National Book Critics Circle Award Research Articles

Circling around Remembrance: A Conversation with Dorthe Nors

Circling around RemembranceA Conversation with Dorthe Nors Kathryn Savage (bio) CELEBRATED Danish writer Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast of Denmark, moving from Skagen to the Wadden Sea. "Wandering Houses," from Nors's collection of fourteen essays, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in the September 2022 issue of World Literature Today. Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop, two novellas, and four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. In her most recent book, her spare and stunning prose depicts the harsh Jutland Peninsula with immediacy, as she moves between the past and the present to record a nuanced and layered place. This work is as much about the external world as it is an exploration of inner weather and personal memory, and the result is an expansive and intimate archive of movement and belonging. Kathryn Savage: In your essay "The Tracks around Bulbjerg," you write, "The landscape is an archive of memory." What did you mean by this line? Dorthe Nors: I wrote A Line in the World in one year. One of the first things I noticed when I traveled in this landscape, which I've known my entire life, was that episodic memory was stored in the places I went. You see, that's how we work: we remember things when we reenter places we used to live in or travel through. Visit your childhood school, for instance, and I'm certain that an episodic memory that you've not been in touch with for ages will emerge from "the archive." The famous Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who traveled a lot, said: "To travel is to live." I changed that phrase a bit in A Line in the World: "To travel is to remember." Savage: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Would you describe the relationship between form and content in your own work? Nors: I want to write in all kinds of forms. I couldn't imagine spending my entire life as a writer who only writes novels, for instance. I love language. I love the things it can pick up on, describe, dig into. I treat my language as if it was an instrument; a cellist didn't become good at playing the cello without rehearsing every day and challenging themselves. The same with language for me. I want my instrument to really develop and grow, as a linguistic art, so I change forms. And while it's true that A Line in the World is composed of fourteen essays, I prefer to call them chapters since the book turned out to feel like one continuous essay to me. Savage: I once heard you describe writing a short story like standing on a stage and singing without stopping, You must be there! Do you think the essay form asks something different from the writer? Nors: I think that there will be elements of the intensity and the "in situ" presence of the short story in both the novel and the essay, as writing forms. The difference between novels and short stories is of course the length and the way intensity varies in the novel. A Line in the World has both novel and short-story qualities, but the difficulty here was that facts and nonfictive information—about landscape, places, local history—had to be embedded in the prose. That was quite a challenge. Essays tend to be didactic and lean toward an urge to educate the reader, and I don't like didactic information, [End Page 10] preaching, etc., being mixed up in my literature. I worked hard to figure out how to solve that problem. You could say that A Line in the World is a fusion of three forms—novel, short story, and essay—without completely being any of them. Click for larger view View full resolution Savage: Across prose forms, how do you balance the ideas that drive your work with the scenes and people themselves? Nors...

The Analysis of Tragic Characters’ Tragedy Origin in The Woman Warrior Based on Freudian Psychoanalysis

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of famous Chinese-American writers. Her prominent representative, The Woman Warrior, let her earn the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1976. This great work surprised literary circle and attracted quiet a few researchers and scholars to appreciate and evaluate. This work is divided into five parts: “No Name Woman”, “White Tigers”, “Shaman”, “At the Western Palace”, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Ripe”, which mainly tell about five females’ stories. With regard to this work, many studies have been conducted before. Here, this paper is designed to conduct the analysis of tragic characters’ tragedy origin in The Woman Warrior based on Freudian psychoanalysis. This paper finds that there are three psychological factors to contribute to the two tragic characters’ tragedy: the influence of the two tragic characters’ and people’s unconsciousness, the effect of tragic characters’ death instinct, and the tragic characters’ overuse of mental defense mechanisms which include displacement, depression, denial, and introjection.

