Book reviews archive

Whale Eyes

Young documentary filmmaker James Robinson was born with strabismus—misaligned eyes. Although his vision is twenty-twenty, his brain doesn’t fuse the images it receives from each eye. As a result, as he writes, “Since each eye sees a slightly different view, every time my brain switches between eyes, it looks like my entire world jumps.” Robinson’s Whale Eyes is an exceptionally well-done memoir about how he perceives and navigates the world, and the difficult stares he often receives.

Robinson immediately draws readers in by showing them how he sees: He instructs them to try exercises that require twisting the book, holding it upside down, reading backwards and flipping pages to let them experience afterimages. Whale Eyes shares its title with an earlier compelling, innovative short film about the same subject that Robinson created for the New York Times opinion. He explains the catchy, apt title: “We love looking at whales. And yet none of us have ever questioned the fact that we can look into only one of their eyes at a time. It felt as if the whales were afforded the acceptance that I was seeking.”

When Robinson was in school, reading seemed particularly impossible—like “an obstacle course”—and he vividly describes his classroom frustration and survival strategies. Meanwhile, as his eyes grew further apart, he felt increasingly stared at: “Sometimes the stares feel like a thousand little pokes. Like acupuncture coming from all directions.” Luckily, Robinson had extraordinary family support and encouragement, especially from his mother, who put her career on hold to help Robinson and his brother, who has dyslexia.

Robinson’s prose is conversational and seemingly light, yet it will leave readers with plenty of substance to ponder. The layout is often fun and always pleasing to the eye—plenty of white space and an easy-to-read font, as one might expect. Colorful illustrations from Brian Rea add to the book’s appeal and readability. Younger readers will be particularly riveted by Robinson’s school struggles, while teens and adults will be inspired by chapters explaining the author’s increasing fascination with documentary filmmaking in high school and college, as well as his advice for creating compelling stories in both film and print. Particularly intriguing are Robinson’s descriptions of his creative decisions when making videos covering subjects such as a man who lacks facial recognition abilities, or a journalist with a severe stutter. Whale Eyes is a superb memoir that champions empathy and understanding on every level.

James Robinson’s Whale Eyes is a superb middle grade memoir that champions empathy and understanding on every level.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Twist

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

by Sarah McCraw Crow

Colum McCann ranges widely in his fiction, from multitimeline historical novels like TransAtlantic to the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, which followed New York City characters through one day in 1974. With Twist, McCann focuses on the present day and a timely issue: the surprising fragility of the internet, whose traffic is carried in fiber-optic cables across ocean floors, and the unseen labor it takes to keep us all connected.

Despite the contemporary time frame, Twist opens with an almost 19th-century feel as it sets up a mystery. On page one, narrator Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and would-be playwright, tells the reader: “I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days.” Instead, he says, he’s going to tell Conway’s story, which others have gotten wrong.

That story begins with Anthony’s first meeting with the enigmatic Conway, who goes by his last name. A shipboard engineer and fellow Irishman, Conway heads a crew that repairs internet cables, often at the bottom of the ocean—a near-impossible job. Anthony has an assignment to write about the cables, and he’s in Cape Town, South Africa, to interview Conway. Although Conway invites Anthony home for dinner, where Anthony meets Conway’s partner, a charismatic actress named Zanele, and then brings Anthony on an outing to observe a group of freedivers, he gives little away.

After a storm in the Congo snaps a cable, cutting off internet access for much of Africa, Anthony joins Conway aboard as the ship chugs north along the coast to find and repair the breaks. The alcoholic Anthony, not drinking for the first time in years, begins to reckon with his own failings as he tries to get to the heart of Conway’s story, and that of Zanele.

