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Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.
Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.
These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.
Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.
Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.
Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.
When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.
Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.
Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.
In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”
Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.
Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.
*
I take as fact that the boundaries between art and the emotional-spiritual interior are entirely permeable. That is, I believe the same motifs that engine the most fundamental human queries—of love and death, moral orientation, the individual’s place and role in the world—also manifest themselves in the human creative endeavor. Gabrielle Bates’ debut collection, Judas Goat, through its title, situates itself firmly within this tradition, and does so in reference to the specific allegory of Judas Goat, the eponymous animal used to lead sheep to slaughter, but whose own life, in the process, is spared. The one animal that survives:
To the goat, / the shackling pen is no more than another human / room.
There is a brand of guilt particular to this paradigm, and without reading a single poem the reader is confronted with, and carries with them through the collection, an underlying feeling of survivor’s guilt.
I am too dying of what / I do not know.
No doubt, the stakes along the speaker’s road through and away from the American South—to one of those liberal cities on the coast—are of life and death. Bates’ work acknowledges the survivor’s guilt inherent in this departure, this leaving-behind of the born home and its definitional danger—that is, the distinctly Southern prejudices based, for example, on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—in favor of a community, a haven, in which to live and practice her art:
What the self forms around / cannot be undone.
And one way this collection makes felt the danger of its speaker’s journey is through the poems’ unflinching depictions of violence against humans as well as raw portrayals of animals being wounded and killed by humans. Sheep, of course, but also dogs, pigs, rabbits, cats, and cows are involved in scenes and images that neither comfort nor turn away, most often destabilizing or unsettling the speaker’s movement through a given poem:
My plan was to come back
and pet its pinky nose
but the dogs got to it that afternoon
and there was no stopping.You know, you know,
but what, you say,
is knowing to a mind
like mine, formed
around the sight
of a blood-drain in the floor?
These sequences, metrically attuned and understated, come off less as moral commentary (“hurting or killing animals is bad”) than as a vehicle for exploration into the speaker’s own violent experiences, particularly with men:
I think of the sentence
the boy (man?) said to me
while I lowered myself
to a frameless, twin size mattress:“your neck looks so breakable.”
And what of the God that allows such violence against women, against animals? Rooted as this collection is in scripture, one cannot experience these poems without eventually wondering about that same God who is stitched, however subtly or indirectly, into the seams of every piece in the collection:
God bless her, / look at her go, / God bless her
God bless the IUD, that little white anchor
Irish theologian and philosopher John Scotus Erigena said of the via negativa (the negative way) mode of reasoning, “We do not know what God is. God does not know what God is because God is not any created thing. Literally God is not, because God transcends being.” Imagine a painted portrait in which everything but the figure is painted, a figure defined by everything it is not. If we apply this framework to Bates’ collection, if the work is indeed a book-length via negativa (and I offer this as one of many possibilities)—who or what, can we say, is God? How do we define her?
Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?
I knew God listened. And I knew where to aim.
All the time, every second. I lacked
but with aim.
These lines are poised somewhere between longing and futility, hope and disheartenment; the effort to locate God is, perhaps, the effort to locate a future in which our speaker, in which all women, can live without the worn and specific fear of violence by men. A future carved from whatever remains of compassion, of love.
When I stopped begging to be believed / and started telling the truth, no man was there.
This collection is haunted by that future, by its possibility, by the chance it may never come.
Bates, with this debut, continues an aesthetic conversation populated by the work of such luminaries as Sylvia Plath (Ariel), Louise Glück (Wild Iris), and Mary Szybist (Incarnadine): American women poets writing towards an autonomy, a personal and artistic and sexual freedom long constrained by, among other patriarchal forces, the taboo of sentimentalism unevenly and unfairly scrutinized in the poetry of women.
One might, for example, hear in Bates’ speaker’s fraught but steady relationship with God the subversive and relentless interrogation of faith in Szybist’s Incarnadine (The holy will overshadow you / therefore be nothing) and in Glück’s Wild Iris (Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree . . . It was a test: if the tree lived, / it would mean you existed). In Bates’s refusal to turn from the daily violences that characterize heteronormative relationality one might recognize Plath, or perhaps an evolution from Plath, who tended toward allusion as opposed to direct reportage (Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss. / It is all Hollywood, windowless, / the fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine). Love and intimacy are handled in this collection neither by shirking sentimentalism nor by embracing it, but rather, it seems, by ignoring the historicized conversation around sentimentalism altogether. Romantic love is spoken of right next to platonic love, and these are written as inextricably connected to pain and suffering and violence—a tapestry, ultimately, of the human condition.
The voice in Bates’ poems, ever measured and inquisitive, steadfast and somber, lends ballast to her aforementioned poetic lineage, a sense that beneath the longing and the hurt and the search for answers, there is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.
Gabrielle Bates is a poet we’ll be reading for a very long time. Eyes forward, one hand always behind, bringing history in from the shadows, Bates offers in her poems lessons on how to move forward toward health and safety, and a thriving creative and emotional-spiritual interior, without letting go of who we are and where we came from, painful though it can be to bring ourselves, fully, into the light.
