​Henry Henry by Allen Bratton is a novel about an heir, Hal Lancaster, who’s life has stagnated. After his mother died, his father, Henry, plans to remarry a French woman. Hal is the oldest son of the Lancasters and is set to inherit his father’s wealth and plots, though a dark secret between the two pushes Hal to use cocaine and keep everyone at arm’s length. This dark secret is that, starting at the age of thirteen, Henry sexually assaulted Hal which became a continuous thing even into Hal’s adulthood. All the while, Hal’s love life mostly consists of hook ups with an old actor, Poins, until Hal is shot in the face by his rival, Percy, at a shooting range. They kick off a love affair which burns hot, in part because Hal hasn’t fully gotten rid of his Catholic guilt, and for another his father’s abuse stays over him like a cloud. Hal attends parties and finds himself falling further and further down into addiction, while his father continues to abuse him whenever he is called. Though, through the understanding of what happened to Henry’s cousin, Richard, begins to kick-start Hal’s (not transformation, but possible retribution). One night, Hal tells Percy half the story, that someone abused him, which makes Percy attend Henry’s wedding and shout that Hal had been abused. Henry worries that Hal has told Percy everything, so sends him away to their other property. From there, Hal decides to get the full story of what happened to Richard, and so makes his way to Richard’s old lover, Edward. At Edward’s house, he tells the story of how Richard died from AIDS and that he was marked a pariah in the family and thus wasn’t buried in the same graveyard as the rest of the Lancasters. Henry, possibly worried he’d be found out, takes a lot of pills and drinks a lot of alcohol, and calls Hal to tell him to come over. Hal follows his directions, and arrives to his father passed out on the floor with his scabs are bloody. Hal cares for Henry and brings him back to health. Afterward, Hal decides to do Richard justice and returns to Henry with paperwork to get Richard’s body moved. In the end, Hal and his sister walk through the cemetery and then the old Lancaster Castle, thinking about how Richard’s legacy was returned to him.
 
The novel, as referenced in its name, provides a modern queering of Henry V’s youth. What is striking, and the most horrifying is Henry’s abuse to his son, which doesn’t necessarily seem to be sexually motivated, but rather power motivated. And that the whole time, Hal feels that it’s his fault, but doesn’t stop it even though in his adulthood he could. This type of relinquishing power also follows in Hal’s sexual relationship to Percy. Though, the revealing and understand of Richard’s story gives Hal a charge to change his own life. While it’s not specifically shown, the way Hal gets Henry to sign the paperwork for moving Richard’s body implies that his rejected his father’s narrative that Richard was a terrible man. It’s a fascinating read that left me wondering how Hal would make a new life and if he’d keep his past tucked away.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer is a novel about a teenager, DJ, on the eve of his enlistment into the Army, recounting a story where he traveled to Alaska to shoot a grizzly bear. His father had originally meant to go with someone else, but the guy had business to attend to and thus brought DJ and his friend, Tex, along with them. Additionally, during the expedition, they have two guides, and joining them are two “yes” men DJ calls Medium Assholes. Once the crew gets to Alaska, they first stay in a hotel where they prepare themselves and shoot the shit over drinks. Then, they arrive to their campsite which is a cabin and for the next few days go trekking. One of the Medium Assholes immediately shoots a wolf, but doesn’t kill it so they have to track it done. This causes the guides to enlist the help of a helicopter with their movements and hauling of animals. They shoot and kill a ram, and then they enlist the help of the helicopter to round up and scare a heard of ram. One time, after seeing a bear, DJ’s father, Rusty, gets the helicopter pilot to drop him down right in front of a bear, but the bear is too much and they have to scare it off. Another time, the guides set up the hunters to kill a bear, but they only injure it as it scampers away. After returning from a hunt, DJ and Rusty decide to break off from the group so that they can find a bear of their own. They do find a bear, with DJ getting the first shot, but then Rusty getting the final shot and claiming the prize. DJ becomes fed up with this and decides to get a bear of his own so brings Tex along with him for their search in the early morning. They avoid the helicopter looking for them and then they leave all their stuff in one area trying to one up the other as they hike up a ridge. Finally, when they return to their stuff, they set up camp and the Northern Lights come out. DJ believes the Northern Lights are God’s way of saying to kill things—anything. And thus, when they return from the hunt, two years later, DJ joins the Army to head into Vietnam.
 