As the title suggests, the novel features a plot twist that feels both surprising and inevitable. But in its setting, its narrative of one man’s search to understand another man’s obsession, and its division into three parts, the book is an homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that 1899 novella (which is referenced in Twist, along with the Francis Ford Coppola movie it inspired, Apocalypse Now), Twist comments on the 21st-century version of predatory colonialism: the environmental degradation that falls on the world’s poorest, and the simultaneous connection and disconnection that the internet has created. This is a lot for one novel to carry, but McCann does it seamlessly, and in the bargain creates memorable characters in both Anthony and Conway, making Conway Gatsby-like, noble in his doomed pursuit.

Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Twist comments on predatory colonialism in a story of an enigmatic engineer tasked with repairing the underwater fiber-optic cables that carry our internet.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

Tilt

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

In Portland, Oregon, Annie decides to go to Ikea to buy a crib for her soon-to-be-born child—she’s waited as long as she can. But soon after she arrives in the store, there is an earthquake: the big one, long predicted on the West Coast’s Cascadia Subduction Zone fault line. Emma Pattee’s debut novel, Tilt is the intense, taut story of Annie’s day, as she navigates each step through and after the natural disaster.

When the shaking stops and the dust settles, the only choice available is to walk, so Annie pulls herself from the collapsed aisles and sets off down the roads and bridges of the city, hoping to meet her husband, Dom, at the cafe where he works. Pattee creates a keen sense of environment, built and natural, as Annie takes in the scale of the destruction and the vast uncertainty of what could come next.

Annie’s narrative voice is striking, moving between her present moment and reflections on the past, all addressed to her unborn baby, whom she calls Bean. She tells Bean about her life in fragments and what-ifs—because what does a disaster do if not clarify what really matters? Readers will move at a rapid pace through the short chapters, urgently needing to know what will happen to Annie and Bean as they continue on their journey.

Pattee brings her expertise as a climate journalist to this remarkable debut, examining how we question our lives when the earth takes control. Ultimately, Tilt is fascinating, haunting and surprising at every turn.

Emma Pattee brings her expertise as a climate journalist to this fascinating, haunting debut about a pregnant woman’s journey across earthquake-ravaged Portland.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Theft

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Theft is Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel and his first since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set mainly in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the story comes into focus slowly. Gurnah is an unhurried storyteller, interested in examining the quiet but complicated lives of ordinary people. His language is rarely flashy, and yet there is a submerged sense of urgency in Theft that bursts to the surface in its final section.

Theft centers on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule. Karim’s mother quickly divorces the much older husband she has been forced to marry, leaving Karim to be raised by his grandparents and, later, his older half brother. Karim longs for the father he does not know, but he is bright and charming, and soon on a path that will eventually lead to high government office.

While in school, Karim meets Fauzia, an education student whose parents worry that she is unmarriageable because of a childhood bout of “falling sickness.” But Fauzia is in the first blush of liberation and is vibrantly alive. The awkward, good-humored courtship between Fauzia and Karim is beautifully rendered, an emotional high point of the novel.

Like Karim, Badar also longs to know his father. As a child he learns the family raising him are distant, impoverished relatives who see him as a toxic obligation. At 13, he is taken to serve in a household whose elderly patriarch despises him for unknown reasons. The lady of the house turns out to be Karim’s mother, and when Badar is unjustly accused of theft, Karim takes Badar home to live in his household and helps find him work in a tourist hotel.

In the final section of the book, the close relationships among its characters fall apart. It’s not incidental that this coincides with the arrival of British nonprofit aid organizations and tourists, who’ve come to “help” the country and “experience” its people. As an empathic reader begins to wonder who are the real thieves, Theft reveals itself to be a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies.

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel, Theft, is a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies, centering on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The Paris Express

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

“Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.” That’s how Emma Donoghue describes a real-life railway disaster in her thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel, The Paris Express. Inspired by an iconic 1895 photo of a train engine dangling out of Paris’s Montparnasse Station, the multifaceted author (Room, The Wonder), artfully blends fact with her astute imagination to create a story representing a broad slice of social concerns, including innovation and technology, as well as art. As the train hurtles toward its fate, Donoghue examines the transportation mode as a metaphor—the train is “a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.”

