Knock Wood: A Memoir in Essays by Jennifer Militello

While billed as a memoir, Knock Wood, winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, is more akin to a theme-and-variations composition: Think love-child of early Bruce Springsteen and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. An acclaimed poet, Militello tells her story in twenty-nine discrete essays that mostly eschew chronology. There isn’t just one title essay but five, each about a lover named Tim and the nature of time, which in Militello’s metaphysics includes a future that “might influence the past.”

In the first of the five title essays, which are interspersed throughout the book, the married-with-children author meets Tim for their first tryst. When he shows up at the train station, Militello glimpses her future and perceives action and reaction occurring in reverse order:

I knew I’d leave my marriage. I knew I’d regret it and die crazy. But none of that could be helped. The arrow points both ways…You knock on a novel instead of wood and it kills someone in the past.

It’s fitting that Militello and her lover meet at a train station, a locale that nicely telegraphs the book’s principal themes: 1) the uncanny nature of time that runs in two directions like a double-track railway; 2) the way our origins—where we’re raised, our family—always lie beneath us like train tracks (one relative attempts suicide by jumping in front of a subway); 3) the desires that carry us away, rendering us passengers in our own life. Bob Dylan wrote: “It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.” Jennifer Militello writes: “The only way we knew love was through hurt. We gave each other the gift of harm.”

The five essays titled “Knock Wood” form a circular narrative through time analogous to the rings of a tree. The fifth one depicting the end of the author’s relationship with Tim begins, “In the end, I recognized that the train approaching was not the one that had dropped me off.”

Some readers associate the label “memoir” with a unique life-story or hardship, perhaps the sensational or salacious. The memories that overtake Militello like an invasive species (one essay about memory is titled “Invasive Species”), and the difficulties she bears witness to, are what we’ve come to view, sadly, as ordinary: a high school boyfriend who dies from a heroin overdose, an abusive uncle, post-partum depression, an aunt and uncle with mental health issues, marital infidelity. Rather, it is Militello’s writing—the range of styles, perspectives, and lyrical language (“We turned each other inside out. We were mollusks with softness of organs for shells”)—that lifts this book out of the ordinary, making it unpredictable and exciting.

As is typical of memoirs, Militello mostly writes in the first person. But in at least three essays she uses a different point of view to emphasize the distance between the narrating self and experiencing self (second person in “Why I became a Criminal” and “Procedures for an Outing,” and third person in “All the Resonance of a Smashed Violin”). But more striking is her deft use of the passive voice in “The Problems of the Mothers,” “The Living Room,” and “The Accidents,” to convey inevitability, helplessness, and neglect. About her grandparents’ home, she writes:

There were rubber bands on the door handles. No one used them but there they were, stored up, red, green, dun-colored, for the day they would be needed. Clusters of rubber bands, rows forearm-thick were they to be placed around a wrist. Things wanted to be bound or joined but instead the rubber bands stood as markers, like lines convicts scratch on cell walls to track the days. Nothing was held together. Nothing was wrapped or sealed or glued or welded or screwed. There were no clothespins. There were no paper clips. There were hardly hinges. Nothing was ever given a Band-Aid or tied up with a string.

The above excerpt also highlights Militello’s ear and ability to craft a sentence as a poet does the line: the internal rhyme of “glued” and “screwed” and the series of four-word sentences beginning with “There were,” which hammer-home the lack of ties that bind. Such repetition and anaphora structure her writing musically. There are, for instance, whole paragraphs in which every sentence begins with “like” or “because.” (My only quibble about her style would be the liberal use of “like” throughout.) If repetition can be considered a vocalized pause, Militello demonstrates over and over again her desire to stop time in its tracks.

As a poet and essayist, I am a fan of Militello’s brand of nonfiction, where moments, images, feelings, and thoughts are on equal footing with action. Without an arc or obvious plot points, which can seem contrived in a memoir, hers is a different approach to story-telling. The “story” takes shape through accretion. What was less convincing for me structurally, and occasionally felt like an artificial through-line, were her regular references to bi-directional time, wormholes, and the superstitious practice of knocking on wood (she even wears a wooden ring). These references aren’t limited to the five “Knock Wood” essays. In the opening essay “Theory of Relativity,” for instance, she attributes an uncle’s death three years earlier to knocking on paper and “felt that ill-fated knock travel back in time.”

