Hello!
First off, some housekeeping — I’ll be at AWP in Kansas City, MO in February; if you are organizing something and could use my (commanding yet ultimately friendly) presence, please write me. I am a good reader and I don’t say that lightly.
I will also be doing this panel on Thursday, Feb 8:
It’ll certainly be interesting to have this particular discussion in a state that has trigger laws in place. My own circumstances were unforeseen, and my own “reproductive elegy” was written from a place of shock, but what must it be like for a person who could see their passage of events coming, and be legally bound to experience it?
Second, it’s the end of the year. I failed to send a monthly letter in 2023, but I sent out a few, and I read a lot, and I have no regrets. I won’t do a whole year-end recap but I will share a few notes about some 2023 favs I haven’t yet talked about here.
I began and ended this year with translation. The first book I read was The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld (tr. Michele Hutchison) — what an unbelievably bleak book, perfect for January. Shoutout to Christine for the recommendation. This book is like Miriam Toews with no laugh-out-loud moments, just the peculiar details. There is some humor but it’s not the kind of humor that has you shaking with laughter. It’s more of a grim chuckle.
No other creature mourns for as long as a crow. Generally there’s one that really stands out, a bit bigger than the others and fiercer too, and it crows the loudest of all of them. That must be the flock’s pastor. Their black-feathered cloaks contrast beautifully with the pale sky, and Dad says crows are intelligent animals. They can count, remember faces and voices, and hold a grudge against anyone who treats them badly – but after a crow has been hung up, they hang around the farmyard. They stare down from the guttering searchingly as Dad walks between the house and the cowsheds, like cardboard hares at a shooting range, their black eyes boring into his chest like two shot holes. I try not to look at the crows. Maybe they want to tell us something, or they’re waiting until the cows are dead. Granny said yesterday that crows in a farmyard are an omen of death. I think that either Mum or I will be next.
I noted this passage because I have also written about this tendency of crows to mourn in community. I think it’s fascinating.
I loved this book. The narrator, Jas, is ten years old, and Rijneveld captures what it’s like to be a preteen without underestimating the mind of the child, without being insulting. Jas keeps some toads in a box and tries to get them to mate, hoping that it will cause the parents of the family to also be normal. But the toads starve over time because nothing is normal; a horrible accident has forever altered their family fabric. Everyone must deal.
Rijneveld also suffered a tragic loss in his youth and has built several books around the topic. I used to think, in the workshops of my life as Young Writer, that you were only allowed one book about a certain topic. Once you write your dad book, or your death book or whatever, your addiction book, your immigration book, you were to move on. But I know this is not true now and I’m impressed with Rijneveld for learning it so young (he is just 32). At the same time, though, your relationship to The Thing changes. I’m writing some nice poems about parenting and climate anxiety; Lumi’s death figures into these poems. I haven’t read Rijneveld’s poetry collection but The Discomfort of Evening won the International Booker Prize in 2020.
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When we were on a longish trip earlier this year, I read Clancy Martin’s alarmingly-named How Not to Kill Yourself (sorry to my husband if you saw the title in our shared ebook library). I deeply enjoyed this strange, forthright book, a memoir billed as “a portrait of the suicidal mind.” There were personal anecdotes which made Martin unsympathetic in myriad ways — bad parenting choices, various thoughtlessnesses in partnership, prosaic stuff like that — but he didn’t try to make himself seem more likable. He just walked the reader through. And as Martin is a philosopher, there were also many analyses of existing texts on suicidal ideation, and passages riffing on external sources from experts of all kinds. There is a generosity toward openly citing one’s sources and showing one’s work that I find contemporary philosophers (and assorted, related, less categorizable writers like Maggie Nelson) are good at.
Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician who has helped thousands of people die and helped their loved ones to accept that death, writes, “I have learned to look when I want to look away. I have chosen to stay when I want to run out of the room and cry. The prelude to compassion is the willingness to see.”