The action of the novel begins with an 8:30 a.m. stop in Granville and continues through the Paris crash that afternoon at 4:01. Chapters are organized like a train schedule, marking various station arrivals, departures and delays, while passengers arrive and occasionally move from carriage to carriage, each carriage “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.”

And oh, what a dinner party this is! People of all ages, classes, races and nationalities interact, as Donoghue introduces characters based on passengers who were actually aboard that 1895 train, as well as other real-life personalities whom she “invites” aboard, and a few characters entirely of her invention. Amid the drama, Donoghue has plenty of fun, for instance, having her characters refer to the recently erected Eiffel Tower as “that monstrosity,” or writing that “Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his first Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.”

Tension builds from the start of the journey, when a radical young woman nicknamed Mado raises the suspicions of Russian emigree and social worker Elise Blonska. Donoghue explains the technology and handling of the locomotive in riveting scenes, bringing the crew to life amid descriptions of corporate greed. Only a writer as talented as Donoghue could have readers so immersed in fin de siecle Paris while also, perhaps, musing about the motivations and movements involved in the contemporary assassination of which Luigi Mangione has been accused.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, as Donoghue wonderfully illuminates the fleeting qualities of both life and art. As Henry Tanner notes: “That’s the paradox of trains. . . . They show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”

Read our interview with Emma Donoghue about The Paris Express.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue’s thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel inspired by a real-life railway disaster.

Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

The Martian Contingency

Review by Noah Fram

by Noah Fram

Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest exquisitely crafted and meticulously researched Lady Astronaut novel, The Martian Contingency, continues her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series set in an alternate 20th century. It’s 1970, and Drs. Elma and Nathaniel York are among the second wave of spacefarers building a permanent home for humankind on Mars. Years earlier, a meteor strike obliterated Washington, D.C. and set off an extinction-level series of climate catastrophes. Like other writers documenting humanity’s often hubristic, Ozymandian response to such existential threats, Kowal contends with whether the disparate and all too dissonant components of Earthbound society will unite to survive. But in so doing, she probes more intimate questions: What would it be like to live your life on that precipice? And how would a society built in one reality adjust to a wholly unrecognizable one?

In The Martian Contingency, Kowal emphasizes this sense of alienation through the calendar. Our celebrations and rituals are so firmly tied to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth and the moon that it is surprisingly difficult to translate them offworld. How will the Jewish Elma and Nathaniel mark Rosh Hashanah on a planet with a year of a different length, two moons and no tidal cycles? When is Christmas, Diwali or Eid al-Fitr? What do those holidays mean, anyway? Watching the piecemeal emergence of a unique spacefaring culture is both fascinating and inspiring.

The moments when the old rules fail to translate drive Kowal’s plot, which revolves around Elma’s investigation into a cover-up of a horrible event during the first wave of Martian exploration. The Martian Contingency is no Roddenberry-esque utopia; rather, it is riddled with the brutal legacies of our worst demons. From the entrenched racism of apartheid-era South Africa or politicization of pregnancy and childbirth to the casual postwar sexism of phrases like “keep the home fires burning” or the connotations of referring to the Mars base as a colony or settlement, Kowal’s Martian pioneers cannot escape the myriad traumas we humans have inflicted on each other over the years. The result is a deeply personal novel about whether the human race will survive and, if it does, what it will be.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s fascinating, inspiring The Martian Contingency observes the emergence of a unique spacefaring culture.

Children's & YA, YA, YA Fiction

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

The House No One Sees

Review by Mariel Fechik

by Mariel Fechik

Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran from the house and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.

The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-year-old girl trying to both outrun and unravel the memories of a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother’s drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling the sense of normalcy that the doll never could—until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.

