An era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.
Witte surveys our apocalyptic times in this poetry collection.
The title of this collection became a kind of slogan during the Covid pandemic. Simultaneously evoking the variable danger of the virus and the uncertain institutional response to it, the newly ubiquitous phrase heralded a suspension of normal life, explaining why we must no longer go near one another. As the speaker riffs in the title poem, “Proceed as if on shattered glass / around suspicious passersby / eyeing each other’s mask and gloves, / give way or cross the street devoid / of traffic, nowhere to commute, / on holiday but isolate.” Rather than presenting such furtiveness as a freakish deviation from the normal, the author suggests that these behaviors are more or less par for the course; in his view, humans tend toward defensiveness, reticence, hesitancy, and self-isolation. “Necks bow in unison, / alone,” begins “Who What When Where Why”; “At church or phone / in urgent prayer, awaiting / word: when and where / dread happens.” “Reap” begins in a damning, near-biblical register: “We sing what we have sown low voices hushed / in hope and shame before whatever ear / might listen in excuses salting praise / as meat is seasoned to devour as we / devour our kind…” There’s an omniscience to the poems that allows the speaker to fade into the background. Witte seems more interested in writing about the collective than the specific individual; in these poems, people are specters, shadows, whispers, shuffling forms who crowd and dissipate, witness and conspire. They move in a landscape dotted with the husks of cicada nymphs, dead birds, decapitated snakes, and underfed zoo animals. The apocalypse is here, brought on not so much by dystopian technology or a ravaged climate as by our own inability to be with one another.
The lacuna-filled verses read—in the best way—like they were written 80 years ago. The poet’s incredible attention to image and rhythm and insistence upon the exact right word create an incantatory sense of inevitability. In “Back of the Napkin,” the speaker delivers some climate math in a latter-day Domesday Book: “Assuming seven years the balance / tips both poles collapse so / oceans fall like hungry ghosts / upon our grain and property / then figure fifty give or / take’s when nothing stays sun / surveilling what it lasers off / infernos roam the highland….” It’s a slightly antiquated, modernist sensibility, but it perfectly captures something of the very recent past—the late Trump/early Covid era. When a more individualized speaker appears in the book’s final section, the reader has a sense that it’s too late, that everything has already been lost. There’s a historian’s resignation to it all, a sense that the last man is scribbling down the final observations about a civilization on the brink of collapse: “Above damp sand trash whirls like restless souls. / Warm humid afterbreath floods ventricles / with suffocating ease. I think we’re done.”
An era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780991378067
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sullivan, winner of Milkweed's 1996 National Fiction Prize for her fifth novel, this follow-up to The Cape Ann (1988), limns with discerning sympathy the struggle of a young girl to escape the terrible toll of a mother's mental illness. The story is set once again in the small town of Harvester, Minnesota; the time now is the mid-1930s, when Sally Wheeler's mother Stella begins having crying spells. She cries when Sally enters kindergarten, she cries in department stores, she cries over anything remotely sad. By the age of seven, Sally resolves that she will never cry as long as she lives. And while her mother gets worse, sinking farther and farther into a depression blamed on menopause, Sally struggles to live a normal life. Sullivan's insights into a child's desperate need for normality and acceptance give immediacy to her story. Close friends like Lark and Beverly- -characters from The Cape Ann—help, as do adults like Lark's mother Arlene Erhart and the widowed Mrs. Stillman and her shell- shocked son Hillyard. Grandparents are loving and attentive, and so is father Donald, but nothing can compensate Sally for her mother's worsening condition. Stella is eventually hospitalized; Sally and her father become the subjects of local prejudice; and, as Sally moves on to high school, these pressures take their toll: Her grades decline, she begins sleeping with boys, and she becomes involved with pathologically possessive Cole Barnstable. A drama teacher, recognizing her acting ability, helps her find some contentment, but when he dies in an accident, Sally falls apart, retreating into herself and cleaning house obsessively, although good friends do come through. Finally encouraged to realize her talents, Sally writes and stars in the ``The Kingdom of Making Sense,'' a play celebrating a place ``where everything is possible, for sadness rarely lasts beyond an hour.'' A perceptive and refreshingly unsensational account, if at times too slowly paced, of a child's determination to claim and affirm life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57131-011-8
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language...
The first novel in English from one of the most important writers in Urdu, an Indian-born author (The Weary Generations, 1999) virtually unknown in the West. That should change.
The story is narrated alternately by Amir, an illegal immigrant in Birmingham, and by his teenaged daughter Parvin, who, having come to England at five, is struggling between the traditional expectations of her father and her desire to enter into the life of her adopted country. Adding drama are the time-shifts between Amir’s first coming to Birmingham and the present, when he is a legal homeowner but nevertheless engaged in a running battle with his wife and children, who have little idea of his struggles to give them a new and better life. It’s a conflict that brings to mind such writers as Henry Roth and Roth’s vivid images of the Lower East Side, as well as V.S. Naipaul with his tales of Indian immigrants in the Caribbean. But, while Abdullah does not suffer from such comparisons, his novel is unique in its depiction of a particular kind of suffering in what most of us consider a civilized country. Unforgettable, for example, is Amir’s memory of living in a house with eight other Pakistanis and his description of their absolute terror at being discovered by the authorities. One of the men finds a lover named Mary, who gets pregnant and later becomes the catalyst for a violent struggle that will break up the group home and force Amir and the others out on their own. After much difficulty, Amir becomes a British citizen, gets a job at the post office, and buys his own home. His dreams are realized, yet he doesn’t do nearly so well with his wife, daughter or son, all in different ways rejecting their father and the life he has chosen for them.
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language can be awkward. But altogether Émigré Journeys is a remarkable performance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85242-638-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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