National Book Award Research Articles

In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace

In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace Dunya Mikhail (bio) In a Word When my students misspell Arabic,they discover how letterscan change fates.Amal (hope) can makean anagram of alam (pain),an exercise I'd hesitate to dissuade,and shafa (healing) will meansome shaqa (suffering)I can't spare them,but when they learn bahr,letting them express a desireto go to sea, I ensure they don'tspell harb, before they end upin a war they never intended.Even a kiss (qubla) could explodeif they wrote qunbla (bomb),but I can't keeptheir best teacher (life)from giving themall the lessons they need. [End Page 11] Flashlight They all know the little boyfrom the flashlighthe carries—not from a fearof the dark in Tahrir Squarebut to shine it as he searchesfor his father, among the facespainted on the tunnel wall.Every day the protestersdraw new facesand when he haloes themwith his flashlight, another deathilluminates their firmament.When one day,the little boy didn't arrive,his face was painted on the wall,beside a dimmed flashlight. Absence The tree too,gets memory loss.She forgets the birdsand their nests on the branchestenderly encircling the eggs,the breath of their flapping wingsteaching her leaves to fly.She forgets the birdsongs,as if she didn't hear them seasonafter season, just as she doesn't waitfor them to return after the storm. [End Page 12] When a bullet tumbles one birdfrom its perch, seed fallingfrom its beak—she will forgetthat, too, but she will knowsomething is missing,leaving a scar in the placewhere a strange silence abides. Embrace Deep inside the beach,moss grows around a rock:a soft embrace.When the water washes it away,it trembles like the gestureswe make waving from balconiesfor our loved onesin the time of pandemic. [End Page 13] Dunya Mikhail Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. Her books include In Her Feminine Sign, selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK) and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019; The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, a finalist for the pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and long-listed for the National Book Award; The Iraqi Nights, which received POETRY magazine's Translation Award; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award; and The War Works Hard, shortlisted for the Griffon Poetry Prize and named one of the New York Public Library's Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005. She edited a pamphlet titled 15 Iraqi Poets. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

Reverb, and: Here I Go

Reverb, and: Here I Go Rae Armantrout (bio) Reverb “Lake-washedchinos,”the ad said, flashing quicklyacross the screen. She didn’t wonderwhat lake they were washed inor who did the washing. Clearlyno one had washed anything.She did wonder why someone would thinkthat someone would think that“lake-washing” was desirable.Was it about the remote spotthe words made her see? She wrote this downbecause she recognized itas a thought—the kind she liked.Or used to like. One with depth,with reverb. [End Page 27] Here I Go 1 “Here I go again”was a rock anthem once,crowds on their feetmouthing the words. 2 There’s no way to explainhow faultlessly I want to writeabout how pointless all this is. Nothing I can point to, butthe gesture itself,the way it comes to seemanachronistic, spectral— like this ongoing attemptto catalog the worldby latching each thingto the lastmemory it calls up. Nothing recallsthe new cat-6haboob. [End Page 28] 3 But I’m hard to discourage. When a branch lays out five—like an old card trick—identical white orchids, three-petalled light sails spread, ready to go—each with a smallbat face in the middle [End Page 29] Rae Armantrout rae armantrout is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She is the author of Finalists; Conjure, a finalist for the Pen/Voelker Award; and Wobble, a finalist for the National Book Award, among other works. Copyright © 2022 Yale University