In the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado, whose acclaimed memoir, In the Dream House, details an abusive relationship through surrealist vignettes, Adina King’s debut novel The House No One Sees depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Machado’s memoir quotes the artist Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”

Written in a hybrid form of verse and prose, Penny’s story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King’s metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.

The House No One Sees offers a guiding light to readers through its depiction of a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

The Expert of Subtle Revisions

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

How does one review a book when discussing even the basics of the plot might spoil it? Such is the dilemma with Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s fascinating The Expert of Subtle Revisions. The novel reminded me of 1950s Russian puzzle book The Moscow Puzzles, not just because it’s about a group of mathematicians/philosophers/Wikipedia contributors, but because the solution to its main question is so devilishly clever.

The book opens in 2016, on the birthday of a strange woman named Hase (German for “Rabbit”). Her equally strange father lives on a rickety boat and is missing. Hase grows more and more anxious as the day goes on and he doesn’t show up; it’s not like this meticulous man to forget her birthday.

Then, in its fourth chapter, the novel jumps backward to 1933 Austria, a most perilous time and place. You’ll wonder what this era has to do with Hase, an impoverished Wikipedia contributor who has neither birth certificate, Social Security number nor any of those other documents that lets the government know you exist. The answer is everything.

Chapter 4 is narrated by a young man named Anton who has been named a Privatdozent, or an unpaid lecturer, at a university in Vienna. His part of the tale is fraught with nasty rivalries, secret loves, weird cults, blackmail, seances, political turmoil and even an assassination. Then, Anton comes into possession of a music box full of strange little gears and an especially haunting melody. Meanwhile, in 2016, Hase is on the lookout for a book her father wants her to find “in the event.” In the event of what, exactly?

The author’s cool writing style is deceptive, for her characters who so value their intellect are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions. These passions, and the one great problem that drives the book, have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds. It leads to an ending that’s surreal, impossible and a tad Lynchian. Menger-Anderson’s talent makes you believe in it.

In The Expert of Subtle Revisions, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s oddball intellectual characters are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions, which have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds.

Comic Fiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction Comic Fiction

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Review by Eric A. Ponce

by Eric A. Ponce

Clowns go in and out of fashion. Sometimes they are twisted killers skipping sinisterly in the streets, other times they are brave and bold antiheroes who laugh in the face of normalcy and sing duets with Lady Gaga. Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One shows clowns in a somewhat less dramatic and flattering light: In these pages, clowns are losers. Cherry is a 28-year-old lesbian stoner working at an aquarium store, but her true passion is clowning. While Cherry seems like someone this reviewer would be friends with, middle-class central Floridian society feels differently about her. Even her stage persona, Bunko, a rodeo-aspiring goofball with a fear of horses, is a loser (in the best way). But as Cherry narrates her tragicomic life, the dullness of Orlando takes on a whimsical and erotically charged atmosphere where the butt of the joke is as callipygian as rich housewives.

Though her clowning might make her seem a bit strange, Cherry’s incorrigible horniness makes her as relatable as any non-clown main character. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One opens with Cherry in a suburban bathroom, getting it on red nose-style with the mother of a birthday boy she just performed for. As things get steamy, Cherry plays into the mother’s clown fetish (don’t judge), pulling some tricks out of her sleeve. The two are quickly interrupted by an irate, door-busting husband, and Cherry has to flee the scene, leaving behind her tools of the trade. This initial assignation not only sets the tone for this comic romp, but also reveals Cherry’s weakness for MILFs. Enter Margot, an older lesbian magician who coolly and easily woos Cherry with her knowledge of performance, schooling her in the storied tradition of clowns and magicians. Margot has a lot more to offer Cherry than a chance to work through her mommy issues, as her industry connections give Cherry a tantalizing glimpse of success in entertainment. It seems like the perfect match, but Cherry’s baggage is as crammed as a clown car, and just as dangerous to unpack. As Cherry struggles to be a true artist and find love, Arnett’s prose perfectly blends the tragedy and humor of life, leaving readers alternately gut-punched with grief and bursting with laughter.

