There's So Much They Haven't Told You

"Always the body was regenerating itself.  Always it was dying."

Michelle Ross has given me a lot to think about regarding endings.  Her stories are strong and lyric and potent - and the endings always feel sharp and jarring.  I keep turning the page expecting more paragraphs because they END and they do not announce their ending.  I am the bird sailing straight into glass.  I am the coyote the moment he steps off the cliff, before he sees the abyss beneath him.  I feel like I'm standing on the earth, then realize I'm not.

There's genius in this.  It's strange to me, unconventional.   Where is the denouement?  The final outcome, resolution, "where all the secrets (if there are any) are revealed and loose ends are tied up"? Michelle Ross is keeping them locked up, or is opening the treasure chest and it's so filled with light we can't actually see inside.  I feel like what Ross is doing is creating momentum in a plot arc where usually there's a flat line.  Maybe the momentum is happening the second I go looking for more sentences.  That's when I plummet, am sucked into some me-sized black hole.

This happens right out of the gate, in Ross' killer opener, "Atoms."  Because the concept of atoms is rattling: "Nothing is solid in the way you formerly understood.  It is mostly empty space...You are mostly empty space."  The speaker is a young child, is swimming with that disarmed and alert and disoriented feeling: "you stand there and you stand there, the chalk shedding molecules all over your skin, molecules composed of calcium, carbon, and oxygen atoms, all atoms you already possess.  You can no longer see the line between things."  This feeling is not resolved or de-loosened at the end.  Michelle Ross does the opposite.  Michelle Ross starts her stories with a small tear that she then deepens.  The seams flap open instead of being sewed shut.  "Atoms" ends with the best possible question, "'There's so much they haven't told you.  Don't you want to know?'"  All of her stories end this way (for me) - I do want to know.  I kind of love that block of white space.  The refusing-to-tell-me.

I'm in the middle of the collection and have hit maybe my tenth glass-window, at then end of "Key Concepts in Ecology."  There's a wild animal somewhere outside, and inside are the highly controlled and organized employees of New Zeniths.  Outside are men in camo and daring delivery boys, there are bullets and an impasse of pines.  Inside are the cubicles, the trapped wild-animals hearts of the workers (the finance who wants to get home, who insists their boss can't keep them hostage; the employees worrying over the birthday banners and the software updates and the rule-mandating employer; our protagonist, trapped in her job, in her relationship to an unemployable man, in the very building she's been advised not to leave, in her devotion to work-ethic, in her head - since she's not the kind of person who feels she can up and quit her job).  This is the kind of story you read because you've been there - in the building you're not allowed to leave, in the job you hoped would fatten your account so you could do with your life what you intended.  You're with the protagonist when she roots for the wild animal, when someone says, "I hoped they missed it.  I hope that animals is fast," when someone else says, "If that animal's smart, it should be halfway across the state by now."  

We root for the animal because, like the protagonist, we want that freedom too.  That disrupting wildness.  We want to be the unshootable thing (or I do).  Some of us have fantasies about the kinds of wildness we don't see ourselves accessing.  We're too practical.  Resigned.  We take our power in small victories, like slightly off-color birthday banner art.  

But I do feel like the speaker of the story wants to be seen, and at the end she is, for a moment, real and untouchable as sunlight.  Right before I smack into the glass.

Letters and Poems and the First sentences of Books

4th grader poem using figurative language.

I feel like I haven't been reading because I haven't finished a book in some time - but of course I've been reading.  I've been underlining the sentences in letters from friends like:

"I've been thinking of all those super short flash piece I wrote and I see now it's not a flash collection but a seed packet."

I've been reading a poem from a brilliant 4th grade student with metaphors like "spring brewing" and "the fiery stencils of leaves" and "in the clouds are holes, that the sun would shine like a basket of hot coals."

Or another student who wrote, brilliantly, "Bananas are when the moon falls from the sky."

I've been beta-reading a friend's sci-fi novel, where passengers on a ship "fly like a flock of the birds we've never seen, and fall back to us like the rain we've never felt."

I've just marveled over the first page Michelle Ross' brilliant opener "Atoms" where "It's as though your teacher has taken the pot she's been feeding you spoonfuls from and poured it over your head."

I've been loving Rion Amilcar Scott's stories in INSURRECTIONS, especially the one about the daughter purposefully not beating her father at chess, about how loving someone means not getting as close to them or yourself as is actually possible.

