Heike GeisslerSeasonal Associate

Abstract

Nota Bene James Sturm Off Season Drawn & Quarterly Graphic novelist extraordinaire James Sturm returns with this quiet but turbulent story of a marriage in decay, played out against the backdrop of the 2016 US presidential election and its aftermath. As attentive to its sense of place as to its emotionally guarded characters, Off Season promises an hour of thoughtful reading accompanied by understated but sturdy visual storytelling. Takarabe Toriko Heaven and Hell Trans. Phyllis Birnbaum University of Hawai‘i Press This chilling autobiographical account of author Takarabe Toriko’s childhood in the Japanese-established puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China details the haunting brutality and violence of the times through the eyes of a precocious young girl. Toriko’s highly venerated evocations on the nature of her youth bring poignant authenticity to the novel’s first movement and heartbreaking realism to the second. winning novelist and poet Katherena Vermette . Her poetry spotlights and rejoices in the multilayered façades of love through postcolonial action. The opening section of River Woman defines love as the vigor of retrieval and repair in occasions of trauma in every era. In this collection, Vermette transports her readers into another world and tries to reveal the secrets of the in-depth reality of the universe. River Woman showcases Vermette’s distinguished and gifted narrative: a quiet whisper that turns into a roar; sparse words loaded with meaning. This compact collection consists of a series of imagistic poems that are challenging to comprehend. Vermette’s trope of the river throughout the collection assembles the maternal spirit within the verses to enhance their universality. She repeatedly displays the image of a river to distinguish the narration of the poems by amalgamating her personal experiences and aboriginal history in a dynamic and versatile technique that reflects more than just words on the page. Moreover, River Woman delineates Vermette ’s relationship with nature as artistically portrayed through her elegant style. Vermette is able to depict the timelessness of nature along with its beauty, power, and destructiveness and how it affects the life and history of mankind. Through her poetic expressions that demonstrate her ardent and keen observations of the environment, the author tries to negotiate the balance between man-made urban structures and the natural world. Thematically, the book deals with history, cultural bargaining, heritage, trauma , love, loss, and the poet’s Métis background along with the duality and harmony she feels around these themes. The first part of this lively collection contains the poet’s approach toward emotionally but largely uncontroversial themed works, while in the second part Vermette deals with political aspects. In the poem “new year’s eve 2013,” she writes: “they say all people are equal / who cannot agree / I say I will believe it / when prison and poverty rates are the same / when thousands of your women disappear / and you do nothing.” River Woman is embedded in a vivid sense of place. Throughout the collection, the extremes of brokenness and resilience are grounded metaphorically in the discovery of love and in confronting the wounds of colonization. Muhammad Imran Shanghai Jiao Tong University Heike Geissler Seasonal Associate Trans. Katy Derbyshire. South Pasadena, California. Semiotext(e). 2018. 240 pages. Heike Geissler would like to be “a person who is what she does,” but her writing and translating work pays too little to buy the occasional extras for her two sons and her boyfriend. She therefore took the seasonal (Christmas) job that she describes here at an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig, where she spends her days unpacking, scanning, and stacking things. This is the epitome of alienation, the complete antithesis to her aspirations. This alienation is particularly salient to her, as a German from a country that no longer exists, because the GDR’s ideals, though never remotely realized, still resonate in her. But at Amazon, “fulfillment” is for everyone else; the customers’ satisfaction is all that matters ; “associates” are totally subservient to that Amazon goal. Coming to work here has, however, also allowed her to realize that others with jobs here like hers, unlike the managers, have no other alternative; they’ve been sent by the employment office WORLDLIT.ORG 105 Books in...