Category: Literary Features

MISSING THE FARM

Travis Mossotti

 

Here’s the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else’s barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else’s bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else’s dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn’s cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.

Share

I WANNA BE WRONG

Michael Chang

 

wanna sleep till i see u again
words u generally wanna hear
except when ur already at their haus
hey do u wanna get outta here
i like it when u talk abt cannes
so much
i like it so much
i’m a same-sex couple
a warehouse
nothing in me but a grand piano
stop staring
start tearing
if u’d changed u wouldn’t be here
did u see my present
the one i left
believing u could be deterred
i think i threw it out
as they used to say in hollywood
that movie sold popcorn
he asked to take me to the pound shop
but it was just a dollar tree
u go to the disco, panic
they want a better look at u
any acknowledgment of their infinitesimal existence
as mark twain’s old saw has it
the difference between a fire & a firefly
rain that looks like u, clean sheets
we luv to be intrusive
take an invasive procedure
make it more invasive
find it hard to leave relationships
luv being in luv w/ machines
money from a white-shoe firm
in fact a frozen-foods conglomerate
angel cakes bearing lines of credit
do not be afraid

Share

I Woke Up Eating Donuts in the Rain

Jarrett Moseley

 

is the note I left for myself
on the introduction page
of a poetry book
three years ago.

 

I did not wake up eating donuts in the rain
except for once
when I was a kid
and even then I was dreaming.

 

I’m always dreaming
of an elsewhere
where the reams of grass
I tucked into a wicker basket
last July have not withered
and the grease of fast food
slides off my fingers like sunlight
and a child touches a mirror, feeling
unlike a severed power line.

 

I was not that child.
When I was nine, I wrote a song
about the black tongue of death
before I even knew what it looked like.

 

I don’t know what to make of that
or if everything is a river
though I keep having the persistent feeling
that everything is supposed to be a river
even bad things
like loneliness.

 

Three years ago, I was lonely
and writing sad notes to myself
like screaming into a shower head.

 

Since then
Mason died
and Savanah moved to New York
and Gracie left New York for L.A.
and Sarah gave birth
and I decided against writing summary poems
but here I am.

 

When I say I’m always dreaming
that’s not what I mean
but that there’s a place inside me called outwards
where each thing faces away
from the next thing.

 

The couch back pushed against another couch back
which is facing away from the mirror
which is facing away from the window
which is facing away from the outside lawn
which is facing away from the world’s
violent unbuckling.

 

You can just say a lot of things
and get away with it
and even without music
or a bicycle wreck set on a loop forever
or waving one’s arms in circles from a distance

 

but once love gets involved
the whole thing turns red-tinted and jutted.

 

The last person who touched me naked,
we didn’t even have sex
we didn’t even know each other
we just slept in the same bed
with our feet barely brushing,
which is more intimate than sex
then never spoke again.

 

I could write an entire symphony
on things more intimate than sex.

 

I slap the back of a friend,
a boy holds the book at just the right angle,
we watch the car skid out on the road.

 

The news blurs into the radio,
a stone reverses back through a window,
the ground is seared with footprints.

 

Remember you are a river—
maybe that’s what the note should have said,
to move inside the banks of my body
through absolute loneliness
to write not about the leaf stuck in my hair
but rather, the wind that put it there.

 

Three years ago I was not having sex,
no one was sleeping in my bed,
my shoulder was like a stick in the mud,
and I didn’t even dream.

 

But today,
on the 12th of March,
pollen scattered like yellow DNA
across the glass porch table
that points outwards

 

into the community courtyard
where a girl mounts her pink tricycle
as her father pushes behind,
into the 70-degree warmth
swarming the dogwood trees
and the cardinals they carry,
into the peace of learning
to love the cliché
of blooming hope,

 

I open a poetry book and read
the note I had forgotten about.

 

Sometimes
you don’t want to dream.
Sometimes you don’t want to think
about death
or loneliness
or even sex.

 

You want to wake up
eating donuts in the rain,
to feel the river rise,
and to float a letter
to yourself
from one world
hoping it finds you
happily in the next.