I've been reading the similes my students wrote, like:

* dark as sludge
*dark as a mouth-hole
*dark as a mustache
*dark as graphite
*dark as the road
*scratchy as burnt toast
*scratchy as sugar
*tight as the end of a balloon
*tight as a sausage
*tight as a molecule
*tight as a wedgie
*tight as a bear hug
*tight as the mouth of a snake
*heavy as the moon
*heavy as a glacier
*heavy as chains
*heavy as a lake
*wild as a sock in the dryer
*wild as Godzilla
*wild as Utah
*wild as green
*loose as a bird
*loose as a flag flying in the wind
*loose as a skirt
*light as a unicorn's teardrop
*light as a penny
*light as a toenail
*twisted as a maze
*twisted as spaghetti
*twisted as a spring coil
*twisted as headphones
*twisted as trees

The Bluest Eye

"What did love feel like? she wondered. [...] Maybe that was love.  Choking sounds and silence."

I know, I'm late to the Toni Morrison party on this one.  I read Beloved about a year ago and fell hard for Morrison's lush sentences, her deep unpacking of character, her truth-telling, her exposure (and understanding) of pain, the way love and violence can be so tightly braided together.  The Bluest Eye hit me just the same.

 I can't believe this is her first novel. 

The framing of this story is so brilliant - using the Dick and Jane reading books as a way to unpack a family and community.  Those books are so quintessentially white and sterile and echo-chambery.  Morrison uses them in direct contrast with lives that are not neat and clear and clean.  Where repetition is a kind of inescapable pitfall.

Those Dick and Jane lines get sewn together so there isn't any space between words any longer.  Then there isn't any punctuation.  They become chapter headings.  The effect on the story is sardine-tight, pressurized, a feeling that things come too close together that shouldn't be, that one thing or another is bound to get crushed.

From American Primers and Readers

Through that frame, we meet everyone twice: who they are right now (Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove at each other's throats) and who they were as children (Cholly as cast-off, losing everything: his parents to abandonment and his foster-mother to peach cobbler, his ability to love in a grief-field under flashlights; Pauline Williams - aka Mrs. Breedlove - begins with a wonky foot and imbolity, a sexless, colorless life.  Truly - when Cholly first comes to her and her busted foot, she feels flooded with purple - "and it never did wash out.")

I guess only the children - Claudia, Frieda, Pecola, Sammy, even those hateful classmates Maureen Peal and Junior - have just one life.  The choices of children are so limited.  In the Breedlove household, Sammy runs away.  "Pecola, on the other hand, restricted by youth and sex, experimented with methods of endurance."  God, that sounds familiar.  Every child trapped by circumstance, by family.

The novel gets it's tension built like a slingshot.  We place a pebble in at the start - something's going on with Pecola - and we pull back into her mother's story, and then pull back further into her father's story, and when the novel ricochets back to the present moment that poor pebble is flung so far from what her reality used to be.  Morrison's generous exploration of Cholly's history makes his violence towards his daughter so much more complicated.  He is a man who wants desperately - and is desperately unable - to love.  "What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?" he wonders.  His impotence with language and tenderness - that's the problem: "the tenderness would not hold."  Morrison creates a world in which we can the patterns clearly: how the lack of tenderness in one's life can undo all the tenderness one tries to put forth.  "Again the hatred mixed with tenderness.  The hatred could not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her."

The concept of beauty has always acted as a kind of interference - find beauty and you've found love too.  That myth.  If you can't be beautiful, disappear.  Disappear into someone else's beauty.  A Shirley Temple doll or the women in the movies or even a house, like Mrs. Breedlove does, ignoring "the dark edges [of her home] that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely."  Or Cholly - disappearing into his daughter.  These characters are convinced of their ugliness.  They pray or they prey or they fantasize or they scrub - trying to change it.  Think of when Pecola prays to disappear - "She squeezed her eyes shut.  Little parts of her body faded away.  Now slowly, now with a rush.  Slowly again.  Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow.  Her feet now.  Yes, that was good.  The legs all at once.  It was the hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull.  Her stomach would not go.  But finally it, too, went away.  Then her chest, her neck.  The face was hard, too.  Almost done, almost.  Only her tight, tight eyes were left.  They were always left."

Think of how many students who google  "does pecola really get blue eyes" because they really don't know.  Pecola is an engine of endurance.  She needs to find some way to survive.

The Sin Eater & Other Stories

"You shake your wife wake.  You take her ring finger and break in half, like a breadstick.  You say, I unmarry you."

