Jo Ristow

The Cosmopolitans

gwen — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman is the story of a family of Russian immigrants reconciling their illusions of America with the reality of life in Stamford, Connecticut. Osip and Stalina are the patriarchs of the Molochnik clan, holding sway over a house of three daughters—Milla, Yana, and Katya—and Pratik, an exchange student from Bangladesh. The novel works almost like a series of short stories, revolving around vignettes wherein each character is given his or her turn to be featured as the centerpiece of the marriage. The reader is guided through the years, watching as the family expands and contracts in a halting, non-linear manner, almost as in a time lapse movie: there are marriages, births, departures, and reunions as the Molochniks struggle individually and collectively to align their real-life trajectories with their American dreams. Throughout, Kalman conjures comic and tragic scenes that are authentic and universal in their emotion but are simultaneously particular and novel in their portrayal.

For instance, Milla’s well-meaning but resoundingly immature husband, Malcom, awakes the day after his wedding and “felt around for his doubts, which he’d discussed at such length with his family, professor, this Buddhist guy who hung around New Haven selling stemless carnations, his dentist, and this girl from high school he’d run into at the drugstore. Miraculously, they’d disappeared... His love for Milla was a stable, growing love, a love like moss.”

The story is also shot through with surrealist, or perhaps magic-realist, qualities. Stalina is in possession of an heirloom handkerchief that speaks to her as the Russian Soul, chastising her when she strays too far from the ideals of Mother Russia. There is also the fact that Katya, the youngest Molochnik daughter, tends to involuntary quote the decidedly masculine voice of Leonid Brezhnev, much to her dismay. The family members’ reactions to her channeling of the Communist leader reveal much about their characters: Osip believes it is a habit of Katya’s that reveals her good mood; Stalina is sure it is a curse she brought upon her daughter because of a long buried secret; Katya herself tries to escape the voice in any way possible. It’s amazing how believable these fantastical turns are in the capable hands of Kalman, who admits that, “as I wrote, I heard the voices of my immigrant family, who spin happy stories out of sad histories and create cautionary tales out of seeming triumphs, and who taught me not to take anything at face value.”

In fact, reading The Cosmopolitans feels a bit like meeting a rambunctious group of strangers for the first time. First impressions may inspire skepticism, as their quirks stand out as oddities that are jarring and unfamiliar. However, with time and proximity, these characters become beloved, their quirks endearing and indulged. Indeed, they come to feel like family.

Written by: Jo Ristow, March 21st 2011

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

barbara — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Heidi W. Durrow

Algonquin Books

Heidi W. Durrow’s novel swirls out from and obsessively around the moment when a mother and her three children fall from the rooftop of a Chicago building. The narration crystalizes around this striking event, with multiple narrators adding their points of view to the interpretation of the mystery surrounding the plunge. Rachel, the sole survivor, struggles to adjust to the losses and changed that characterize her life after the fall. Brick witnesses the family tumbling from the rooftop, mistaking the plummeting bodies for birds. Laronne is the former employer of Nella, Rachel’s mother, and is charged with sorting through the aftermath of the tragedy, trying to make sense of the event through only what fragments of the family is left behind: their belongings and their story, with its embellishments and rumors.

Like Laronne, the reader has to piece together the fractured picture of that day. Many pivotal characters stay on the periphery, darting in and out of the narrative through memories or secondhand accounts: Rachel’s father makes his voice heard through one chapter and through his encounters with Jamie; Nella speaks through her diaries, chronicling her journey towards sobriety; Rachel’s siblings are muted, as is the man that convinced Nella to leave her husband behind and move to Chicago to pursue a new life. The true story of what happened on that roof is elusive and evolving.

With such a startling and intriguing premise, Durrow still manages to shift the focus and drama of the story to Rachel’s life after the fall. The young girl not only tries to come to terms with her mother’s motives, her father’s distance, and her brothers’ deaths, but also tries to fit into a new culture that is at best dubious about her blue eyes and mixed race. Rachel seeks to establish herself as a “new girl,” with a new start after her the deaths of her brothers and mother, but finds she cannot escape from who she was and can only try to shape who she will become.