***
Kathryn Scanlan is a master of distilling found truths into compelling fictions. In her first novel, Aug 9 – Fog, she artfully conjures a singular portrait of life-sized ordinariness by rearranging fragments from a diary, once belonging to an eighty-six-year-old woman, that she found in an estate sale in rural Illinois. In The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty haunting pieces of flash fiction, she strips our experience of being human down to its essential eeriness and basest cruelties. Now, with Kick the Latch—her second novel and likely most propulsive work to date—Scanlan once again brings to light the touching strangeness of everyday mundanity, offering herself up as the medium for a midwestern woman named Sonia whose real-life experiences as a horse trainer are here presented as a fictionalized account of brutality, camaraderie, toil, and trouble on the racetracks.
Written in short, vignette-length chapters, Kick the Latch follows Sonia from the setback of her birth in 1962, when she came into the world with a dislocated hip and a doctor’s prescription for a lifelong impairment—”turned out I could walk”—into the contentment of a middle age that follows only a fulfilled, well-loved youth. In the course of just over a hundred and sixty pages, it bites clean through the flesh of her experience and into the rind, journeying across the development of her passion for horses and the adolescent years of mucking at local stables; through training, hungrily, at the provincial tracks leading to the wealthy realms of the Florida racing circuit; and into the quieter years of a present spent as a correctional officer and flea market vendor.
Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar. Describing an episode where a jockey breaks into her trailer and rapes her—a seventeen-year-old and an apprentice—at gunpoint, she presents, bluntly and stoically, her decision to keep her silence and her job. “I knew exactly who it was, it was bad, but anyway I survived. I cut my hair real short after that.”
Later, when speaking of a friend who broke her neck while galloping a young pony, or another who jokingly told her of his plans to kill himself before doing exactly that, or even the accident that sent her own body “bottom of the pile” on the racetrack and into a long coma, she foregoes all shows of sentimentality to paint a picture of just what life was. Her matter-of-factness belies any notes of repression, coming off instead as expressive of a particular way of life where pain is commonplace and not allowed to gain authority. It happens to the horses and it happens to the people around them, “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hot walkers, everybody”—all part of the business.
Such consideration of trauma—as mere happenstance rather than a defining feature of life—may be used to obscure a character’s emotional landscape elsewhere in literature. However, in Kick the Latch, it bolsters our reading of Sonia as an individual, and of the things she holds dear. Though she speaks with brevity her eye is unsparing. Her words, too, flow as if in an intimate conversation she is having with us, so that from amidst her recollections of the violence of the jockeys and the punishing hours of work, the dilapidated trailers and threatening motels, the injured animals taken out back, and the names and faces who disappear forever emerges a sprightly image of tenderness: of the community that formed around her “racetrack family,” all eating together, and frequenting the same stores, laundromats, pubs, and bars—they even had a band—and of the horses who, according to her own claims, were the ones that “raised her.” Pain may be everywhere in the rugged landscape she inhabits, but so is compassion—and we, as readers, do not ever have to go looking for it.
Indeed, it is because of Sonia’s spareness and not despite it that her story appears to unspool itself with such honesty and intricacy in the readers’ consciousness. She emerges through these pages as a sort of figurehead for authenticity, both sober and compassionate, and her economy allows Scanlan—whose authorial hand is entirely invisible throughout the book and casts not a single shadow of invention on the narrator—to pursue through her an appreciation for the extraordinariness of the ordinary, something that sits at the foundation of her craft along with an exemplary skill for compression.
In one of the shortest chapters in the book, comprising only fifteen words, Sonia declares of the racetrack: “You’re around some really prominent people and some are just as common as old shoes.” It is clearly these old shoes that fascinate her and the author; it is their stories, however fleeting, that offer themselves up to our attention and empathy. Characters like Bicycle Jenny, a kooky neighbor from Sonia’s childhood; Thorby, a fellow trainer who “was gentle but when he got drunk he’d pick a fight with a cigarette machine or a jukebox”; and Dark Side, the one-eyed horse whom she obtains for “kill-price” and rehabilitates to victory, are the ones who take up most space in Sonia’s compressed narrative, even when they may exist closer to the periphery and disappear completely the moment after they are first introduced. The idea of what matters in a story is here distorted to accommodate chance and banality at the front and center, which is often where they sit in real life. So much happens, and yet nothing does—everything passes by in a matter of seconds, in a matter of sentences, and leaves in our hands the imprint of a life. In the end, it is as if we’ve taken the stranger from the bar home and made friends with her, as if we have spent all our years together.
In fact, the narrative that is Kick the Latch is gleaned from a series of interviews that Scanlan conducted with Sonia over a course of three years. Part of what makes this book such a brilliant read is how the former disappears from it altogether, expertly concealing her own voice and labor of transcription and creative reconstruction, so that it is only at the end—in an afterword that feels like a revelation—that we are reminded of her presence as the author and intermediary. And though Scanlan here takes her cue from experimental writers such as fellow Americans Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Willy Vlautin, as well as the Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra, Kick the Latch is a novel like none other—if you would even call it a novel, or a work of fiction. It feels more like a card trick—one where the magician disappears completely and allows the cards to dance for themselves—or better, an act of literary ventriloquism: the work may be hers, but the words come directly from the horse(trainer)’s mouth. And dance they do, each move performed with stunning, reverberating, unforgettable precision.