Willingness to see. When people say “I can’t imagine” about a tragic event, to me, what they mean is “I don’t want to imagine.” Imagination of grief, for the human mind, involves placing yourself into the passage of events, into the place of loss. Saying “I can’t imagine” in response to something terrible that happened has a kind of distancing effect. It makes it so the speaker remains in the realm of sympathy without crossing over to empathy, to compassion. It’s waving from the threshold, saying “I’m glad I’m not you.” I have long railed against this purposeful limitation of the imagination when it comes to matters of grief; when I hear about someone’s tragedy, I try my hardest to imagine it. So I did think this was beautiful, and there are many more passages where I paused and reflected in the same way. The book is long and in many ways tedious, but I got a lot out of it.
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When there’s messy stuff about motherhood in a book, people often tell me to be wary of it ahead of time. I appreciate it, but warnings usually make me want to delve deeper. The reason for this is the reason that I also read tons and tons of Reddit posts from people who go through rough stuff — I want to witness the way that the unpalatable story is told. Anyway, Deliver Me by Elle Nash is a very unpalatable story about someone’s desire to be a mother. Shocking and propulsive and kind of horror-adjacent, with a twisted logic you can almost understand at every turn.
I read this book late this fall, mostly in the mornings, which felt insane considering the amount of visceral darkness in the pages. The narrator, Dee-Dee, works at a chicken processing plant in the Ozarks, and Nash liberally uses this metaphor to highlight what it means to grow up rural and poor and desperate (skip this passage if you’re not into grossout stuff about meat).
A giant yellow excavator comes into view around the corner of the building, dropping hundreds of chicken corpses in a giant dumpster. Hundreds or thousands. A waterfall of bodies. In it, there is an inescapable pull of power mixed with my fear: the act of human consumption, the cog of need. How many thousands of millions of mouths fed each year, how many millions of pounds of chicken breasts cut, pumped full of saline like little sluts, wrapped in Saran wrap, shipped all over Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma; frozen and shipped even farther than that. The factory churns, its mouth eats the bodies and spits them into the trash in an endless cycle, it eats our energy, and here I am, my energy makes it. The dumpster has a special mouth with many rotating metal teeth to catch the bodies. Each load that’s dropped, they’re crushed into a ground-up liquid of bones, fat, feathers, and flesh.
One of the few poems that have ever made me cry, “I’m a Broiler” by Tytti Heikkinen, examines the brief, gain-focused life of the broiler hen, and this reminded me of it. Check the poem out here (full disclosure, I translated it).
There were a few other books I found personally meaningful this year. Molly by Blake Butler. Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso. My Work by Olga Ravn! But I’ll skip writing about them for now — I think this is already getting long. I’ll leave you on the translation with which I ended the year: Heaven by Mieko Kawakami.
Kawakami was this year’s revelation for me; this book was the second of hers that I consumed — the first was the transcendent Breasts and Eggs. Heaven is a novel (part epistolary) about two bullied kids and their exchanges with one another. What I loved about it was the way Kawakami writes about the extremely large feelings that you get in your youth. Maybe a part of this is in the translation (here expertly done by Sam Bett and David Boyd), but the language around teen angst and teen feeling in general feels fresh.
I sat up, but forced myself back to bed and closed my eyes. Every second, her name strobed through my nervous system, getting larger and larger, filling my blood. I sat up again and pulled down the slipcase and read through those old letters from the beginning. I was unsure of how I felt about the long one or how I should respond. Going through her letters made me sure I wanted to see her, but feeling the way I did, I wondered if I should even write to her at all. I thought about the time she said she liked my eyes. I replayed every second of that minute in my mind. She really liked my eyes. The memory stood on my chest. The pain was good and bad at the same time. I couldn't move. Maybe I wanted something else from her, something more. Something was taking root inside of me, something that letters alone could not sustain. Its roots dug deep. I flipped over onto my stomach and stuffed my face into the pillow, thinking about Kojima in the undulating darkness.
“The memory stood on my chest”! The writing style, jaded and wondrous, reminded me of another book about a bullied teen, Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, in which a shunned kid by the name of Oskar falls deeply in love with a vampire called Eli. Of course that one is supernatural, but maybe there is something about teenage magic that is always supernatural in origin.
Did you read any good translations this year? Tell me about them — I want to consume more translation next year. Also, next letter will be about poetry; I owe my time, since this one exclusively featured prose.
Happy new year, and thanks for following along. I appreciate your time and energy.
Thanks for reading 🥰