“Read the City Walls for Signs of My Life”: Four Reviews

“Read the City Walls for Signs of My Life”: Four Reviews Christopher Spaide (bio) More Anon: Selected Poems by Maureen N. McLane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2021) Blood on the Fog by Tongo Eisen-Martin (City Lights Publishers 2021) The Past by Wendy Xu (Wesleyan University Press 2021) Pilgrim Bell: Poems by Kaveh Akbar (Graywolf Press 2021) In early 1954, approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, Wallace Stevens faced a dilemma unique to monumental poets nearing the final stage of their careers: Should he publish a selected poems or a collected? Nothing but the hits, or everything, including all the misses? Writing to an academic acquaintance, he weighed his options: “They are different in the sense that people read selected poems but don’t buy them. On the other hand, they [End Page 150] buy collected poems but don’t read them.” It’s a fantastic little quip, a perfectly knotted rhetorical bow—but in Stevens’s case, it isn’t remotely true. When his Collected Poems was published that fall, it garnered him plenty of new readers and considerable sales, along with the Pulitzer Prize, his second National Book Award, and a celebratory birthday lunch at New York’s Harmonie Club, hosted by his publisher. (In the years since Stevens’s death, there have been several Selected Poems, any of which I recommend reading, buying, or both, even though none of them led to lunches of much literary-historical distinction.) Maureen N. McLane, the author of five collections and now her first selected poems, More Anon, has her own fantastic witticism about reprinting poems. It appears in her unsummarizable poetry-meets-prose-meets-everything-in-between memoir My Poets (2012), in an essay titled “My H. D.,” in a paragraph collaging appraisal and crafty quotation: It is no dispraise to be a poet best served by an anthology, a rigorously pruned selected—no dispraise particularly for this poet, who knew very well that “anthology” comes from the Greek: a gathering of flowers. “Little, but all roses.” True enough for H. D.; true enough for any number of poets whose work looks best when handpicked and arranged into a modest bouquet. But McLane, like Stevens, lucked out: her own gathering of flowers easily exceeds the rosy standards she set for H. D. Reprinting around a third of her previously published poetry, More Anon may be “rigorously pruned,” but its contents are so various, no mere bouquet but a botanical garden, that you might reasonably wonder how it all came from just one poet. The final poem in More Anon, “envoi: eclipse,” reads in full: [End Page 151] “I don’t trust myself / not to look.” From first page to last, More Anon presents McLane as a lowercase-e experimentalist, taking a methodical “look” at the marvelous; each new poem is an occasion to attempt something ever so slightly unprecedented, learn from the results, then promptly move on. Our ready-made phrase for dabbling among styles and stances, especially for young poets, is “finding one’s voice.” Counterintuitively, McLane found her first voices by throwing them every which way. The “envoi” to her debut, Same Life (2008), sounds like a post-breakup Chaucer, taking it hard, or a punkish Dickinson, promising mind-blowing sublimities: “Go litel myn book / and blow her head off.” That first book also includes a catechism, Sapphic love poems, a 118-line verse-essay on Susan Sontag, and episodes in the serial biography of a poet-scholar, Mz N. (That code name deserves an explanatory essay of its own: “Mz N” could be an alter ego for McLane—whose initials are two Ms and one N—or a glitchy abbreviation for an existentially “missing” person.) What all these one-off exercises had in common was their origin point: wonder. Sometimes it spilled from her opening lines (“Terrible things are happening / in Russian novels!”), and sometimes it came slowly to simmer: Sometimes we arrange to meetand after some wine they rememberand blush and wonderand ask if I too wonder. McLane embodied her wonder in a springy free-verse line, extendable and retractable as a lecturer’s pointer, and in her worldly palate for vocabularies, taking...

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Understanding Alice Walker by Thadious M. Davis