***
Since the appearance of her debut collection in 2006, Ada Limón has made herself a consistent presence in the small yet voluminous world of American poetry. Releasing a new book every three to five years, each of which has been met with increasing critical acclaim, the newly appointed Poet Laureate now occupies the tricky position of an artist on a hot streak, for whom continued success is expected as a matter of course. Into this atmosphere of eager anticipation comes The Hurting Kind, her sixth collection and a confident follow-up to 2018’s award-winning The Carrying. Fans of Limón’s previous work won’t be disappointed by the new, which adeptly lives up to the high standards set by its predecessors; the collection brims with the kind of highly polished, emotionally resonant, and musically dynamic poems characteristic of their creator, who seems to have developed her creative process into something like a personal science. The upshot of such rigorous craftsmanship is a certain dependability on the part of Limón’s poems, an assurance that each one will have something valuable to offer, whether that be a potent image or a delectable turn of phrase or a particularly impactful catharsis. Inherent to this dependability, though, is the risk of becoming so entrenched in a given style that the poems, for all their ability to awe and spark epiphany, themselves become formulaic. It’s this risk that haunts The Hurting Kind from start to finish, even if Limón’s writing is often dazzling and deliberative enough to obscure it.
The commitment throughout her recent volumes to a specific poetic style is complemented by Limón’s equally steadfast commitment to a handful of subjects as universal as they are inexhaustible: memory, grief, love, nature. Typically, these strands are interwoven in ways that both reinforce and complicate one another, resulting in taut, melodious mosaics that, in the most successful cases, give one the impression of having discovered something urgently beautiful about existence, or at least about Limón’s. The currents of her personal life provide the premises for most of the poems, with narrative elements from previous collections reappearing in updated form: a cat formerly owned by the ex of the speaker’s husband and adopted by the couple upon her passing (documented in The Carrying’s “After His Ex Died”) leads Limón into an oblique meditation on death, memory, and affection in the early poem “Glimpse,” while animals more generally continue to function as favored Muses. Horses in particular elicit powerful responses from the poet, as in “Intimacy,” where a memory of the speaker’s mother tending horses culminates in a recognition of “a clean honesty / about our otherness that feels / not like the moral but the story,” and in “Foaling Season,” where she connects “a sea // of foals, mare and foal, mare and foal” standing “[i]n the dew-saturated foot-high blades / of grass“ to her own foiled desire for motherhood. Elsewhere, focus lands on the varieties of birds and trees also found in the rural Kentucky hills that Limón has now called home for several years, along with those from her cherished California past. The insights mined from such encounters are wide-ranging—some, like that regarding the entwined cypress trees central to “It Begins With the Trees,” are about love, and others, like that belonging to “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” concern the ever-important act of naming. But no matter the differences in their subject matter, the poems of The Hurting Kind are all linked by an immense and undiscriminating tenderness, the bestowal of which once again proves to be Limón’s great strength.
Though in her past work this tenderness has manifested most frequently as an ultra-perceptive rumination on the natural world that rivals even Mary Oliver, here we find Limón taking a more overtly ethical posture. “Is this where I am supposed to apologize?” the speaker asks in “The First Fish,” having recalled how, as a girl, she “pulled that great fish up out of Lake Skinner’s / mirrored-double surface” and killed it at the behest of “the old tree of a man” accompanying her. Shame ripples palpably through these lines, especially those that follow, which widen the poem’s purview “[n]ot / only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me / but for the generations of plunder and vanish.” Humanity’s capacity for inflicting hurt on nature emerges as a focal point of the collection, as does the dereliction of responsibility this hurt implies. Consider another reflection on casual childhood violence found in “Cyrus & the Snakes,” where a young speaker and her brother crack open an egg they’ve stolen from their family’s chicken coop. The poet renders the event in her by-now familiar couplets:
[…] Where weexpected yolk and mucus was an unfeathered
and unfurled sweetness. We stared at the thing,dead now and unshelled by curiosity and terrible youth.
My brother pretended not to care so much,while I cried, but only a little. […]
By poem’s end, her grown brother has renounced his childishly aloof facade, instead desiring “all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered,” a shift that highlights the abiding possibility of redemption in our fallen world. Still, it too often remains a possibility unfulfilled, as represented by the venerable mulberry tree of “Power Lines,” whose destruction at the hands of municipal workers leaves “just a ground-down stump / where what felt like wisdom once was.” In a masterful display of Limón’s instinct for sequencing her poems, we further appreciate the weight of this loss in the immediately subsequent “Hooky,” an ode to carefree college days that soon becomes a celebration of “[t]he true and serious beauty / of trees, how it seemed insane that they should / offer this to us . . . .” Taken together, these and other instances present a vision of ethical engagement with our environment rooted not in diminishment of the human, but in reverent elevation of the non-human.
Crucial to any vision of this sort is a method for bridging the illusory divide between the non-human and the human, a way of making the non-human legible to the human, so that the respect and compassion necessary for the survival of both can be extended from the latter to the former. The method Limón has adopted—punctilious use of the proper names for each and every organism she includes in her poems—is not a new one, having been employed in her previous volumes and almost certainly by other poets. But in The Hurting Kind her efforts assume a new centrality, as the urgency of the threat posed by the climate crisis to human and non-human alike only grows with time. As useful as her method is for the non-human, however, its limits are revealed by her attempts to render comprehensible the inscrutable vastness of the human. “You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving,” Limón writes in the collection’s titular poem, an existential grappling with the death of the speaker’s beloved grandfather. “She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.” Here in the realm of the human, there are things like lives and selves that remain forever inexpressible through words, the usage of which always carries the risk of misrepresenting the subject. Implicit in this formulation is the role of the watcher, separate and distinct from the watched. Limón dwells on the objectifying quality of the interpersonal with a determination that makes it another central theme of The Hurting Kind. The near-worst-case scenario is explored at the start of “How We See Each Other,” when she recounts the following disturbing incident.
