It is likely that questions concerning Rusty Sabich’s fate have been knocking around in the minds of Presumed Innocent fans for the past 22 years…questions which can now be answered with Turow’s definitive sequel, Innocent.

Turow is the king of the Legal Thriller Genre, which is to say, he defined it, and set the bar high. His near-abnormal ability to focus is apparent, especially in Innocent, in the seamless reintroducing of his realistic characters and a refreshingly complex plot, which switches between perspectives and points in time.

In 1987, with the release of Presumed Innocent, readers met a slew of absorbing characters and identified with their individual struggles. In 2010, returning to Turow’s beloved Kindle County, Illinois, readers find former lawyer, Sabich, a Chief Appellate Judge, turning 60. His sensitive and brilliant son Nat, has recently graduated from law school, following in his father’s footsteps, and Sabich has managed to somehow maintain his marriage of 36 years to bipolar Barbara.

“Barbara and I have resumed our normal mode,” Sabich says. “There is no sound, no TV, no dishwasher rumbling. The silence is the absence of any connection. She’s in her world, I’m in mine. Not even the radio waves that come out of deep space could be detected. Yet this is what I chose and more often still believe I want.”

Then one morning, Sabich wakes up next to a dead wife and chaos ensues. He waits 24 hours before reporting her death, casting a shadow of a doubt on his character. Was this murder? Suicide? An accident? The public demands an answer. The cards are not stacked in Sabich’s favor when it is revealed that a 24 hour window would have allowed incriminating chemicals and evidence to disappear from Barbara’s bloodstream.

Tommy Molto, a former acting prosecuting attorney and Sabich’s nemesis, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades ago, resurfaces alongside cocky and shifty, Chief Deputy Jim Brand; both are determined to go after Sabich once again. His candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election and his most recent affair with his magnetic law clerk, Anna Vostic, 26 years his junior, combine to shift his life once again toward downfall. On top of this, his former attorney Sandy Stern, who saved his life the first time around, is now in poor health and the question remains, whether he, or anyone, can save Sabich from himself a second time.

Turow will always stand out because of the seriousness with which he approaches his work and the weight he gives his characters. It is comforting and discomforting to revisit Sabich, his family, and his cohorts. Readers see evidence of their maturity, yet a new sadness blooms, revealing sharp insights about relationships.

“It’s prosaic most often, but so is much of life at its best—with the family around the table, with buddies at a bar,” Sabich says.

Most of Turow’s old characters long for the unattainable and mourn their past choices. New characters, dynamic Anna and hilarious Judge Yee among others, provide some relief from the dark turmoil that accompanies scrambling with unchangeable mistakes and flaws. Sabich concludes, “The Declaration of Independence said we have a right to pursue happiness—but not to find it.” Innocent’s airtight plot will have readers racing toward the end, while battling an impulse to slow down and appreciate Turow’s craft at its best.

Erin Lewenauer is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also reviewed Manhood for Amateurs and Elephants in Our Bedroom for Hot Metal Bridge.

John Berryman made the famous observation “Life, friends, is boring” and many poets today seem to agree. A great deal of modern work seems to be concerned with mining through layers of the mundane to access some nugget of meaning. We often conflate the everyday and the possible.

Birdwatching in Wartime suggests that the problem may be geographical. Most of us simply don’t live where it’s dangerous. We no longer feel overwhelmed by physicality— hunger, pain, and wild beauty. Jeffrey Thomson brings us back to this world.

Thomson’s poems wind through the Amazon, detailing the fantastical creatures that seem to emerge from every direction. The poems are at times overwhelming, but leave me with a terror and fascination unmatched in any other poetry I’ve read. Much of the effect comes from Thomson’s lyrical dexterity:

…a pity not to have seen

the spattered sun

scribbled down to nothing more than matchlight on army ants

engraving leaf litter,

the cuneiform of tapir prints in the mud of that flat-banked stream,

not to have seen

the wattled jacana scrawl across water lilies with her vast, forked feet

a pity

never to have taken piranha from the river and watched them slap

their gibberish

across the bottom of the boat.

But unlike many lyrical poets, I get the sense that Thomson’s language is lagging behind the reality of the experiences, not dominating them. I picture him running through the jungle, breathlessly jotting down what is happening around him without enough time to focus on any particular wonder.