Elizabeth Frankie Rollins is spellbinding.  These stories swirl with themes of destruction - a smattering of buboes indicating plague, a woman next door smashing everything inside and outside her house, the sin eater who becomes more bruised and swollen the more of your evils she eats.  The characters seem stunned by their own ability to destroy: "It looked as though I had built a ruin on purpose," or "We often heard her say, I can't take it anymore, but we were witnesses to all she could and did take."  

Her book seems to ask what is explosive about each of us.  If our destructive tendencies have minds of their own.  And, perhaps more interestingly, her stories explore the surviving of damage, coming through making art or making peace (sometimes - and other times driving away wildly with your plague body in the open air).  One of my favorite stories in the collection, "Tail," recounts a woman who begins to grow one.  "You're past the age for growing things," the doctor tells her, and she tells us, "It didn't hurt.  It grew."  She goes through stages of pride and admiration, nervousness and secrecy, neglect.  Her tail is as large as she is.  At one point the tail is so mud-caked and tangled, heavy as a body.  The woman looks longingly on at those without tails, living their tail-less lives.  

Damage is like that - that small protrusion we start noticing, that growth we didn't exactly choose, the one that's difficult to hide and needs caring for, even when we want it out of body, our bathtub, our bed.  She writes, "I thought, it's not cancer, it's not malignant, it won't kill me.  But it's a tail and it's going to follow me forever and now nobody, anywhere, will ever really understand me."   

I think one reason we turn to stories are to feel less alone.  We tell them to be understood, we hear them in order to understand.  Frankie's book goes to that most alone, most misunderstood place - and shows us her characters' choices.  Being magnetized towards that damage, carrying it on or in our bodies.  Many times the characters make art to escape.  "There is a pulling inside you, not quite sexual, but deeper, as if a hand is digging within your body, feeling for something, or maybe drawing something out, a giant white root, a tendon, a bone."  These characters are so insistent about the choices they make - they sculpt and devour and curse and run away.  They eavesdrop.  They hallucinate.  They fantasize.  They burst open like ripe fruit. Even when they know they are going to die.

Repetition

"Something is being covered up, although imperfectly--there remain traces of blood in the published version, references to the young man coming to a 'terrible end.'"

James Tadd Adcox's novella is an emotional narrative suited up as a scholar, wrapped tight in philosophy, much like it's protagonist.  Because in the world of Repetition, there's this text (called Repetition) that is heavily analyzed, discussed, the various scholars wondering, at its heart, if "repetition is both possible and necessary for human happiness" or if "repetition and therefore human happiness is impossible."  One can't help but read the novella's characters as examples - figureheads - lab mice in this (the book's) experiments.

Human happiness may be code for 'love' in this novella.  And why shouldn't it be?  Being unloved sucks.  Our protagonist sleeps in an easy chair in the den, might go days without seeing his wife, falls instantly in love ("in jealousy" perhaps?) with his graduate assistant Sandra as she panics because of her own heartbreak scenario, because the motion of that panic is what creates beauty - she exists "in time."  Often our protagonist goes to the text Repetition for Constantius' definitions of (warnings about?) love: "the woman he loves was not important in herself, but rather represented an ideal."  

Of course, this is true of our protagonist, who "was happy in that moment to feel once again the possibility of love, and [...] was determined to guard [his] love in silence."

Those aren't the only stakes--it's more about the guarding than the love.  It's more about reverse engineering - if we know what does not cause love, can we figure out what does?  It isn't as simple as an inverse.  Even Sandra, whether or not she represents an ideal, wants love to be less opaque, less multi-sided, less sharp-cornered.  "'Love,' she said, and made a kind of spitting sound to show her disgust." In a story about patterns, mirrorings, in a world (ours) which might be predicted by the right algorithms - the worst stakes are knowing your patterns as inevitabilities.  Guarding what you've come to know is yours to lose.

People With Holes

"But that was my problem, continued interest in absences."

I first heard Heather Fowler read at AWP 2016, in a panel on magical realism, where she read excerpts from "With The Silence of a Deer" - where a women wakes with a stag's head for a head.  A woman with a hunter for a boyfriend, who finds she can't speak with this deer's head, who has to write down on paper "I'm hungry.  Please don't shoot me," before she bends over the yard to eat grass.  The comparison - predators/prey - is apt for the entire collection.  Each tale explores a coupling, drawing clear boundaries between gendered power dynamics but unclear boundaries between causation and consent.  