Mailer has made me hate his genius in this novel. What’s most distinct about this novel is the brash, homophobic, anti-sematic, racist, hyper-sexual, hyper-masculine voice the main character and thus the 3rd person narrator displays. There are ‘N’ words thrown everywhere, tangents about fucking and women’s genitalia and masturbating, an Oedipus-like obsession of his father, and pretending that he’s a Black kid from Harlem, which immediately makes DJ unlikable. I can absolutely understand how inappropriate DJ both is and believes himself to be. He thinks he’s smart and slick with his wordplay, giving people nicknames and referencing Melville. It is unappealing, in part because (I hope) Mailer intended for DJ to be the crystallization of ‘hoorah’ masculinity, where violence and anger and sex are the defining characteristics of a man. Though, it is quite clear that DJ projects himself as this super manly man, when he’s trying to cover for his insecurities. In fact, every single man on the hunt tries to display their masculinity, while hiding their insecurities, in moments where for ten pages they compare and talk about what weapons they brought (the guns themselves a thinly-veiled analogy for DJ to talk about and compare dicks). The truth is, and maybe DJ gets a hint of this when he discusses them enlisting the help of the helicopter, “[The guide] was forever enough of a pro not to use [the helicopter] with real hunters, no, man, but he had us, gaggle of goose fat and asshole…” That the helicopter, the cabin, the guides were what could be seen as unmanly because they were not braving the elements. They had luxuries. They were glamping (in the “manly” way). What is possible then is that DJ recognizes this, which may have been why in the last portion of the novel removes his weapons (even his knife) when he and Tex went up the ridge. That DJ, and the other “hunters”, must compensate for feeling less of a man, and so become increasingly violent towards the animals.
 
The novel’s title may seem initially peculiar because they narrative doesn’t reside in Vietnam, and in fact only mentions it at the very end. However, it’s not hard to see that the book itself is answering the question it poses: Why are We in Vietnam? Well, because of these men, the people who view war as a hunt, the enemy as animals, and a need to project their power over the wilderness. The novel’s most direct parallel image lies in the helicopter, which was a prominent symbol and equipment used in Vietnam. We were in Vietnam because there was a prize to be had, and goddamnit, America wanted it—and wanted it through violence.
 
What I think is most striking about this novel is not its language or the sense of DJ’s imposing masculinity, but it’s in one of the final scenes. This is where DJ and Tex are sitting by a fire alone with the Northern Lights appearing above them. It is striking most notability in how the language changes. It shuts out the expletives, the sexual innuendos, the racism and focuses on the nature as a beauty. We get, just for a second, a crack in DJ’s ability to keep the masculinity front up. And personally, the whole novel felt like it was building up to this moment. With any other characters, this would become a romantic getaway where DJ and Tex embrace the sexual tension between them. DJ even presses his palm into Tex’s groin, but as we soon learn, this is not a sign of romance, but a sign of power. For context, earlier in the novel, DJ discusses Tex’s father as someone who would have sex with anything, and thus that was transferred over to Tex. What this meant was that DJ had thought that Tex would be the one, if anyone, to use his power over DJ to get him to have sex. Now, however, DJ realizes that power dynamic has flipped and he could, if he wanted to, fuck Tex. Thus, equating power and violence to sex. In that moment, what we get is DJ’s understanding of God telling him, “’Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill’”, thus sealing away any part of DJ that was sensitive or had humanity. After, the language returns to its former crudeness, indicating that he is now a hardened American ready to kill in Vietnam.
 