There is an almost inconceivable breadth and strangeness in Thomson’s landscapes. In “Landscape with Flooded Forest,” Thomson shows us a world where “the horizon rises up around the shoulders of trees/ and fish fly through branches in flocks of scale…a wire-tailed manakin flames/ through the middle-story treetops and pink dolphins/ slalom through the sunken trunks.” The impossibility of these images and their apparent reality challenge the imagination. But there is a darker side to these worlds; a constant danger:

when those wasps

stapled my back and sides and face

…

…when the splotches flushed across my back

my neck, my sweat-licked face,

when the diaspora of venom wrote a question across my back

in hot letters that left me

cold and shaking

The less personal but no less fierce violence of the “Tarantulas that hunt fish” or “piranha, red-bellied as rage…that dissembled a swimming sloth” also stalks through the poems. Thomson’s cocktail of fear and wonder is potent. It keeps the poems engaging even when the density of creatures and events threatens to overwhelm them.

Though Thomson’s Amazon poems are the vanguard of Birdwatching in Wartime, they are not the totality of the army he has deployed. He also experiments with two long multi-part poems.  The first, the “Celestial Emporeum of Benevolent Knowledge,” plays with the idea of cataloguing experience into a handful of categories. Thomson’s fresh use of language is an asset here and the poem sparkles with clever metaphorical gems. Though it’s length and wit are impressive, the poem seems to buckle under the freedom afforded by its scope. The second long poem, “Blind Desire,” is largely successful, with a coherent series of three-tercet sections interlocking through a sequence of overlapping images.

Other directions abound in Birdwatching, including commentary on religion, imperialism, and desire, a poem entwined in the philosophy and desperation of Jack Gilbert, and a poem comprised solely of footnotes. But it is really the Amazon poems and their “Landscape” form, which re-appears throughout, that give this book its thrust. “Beauty is a theatre of risk” writes Thomson, and in terms of form and content, this book goes all in.

Dmitry Berenson is pursuing a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is an avid reader and writer of poetry.

It is 1947, and the English countryside is still reeling from WWII. Doctor Faraday has been summoned to Hundreds Hall, the home of the Ayres family, to look in on a servant girl who claims that she is too ill to work. Faraday determines that the girl is merely homesick but, before he leaves, she confides that she keeps hearing strange noises. She believes that the house is haunted.

We are in familiar territory from the moment we enter Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: there is a rational man of science,  a repressed and restless heroine, her scarred and reclusive brother, her alluring mother, even a long-dead child who may be the “little stranger” of the title. There are also mysterious fires, madness, and things that go bump in the night. And of course, there is a house. Still grand despite patches of dry rot and peeling wallpaper, still impressive despite the encroachments of Council estates and nouveau riche neighbors, Hundreds Hall may be the central character in Waters’ novel (as in any good haunted house story). However, it is the unfamiliar spin that Waters puts on these familiar material that elevates her tale above a good rainy day read.

Best-known for bringing queer sensibility to Victorian generic conventions, Waters here turns a critical eye on the type of sedate country-house ghost story embraced by Henry James and Edith Wharton. But in this case, Waters doesn’t focus on sexuality (perhaps because sexuality is so often the subtext of gothic horror; the house becomes a symbol of buried impulses). Instead, she takes a good look at the house itself as an object of desire, locating the discontents of gothic horror in socioeconomic resentment rather than psychosexual neuroses.

Waters’ (very unreliable) narrator, Doctor Faraday, is keenly aware of himself as an expression of class aspiration. The son of working-class parents, he frets that his position as the village doctor’s partner doesn’t warrant the sacrifices his parents made for him. Faraday also worries about the effect that the introduction of the National Health Service will have on his income and ambitions. He is thus both flattered and relieved when the Ayres family begins to depend on him – first for medical advice, later to provide a rational explanation for a spate of bizarre sights and sounds. The characters’ relationship to the house and its haunting are informed by class. Both Caroline Ayres and her brother Roderick fear that they have given up productive lives in the larger world in exchange for preserving the family estate. Unsurprisingly, they are readier than Faraday to accept the possibility that the house has taken on a malevolent life of its own. (In one memorable scene, household objects seems to attack the family in a ghoulish parody of commodity fetishism.) But Faraday also may be haunted by the house. As a child, he was so taken with the place on his sole visit that he chipped off a piece of ornamental border as a souvenir. And, in that single neat image, Waters blurs the line between acquisition and destruction, forcing us to wonder if Faraday’s concern with the Ayres family is entirely benevolent.

Waters’ adherence to gothic narrative conventions and style has its drawbacks. Her style here is leisurely and circumspect (which may come as a surprise to readers who know her playful and robust prose from her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet) and a good hundred pages pass before the muted shocks of footsteps in empty corridors give way to something more visceral. Further, Faraday can be a frustrating presence – at one crucial moment, he literally can’t see what’s right in front of him, and the disconnect between his actions and his intentions becomes increasingly painful. Still, if you’re interested in seeing how old houses can be inhabited by new spirits, The Little Stranger offers a lingering chill sharpened by social critique.