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

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Author Isabel Wilkerson to Present Opening Session Lecture

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article APA & MeetingsFull AccessAuthor Isabel Wilkerson to Present Opening Session LectureSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:26 Mar 2021https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.4.28AbstractJoe HensonIsabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, will be the final speaker at the Opening Session of APA’s online Annual Meeting. Her topic will be “Our Racial Moment of Truth.”Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize while serving as the Chicago Bureau chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal.Wilkerson is the author of The New York Times best-sellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named to more than 30 “Best of the Year” lists, including those of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents was published in August 2020.Wilkerson will present the lecture “Our Racial Moment of Truth” during the Opening Session, which will be held on Saturday, May 1, at 10 a.m. Recording of this event is not permitted. For more information on this speaker, please visit prhspeakers.com. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

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

A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy

A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy Jacob Griffin Hall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Beowulf Sheehan [End Page 168] Camille T. Dungy is a poet, essayist, professor, and editor based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade, Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. Dungy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in anthologies and in literary magazines, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, VQR, and Guernica. Dungy is currently a University Distinguished Professor, teaching in the English department at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted by e-mail between December 2020 and February 2021. [End Page 169] JACOB GRIFFIN HALL: Could you tell us a bit about what initially drew you to writing poetry? CAMILLE T. DUNGY: I grew up in a family that values literature, poetry included, so I was reading poetry and having poetry read to me from a very young age. I remember memorizing my first poem in kindergarten or first grade. I have always loved the taut power of a poem. The way some of us love watching world-class sprinters do their thing. Those quick bursts of power and import. That's exciting. HALL: Your first book of poems, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, is a collection of loose sonnets. Much of your later work is formally conscious but still free verse. How has your relationship to form evolved over the course of your career? DUNGY: I often think that landing on that rogue sonnet form in my first book was one of the best things that could have happened to me as a writer. It taught me a lot about the power of rigor and tradition as well as the power of improvisation. My whole career I've played with toggling between using elements of received forms and resisting them. I love counting the syllables in my lines, the beats in each line, the number of lines in a poem. The ways that rhyme can work to suggest a familiar form, even if the poems don't exactly and perfectly implement that received form's rules. I like paying attention to what forms may echo through my poems. My parents listened to a lot of jazz when I was growing up. Listening to jazz, you can often hear the echo of classic songs from different traditions buried inside songs that sound nothing like those referent pieces but which are also clearly shaped by the referent pieces. I like to play with traditional forms in a similar way. HALL: I love the comparison to jazz here, and the idea of form echoing through a poem even when it doesn't fully conform to its rules. A lot of poets whose work I'm drawn to take up sonnet variation in this way—Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets, Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and more recently Diane Seuss's forthcoming frank: sonnets. Do you think there's something particular to the sonnet that makes it a good site to explore this meeting of tradition and improvisation? [End Page 170] DUNGY: Absolutely! The sonnet is already like a little argument. A mini-essay. Like those five-paragraph theme essays of our school days. You open the sonnet with a set of expectations of what a sonnet will be (for instance: about love, both attainable and unattainable), and the sonnet proceeds for a while either confirming or disabusing you of this expectation. Then the poem goes a bit deeper into this idea until the volta around the eight or tenth line, depending on how traditional the sonnet is. At the point of this turn, the poem either moves even deeper into the line of inquiry or turns in another direction. Then, depending on the kind of sonnet it is again...

