lost his soul and, while he’s been unaware of the missing soul for quite some time, it is out there looking for him, desperately trying to catch up. Souls live slow, gentle, and unhurried lives, so John is given a prescription to rest and to wait. He finds a cottage on the outskirts of the unnamed city and does precisely as prescribed; “He didn’t do anything else,” Tokarczuk writes. What follows are pages of Concejo’s timid, delicate pencil drawings: postcards of indistinguishable places, a public park in winter, silhouettes of people walking their dogs or playing ice hockey, a lone figure’s footsteps in the snow, and a child, no more than seven or eight years old. While John waits and the plants in the cottage grow tall and wild, the child wanders on, observing a village dance, playing at the seaside, and gazing at a sunset through a train window . These scenes feel far from the frantic existence John left behind. Is the child unable or just unwilling to witness those moments—dull commutes, board meetings , tennis sessions, late nights working? Or is it John himself, sitting in the cottage, revisiting only the slowest and most serene memories to invite his soul back in? As the child closes in on the present day, Concejo’s grayscale illustrations give way to a burst of color, as a bearded, aged John and his soul meet face to face on opposing pages in a sincerely moving tableau. Of course, there has never been a stranger time to review a book about slowing down, a year into a pandemic and in the dead of a dark winter lockdown. We don’t really know what John has left behind, only that he lives “happily ever after” through “all the peaceful winters that followed.” Reading, I felt a sad pang of envy for John’s hurried modern life—an ache to see a city through a hotel window, or to look through any window that isn’t mine. Our response to enforced inertia has been an insatiable craving for more: more excitement, more feeling, more lockdown hobbies—anything to keep us from sitting, “day after day, waiting .” But in waiting for his soul, John came to recognize what is “enough” or, as many other fairy tales imply, “just right.” In a time of uncertainty, stagnation, and grief, Tokarczuk and Concejo offer consolation—that we too might stop and recognize what is enough, endure our own “peaceful winters,” and possibly let go of the craving for more than that. Hannah Weber Brighton, United Kingdom Nate Marshall Finna New York. Penguin Random House. 2020. 112 pages. SLIPPERINESS IN LANGUAGE, often invoked as a postmodern outcome of oppositional poetry, could mean, in some parts of the world, slipperiness in life, literally social or physical death. Words carry consequences. No one understands this more than Nate Marshall, whose eponymous poem Finna catalogs near misses and narrow escapes that underscore a journey of linguistic and emotional survival. Such a journey is arguably emblematic and a necessary precursor for living fully as a human being and flourishing inside an art that, as this book testifies, is more than imaginative fodder: i remember a million finnas i avoided to get here. like the day them dudes jumped me off the bus & i was finna get stomped out like a loose square. or the day they got to shooting at the park & i was finna catch one like an alley-oop. or the day my grandma died & my grades dropped & i was finna not finish high school except i had a praying mama & good teachers & poems to write. If, as poststructuralist critics remind us, language is destiny, Marshall also knows that language is likewise geography and the people “who you [matter] to.” Alerting his reader to its origins, a speaker announces, “finna comes from the southern phrase fixing to,” but one of the nobler aims of the book is to pay homage to his genesis, the city of Chicago where, yes, “bustdowns bloom in our mouths” but also where gangs give “the strong dap & safe haven / to go on being bookish / & breathing & walking in the hood,” and where the young poet’s tongue is shaped by a grandmother who “kept...
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Jun 25, 2021
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer 
Open Access