Reviewed by: Understanding Alice Walker by Thadious M. Davis Shermaine M. Jones DAVIS, THADIOUS M. Understanding Alice Walker. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. 176 pp. $59.99 hardcover; $19.99 paperback; $14.99 e-book. Thadious M. Davis’s Understanding Alice Walker comprehensively examines Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Alice Walker’s rich and multifaceted oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and essay. As the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple (1982), Walker’s work has been met with great critical acclaim as well as harsh and sometimes soul-crushing criticism, as Davis illuminates. A self-affirmed daughter of the South, Walker’s work is informed by and operates within multiple registers of “vernacular history, community wisdom, and formal education” (32). Walker’s work is at once philosophical, personal, and political, engaging subjects of racial oppression, gendered violence, economic exploitation, spiritual transformation, global interconnection, and joy. Davis illuminates the ways that Walker’s deep belief in “a moral function of art” and specifically that “art save[s] lives” (11) consistently inspires and animates her prolific literary career and activism. Understanding Alice Walker is organized into four chapters: “Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family” (Chapter 1); “The Sight of the Familiar: ‘I Love Myself…’” (Chapter 2); “The Work of the Woman: Coloring Purple” (Chapter 3); “The World of the Word: Mediating Self” (Chapter 4). These chapters trace the thematic and ideological development of Walker’s multifaceted writing and philosophical consciousness from her earliest works to her later meditations. Davis begins with Walker’s biography as a child of the South raised in poverty and the Jim Crow era. Specifically, Davis foregrounds Alice Walker’s early vision loss in one eye, due to a childhood injury, to suggest that “[w]hat distinguishes her prolific artistic production is her way of seeing herself and her world….Her writing underscores her attention to debilitating injury, inner vision, and spiritual awareness that attends to the wounded, the lost, the oppressed, the dismissed, the maligned, and the invisible” (2). With an ethic of care, Walker represents the interior lives of characters that are often discarded and neglected in society as evident in her early works Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Walker critiques patriarchal abuse and the way that it stifles Black womanhood, creativity, and agency as evident in her most celebrated works In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose and The Color Purple. Davis’s keen attention to Walker’s less critically engaged works is Understanding Alice Walker’s greatest contribution and intervention. Davis’s reading of Walker’s Civil Rights novel Meridian is particularly rich in its assertion that, “[d]ecidely utopic in its rendering of a Black woman’s body as pangendered, Meridian ultimately locates itself not merely in an analogy to the South but to all political spaces of [End Page 123] society, and as seminal in Walker’s reading of transfiguration” (46). Davis illuminates Meridian’s significance in exploring the cost of survival in the fight to create a beloved community. Moreover, Davis argues that “Meridian may be Walker’s most brilliantly conceived and realized novel” (46) despite its relative obscurity in comparison to The Color Purple. For Davis, Meridian represents an important turning point in Walker’s identity as a writer, revealing Walker’s “tendencies toward mysticism and philosophical musings” (60), which become increasingly centered in Walker’s later writings such as The Temple of My Familiar and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. While Davis diligently illuminates the successes of Walker’s career and corpus of work, she seems less eager to pursue criticism of Walker’s output, even in areas where such criticism would be useful. In particular, a deeper treatment of criticism regarding Walker’s representation of Africa in works such as The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy is warranted. Though Davis notes Walker’s seeming preference for essay and poetry in the latter part of her writing career, a fuller discussion of the limitations and possibilities of genre and form for Walker would enrich the...

Game On! Authors, Fans Face Off in Innovative Experiment

Authors have total recall of everything in their books, right? Or would an avid fan kick their butt in a trivia match? This ingenious concept—conceived in the early days of the pandemic by three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin and Stacey Rattner, librarian at Castleton Elementary School in upstate New York—was only supposed to be a temporary virtual offering.

Haiku Garden

Haiku Garden Harryette Mullen (bio) Find frogs and toads inevery yard. No garden iscomplete without them. Zipped tight in their sleep-ing bags—who could imaginetheir deep black-eyed dreams? Piquant peppers pleasetaunt tease with tongue-piercing taste,igniting desire. Of all edibleovaries, what could taste asluscious as sweet figs? Okra’s baby fuzzstiffens to bristles, loadedmissiles point to sky. Watermelon crossedAtlantic’s perilous waveswith blackseed cargo. Injuries sustainedwhile picking berries: snagged skin,bruised fruit, hurt feelings. [End Page 22] Harryette Mullen Harryette Mullen’s books include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a pen Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between, published in 2012 by the University of Alabama, won an Elizabeth Agee Prize. Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013. A critical edition of her poetry is forthcoming in 2023 from Edinburgh University Press. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at ucla. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press

Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit by Nagueyalti Warren

Reviewed by: Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit by Nagueyalti Warren Rochell Isaac (bio) Warren, Nagueyalti. Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit. Landham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-1538123973. $129.85 Hardcover. In multiple interviews, Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker, has shared the story of seeing the dead body of her classmate's mother whose husband had shot her in the face. Walker explains that as a child, she knew that she would tell that woman's story and that while she didn't yet have the words, she would learn, and that story would be about poverty, rage, oppression, sexism, and misogyny. As Walker surmised at a young age, she would indeed learn to tell such stories; in fact, addressing these social ills has been the focus of her life's work. Professor of African American Studies, Nagueyalti Warren, in Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit, seeks to securely place Walker and her work in the African American homiletic tradition. Warren's ambitious book delves fully into Walker's body of work. She locates Walker in the tradition of Sojourner Truth who wrote on matters of race and gender drawn explicitly from her own lived experiences. The truth is Walker's only guide and compass. Warren blesses her audience with theological, metaphysical, ecocritical, ecofeminist, cultural, and structuralist readings of Walker's texts. Her access to Walker's private notes and manuals provides profound insight into Walker's thinking, further heightening the book's appeal. Warren presents Walker's works as the culmination of an aesthetic vision of her theology of spiritual liberation and transformation, embedded with a rejection of religion, dualism and suffering. She depicts Walker's search and exploration of mystical truth for self-empowerment. Alice Walker is represented as literary mystic, pagan sage, and healer. Warren introduces Walker as mystic born of childhood trauma: the eye injury she sustained at 8-years-old, the unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and a long illness which she self-diagnosed as Lyme disease. These existential crises brought Walker to experience the dark night of the soul, a common experience for mystics, and as mystic, she draws on her own experience as an African American woman in her writing. I was first introduced to Walker's work as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University and was instantly captivated by Walker's own story. The daughter of sharecroppers, Alice Walker rose to become a major writer of the 20th century, becoming the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple. A prolific writer, Walker has written several novels which Warren dissects chronologically illustrating how with each novel, Walker takes her audience deeper into the "mystical realm." Warren concludes that Walker's collective work has brought about a paradigm shift, which unveils and challenges our archaic binary thinking [End Page 320] about life as simply defined by our notions of good and evil. Walker's writing then, opens up a sacred and communal space to the "infinite possibilities" created in a spiritual universe for readers who dare to journey with her. Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Warren describes as a "mediation on choice" where free will, fate and destiny are highlighted with sexism, classism, and poverty categorized as intersecting symptoms (21). Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), is followed by her magnum opus, The Color Purple (1982), which Walker herself posits is a theological work and which Warren depicts as a sermon. The novels: The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), and a memoir, The Chicken Chronicles (2011) follow to varying degrees of acclaim. Walker has also produced several collections of short stories: In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman (1973), You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down (1971), Alice Walker Banned (1996), The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). Warren uses Organic Inquiry—a research method and spiritual inquiry blend aimed at transformative change—to unpack Walker's...

Conflicting Masculinities in Ha Jin’s Waiting: Talented Scholars and Ruthless Men of Action in China’s Mao and Post-Mao Eras

Abstract As a highly acclaimed novel for which Ha Jin won the U.S. National Book Award in 1999, Waiting covers the period from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, encompassing the Cultural Revolution through the early reform era. Its oft-noted central concern is the suppression of emotional life, and by extension humanity, in the totalitarian climate of Mao’s regime. This article offers a new reading, which foregrounds the novel’s use of masculinities as a central theme and driver of the plot. Through the prism of Kam Louie’s wen-wu (literary accomplishment – military prowess) dyad, this study focuses on Ha Jin’s critique of the socialist-era trajectories of two historically prominent Chinese male character types: the intellectually-oriented man of book learning and the physically-driven man of action. It shows how Waiting illuminates the conditions underlying a pervasive social and psychological paralysis of male intellectuals and the contrasting empowerment of a predatory class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs.

Ellison’s Invisible Man and Faulkner’s Light in August: An Argument in Black and White

In a letter to Albert Murray dated April 9, 1953, Ralph Ellison described meeting William Faulkner at Random House on the morning of the National Book Awards ceremony for Invisible Man (1952): Saxe [Commins, Faulkner’s editor] says, “Bill, I want you to meet Ralph Ellison. He’s one of our writers who’s won the National Book Award.” “Glad to meet you, Mr. Ellison,” Faulkner says. “Well, Mr. Faulkner, this really completes the day for me,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “I guess this really is a day for you.” “Ralph’s book is Invisible Man,” Saxe said. “Yes, I know,” Faulkner said. “Albert sent me a copy almost a year ago.” “You know,” I said, “you have children all around now. You won’t be proud of all of them, just the same they’re around.” “Yes,” Faulkner said, “I was surprised to learn how many people like the stuff.”1 On...