For all of these reasons, I found the way it characterized the American psyche on sex, violence, and masculinity to speak to why we were in Vietnam, and in other wars. However, as with all media that represents hyper-masculinity, I’m sure the novel’s meaning and point has been completely misunderstood by others. I’m thinking here of how even though Fight Club is about being gay, many people only see it as about being tough. That is to say, people will be dazzled by its language and the crudeness, and not look under the hood to find a rat-infested engine. I can recognize the importance and talent of Mailer in this novel, and still hate it.
 
Final Rating: 2.5/5

​The Wild Palms by William Faulkner is a novel comprised of two completely separate narratives, ‘The Wild Palms’ and ‘The Old Man’, which are spliced together after each chapter.
 
‘The Wild Palms’ follows a man who becomes wooed by a married woman, and they form a plot to leave the town and be together. The woman, Charlotte, directs and desires this move, first going to a hotel with the man, Harry. When they form the plan, they don’t have the money to execute a disappearance. Suddenly, Harry finds a wallet with the money, phones Charlotte, where they decide to get train tickets out of New Orleans to Chicago. On the ride, Charlotte’s husband joins them where he allows Harry to take Charlotte away from him, but that he'll keep an eye on her. After this, both Charlotte and Harry think the money will last them awhile, with Harry taking on a job at a hospital and Charlotte selling her puppets. But things turn sour, and their money runs out so they hop from place to place trying to survive. First to a cabin where a friend stocks them food, then to a worker’s camp in the winter, and finally to Florida. However, during the worker’s camp in Utah, they meet another couple and live with them, where eventually the woman asks Harry to perform an abortion on her. When he finally does, Charlotte forgets her cleaning items in the cold, and so learns that she too has become pregnant. It’s only when they hear back from the woman, does Charlotte ask for Harry to perform an abortion on her. Harry freaks out, and at first tries to do anything to stop the pregnancy, going so far as pleading a brothel for their abortion medicine. Eventually, after Charlotte’s pleading, he performs the abortion, but it goes awry. They get out of Utah, and travel to Florida where Charlotte is suffering at a hotel owned by another doctor. One night, when Charlotte becomes weak, Harry must call the doctor for help, only to be detained because he first performed an abortion, and then later being responsible for her death. In the end, Charlotte’s husband returns to Harry and hands him a pill of cyanide in jail.
 
‘The Old Man’ follows a convict who was arrested on an attempted train robbery gone awry. This was because what the convict read in books about robberies was totally different than real life, thus bungling it. While in prison, a massive flood rips through due to a levee breaking from a storm. The convict, along with the rest of the prison are taken to the levee where they are sent to row boats and rescue people stranded from the flood. When the convict and his partner get sent out to rescue a woman and a farmer, their boat flips and the convict regains control, and collects the woman who is pregnant. However, from other people’s vantage points, the convict looked like he drowned. For many days, the woman and the convict row around the flood encountering people who give them food, but are skeptical of them, a town that shoots at them while the convict tries to surrender, a paddle boat that takes them in but has other wishes for their labor, an alligator pelt farmer, a sugar cane plantation, and finally back to a police officer where the convict begs to be taken back to the prison. Along the way, the woman’s child is born on a mound of earth with snakes. But when the convict returns, instead of being reward for his efforts in taking care of the boat and the pregnant woman, he’s given 10 more years in prison.
 
