​The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a story set in a postapocalyptic world where everything has burned to ash. It follows an unnamed man and son who travel together on a road south toward the coast. They believe at the end, they’ll find warmth and relief. On their journey, they push along a shopping cart and hide from other people on the road. They have many encounters with other survivors, the first of which a man tries taking the son, but the father kills him. They meet other people: an old man who they give some cans of food, a house with a basement filled with people that were going to be eaten, a baby charred on a spit roast, a man who stole all their stuff, so they took all the thief’s clothes from him. Though, once they get to the coast, it ends up being like everything else: desolate. They continue into a town where the father is shot with an arrow and eventually dies from the wound. Finally, the son is picked up by another man who is assumed to be in good faith.
 
McCarthy is a master in how smoothly the moments and narrative flow, and what really held the story together was the bond of the father and son. Their conversations are little more than a few words each, but what felt so powerful was the way they were in context. For example, in one moment, they scavenge and find a Coca Cola, and the father gives it to the son. However, the son prods the father to drink some as well, “You have some, Papa./I want you to drink it./You have some./He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let’s just sit here.” Their relationship is encapsulated when McCarthy writes, “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” Which felt so true throughout the interactions: the way the son holds the father back from entering buildings and taking risks and how the father takes care of the son when he has a fever. The novel is about how two people can survive in a broken world and how that brokenness forces them to grow closer.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a novel set in the eighties in a town called Mallard which no one outside of Louisiana has heard of. The town exists a way for the founder, a black man, to create children whiter than him. The novel focuses on a pair of twins, who leave Mallard for a time. Though, one of the twins, Desiree, comes back after some time with a daughter who is far darker than anyone else in town. The other twin, Stella, runs off with her boss and tries to distance herself from her black identity as she passes as white and marries a white man. Along the way, the two twins have daughters with vastly different upbringings, one in a predominately white neighborhood, and one in Mallard. They meet in Los Angeles where the daughters, Kennedy and Jude, eventually learn they’re cousins. Stella wants to keep the lie that she isn’t black while her daughter wants to know the secret. Along the way, Jude falls in love with Reese, a trans man, and Kennedy becomes a midlist celebrity starring in off-Broadway plays. Near the end, Stella learns Kennedy has found her out and confronts Desiree, asking her to keep Jude away from her family. The novel ends with the twin’s mother dead, and at the funeral the one person absent is Stella.
 
I loved how this novel interrogated identity and questioned our understanding of what makes a person. It was interesting to read about a town where, even if they appeared white, people distrusted and killed them. It took the “one drop rule” and applied it to social issues rather than governmental ones. This was also paralleled in how Reese was introduced to Jude, where both felt different from the people around them. It was nicely contrasted in how Jude’s identity was external with being darker skinned in a town of mostly white passing people, while Reese presented as a man whose identity was much more internal. I enjoyed the interactions between Reese and Jude the most because they recognized each other’s pain and through that had tenderness for each other. Overall, I thought the book’s emotions, relationships, struggles with identity, and family worked in a powerful and personal way.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a novel set in the antebellum era about a black girl, Cora, who escapes from a plantation in Georgia and continues to run north toward freedom. Along the way, she meets people who work the Underground Railroad (a metaphor turned physical), abolitionists, slave patrollers, and hunters. Cora is victim to and watches the horrors of slavery, hangings, torture, and the worst of people as she tries to survive. It is a brutal and horrifying account, which feels like only a fraction of how terrible slavery was. As with any runaway slave, Cora is subjected to the unrelenting onslaught of a brutal slave catcher, Ridgeway, tasked with finding Cora. At every reprieve in South Carolina, Mr. Fletcher’s attic, the farm in Indiana, Cora is lulled into thinking she is safe, but she isn’t. She never is. The story ends with Cora finally killing Ridgeway and exiting a railroad tunnel, which acts as a physical embodiment of her freedom.
 
Whitehead intersperses Cora’s narrative with some of the people she meets along the way, such as Ridgeway, Caesar, Ethel, and her mother Mabel. Each one shows the depths of how gruesome their lives are and the never-ending way they are tied to slavery. It is a novel that doesn’t shy away from terror in how it describes moments like the torture of a man whose genitals are cut off and stuffed in his mouth. The novel is devastating, compelling, and powerful, but above everything else, terribly sad.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe is a collection of 4 novella length stories detailing strange occurrences and of people going mad. The first, ‘The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away’, is about a man who believes he has liver cancer and is describing to the nurse about his father (who died from bladder cancer), his grieving mother, the emperor, and his brother who was killed during the war. It is a fascinating and sometimes confusing story where the man used to look up to his father but has difficulties understanding his place in the world. The second story, ‘Prize Stock’, is about a boy in a village that has captured an American pilot who crash landed in the forest. The boy is apprehensive and curious about the American while they begin to get along. However, when the American is about to be given over to the Japanese military, the American holds the boy hostage, which ends in the killing of the American by the boy’s father. I was drawn in by the way the boy sees and interacts with the American and how he digests his father’s actions. The third story, ‘Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness’, is about a father whose son has a disability and is fierce in trying to protect the boy’s innocence. Though, at a zoo, the father feels helpless in trying to protect his son, and it starts cracking his understanding of himself. This particular story was based on Ōe’s own experiences with his disabled son. And finally, the last story, ‘Aghwee the Sky Monster’, is about a young man who helps out a composer haunted by his dead son in the sky. The young man helps the composer right his wrongs, destroy his work, and say goodbye to the places he loved before the composer attempts to kill himself by walking in front of a truck.
 
