​The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night by Truman Capote is a collection of short stories and one novella, The Grass Harp, that focuses on families and children in the south and sometimes New York City. The Grass Harp follows a teenager as he is brought to his aunts’, Dolly and Verena’s, place with his father passing away quite soon after the boy, Collin, is dropped off. Verena is the industrious aunt who has businesses everywhere in the small southern town, and as such she’s quite demanding and strict with Collin and Dolly. As for Dolly, it becomes clear through her interests (e.g. painting a room fully pink, boiling medicine in a tub, etc.) and demeanor, she is disabled. However, Collin, Dolly, and their help, Catherine Cook, make a fine group that helps cook and sell the medicine. One day, Verena returns home with a businessman who wants to get the recipe for Dolly’s cure and make labels for the bottles. She doesn’t like this, and to get away from the businessman, Dolly, Collin, and Catherine all runaway to a treehouse in a field. The first day, they nearly get shot out of their hiding spot because of a boy, Riley, who was looking to hunt squirrels. He leaves them and then a troop of the Sheriff, Judge, and a few other people come to collect them from the treehouse after hearing word from Riley where they were. The Judge joins the group, while the rest are shoed off. When the sheriff and his buddies return, they come with a vengeance trying get the group to return to Verena—though while everyone escapes, they catch Catherine, the only Black person in their group. During their time in the treehouse, they meet a woman who has fifteen children looking for food and to tell Dolly that she hadn’t bad-mouthed her. All while this is going on, back with Verena, the businessman ran off with twelve-thousand dollars of her cash. While in the tree, the Judge and Dolly get married right before the sheriff returns a final time. Though when one of his buddies is nearly choked, he shoots his rifle and the bullet hits Riley in the leg. This just about ends their adventure with Verena taking them back in, but things between the sisters had changed.
 
The other stories in the collection follows: a woman who gets paid for telling a mysterious man about her dreams, a little girl that tries for a talent show while everyone is mesmerized by her but she’s swindled out of her stardom, a boy who tries extra hard in counting the money in a jar put up for guessing, a mysterious girl that shows up at a woman’s house and won’t leave, and a niece returning from attending her uncle’s funeral sitting next to a deaf man and drunk wife. All the stories had an insane amount of charm and craft, but I particularly liked, ‘My Side of the Matter’, which is a man’s recounting of how he nearly got stabbed by one of his wife’s friends. The voice, snappiness, and humor were really striking (albeit misogynistic).
 
