​Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is a novel about an Artificial Intelligent humanoid robot, Klara, as she navigates the world, first in a store and then in the home of a family. She starts off observing the world through the display window of a store that sells the robots, seeing how people interact, the pollution created by smoke-stacks, the sun reflecting off windows. One day, a child spies her in the window on her way to a portrait session saying that the girl, Josie, wants to take Klara home, though this is only brief. Eventually Josie returns with her mother and they buy Klara after they ask her to replicate Josie’s walk. Klara becomes integrated into the family, watching the Bubble Game between Josie and her neighborhood friend, Rick, attending Integration meetings with the other kids in the neighborhood, becoming Josie’s friend and a caretaker. This is because Josie has health issues that were caused by gene editing to make her smarter. It’s alluded that Josie’s older sister had also undergone the same thing, but had died due to health issues afterward. In an effort to preserve Josie and her likeness, the mother and Josie had been going to get her portrait taken in the city. Though, it turns out after Klara deduces and overhears that the “portrait” is a way for the mother to replicate Josie and put some sort of costume over Klara that looks like Josie. Meanwhile, because Klara is powered by the sun, she believes that all that needs to be done is for the pollution makers, which block the sun, to be destroyed. Klara and the father, who had separated from the mother, go on a mission to destroy a pollution maker. Klara believes this will fix Josie because she had communed with the sun at a barn near Josie’s house. However, Josie’s condition worsens to the point that everyone loses hope except Klara. Klara makes one final plea to the sun and believes after a stormy and then sunny morning that Josie will get better. Somehow, Josie does return to her health and eventually goes off to college. The story ends in a junkyard where Klara is standing observing and thinking about Josie when the store manager talks to her many years later.
 
Ishiguro surprised me with how interesting getting inside the mind of an AI could be. He writes out specific observations that a human wouldn’t make, but a robot that doesn’t know any different would. For example, Klara believes that because the sun powers her, it also powers Josie and that the sun is a being that will listen. So, when Klara pleas to the sun, it’s logical to the robot that is solar-powered, but less intuitive to the other characters. This too seems to be a way for Ishiguro to discuss, and maybe critique, religion and the belief of God. The sun is a stand-in for God, and as the reader we know that the sun can’t make the specific requests Klara makes come true. But somehow, Josie does get better whether through the improbability of the sun or of medicine. Klara, the first-person narrator, believes it to be the former. Throughout the read, Ishiguro does make it seem like Klara’s beliefs and actions are ridiculous, though in the end she got the results needed. I think on the whole a decent read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​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

​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

​Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford is a collection of interlinked short stories that follow the lives of a Native American family first in Oklahoma and then in Texas as they deal with skeletons in their closets. In some instances, they flee from wildfires, hunker down in cellars during tornadoes, or battle their own family history. One of the characters, Justine, gets pregnant while she is in high school with a man twice her age. And when her family finds out that she’s going to be a mother, Justine runs away at first and then returns to her family at church. This child is Reney who, somewhat aware of her mother’s early parenthood, lives recklessly, smoking in abandoned houses, running away with a boy, scoping out her father at the gas station. In the collection, I really enjoyed the first story, ‘Book of Generations’, which follows Justine’s pregnancy. Another story I was quite fond of was ‘Then Signs My Soul’ which is about a guy, Moses, who recently lost his mother. In the first week of his grieving, a pair of married women move in next door and help him care for his garden while he helps repair their house. The third story that I thought was really good was ‘Bonita’ which follows Justine and her partner as she weighs leaving him while a fire whips through Bonita. These stories feature generations of strong women, sometimes in the wrong, but always resilient.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

Queer by William S. Burroughs is a novella that follows an expat, Lee, as he lives and parties in Mexico City in the late 1940s. Lee is an old queen who clamors over younger men, drinks to excess and begins to fall in love with a man named Allerton. Allerton however presents his sexuality vaguely, sometimes hanging around a woman named Mary, other times going out to bars with one of the vibrantly flamboyant gays where they attend gay clubs. Lee latches himself onto Allerton, nearly pleading him though thinly veiled stories of queer encounters to monologues about a mind control drug called Yage—supposed later on in the novella to be Ayahuasca. Eventually, Lee invites Allerton to his place after a long night out drinking where, after Allerton pukes, they have sex. After, Lee attaches himself more to Allerton, and in one overtly romantic appeal buys Allerton’s pawned off camera for 600 pesos. Though this action makes Allerton pull away from Lee because he doesn’t like being indebted to anyone. Allerton goes away for a stint and then upon his return, Lee pleads with him to join on his search and selling of Yage in South America. Allerton reluctantly joins him and they first take their time on outings, then eventually hear about a white man deep in the jungle that is doing chemistry on what Lee supposes to be Yage. After an arduous search, they find the man, but he is so skeptical of Lee that nothing comes of their search. Now, six months later as Lee goes around photographing people that don’t want to be photographed, he returns to Mexico City looking for Allerton only to find that five months before, Allerton left back to South America. And he hadn’t been heard since.
 