Sigrid Nunez on the Writer’s Life

Abstract The Friend (2018), the seventh novel of Sigrid Nunez, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. It not only tells a touching story about the human-canine bond between the narrator and a huge Great Dane but also involves much meditation on writing as a profession and the universal concerns of humanity. Looking back at her writing career, Nunez talks about her beliefs as a writer, her observation of the contemporary literary scene, her evaluation of the status of fiction in the current era, her teaching experiences in writing programs, and her personal story as a child of immigrants and a former assistant to Susan Sontag. According to Nunez, a life of solitude is conducive to writing books, and experiences of frustration are normal for a writer. However, she maintains that writing should be seen as a vocation instead of a means of self-advancement. With respect to new trends in literary culture, Nunez believes the house of fiction does have many rooms, and the definition of a novel has become much broader.

Race

60 WLT AUTUMN 2021 a POETRY Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents, all the time past, are earth. But also language, words like Spanish, gypsy, black, or immigrant. Words that rise like swords, walls that are constructed with words, the old continents, the new continents, with the fading kingdoms and kings over there, on the same ruins, on the myths and oracles, America rises. Into it pour the children of the children of the grandchildren of civilizations. Children of Rome and Greece, settlers of Egypt, nomads of India, its rivers flow into the womb of the Mississippi, they bring the water in their veins, they water the fertile land, and then they are food for the trees, oxygen in the lungs of other men, water again in combination with hydrogen. America is watered with the blood of civilizations. Past is the word that keeps the balance on their lips, the present is yesterday, the future is yesterday, the fruit after a storm was bitten. I say Spanish, and I do not understand. I say Spain, and my eyes fill with melancholy, but also my heart with flowers is gone, of a mineral taste, as if it were the smoke of a distant fire. Race by Fernando Valverde WORLDLIT.ORG 61 Fernando Valverde (b. 1980, Granada) has been voted the most relevant Spanishlanguage poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities. For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco, he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014. He teaches poetry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Poet, teacher, and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and written about some of the most devastating events of twentiethcentury world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Forché’s ability to wed the political with the personal places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov (New York Times Book Review). Her memoir What You Have Heard was named a finalist for a 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Only the color of the land where I grew up is as certain a race. A reddish earth, often bathed in blood. Land that saw Phoenicians die, Romans, Arabs, men of every land and country, and also to my grandfather, and my grandfather’s father, and also the old blesseds who come every morning to the parish of San Juan de Dios, and the men who try to cross the strait and are returned to the shores of my country by the waves of the Mediterranean, and to the people who suffer and always look toward the ground out of shame or weakness, or simply because they want to put an end to the journey. My race belongs to that land, and the word land, and the water that cleans it without paying heed to the blood that drags it away. Translation from the Spanish By Carolyn Forché Editorial note: “Race” is forthcoming in America, published by Copper Canyon. FERNANDO VALVERDE PHOTO BY CHRISTINA ANTON, CAROLYN FORCHÉ PHOTO BY DON J. USNER ...

Open Water

Open Water Ada Limón (bio) It does no good to trick and weave and losethe other ghosts, to shove the buried deeperinto the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistentin water I cannot tell if it is a wave or youmoving through waves. A month before you diedyou wrote a letter to old friends saying you swamwith a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,but what you told me most about was the eye.That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fishthat passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim.On the shore, you described the fish as nothingyou'd seen before, a blue-gray behemoth moving slowlyand enduringly through its deep fathomlessNorth Pacific waters. That night, I heard moreabout that fish and that eye than anything else.I don't know why it has come to me this morning.Warm rain and landlocked, I don't deserve the image.But I keep thinking how something saw you, somethingwas bearing witness to you out there in the oceanwhere you were no one's mother, and no one's wife,but you in your original skin, right before you died,you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with younow ten years gone, I was so happy for you. [End Page 120] Ada Limón Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College