Kathleen Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

Following the lives of floating souls, Michael Czyzniejewski’s debut short story collection could be a disenchanted autobiography of our generation.  The stories, all written in first person, possess a collective strength of voice and echo the authority of nonfiction.  They throw a spotlight on the little problems that are sometimes, let’s face it, the big problems.

To the extent that Elephants in Our Bedroom conforms to a genre of fiction, it lies at the midpoint between realism and fabulism.  This is to say that while Czyzniejewski’s stories contain elements of the supernatural and fantastic (“Pleurisy” begins, “About eight years into our marriage, the dictionary started lying to my wife”), they also smack of good Midwestern sense.  All of the multilayered characters appear simultaneously perturbed and amused by life’s uncertainties and its refusal to grant guarantee.  In “Wind” the narrator’s infant son falls off the couch, which triggers a memory of his own father’s suicide and the question of what the future holds.  “Streetfishing” hilariously details a day in the life of two friends who sit on their street, get drunk, and fish for a laundry basket.  In “Valentine” a husband becomes suspicious of his wife’s yearly visit to the gynecologist on Valentine’s Day.  And in “Green” the narrator’s husband invites all of her old lovers to stay with them for two weeks.

Czyzniejewski’s prose is direct and immediate (some stories border on flash fiction), yet it retains energy and never bores.  There are moments of brilliance in the characters’ commentary on how the world is arranged (“I’m not sure why she fosters my once-a-week binging, but again, that’s the way we deal with each other”), and any writer could learn from and admire Elephants’ airtight plots.

But what is most striking about Czyzniejewski is that he does not attempt to explain the unexplainable.  He does not apologize for keeping readers at a safe distance or for the pleasure his characters take in keeping secrets.  Not even for the fact that once the well-crafted humor dissipates, readers are left without anything to hold onto.  In other words, his stories function like the best of fiction: they are true to life.  While Elephants in Our Bedroom can be intermittently depressing, the optimism inherent in truth-telling prevails.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  She reviewed Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs for Hot Metal Bridge in 2009.

Monkeys by Susan Minot
(Dutton, 1986)
Rosemary McMillen

I hadn’t heard of Susan Minot’s book Monkeys until recently, when it was recommended to me by one of my professors. Originally published in 1986, the book was reprinted in August 2000 by Vintage Contemporaries, a division of Random House. It ended up being one of those books I spent all day reading from cover to cover, and I’ve been passing on the recommendation since.

Although the nine short stories that make up Monkeys follow the same characters over the course of thirteen years, the book cannot be called a novel. Many pivotal events happen off-stage, and it is left to the reader to infer what has happened between stories: break-ups, a death, a marriage. What binds the stories together are the Vincent family—Mum, Dad, and their seven children—and their relationships to each other. Minot’s prose is sparse and economic, but she portrays these characters with a warmth that allows you access to their lives.

The reader is introduced to the Vincents through the eyes of nine-year-old Sophie, who narrates the  first story, “Hiding.” Because of her youth, Sophie notices many things innocently, without understanding their significance. Thus unknowingly, she introduces the reader to the problems that will haunt the Vincent family throughout course of the book: Dad’s alcoholism, his distance from the family, Mum’s hunger for his affection. Sophie describes Dad’s withdrawal while Mum dances for her children:

She bangs the floor with her sneakers, pumping and kicking, thudding her heels in smacks, not like clicking at all, swinging her arms out in front of her like she’s wading through the jungle. She speeds up, staring straight at Dad who’s reading his book, making us laugh even harder. He’s always like that.

Because she doesn’t understand the implications of what she sees, and so does not dwell on them, Sophie’s observations become an example of what the jacket blurb calls Minot’s “sparely eloquent” writing.

While it is impossible to develop the personalities of all seven children in the space of 150 pages, as a whole the Vincent family is believable and knowable from story to story. Mum especially comes alive with her zest for life. On the way home from fancy parties, she goes swimming in the ocean in her cocktail dress; she holds protests against the Vietnam War. Her joy in life is passed on to her children, expressed in their enthusiastic welcome of new births in the family. She surrounds her children with affection to make up for their aloof father; but her own unsatisfied need for love cripples her. The reader is never given direct access to her thoughts, but sees her through the eyes of her children, who perceive more of her pain as they grow older.