Share

Dirty Moon Dog

Francine Witte

 

Tonight is the night
of the Dirty Moon,
where dust and scrub
show up thumbprint
on the lunar face.
Visible here on Earth
for only a speck,
showing itself quiet
in July or maybe
November. No one
talks about the Dirty
Moon the way no one
talks about the second
Love goes cold, maybe
one less phone call,
one less kiss, or
the way your parents
go see-through,
translucent on
their way to being
gone. But tonight,
right now, a dog
is howling it out.
He is alone
in a field, around
him the worry
of wheat, a shush,
a soft wind trying
to quiet him, his snout
full up, his mouth open
wide into the night.

Share

Two Poems

Rebecca Foust

Ocean Beach

I am not quite thirty again
on a beach under a three-quarter moon
slung low in the sky, stars pricking
darkness & so cold where the tide
rushes in, swirling ankles then knees
& you swooping me up in your arms
like any fantasy of rescue & I’m ravished
in John Donne’s sense of the word
& pretty much every sense
of the word, licked up & down my spine
by freezing flame, slicked wet
like a dog in the rain, every nerve
buzzing bees in a beauty bush June—
it happens every time I return
to memory’s long, low curve of cold sand,
the swallowed surge of a wave,
held breath knocked out & away
into liquefaction & release,
an icicle held in your warm, bare hand.

 

Pasiphae

In a myth from the southern sea
a woman loved a god
in the guise of a bull, or maybe
it was the sea, or maybe
it was a bull made of waves
that came from behind
all muscle & surge
to her knees, waist, chest,
throat, mouth & eyes, then left
with the morning tide.

 

They say she near died, burned
by sorrow & salt & sun
before she thought to build
a bull of wood she could live
within. For she was also a god
who could drain all she filled
& fill all she drained
like us, who daily dwell
in a world that swallows us whole,
while we take it, holy, inside.

Share

Review: All The World Beside by Garrard Conley

Review of All the World Beside, by Garrard Conley, Riverhead Books, 352 pages, $28, Publication Date: March 26, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

 

Though Garrard Conley’s transcendent debut, All the World Beside, is ostensibly about an eighteenth century gay love affair between Arthur Lyman, a physician, and Nathaniel Whitfield, a reverend, the novel is chiefly concerned with the nature of desire and the salvation of the soul.

 

The story unfolds in Cana, Massachusetts amid the Puritan push for utopia. Arthur is married to the bold, scandalous Anne while Nathaniel’s wife is the accommodating, unwell Catherine. Both men have children. Arthur’s daughter, Martha, and Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, eventually become friends by way of Anne’s engineering, but it is Ezekiel, Nathaniel’s son, around whom the plot is framed. His letters to Sarah, years after the central events of the novel, anchor the story, providing an additional layer of tragedy.

 

We soon learn that Ezekiel, named after the prophet who saw the demise of Jerusalem, is answering for the sins of his father through exile. While Nathaniel is away with Arthur, Sarah becomes possessed by righteousness and castigates the citizens of Cana who are swayed by a swindler selling watches. She scolds them for their pagan proclivities, claiming they have become Satan’s puppets, especially her father who sins with Arthur, and her mother who hides his sin. Sarah feels responsible for the town’s great awakening. The Great Awakenings—a succession of religious revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers that gripped believers throughout the early eighteenth century and into the late twentieth century—play a central role in the novel.

 

When Ezekiel’s mother calls a group of French sex workers “nobodies,” Ezekiel internalizes the notion of a “nobody” as someone without a home, free to do as they like, including finding a home as they see fit, a “terrifying and exciting” prospect. We learn that Ezekiel was cast off to the hinterlands because he would not betray Nathaniel and Arthur, his “two fathers.” In his quiet despair, Ezekiel questions a “God who has created such impossible conditions.”

 

Conley does not hide his numerous parallels to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: pilgrim judgment, shunning, damning ostracization, banishment, and the weight of mortal transgression, along with the characters’ names themselves. The novel intrigues and mesmerizes with its density of complex histories, scandalous pasts, tormenting secrets, and haunting lies.

