No matter how many classes I take, no matter how many literary journals I read, poetry still makes me nervous. The distinction between brilliant and appalling sometimes seems to be made based on how much sleep you got the night before, and it’s just so scary to look at that line and realize that everyone else around you picked the opposite side.

It needn’t be that difficult, right?

All I ask of poetry is that it sends me off with strings of words that run themselves through my thoughts with the tenacity of a Top 40 hit.  I want to hear and see with the weird intensity that comes after leaving a movie theater.  I want to snuggle into images as I do my favorite memories.  This might be a childish way to read poetry, but so be it.  Because under those guidelines, Nicole Walker’s debut collection, This Noisy Egg, does all the right things.

Walker’s thirty-nine poems (nineteen of which have been previously published) meditate on conception of all kinds – birth, rebirth, beliefs. So much in these poems feels lost or unfulfilled for the many speakers though there are lighter moments as well.  “A Number of Things Are Scarily Lacking” – a list not unlike a Whitman poem or a Cole Porter song – counts on both the humorous (“9. A hotdog. No condiments.” “18. Telling your boyfriend that he looks like Alan Alda.”) as well as the crushing (“6. Your loud voice, no whispers, only walls acoustic.” “30. Turning. 30. No able-bodied Superman to spin the world backward—make up for lost time.”).

The physicality of being often emerges through the emotionality. “She doubled in size & split into you, your mother’s personal geometry. / One noisy seed caused a sea of regret & repainted walls,” says the narrator of “Bivalves.” And in “The Coroner Senses a Blackbird” – “My body told a story my mouth could / not hide.”

As might be expected, the collection wavers a bit in the middle. “What Is Wanted from the Suicides” is probably the weakest piece, not really adding anything to the thick stack of suicide poetry already in existence. I wouldn’t not recommend the book as a result of it, though. Especially by the time we get to my favorite lines in the collection, which are in the middle of “Where P is P & not P”: “You will / find the compass / which will / tell you what lines you must read.”  (Note: sometimes you stumble across exactly what you need to hear.)

While most of the poems fall into a standard page-or-so length, the penultimate poem, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species,” stretches for almost twelve full pages.  It is here where the changing rules of childhood parallel the just as random rules for which animals become pets while others are left to the wild.  It’s actually the narrator of “Canister and Turkey Vulture” that explains the themes most aptly: “everything that stands between the oh so obvious / and the almost can’t imagine.” (Almost can’t imagine – Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi in a tryst.)

The broken sections of the poem are marked with Greek symbols and headline-esque words. To that end, Walker’s note to the poem adds much to “Unlikely” as well as the collection as a whole: “But doesn’t it nearly make you cry when you realize the alphabet doesn’t have to begin with the letter A?”

Amy Whipple is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Readers can also find her at <http://www.amywhipple.com/>.

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential:  Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches.  He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine.  The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket.  So I stopped saying mean things about her.  It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority.  “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain.  “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.  But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens.  But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool.  He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit.  The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years.  Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business.  Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing.  In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie:  “The reaction is violent.  It hurts.  Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age.  As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.

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.

“Inherited Fears and Real Dangers: Being Visible as a Woman Writer”

All I needed was a decent copy of Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” I found several online, all excerpts, and when I combed the digital archives made available to me through the university where I teach, I found The New York Times Magazine backlog stopped just short of the issue in which it first appeared (December 5, 1976).

I wanted to use “Why I Write” as a companion piece to “On Keeping a Notebook.” My summer composition course began in less than two weeks, and I wanted to teach these two pieces. I wanted to start a conversation about freedom, about writing as a means to express perspective, memory, and, in the case of “Why I Write,” as a vehicle for uncovering thoughts and ideas.

I finally stumbled across the essay in an anthology called The Writer and Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-century American Writers. I ordered it, and it arrived several days later. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks until I was tired: of reading student papers; of staring at blank screens, waiting for my own words to appear; of trying to be wife and mother a hundred miles from my home, my heart; of questioning myself, wondering what the hell it was that made me think that, at middle age, I should be, in my mother’s terms, gallivanting, shrugging my responsibilities in favor of pursuing what I want, what I’m driven to do, not what’s good for everyone else. Woman, take up thy cross.