Although most of the stories were published individually before the release of Monkeys in 1986, the book does come together into something more than a collection of  individual works. Each story draws subtle details from others that would otherwise lay dormant—a box of postcards in one story from a lover in another; a seemingly irrelevant ghost story that becomes foreshadowing.

And despite the gaps between them, the stories trace an arc that would be incomplete were any of them missing. By the final story, “Thorofare,” the emotional journey is brought not so much to a resolution as to a revelation of the tragic effects that Dad’s distance and alcoholism have on each member of the family. The pain here, as in all the stories, is tempered with graceful understatement, a fitting conclusion to this soft-spoken, heart-rending book.

Rosemary McMillen is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.

David Foster Wallace called John D’Agata “one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.” According to Andre Codrescu, “Here is an essayist who fears nothing.”  These comments reference D’Agata the essayist (who established his own hybrid voice in Halls of Fame) and not D’Agata the anthologist, but both “fearless” and “emergent” are equally suited to a description of D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay and his entire, massive, three-volume mosaic redefinition the essay. The trilogy’s first volume, The Next American Essay, anthologizes one essay per year from 1975 (the year of the anthologist’s birth) through 2003 (the year of the book’s publication). The Lost Origins of the Essay, though the chronologically first of the triptych, has just now arrived, and it endeavors to cover the formative moments of essaying that precede 1975. (The trilogy’s final volume, The Foundations of the American Essay, is still forthcoming.)

Of course D’Agata’s selections do not actually form an inclusive picture of every major essayistic moment in global literary history, and despite the book’s 600-plus-page heft, you still get the feeling that D’Agata may just be getting started. That said, the essays he’s selected do compose a brilliant constellation. He moves from the far shores of history in Sumer and Babylonia to the center of the classical cosmopoleis of Plutarch and Seneca and then east to the proto-essayists of China and Japan. Later writers include Montaigne and Bacon, Basho and Blake, and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. And from the twentieth century, D’Agata plucks Artaud, Pessoa, Woolf, and Celan, but also Ana Hatherly, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Avant-garde and performative essays show up from Clarice Lispector, Kamau Braithwaite, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett. And D’Agata offers his own introductory words to each entry—the sum total of which compose a work that is as much an essay as any of the essays he’s introduced.

In his commentary on a surreal and haunting dialog written in South Africa by Azwinaki Tshipala in 315 C.E., D’Agata writes:  “Ask a friend: what is an essay? An essay, I suspect, is something to which your friend might turn to watch a problem being solved, a proclamation made, the world recorded honestly. After all, no matter how playful Seneca, Plutarch, or Theophrastus make their essays, let’s not kid ourselves about them: their essays are making arguments.” And there it is, I thought on my first reading. A clean definition of all of these strange angels cutting across the page: they’ve each their own voice and form, but in the end they all are rhetorical. They are making arguments.

But on a second read, I paid more attention to the rest of D’Agata’s treatment of the seventeen-hundred-year-old essay: “We might read these arguments through the lens of emotion, or experience, or a boldly clever adventure into the limits of human logic, but once we emerge from reading them aren’t we nevertheless changed? Haven’t we been moved? Doesn’t good art resist the intelligence only almost successfully? Or: is every essay an intelligence that inaugurates its own form?” It’s a subtle enough distinction that I breezed past it at first, but it constitutes the difference between changing readers’ minds and changing their way of thinking. In an essay about essays, D’Agata’s formula accounts for the difference between changing someone’s opinion on what constitutes an essay and changing their way of reading nonfiction.

Throughout this anthology, D’Agata throws everything in his arsenal against the misperception of nonfiction as “a genre that is merely a dispensary of data”—a “genre of negation.”  In his introduction to Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Interior,” for instance, D’Agata offers an etymology of memoir that reaches past the Latin memoria to “the ancient Greek mérmeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’”

And this brings me to the best way I’ve found to express what D’Agata’s constellation is itself essaying: a thing that is both a form and an action, an etymology of the art of the essay.

About a Mountain, another of John D’Agata’s reconsiderations of the nonfiction genre, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in February.

Joshua Schriftman teaches and writes for a living but also has experience in marketing, travel, retail, sushi, and construction. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He has essays of his own appearing in the spring issues of Ninth Letter and The Pinch.

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black.