What I love most about Knock Wood, Militello’s first foray into nonfiction, is her vivid depiction of adolescent life in working-class neighborhoods and her portrait of a New England mill town. The youth are feral, the adults mostly absent and sometimes malevolent: “Her father’s wife is the kind of woman who pinches a child when no one’s around just to see what the child will do.” “The Town” is so gorgeously written, spot-on, and evocative, I wish everyone would read it, particularly now as we try to understand what we’ve become as a country.

Here are selected passages from the last two paragraphs about the boys of her town, some of whom she loved and have already died, who drink and drive “late at night at top speeds through winding wooded back roads with the headlights off and the music turned up; it almost kills them and it keeps them alive”:

What can any of us know of their lives? The sons they are, skinny in their belted jeans, heads hung and long arms, what do we know of their starved kittens and unpaved driveways and widowed mothers and diseased dogs? What do we know of their bedrooms, mattresses without sheets, fridges without food, sugar the one thing on the shelves, the one broken chair in the kitchen in which they sit and then lean too far back?

 

Love them and they will be dust that sifts through your fingers. Love the damaged, the despised, the crooked, the lost. They are your boyfriends, your friends, or your fathers. Love them and this is what you get.

Militello has created “a gift of harm,” inflicted and received—a way to look at and love what is broken—and for this I am immensely grateful.

Dzanc Books
$16.95 Paperback | Buy Now

To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight by Terrance Hayes

In To Float in the Space Between, Terrance Hayes writes, “One’s poetics should be liquid.” Before grabbing hold of that line, I had already dipped into this book’s structure, a dialogue between Hayes, Etheridge Knight’s life and his poetry, and interviews and stories by writers acquainted with Knight’s work. Within all this moving around, Hayes provides context through a selective use of Knight’s poems, beginning with “The Idea of Ancestry,” from 1968. Hayes pays tribute to the proposition that a mixed-genre of biography, memoir, criticism, and poetry can work together.

Hayes correlates Knight’s writing of “The Idea of Ancestry”—a major poem he wrote while serving an eight-year prison sentence for robbery—with the progress of this book. Knight’s poem is both guide and signpost. With each line selected from “The Idea of Ancestry,” Hayes creates a kind of stylistic effect in the book; the conversations among the two poets seem to highlight the flow of the poem—and vice versa. Hayes challenges the reader to fill in the spaces and to make connections of their own. I did so and floated there.

As I read, I realized my father never wrote, jotted, or scribbled a note to me. There are no pieces of paper, no post-its, or cards that survived his last breath. I do not have those things to tape to my walls. It feels nice to believe, which is possible, there is at least one birthday card stuffed in a paper-drawer or withering in a landfill waiting for an artist to repurpose it. Like the walls of Knight’s cell—he put up pictures of “47 black faces”—I have photos of my father’s blackened face before me. These photos avail themselves in my poems.

As if daring the reader to evaluate his or her existence against what strings us together, Hayes makes that which connects us have meaning in the moment. It is not necessarily about the blood that courses through veins, or flesh that encases our bones. As complex as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) may be, our experiences far surpass the self-replication of those building blocks. Biology is itself poetic, and the space between cells is nurture. It flows. In To Float in the Space Between, Hayes expands this notion.

Through conversations between Hayes, Knight and others, Hayes shows that our experiences, often random, shape who we are. If not for Knight’s addiction to opiates, fortunately and unfortunately, the literary culture, especially the Black Arts Movement, may not have been afforded his poetry. Dudley Randall may not have shared Knight’s works with Sonia Sanchez, who became his first wife. She would not have been in the spaces of “Upon Your Leaving,” another of Knight’s poems, and Hayes may have attended a different workshop than the one at the University of Pittsburgh where he discovered Knight’s work. Unrelated events are often irrevocably intertwined.

Hayes’s approach to his subject matter is unapologetic. His references are subtle at times, but he beautifully disrupts the space allowing the reader to chew on details. He sucked the finger of a friend’s sister before making love to her. He knows the Negro, African-American, folklore of “Shine and the Titanic.” As a teen, I was introduced to a version delivered by Rudy Ray Moore, entitled “Shine and the Great Titanic.” My favorite Rudy Ray Moore rap is still “the Signifying Monkey.” There I go, filling in the spaces. Thank you, Terrance Hayes!

