An elegantly chaotic collection of Space Age verses.
Christain makes meaning from the fragments of dystopia in her second poetry collection.
“Never model a love on the extinction of a species,” cautions one speaker at the end of a poem late in this collection, which finds its vernacular in a world collapsing in a cloud of technology, religion, pop culture, and astrophysics. The poems discover metaphors for love in the imagery of SF, as in the inaugural piece, “Heaven Is a Soundstage Meant To Make Drugged Soldiers More Fearless”: “That’s mine, I scream as a red lever appears under my armpit, and she knows to pull it. / I’d like to think that means my cloned body on another planet actually hooked up with her.” Alienation and queer longing seek articulation in wide-ranging references to cartoons, conspiracy theories, hip-hop, biblical eschatology, cinema, and the occult. The isolation of outer space (and art about this emptiness) reappears again and again, as when Christain invokes the frozen body of an Earth-destroying comet: “Someone could share my same center of mass now without pretensions, but I’m misting out chemicals to hide myself so I won’t have to kill anyone.” Elsewhere, the poet contemplates the iconoclasm of new technology with gleeful disdain: “Though I destroyed the Buddhist ruins, / the 3D light projection replacement / was going to create many jobs, but no one else saw it that way.” Like the points of light that revivify a dead performer in this verse, Christain’s poems find organic life in the clips and blips of the digital present.
Throughout this book, the poet’s works have an unpredictable energy, marrying hyperspecific language with surprising leaps in image and tone. There are misheard lyrics, erasures made from news stories, extensive footnotes, and well-deployed (and often obscure) epigraphs. She’s frequently funny, but the phantasmagoria works better when the underlying emotions are sincere, as here, where the vacuum of space is the void between human bodies: “She said our sun entered into it, its plasma crossing with Saturn’s plasma….The electric discharge became a ladder to Earth, and this, she had to press into me, has everything to do with us now, and how no baby is ever a mistake.” At another point, the now-ancient technology of an instant messenger bridges the same void: “When I was in the tenth grade, / an older woman in a chat room asked, / What do you want to do? / and I wrote Just hold you.” Other standouts in this collection include “Retrieval Structure” (“If you were trying not to stumble into anything too sharp…how did you?”), “Coral Castle: The Tent of Meaning,” “Music Used Against the Enemy,” and “I Need You To Make Me My Own Dinosaur, But It Must Have Feathers,” which yields the quote about extinction noted above. (Needless to say, Christain clearly enjoys wordy titles.) Although these works do not give up their meanings easily, they are messy and intricate in a way that draws the reader deep inside.
An elegantly chaotic collection of Space Age verses.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73582-364-5
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Headmistress Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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