 

Conley’s revelatory 2016 memoir, Boy Erased, also dealt with the cruel and ignorant things people do in the name of religion, but with compassion and insight. Homosexuality and Christianity coexist in an uneasy arrangement in Conley’s personal world, as in his fiction. The characters treat each other with care, tenderness, and concern for their well-being. Even Nathaniel and Arthur are protected and loved by their families and communities.

 

All The World Beside is largely a meditation on the simplicity, beauty, and goodness of nature and faith, despite the pain both cause. The characters are at the nonnegotiable pull of a wild will and its demands, as well as the imagined expectations of God. The punishments doled out by religious law seem unreasonable, even draconian, but in Conley’s view, these are the products of fear and reverence. In a moment of the metaphysical melding with the scientific, Nathaniel says to Arthur, “You said wounds allow love to enter the body more freely.”

 

Conley’s voice is clear but ambiguous, gentle but never coddling, and firm but not merciless. His spare language is imbued with an assurance that disarms with its sincerity. The novel was born of Conley’s conversation with his Missionary Baptist father, and a subsequent objective to prove queer people existed and even thrived during the 1700s. The eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, after all, and enlightenment meant privileging science over blind faith. These dualities are at play in the relationship between Nathaniel, a man of faith, and Arthur, a practitioner of medicine. Nathaniel is responsible for the town’s spiritual health while Arthur bears responsibility for the inhabitants’ physical wellbeing. The soul and the body intermingle. The divine and the material parry.

 

By virtue of the milieu and period, Conley tells an elemental story about faith and nature, free from civilized constructions and cultural touchstones. The focus here is on engagement with God, with imagination, with the soil, and, finally, with each other. Still, there pervades a din of the superstitious, the anxiety of bearing a mark and being damned, the devil lurking in the shadows, ready to claim his due. “The devil never forces a hand. He is cleverer than that. He tempts.” Nature itself possesses evil, or at least, indifferent properties. But God is everywhere too. The divine is a constant presence and a perpetual promise, a goal to work toward, and a pleasure to be earned.

 

The love shared between Nathaniel and Arthur feels like an invention, even if the men discover that their shared feelings are all too familiar. Theirs is the possible start of a freer land, one of not just national possibilities but also a sexual renaissance. “We just invented it,” says Nathaniel to Arthur. “Never before has another man done what I have done or felt what I have felt. God did not create this. It is not natural. It is not divine. It is nothing but what it is, here in this bed.”

 

Though the families keep their secrets, Nathaniel and Arthur’s love harms them. Sarah, in her rapturous call to duty, believes that their sin prevents the salvation of the town. “A town must be safe before it may be saved,” claims a parishioner named Priscilla. Conley maintains nebulous motives for his characters, especially the men’s families. Do they keep the secret of the affair to protect their husbands and fathers, or to protect themselves? To ensure the awakening unfolds unsullied, or to preserve the fantasy of their faith? Catherine tells Sarah, “Men have the power to change. Women cannot change, not really; they have no such luxury, but men change all the time.”

 

All The World Beside’s bittersweet tone is perhaps best captured by Catherine who, overcome by her family’s lot in life, laments, “There is life yet to mourn the loss of beauty.”

 

Conley ends with an academic postscript that rigorously assays the hidden history of LGBTQ life. He so expertly evokes the eighteenth century that the modern thoughts and words of the closing essay stand as a jarring contrast and pointed reminder of where we’ve been and where we are. In the end, Conley tells a story that feels ancient but somehow new, and he does so with grace, restraint, and generosity. His characters are as alive and urgent today as they would have been over 250 years ago, and the world, though changed, remains in many heartbreaking and healing ways, the same.

Share

In the Nude

Brendan Gillen

Charlotte lived in the Village, where the buildings shared narrow courtyards, so it was not a matter of neighbors seeing. Of course they saw. She sometimes waved. The uptight spinster across the street who pulled her curtains. The young men whose kitchen window was adjacent to her bedroom. They did not stare. They smiled giddily and waved and went about their business. Who knows what they said when they ducked out of sight? Charlotte didn’t care. Her days of giving a damn were long gone.

 

One afternoon, the police came. The knock was polite. Charlotte answered in her robe. She could have been their mother. They hardly looked old enough to drive, let alone carry weapons.