Durrow is a talented and eloquent storyteller. The metaphor of flight, both as flying and fleeing, is satisfyingly woven throughout the novel as the thread that unites characters and revelations. Durrow creates a affecting and personal portrait of a girl growing up in a world that expects her to define herself as either black or white, a stark decision she’s never considered and that makes her feel she is betraying the memory of her mother or the culture of her father and grandmother. Durrow’s novel deftly explores the idea that there is no singularity of truth, self-identity, or survival.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 20th 2010

The Fatigue Prescription: Four Steps to Renewing Your Energy, Health, and Life

beth — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Linda Hawes Clever, MD

Viva Editions

In the style of many self-help books, Linda Hawes Clever, MD, is a product of and a subscriber to the program of renewal that she presents in her book. In the span of eighteen months, the physician endured the death of her parents, a home burglary, the loss of two jobs, and her husband’s cancer diagnosis. In the process of dealing with the impact of these traumatic events, Clever reached out to others who were interested in revamping their own lifestyles and ended up founding RENEW, a not-for-profit that “aims to help busy, devoted people sustain or regain enthusiasm, effectiveness, meaning and, yes, joy.” The Fatigue Prescription: Four Steps to Renewing Your Energy, Health, and Life brings together Clever's experience from her ten years of heading up the company and laying out a four pronged plan to recapture energy and motivation. Whether stress and fatigue stem from life-altering events or just daily life itself, Clever’s thorough, warm-hearted guide is intended to give readers the tools to ditch their ruts and find their groove.

Clever's writing is persistently optimistic and quippy. The book is brimming with quotables from both the author and other sources as diverse as Langston Hughes, South Pacific, Rumi, and Wendell Berry. The requisite checklists and brainstorming questions are laced with good humor. Clever's voice is a strong selling point for her The Fatigue Prescription. It makes you feel taken care of—you can tell Clever is a doctor with a warm and friendly bedside manner.

In fact, Clever's profession shapes her recommendations in many ways, bringing a unique and holistic focus to her prescription for better living. She includes extensive sections about taking care of your body and brain and backs up her advice by referencing, in plain English, various medical studies including a fascinating study about possible links between longevity and positive attitudes.

However, the book is still plagued by some of the familiar demons of the self-help genre. While Clever tries to keep things simple by outlining four steps to a fatigue remedy, the book wanders from this premise and spins new jargon that can get confusing: there are renew-o-meters, buff-o-meters, and three kinds of “buckets” for your self-esteem, worthiness, and energy. Also, the prescription metaphor, while catchy, doesn’t quite work to describe Clever's approach accurately and has to undergo some complex contortions to try to encompass all of the recommendations put forth by the author.

The Fatigue Prescription does offer inroads to making a change and plenty of positive affirmations. Clever writes a prescription for combating fatigue but she acknowledges that it’s not a magic pill you can pop and forget about. Her approach engages the reader in intense reflection and reevaluation of fundamental values and priorities in order to begin the journey towards rediscovering lost energy.

Written by: Jo Ristow, October 13th 2010

Thin Kimono

caitlin — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Michael Earl Craig

Wave Books

Michael Earl Craig wants you to know something: he's glad he's not a poet. He is a Certified Journeyman Farrier who says, “Every now and then I wonder if I fucked up with this horseshoeing thing, but then I talk with my friends in academia and, well, I’m okay with my choices.” So yes, he does write poetry, and may even author a volume or two, but he’s not a poet.

Thin Kimono is one of those volumes. Some of the pieces within read like slightly cracked, modern versions of William Carlos Williams’ prescription pad musings. Others read like skewerings of the absurdity of twenty-first century living, where plane rides and acupuncturist visits reveal that “people fall into two categories: Doonesbury or Far Side./ Well, or Andy Capp. Andy Capp type people./ They’re everywhere.” All are written in plain language that cobbles together a patchwork of ideas, concepts and images culled by Craig from ordinary encounters and events. While he contends that his readers can be dumb and still understand his poetry, Craig creates a complex, absurd world by isolating and examining the smallest details of daily life around him, presenting them together like a coveted, surreal menagerie.