There is a reason why Faulkner has become a mainstay in the literary canon. It’s because the language and flow of these two narratives are unparalleled. There’s situational humor with the convict in ‘The Old Man’ being washed down the river, and every time he tries to be detained to go back to the prison, he’s shooed away. While in ‘The Wild Palms’ the scene of Harry in the brothel desperate for abortion pills is quite an interesting scenario. Even on the sentence level, which Faulkner is known for, is so meticulous but grand. In fact, one of my favorite sentences of all time is from ‘The Wild Palms’, “And when he (the doctor), came home at noon she had the gumbo made, an enormous quantity of it, enough for a dozen people, made with that grim Samaritan husbandry of good women, as if she took a grim and vindictive and masochistic pleasure in the fact that the Samaritan deed would be performed at the price of its remainder which would sit invincible and inexhaustible on the stove while days accumulated and passed, to be warmed and rewarmed and then rewarmed until consumed by two people who did not even like it, who born and bred in sight of the sea had for taste a fish a predilection for the tuna, the salmon, the sardines bought in cans, immolated and embalmed three thousand miles away in the oil and machinery of commerce.” What a doozy of a sentence, which I found funny in that the doctor’s wife cooked a huge vat of gumbo in spite of her husband even though the both of them dislike it to canned fish. This is Faulkner’s magic: to create a winding, almost hypnotic syncopation of language. Though, both end grimly: men stuck in prison. One for doing something the love of his life begged for. The other, for doing the right thing and getting more time for it. There’s something to be said of the terrible reality of systems and how even as we do our best, they react in ways we do not expect. I can understand why these two stories are linked, how the narratives don’t necessarily follow each other, but instead they are in some conversation. One of blind love. One of blind faith. Both of survival. I am in awe of these stories in every way and it is no wonder Faulkner has stayed a common household name.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a novel which follows a mother and daughter after the husband kills himself by inhaling gas in their New York City apartment. A nun passing by the apartment decides to attend to the commotion where she finds the mother, Alice, pregnant and distraught from her husband’s death. The nun brings her to their church where Alice joins the Sisters in cleaning and folding laundry. Alice gives birth to Sally who grows up watch Alice do the laundry in the church’s basement with Sister Illuminata. One time in the basement as a prank, Sally employs Sister Illuminata to dress her in another sister’s habit, realizing once Alice finds them out that Sally wants to become a nun.
 
Everyone, particularly Alice, is skeptical and so in a “Baptism by fire” trial, Sally follows another nun, Sister Lucy, as she goes about caring for people outside of the church. They first go to a woman, Mrs. Castello, whose leg was bitten and then infected by a dog to care for her while her husband, a milkman, is away working. After they tend to Mrs. Castello, they find a girl crying about how her sisters were tied up by their brother. Sister Lucy and Sally go up to their room and untie them and clean the sisters up when the perpetrator and their brother, Charlie, comes back. Even though it’s heavily implied that Sister Lucy knows Charlie both physically and sexually abuses his sisters, Sally is both charmed by his looks and realizes Sister Lucy isn’t as terrifying as Sally once thought.
 
Following this initial training, Sally feels firm in her conviction to be a nun. So her mother painfully sends her off where Sally boards a train to Chicago. On the ride there, her temper is tested through a large, mean, and racy old woman, a girl who spikes her tea with whiskey and begs for money, and a little child. What Sally realizes on the train is that she doesn’t want to be a nun, so returns home on the next train. However, when she returns home, she finds out that her mother has been having an affair with Mr. Castello. And because of the affair, Sally is told to find another place to stay.
 
The Sisters bring Sally to the Tierney’s house where she and the oldest boy, Patrick, start to get along. Initially, Sally is mad at her mother, but when Mrs. Castello’s health turns for the worse, Mr. Castello abandons Alice to tend to Mrs. Castello. This makes Sally feel for her mother since she is afraid of being lonely. Sally then concocts a plan to poison Mrs. Castello so that her mother and Mr. Castello can marry freely. So one day, she goes to Mrs. Castello’s place where a few of the Sisters are already tending to Mrs. Castello, and she drops in some cleaning chemicals in Mrs. Castello’s tea. Mrs. Castello chokes after a few sips, but it’s unclear whether it’s the illness, the chunky applesauce, or the poisoned tea which make her suffocate. In the end, Mr. Castello and Alice get together and have a child, and Sally and Patrick get together as well. Though, Sally, just like her father, eventually succumbs to her depression after she has kids.
 
McDermott is a genius with this novel. It’s first so beautifully written, each sentence seems to hold its own magic. And while I wasn’t initially interested in reading about nuns, there’s so much drama McDermott shows that it’s hard to look away. There’s the father who kills himself while Alice is gone, and while everyone knows it was a suicide, they try to keep that hidden from Alice and then Sally. But then in the end, depression was what got Sally as well, speaking to the cyclical nature of family conditions and how if not addressed, they can manifest.
 