I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave
at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend.The car then circles the block and goes past me five times.
One wave and five times the car circles. Strangers.
Counterposed against this injurious gaze is that with which Limón ends the poem, “the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable, / the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.” The evolution of the other’s gaze from maliciously constrictive to borderline liberatory demonstrates both the raw power vested in it and the responsibility that it demands of its wielder. Limón alludes to as much in the wonderfully disjunctive “Sanctuary”:
[…] The great eyeof the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
The full complexity of interpersonal relations is here condensed into just a handful of lines, and it’s a testament to Limón’s ability as a poet that we can also recognize in them the many valences left unwritten. Whether she’s considering the human or the non-human, her ethical values are consistently generative of a poetry whose vigor and music make it more than the sum of its parts.
That achievement is primarily owing to the content of Limon’s poems, rather than their forms. Like its predecessors, to read The Hurting Kind is to cycle through a series of the same four or five formal templates, which, despite each poem’s unmistakable singularity on the levels of meaning, emotion, and sound, comes to impose something dangerously similar to monotony on not just this collection, but on the past decade of Limón’s poetic output. Opening her three most recent volumes at random, the reader is most likely to find a poem consisting of a single unbroken stanza, ten to forty-odd lines in length, with each line ranging from eight to sixteen amorphously rhythmic syllables. Or they might find one in couplets, or even tercets, the lines indented to give a sense of movement, maybe a few one-line stanzas interspersed throughout for variety. Other less common formats include a paragraph of prose and a type of poem written in short, highly enjambed lines. The majority of The Hurting Kind’s entries fall into one of these categories, excepting certain laudable outliers like “Where the Circles Overlap” and “The Hurting Kind,” though even these more irregular cases tend to cohere into stanzas of two to three lines. None of this necessarily detracts from the collection’s overall caliber—Limón is clearly invested in these forms, and they offer sturdy, dependable structures for the contemplative reveries at which she excels. But after reading what appears, at a glance, to be the same poem for the twelfth time, one might be forgiven for having trouble distinguishing one from the other in their memory. Stretch this out over at least three volumes, and the suspicion of artistic stagnation seems not unreasonable. Limón’s gift for spinning dynamism out of her subjects keeps that danger always at bay, but her lack of experimentation in the formal dimension leaves uncultivated an entire axis of poetic potential. A stylistic evolution that incorporates her existing virtues will be the challenge of her next collection.
Excitement for such a follow-up promises to be great, given the predominant success of The Hurting Kind in continuing Limón’s hot streak. The poems in it tread familiar ground, yet they do so with a keener, more consciously ethical attitude than her earlier work, the payoff of decades spent fashioning memory, impression, and nature into the beautiful words appropriate to them. Formal inertia notwithstanding, Limón has once again proven her powers both as an artist and as a witness of our increasingly endangered world, handling her materials with a uniquely palliative tenderness. Combined with her poetry’s characteristic musicality, this more than justifies The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik imploring us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
***
To answer the slightly racist question “Where are you from?” with “Illinois” as a Chinese American person can be confounding for those standing on either end of the pointed question. The Midwest is widely imagined, if imagined at all (the derogatory term “flyover states” comes to mind), as white and rural. The Asian American experience, as Steven Yeun puts it in an interview with Jay Caspian Kang, can feel like “when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you.” Where and what is the intersection between these two sometimes conflicting, often ignored identities?
Delia Cai’s debut novel, Central Places, follows protagonist Audrey Zhou on her trek back home to Hickory Grove, Illinois, a tiny town outside of Peoria, Illinois, a good 170 miles away from Chicago. With her diehard New Yorker and professional photojournalist fiancé Ben in tow, Audrey is spending the week of Christmas relitigating mixed feelings about her hometown and attempting to stay out of her highly critical mother’s line of fire. She hasn’t been back since she left for college eight years ago, partly to avoid the crushing weight of her immigrant parents’ hopes and expectations, and partly to avoid the thought of who she was when she lived there.
Audrey spends most of the novel the way many of us spend our time at home during the holidays: descending into a muddled nostalgia for childhood and backsliding into the idiosyncrasies of adolescence. She shows Ben around town and he feigns interest well enough, though his New York superiority complex is evident. Her parents are embarrassing, but she only needs to make it through one week. Hickory Grove might be where she’s from, but New York is where her life is now. With an intense job, a doting fiancé, and future parents-in-law who are “fluent in both Latin and the lingua franca of the Upper Both Sides” and are financing Brooklyn apartment ownership, Audrey might have everything she ever wanted. But Audrey’s life in perpetually forward motion comes into question as she returns to haunt her hometown.
In a Walmart parking lot, Audrey and Ben run into Kyle, the former close friend and longstanding crush that defines her memories of late high school in the way only an adolescent infatuation can. While hanging out with Kyle supplies some of the tension between Audrey and Ben, this novel is no Hallmark romcom where a hometown reunion resolves all. It becomes clearer, as the novel progresses, that Ben had accepted Audrey’s previous broad dismissals of Hickory Grove and shares a similarly dim view of the place. But your hometown might be one of those things where you get to hate on it because it’s yours, and it just isn’t the same when someone else does it.