But wait: Craig also wants you to know that he is not a surrealist. In “Poem,” he admonishes: “To those people who are always talking about ‘surrealism’/ can I suggest you open your fucking eyes?/ If you do this, you will see mothballs./ And a green nightgown.” However, I would argue that surrealism is nothing more than an intensely peculiar and personal interpretation of reality. Craig walks like an alien among us, with new eyes for the world and his craft, remote from the process and conventions that typify modern poetics. Sometimes this results in pieces that read like inside jokes – his more unsuccessful poems feel a little “you-had-to-be-there.”

The majority of the poems tantalize with their ability to look deeply into the archetypes and absurdity of this, our modern way of life. Craig himself winks at us in these successes: his “Advice for the Poet” is typical of his verse, tersely recommending: “Never aim your bicycle at a chicken./ Never set your glasses on an anvil.” However, his real advice seems to come from an Albert Einstein quote he uses twice in the volume: “‘Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.’“ In Craig’s poetry, something is hidden; meaning lurks in the periphery and skitters away when you look at it directly. He doesn’t truss up a take-home message for his readers but the hunt itself is invigorating. For someone who isn’t a poet, he sure does a mean imitation of one.

Written by: Jo Ristow, September 26th 2010

Seedlip and Sweet Apple: Poems

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Arra Lynn Ross

Milkweed Editions

Seedlip and Sweet Apple is a poetry collection that blooms with the voice and life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect deemed the Shakers for their prayerful and "ecstatic" dance. Her followers eschew marriage and reproduction, living in brotherly and sisterly communities devoted to harmony and God. The author, Arra Lynn Ross, has created a cohesive story that will capture you even if you have the barest knowledge of the real life of the religious leader. (For those of you who do want to do some prep work, you can gain reference from the PBS site American Stories, or even Wikipedia.)

In such a slim volume, there is so much depth. Ross plays with form and function, mixing prose with poetry, shaping Revolution-era newspaper articles into stanzas and weaving together bits of Gospels, Shaker writings, William Blake and even Sappho into the Mother Ann's narrative. The notes at the end of the book are a must-read, as they help the reader engage and decode the poetry even further. She also provides a list of her source material, and by the end of the reading, the reader may be tempted to read more on this incredible historical figure.

The poems themselves shine alone (in fact, "Mother Ann Tells Lucy What Gave Her Joy" was featured by the American Academy of Poets as a Poem-A-Day in March, a well-deserved honor). As a collection, the poems form an intense meditation on intimacy. It examines the relationship between lovers, siblings, and a believer and her faith. There are moments of breathtaking intimacy, where the reader feels almost intrusive in the moments of revelation. In "Abraham Left Me on a Thursday," Ross captures at once the joy and loss of the dissolution of Mother Ann's arranged marriage:

"They'll say he was a bad man, but I know how hard it is to live with God. In the flesh, in the flesh, where are you Ann? You're a spirit banging at your own rib cage. [...] he danced me across the room, laughing, the heat from his grip burning my side. I shook my head, No, Abraham, no, and he stumbled. We fell sideways to the floor, tangled, my cheekbone pressed to the wing of his shoulder, the rough weave of his hemp shirt. I could smell sweat soaking the cloth, strong with fear and sadness."

Ross doesn't canonize Mother Ann. Instead, she reveals the human being she was, rife with complex paradoxes: disgust and love, fervor and patience, the dichotomy of the spiritual and corporeal entities. It's a work powerful in voice and craft.

I also want to take a few words to acknowledge the Milkweed Editions, the non-profit publisher of Seedlip and Sweet Apple. I worked briefly in the world of publishing and am compelled to spread their message: "Milkweed Editions publishes with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a transformative art uniquely able to convey the essential experiences of the human heart and spirit. In an increasingly consolidated and bottom-line driven publishing world, [the reader's] support allows [Milkweed Editions] to select and publish books on the basis of their literary quality and message." If you care about the value of our national literature, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is well worth the investment.