Kristen Arnett’s comic romp, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, centers a 28-year-old lesbian stoner with a passion for clowning rivalled only by her passion for MILFs.

Education, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Education

Spellbound

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Canadian comedian and former model Phil Hanley’s debut memoir, Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith, is refreshingly frank, disarmingly vulnerable and, yes, frequently hilarious.

Thanks to appearances on late-night talk shows, two comedy specials and regular gigs at Manhattan’s Comedy Cellar, Hanley’s known for his sharp wit and masterful crowd work. But he wasn’t always at ease in the spotlight. Years of frustrating, humiliating struggle in a school system not equipped nor inclined to support students like Hanley—diagnosed with severe dyslexia—ensured he shrank away. Reading aloud was excruciating: “Looking at a block of text was like trying to memorize an abstract painting,” he writes.

After his hard-won high school graduation, Hanley wondered, “What do you do when you’re eighteen years old and out of school and have no plans for the future?” Well, you say yes when your friend Shalom (Harlow, the 1990s supermodel) asks if you want to try modeling. Hanley posed for Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, but his heart wasn’t in it. No matter: “Modeling wasn’t my goal, but it was leading me somewhere,” he writes. “Being directionless is only a bad thing if you let it prevent you from moving.”

And move Hanley did, to the U.K. and Vancouver and New York City, his life populated with generous friends, devotion to the Grateful Dead and a burning desire to become a comedian. Self-doubt lingered: “How could I be a comedy writer when I struggled to read a takeout menu?” But Hanley developed his own systems. Most comics jot ideas in a tiny notebook; he uses giant canvases. Some comics meander to the punchline; a shorter attention span yielded “concise jokes that were precisely worded.”

And all comedians rehearse until their jokes are second nature and the stage feels like home. Readers will cheer for Hanley as he achieves that comfort level with his comedy craft and learning disability alike: “I now wear my dyslexia as a badge of honor.” Spellbound will resonate with fans of Simu Liu’s We Were Dreamers, James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Amy Schumer’s The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo: It’s an inspiring, well-written tale of overcoming adversity and self-doubt that’s plenty funny, too.

Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”

Children's, Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Stalactite & Stalagmite

Review by Linda Castellitto

by Alice Cary

Two charming anthropomorphic nubs of cave rock take center stage in Drew Beckmeyer’s Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave, a superbly funny and profound introduction to the history of the world thus far.

Beckmeyer is an elementary school teacher known for imaginative books like The First Week of School, and Stalactite & Stalagmite does not disappoint. His titular mineral formations are a pointy practical-minded fellow who hangs from the ceiling and a squat little dreamer-philosopher who rises from the cave floor. Together, the duo have amusing chats, host a variety of animal visitors and bear witness to millions of years of earthly transformation as viewed through their picture-window-esque cave entrance.

And oh, the changes they see! Inside the cave, an Ichthyostega (“kind of like a fish mixed with a frog”) with appealingly buggy eyes and bright green skin wraps the stalagmite in a friendly hug. It heralds the arrival of new creatures, too, being “one of the first animals that could walk on land and swim in the water.” Outside, the Cretaceous Extinction meteor shower creates a breathtaking backdrop for a poignant portrait of a red-dotted triceratops mesmerized by “dazzling lights flying across the sky.”

As the epochs and eras roll along, the dripping of the mineral-infused water that formed the nubs remains as steady and enduring as their friendship. Whether shooing away a bat that rudely hangs from the stalactite’s tip or asking each other, “If you had arms, what would you draw?” the chatty duo’s conversations punctuate the inexorable passage of time with humor and sweetness.

There is trepidation as the day they merge into a stalagnate (also known as a column) looms large. “I don’t know what I will be when we are us and I am not me anymore,” the stalagmite says. “Maybe becoming the us is where our story really starts,” the stalactite posits. It’s an affecting, thought-provoking exchange in a book filled with opportunities for readers to ponder the wonder and beauty of our world—and the loveliness of having a trusted companion through it all.