McDermott also employs time in a very interesting way. In particular, the first chapter follows an old nun as she finds the dead husband, and it is not until the last paragraph does the story fast forward, but also provide the perspective of the story. Initially it seems to be a 3rd Person POV, possibly omniscient narrator, but the last line of the chapter reads, “When our young grandfather, a motorman for the BRT whose grave we have never found, sent his wife to do the shopping while he had himself a little nap.” It provides us with who is telling the story, and what stakes they have in it as well.
 
Another, I think brilliant prowess of McDermott shines through in her transitions. There’s a chapter that focuses on Patrick as he and his father attend his father’s funeral, which in the story seems tangential to Sally. But as we’ll later learn, Sally and Patrick are the narrator’s parents. What works so well is her ability to zoom from Patrick returning from the funeral and his father getting money from Patrick’s aunt to them buying a house for all their kids, to Sally arriving at the house after she has just found her mother and Mr. Castello in their apartment. “A wide bedroom for the parents, and, after all that spreading out, an empty bedroom left over, suitable for a boarder or a guest. / Suitable for Sally when she came to the door, late in the afternoon of the day she returned from Chicago.”
 
And finally, craft-wise, while the narrative and the person speaking throughout the novel never say that Sally failed outright in being a nun, as the reader even before she steps onto the train, we know she will fail. This is because in order to be a nun, you can’t be married or have kids, and based on the narrator referring to Sally as their mother, we know this not to be the case. It’s such a subtle thing, but contextualizes her journey on the train as one of naivety and folly where her fate was already sealed before the narrative arrive there.
 
The novel also peppers in objects/situations that come into play later: the whiskey the girl on the train spikes her drink with also being used to cover the taste of Mrs. Castello’s poisoned tea, the anecdote about the alum when Sally goes into the hotel laundry becoming the building block for her poisoning, the mother and daughter she sees at the hotel talking about getting married when in the end that exact thing happens to Alice and Sally. The novel is clever, drama-filled, and crafted so well I’m left in shock. Brilliant!
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley is a book about the author trying to understand the aftermath of her friend’s suicide. It accounts Crosley’s time in the book publicist world where she met Russell, her boss. They immediately create a friendship that lasts years up until the day he hanged himself in his barn. Around the same time, Crosley’s apartment gets robbed of her grandmother’s jewelry which causes her to go on a massive search for what is lost. In the book, the two events (the theft and the suicide) become interlinked and play off each other in profound ways. Crosley also meditates on how the pandemic occurred right after Russell’s death, while also recounting the slow trajectory downward of the popularity of the publishing industry. Near the end, Crosley herself contemplates the act while cliffside in Australia, but her body tells her to stop. The accounts of moments with Russell as well as the discussions of grief felt heavy but also heartwarming.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is a novel about a man who’s about to die, but is able to make a bargain with the devil to stay alive. For everything the speaker decides to disappear, the devil will give him another day of life. Initially, the speaker thinks this an easy thing, so agrees. The first day phones are disappeared which causes the speaker to reflect on his old love whom he spoke with over the phone for hours at a time. The same day, he meets his old love to say goodbye. This is when she invites him to a movie date the following day. When he returns, the devil is there to suggest to disappear movies. Movies are a little harder for the speaker to give up, but after a visit to an old movie buff and then watching a screen display just white, the speaker becomes ready. On the third day, the speaker agrees to losing clocks, which had been his father’s primary line of work. And when on the next day the devil suggests to disappear cats, it takes a whole day for the speaker to make a decision. He remembers life with his current cat and the cat before in the context of his mother who died years before. In the end, he decides other people’s life would be worse if cats didn’t exist, so refuses. Knowing he’s on a tight timeline, the speaker writes down everything that has happened and intends to mail it to his father whom he hadn’t spoken to in years over the mother’s death. The novel ends with the speaker on his bike arriving at the father’s doorstep.
 