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young

Reviewed by: African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young Mildred R. Mickle African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young. New York, Library of America, 2020. 1150 pp. $45.00 hardcover. Kevin Young's 1,100-plus-page anthology provides an intriguing selection of African American poetry that was published from the late eighteenth century all the way to 2020. The lineup of poets in this book rightly begins with Phillis Wheatley, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003), terms "the mother of African-American literature" (50). Wheatley's groundbreaking, pre-Revolutionary War poetry, published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), provided a much-needed critique of the foundation of American conceptions of independence. At the anthology's opposite end we have poets younger than forty, such as National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ishion Hutchinson and Aja Monet and Jamila Woods, activists and civic engagers of the twenty-first century who are training the next generation of poets and paying homage to those who have died in the ongoing struggle for agency and autonomy. In between are selections by nineteenth-century enslaved and free poets, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, poets of the Black Arts Movement, and work by a number of Pulitzer Prize winners: Gwendolyn Brooks (1945), Rita Dove (1987), Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), Natasha Trethewey (2007), Tracy K. Smith (2012), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tyehimba Jess (2017), and Jericho Brown (2020). Young also represents a variety of award-winning poets from abroad, including 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who lived much of his life in St. Lucia, and the Emmy-winning Kwame Dawes, who came to America from Ghana and Jamaica. Here too is much-loved Maya Angelou, a three-time Grammy winner and the author of the 1992 presidential inaugural poem. Young also makes a concerted effort to present work by lesser-known poets. In his introduction, which is titled "The Difficult Miracle," Young writes: [End Page 577] African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song captures a quarter-millennium of Black poetry in the Americas, from Phillis Wheatley to the present day. Whether we consider that time span to consist of what June Jordan calls "the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America," what Amiri Baraka names "the changing same," or the pleasure that Toi Derricotte invokes when she says "joy is an act of resistance," this anthology provides a comprehensive look at the centuries of song and struggle that make up African American verse, a legacy that is fruitful and large enough to barely be represented by one volume. (xxxix-xl) Not only was it "difficult" for African Americans to write and publish poetry, but it is also difficult to capture the scope of that extensive body of literature accurately. What Young has achieved in this volume is to be commended. He does note that he made the executive decision to omit certain types of oral poetry like the blues and spirituals (xlii-xliii), but he compensates for that lack by including "poems in translation by American poets of African descent writing in languages other than English" (xliv). And, to narrow the selection further, he limits the geographic region to the United States and parts of the Caribbean. It would have been helpful to have poems from some of the French-language writers of the Negritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who were influenced by Langston Hughes's efforts in the Harlem Renaissance. America is a postcolonial state, and the literary production of African Americans contributes significantly to the development of a postcolonial ethos. That very effort sent shock waves back to countries like Césaire's Martinique and Senghor's Senegal as black artists there struggled to find their own postcolonial aesthetic. Césaire's and Senghor's works have been translated into English from French. Still, it is easy to see why Young had to limit the scope of this volume. Already over eleven hundred pages long, the book hardly had room for more. The anthology is divided chronologically into eight sections; Young titles each with a quotation...

An Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

© Gaspar Tringale Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major critical and popular acclaim in 1993. It has since been translated into thirty-four languages and adapted on screen by Sofia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix Medici. The Marriage Plot (2011), his third novel to date, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. First publ...

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.

The Function of Time Figuration in Reading Atonement

This study investigates the relationship between time and memory in McEwan's novel Atonement and the role the three different kinds of time figuration play in constructing the harmony among characters, authors and readers. Atonement is another masterpiece after First Love, Last Rites and Amsterdam, for it gains several literary prizes: the Smith Award, the National Book Critics Circle and Santiago European novel Award. In Atonement, McEwan describes the protagonist Briony's memory dilemma through disrupting the linearity and stability of narrative and readers are often caught in a Foucault-like maze in reading. Ricoeur's interpretative theory of mimesis and figuration provides a new hermeneutic dimension to the interpretation of the text and an alternative perspective to the reader. In fact, the understanding of the novel can be helped by the dynamic cycle of figuration chains including prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. In prefiguration, the underlying reasons for the central event in Briony's memory are introduced. The key links between historical and individual events, the past and the present, the main and messy plots scattered throughout the novel could be organized by emplotment in configuration. In refiguration, Briony's reconstruction of the same events is achieved by meta-narrative strategy. To sum up, the time figuration model contributes to the interpretation of Atonement and the analysis of the figuration strategy provides possible spiritual sustenance for the child who experiences traumatic events in the early stages.

