Current is not your ordinary mystery/thriller; in fact, I would strongly discourage those who enter its icy, frozen Minnesotan (and Iowan) world to read it for the mystery, or dissuade those looking for a fast-paced thriller.



What Johnston has written instead are dark, harrowing character studies of those who are trapped in present and past traumas—all of which collide when one college girl is assaulted on the way home to visit her dying father, the town’s old sheriff, and she and her friend go into the icy river. The opening chapter depicting this scene is claustrophobic and written so close-to-the bone that it’s hard not to keep reading once the book splits into different characters—often beginning simply with pronouns in chapters, so that it takes the reader a few pages to disorient from what came before and orient his or her way into what’s taking place now.

Johnston’s skill here is his prose: this is perfectly written, almost with echoes of McCarthy, Robinson, Sam Michel, Schutt, Faulkner, and others, yet all the while in Johnston’s own undeniable voice. The prose is what carries you through The Current, and Johnston’s versatility is keen when moving between the past and the present, and also showing how interrelated they are for these people stuck in their own individual traumas, and I was often awed by some passages’ abilities to evoke, to suggest, to reveal the deep winter in which the story takes place as it mirrors each character’s own dark interior world:


Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?



If this book doesn’t leave you feeling frozen and like you’ve been stuck in an ice-cold winter in a Minnesotan storm, I would be shocked. And if this book doesn’t leave you moved in terms of how it questions generational trauma, isolation, and sexual assault, then the immense empathy Johnston’s book holds to the light is but a mirror for whatever demons you harbor inside you.

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The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope

The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss.”


“When I see women kiss, I always think that there is a deep hatred at the bottom of it.”

And so the long, arduous, fitful, endearing, maddening, and epic-filled Chronicles of Barsetshire are at an end… and it’s a glorious end that my four-star rating can’t truly reflect, unless you’ve read them all in order and in fairly quick succession. It feels, in many ways, like the end of an era; the close of a century. 



As is usual with Trollope, he takes his time to set the stage; but since most of his novels in the Barsetshire series are not as long as this, the last, one, here he takes triple the amount of time: where he normally needs about a hundred-or-so pages to set the preliminary characters into motion, in The Last Chronicle it takes him nearly three-hundred pages to do so. Some of this is a bit awkward and clumsy, with a bit of redundant scenes toward the beginning of the novel, especially as he attempts to gain the readers’ sympathies with Josiah Crawley, a perpetual curate (and an unlikely protagonist for this, but, as it turns out, the perfect one) who is accused of stealing a check for £20.



Many of the characters that populate The Last Chronicle appear in the previous four books, but especially from
Framley Parsonage
and
The Small House at Allington
—and, of course, the fire-cracking Mrs. Proudie, whose shenanigans make
Barchester Towers
the comical tour de force that it is, even though it’s a bit of an outsider when taken with the rest of the Barsetshire books. Lily Dale and John Eames return, Dr. Thorne and Mr. Harding… it’s much fanfare for the swan song, and it’s as thrilling to read this closure to a world that only Trollope could make seem so real as it is to leave it behind, tucked coolly on the bookshelf to delve into in perhaps another decade or so. 



Love, romance, deceit, gossip, back-stabbings, and several twists and turns that show Trollope is at his finest, wanting quite obviously—but successfully—to end the series with a flourish and a great deal of lament and remembrance. The sole reason for the four-star rating is the very slow and clumsy start of the book; it seems that Trollope knew exactly what he was doing (when does he not?), but that in dealing with this many characters and more subplots than any previous Barsetshire novel, he couldn’t settle on where the focus was. 



While many readers below suggest that this (or any) of the books could be read as standalone novels, I would disagree: one really needs to see the progression of the characters; the different ways and great lengths to which Trollope goes in his world-building of this fictional place that, by the end, feels like such a real world inhabited by real people; and one needs a lot of the backstories from the previous two novels especially to really understand Lily, John, Grace, and some of the other characters’ transformations across time and space. (For a good Trollope standalone, might I suggest
The Claverings
?)

Definitely read these in order, slowly: this is a series to be savored, and read again and again. This is my second time reading the series; it will definitely not be my last.

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The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Speeding through Trollope is never wise: each of his books are long, drawn out performances, where the various threads he weaves throughout eventually come together in the end—the different characters of different social stations and statuses; the bickering family members, neighbors, and parish members; and also the young men and women (typically, the latter) who defy gender norms and conventions, but who, by the novels’ ends, adhere to a Victorian readership’s expectations and satisfy their sense of closure, of right made wrong, of good triumphing over evil.

But this is to overlook Trollope’s greatest strength as a novelist: he never condemns those who have transgressed against social norms; he doesn’t join the neighbors who gossip and spread rumor and cast stones. In each of Trollope’s characters—both the worthy and the unworthy—we see facets of human nature, and, in turn, we see shimmer of ourselves, to be examined and never judged. In short, Trollope recognizes that all of us are as capable of evil as well as of good, and he explores the thin line that divides what society and culture would view as extremes, and which he views as humanity merely toeing the line.