Written by: Jo Ristow, July 16th 2010

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Maxine Kumin

W.W. Norton

It’s truly a shame that poetry is so often thought of as inaccessible, hopelessly and purposefully snarled with obscurity and flabby with rococo intellectualism. Great poetry should work on many levels, and thus appeal to a wide audience from those who appreciate it for its pure beauty and those that delight the complexity of further analysis. Maxine Kumin is a poet whose entire oeuvre is rooted in what she knows: her farm in New Hampshire, where she works in the ground, keeps horses. Her poetry is the dirt, it is the food scrap, it is the snort of horses, but she makes these mundane details peal out their secret beauty; she makes them transcendental.

Where I Live is a collection of poems that spans two decades of the poet’s illustrious career, which includes a Pulitzer Prize, a stint as Poet Laureate of the United States and countless other honors. The collection allows a reader to follow along with the contours of Kumin’s life. As with any life, there are personal and cultural landmarks, some common and others not so: marriage, giving birth, creating a home, a broken neck suffered by falling from a horse at age seventy-three, the death of a close friend, Anne Sexton. All are contemplated with a true, ringing voice and simple grace.

More interestingly, though, are those elements held constant. Kumin’s love for nature and animals alternately stings and sings. The reader can also feel her all-consuming vitriol for those who mistreat land and beast alike:

Damn all of you with dumpsters.
Damn all who do not compost.
Damn all who tie their dogs out
on bare ground, without water.
Damn all who debeak chickens
and all who eat them, damn
CEOs with bonuses, corporate jets, trophy wives.

Her poems of celebration are absolutely reverent: in an ode to her garden plants, she writes, “O children, citizens, my wayward jungly dears/you are all to be celebrated/plucked, transplanted, tilled under, resurrected here […] For all of you, whether eaten or extirpated/I plan to spend the rest of my life on my knees.”

It is from this celebratory spirit that she approaches her craft, too, referencing and playing with other poets, taunting and engaging them in her own verse. Her belief in the healing and cleansing power of composting and mucking out and gardening easily becomes a metaphor for her own work as a poet. Her exhilaration for both nature and language sustain one another; in fact, they feed one another, and Kumin, in her eighties, has much fertile land left to till.

Written by: Jo Ristow, March 19th 2010

Picara

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

By Pat MacEnulty

Livingston Press

Here’s the truth: right up front I judged Picara by its cover. The cover, a photo of a young girl sitting on a rail guard with a sideways gaze and unreadable emotion on her face, conjured up one word in my mind: Angst. Well, two words: Teenage angst. Having lately been exhausted by over-publicized Twi-hard* Sturm und Drang, I was anticipating a broken, lonely adolescent heart coupled with an empty highway metaphor to round out the cliché. Sans vampires, though.

I was wrong—about the angst part, not the “no vampires” part.

Eli Burnes is not your typical hurting heroine. For one, she was raised by her opera singing step-grandmother, Mattie, and their family maid, Miz Johnny. Her parents are not around; Mattie stole Eli away from her alcoholic mother when Eli was only two, and her father, Willie, has started a life as an anti-war activist in Missouri, light years away from the sheltered life Eli lives in Georgia under the doting care of Mattie and her cadre of opera friends. Many nights, she falls asleep under the piano listening to their voices, singing, and laughter.

However, when Mattie succumbs to cancer, Eli is faced with starting over. Unable to imagine life with her father and his other family, Eli takes off with a draft-dodging friend to try her luck in Canada. When plans go awry, Eli has only her insight and instincts to find herself a home.

MacEnulty does a wonderful job of capturing the dichotomous cultural forces at work in Eli’s travels, which are set mainly in the ’70s. She portrays the warmth and hospitality of the South alongside the escalating tension and violence of race relations there. She captures the hippies’ ideals of love and peace, but doesn’t shy from the bitterness of their resistance against the government and the war. Throughout, Eli provides a wide-eyed yet remarkably sage witness to race riots, Woodstock, and political turmoil.