 

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the bearded officer. His nameplate read: Finn. He seemed to be in charge. “There’s been a report of a disturbance.”

 

She clocked the shaven one eying her figure, which she maintained with water aerobics.

 

“A disturbance?” Charlotte said. “Here?”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Finn said.

 

Charlotte wondered if one of them always spoke, if their roles were set, or if they sometimes traded.

 

 “I make a real effort to keep to myself,” she said.

 

“It has nothing to do with noise, ma’am,” Finn said.

 

The clean-shaven young man adjusted his belt. His radio chirped. His name was Bradford.

 

“There was a call that you’ve been going about your apartment in the, ah, nude and whatnot.”

 

Charlotte bit her cheek to keep from laughing. In the nude! For such a progressive city, New York’s sense of civic propriety was practically Victorian.

 

“I see,” she said. “Is it illegal? This is my home.”

 

“Not exactly, but if it continues to be a public disturbance—”

 

“Who was it that complained?”

 

“We can’t divulge that information, ma’am,” Finn said. But Charlotte knew. In some ways, she’d been waiting for it. She didn’t know the woman’s name, but they’d passed each other plenty of times on the street. In another life, they might have been friends. In this life, her neighbor was stoop-shouldered and severe, and she pushed her chaotic hoard of belongings around the neighborhood in a rolling cart.

“All we’re asking,” Finn continued, “is that you cover up.”

 

Instinctively, Charlotte released the clutch she held on the collar of her robe so that it fell open at her throat. Bradford stole a glance at her cleavage. Finn dropped his hand to his taser.

 

“Ma’am,” he said. “It’s a simple request.”

 

She thought of Donald. How could she not? His mustache. His overcoat. Always layered. Their marriage was full of love. Over thirty years. Toward the end there was no sex, not because they didn’t want it, but because of his condition. It worsened precipitously in the final months. He was hollowed out, hunched over. Clothes hung about him as though they’d been donated by a much bigger man. It was awful to see. Yet Charlotte had felt an undercurrent of liberation. An unburdening, a shedding of skin. She waited until Donald passed to express it. To do otherwise would have been cruel. She sold the house, bought the studio in the city. She began to paint, went for cocktails. It wasn’t even a year before she brought a man half her age back to the apartment. She was taking control of her grief. Of her life. She knew Donald would have understood. She’d given up her career at McCann to make their home, raise their boys. This was her time. Yes, he would have understood. She was certain. She was the only woman he’d ever loved.

 

“Let me ask you something,” Charlotte said to the officers. “Have either of you tried it?”

 

Finn cleared his throat. His hand twitched on the taser. “Ma’am?” he said.

 

“Walking around the house,” she said, “in the nude.”

 

Bradford swallowed. The arrowhead of his Adam’s apple dipped.

 

“Ma’am, this doesn’t have to be difficult,” Finn said, losing patience. “This isn’t a negotiation.”

 

“Oh, it’s not difficult at all,” she said. “You’d be surprised how good it feels. The world is constrictive enough.”

 

“I’ve tried it,” Bradford said, seeming to startle himself. “Sleeping naked, I mean.”

 

“See?” Charlotte grinned. She clapped involuntarily. Heat rose to her face. “And?”

 

“It was okay. Little chilly.”

 

“Enough,” Finn snapped. He’d been undermined.

 

“Oh, give it another shot, Bradford,” Charlotte said. “You too, Finn. Your wives or girlfriends or boyfriends, whatever, will notice the shift, trust me. Especially after a long day in those uniforms. Don’t they itch?”

 

“Wives,” Finn said, flustered. “Listen, if we get another complaint to this address? We won’t be so cordial.”

 

Charlotte looked Finn in the eye and smiled. He flinched, and she saw his guard drop. It was all very silly. The roles we convinced ourselves to play.

 

“That won’t be necessary,” Charlotte said. “Message is loud and clear. All I can say is that I hope you gentlemen find comfort in your own skin before it’s too late.”

 

“And I hope this is the last we see of each other,” Finn said. One of their radios crackled. “Good afternoon.”