As the fifth book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, The Small House at Allington casts a much smaller net than its predecessors, and, from what I recall, from the finale that follows. Whereas The Warden began the series on a somewhat tentative note, almost unsure of itself or where it stood (standalone book or part of a series?), Trollope’s ventures from Barchester Towers—the most widely-read of Trollope’s novels, perhaps, and not a good indication of his scope, as I wrote in my linked review—to Doctor Thorne, and from Framley Parsonage (perhaps the most successful thus far of the series; see my review there) to this title show a steady progress toward world-building and the reader who tackles these books in order will be a much happier reader for the dipping in and out of characters from previous volumes, many of whose backstories Trollope takes for granted that you know.

While the second through fourth books highlight how skilled Trollope is at assembling a wide range of characters and having plots and subplots abound, all of which intersect around a certain character or a problem (usually money or marriage), The Small House at Allington is much smaller in scope, dealing almost solely with the same group of characters during and after the young, beautiful, but immensely annoying Lily Dale is jilted by Adolphous Crosbie for a woman of rank and, so he thinks, money, the Lady Alexandrina de Courcy. In her introduction to the lovely new Oxford editions of the series, Dinah Birch states that this was the most popular of the Barsetshire books for Victorian readers (and was even viewed by Trollope as such: “I do not think that I have ever done better work,” he wrote in An Autobiography), but she does note that today the novel “divides its readers, and the character of Lily Dale has always been the central point of contention.”

Allington is a much bleaker world than we see in the other Barsetshire novels: characters don’t change much here; they don’t learn much in their toils of troubles; they don’t succeed or triumph in ways that most readers of Trollope expect from his characters. And, in some ways, that is this book’s strength: it categorically refuses to give readers what they expect from a novel, what they have grown to expect from a certain author, and, as such, Trollope can take liberties that he has not done before. However, while Lily Dale’s jilting is the central problematic around which numerous characters revolve, some of the more interesting characters do get more room in the spotlight: the “hobbledehoy” John Eames, who is trying to make his way in the London world of business and busyness, longing all the while for his childhood sweetheart, Lily Dale; Crosbie, who has won Lily’s heart but who has his own selfish desire for power and wealth in mind when he jilts her; Mrs. Dale, who is a fascinating study of motherhood and female power (as well as restraint) in dealing with widowhood, bringing up two daughters alone, and being forced to live off the “generosity” of her dead husband’s family; and earls, squires, ladies, and lords galore. Unlike the previous books in the series, though, Trollope fails to unite these refracted characters; and, as a result, the novel does not read as well thought-out or as well-plotted as his others. Indeed, there are even three or four chapters on Plantagenet Palliser’s dangerous liaison with Lady Griselda Dumbello (whom one will recall from earlier Barsetshire novels) which seem to add nothing to the main plot here at all; Trollope was working on the Palliser series’ first book, Can You Forgive Her?, as he was writing Allington, and appears to have got some of his signals crossed.

I do still strongly recommend that those new to Trollope begin with his lesser-known, but wonderfully executed, The Claverings (you can read my review there).

Still… yet still… ah, still, still… There is nothing quite like spending a month immersed in a 600-or-more page Trollope. It is very much like a holiday, getting acquainted and reacquainted with characters; getting close to them, seeing them flaws and all and being almost as nonjudgmental as the narrator/author is about their deeds and misdeeds. It opens one’s eyes to human nature in microcosm, and forces one to see things in oneself that one might prefer to keep buried or cloaked in shadow. Allington is very much the bridge to the finale of the series, and I look forward to revisiting that before the year’s end, before I take my leave of Barsetshire for the world of the Pallisers.

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Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Frankissstein: A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite this being longlisted for this year’s Booker, I might have given Winterson’s latest a pass, had it not been for several people whose opinions I trust calling this “a return to form.” My relationship with Winterson’s work is both perfect and harried; during my undergraduate days, I spent a lot of time with her work, and her work from the 1990s through the early-2000s is very strong, ground-breaking, and original.

But after The PowerBook, Winterson’s work started to become derivative; I even attended three or four of her lectures, and she returned again and again to the same anecdotes and stories in the talks—likely as these were the ones that earned some guffaws. After the masterpiece that was Art & Lies, can any author surpass their own best creation?

And this is something like the main conceit in Frankissstein: the question of artificial intelligence; how wedded is our consciousness to our brains; is artistic creation the same as, or at least akin to, scientific inventions; how do the bodies we inhabit—and which change both with time and with our wills (made emphatic by one of the main characters, Ry, whose trans body is much on display and much discussed in the novel)—problematize things like being, consciousness, and desire if the promise or threat of AI is on the horizon?

I began the novel with high hopes: the early sections, told from Mary Shelley’s point-of-view, detail the genesis of Frankenstein and the conversations about gender, authorship, artistic creations, and also vivisection were some of the more interesting sections here. Given that two of Winterson’s strongest novels, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, are historical and tackle these same questions seemed to bode well. However, the present-day sections are riddled with cliches and stereotypes, e.g., the African American woman who checks Ry into the AI conference in Memphis; Ry’s own trans body, which, as a cisgendered person, even I took some issues with: it will be interesting to see what trans readers make of Winterson’s depiction of Ry as something like the promise of the future, the making of the new self—something she pairs very haphazardly with AI.