As with all of Capote’s other works that I’ve read, this collection entranced me. The language, which is one of its most striking elements rolls you along with this confident and propulsive pace. Capote, it seems, had an internal rhythm of language that makes descriptions of the landscape or of people magical. The dialogue and quips were so memorable as well, particularly in ‘My Side of the Matter’. It is also surprising that ‘The Grass Harp’ was made into a musical that, while unfortunate that it flopped, still has its soundtrack online. There so much to say about Capote’s brilliance, but I’ll just leave it at this: read this book!
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​AGNI Issue 101 is a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and art mainly centered around conflict and the pain of war. There are pieces on Gaza and most notably the art feature of the issue is art done by a Palestinian artist. And the pieces I particularly liked were ‘Pandora Addresses the Court’ by Vanessa Stauffer, ‘Catching My Breath, I Nearly Forget the View’ by Jim Whiteside, ‘What I Can’t Say’ by Brandi Bird, and ‘Curly’ by Ahmed Douma. Though the piece that has stuck with me the most is ‘Florence, now a bird’ by Silja Liv Kelleris which is about a girl who begins growing wings. The government then takes her as a young girl and cages her up in the center of the town as a tourist attraction. After many years, they sew up her mouth and put a beak on her mouth. After a while, the government takes her out of the cage and makes her “fly” from the top of a building, which is really her plummeting to her death. Overall, a decent issue.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen is a poetry collection centering around queerness, love and family tension during and after Covid. The poems follow a speaker as he settles into his life with his partner, Jeff, while navigating teaching, his mother’s wariness and trepidation about his sexuality, all against the backdrop of the world falling apart. There are poems, such as, ‘One Year Later: A Letter’, which recognize the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, or of Covid being labeled the “Kung Flu” in ‘Winter [It’s April.]’. Though, my favorites of the collection were ‘Winter [Big smell]’, ‘Elegy While Listening to a Song I can’t Help But Start to Move to’, and ‘I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party’. The poems at times are funny—one referencing poop—while other times longing for the speaker’s mother to be okay with his partner, all while the world felt completely unsettled. Really enjoyed the read (and the cover is really cute too).
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Bestiary by Donika Kelly is a collection of love poems, sometimes about the author sometimes about her beloved, though always centered around mythology and creatures. Trauma from the father surfaces in poems such as in ‘How to be alone’, the author says, “The gusset of your panties / soaked with your father’s semen. Why / you no longer wear panties.” A sharply horrifying image, one that becomes really the only specifics of the father’s abuse that is referred to later on in the collection. Though, above and beyond, the collection has a bountiful of love directed at the speaker’s lover, such as in ‘Love Poem: Centaur’ which says, “I would make a burnishing / of you, by which I mean a field in flower, / by which I mean, a breaching—…Love, / I pound the earth for you. I pound the earth.” Other poems that drew my attention were ‘Tender’, ‘Little Box’, and ‘Love Letter’.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo is a collection of stories featuring women in Nigeria who are driven to extremes by the people around them. The whole collection was astounding, and almost every single story was amazing. The first story, ‘Nwunye Belgium’, is about a woman whose mother is in search of a husband for her and when she isn’t able to find a good suitor, her friend suggests her son, a doctor working in Belgium, to marry. And even though she is seeing another man, her mother convinces her to stop seeing him because he isn’t wealthy. Because this is a small town, it becomes talk that she will be marrying a very wealthy doctor and will be taken out of Nigeria into Belgium. However, as time unravels, the status of the friend’s son is shown to be a lie. That while at one point her son did pursue work in Belgium, she actually doesn’t have contact with her son anymore. That the friend made up her son being a bachelor so that she could have a higher status in the town. And now, the woman is marred and ridiculed because she’d stopped seeing her actual love in return for a fake suitor. Another story, ‘Animals’, is about a boy Nedu and his family that bought a chicken to slaughter for dinner. But the mother is unable to kill it, even though she’s done all the work in the family. Nedu becomes so attached to the chicken that they give it a name via a ceremony that the father is encouraging while the mother looks down on it. In fact, she realizes that without her, the family would be dysfunctional and is frustrated that the one thing that a ‘man’ is supposed to do (i.e. kill the chicken) is made to be her job. The father, after a while prepares himself to kill the chicken, and when Nedu pleads them not to, they see that the chicken has been cut from its leash and runs away from them. The sister films the whole thing as the family runs around the town to get the chicken. Finally, when the family catches the chicken, the father kills it and Nedu becomes so distraught that he won’t eat dinner. Eventually he does, but he eats around the cooked chicken parts. A third story to highlight is ‘Eden’ in which a brother and sister rummage through their father’s collection of tapes and find his pornography. They watch together both mesmerized and terrified of the consequences. So much so that one day when the power goes out and they can’t pull the tape from the VCR, they are on edge until their father finds out what they’d been watching. From this, he freaks out and beats the son who admits to watching it, and covers for the sister. After some time, the brother gets into more trouble, and to show that she can be just as strong as him, she admits to her father that she also watched the tape. Her father beats her as well.
 
I’ve dogeared basically every story in Okonkwo’s collection because they’re truly so astounding in the depth and propulsion that they’re all hits. These feel like quintessential stories of religion, mental illness, family pain and drama. And each story opens up a world that felt so specific and full of emotion that I can only be left in awe. An unrivaled read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett is a collection of stories about queer women living in Florida. Many of the stories follow lives that are rough around the edges, such as ‘Aberrations in Flight’ where a married couple, after buying a fixer-upper of a house, fight over the color of the studio all while birds fly into their windows. Or, in ‘Blessing of the Animals’, where a queer couple goes to a church on the day they bless animals to ask for their wedding to be done at that church. Though, one of the partners is unenthused about the idea while the other has an accident with their period. I particularly liked ‘The Locusts’ which follows a girl as she leads her cousins in drinking beer and then eventually forces the youngest to swallow acorns. This leads to the child’s choking and then death which makes the girl run away. All of the characters in these stories don’t and shouldn’t be let off easy—like any person, they are flawed, though that doesn’t make them unlikable. For example, in the last story ‘See also: a history of glassmaking’, the woman once was married and had a child, though was so distant from her son, she doesn’t really know who he is. Even still, she volunteers to take a coworker home partway through a night out. A worthwhile read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Slow Stories by Bette A. is a collection of stories that follow characters into the strange and surreal. They’re framed like fairy tales with a nod to morality, though it never arrives. The stories are about people who get stuck in a continuously growing house, or a king who asks for everything or else he beheads people, a village that builds a microscope that is so long that they direct it on themselves. The strangeness of these stories keeps them an arm’s width away, sometimes by not naming characters, other times sprinting through time. The stories that I most enjoyed were ‘The Other Village’, ‘Guided’, ‘The King and His Things’, and ‘The Inverted Gallery’. While entertaining, the stories felt fairly surface-level in their meanings (in part because they’re so short that ‘Guided’ was really the only story that delved strongly into emotion).
 
Final Rating: 3/5