There is much to love about To Float in the Space Between. War takes and creates in the section titled “An Empty Space.” Here, descriptions of loss breathe life into stories that swing between myth and truth. During the Korean war, Knight’s job was to remove bodies from the battlefield. Hayes brings Knight’s voice to the page with tragically beautiful lines like “I was making my way through a field of limbs and torsos with no attachments.”

In “Messages,” the tenuous ties of race are laid bare. Hayes conveys that art, via the Negro artist, is critically intertwined with our days as it leans against our experiences. He cajoles the reader to first submit to the notion that an artist cannot separate life from art; Knight and his poem, “The Idea of Ancestry,” continues to hover in the background. Through other artists like Langston Hughes, he illustrates how politics and art converge.

Hayes exposes his relationship with his dad and his father in “Genes.” Although the reference to each moniker is blurred in the conversation, the insinuation that there is a difference between the two is not shrouded. When Hayes describes meeting his father, it is clear that the biology of flesh and bone provides explanations distinct from nurture. Yet, it is his dad, the adopted father, who fills the spaces. As Hayes writes, “he wanted to give his family a future to be proud of.”

It never feels like things are out of place even when they seem to be. The book is organized by Hayes’s lifting the necessary themes and ideas from “The Idea of Ancestry.” Whether Knight’s poem influenced Hayes’s direction, or he entered the project only to extract the necessary pieces, he delivers an engaging work of multi-mixed-genre.

Wave Books
 $25.00 Paperback | Buy Now

Be with Me Always by Randon Billings Noble

Be with Me Always is Randon Billings Noble’s first book, although she has been a celebrated essayist for at least a decade now. In 2008 Noble published “War Weary from a Dangerous Liaison” in The New York Times’s Modern Love column, retitled here as “Ambush.” The piece recounts Noble’s reaction to a jolting Valentine’s Day email from a contentious past lover and how the potential of a path not chosen can haunt us irresistibly. Since then, Noble’s essays been featured in The Rumpus, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and Creative Nonfiction, among other publications.

This book is the culmination of much of that featured work, buoyed by dazzling new additions like “Striking,” in which she speaks directly of the supernatural, her prime subject: “We can’t control when the ghost materializes or what drives it away, Sometimes it’s a presence, more often an absence.” Noble’s slim collection is teeming with ghosts of all shapes and sizes. However absent the hauntings therein may feel to her, to this reader they are vivid and immediate and bold, nestled in dreamlike prose.

For instance, in “Elegy for Dracula,” Gothic drama emerges from what, at first, seems like a sentimental reflection on young love:

He sent bulky packages full of black-and-white photographs that he had developed in his school darkroom, and I sent scraps of poetry from anthologies stolen from my English department’s lounge. . . . And then late one January night the phone rang. I was a hundred miles away, wrapped in plum flannel sheets bleached gray by the moonlight. He had called to tell me he had cut himself. There was blood on the floor, but he had found a bandage. What to say?

 

For Dracula—all the Draculas—blood is life. But it must constantly be sought. From victims willing or otherwise.

Totemic moments like this seem to be what drive Noble. Again, in “Striking,” a segmented essay at the heart of the book, she confesses: “Here I am haunted by my need to be haunted, by my reluctance to let anything stay buried, by my desire to bring hauntedness itself into this weak winter light and see it truly for what it is.”

Among her particular ghosts are experiences with pregnancy and childbirth (Gothic horrors, without a doubt), the prospect of widowhood, and the subversive pleasure of adopting the active gaze as a flâneuse, rambling in boots and coat, disguised as a genderless figure.

Pregnancy and birth narratives abound among nonfiction essayists. But Noble’s ability to access this trauma (Greek for “wound”)—through the unfamiliar re-formation of her body and its post-natal scarring—manages to challenge the cliché that too often dogs such stories. In “Assemblage,” she reimagines herself as Dr. Frankenstein, and her own twins as her creations. She poses the unlikely incarnation of such flesh doubled within a woman, herself, recalling Frankenstein’s confounding alchemy. It’s a powerful metaphor. Near the essay’s end, she writes:

These hands held Frankenstein on a sick child’s bed while these eyes read—heartbroken—about the creature confronting the creator who had abandoned him: “I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” And then these hands put the book down, cared for the sick child who had been sleeping in that bed, and didn’t pick up the book again for days.