 

Finn turned and made his way from the threshold. Bradford lingered a moment, and, ever so slightly, smiled, as if to say, Thank you. Then he ducked out of sight.

 

Charlotte closed the door, went to her nightstand, leaned against the bed. She picked up the framed photo of Donald, touched his face through the glass. He was squinting in the direct sunlight, ballcap pulled low, one of their last journeys to the desert.

 

“Miss you, love,” she said. “We would’ve had fun. I’d’ve loosened you up.” At least she would have tried. But had he never passed, would she have arrived here, at herself? It was impossible to know.

 

She went to the window and looked down on the street, the slow-moving traffic, the bustle and flow of a Manhattan afternoon. The spinster was not at her window, but Charlotte could see the tunneling squeeze, the decades of accumulation. She decided she would get dressed and go over there, try the third-floor buzzers until she found the right one. Maybe all the woman needed was someone to talk to, or, more likely, someone to listen.

 

For now, she closed the curtains against the glare, dropped her robe, studied her figure in the mirror. It was something you had to work for. Not the body, the love for it. That alone was worth the heartbreak.

 

“Oh, I hope you’re watching,” she said.

 

Then she danced to the song in her head, the one Donald loved most. A slow bolero, a languid ache, an invitation to the rest of your life.

Share

Finding the Final Sentence: A Conversation with Carolyn Forché

* This interview was conducted at the Miami Book Fair in Miami, Florida on November 19, 2023. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The interview concerns the memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), a 2019 National Book Award Finalist.

 

Chelsea Alice: Something I love about your memoir What You Have Heard is True is how present we are in the moment with you as we’re reading. Could you talk about what that process was like for you to write in that way?

 

Carolyn Forché: I wrote four versions of this memoir. And the first two, I just completely had to tear apart and put away. They weren’t what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. And I realized, after I’d written the other two versions, that I wanted to bring the reader with me on the journey. So, I made a decision that I would never let the reader know more than I knew in any moment. I tried not to interrupt the dream of the experience by intervening and making commentaries from my present self. I tried to recreate my twenty-seven-year-old self and reenact the journey with Leonel [Goméz Vides] and everything that happened along the way. I included all of her confusions and guesswork and misgivings. I wanted the reader to feel what it was like to go through that particular transformation, that education.

 

It helps, when you’re writing a book-length work of prose, to make decisions that give you some boundaries about what you will and will not be doing. For example, that decision helped me enormously. And had to do with pacing. I decided not to write long, sustained narrative chapters. I decided to write almost prose poems and self-contained units of prose. I was then able to move them around, where they would appear, so that, for example, the book doesn’t begin with the doorbell ringing. The story begins with the doorbell ringing, but not the book. I include a scene from well into the experience as the beginning. Once you get through that, those first two pages, the doorbell rings, and you’re following the journey as it unfolds.

 

Chelsea Alice: How was it for you to revisit all of those memories?

 

Carolyn Forché: Those were the two most vivid years of my life because of the heightened emotion I was feeling while I was living them. I’ve learned since that memory registers more deeply and indelibly when the experience is accompanied by an intensity of feeling. I had that, but for years I put it off. I didn’t want to write the book. I knew I had to write it someday. I promised I would, but I always told myself I wasn’t ready. I just didn’t know enough yet. The war was still going on, and I wanted to be careful. I always had a reason. The real reason was that I knew I was going to have to relive the experience. And I knew that it was going to be hard to do that, especially after Leonel died. It was going to be painful.

 

I didn’t know anything about writing prose, and I didn’t know about structure. I loved writing sentences, and I would write sentences and polish them because I was a poet. I was used to polishing things and writing short things I could work with in an intense way. And this was a 400-page sustained work. For me, the process involved getting rid of the first braided narrative because it shouldn’t be braided. With the second narrative, I took out even more. Then I had to amplify and include things that weren’t yet there. By the fourth version, I tried to recreate myself as I was then and not as I am now. All of my impatience, my stupidities, and my petulance and arguing with him, all of that had to be there. I had to show my flaws because I did not yet know what I know now.