“Every Novel is a New Country”: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

ABSTRACTJunot Díaz (born on December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and obtained his MFA from Cornell University. Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2012, and was also the recipient of PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O Henry Award. He was appointed chair of the Pulitzer Board in April 2018. This conversation took place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 6, 2019.

Beyond Graphic Memoir: Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging

Beyond Graphic Memoir:Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging Tammy Clewell (bio) "We are made of the past."—Nora Krug In her 2018 visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Nora Krug, a German-born artist in her early forties who has lived in New York for more than two decades, grapples with a personal and collective legacy that she describes as darkly shadowed by the Second World War (2018a). Krug's book—a formally innovative and visually stunning collage of comics, family photographs, journals, letters, and newspaper clippings, along with war memorabilia, official documents, phone books entries, and maps—responds to an unspecified yet trenchant sense of the collective guilt she feels as a German born in 1977, more than three decades after the war's end. In seeking to come to terms with what she describes as "the consequences of another generation's actions" (2018a, p. 16), Krug details her efforts to discover all she can about the wartime activities of her family members, including her maternal grandfather, whom she describes as an "in-between man"—in her words, neither "a resistance fighter nor a major offender" (2018a, p. 191)—and her paternal uncle, who was drafted into the SS and killed in battle at the age of 19.1 In addition to conducting field research and gathering materials from German archives and flea markets, she also questions her mother and father, both of whom were born just after the [End Page 459] war's end, to ascertain whether they countered the widespread culture of silence, denial, and disavowal that persisted at least through the late 1950s by asking their parents and other relatives what they did and did not do during the war. The critical acclaim that Belonging has garnered in the U.S., Germany, and other European countries suggests that Krug's representation of a lasting legacy of collective guilt among the children and grandchildren of the war generation has touched a nerve still sensitive for some and ignited the imagination of others across multiple populations today. Winner of numerous awards, including the American 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award Prize (in autobiography), the British Victoria and Albert Museum's Book Illustration Prize, the German Youth Literature Prize and, also in Germany, the Protestant Book Prize, Krug's memoir begins by exposing what she regards as the incomplete nature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—Germany's effort to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Following Allied initiatives, including the public recognition of war crimes at the 1945 Nuremberg trials and the process of denazification, and after a protracted period of silence and denial, the German struggle to acknowledge and overcome the negative consequences of the past, as was established in the 1960s and reconfirmed in the 1980s, has taken place through official programs of commemoration and, perhaps primarily, through formal education in the schools, where children, starting around the fifth grade, learn about Nazism and typically visit a concentration camp museum. Krug's German education reflects the country's longstanding and deep commitment to publicly acknowledge and reflect on the past; indeed, she remarks that her studies provided her with an understanding of "the scope of the atrocities committed" and "evidence of our collective guilt" (2018a, p. 22). However, this schooling failed her, she reports, in two significant ways. First, her education did not help her move beyond a paralyzing form of collective guilt, one that she describes as being heightened by the fact that she has lived most of her adult life outside Germany and that manifests, for instance, in her anxiety about speaking English on New York subways lest her accent reveal her German identity. In reflecting on her [End Page 460] education, Krug remarks, "Being FEHLERFREI (fault-free) was our universal goal. Our teachers' red pens divided our exercise books into right and wrong, and the red marks felt as reassuring in their clarity as they were forgiving" (2018a, p. 24). However, she concludes that the curriculum, for all its public openness about National Socialism, never encouraged students "to ask about one another's grandparents" (2018a, p. 24) or to inquire "about...

Луиза Глик: мифологический феминизм и попытка преодоления антагонизма

For many people the fact that Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was a complete surprise. Ian Probstein comments on the judges’ decision and reminds about the poet’s “CV” that includes National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Humanities Medal, several Guggenheim fellowships and some other prestigious awards. Louise Glück was Poet-Laureate of the United States (2003–2004), the president of The Yale Younger Poets Prize jury. The essay contains a brief biographical sketch and a careful, subtle analysis of Glück’s poetry supplemented by Ian Probstein’s translations of poetic fragments.