Burroughs does strikingly well in balancing a sharpness to his prose while also capturing the voicy-ness of Lee. Lee himself seems to be a parallel world version of Burroughs in which both lived in Mexico City, both had queer sexual encounters, and both were obsessed with occult/occult-like medicines. It may even be true to say that Lee’s character (what I read as a washed-out “queen” who desires the limelight but is relegated to the backstreets of Mexico) is Burroughs making digs at himself. When, for instance, Lee begins to make up a story, adding in bravado, and Allerton becomes so disinterested that he leaves, the narrative mocks him, noting how the bar itself was nearly empty. In effect, Lee is playing to an empty crowd—that is except for himself. In this way, Lee’s lust for Allerton may be more a need for a man who listens to him and not so much is in conversation with him. His self-obsession overrides Allerton’s own needs as a man who desires to be indiscrete and non-committal. Lee’s character is also questionable when he sees a group of teenage boys and begins lusting over them, adding to his predatory nature (in both taking advantage of Allerton and desiring to capitalize on a mind controlling drug). It’s hard for me to tell if this narrative of Lee (one I take as subtly mocking him) is Burroughs’s earnestness about his own self. I only need to point to Burroughs’s own obsession with the occult and Yage and his time in Mexico City to think that Queer’s narrative is his way of justifying himself. Whether self-aware or not, the ending lacked a cohesion that this type of narrative needed. It ends on a dream that is about Allerton, but is so separated from everything else that it felt disjointed and dissatisfying. While I may not fully understand why it ends that way, I have wondered why Burroughs doesn’t end it in a more inevitably. That is, after taking photos and asking around Mexico City and learning that Allerton isn’t there anymore, Lee should’ve gone around taking more photos and thinks he sees Allerton, only to realize it isn’t Allerton. But then begins hitting on the man all the same. Another part that was questionable was its semi-antisemitic moments. Though, for all its faults, I can understand why it has stuck around for so long: Lee, who is an arrogant washed-out queen, is entertaining to watch.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Black Warrior Review Issue 52.1 is a collection of poetry, essays, fiction, and comics. The fiction in particular displayed the monstrous, the strange, and the surreal while the poetry interrogated the political. The pieces I enjoyed were ‘Four Teachers Stapled Together’ by Brett Hymel Jr., ‘Bring us to the Egalitary, Bring us to the End’ by Rishona Michael, ‘Dear Property Owner’ by Renata Golden, and ‘How to Catch and Cook a Mermaid’ by M. Lea Gray. One of my own stories is featured in this issue, but it was a delight to read such brave works of art.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​American Short Fiction Issue 82 is a collection of six short stories all revolving around relationships in turmoil or that fizzle out. ‘When We Go, We Go Downstream’ by Carrie R. Moore is about this brother and sister whose family has said to be cursed and that all relationships end afoul. It’s set in the days before the sister’s wedding where the brother has brought along a new date and problems arise when the sister’s partner goes missing. The brother soon realizes the curse is real and thus cuts off his own relationship. ‘Archer’s Paradox’ by KJ Nakazawa-Kern is about a man who has started dating a woman after a divorce and takes up archery in his house to start coping with it. Though, I think the most interesting story was ‘The Skilled Anatomist’ by Colleen Rosenfeld in which a woman’s friend is attempting to get over the grief of losing her family by getting procedures done by anatomists to be where the grief goes. Eventually none of the procedures work, so the woman is asked to become pregnant with a baby and her friend’s grief.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran is a collection of poems in which the speaker contends, contextualizes, and survives a sexual assault. Its poems draw from Vietnamese folklore, the Buddha, and the speaker’s lineage from Vietnam. There is an intensity that comes through in the poems, ‘Incident Report’, ‘Chrome’, ‘The First Law of Motion’, ‘Lipstick Elegy’, and ‘The Santa Ana’. Its lines were haunting though powerful in describing the assault and the aftereffects, specifically when marking things down in the incident report.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​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