At one point—two or so pages before a sly admission regarding the nonfictionist’s calculated, “Holmesian” myth-making—Noble laments, as a writer, “Must every inch be unraveled and exposed?” No, every inch need not. Instead, her essays prove, in the way this reviewer’s favorite dog-eared collections by Patrick Madden and Charles D’Ambrosio also reveal, that the essayist need not craft a literary tell-all to create a captivating, significant work of narrative nonfiction. Though her title is taken from Emily Brontë’s “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad!” these essays are not dark romantic adventures. Their mystery is more enigmatic.

For example, “What of the Raven, What of the Dove?” is about the problematic nature of excision of all sorts—in Noble’s case, the surgical removal of a nodule from her throat. (The title pays homage to Terry Tempest Williams.) The contrast between Noble’s writing in a grounded, plain-spoken style and the wild fantasy of other pieces like “The Elegy of Dracula” is especially apparent in this piece; one of its most powerful observations is deceptively simple: “The twins—my daughters—will live beyond me. Their lives are wide open, and they don’t know agoraphobia. My life is not claustrophobic, but it has narrowed narrowed narrowed with each choice.”

If not for the repetition of that single word “narrowed,” one might miss Noble’s despair. It’s also a deft nod to the essay’s theme—that which is carved away. Alongside Williams are references to other women writers who tackle similar moments of anguished being: Brontë, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf. Noble builds on such classics as Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, renewing their literary themes in her own nonfiction.

In this sense, Be with Me Always is a singular addition to women’s nonfiction, an ever-expanding pantheon. In fact, women may be born essayists: they sit back, observe, and consider, perhaps by nature but more likely by social position.

In “Camouflet,” Noble positions observation, and perhaps essay-writing, as gendered. She writes of rambling the streets in plain clothes, disguised by her mercifully nondescript (and androgynous) appearance, her anonymity allowing her a new freedom:

I’m checking the sky, noting clouds. I’m feeling the weather on my face and hands, the sidewalk under my heels. I’m listening as I thread through a crowd or pause at a crosswalk—to conversation, to birds, to traffic’s rush, a truck’s grumble, the general hum and swell of the city. . . . I am looking and walking and looking and walking.

In “Camouflet,” Noble writes about herself as a flâneuse, the female version of the flâneur. She invokes two other flâneusesin this essay and, tellingly, both are female nonfictionists: George Sand, a novelist and memoirist known for flouting gender conventions of her time by donning men’s attire, smoking cigarettes, and perhaps pursuing a same-sex relationship; and Virginia Woolf. At the end of “Camouflet,” Noble speaks directly to her sister flâneuses: “I am moving fast, although I am not in a hurry. I’m not sure where to, but it doesn’t really matter. I am en flânant, following Sand, following Woolf, giving rein to my wandering wishes, heading across town, around the corner, and out of sight.”

Noble’s talents are numerous, and a myriad of them is represented over the course of Be with Me Always. Twice in the collection, for instance, she writes in the classic style of Montaigne (“On Looking,” “On Silence”), which are every bit as fascinating as her Gothic work. In addition, there are several prose poems or severely fragmented pieces (such as “Striking), which invite further meaning-making through their creative structures.

However, to comment on the author’s fluency with the essay would be to neglect Noble’s ideas, which are original and compelling. Anyone can manipulate structure, but the conclusions that Noble reaps from the annals of Gothic literature and the flotsam of her life are entirely her own. The most overt truth that runs through the collection is a paradoxically reassuring one about her presences, namely, that our hauntings, our memories, and the questions that drive creation—of career, of child, of essay—prevent us from being alone. The essay, a peek into the nonfictionist’s internal life, is likewise a stay against loneliness, and, to that end, Noble and her collection are fascinating companions indeed.