Each story is beautiful, haunting, and powerful in how death, grief, and terrible life circumstances affect and change the outlooks of the characters. It is painful to see how each character’s “madness” reveals itself and what they must do to right their wrongs. It is a collection of what it means to be a father, a son, and what happens when the world between the two falls apart.
 
Overall Rating: 4.5/5

​Halfway from Home by Sarah Fawn Montgomery is a collection of essays about daughterhood, familial troubles, the pandemic, home, and her father. All of which are framed and analyzed under a nature and climate conscious lens. Montgomery uses language which draws in and imbues memory into every fiber of the collection. There is an expert use of braided essays, in essays such as ‘Forest for the Trees’ and ‘Taking Stock’.
 
The first essay, ‘Excavation’, acts a strong primer in digging up memories and moments by Montgomery, in which as a child she digs up treasure after treasure hidden in her family’s back yard. Only later is she told that the treasures were placed there by her father and not natural finds. In this way, Montgomery sometimes questions her experiences as they don’t match up with her father’s. ‘Excavation’ is also sectioned off using dig sites as places to begin her memories.
 
The essays discuss her tenuous and loving relationship she has with her father, which is the heart of the essays. She contemplates what it means to be home, to desire for it, and to know it won’t exist forever.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón is a collection of poems which spans death, womanhood, and relationships, all with the thread of nature. It is a beautiful collection with striking descriptions and images. I particularly liked the poems, ‘How to Triumph Like a Girl’, ‘I Remember the Carrots’, ‘Cower’, and ‘The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road’. Specifically, ‘The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road’ uses conversations between Limón and her stepfather, who had just gotten sober, to display their collective desires. While her stepfather is looking out on a lake, even though he had rarely seen a blue heron, he would always tell her there was one. In the shared acceptance of a white lie, Limón and her stepfather acknowledge the world for what it is but hope for something greater. It’s a lovely poem, and the lines about the blue heron having to exist were powerful.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The September 2022 issue of Poetry is a collection of poems interested in the idea of monuments, real or imagined, and how that affects our understanding of the world. There are moments in the issue, particularly the poems by A. Van Jordan, which see monuments in people, those who were killed, and the affect they have on the public. The poems observe and exist in a life caused by war, the aftermath of police brutality, and what comes of being. The poems I enjoyed were ‘poem’ by Mansi Dahal, ‘Section 267C [Ars Poetica]’ by Janelle Tan, ‘I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows’ by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, ‘Missed Calls’ by Christopher Shipman, and ‘Airsoft’ by A. Van Jordan. I loved and ached from the lines written by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, “He isn’t asking/anymore. He is making me/monument. You would still be/if I cut you in half.” They are angry poems, poems that contain much more than themselves, and it felt like this issue resonated with me much more than other Poetry issues.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a novel which spans lifetimes, weaving in elements of science fiction, history, and grief. It’s a collection of short stories which exist in the same timeline and have interconnected characters. It begins with the discovery of a child in ice whose body contained a virus that morphs organs into other types of tissue. From this basis, Nagamatsu zooms in on specific characters, shows their loss, displays their grief, and works to create a depth to his world.
 
I was particularly fond of the chapter City of Laughter, in which a young boy is dying from the disease and is taken to a roller coaster park, to first be a patient in a drug trial, and then be sent on the final roller coaster meant to kill. It’s a deeply powerful story of love and loss between a worker at the park, the boy, and his mother. And throughout reading the chapter, there are varying degrees of happiness and sadness. And the story balances its bittersweet end perfectly.
 
I also liked the way it was critical of how capitalism works to use death as ways of profit in Elegy Hotel, in which a hotel chain stages the bodies of the recently deceased in hotel rooms for their loved ones to say their final goodbyes. Some of the stories, such as Through the Garden of Memory and Pig Son have otherworldly concepts, but Nagamatsu works so elegantly in crafting them, that they don’t feel out of place. It is a beautifully apt novel for the current moment, but also heartbreakingly powerful in how it sits with death, grief, hope, and survival.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Song of Achilles is a novel by Madeline Miller that focuses on the relationship between Achilles and his gay lover Patroclus before and during the siege of Troy. Miller takes from the source material of the Iliad and works in a deeply powerful mortal relationship not often written about in Greek mythology. The relationship been Achilles and Patroclus is written naturally and fluidly to offer a look into their budding understanding of each other. It’s a heartfelt, and at times, moving piece that works in Greek legend, the human condition, and a history that has been long overlooked. It was crafted in a way that let me ease into the work of Ancient Greece without being shocked. I also appreciated the relationship cultured between Patroclus and his father and Achilles and Thetis.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry that focuses on the pain wrought from the treatment of the Native American people. Diaz works to expose, rectify, and challenge the American narratives about the Native population and their land. It is brilliantly done through the use of rivers and waters acting as the constant theme throughout the collection. In ‘The First Water Is the Body’, Diaz writes, “Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real Native. Even a real Native carrying the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body.” She touches on the Flint, Michigan water crisis, the exploitation of water by the government and corporations, and explains that water is not separate from the body. The collection is heartbreaking as it shows the rawness and pain that her and the Native Americans have gone through and will continue to go through. In the collection, I enjoyed the poems ‘Catching Copper’, ‘American Arithmetic’, and ‘exhibits from The American Water Museum’. It is a brilliant and aching collection of poetry.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5