The sections with Mary Shelley—and those of her meeting her own fictional creation in Bedlam—being the strongest, the present-day sections (dealing with sexbots and trans bodies and lots of fucking and the question of whether a disembodied brain can still house consciousness and intelligence) are a mess: Winterson fails to join them, even though one can see that the underlying themes with which Shelley grapples and with which Ry and Dr. Victor Shelley grapple in today’s Manchester are indeed united. Winterson chooses to join them by poetic repetition and the use of literary quotes—one of which is her own—and this feels more like a patchwork quilt of a book than a novel.

Still, this was a fun read overall, and I would recommend it; however, I would in no way recommend that readers new to Winterson begin here. This is an author definitely back on track after more than a decade off the mark, but Frankissstein fails to deliver a convincing narrative, despite its topical questions, and instead reads like two very different novels that have been joined together in places where they seem to “fit.”

With thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this in exchange for my honest thoughts.

3.5 stars

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The Hide by Barry Unsworth

The Hide by Barry Unsworth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man] The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour…

— Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Josh, or Josiah, is a 20-year-old lower-class youth, working “on the stalls” at an amusement arcade in what reads like Brighton. An innocent, he latches on to Mortimer, an older and seemingly wiser man with whom he works, forming an odd and sometimes queer friendship with him. When Mortimer speaks of sex and class and the revolution and the bourgeoisie, the naive Josiah—who often asks “What’s your terms?” to get Mortimer’s use of vocabulary correct—begins to take on this man’s beliefs as his own.

Simon is a forty-something-year old neurotic effete: over-educated and under-socialized. Living on the grounds of his widowed sister Audrey’s massive estate, he has acclimated to life by burrowing underground, creating what he terms his “hide.” Some of Unsworth’s most stunning descriptions in this book of landscape and distance are in Simon’s sections, and, admittedly, it’s unclear just how skillfully Simon has constructed his hideaway or if it’s just merely a series of bushes and fences. From here, he moves about the estate, surveilling and watching neighbors and also the social gatherings of his sister’s theatre group—distanced, remote, but judgmental: “Why should I always be on the outside of everything, appreciating my exclusion with an aesthetic ache?”

When Audrey realizes that the estate needs a gardener, Josiah answers the call, and the lower-class gardener’s presence—bringing more to the fore the same-class but servant-like Marion, Audrey’s late-husband’s cousin—begins to complicate everyone’s lives. While Simon is innocent in his voyeurism and underground burrowing, insofar as he never acts on his desires, this is juxtaposed with Josiah’s less-educated and much more youthful innocence: the wide-eyed, believe-all-you-tell-me sort that takes words at face value, an innocence that longs to explore. Both of these get tested and pitted against one another in a theatrical and truly psychoanalytic way; indeed, while immersed in this, my first Unsworth, I read somewhere that this was an early and more minor work of his. I can only imagine how his insights into human nature have grown with his subsequent books.

Much of Unsworth’s strength in this book is how slowly the creepy and evil aspects of human nature begin to become apparent—and this is even long after the first chapter, when we witness Simon observing the neighboring woman (virtually naked) do her chores in a heat wave from the security of his hide:

I do not know her name. She has brought me often, and especially on windy days when I am vouchsafed incidental revelations, to the threshold of intense pleasure, and on occasion I have been enabled, kneeling in my little corner here, with the complicity of the laburnum… to cross the threshold. I have never been nearer to her than I am now, I do not desire any closer proximity.

Lust, covert queerness, hero worship, sibling rivalry, and an ever-growing sense of the strange and the downright eerie… The Hide grows steadily just as it ping-pongs back and forth between the two men narrating, keeping a running volley on very different voices’ commentaries on social class, generational gaps, and displaced (or repressed) desires. A true commentary on, as Unsworth puts it, “how inscrutable we human creatures are, what a mystery inheres in every follicle.”

Highly recommended for fans of interior and gradually unsettling prose.

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Tentacle

for A.T.

we send them both off bare-chested into the den to plug in their machines and watch the images on screens morph into shapes they assume for the duration of the spell     in Guadalajara the trees bloom and then wilt spent spine curved like a question mark I send you messages while they are occupied that sound like branches snapping or me lapping up your saliva     when he is next to me the proximity can lie or at least slant the truths the dreams speak to me as dire as any sibyl mouthing doomed doomed     I imagine your hand is less bony than his and that your tongue when it reads words aloud from the page hits the upper palate like the bolt my own words caused in the wake of their banishment     remember that I never wish to cause you regret if that can be avoided in the drone of distances crossed to let me touch your spine so that I might straighten out my own remember too that I love him even though I am sending you messages the shape of pellets troubadours once threw at windows in the dank hours of night before lighting up the air with their song     perhaps whatever words we are free to speak while they become dragons or zombies or humans can sunder us both but I believe that if the words are that strong we must heed them like portents we must follow them where they lead     me into your mouth or else into his you into some crevice while the city decides its season