Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe is a surreal novel about a man who works at a products company and one day finds radish sprouts growing on his shins. He decides to go to the doctor where he is prescribed a bath in a sulfur lake. Then the bed he is on begins to move on its own volition, which takes him along the street, where he gets ticketed by a police officer for parking on the road in the bed, and is sent into a cave where he is nearly killed by an oncoming train. He then is taken on a boat by the bed along an underground sewage river where his IV bag turns into a reproductive organ of a squid and if it is smashed into another reproductive organ, it creates a bomb. Other adventures include the man going to an underworld tourist attraction where child-demons sing songs to visitors, meeting his mother in the underworld where she has no eyes, a nurse who tries to collect as much blood as she can from unwilling people, killing another hospital patient with nine other people because he was making too many noises, and finally going to a circus where the child-demons pack him in a box where he dies.
The novel takes many unexpected turns, and as with the narrator, it feels as though we are the patient strapped to the bed and are brought along to wherever it takes us. There are many moments of surprise, and I particularly enjoyed the way the man recalls the author who wrote about the squid bombs. It’s a weird and fun novel that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. Final Rating: 4/5
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Japanese Fairy Tales edited by Philip Smith is a collection of five fairy tales from Japan during their years of isolation. Many of the stories involve older married couples wanting children, and fighting demons. I’m most familiar with Momotaro, but thought the Tongue-cut Sparrow was an interesting read as well. As with most of the stories, there are morals imbued within them, and because they are meant for a young audience, provide templates for children to act with their parents or loved ones.
Final Rating: 4/5 Sky Ladders by Ethan Chua is a chapbook centering on the Chinese-Filipino experience and the effect of the Atlanta shooting that killed Asian Americans. The poems feel raw, at times in their untranslated forms, and in their translated forms. I found the poem, ‘The Bardo’, with its last few lines to be striking, “(48) how she always picked up when I called, and that day she did / (49) & the sound was forever”. I also found the poem, ‘Arrivals’, with its initial lines to be intense and powerful.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Kenyon Review Summer 2023 is a collection of poetry, short stories, and essays focusing on Women’s Health and ecopoetics. I was particularly drawn to the essay, ‘Shelter in Place’, by Sydney Tammarine, the essay, ‘How to Tell a True Love Story’, by Leslie Jill Patterson, the story, ‘Robber’s Lake’, by Emma Binder, the story, ‘Burnings’, by Kabi Hartman, and the poem, ‘Comfort Food’, by Terrance Hayes. In ‘Robber’s Lake’, a boy fashions himself a diving rig to go to the bottom of a lake and bring back his mother’s painting which he thinks will bring her out of her depression. He enlists the help of an older gay man and as the boy searches, his contraption fills with water and the man has to jump in to save him. This collection was strong in its discussion of the environment and how women are vital for a healthy world.
Final Rating: 4/5 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn is a memoir about a son whose father gets into trouble, becomes homeless, and their complicated father-son relationship. The father believes himself to be a great writer (though never publishes anything), goes to jail for forgery and robbing banks, and becomes homeless after bouts of drinking and threatening people. Flynn has his own struggles with drugs and alcohol, gets into drug dealing schemes, but is able to carry himself through tough times. Flynn eventually works at a homeless shelter in Boston, where inevitably his father appears. Not only is Flynn trying to distance himself from his father, but then his mother then commits suicide. Flynn reels from this loss and at one point, decides to create a documentary with all his mother’s past partners. It’s a strong foray into how a father-son relationship can be continually fraught, but also is kept alive.