He Said She'd Have to Walk Six Miles to Draw Them Water

He Said She'd Have to Walk Six Miles to Draw Them Water Rodney Jones (bio) Willodean wore long-sleeved black shirtsand long dresses with her hair swept back from her face and falling down her backclean to the waist in a straight braid, she and the sisters always in blackaccording to the strict proscriptions of their father, the old man in suspendersand beard, who had peculiar ways, people said, living like that, up in a hollerbetween Nebo and Mount Zion. A cult, some had it, of one family, the old man Willand his daughters: Willodean, the painter; Wilma, the philosopher; and Willa, the singer.Some told of a wife who died in childbirth, two sons disowned and driven off like lion cubs.Though few saw the family in their daily life, holding to the old ways, in holy abstinence.They hoed, they sewed, they milked the cows. Some Saturdays they would ride to townand sell produce from the back of a wagon: preserves, honey, lettuce, watermelons;and handiworks: footstools and whatnots, [End Page 141] woolen socks, and Willodean's paintings:a goat in a churn, a crawfish with sextant, smoke boiling up from a fleeing animal.Daubed onto bed sheets—few bought them. But then, briefly, her name was everywhere,the paintings in museums, everyone had to have one. This happened as horses disappeared,as the Beatles harmonized on Ed Sullivan, before the depot became the bistro.When a man on public television discussed Willodean's technique with chiaroscuro,he said it was if a genius from a remote tribe in Borneo had discovered, by scratching in dirt,the rudiments of Euclidian geometry. But it is all gone now: the decoys and the whatnots,and the strange paintings for two dollars. No record of Willa's singing or Wilma's logic.Like nuns or crows, a girl said, and it was true. To see them, who'd know one from the other?Once an expert came to Saturday market to ask Willodean questions. She never spoke.The old man Will spoke for her. These paintings, he said, were part of prophecy. She saw, but didnot seek these visions, and he said the blasting had started on the bluffs, Judgment Daywas coming. The interstate would be a sign. [End Page 142] Rodney Jones Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books, including Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Award. The poem in this issue is from his forthcoming book, Difficult Subjects. He lives in New Orleans and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