Yet the disconnect that Audrey and Ben experience is a secondary effect of the unreconciled and underprocessed parts of Audrey’s experiences growing up in Hickory Grove. The ambient childhood racism experienced as one of the only Asians in a very white school in a very white town is often flattened in popular discourse into anecdotes about smelly lunches, but Cai illustrates the experience far more deftly. No one incident is “that bad” if you’re measuring relative harm, but the accumulation of 18 years of being othered is still dehumanizing and discomfitingly psychologically formative. Being accosted in the local bar by a man asking “What are you?” immediately sends Audrey spiraling into childhood memories of being chased around called “snake eyes” in elementary school and of an Applebee’s waiter mocking her dad’s mispronunciation by answering that “no, the fajeetas were not velly spicy.” The shame is cumulative. Suddenly lacking the buffer of geographical distance and her New York preoccupations, Audrey can’t easily divert attention from her fraught childhood.
It’s not just about the girls next door bullying six-year-old Audrey for mispronouncing thank you by saying it the way her parents do. It’s when she tells her mom about the incident, “thrilling slightly at the fantasy I had where she would transform into the kind of sitcom mom who would march me back down to the neighbors’ house and tell those girls off for me.” In reality, her mom faults Audrey for making the neighbors dislike her. She ”had given [Audrey] an exasperated shake and asked what it was that [she]’d done to make the neighbors not like [her].” Somehow her mom is never on her side, and Audrey never feels as though she is doing enough, or is enough to meet her mother’s exacting standards.
Wanting social relationships to operate in a way that fits neatly into 22-minute episodes is a pretty common experience for kids. But the contrast between TV fantasy and reality can be particularly sharp for kids with immigrant parents, who came all this way and sacrificed so much only for us to be embarrassed by them, to veer off course from their American Dream, to spend our lives puzzling over their unarticulated emotional lives. To move to a foreign country with limited funds and a tenuous grasp of the language and culture requires a special type of bravery, but living in said foreign country is more often defined by a special type of fear and sense of precarity. Audrey thinks to herself:
That was the hallmark of my childhood here, I realize, my parents’ fear. There was so much to be scared of: tornados and kissing diseases and carcinogens and loud music and pain pills and not going to the right college and gun owners and the huddle of teens at the mall food court who were some of the only Black people my parents had really seen in their life outside of the TV screen.
It’s both understandable and deeply, deeply frustrating to consider. Behind every critical comment is her mother’s well-intentioned fear of her child being unprepared, of making a hugely consequential mistake.
How can Ben even begin to understand any of this when Audrey is just beginning to? How can Ben even begin to understand any of this when he isn’t even trying to? He’s the white boyfriend to the Chinese American girlfriend, an increasingly visible trope with numerous variants and centuries of baggage, and he says, “Come on, I never bring your race up. Ever,” in an argument.
What propels Central Places forward is the fact that Audrey is self-aware but not quite self-aware enough, as she becomes entangled in a series of interpersonal conflicts she can almost see coming but is never able to defuse while they’re happening. It’s deeply relatable—knowing better doesn’t always mean you’re immediately able to do better. Mid-argument with Ben, she thinks, “I know if I could step back for a moment, I’d see how I’m fighting with him exactly the same way that my mother fought with me and with my dad: by shutting myself down and then feeling for all the soft parts of his psyche and sharpening my knives.”
It is both delightful and stressful to watch Audrey outgrow the stories she’s been telling herself about her family, her relationship, her estranged childhood best friend, her unrequited crush. The first person narration keeps the reader close to Audrey’s interpretation of Hickory Grove. But as old resentments get dredged up and surprise run-ins occur, both Audrey and the audience see how she has sometimes flattened the people she loves in her imagination. Her kindhearted but passive father clandestinely checks her Instagram posts and tries to recreate a fancy roast chicken she posted once; her mother has been diligently volunteering at the church not just for herself but in the hopes of securing it as Audrey’s wedding venue. Audrey loves that Ben is decisive, but she’s starting to see that his certainty doesn’t always leave room for her to be an equal partner in the plan. Kristen, her former best friend, is the only one who successfully tells Audrey outright that she needs to stop acting like everything is happening to her. Audrey can’t keep treating Kyle as a symbol of her senior year of high school if she wants to have an actual friendship with him now. An early Goodreads review of this book compared it to the song “‘tis the damn season” by Taylor Swift. I would add “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Anti-Hero” to the mix as well.
By the end of the trip, Audrey has seriously reevaluated what growing up in Central Illinois means. She can no longer maintain an impenetrable wall between Hickory Grove Audrey and New York Audrey, nor does she want to.
Delia Cai’s writing is vulnerable, sharply observant, and compelling. Part of me wishes there was a lengthier or more thorough resolution between many of the characters, but I also think that Central Places is pragmatic the way it is. Letting your neuroses get the best of you and trying to nail down an ironclad understanding of everything is both futile and ultimately unhelpful. Sometimes the repair or readjustment of a relationship is mostly about moving forward, together, as Audrey and her parents and her friends do. You find a way to belong, Midwestern Asian or otherwise, not necessarily by escaping and finding a new place or assiduously defining yourself into belonging, but by generously accepting others and allowing them to do the same for you.
***
The French translator and theorist Antoine Berman has remarked that in a subset of great novels, it is exactly their “bad writing” which makes them rich. They suffer from an overabundance of voices, threatening to explode the form in an attempt to encompass their language of composition in all of its plurality and heterogeneity. The Hive, James Womack’s new translation of Nobel Laureate Camilo José Cela’s La colmena, is just such a work. Set in Madrid during the early 1940s, it is an admirable attempt at the surely arduous, and sometimes paradoxical task, of translating a polylingual novel that is richly rooted in a specific time and place.