The memoir takes on different forms, with one part being a script for a play about santas and daughters, another part listing facts his father tells him, and some meta-textual references at the end. It’s a heartbreaking story about relationships, drug/alcohol abuse, and how best to pick up the pieces. Final Rating: 4/5 The Greensboro Review Fall 2023 is a collection of poetry and fiction with a few notable stories. The first is ‘Expedition’ by Mike Nees, which is about a man who is determined to go on an expedition to the poles to prove that the earth is hollow. The narrative slowly shows how unhinged the man, Justin, is in his adoption of other fanciful conspiracy theories. Another story I enjoyed was ‘Goblin’ by Robert Stone with its eeriness and reference to an imaginary goblin between a father and son. It had some striking images with the decomposed food behind the oven being one of them. The final story I enjoyed was ‘Men with Guns’ by Ania Mroczek for how oddly the speaker has a fixation on guns and the men who own them. Later on, it’s revealed she has a fascination because of her parent dying in a car crash with guns in the glove compartment. Overall, I enjoyed the way the stories flowed and thought it was an interesting issue.
Final Rating: 4/5 All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang is a novel about two poets trying to survive and make it during grad school and after. Their instructor, Miranda, is seen as a cold and exacting professor who is impenetrable. Roman comes to her for help on his poetry, which then blossoms into an affair, and leads to him winning a prestigious prize. Bernard is also in love with her, but tames himself as he struggles to write his one long poem. After grad school, Roman and Lucy, another student of Miranda’s, get married and have a child. They raise him while Roman teaches composition at a university. Throughout all this time, Roman is continuously questioning his ability as a poet, wondering whether it was Miranda’s love for him that made him win, or if his work was truly groundbreaking. Over a decade later, Lucy and Roman welcome Bernard into their home because he has nowhere else to stay. This is where, among other things, Roman reads Bernard’s manuscript and is envious of how great it is, Bernard reads Roman’s manuscript and doesn’t like it, and Roman and Lucy have a falling out. Lucy and Roman then divorce following Bernard leaving their home, Roman receives the Pulitzer for the poetry manuscript Bernard didn’t like, and their son, whose goal was to play in the major leagues, loses that chance after an injury. At the end, Bernard is dying of lung cancer, and Roman returns to talk with him about Miranda and their friendship during college.
This novel is acute with its internality of Roman and Bernard, and I was enraptured with the way Chang describes their longing. The characters continually question their self-worth, and in the end, the reader is left believing that Roman sees Bernard as the better poet. It’s a heartbreaking, but precise look at how life unravels for two writers after they meet. Final Rating: 4/5 Warda by Nardine Taleb is a poetry chapbook about being Arab American, Taleb’s relationship with God, and the Egyptian culture she grew up in. This collection, and specifically the poem ‘body of a whale’ confronts these identities head on with the lines, “It is hard/to see the world without america in my body.” There is tenderness, love, longing, and a need to understand everything in a world that contradicts itself.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang is a collection of stories about Chinese immigrants and their children trying to survive and exist within America. These stories exist within longing and grief, while their characters fight to understand why they’re there, and what to do about their situations. I enjoyed stories such as ‘The Subject’, which is about a painter finding connection and betrayal in her elderly roommate, ‘Any Good Wife’, about a couple that has moved to America and the wife is trying to fit in by cooking odd American meals, ‘Knowing’, about an elderly man who teaches a daughter math. And finally, the story I particularly enjoyed, though it was heartbreaking was ‘Sister Machinery’, which is about a family trying to exist after the middle daughter’s death in a car accident. The speaker of the story understands the tension in their parents and sees her older sister grow apart from her. And it ends on a scene in which all three daughters are alive and they are teaching the youngest, the speaker, how to ride a bike. It's such a small moment, but it’s an insanely powerful and moving one.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang is a collection of poems heavily influenced by the poet W.S. Merwin and written in varying forms of wakas. The poems are about grieving Chang’s mother and father, about how the environment and animals interact with grief, and what it means to exist within loss. The poems I was particularly drawn to were ‘Losing a Language’, ‘Passing’, ‘No One’, ‘The Sound of the light’, ‘In the Open’, ‘What Can We Call It’, ‘The Lovers’, ‘In the Doorway’, and the last few stanzas of ‘Love Letters’. It ends with the beautiful lines, “Let me tell you a story/about hope: it always starts/and ends with bird.”
Final Rating: 4/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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