Kawamura creates a whimsical story where the devil is the speaker’s doppelgänger dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Cabbage the cat can speak. The speaker’s relationship with his father is never really front and center until the last portion, but it seems that the story revolves around him reconnecting with his father. A fun read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Battalion Shaped Girl by Temperance Aghamohammadi is a poetry collection imbued with the sense of the ephemeral. The collection feels like a meditation, on womanhood, on being trans, and on the violence our bodies are employed to withstand. I was particularly drawn in by the poems, ‘There are no Sound Machines’, ‘Did You Want to Come In?’, and ‘Fetish III’. Syntactically, the poems are mostly constructed from phrases cut through with periods which provide the feeling of only making out a glance of the subject. Never quite able to capture all of it in one thought. A delight to read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The poems in Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell chart out a life in four parts: the impersonal beginning, reflections of the speaker’s father, early sex and love, and finally the speaker as a mother. The collection’s language and imagery are particularly striking in ‘The Food-Thief’ in which the speaker writes, “His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a/woman might be open, as the earth itself was/split”. What’s intriguing about this line and many others in the first three parts of the collection is a drive toward writing about sex—when the poem itself is about a man who stole and is on his way to be drowned. And not only sex, but taboo sex because line above implies the man intends to kiss his brother as if he were a woman.
 
Sex finds itself in many portions of the collection, and most strangely in poems about the father. Maybe the father is seen as a figure so imposing and important, that sex (an inherently power-driven action) is the only way to talk about the father. For example, in ‘Looking at My Father’, the speaker says, “I know [my father’s] a tease,/obsessive, rigid, selfish, sentimental,/but I could look at my father all day”. Then the speaker goes on to describe the father’s head, nose, teeth all in an unsightly way, comparing, “the irises” to “the lip of a live volcano”. Conceding that, “I know he is not perfect but my/body thinks his body is perfect”, which is followed by much more descriptions of desire for the father. The speaker is battling with how her father appears in her life (whether positive or negative) because even though parts of him are unsightly, she still wants him in her life. Sex is then brought into the speaker’s teenage life as she describes her first sexual experiences (i.e. a handjob she gave a boy in ‘First Sex’) to the more sensual descriptions in ‘It’.
 
Because the collection follows the speaker’s growth chronologically, this love transforms from sexual desire to maternal desire in the fourth part. This is where we see the worries of her son and daughters’ injuries against the backdrop of their dead pets. In this way, the speaker’s fears are manifested, even confirmed, when they have to gas the daughter’s gerbils in ‘The Prayer’ or care for their son whom broke him arm in ‘The Green Shirt’. The speaker fears are at their highest when she imagines her daughter being raped in ‘The Quest’ like what happened in ‘The Girl’. Though, in the end the speaker may not have a solution beyond providing her children as much attention and love as possible.
 
The collection’s controversy arrives in the first part with the poem ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’. In this poem, the speaker describes “a tray/of penises” outside the operating room. The penises then are given voices somewhat comically. One way to read the poem is it’s a critique on how, as a society, we value manly violence when the first penis says, “I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more/killing.” In which the speaker is making a comment on how the man and thus the penis is the epicenter of violence. And in the removal of the penis, there is a removal of violence.
 
This is a very generous reading because the last penis in the poem is described as “unhappy”. In this instance, does this mean the penis was forcefully removed from the patient? Is Olds implying people are having sex reassignment surgeries not of their own will? If so, that is a hefty and baseless claim which derives from right-wing fear mongering. Some may say the collection is “Of Its Time”, as it were published in the late eighties, and the politics back then were much cruder. Even still, it wasn’t like trans people didn’t exist back then.
 
Regardless, torrin a. greathouse critiques Olds’ poem noting its transphobia in, ‘In an Operating Room Outside of the Cis Woman’s Imagination’. greathouse notes how Olds’ poem uses language of removal and absence. That Olds states something—a body part—was lost. greathouse retorts by saying, “After anesthesia, nothing is removed. Nothing wasted. Instead, skin/budded inward, a rose blooming into its own mouth.” greathouse notes that Olds has no authority on how trans bodies undergoing surgery should be described and interpreted. Even if the poem’s intent wasn’t to provide an opinion on trans bodies, the poem’s image was then a sloppy choice.
 
