Finally, we sleep well, where the walls lean
with a drunk’s articulation. We wake
to homemade apple pies and hot cocoa.
We talk through a day of Rummy and three
Please join us in welcoming Erica Dawson and William Brewer, poets new to our pages. Both have work forthcoming in our print journal.
Book by NICOLE DENNIS-BENN
Reviewed by
Nicole Dennis-Benn’s debut novel Here Comes the Sun opens with the stirring words, “God Nuh Like Ugly.” The melding of Jamaican Patois and English establishes an immediate authenticity, as does the disturbing discovery that ugly is synonymous with the blackness of one’s skin. The experience of reading this is akin to encountering Toni Morrison’s unflinching gaze upon the Antebellum South where she set her novel, Beloved. However, Dennis-Benn’s setting is not the slave-owning South of the 19th century U.S. but a black nation, the island of Jamaica, specifically, circa mid-1990s.
Where am I, tracing lines in the bark
of an oak, a name
I have yet to forget?
It wasn’t love, this
half-attempt, my breathing in
the dust, the fire ants
lock-stepping down
Our flight to Boston had been delayed five hours for operational reasons, we were told. The Istanbul airport was hot and thick with people, a hectic crossroads from which we all hoped we’d escape, eventually. We’d been there three hours already—essentially nothing, judging by the quantity of sleeping bodies slumped against each other on the ground, splayed across chairs, face down on tables. We paced the warm corridors, sticky with traveler sweat, past the food court, mosque, flooded bathrooms, Victoria’s Secret. We slumped over a table eating savory pastries, watching others in similar states of surrender.
My husband’s nemesis is a taxi driver who is always parked at the end of our block. He has a luxury vehicle, an old Mercedes, which looks out of place on these long-neglected, pocky streets. To my knowledge, he’s never given anyone a ride. Ethan gets into arguments with him about the cost of a trip when we’re in a desperate hurry. It always ends the same: we look for someone else. From what I can observe, the driver has a Sonic-the-Hedgehog knockoff on his iPad knockoff and he won’t stop playing unless offered a ridiculous amount of money. He’s the Linda Evangelista of taxi drivers in Kyrgyzstan.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews ANGELA PALM
Angela Palm is a Vermont-based author, editor, and writing instructor. Her first book, Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here, will be published by Graywolf Press in August 2016. S. Tremaine Nelson met with Palm outdoors at a cafe less than a hundred yards from the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, on the first warm day of spring this year. They spoke about Palm’s influences, class in Indiana, and the pervasive brokenness of the American criminal justice system.
My neighbor Geraldine
runs her sprinkler
like a public fountain.
The kids run through hollering
when all that dead grass
stabs their little plum feet,
Book by PAMELA ERENS
Reviewed by
It’s a brave choice for Pamela Erens to write her third novel about a birth. Shining the spotlight on two women—one in labor, the other her pregnant nurse—during this passage feels almost subversive. Birth is rarely the main event of a book—it’s something that happens to a character or an entry point. But what a gorgeous book this is, dramatically taut, emotionally wrenching, the prose crystalline. It satisfies the reader as an entire universe in the space of a few hours and a rocking story as well. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing: this novel keeps you turning pages. We don’t tend to think of labor as driving, propulsive, and yet the story reads more like a thriller than anything I’ve recently read.
It’s also a deeply feminine book. Where many novels are concerned with a Hero’s Journey, complete with tasks and dragons and epiphanies, Eleven Hours is a poster child for The Heroine’s Journey. The birth in a hospital provides the time and place but, beyond that, there is web-like interconnectivity between Lore, who is having her child, and Franckline, the Haitian maternity nurse assigned to her. Though these women are so different, socio-economically and culturally, they share their experience of men and pain and transition. Their relationship accrues in a very female way as time goes on and Franckline helps Lore navigate the peaks and swoops and plateaus of her labor.
Please join us in greeting new contributors Jane Huffman and Jeff Hipsher.
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