Calyx (Summer 2010, Issue Vol. 26 No. 1)

Serving as a forum for women’s creative work, Calyx, a literary journal of art and literature, has been publishing new, emerging and established female writers and artists for the last thirty-four years. The seventy-fifth issue celebrates Calyx’s success and progress, while showcasing the journal’s continued commitment to providing readers with an eclectic mix of poetry, short stories, photography, and other work.

Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Please read this book. If you were in any way inspired by the groundbreaking 2008 election of President Barack Obama, you will find an essay in Who Should be First? that speaks what's been on your mind, challenges your way of thinking, causes you to feel frustrated, or represents the many complex emotions you felt on that historic day.

This – A Literary Webzine

Early this year, I began writing for Elevate Difference. Over the past few months, I have written more prolifically; built relationships with a handful of supportive, feminist artists; and above all, gained greater insight into my own writing through feedback from editors and readers. This – A Literary Webzine is another example of a space on the Internet that provides a forum for writers to produce and publish while joining a community of their peers. Created by Hollis University graduate Lacey N. Dunham, a former Elevate Difference contributor, This zine employs a volunteer group of editors and seeks submissions from a variety of genres.

Living in the End Times

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place

I felt deeply uncomfortable while reading Clare Cooper Marcus’ Iona Dreaming. Too uncomfortable, I thought—like eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation with a long-lost friend.

Crow Mercies

When picking up a new poetry collection, I give it an initial read and then sit with it a while, thinking about whether any particular poems or lines stuck in my mind, or whether I had any specific feelings while reading. Sometimes I draw a big blank, which usually means that particular collection doesn't merit another read. Collections like Crow Mercies are different. Even during my first reading of this collection, I found myself stopping to reread poems again out of excitement. This is certainly the kind of book that ends up a permanent fixture on my bookshelf that I come back to again and again.

You Have Given Me a Country

At the beginning of You Have Given Me a Country, author Neela Vaswani writes, “What follows is real, and imagined.” Thus begins Vaswani's memoir, a dreamy collection of reflections on her family's multiracial, multinational history. Ashok Vaswani, Neela's father, was born in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan) before the cataclysm of Partition. As a toddler, Ashok fled with his family to the new state of India, where his father found a job as a traveling railroad physician. Later, Ashok traveled to the US to practice medicine and to leave behind a tense postwar economy and a family that had fractured under the pressure of exile. “To my father, nationality was fickle, unreliable,” writes Neela. “My father said, 'Homeland is in the body,' and 'Land is in the blood.'”

Tough Skin

In this collection of prose poetry, Sarah Eaton takes her reader on a wild romp, stomping through delicate issues of incest, death, and the family with the care that might be accorded by a child as it destroys a garden of hitherto well-tended flowers. While she brings a dark sense of humour to themes that might more traditionally be described as horrific, she also manages to litter her gory stories with surprisingly familiar and endearing characters such as the drunken uncle, or the teenage candystriper (hospital worker, for the uninitiated). What strikes me as most interesting about this collection is not her dark humour, but how this approach is particularly effective at handling what seems to be the overarching theme of the book: care-work and the people who do it. Eaton’s world is one that exists on the edge of violence, which some might say is also where the work of care exists.

Granta 112: Pakistan

I was not looking forward to the new issue of Granta on Pakistan. I worried about opening it and finding it looked like some compendium of war reportage. But what I saw when I opened the envelope made me laugh, and it has been a long time since anything about my home country has done that.

She's Gone Country

When I received Jane Porter’s second novel, I’d been sick in bed for nearly two weeks. Though the book helped pass the time, it did little to hold my interest. From this reviewer’s perspective, a true test of a novel’s worth can be answered with one simple question: Would I buy this book?

The Night Bookmobile

I am new to the world of graphic novels and so is The Night Bookmobile’s author Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. According to the author, the book was inspired by a short H.G. Wells story and a dream she had as a teenager. In just thirty-three pages, Niffenegger manages to intrigue and captivate with the story of Alexandra, a young woman who gets into a fight with her live-in boyfriend and begins wandering the neighborhood in the dead of night hoping to blow off some steam. That’s when she comes across The Night Bookmobile, a mobile library run by Mr. Openshaw.

The Red Queen

Philippa Gregory’s most recent work of historical fiction, The Red Queen, describes the bloody War of the Roses from the perspective of Margaret Beaufort, a member of the house of Lancaster and, perhaps most famously, grandmother to Henry VIII. Gregory’s second book in the Cousins’ War series, The Red Queen serves as a foil to The White Queen, which presented the war from the perspective of the York Queen Elizabeth Woodville.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance

Beginning at a Halloween-themed singles dance for Mormon adults in the tristate area (the party referenced in the title of her novel) a Queen-Bee-costumed Elna Baker sets the scene for the spiritually-infused existential struggles that are soon to come. Although the attendees are adults, the event aches of prepubescent awkwardness and is plagued by the same maladies that afflict these preteen school functions: forced sobriety, abysmal music, sex-segregated clustering, embarrassing encounters with couples dancing, and sanctified social hierarchy.

Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

In a book about race, class and cultural differences, the author argues that a global common culture focused on human rights may be emerging. Proving an excellent example of the gulf between academics and activists, research and experience, the book’s reader strains through reams of multi-syllable words, only to confront a mass of contradictions and confusions, statements unsupported by facts or logic, and conclusions that are unfair or just plain wrong. The author analyzes race and caste and claims that we are reminded daily that we live in a post-racial world.