I picked up Writer and Her Work and began reading. Janet Sternburg collected these seventeen essays (nineteen, actually, as the second issue includes an essay-length preface by Julia Alvarez and a second introduction-in-miniature by Sternburg) because, she says, “we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.” I don’t know if, in the intervening thirty years since its initial publication, ten years since its reissue, that statement still holds true—we women writers today seem much less reluctant to commit our process to the page—but the value of these women writing of their craft and their writing lives in the decades that feminists’ heralded the cracking and crashing of glass ceilings everywhere, it’s comforting for this woman writer to know my own insecurities, my fears, my occasional sense of isolation is not a regression or a betrayal of my sisters who’ve come before me.

Sternburg set criteria for this essay collection: First, they must be written by American writers (her rationale: “to ‘go abroad’ would scatter the impact of our own experience.”). Second, they must represent “many different kinds of writers, especially those who have worked in more than one literary form.” Third, the backgrounds of these women must be diverse, while at the same time “suggest what women writers have in common.”

Sternburg solicited and received material from Mary Gordon, Nancy Milford, Margaret Walker, Susan Griffin, Ingrid Bengis, Toni Dade Bambara, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Burroway, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gail Godwin. Among them are novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, essayists, literary critics, memoirists, feminist and Womanist critics, documentarians, and authors of children’s books.

They are recipients of many awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Emmy and many others.

Julia Alvarez, in her preface to the updated edition, calls the book, “a liberating text for so many women writers who, like me, felt isolated and afraid.” Isolated and afraid? Check. I had to keep reading.

Anne Tyler addresses the Woman-Having-It-All Syndrome in her essay, a condition that began developing among independent-minded women sometime in the mid-sixties, morphed several times over the intervening decades, has been disputed, disproved, redefined, and, lately, appropriated in the most twisted sort of way by certain far-right conservatives [halting now my derisive tangent]. Tyler’s recounts the many intrusions into the writing life and brings a reader like me, one who “always did count on having a husband and children” back down to earth. She offers hope, says, “I’m surprised to find myself a writer but have fitted it in fairly well, I think.”

Not what you’re looking for? Then turn to Alice Walker, who begins her essay by answering the question about women artists and motherhood—you know, that one that implies we can be only one or the other, so what’s it going to be? She says: “Yes….[women artists] should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one….Because with one you can move….With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” (Is that what I am, as a mother of four? A sitting duck? Hmm.) This is not to say that Walker maintains for nearly twenty pages a discussion limited to this one narrow (narrow?) consideration. No, she expands, blossoms, even, from womanhood to black womanhood, to criticism and representation (nonrepresentation?) of black women artists in feminist thought. She covers a lot of ground, ending, just prior to her closing poem, with the words: “We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.” It’s worth the read to discover on one’s own what comes between.

Michele Murray’s[1] essay, entitled “Creating Oneself from Scratch,” resonated most strongly with me. It is a posthumous creation, comprised of selections from her diaries and covers a twenty-year period where she contemplates writing, motherhood, the agonies of motherhood in relation to her writing, and, the motivating force—cancer—that drove her on, in spite of the challenges of raising four children, to produce four books, two children’s books, an anthology of women’s literature (her bio mentions it being one of the first of its kind), and a book of poetry prior to her death. She yearned to live long enough to see the publication of the last, The Great Mother, her poetry collection. She died seven months too soon. It makes me wonder at we women artists, especially those of us for whom prominent identifying labels often shift, one day more mother than writer, another more writer than any incidental markers of DNA. What would we do, what would we produce, knowing our time is limited? How would we shift our time, how would we choose our priorities, what would we leave for our daughters, our sisters, what words of wisdom or folly would we commit to the page, not leave to chance and stardust?

My recommendation? If you’re a writer, pick up this book. If you’re a woman writer, pick it up and don’t put it down. Hold it close to you. Create.

Jody Lucas Kulakowski is current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about pain and spirituality, motherhood and rural womanhood, growing and dying. She lives between Pittsburgh and her home in Punxsutawney, where she much prefers peacocks to groundhogs.

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.