Often, the women in these stories don't know how to say no: "so I took to nodding and letting it be; I was, at least, good at that, getting better and better, a nodding welter-weight champion."  There's a discomfort (for me) reading this over and over: "I hear something rip.  I think, That must be passion.  My clothes had to go.  Somewhere.  Oh, the destruction!" Or: "Her life felt an endless parenthetical omission to the whisper of pleasure." Or, even when a woman is saying no - "'OhmyGod that is hot,' he said. 'I love that you don't want me.'"  

To be fair, at the end of their stories, the women largely escape their scenarios.  They retaliate.  But they never begin with agency.  They are always the bait in the trap, never the teeth.  "She was an object in repair," Fowler writes.  So not only was she an object.  Not only was she objecting.  

I appreciate most when the magical transformations in People With Holes lead to pensiveness.  When the stag-girl has time to realize that her 'Neanderthal' hunter "said the dirty words without hesitation [...] She wasn't sure he knew the other words."  I only wish Fowler lingered in these moments more.  Broke them down to the biodes.  That's always been my favorite part of magical realism - how the magic helps decode deeper truths.  Hovers for a moment in that pain.

Inter: Burial Places

"you were a whole country away from me by then//she was a hole"

Something seems unburiable in "inter: burial places."  Each poem clutches that prefix, poems excavating loss and longing and the impossibility to move beyond someone you've loved: "you've swum the reaches//of love but just because you surfaced/doesn't mean it's not hypoxia."  

Billie Tadros brings vulnerability to our lips in a cup.  Sometimes the 'you' is "a whole country away," other times the 'I' and 'you' fall into dandelions together.  Sometimes they are called 'we.' Sometimes "stop over stop/overlapping stop/lapping at me."  But often it's that luminal in-between space that's explored, or the richoceting between "I could core//you I could/cure you" and why shouldn't it?  After all, this collection is called "Inter," meaning "between," "in the midst of," but meaning also "reciprocally," "together," "mutually."  I like "in the midst of" best - that storm-center feeling her poems give: "if I can't have you/anywhere I'll have you/everywhere."

There's a sense of regret, time-loss, betrayal (I was/yours I was/your vibrating/medium I was/your bridge your cavity/music) in this collection, this juxtaposed love/lunging-for-the-jugular thing.  This comes through perhaps best in intermittent, one of my favorites from the chapbook.

And I think what's and the end of that poem is what I love best about reading Billie.  There's this on and off business (un)burying our demons.  We're up to our necks in heart meat.

The Neighborhood

"I am heartbroken still.  Or all over again.  I am orbiting the heartbreak, waiting for it to pull me in."

As always, the first thing I'm drawn to in Kelly Magee's new book is her fish-lure first sentences: "When the seas warmed, the mermaids washed ashore," "Once a girl found a stray tornado," "The wire children move independently and have recognizable faces."  This is something I so admire about her writing - the right-away whirlpool of it.  The dunk-tank feeling.  Total immersion.  It's the kind of storytelling I wish to emulate.

But as much as the magic, what's really fascinating is this neighboorhood thing.  Mob mentality - how the first person plural operates as a unit, thousand-eyed and myopic.  How a fairytale creates corners.  How even our unchecked memories surround us.  Her stories study the pressure applied by communities in worship, in mourning, struggling with vicious mermaid seductresses.  There's real culpability to living as part of something larger than oneself.  

Even in the stories devoid of neighborliness, "with aggressive layers of hedges and fences and underbrush" - community dictates behavior.   A girl calls a tornado-bite a dog-bite.  A girl hides who she is in her house because that's what this neighborhood does.

It makes me think that the larger things grow the more out of control they become.  A memory that used to be a point on a timeline and is now a planet. The tornado that is thrown a stick  and fetches an apple tree. Setting a woman onto a pedestal so easily - but how impossible to come down.  

Our Dreams Might Align

Disclaimer: I love Dana Diehl.  I've so enjoyed her star-shark of a debut and hanging tight to her kite-tails of sentences.  These stories are explorers and untamable animals and worriers (in the best way).  I feel as though her characters are always on the brink of becoming dangerous versions of themselves, and I love walking that knife's edge with them.

I have so many favorite stories in this collection, from the beam-of-light-husband to the couple raising dragons to the whale-swallowed brothers who tie their shoelaces together "so that if one of us falls into intestines, we both will.”