The Company of Strangers by Jen Michalski is a collection of short stories about frayed relationships, queerness, and the ways in which love inhibit and enhance life. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Loneliest Creature on Earth’, ‘The Long Haul’, ‘The Company of Strangers’, ‘The Goodbye Party’, and Scheherazade’. I loved the way ‘Goodbye Party’ provides an outlet for Sam’s grief through the dogs that will be put down and how he contemplates how his wife’s passing will affect his son.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
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South Dakota Review 58.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Out of the pieces, I enjoyed ‘Nepenthes Northiana’ by Virgil Suárez, ‘When it Rains’ by Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Never Break Two Laws at Once’ by Adam Straus, and ‘Mascot Worship’ by William Musgrove. Particularly the story by Adam Straus was interesting in the way it handled desertion, anxiety, and dislike toward the military.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Rupture by Adrie Rose is a poetry chapbook focusing on the experience and time after of having an ectopic pregnancy. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Rupture’, and ‘The Bell’. The poems also experiment with form through erasure and spacing.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara provides a strikingly deep look at Frank O’Hara’s work and his life. Most of the poems provide an almost diary-like feel to them which creates an intimate view of O’Hara’s thoughts. It seems he was consciously trying to push back on the conventional idea of what poetry was at the time, as can be seen through the continual iteration of titling many of his poems ‘Poem’. There is a wide breadth of poems that I enjoyed, though found ‘Poem [Let’s take a walk, you]’, ‘1951’, ‘Steven’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Poem [Pawing the mound with his hairy legs]’, ‘Two Dreams of Waking’, ‘The Anthology of Lonely Days’, ‘Three Poems’, and ‘Rogers in Italy’ all to be particularly interesting. And I really enjoyed the lines in ‘Rogers in Italy’ that goes, “And now at last I am/alone again and night, at last, has come.” Throughout the poems, there are thoughts about paintings, other poets, his mood, and his sexual encounters both with men and women. Also, the essay, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ was interesting.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection by Michael B. Tager is a collection of poems contemplating the nostalgia, cultural effects, and personal connections to important people such as Justin Bieber to Patrick Swayze. I enjoyed the poems, ‘All Neon Like’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Dalmatian’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Capitalism’, ‘Genghis Sees a Michael Bay Movie’, and ‘Human fighter jet’. The poems are playful, humorous, and provide interesting scenarios.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Poetry December 2023 is a collection of poems and a feature of Frank Marshall Davis. It’s a solid issue with Diane Seuss with ‘Cowpunk’, Okwudili Nebeolisa with ‘Innocence’, and Frank Michell Davis with ‘Giles Johnson, Ph.D.’. I especially enjoyed the interview, discussion, and short essay by Davis’s daughter. It was an in-depth look on how Davis’s work was heavily influenced by living in Chicago, the way people at the time saw his work as too political and bordering on propaganda, and how he viewed his work.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel about two video game makers, Sam and Sadie, as they navigate life through the creation of multiple video games. Sam had gotten into a car wreck where his mother died and his leg was terribly injured. Sadie’s sister was receiving treatment for cancer when Sadie meets Sam when they were kids. They play and get along until Sam finds out she is using him for community service. They distance themselves for years until college in Boston where they randomly find each other and Sam encourages Sadie to make a game, Ichigo, with him. They work together, with the aid of Marx, Sam’s roommate, and create a game which sells millions of copies. They continue to make games together through tumultuous times: Sadie’s abusive boyfriend and professor, Sam’s amputation surgery, badly reviewed games, Sadie and Marx’s relationship, and finally a gunman who fatally shoots Marx. Sadie and Sam split ways after Marx dies and, to win back Sadie, Sam creates a game only for her. By then, she has a child and is a professor herself. At the end, there’s hope that they’ll continue to make games together.
Zevin makes interesting choices in form and structure. For example, one chapter splits the narrative between Sadie and Sam, paralleling the story of their game Both Sides. She also has another chapter written from the perspective of Marx as an NPC in a game after he is shot. And a third chapter which tells the storyline of an in-game interaction between Sam and Sadie. The characters feel lived in and their motives are complicated and powerful. It threads in pop-culture references, historical events, and feels like a unique take on what game designers go through. I was a little annoyed at some of the explanations of games or their lingo, where, for example, Super Mario Bros. is described too in-depth. It reads as if it were written for an older generation where they don’t know basic aspects of video games. There was another moment where the events of 9/11 are discussed, which I think was meant to ground the reader in the time, but to me, it felt as if it were only added in to try and prove the novel’s own relevance. Additionally, some of the situations felt too easy, with payoffs happening quickly after problems arise. However, I generally enjoyed the way Sadie and Sam’s relationship is mulled over and it worked well within its universe. Final Rating: 3.5/5 The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is about a cast of interlinking characters in Iowa City as they navigate grad school at the University of Iowa and life. One of them is a poet that despises his classmates, another is a dancer who then decides to become an investment banker, another is an older closeted man. There are others too that all intermingle and conflict during their tenure. The novel is heavily queer, though in a sense that emboldens and questions the masculinity of its characters. It comments on capitalism, parental wants, love, sex, and art. The characters and its dialogue, whether in a café or bar or classroom, are filled with tension and longing. It has an airy type of quality to it, and seems in some respects to be in conversation and conflict with Lan Samantha Chang’s All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. Overall, a decent and dramatic read.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Persuasion by Jane Austen is a novel about a well-off daughter, Anne, and her desires for a man, Captain Wentworth. The novel kicks off with Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, having lost his first wife and now married to another, spending above his means. They have to sell off one of their pieces of land, Kellynch Hall, to a navy man, Admiral Croft, and his wife. Sir Walter Elliot hates this, and says, “a sailor grows older sooner than any other man…”. Admiral Croft brings with him Anne’s old lover, Captain Wentworth, who believes she betrayed him when she cut off their relationship. This was in part due to Lady Russell’s, Anne’s house-maid, word. Once Anne moves from Kellynch Hall, she meets Captain Wentworth and desires him throughout, but then begins to be courted by her cousin, Mr. Elliot. Captain Wentworth was also trying to marry another woman, Louise, but soon falls out of love with her after his friend courts her. It’s only when Anne’s friend, Mrs. Smith, reveals to her that Mr. Elliot is a conniving person only out for prestige that she cuts it off with him. And throughout, Anne goes to concerts, card parties, and hosts parties of her own. At the end, even though Captain Wentworth is not the type her family or friends want her to marry, they do and everyone, except Mr. Elliot, seems to get around to being fine with it.
I enjoyed the wit and acuity Austen deploys with Anne and Captain Wentworth. And while it is a story of its time, I did find the way everyone treated Anne to be transcendent. Lady Russell tells her to marry someone else, her father thinks she’s the lesser of the three daughters, and Elizabeth is simply rude to her. Though, at times, the parties got a little overbearing and I had difficulty with how quick the final chapter wraps things up. I’m also not that interested in stories about well-off families, as their problems seem more or less comparatively small to others. Overall, I thought it to be a fairly enjoyable read. Final Rating: 3.5/5 Lighthouse Dreams by Elizabeth Genovise is a collection of stories of people in some sort of in-between. The first story is about a passenger after a train crashes, another is about a family who arrives at a lighthouse, another is about a hike between two friends, another is about an art history professor and student who both plan to kill themselves. The stories, as the title suggests, feels surreal at times, meaningful in others but exist to create something more for the characters and the reader. In a few of the stories, dreams are used as vehicles for the character’s unconscious to show their fears and desires. I enjoyed the banter between the art history professor and the student the most since it felt real and tender, both trying to say more, but unable to address what’s truly on their mind.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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