Editors’ Picks: Books for Our Current Moment
This month, members of the Review’s Editorial Board have compiled a variety of contemporary books that speak to our individual as well as our collective realities. During this moment of political, environmental, and cultural upheaval, literature has increasingly provided a site for resistance and joy, and we hope that our picks reflect the role that books have had in creating visions of the future and meditations upon the past.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Jericho Brown portrays an America wracked by violence against Black people but also filled with Black queer joy, art, love, and desire. These various “traditions” intertwine throughout Brown’s poems, where one speaker’s religion is “his long black hair” and another describes the “bullet points” a cop would shoot into his brain, where one can both observe rabbits—“furry little delights fucking / In my own front yard”—and remember how, working in the garden, “men like me and my brothers filmed what we / Planted for proof we existed before / Too late…” His poetry provides far more than “proof we existed”: it conjures heartbreaking beauty and reinvents tradition, merging the poetic forms of sonnet, ghazal, and blues in his creation of the “duplex.” “I begin with love, hoping to end there,” starts one duplex, and Brown takes his readers along with him on this journey, writing with love and urgency, “set on something vast.”
(Also, a quick plug for a reading by Brown at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 11, sponsored by the Cooper Series, the Sager Fund, and the English Department! We’ll send a Zoom link soon, and there’s a Facebook event here.)
— Reuben Gelley Newman, Fiction & Poetry Editor
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, 2019)
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado was hands down one of the best books I read over winter break. The memoir, a follow-up to her stunning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, chronicles Machado’s abusive relationship with a woman in her MFA program. But, unlike other memoirs told in first person, Machado uses the second person, referring to her victimized self and the reader as “you.” This choice forces the reader to identify with a victim of domestic violence, but in a much larger way it also forces the reader to understand that domestic violence is not contained to heterosexual relationships; Machado wants us to know that violence can exist in queer relationships, and victims deserve the space to talk about it.
This book does give space to talk about domestic violence in lesbian relationships, but it is also a testiment to healing from domestic abuse as well as how to cope with trauma without belittling it as “not that bad.” Machado’s abuse was not physical, and so throughout the book she questions the legitimacy of her experience and at times wishes for physical proof of the abuse so that she could stop questioning. She says, “You have this fantasy, this fucked up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsating star. [...] Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.” Many survivors of violence doubt themselves, and Machado tells her reader that it is okay to do so. It is okay to want proof and explore thoughts you might be ashamed of, because acknowledging that want is part of healing.
— Elisabeth Miller, Books Editor
Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy (Harper Collins, 2018)
Akil Kumarasamy’s debut collection Half Gods contains ten interconnected short stories that roam across generations, continents, and eras, with an immigrant Sri Lankan family living in America centered at its stony, darkened pit. Both tender and jagged, these stories are a stunning examination of home: what it means to be home, how home can break us, how home can hold us, how home can elude us. Something that stood out to me was Kumarasamy’s bringing of different lands into dialogue with each other: from a terraced tea plantation in Sri Lanka, thick with rain and koel birds, to the muddy tulip bulbs and cigarette smoke of suburban New Jersey, the intersections of our personal, political, and geographical histories felt at once ephemeral and ingrained. What do we do with the wars that have ravaged our bodies and lands? Have they crept their way into our households over the decades? How do we name the cultural disarray and contradiction that lives within us? The unique generational nature of South Asian existence that Kumarasamy invokes feels close to a collective answer, her depiction of elders, ancestry, and mythology reassuring me that in so many ways, I’ve existed long before I was born.
— Anoushka Subbaiah, Movies/TV Editor
When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole (William Marrow Paperbacks, 2020).
In a departure from her typical romance novels, Alyssa Cole had me hooked in her thriller When No One is Watching. As I read about Brooklyn-born and raised Sydney Green’s struggles dealing with grief and a gentrifying neighborhood, I became deeply invested in Sydney’s life. I wanted the best for her, I was annoyed with her, I was fully on board with her journey. The beginning of the book—one that was spent introducing us to Sydney, her neighbors, and her neighborhood—mirrored aspects of my own experience growing up on the cusp of a gentrifying Harlem, allowing me to get caught up in the world-building as well as the similarities to my own life. When little things seemed amiss or strange I brushed them off, downplaying their importance. When tensions started to rise, I felt the paranoia. As Sydney tried to answer the question “where do people go when gentrification pushes them out?” I became just as disoriented and alarmed as her when things took a turn for the sinister. I was unsettled as I watched Sydney’s world veer off course after being tricked into a false sense of security. A book that deals with loss, community love and support, the haunting effects of gentrification, and more, I would definitely read When No One Is Watching again.
— Hope Darris, Personal Essays Editor