Take a Body and Replace It with Another Body

Take a Body and Replace It with Another Body Daniel Borzutzky (bio) Take a word and replace it with another word This is the most miserable place I have knownTake a word and replace it with another word This is the most miserable life I have knownTake a verb and replace it with another verb The river swallowed my face my mouth my body my arms my hands my legsTake a verb and replace it with another verb The river loved my face my mouth my body my arms my hands my legsTake a noun and replace it with another noun The authoritative body loved my face my lips my teeth my tongue he loved meTake a body and replace it with another body, take a verb and replace it with another verb [End Page 38] The bureaucrat killed my face my lips my tongue my teeth he killed meTake a blank and replace it with another blank The blank blanked my blank my blank my blank it blanked me The wrong face might kill youA certain change might be possible if the wrong face kills youA certain change might be inevitable if the wrong face doesn't kill youYou think you drowned in the river but really it was the city that killed youYou think you are the body that drowned in the river but you are dead and you do not get to control the circumstances surrounding your disappearanceTake a word and replace it with two words You do not get to have feelings about the circumstances surrounding your disappearanceTake a body and replace it with another body I do not get to have feelings about the circumstances surrounding my disappearanceTake an adjective and replace it with another adjective [End Page 39] I do not get to have feelings about the circumstances surrounding your disappearanceTake a verb and replace it with another verb, take a noun and replace it with another noun You do not get to question the circumstances surrounding my reappearance It was a day he knew he would die an unspectacular death in the river of venomous alonenessIt was a night they knew they would die a spectacular death at the hands of the paramilitary nationalists who were armed by the secret policeIt was an afternoon they knew they would survive and be forced to persist in a world where they'd rather be deadEnvy leaked from the mouth and vengeance dripped from the eyeballsPetroleum dripped from the teeth and plastic straws were shoved into the nostrilsHe gave his child a kiss on the foreheadHe gave the bank a body that once loved himParentheses but in reality it was hard to have feelingsParentheses and in fantasy it was even harder to have feelings [End Page 40] He disappeared unspectacularly into the blank of the American nightTake a body and replace it with another body I disappeared unspectacularly into the blank of the American nightTake a verb and replace it with another verb, take a noun and replace it with another noun I bloomed unspectacularly into the debt of the American night [End Page 41] Daniel Borzutzky daniel borzutzky is the author of Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, among other works. He received the National Book Award in 2016. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia won the National Translation Award. Copyright © 2021 Yale University

Eudora Welty Foundation

Eudora Welty Foundation Jeanne B. Luckett The Eudora Welty Foundation's 2020 organizational, educational, and public activities were impacted considerably by the Coronavirus pandemic. Many events were canceled, and others were reformatted to assure safety for participants. In spite of these necessary accommodations, appreciation for Welty's works and enthusiasm for connecting with others who had similar interests kept the Welty Foundation busy. Likewise, when all public events at the Welty House & Garden scheduled from March 23 through May were canceled by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the staff of the Welty House & Garden developed innovative means of connecting with visitors as circumstances and regulations permitted. Gradually, following safety protocols, the public was permitted to take unguided free tours of the Welty Garden, and in July, limited tours of the Welty House & Garden resumed. Working together, the Welty Foundation and the House & Garden, along with Millsaps College and other partners, offered creative programming during this most challenging year. As was the case with many other organizations, the internet played an important role in our communication. Authors Sarah Broom and Kiese Laymon Discuss Their Memoirs Before the pandemic necessitated programming changes, authors Sarah M. Broom and Kiese Laymon presented a discussion on their memoirs at Millsaps College on February 25, 2020. Broom's memoir, The Yellow House, received a 2019 National Book Award among other honors. Laymon's Heavy received the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in addition to other awards. The discussion was sponsored by the Millsaps Visiting Writers Series; the Eudora Welty Foundation; the Millsaps Center for Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation; and the Center for Art and Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art. [End Page 275] Jolly Lecture with Ron Rash Canceled; Other Rash Book Events Held The annual Bettye Jolly Lecture, scheduled March 19, 2020, with award-winning poet and fiction writer Ron Rash, was the first event to be canceled. The Foundation anticipates rescheduling Rash for the Lecture as soon as circumstances permit. On April 13, 2020, Eudora's birthday, Rash's short story collection Something Rich and Strange was the subject of the monthly Brown Bag Book discussion moderated by Welty scholar Suzanne Marrs. Usually held over lunch at the Welty Education and Visitors Center, the discussion was the first virtual program coordinated by the Welty House & Garden staff and offered via Google Hangouts. Later in the year, Rash's latest book, In the Valley, a selection of short stories and a novella based on his best-selling book Serena, was scheduled as the January-February 2021 selection for the virtual Welty-at-Home Book Club. Spring Plant Sale Canceled, Replaced with Plant Purchase Opportunities Set for April 11, 2020, the annual Spring Plant Sale, benefitting the Welty Garden and usually featuring some plants propagated from those grown in the Garden, was canceled. But heirloom plants cultivated by the Welty House staff, Cereus Weeders, and other volunteers, were made available for sale at the Welty Education and Visitors Center. Scholastic Writing Award Winners Honored by Video and Through Mail Scheduled for April 19, 2020, to honor 321 winners from around the state, the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony, generously supported with a grant from the C Spire Foundation, was canceled. The keynote speaker, author Maurice Carlos Ruffin, 2020-21 Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, recorded a video of his remarks which was sent to the award winners. A transcript of the talk was provided on the Welty Foundation website. Certificates were mailed to the honorees, and all gold medalists received a copy of A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn Brown, through the generosity of Jean Nicholson Medley, Welty Foundation Board member. The 2021 Scholastic Writing program began September 1 with packets distributed to teachers statewide, and the deadline for entries was December 15, 2020, according to program administrator Sally Birdsall. [End Page 276] Virtual Welty-at-Home Book Club Attracts Nationwide Audience Making use of the audio and video conferencing platform Zoom, the Welty House & Garden staff, working with Welty biographer and scholar Suzanne Marrs, developed plans for a virtual book club focused on Welty but exploring other authors' works as...