Stalactite & Stalagmite is filled with opportunities for readers to ponder the wonder and beauty of our world—and the loveliness of having a trusted companion through it all.

Children's, Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Sea Legs

Review by Emily Koch

by Emily Koch

Janey may be the only fourth grader who wants to go to school on her birthday . . . because normally she’s homeschooled by her mom, while her family sails around the Bahamas and Virgin Islands. Life on her parents’ handcrafted boat is an adventure, but Janey rarely comes across other kids her age. When her family is temporarily harbored, and she spots Astrid on another boat, she is ecstatic. Astrid is unfathomably cool and daring, but her moods are as unpredictable as the sea. Is this really the friendship Janey’s been craving?

Both funny and intense, Sea Legs was created by illustrator Niki Smith (The Golden Hour and The Deep & Dark Blue). She teams up with debut author Jules Bakes, whose uncommon childhood growing up on a boat provided the basis for this graphic novel. Smith’s art accurately reflects the eclectic nature of the story, with lively illustrations that switch from comical expressions that convey Janey’s humor, to more serious moments involving sudden uses of red, like in Astrid’s pupils when the tension of her home life becomes apparent. Life at sea is complex, and Baker and Smith—lifelong friends who met after the events that inspired the book—lovingly depict it as both a privilege and a burden. The valuable portrayal of a complicated friendship makes Sea Legs relatable to any landlocked reader.

The valuable portrayal of a complicated friendship makes Jules Bakes and Niki Smith’s Sea Legs relatable to any landlocked reader.

Fiction, Poetry

Fiction Poetry

Scorched Earth

Review by Kelly Ann Graff

by Kelly Ann Graff

With Scorched Earth, Tiana Clark has sculpted a collection for those who love literature and who wrestle with what it means to love themselves.

From the outset of the collection, it becomes clear that we are exploring life after personal apocalypse. Her prologue introduces the post-divorce context of the book while laying out the thematic journey with the closing couplet, “There is still some residue, some proof of puncture, / some scars you graze to remember the risk.” We examine the wreckage of divorce, gather what has been left behind, and take brave steps into the unknown, carrying our histories with us.

While these poems are unquestionably personal and vulnerable, they force the reader to reckon with the role of biography in poetry. Where does the poet fall on the spectrum of truth between a novelist and memoirist? For those familiar with Clark’s oeuvre, there are references to not only her previous collections, but also how the public has responded to her work. In the titular poem, “Scorched Earth,” Clark writes, “I get so tired when people ask me about this one / poem that I wrote. The truth is: I lied. / Did I have to be there for it to still hurt me? / Am I allowed to conjure the possibility of pain / to protect myself from the pain?” “Scorched Earth” is a response to Kara Walker’s print Buzzard’s Roost Pass, and within it, these lines illustrate how readers and writers can identify with and explore our own traumas through images, texts and experiences that are not our own.

Clark’s role as a literary educator is evident throughout, as well. The allusions in a single poem, such as “Broken Ode for the Epigraph,” would make an engaging and exciting reading list. Her conversational language and anecdotes pull readers in as though she’s recounting a story to an old friend, but then she’ll pull out a literary term like “duende” or “monostich,” reminding you that you are in the presence of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing with her words.

Clark’s obsession with literature mirrors her investigation of beauty: What does it mean to be beautiful in a society dominated by white beauty standards? What does it mean to be a poet in a tradition dominated by a white canon? The final section of the collection answers these questions by finding joy and desire outside of white, heteronormative expectations. With poems like “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” and “Queer Miracle,” Clark repurposes traditional English poetic forms to suit her own dreams, adhering to her own rules.

This is a collection that laughs at “confessional” as a derogatory term and embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.

Read our Q&A with Tiana Clark about Scorched Earth.

Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.

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