University of Nebraska press
$19.95 Paperback | Buy Now

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place Edited by Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

Where—or what—is your hearth of hearths? Where is the place you feel most alive or connected? What is the thing that reminds you who you are and to what (or whom) you belong? In all the world, what do you call home?

These are some of the questions that Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor pondered as they edited Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place. In the preface, they describe how the “idea for a book about hearth started on the rim of the Kilauea Volcano on Hawai’i’s Big Island” when author, revered elder, and teacher Pualani Kanahele—who describes her hearth as the volcano—asked others to consider their own hearths: “Invite guests to your home,” she said, “and over a generous offering of food ask them where their hearth is.”

Over just such a meal at her home, O’Connor described her hearth as “an ancient grove of larch and pines.” Smith named her Hungarian-Jewish grandmother’s recipe for csirke paprikás (chicken paprika) as hers. The idea of an anthology about hearths intrigued them; they also wondered why “do we need a book about something so obvious and good?” Eventually, they committed to a book that would inspire readers to “identify, protect, or reimagine their home places.”

The result is thirty-five pieces, most of them written for this collection. While most of the contributions are essays, Hearth also includes a short story, a translated excerpt from a Pakistani novel, and six black-and-white photographs by Sebastião Salgado. Plus, nearly a third of the selections are poems, including two by W. S. Merwin.

The book is divided into three sections, each taking its title from one of the words—and concepts—embedded within “hearth”: Heart, Earth, and Art. Some pieces have a clear connection to their section title, but most would have been at home in any of the sections, a testament to the interconnectedness of the book’s themes and selections.

As I read Hearth, I became slightly obsessed with the word itself. “Hearth” can mean “the floor of a fireplace” or “a vital creative center.” It’s often found standing side-by-side and holding hands with “home,” as in hearth and home. But I found myself thinking beyond the definition and into the word itself. It’s just six letters long, and yet hearth contains multitudes. Besides the above-mentioned heart, earth, and art, hearth also contains he, hear, and ear.

And then there are the anagrammatic possibilities: the, heat, hath, heath, at, tar, rat, hat, ha, eat, ate, et, ta, hart, hath, her and aha. There’s also ae and hae (Scottish variants for “one” and “have”); rath (an ancient earthwork settlement in Ireland); and rathe, an archaic term for “growing, blooming, or ripening early in the year or season.”

Each time I found another word, I ran it through the filter of hearth as a concept: Is heat a required element of a hearth? Could a rat or tar figure into someone’s idea of home? What ancient hearths were found upon a heath or within an Irish rath?

This indulgent wordplay is more than a writer’s preoccupation with language. The way the term hearth spirals into itself and blooms outward into so many other things mirrors the content of the book. There are the expected hearths of stone-circled fires, hometowns, and houses, in these pages, as well as the unexpected: the Internet, a rug, cities, fathers, trees, birds, gardens, oceans, rivers, poetry, time, the cosmos. People find sanctuary in so many different ways—in other people, human-built environments, the natural world, even a metaphysical concept.

As its subtitle declares, Hearth aspires to be a “global conversation” with dispatches from more than twenty countries across seven continents. (Antarctica appears thanks to Barry Lopez’s foreword to the book.) The United States is perhaps overrepresented, the setting for about half of the book’s selections. Europe and Asia are represented by seven entries each, and Australia features prominently in two essays. Just a handful of selections have ties to countries in Africa and South America.

Pieces speak to each other in complex, surprising ways. A sense of interconnectedness is one of the anthology’s most striking features. In addition to the typical themes of identity, community, and place, other thematic images emerge and echo throughout. These include gardens; beehives; trees as companions; tigers; architecture; fathers and rivers; dreams and dreamscapes. The resulting concatenation creates a rich conversation among contributors and between contributors and readers.

One of the best things about Hearth is its global scale—the way it smashes through broad assumptions about “foreign” places and drops readers into the heart of such places, cultures, and histories. For example, contributor Alisa Ganieva came of age as the USSR was becoming Russia. In her essay “Hearths in the Highlands,” she searches for a place to call her own while tracing her ancestry to villages in the Caucasus Mountains:

Makhachkala, the plain seaside town I lived in, wasn’t native for my family, which had descended from different villages in the highlands. So I couldn’t name my motherland. Was it Russia? Or Moscow—my birthplace and the capital of my freshly diminished country? I preferred to answer ‘Caucasus’ or simply ‘mountains.’