True to its name, The Hive is buzzing with characters—over three hundred in all. They weave in and out of the honeycomb streets of Madrid, stopping in cafés, salons, dive bars, bakeries, antique shops, police stations, apartments, and alleyways. Most of them are cast in sharp, jocular detail for hardly more than a page at a time. These descriptions leave the impression that many of them are “types” more than characters proper. A favorite example of mine is a man introduced near the end of the book as nothing more than the father of another man named Fidel:
Fidel’s father, who is a pastry chef as well, had been a brute of a man who ate sand as a purgative and who spoke about nothing apart from folk dancing and Zaragoza’s protector, Our Lady of the Pillar. He thought a great deal of himself as a businessman, was proud of how cultured he was, and had two types of business card, one of which said “Joaquín Bustamante—Tradesman,” and the other said, in Gothic script, “Joaquín Bustamante Valls—Author of We Must Double Spain’s Agricultural Production.” When he died he left behind a huge amount of rough-edged handmade paper covered with numbers and plans: he wanted to double the number of crops each year using a system of his own invention: vast piled-up terraces filled with fertile soil, which would have water pumped into them via artesian wells and sunlight delivered to them by a system of mirrors.
Fidel’s father goes on to give his pastry shop a ridiculous, politically charged name—“The Sons of Our Forefathers”—and then we never see him again. His son complains about the name a bit, and then changes it, and then too disappears into oblivion, along with so many other colorful examples of 1940s Madrileños, after providing us with just a couple of pages of entertainment under Cela’s all-knowing smirk. Cela might have been writing about all of his characters when he comments on another baker, Señor Ramón, that “You could write his biography in a few lines.”
We meet many dozens of people like this before something like a plot begins to flicker into existence under the surface of these vignettes. The first chapter is composed of 46 short scenes, which are almost entirely set within the same café, and arranged in an unclear chronological order within a period of time that’s somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours long. It introduces us to more than twenty of the café’s patrons, employees, and its cruel owner, Doña Rosa. While many of their conversations appear to have no more purpose than to make us smile, or laugh, or frown, eventually something like the threat of a serious, violent event emerges. Other threats, major and minor, are much of what drives the drama throughout the rest of the equally fragmented book, which takes us out of Doña Rosa’s café and through the many shadowy alcoves of Madrid over the course of a few days. These are threats of violence, which is lurking at all times beneath the many characters’ daily toils, and of desperation, as poverty forces nearly everyone in the city to give up something they hold dear, and they seem to culminate in one major threat to one of the novel’s most frequently recurring characters, the down-and-out writer Martín Marco. But this arc is blended in with hundreds of such micro-episodes that have nothing to do with Martín Marco, and which on the surface have little to do with anything else either. It’s clear to the reader that, despite the haunting connections between the vignettes constituting the novel, its primary achievement is these portraits for their own sake. Cela’s ironic presentations of the folk of Madrid curdles into pity, and then love, as those of the best social novelists do.
A favorite irony of Cela’s seems to be the image of the woman who turns to prostitution to support a feeble or infirm male partner, with or without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, women are portrayed as being uniquely vulnerable to the poverty gripping the city, as the few men who have money use it to encourage, or even coerce, women to sleep with them. These and other, less troublesome sexual relations drive much minor action of the novel; the three most common activities we see Cela’s characters engaged in might be eating, complaining about not having enough to eat, and sneaking around at night. The frivolity of these cavalier episodes sometimes gets a little tiresome, and their juxtaposition with darker incidences of sex trafficking and violence is jarring. At its worst, reading them together can make you wonder if Cela, or his narrator, take threats to women’s agency in sexual situations as seriously he should. But as a whole, what emerges from the novel is a scathing critique of the kinds of relations that organize how people approach love, money and sex in 1940s Madrid. Concern with propriety and familial honor appear alongside desperate poverty as the factors that are most likely to leave women vulnerable to abuse, and this is surely one of the reasons that the novel was banned by the censors in Franco’s Spain, a regime which relied heavily on “traditional family values” in its rhetoric of a unified, proto-fascist, Catholic Spain.
Another reason would be the way The Hive foregrounds Spain’s linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. One of the most studied characteristics of the novel is its characters’ social class and cultural background: how much money they have, how they got it, and what they do with it; where they’re from, who their family is versus who it claims to be, and so on. The greatest tell, besides the characters’ material conditions, is their language: how they speak and to whom. Madrileños of various levels of wealth and background are surrounded by Galicians, Catalans, Romani, and other people for whom Spanish is a second language. All characters in The Hive are gently mocked by its narrator, but none are so thoroughly ridiculed as those who believe in the myths of superiority of certain backgrounds. Madrid is ultimately portrayed in a rich diversity that is not an aberrance from Spanish national identity, but rather constitutes it.