In the Wake of Trauma

In the Wake of Trauma Ashley Hope Pérez (bio) The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir Thi Bui Harry N. Abrams https://www.abramsbooks.com 336 pages; Print $26.99 The Best We Could Do draws readers into the often unspoken pain of growing up in the wake of the traumas that Thi Bui and her family endured during and after the Vietnam War. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography and already translated into Spanish and Italian, Bui’s haunting memoir contributes a visually complex graphic narrative to the emerging genre of refugee literature. Click for larger view View full resolution In 1978, after fleeing from Vietnam to Malaysia, the Bui family was relocated to Chicago in a matter of months thanks to the help of a sponsoring family. This historical depiction of a refugee experience stands in stark contrast to the reality of the world’s more than 22 million refugees seeking asylum today, the vast majority of whom will not achieve resettlement in their lifetimes. In the face of this staggering reality, the events depicted in The Best We Can Do seem to offer the consolation of particularity: in it, we track how one family persists, contorts, and reconstitutes itself despite experiences of abandonment, hunger, displacement, and crippling uncertainty. But Bui complicates this consolation by confronting readers with the human cost of war and the long shadow that it casts in the lives of the “lucky” ones who, like her family, escaped Vietnam and avoided decades of languishing in refugee camps and other spaces of detainment. The memoir begins with a full-page image of a pregnant belly seen from above. Meeting our narrator in childbirth is apt, given that becoming a mother is what triggers Bui’s quest to understand her parents—or at least to encounter them in their complexity and in the context of their histories rather than as “two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” From here, the narrative is organized around Bui’s longing for “an origin story that will set everything right,” and we track her efforts to amass historical knowledge and extensive family testimony. But as Bui struggles to achieve reconciliation with the pain that has been suffered and transmitted, that reconciliation comes from loosening her hold on the particulars of the past and instead unspooling their emotional content. In contrast to the understated text, the panels of the memoir ache with such verbs as withholding, denying, stifling, longing, drifting, dreading, hoping, with nouns like birth, water, blood, milk, fear, and hunger. Bui excels at depicting suppressed physical pain and afflictive emotion in the human figures she draws. If we return to the opening scene of Bui’s own labor, we encounter the description of pain that “comes in twenty-foot waves,” but the visual narrative makes clear that the most potent source of hurt for Bui is her mother’s sudden departure from the hospital room. Bui depicts her mother in the hallway just outside, her eyes cast down, eyebrows gathered, one hand pressed across her mouth and the other braced across her stomach as if contracting around the remembered pain of her six childbirths and the periods of grave unrest and danger that accompanied them. Like many gestures of suffering in the narrative, we will see this posture repeated in other bodies, as in an image of Bui as a small girl terrified by her father’s menacing presence. Postural echoes like these abound in the memoir, subtly signaling the embodied character of intergenerational trauma. The opening labor scene also initiates a painstaking process by which Bui will chronicle all six of her mother’s experiences in childbirth at various points in the narrative, including those siblings who did not survive. To remember and record these births in a ritual act by giving each scene of pain and possibility its due offers one metaphor for the work as a whole. Bui’s own birth comes just three months before the surrender of South Vietnam, which means that she has no memories of this period in her family’s suffering. In the...

Incredulous Essay on Hummingbirds

Incredulous Essay on Hummingbirds James Richardson (bio) Whirr of spokes, little splashof tachycardia—everything about them is too vivid to believe,as if they were illustrations somehowlifted from the page, even their obvious hoveringa kind of concealment, the wingsinvisibly swift. Some weigh less than a penny, little morethan my first thoughtwhen I see one—this can live? ________ Infallibly the surpriseof their first droning in the garden, all dangerof frost past, freezes me (the stingof a bee that loud would kill instantly). White blooms are flame enoughto draw them, seeing what they see of ultraviolet colors, [End Page 131] to us, mere rumors. ________ The whirling turbineof the wings, the heart strobinga thousand times a minute— Time must ragein them. If I touched one, immediately my hair would silver, and my bonesgray. Naturally, their torpor,as it's called, is in proportionsteep and dark, a 90 percentdrop in metabolismthat an insomniac could envymore than flight, even the tiny lightin their headsoffthat they would need to dream. ________ Busy winds, tiny flywheels loosedfrom day's machine— no way, from the meresipping of nectar, could they build feather and speed and tendon,yet seeing them snap up insects when they thinkno one's looking [End Page 132] is faintly a letdown. I wantedsweetness to be that strong. ________ It isn't humming, is it?—the note changingmore slowly than the weather. We'd have to listenall summer, and to all of them at once, to hear the whole song,its secrets hiddenright there in the open from us, always too lightly turningto our smaller, quicker tasks, as if anything at all could be an ending. [End Page 133] James Richardson James Richardson's previous collections of poems and aphorisms include During (2016); By the Numbers (2010), a National Book Award finalist; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (2004), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001), all published by Copper Canyon Press. For Now will be published in 2020. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications

Commentary: It’s the 21st century. Why are scientists still writing books?

Commentary: It’s the 21st century. Why are scientists still writing books?

Introduction: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most celebrated writers today. Besides the many prizes that his fiction has garnered (including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the McArthur “Genius Grant”), his work has also inspired a broad range of cultural spinoffs and homages from adaptations in film and music all the way to literary parodies and imitations of his style. Having been embraced across the cultural spectrum from Hollywood to Harold Bloom,...

About the Poets

About the Poets