She reveals an intricate history of people and place, reminding us that even small patches of land are steeped in epic stories of love and loss, and that a small mountain village can be a world unto itself.

And yet, towards the end of Ganieva’s piece, rather than finding her own place, she admits that she’s “glad to be a cosmopolitan” and concludes: “Perhaps my hearth lives only in my mind. Sometimes I feel a sting of happiness and a sense of hearth and home far away from my ancestors’ lands—sometimes on another continent. It all depends on the ambiance, on surroundings and people.”

Finding a sense of home away from one’s homeland is a recurring theme in Hearth. A number of essays explore migrations of various sorts. In “Enchantment,” Andrew Lam’s family leaves Vietnam for the U.S. while he is still a child. In “The Ink of Cemeteries,” Mihaela Moscaliuc considers the cultural differences between Romania and the U.S. through the eyes of her child. In “Home is Elsewhere: Reflections of a Returnee,” Boey Kim Cheng searches for a sense of home, first as an expat in Australia, and then again when he moves back to his native Singapore.

Some migrations are subtler and more “domestic” than others. In “The Rent Not Paid,” Kavery Nambisan moves back to her home district in southwestern India and ponders the ways life there has or has not changed over time. In “The Great Big Rickety World My Father Saved Me From,” Debra Magpie Earling leaves the Pacific Northwest (where no one in her family “lived more than an hour’s drive from Spokane”) for college in Ithaca, New York.

And in “Dream Shelter,” Angie Cruz writes of living “two realities. The reality of my marriage, motherhood, and teaching at a university in Pittsburgh, all of which are legibly responsible behavior, and my other reality, one often referred to as irresponsible, where I piled on debt to sustain my New York City apartment in Washington Heights.” In Cruz’s essay, cities, neighborhoods, and architecture become hearths and anti-hearths that have the power to shape the people who dwell there.

For too many people around the world, home is a place they’ve been forced to leave. Stories of immigrants, migrants, and refugees regularly inhabit the news in brutal, heartbreaking ways. The contributors of Hearth remind us that behind each of those labels are people seeking the same thing: the safety of hearth and home.

In his poem (“Codex Hogar”) and an accompanying essay (“Hearthland”), Luis Alberto Urrea explores in vivid detail the hardships and joys of living along the U.S.-Mexico border. He unflinchingly describes coming to the U.S. with his American mother:

I was suddenly called things I had never heard of. Greaser, wetback, pepper-belly, beaner, taco-bender. I learned that we are not human. We were Other. Because of some line that a commission decided to etch on some map…. And this mythos of wall-building was just more calling of names. Names in brick and mortar and wire and steel. And thus, my fourth lesson in home: I am and will be Other. Until I write you into my heart and make you see my home as what it was. Just another extension of your own home. For there is no them; there is only us.

People leave or lose their homes for a variety of reasons in Hearth, including climate change and politics. The outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election hangs like a specter over sections of the book, most notably in “A Tea Ceremony for Public Lands” by Terry Tempest Williams and Sarah Hedden. This segmented essay is formatted to follow the progression of the Japanese tea ceremony, which the authors and their neighbors hold to honor the endangered public lands of Utah—and to deal with their political grief and fury.

Gretel Ehrlich issues a clarion call about global warming in her essay “To Live.” She takes us to Greenland and shows us a place where hearths are made not with fire, but of ice:

At seventy-eight degrees latitude north their Wilsonian longing for home was not for green savannah, but for great expanses of white—of ice and snow-covered ice. Intense cold was not considered an enemy. They had no wood to burn. Hearth was a calm frigid place where sea ice could form, where the panting of sled dogs was the national song.

“But,” she writes, “the ice didn’t hold. That hearth—the culture of the extended family groups that coevolved with and was dependent on ice—is gone.”

Like Urrea, Ehrlich reminds us that there is no point in the act of othering, that there is only us: “[L]ife as we have known it everywhere” is also gone.” She weeps for these losses, especially reflected surface light on ice or albedo:

I’ve been on my hands and knees sobbing as the ice melts, as we lose albedo, as die-offs mount up, and though there’s been no doubt that life is transient, chance, and change, I hadn’t anticipated the scale of loss, of the many worlds, cultural and biological—wholes within wholes—gone with no hope of return.