This is also where the process of translating the novel must have been the most challenging. How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text? The short answer is that you can’t—not exactly. To take an example from the novel, there is no perfect English translation for the idiom “Es que estoy que no me llega la camisa al cuerpo”; to translate it literally would not make its connotative meaning available for the English-language reader, and this is the meaning that is important: The man who says it is not really having a problem with his shirt. We can say the same for Womack’s decision to translate this idiom as “It’s just that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.” There is no exact translation for “heebie-jeebies” into Spanish, or any other language for that matter; but it is something that someone might say in the same context, to paraphrase linguist Eugene Nida. This technique becomes absolutely essential when translating a novel as rich with colloquialisms as La colmena. It allows for approximations of those characteristics of language we call tone, style, register or voice, and if it does this sometimes at the cost of more direct translations of the sense of the words chosen, Womack deploys these approximations aptly in most cases. The characters of The Hive sing—or occasionally, in more dire conditions, croak—in distinct, lively voices, with great respect for the emotional valence and diversity of register that makes the Spanish-language original so compelling.
Womack has especially nailed what’s possibly the most important voice of all: the narrator’s. Though he never appears in the action, and only very rarely admits to his own existence by means of a personal pronoun, the text is thick with his irony, his judgments, his caresses, and his humor. He is similar to, but not quite the same as, the voice that writes the many prologues of The Hive, which addresses the world—and the book’s place in it—a little more directly. La colmena has had a long and complex publication history, and for at least six of these editions, Cela wrote a separate preface, which are dutifully compiled and translated in this edition. Of these, the most compelling are probably the first and the last, in which Cela enumerates some of the book’s early troubles getting past the censors of both Spain and Argentina, and considers the problem of translating a book written in and about “Spanish as she was spoken in the city of Madrid between about 1940 and 1942” into Romanian a quarter of a century later. In this last preface, written for the first Romanian edition, Cela is pessimistic about the possibility of translation, going so far as to complain that “if there were such a thing as good sense in the world, we writers would be the first and most stubborn opponents of translation.” But after reading this work of Womack’s, I don’t think we need to be. Despite Cela’s potent criticisms of their lives, his characters keep on plodding along, and despite whatever he thinks about the possibility of translation, his books will keep on being translated. Womack’s work in this new edition not only proves that this is possible but in fact desirable, and his work makes available much of what makes this important novel worth reading. I only wish Cela were still around to write a new preface for it.
***
Most of us worry—maybe even obsess, if we’re being honest—about our future as we emerge from a global pandemic and continue to grapple with the threat of climate change. In Anchor, her third poetry collection, Rebecca Aronson explores these issues on both the personal and the universal level as she writes about the death of her parents; her own mortality; and, ultimately, expands her grief to include our dying planet.
The powerful opening poem, “Dear Gravity,” introduces Aronson’s major themes. The 18-line single stanza epistle is one of ten such letters in the book, all addressed “Dear Gravity.” These poems deal with the physical force of gravity and its ability to fell the human body, but in the first line of this first poem, Aronson heightens our awareness of the full effects of gravity by alluding to other shades of meaning. The line “May I call you Grave?” makes explicit the seriousness of the topic and the ultimate result of gravity.
The speaker in the poem then establishes a connection between her own mortality and the natural world: “An old tree falls / after long weakening,” followed a few lines later by, “At the doctor’s office the nurse says / I’ve grown shorter. Only natural.” After revealing the effects of gravity on her own body, the speaker describes the diminishment of her parents:
. . . My mother’s hips
are out of plumb; she lists like a sailboat
about to slice sideways into waves and then under.
My father’s head is even with my own, so he’s winning
the shrinking race . . .
The speaker closes by imagining the three of them “disappearing altogether, like a popsicle / that has melted into a stain on someone’s smile.”
The order in which people and objects appear in in this opening poem is significant. Aronson begins with a dying tree, which “keeps falling, rotted core turning to damp dust, / becoming earth,” signaling an overarching principle of death as an inevitable part of nature. The description of the tree also foreshadows later poems that directly address climate change.
She next discusses the effects of gravity on her own body (shorthand for confronting mortality) before describing how gravity is destabilizing her parents. As a parent’s death approaches, one of our most primal instincts is to examine how it affects us. We are forced, maybe for the first time, to admit to ourselves that we will die.
The epistolary poems spaced throughout the collection all share the same title: “Dear Gravity.” What is gained by including ten different poems with the same name? Emphasis, obviously, but also a richness and depth in the treatment of the topic. The book’s first epigraph, from Shakespeare’s Richard the Second, asserts there are many shades of grief:
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
In Anchor, gravity is inextricably bound with this grief. Each iteration of “Dear Gravity” comes at the topic from a slightly different angle, offering multiple perspectives and insights. The speaker addresses gravity directly: She pleads with it; she rails against it; and finally, exhausted, she accepts it, acknowledging that gravity always wins.
One of the most heartbreaking “Dear Gravity” letters comes near the end of the collection. Here, the speaker addresses Gravity intimately, as if confiding in an old friend, describing her father as he nears death: “My father in his bed is a wrinkle among thin blankets.” In language that is tender and sorrowful, the speaker shows us her father’s failing body and his slow drift from consciousness.
A more joyful letter to “Gravity” captures an everyday scene of mother and young son jumping on the trampoline: “We throw ourselves up to come down hard. We soar / until we fall laughing and breathless . . . ” Even here, when death is presumably far off in the future, the speaker doesn’t let us forget that it’s coming. She says, “We fail / to defy you over and over and that is the game,” and later acknowledges, “We will never win the game. We are dying / of laughter . . . ”
Other poems address the speaker’s fears more openly. In “Latch,” prompted by a breast cancer scare, the speaker muses on her complex relationship with her breasts. They are admired by men, they nourish her baby, but mostly she doesn’t think about them. However, the discovery of a lump in her breast brings her to admit, “But now // here I am in this vast new country / where fear lives . . .”