My main qualm with the book is the fact that Eli is so perceptive and mature that it seems to belie her age (and hormones, in the case with her first boyfriend, Zen). In general, though, I welcomed her insight and, at times, marveled at their beauty. For example, when a friend tried unsuccessfully to kill herself, Eli reflects: “I wondered why she wanted to die. True, life was sad, but there was something nice about its sadness, something good enough to make you want to wake up and be sad for a little more.”

Yes, she is an adolescent, and yes, her life is characterized by loneliness and loss, but Eli’s resilience, levelheadedness, and knack for linking up with quirky, interesting folks helps this road trip novel escape most of the truisms associated with the genre.

Don’t hate, Twilight fans. I’ve got nothing against you. I just feel like there has been pale, undead bathos everywhere I turn as of late.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 5th 2009

The Richest Season

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:28:00 +0000

By Maryann McFadden

Hyperion

The Richest Season is a familiar tale to any romance reader, occasional or obsessive: a wife and mother, disillusioned with her compressed, tepid worldview and identity, flees to an exotic locale in order to find herself. In this case, the wife and mother in question is Joanna Harrison. An empty nester with a distant corporate husband, she spontaneously decides to run away to a new life on Pawleys Island. She becomes a caretaker of an ailing older woman, Grace, meets some colorful local characters and begins to get in touch with—well, the story unfolds predictably from there.

McFadden does throw in a few surprising garnishes along the way. Grace, the older woman with a terminal illness, is one; her story has some interesting parallels to Joanna’s as Grace struggles to come to terms with her death and life. Paul, the husband left behind, also plays a surprisingly large role in the book, with his own chapters of narrative that give him some complexity and humanity. There is also a pleasing metaphor centering on the migration habits of mother sea turtles; however, the book doesn’t venture much outside its own comfort zone.

Some books take over your life from the first page. You spend your days either reading them or halfheartedly going through the motions while yearning to be reading them. Then there are books that fit into the cracks of your life, filling it up the days instead of consuming them. These books are read in odd snippets, right before bed or while waiting for toast to pop up or whenever it’s within grabbing distance and the time is right. The Richest Season, is of the second species. It’s entertaining enough to pass the time with while waiting for the sauce to thicken or while brushing your teeth. It won’t keep you breathlessly awake until you read the last word, but you will drift off to sleep with a warm heart and quiet mind, confident in happy endings.

** Sometimes we accidentally duplicate a review. What can we say? Perfection is an illusion. Click here for another Feminist Review writer's vantage point on The Richest Season.**

Written by: Jo Ristow, October 4th 2009

Mudbound

admin — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:04:00 +0000

By Hillary Jordan

Algonquin Books

Mudbound, the first novel by Hillary Jordan, is all about tension. Race, family, marriage, class, identity are all buzzing, pressing in the narrative, and all of them feed into the greatest tension of all: the classic survival story of man versus nature.

The first few pages describe two brothers scrambling to dig a makeshift grave ahead of an impending storm. This scene sets the tone and becomes, in many ways, a vivid metaphor for the entire narrative. The characters are constantly battling to stay one step ahead of the novel’s tragic but inevitable conclusion.

Henry McAllan, a man bent on making a living out of a scrap of land, moves his wife, their two young daughters, and his elderly father from their home in Memphis to a farm on the Mississippi Delta. Laura, Henry’s wife and the main narrator, feels dismayed and demoralized by every aspect of farm life—from the shack that the family lives in, to their strong-willed black sharecropping family, to Henry’s preferential love of the land she hates. Worst of all is Henry’s bigoted, cantankerous father who makes the family’s life miserable in every way he can.

Jamie, Henry’s handsome younger brother, soon arrives home from fighting in World War II. Jamie is winsome and charming, but troubled. Seemingly too caught up in his war memories to recognize the perils of the post-war South, he befriends Ronsel, the son of the McAllan’s sharecroppers, and he watches as Laura falls in love with the idea of saving him from his inner demons. Jordan does a good job of heightening drama by fracturing the storyline with the multiple narrators (each character narrates individual chapters, a la As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner). She also does a remarkable job of creating characters that speak with languid Southern drawl while at the same time keeping the plot tight and tense.