I think about the editors’ early question: “Why . . . do we need a book about something so obvious and good?” A book about hearths could have devolved into the merely warm and fuzzy. But the editors and contributors resisted such feel-good rhetoric; they have, instead, created a collection that sparks and sparkles with a kind of living fire that lights up the people and places of our world.

Milkweed Editions
 $18.00 Paperback | Buy Now

Fluid States by Heidi Czerwiec

There may be no more startling way to bait readers into an essay than this: “Is there a word for the unsettling sensation of sitting down on an unexpectedly warm toilet seat, because someone used it just before you and sat there for a good long while? Maybe something in German?” The author titles it: “FREUDENSCHANDE: PRIV(AC)Y,” translated as “joyful-shame.” Using more of these “made-up” German compounds as section titles, she goes on to compare the “bowel mover” in the “public privy” to the commodious confessions of the personal nonfictionist, the emotional “shitshow” so many memoirists and essayists insist readers have to sit with. All this “warmth sharing” breaks “the illusion of privacy” and invites us into the shape-shifting, sense-altering, fearlessly original prose of Heidi Czerwiec.

In this high-voltage little book, which won 2019’s Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose at Pleiades Press, we find a jagged mountain collection of nine probes, experiments, Frank Gehry-like edifices of distemper and delight. These probes do not circle a thematic center, but are separate spates of the author’s lusty ingenuity, at times, voiced in pithy lines of poetry. The book is best exemplified by the almost chillingly inventive, thirty-page stunner, “Decants,” a masterpiece of sophisticated mischief about perfume.

Czerwiec, with several volumes of verse under her belt, is a “perfume collector.” Bottles, sprays, elixirs, bouquets, notes, whiffs. Favorite fragrances (grist for her smell) include Chanel No. 5, Vent Vert, Bandit, and Scandal. Her scent decrees cast a wide net. They epitomize crime in general, robbery and affairs in particular; they eroticize such figures as Marilyn Monroe who when asked what she slept in replied, “five drops of No. 5”; and they recall those nasalized magazines, first fueled in the 1970s, that included as inserts scratch-and-sniff cards.

Czerwiec’s language is liquidly thick. A lover’s odor, she recalls, as a “vivid viridescence,” his body redolent of bright green. Her flesh applications are “like a cloak, a second skin I can’t shed.” Extracts that mimic gardenia manifest her “hormonal flux” with an “indolic floral,” the scent of moth-balls. Lab-made fragrances catalyze desired if fleeting personas: the aggressive (the “iciness” of Chanel No 19, “an iteration of the sleet in the streets, its cold metallic hiss”), the gamey (La Parfum de Thérèse with its “dark animalic notes and bright pepper, melon, and jasmine extracts”), and the sexed (the French perfumier Germaine Cellier whose Bandit perfume “juxtaposed components [that] fight and fuck within your nose”). Bathe, dress, scent, score, undress, make love.

While Czerwiec wears fragrances to stimulate play and libido, she also does so to challenge identity. There’s a kind of dropping-of-the-veil about the scented body that I’ve experienced but never fully understood—perfumes transcend gender, they befuddle roles, they incite us into unzipped passion and wanton frenzy.

One of Czerwiec’s craftiest touches is how the vignettes in “Decants” enact the intimacy of aromatic bodies and the open-endedness of prose. By which I mean scent and prose create their impact by dousing the air around the body and by lingering from one page to the next, but soon enough that impact evaporates. Many of her pieces and their parts perform a fade—the last sentence is poem-ed out, if you will, an evanescent-like use of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot.” An example:

A boy I loved and favored for a lover took me to prom twice. The first time, I wore black satin overlaid with black lace. The second time, I wore red satin, gathered and draped as though wrapped in a post-coital bedsheet. Both times, I wore Chanel No. 5, borrowed from my mother’s boudoir since my own everyday scent—Anaïs Anaïs—despite evoking a favorite eroticist, smelt too candy-sweet, The Chanel felt stately, grownup, untouchable.

 

I wanted the boy
to touch me, wrap me in his sheets;
he never did.

