​The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw is a collection of stories where Black women and daughters contend with religion, specifically the institution of the church, on sex, relationships, and desire. The stories are all interconnected, some loosely, some following a character at different parts of their lives. Though, all of them are interested in how desire can be shamed and used as a weapon in the context of God and worship. In particular, the stand-out story is ‘Peach Cobbler’ in which a daughter watches her mother bake a peach cobbler for their pastor who has a wife and son of his own. The story follows the daughter in her first believing the pastor is God, and then becoming envious of her mother’s cooking, all while she is learning about her own desires as a woman. When the pastor asks the daughter to tutor his son, she goes over but doesn’t want his money. Though, the son is a copy of his dad in that he is cheating on her. The story discusses womanhood/virginity/desire without fully mentioning it, but instead used the cobbler as a surrogate. In which the mother prepares the peach cobbler and the pastor hungrily eats it. In how Olivia, as she grows older, intends to bake her own cobbler. The story also hints at the pastor actually being Olivia’s father, which implies that she started developing feelings for her half-brother. Then, we return to this character in ‘Instructions for Married Christian Husbands’ where the speaker lays out how she wants to have sex. It parallels ‘Peach Cobbler’ so well because now that the character has come into her own, she has embodied what her mother was doing (i.e. letting a married man have sex with her). Other notable stories in the collection were ‘How to Make Love to a Physicist’, and ‘When Eddie Levert Comes’. A succinct, though powerful read.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a collection of poems in which the speaker documents his stroke, his time in the hospital, and his reflections on family and life. The language is sharp and cutting, and because they’re all prose poems, it is the language that holds each one up. There were so many poems I was affected by that I would just be listing off the table of contents if I were to say which ones I liked. However, there was one poem that I reread because of how piercing it is. This poem is, ‘Redshift’, in which the speaker describes a house being on fire for six years, and a man beating his wife, “…all night, the same night…” It highlights how trauma can be unseen, its recurrence, and that no matter where you stand, there will always be pain somewhere. In one of my favorite lines of the collection, the speaker observes, “When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and / everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.” What exists consumes and what consumes cannot be avoided. The collection is deeply haunting in how the speaker is frank about his family, his past lovers, and the stroke that invariably changed his world. An essential read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​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

​Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf is a letter addressing the indecency of war, how society views women, and how women must fight in their own way to combat war. It details the ways in which women in Britian at the time (and largely the century before) were dependent on men, not necessarily because they needed the resources their fathers/brothers/husbands provided, but because men forced that servitude and reliance on them. Woolf outlines how education, specifically education of women, is one important pillar of preventing war. While another point she makes it noting how society must restructure itself around women independence. The message is clear in her letter: war is evil. And the man she is addressing in the letter must do what he can do as a man to prevent war, while women must separately do what they can. The letter notes the beginning of Hitler, but the devastation has not quite become apparent, seeing as Woolf passed away in 1941. It is haunting and telling, while also deeply unfortunate how even before the worst of World War II, Woolf was sounding the alarm bells.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​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