The comparisons to As I Lay Dying are inevitable. Even Jordan, in an interview with NPR](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067973225X?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=067973225X), makes the connection, if a bit uncomfortably. It’s difficult to invoke a heavyweight classic and not be measured against it, and it seems that this sort of inspection often doesn’t bode well for the new challenger.

An in-depth analysis could be interesting: both books have thematic similarities as well as multiple narrators, cantankerous patriarchs or matriarchs that burden their families even in death, wild rivers, class tensions and even unusual and affecting descriptions of the sounds of coffins: scrubbing of lathes, banging of nails. The McAllans achieve a bit more closure and happiness than their Faulknerian counterparts, and the lives of Addie Bundren and Laura have many parallels. However, it’s implied that Laura finds more vindication in motherhood and may even gain respect and understanding for her stolid husband. Although this isn’t exactly empowerment, it’s a version of a happy ending.

In side-by-side scrutiny, it’s a bit tempting to think of Jordan’s novel as Faulkner with less of that bitter aftertaste. Nonetheless, Mudbound holds its own by addressing universal and timeless themes with an emotional gravitas and a remarkably steady hand for a first time author.

Written by: Jo Ristow, July 22nd 2009

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New & Selected Poems

admin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:44:00 +0000

By Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Karen Van Dyck

Graywolf Press

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems presents compositions drawn from Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's extensive oeuvre and includes five new pieces. A native of Greece, Anghelaki-Rooke was the winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry is lusty; corporeal; and rooted in flesh, color and tactile sensation. Verse and prose both vibrate with descriptions of a lush and living Greece. At the same time, Anghelaki-Rooke's words reveal a preoccupation with the vacillating power dynamic between the tangible and the intangible. At one moment, the body is its own autonomous king reigning over the spirit, a mere prisoner within; the next, the soul reveals that it is the supreme animator of bone and blood.

Van Dyck has carefully chosen the translations in The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems, and acknowledges the fact that the author is “conjured” by a handful of different translators, providing the reader with a unique incarnation of the poet on nearly every page. The selected poetry spans Anghelaki-Rooke's career; the evolutionary cycles in her work create even more incarnations of the author. Van Dyck emphasizes a thread of voice that weaves itself through all of the poems, regardless of translation or time period. Anghelaki-Rooke's thoughtful, plush poems seem unharmed by their transition between languages. Whether this is due to the overwhelming voice of the author or the deft touch of the translators is arguable.

However, the real beauty lies in the differences between the poems. Case in point is the exploration of sex. Sex is grotesque and elicits feelings of squeamishness in the poem "Heat." Sex is transcendence in "When the Body" and annihilation in "My Plastic Thing." In fact, Van Dyck’s choice to use different translators (herself included) further emphasized with these contrasts. However, it would have been fascinating to see the same poem translated by an American living in Greece (Jane Assimakopoulos), a Greek living in America (Rae Dalven), a male scholar (Edmund Keeley) and a husband-and-wife team (Mary Keeley, wife to Edmund). It would have also been wise for Van Dyck to clearly note the date that Anghelaki-Rooke wrote each poem so that the readers could have appreciated the chronological differences in the compositions.

The weakest poems in the collection are those that invoke Penelope, wife of Odysseus, as a feminist figure. Despite the existence of works like The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, the famously faithful wife still seems a poor choice for a strong, independent heroine. Anghelaki-Rooke's strongest poems are those that deal with feminism in her own day-to-day life, not her re-imagining of Penelope’s long vigil.

As perhaps alluded to in the title of the collection, Anghelaki-Rooke's English-translated poems were previously scattered in small literature magazines and short runs. Here, they are united in a dynamic volume. Van Dyck's thoughtful compilation of her friend and colleague’s work is an enjoyable offering.

Written by: Jo Ristow, March 27th 2009