What to make of the other probes? Uneven. “A Child of God Much Like Yourself” is a head-scratcher, an essay of bitter revilement on nuclear annihilation with lathered-in quotations from a Cormac McCarthy novel (the master of oblivion), a fact I would not have known had the endnotes not alerted me. The writing is slippery, the references oblique, the subject matter ghostly.

The soliloquy of “Bear” reads like a grizzly paw swipe against an ex-husband who has no substance or voice in the piece other than to be (to have been) the author’s dalliance and scourge of her person and pen.

I was taken by the two expository essays in which reportage dominates and Czerwiec adumbrates her subjects with clear outrage and stinging judgments. “Sweet / Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle” is a substantive drive-through of North Dakota in the mid-2010s when the deep-drill-dive for new energy sources trucked in. It’s a layered tale of the rapacious takeover of Ag by Gas. I admire the author’s digging into the polluted remnant of the under-earth whose treasure the oil companies targeted (and still swill) via shale extraction and fracking.

Czerwiec skewers the profiteering class of Americans who’ll do-anything-for-$, much as past avaricious stampedes exploited Alaska, the Sierra, the Gulf, Florida coastal real estate, the cities of San Francisco, Austin, Portland. She piles on contempt for the environmental wreckage Big Oil & Gas wrought in a few short years. In the end, we are astonished at how easily investors used (and threw away) the roustabouts who were less victims of their own greed and suffered just as much, without the livable infrastructure of education, housing, and healthy food, as the land.

Finally, “Anatomy of an Outrage” is a classic fulmination, chronicling an incident of domestic terrorism, which the author witnessed and fought bravely and which will one day rank in the annals of the vilest Internet assaults on a citizen’s right of free speech.

In 2016, Czerwiec sees out the window of her campus office at the University of North Dakota men in camouflage with guns, running amuck through the quad. She calls 911: It seems like there’s an active shooter or a military takeover of the school. Wrong! It’s an ROTC drill, which, we’re sorry, was neither preapproved nor advertised nor should pose any problem. No worries. Thanks for the alert.

Czerwiec is livid, only to be cast later as the problem: Her reaction, scathing emails and enraged phone calls, proves it. The result is that no one—not the president, not the English department, not the students, not the ROTC, and especially not the gun rights’ advocates—acknowledges her fear, let alone her fury at how dangerous these maneuvers are. Men and guns running amuck is no big deal, she’s told. Relax and shut-up, she’s told. Our student-soldiers are protecting your freedoms.

Czerwiec attacks the mean-spiritedness of the trolling nutjobs whose bullying and death threats she has to manage—to keep her job as well as her sanity. It’s a tour de force, so well done, in fact, because she uncovers the incident’s unifying idea: It’s a story “not about the failure of language” but “about how effective language is,” whether Czerwiec keeps defending herself with the letters and emails of a civil English-teacher practicing dissent or her Second-Amendment abusers who keep gaslighting her online, which, in the end, do nothing to assuage her feeling of being “Fucking. Terrorized.”

Fluid States is a prose mélange with a (good) maddening quality to it. The writing overheats its lyric and bricolage elements and backseats its essayistic and discursive range. (It’s more Charles Mingus than Miles Davis.) It’s maddening not in the sense of certifiable or institutional like Macbeth. But maddening like Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, a vitriolic performance, language less an expository tool, more a libertine value.

Trying to represent Czerwiec’s wildness is like trying to turn literary consciousness into an algorithm—the point of the work is its disobedience, its dissociation of the whole. It’s shaped chaos, fractal-like in posing what a quilted or ragged volume “should be.” Such is the work’s strength. But that strength feels precarious. There is a broken-glass beauty to the book’s variability that stands solidly alone. But how that beauty coheres as a unified testament or as an integrated narrative—for some the sine qua non of a book—the collection by its nature cannot answer.

The fluidity of these states stays with me, something windy and will-of-the-wisp about it all like a clothesline of circus outfits—the ringmaster’s tails, the showgirl’s bodysuit, the bearded lady’s muumuu, the strongman’s tights—resisting an amalgam, vexing the reviewer.

Fluid States by Heidi Czerwiec

Pleiades Press
$17.95 Paperback | Buy Now