Arthur SzeThe Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

BOOKS IN REVIEW ARTHUR SZE Arthur Sze The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2021. 560 pages. THIS COLLECTION IS a book I think you will want to live with, as I have been living with it for a few months now. Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seem affected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below the surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect. The poems presented here simply will not allow a reader to be complacent. We are drawn into a multitude of scenes that assault the senses in various ways at various times—often with the dual effect of life-affirmation in the midst of decay, hopes clarified, truth realized within contexts of mundaneness, confusing everydayness, if not outright violent indifference. This collection includes a significant amount of award-winning work from ten previous collections dating back to 1998, including the critically acclaimed The Ginkgo Light (2009) and the 2019 National Book Award–winning work Sight Lines. Additionally, in a concluding section— “The White Orchard: New Poems”—Sze offers twenty-six new poems. One of Sze’s striking writing characteristics involves his ability and propensity to create simultaneous actions, apparently unrelated, within a singular poem’s context . These apparently unrelated actions are, in a larger sense, connected, and his juxtaposing of scene and character with apparently contradictory elements serves as a (sometimes unsettling) reminder that we are all connected, and everything is connected, for better or worse. For example , in the first poem of “The String Diamond ,” a pleasant “apricot blossom” occurs along with a number of other unpleasant events such as: a mistake in surgery, a compressed nerve, asphyxiation, and other everyday misfortunes. These tragedies, along with the mundane, and with the blossoming apricot, cause “wonder” about other “inchoate griefs” happening all the time. His choice of the word “inchoate” seems to climactically (or perhaps it is anticlimactic ) verify a total truth of a situation not fully observable, at least at first glance. An artist is to help us see, to truly see, and Sze’s poems promote this visionary effect over and over again. The poems engage the contemporary and the historical. Sze’s vision encompasses an amazing variety of animal, reptilian , and vegetal lives. It conveys a rich variety of ecosystems around the globe. It also reaches the heavenly bodies, the ends of the known universe, as well as an abundant variety of human cultures, but always reconnects to the human attempt to perceive. As collected in book form, but also, even more impressively, within the singular context of an individual poem, Sze often presents a speaker enveloped and shaped by concentric circles. The “meaning ” of the poem, or the sensual, artistic value, is to be understood in the various individual circles, but also in the cumulative whole. A consistent feature of Sze’s writing style is his collapsing of past and present into a single moment. In “Cedar Fires,” the speaker “thinks” of “the antelope carved in the rock” even as “we touch the Pleiades.” Though I feel Sze’s poetic vision moves beyond labeling, quite a bit of his work might be classified as “necro-pastoral”— the living enduring in the midst of decay or death—or perhaps even “necromancy.” One of many examples of this occurs in the third poem of “Infloresence” in which “A shrinking loop becomes a noose” and a red snake snags its epidermis, the mind snags, molts from the inside out. Although sand plunges in an hourglass – soon the last white particles will vanish from the top – I ache for a second, sulfur butterfly pinned over black paper, to stop: but eelgrass in tidal water, I catch the scent of tomato leaves on my hands, swing palms near a horse’s head: flies flit and land, flit and reland. It is exhilarating to see a poet’s evolution in style and content, evolving yet grounded in its original soul-stirring lyrical style...