Many pieces deal with the plight of parents. We learn in the second poem, “San Stefano,” that the speaker’s father is dying: “It won’t be the cancer that kills you, the doctor said. And it was and it wasn’t.” Yet after this stark opening line, most of the poem is an evocative, lush description of San Stefano:
What I love is the dark that pools
in a courtyard corner and how those small cars sometimes careen
through the late afternoon hush sending pigeons whirring,
their maraca wings rattling the sky.
At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to her father’s impending death in an almost matter-of-fact way: “I got up the nerve / to ask how you felt about dying / and you told me and we went out for gelato again.” It is as if the speaker wants to focus on these last moments together, rather than death, but the phrase “I got up the nerve” hints at the emotional toll.
The poems about her mother, who suffers from dementia, are heavy with loss.
In “Shell,” Aronson takes us through flickering scenes from a girlhood that the speaker’s mother can’t remember:
Now that the stories
have no before or after, they blaze
brief and bright as flashbulbs
and go dark.
As the speaker grapples with grief for her parents, she also weaves throughout the book a thread of mourning for the planet. Several poems, such as “Bombast,” “Fire Country,” and “When I am Trying to be Hopeful,” directly confront climate change, and it is a subtle undercurrent running through many other pieces. In “Fire Country,” Aronson locates personal tragedy in the context of global disaster: “The hills are on fire / and the desert is on fire . . . And my own burning / is so small as to go unnoticed.”
Anchor is both elegy and eulogy, but the collection also pulses with life as the speaker remembers small moments. In “Is That All There Is,” the speaker joyfully recalls her waitressing days, when she “looked good” in her uniform and shares “the secret to living: what is dull can be polished to a hot glow with the right friction.” In “The Dress I Loved,” she describes the effects of a favorite garment:
When I walked the dress to work, the sidewalk sidled alongside
bumping my leg like a needful dog. If I allowed a hand to followthe long spine of the zipper, my shoulders slid like lake stones,
blades blurring as if rain, as if a forest turning night.
“My Mother Disapproves” is a tumbling, eclectic spill of the many things her mother deems inappropriate, including “tight pants, my uncombed hair, / the fleshy, unbound hours of my every day and night.” These three poems appear in sequence and all are sexually charged to some degree, sweet odes to living and its pleasures in the midst of grief.
Such richness abounds in the content of Anchor that it is easy to overlook Aronson’s technique. The author writes in free verse and most of these poems are short enough to fit on one page. But they pack a punch. Her skillful use of syntax is worth noting for its freshness. The phrase “When I walked the dress to work” in “The Dress that I Loved” is playful and apt. It animates the dress and the poem. Her originality in ordering her words, for instance, in phrases like “dip fast the sack of your body” and “before they rot and darken orange” slows us down as readers and focuses our attention in a slightly new way.
She also has a knack for inserting an image or idea early in a poem that at first glance can seem almost offhand but builds in import to sometimes breath-taking effect. A prime example is “Chrysanthemum,” the only prose poem in the collection. The poem connects a series of images like a chain in a way that at first seems arbitrary: “chrysanthemum,” “cat ears,” “a petal disintegrating,” “a swirly-glass paperweight.” She compares many things to petals and somehow at the end of the poem brings it all together in a line that adds up to much more than the sum of the poem’s parts: “the petal of your life which is brief, which is delicate and weightier than you know.”
For readers unfamiliar with Aronson’s poetry, Anchor is a beautiful introduction. Her second collection, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, is also excellent. However, this third book displays a stronger thematic cohesiveness, making the individual poems resonate more fully.
The book’s title, Anchor, adds to that resonance, as it helps pinpoint our relationship to gravity. In “Dear Gravity,” [Do you imagine he is trying to escape you?] the speaker describes her father’s struggles, telling gravity, “I know you are trying to make an anchor, / having filled his legs with fluid until they nearly burst.” She adds near the end of the poem, “You want him all to yourself / but he is half floating, half falling stretched between realms.” Gravity is what tethers us to the earth and to those we love, but it is also what we are constantly trying to escape. Anchor is about both these states—the holding on and the letting go—and the tension between them.
The letting go, the escape from gravity through death, is described beautifully with bird imagery and references to flight and floating. The speaker declares, “Dear Gravity, “My bones are hollow. I dream of flight.” In “Underneath,” Aronson writes, “It appears / I’m tethered,” but adds “don’t believe what you see . . . I am winged . . .”
In “Aviary,” which describes the moments just after her father has died, Aronson weaves together two scenes: one in which she and mother are in the hospital room “when his breathing stopped” and a second from the speaker’s memory of watching hummingbirds with her parents the year before. She remembers “small wings shimmering around us” and also recalls, “The hummingbirds, alerted by a signal / we couldn’t know ceased their whirring and were gone.”
Anchor’s poems build to a crescendo of grief, washing over us like waves, waves that come crashing down with the pull of gravity, but also waves of release and acceptance. The poet brings these elements together near the end of the book in “Star Dust”:
Grief is in you from the start and in you at the end
and though sometimes your days are flooded with it,and sometimes your days are clear, we are made of it
as much as we are made of the ruinsof the first flaming star, whose far flung dust still spins
us into being.And really, what more could we ask of life than that? To be star dust.
***
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