In fact, the poem’s inclusion in the collection is strange with how out of sync its structure and satirical voice reads after ‘The Girl’. And even still, what’s interesting about this poem is how it speaks to another portion of the collection. If read in isolation, the poem is frankly not all that strong. It relies on the situation of penis’s talking to keep the reader’s attention. Like, isn’t it funny that this penis wants to be painted in a still life—oh and look at this penis, it thinks it’s a dirty dog and needs to be put down. However, if contextualized against, say ‘Alcatraz’, maybe there was reason for Olds to include it. The first line of ‘Alcatraz’ reads, “When I was a girl, I knew I was a man”. Following this line, the speaker is haunted by the idea of being imprisoned due to stepping out of line with her parents’ teachings. With the line in mind, is it possible the speaker feels trapped in how she wants to express her gender? This feeling of conformity that the last penis in ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ conveys when, “He lies there weeping in terrible grief,/crying out Father, Father!” And as such, is the sex in parts three and four ways for the speaker to defy her parents through liberation? That while she had no active participation in how her parents employed her gender, now as an adult she does and fully embraces it.
 
Or it is possible the poem’s shallow exterior is all it has. Situation and humor. Simply gilded. Transphobia in the age when being transphobic was simply the norm. However, a poem does not necessarily make or break a collection—like a clay brick building, one or two can be faulty and the whole thing can still stand upright. Which in the case of The Gold Cell, both ‘Looking at My Father’ and ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ are faulty bricks. Bricks that show the builder was imperfect; bricks that crumble with time, revealing the outdated politics of forty years ago; bricks that—as greathouse has shown—must be reformed and refired and rebuilt.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela is a novel about a man, Andy, who’s marriage with his husband, Marco, is in a rocky patch. Instead of joining Marco on his work trip, Andy decides to return home to care for his father and go to his 20-year high school reunion. As Andy joins the reunion party at a local bar, there are two people from his past he is not ready to see: Paul, a man who had killed a gay man, and Jeremy, Andy’s high school love. This kicks off a tensioned bout with Paul in the intervening weeks where Andy confronts him about the death in Paul’s church, and finally Paul taking Andy to the spot of the beating to confess. While the meeting with Jeremy, who already had a wife and kids, kick starts an affair that seems to pick up where they left off right before they were going to run away together. Among all of this, Andy visits his high school friend, Simone, who turns out to have Schizophrenia and is in a mental health facility. He talks with her about his older brother’s death, his affair, and politics. Eventually, months pass and Andy’s father dies, so he returns home to care for his mother and visit Simone. And while Jeremy confessed his love, Andy knows and says the better choice is Marco.
 
Varela constructed the novel in a way that felt expansive and fulsome. We got an understanding of Andy’s parents and how they raised Andy and his brother. There was a chapter that focused on Simone’s father and his medical condition which informed Simone’s moments. While also following Andy’s brother and the troubles he had in life. However, because the novel spanned so many people and relationships, there were moments that felt like they were deviating from the main themes of the novel (i.e. Andy and Marco’s infidelity and what that meant for their marriage, and Henry’s death as it reverberated through Andy’s life). And while I thought Simone’s father’s moments made sense, they felt somewhat tangential to those central ideas. Additionally, the way the novel dealt with time sometimes felt disorienting. This was the main case for the last chapter which didn’t give much ceremony from Andy’s last visit to him visiting after his father’s death. And I initially thought the reunion would have a much stronger driving force (My personal writing instinct, I think, would be to use it not just for us to meet Paul/Jeremy, but to have the events of the reunion chart out Andy’s return in a more chronological way). Though, I felt it gave an amazing portrait of how queer folks deal with small towns, how the death of a brother influences and complicates life, and where family fits inside all of it.
 
Final Rating: 4/5