Like Nella Larsen’s biracial heroine Helga Crane in Quicksand, Rachel is a child of multiple worlds—White, Black, American, foreign.  At once an insider and an outsider, she strives to reconcile parts of her character that belong to rigidly separate lives.  She wonders what it means when friends tell her she “talks white” and worries that “the Danish in me [will] be something time makes me leave behind.”  She ponders how identity is tied to what others see and refuse to see, to the events that confront her unprepared in the present and those that remain only in her memory.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are the voices of other family members and witnesses to the accident, with their own versions of reality. Readers are reminded of how, like ripples in water, a tragedy affects an entire community. But the story remains Rachel’s—it is through her innocent-yet-haunting blue eyes, private ponderings contained in what she calls her “blue bottle,” and the wide stretch of blue sky she sees above that we experience the violence of the everyday, the loss of the past, and the hope for a future in which our vision of race and family and difference is inclusive and expansive.

Though Durrow compellingly shifts Rachel’s perspective to reflect her always-inexact, ever-changing insider-outsider position, at times she sacrifices the cohesiveness of the chronology.  Rachel’s age is too often uncertain, her voice more innocent than her experience would suggest.  Yet beneath the halting words lies a poetry that poignantly captures the pain and loss of death and separation from family. The reader can see the taunting looks of Rachel’s classmates, hear the Danish accent she suppresses, feel the widening circles of heat within her as she experiences her first kiss.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction that addresses issues of social justice, is a book that enlivens American identities of the past and the present. In these pages are echoes of our ancestors, Langston Hughes speaking to Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen speaking to Alice Walker, and this new voice—Durrow’s—speaking to us.

Heidi Durrow will give a reading and lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on April 13, 2010.

Liberty Hultberg is a Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose writing deals with multiracial identity.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.

One time you hit a guy so hard

even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for days

after that.

Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd.  Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter.  These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.

These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives.  The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.

A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope.  This time will be better:

It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you.  It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands.  She’ll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her.  O it will be beautiful.

Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time.  Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going.  Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches.  Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive.  There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.

Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie.  Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.

Readers who remember the final scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 entry into speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction, may not be surprised to find that she has written a sequel. The Year of the Flood (whose narrative is staged simultaneously with Oryx and Crake’s) suggests an alternative to Crake’s diabolical destroy-the-world-to-make-it-new vision. Here, an anarchic cult called God’s Gardeners has reinterpreted the Bible to support a version of eco-Christianity, erected a hierarchic monastic order to ensure the success of its eschatological project, and reclaimed various ruined urban spaces so heavily under the heel of the all-powerful Corporation. The Year of the Flood, for the most part, attempts to offer a less problematic utopia than that imagined by Crake in the first novel, even if achieving it still requires the deaths of 99% of the world’s population in what God’s Gardeners call the “Waterless Flood.”

Though assuredly a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and interesting read, The Year of the Flood, like the soon-to-be overexposed film 2012, is yet another contribution to the glut of what I call “eco-jeremiads.” Atwood’s consideration of the apocalypse only exacerbates the manipulative and weighty rhetoric of the genre. While Oryx and Crake raised some serious metaphysical and ontological questions through its use of eschatological catastrophe, it is unclear what the new novel is attempting to accomplish beyond its gesture toward the generalized anxiety that “we should be more environmentally conscious.” In the same way that nuclear disaster narratives often merely point out the banally obvious—it would be really bad—The Year of the Flood relies upon the apocalyptic thrust of disaster primarily to highlight the author’s serious (if unambiguous) environmental engagement. It appears that Atwood truly intends much of this novel as a model for a lifestyle that moves past the “green” and “eco-friendly” into a wholly-revamped mode of operating in the world more naturally and responsibly. There are hymns interspersed throughout the book (and set to music on the website) that are explicitly intended for readers’ “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” Major figures in history of ecological activism form a religious canon for the Gardeners: St. Rachel Carson, St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. Julian of Norwich. But Atwood isn’t really exploring much territory beyond that of other eco-utopian or eco-apocalyptic novels (most notably the bundle of work from Kim Stanley Robinson).

Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, asks in his final speech, “Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a species?” If the major goal of this novel is to answer “No, we don’t, but we should all work individually toward a place where we would deserve that love,” then it is quite successful. But everything from Carson’s Silent Spring to Shyamalan’s The Happening has effectively already covered the same ground. For Atwood, the possibility of a collective, emergent movement capable of effecting change gets derailed in favor of a thrilling yet normative narrative with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the environment. Basically, The Year of the Flood comes off as being far more programmatic than aesthetic, and it is difficult to discern much in that program beyond the cliché: “think locally, act globally.”

(That said, if the endings of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are any indication, Atwood may be inclined to contribute one more post-apocalyptic novel to this universe. A third volume might provide an interesting and necessary engagement with our penal system and culture of ubiquitous surveillance. But we shall see.)

Bradley J. Fest, a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse, recently reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for Hot Metal Bridge.

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.