Book Review: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a saga of the trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows of a Korean family spanning from 1910 to 1989. Lee is a Korean-American author whose work engages with themes of the diasporic Korean identity. Pachinko was published in 2017 to critical acclaim and it was in the running for the National Book Award for Fiction.
 Pachinko is a historical novel and its panoramic gaze encompasses twentieth century Korea giving us a terrifyingly real account of Korean society from the Japanese colonization of Korea to the Second World War. The Financial Times wrote in their review of the book: “We never feel history being spoon-fed to us; it is wholly absorbed into character and story, which is no mean feat for a novel covering almost a century of history.”
 It is the first novel about Korean history and culture written for English language readers.

Words Reek Worlds

Frank Bidart’s most recent book, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A poem he wrote in 1975, ‘Ellen West,’ provides the libretto for Ricky Ian Gordon'’s recent opera, Ellen West.

In Siren Times

Poet, essayist, and translator, Sherod Santos’s most recent collection of poems is Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton, 2017). A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The New Yorker Book Award. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works in an outreach program for the homeless.

My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich by I. Zoboi

Zoboi, Ibi. My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich. Penguin Random House, 2019.
 My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich is Ibi Zoboi’s middle-grade debut, following her YA novels Pride and the National Book Award finalist American Street. Some of Zoboi’s concerns in her YA fiction are revisited here: Black community and communities, complexities of family relationships, and the difficulties and joys of discovering new places. Here Zoboi adds to the mix a quirky, sci-fi loving protagonist, and a historical setting: Harlem in the summer of 1984.
 Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman (aka E-Grace Starfleet in her galactic "imagination location," aka Ice Cream Sandwich to the Nine Flavas crew of MCs and B-girls) is a seventh-grader from Huntsville who is sent to live with her father in New York City for the summer. She’s full of science fiction knowledge and enthusiasm, abetted by her Granddaddy, who worked for NASA and occupies a large role in her internal narrative as Captain Fleet.
 Ebony-Grace is a somewhat frustrating protagonist, making a number of seeming unforced errors due to her commitment to her spacefaring alter ego, but she is authentic and compelling, too. Her insistence on being E-Grace Starfleet can be endearing, though she’s clearly using her imagination to avoid dealing with, or understanding, what’s happening around her. She describes her surroundings in terms of her space adventure: that Captain Fleet has been taken captive by the Sonic King on Planet Boom Box, and that the Sonic Boom threatens to overtake everything. Her new friends initially have little time for this kind of play; they’re busy developing their crew’s double-dutch, rapping and breakdancing skills in preparation for a competition that might get them into the big leagues. The culture-shock contrast, in other words, isn’t just between Huntsville and Harlem, but also between one kind of play and (although the Nine Flavas crew don’t see it like this) another; between childhood and adolescence.
 A caution for readers who appreciate concreteness: one subplot seems ambiguous to the point of opacity. Ebony-Grace has been sent to New York because of some trouble her Granddaddy has gotten into, or possibly a health crisis he is having. There are allusions from adult characters to sins Ebony-Grace’s grandfather has committed, consequences for bad decisions, lawyers, and journalists. His death near the end of the novel leaves both Ebony-Grace and the reader with questions but little closure; veiled references imply a sex-and-drugs aspect to his troubles, or a connection to the AIDS crisis, but this is never clarified.The narrative here is more atmospheric than propulsive, but that atmosphere is alive with culture and history. Character voices are lively, funny, and down to earth; their moment is depicted lovingly and specifically but without preciousness or nostalgia. This love letter to 1980s New York has mountains of appeal for any reader interested in science fiction or hip hop culture, and is a must for any collection looking to continue prioritizing diversity and representation in its holdings.
 Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Amanda Daignault 
 Amanda Daignault is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She studies contemporary children's middle-grade fantasy novels, using methods of book history and bibliography to figure out where all those giant trilogies came from and what they're doing.