 

And I wanted to capture Leonel because he was a remarkable, intriguing, amazing, mysterious, terribly funny guy. He’s alive in that book. You really meet him as he was. And, for me, that is the book’s best accomplishment. Over the years, Salvadoran students, at universities at which I taught, would ask me to tell them what happened. Their parents had brought them to the United States and wouldn’t talk about it with them. Parents didn’t want to talk about the horrors of that time. I don’t blame them, but the kids wanted to know. So, the other reason to write this was to tell the Salvadoran students some of what their parents went through in those years.

 

Until I wrote the last sentence, I worried I wouldn’t be able to accomplish the portrait, you know, that the book wouldn’t be good enough and that I would never finish. I took a writing residency for two weeks, and I gave myself a deadline: finish the book in two weeks or put it in a box and admit I couldn’t write it. The second to the last day before I left, I found the last sentence.

 

Chelsea Alice: I’d like to ask about “The Colonel” because that was a poem that someone recommended I read before I went on a trip to Peru. I read it on my way down, and the poem resonated with me. On my way back, six days later, I reread it, and it was very different that time. The poem resonated with me in a more powerful way, having experienced Peru.

 

Carolyn Forché: I understand.

 

Chelsea Alice: I wondered when you wrote that poem in relation to these four different versions of the memoir.

 

Carolyn Forché: I finished that poem in 1978, decades before the memoir’s first version, before any version. I wrote the poem to capture the details of that evening because I thought, well, this will be for the prose book someday I will write. I intended it to be a paragraph. Then it got mixed up with my poetry manuscript. And a poetry mentor of mine told me I had to leave it in the poetry manuscript. So, this thing that I wrote to be prose wound up as a poem, accidentally. And it was published everywhere, that poem. I decided not to put it in the memoir because it already had a life of its own. But I put a little passage that alludes to the poem and has Leonel tell me something more about that night, so there’s something of the poem in the book, but not the poem itself.

 

Chelsea Alice: How has the completion of the memoir impacted your life now?

 

Carolyn Forché: It’s very interesting questions you’re asking because you consider the same things I think about it. You’re asking me what I would ask myself. I didn’t know how it was going to feel to finish the book, but, finishing, I felt lighter. The whole story was now outside of me, not inside of me, and I didn’t have to carry it around anymore. It has a life of its own in the world. It lives in a book, and the book will outlive me. It took fifteen years to write, and I was scared all the time that I wouldn’t be able to write it. I’d wake in the middle of the night thinking about it. It was an intense fifteen years.

 

I was relieved when it came out. And I didn’t anticipate that. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be relieved.

 

Chelsea Alice: Has the book been published in Spanish?

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes, there is a Spanish edition. It’s published by Swing Capitan [Capitán Swing Libros: Madrid, Spain]. It’s a beautiful translation. [The Spanish title is Lo que han oído es cierto.]

 

Chelsea Alice: I’m interested in translations in general. I like to interview translators when I can because the difference culturally and linguistically is beautiful, and I love to see that bridge. This is such an impactful memoir, and I’m curious as to what you think the cultural impact for readers will be here versus in El Salvador.

 

Carolyn Forché: Salvadorans who’ve read it have been wonderful. Those I’ve talked to feel that a part of their history is now out in the world. They’ve been very supportive of me writing this. They recognized that I wasn’t trying to be Salvadoran, and I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t. This is the account of a North American young woman encountering their culture. And I love so many people in this book. Those who are in the book were like, How did you remember all of this? Because when they read it, they remembered it, and they were happy.

 

In North America, I get different responses sometimes. They’re very nice, very good responses. Sometimes people say: “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you just have gone home right away when it got dangerous? Why did you stay there?” And I’m not going to be able to explain that. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving. I didn’t even want to leave when I left. I went kicking and screaming.

 

Everybody wants to be safe, as though that’s the most important thing. There are cultural gaps there. But that was the one question that North Americans had most often. That, and: “Why did you trust this guy? You didn’t even know him.” That was the other question.

 

Chelsea Alice: Taking a leap of faith is not a big part of American culture anymore.

 

Carolyn Forché: No, not anymore. People are skittish. They’re worried. And they regard other countries as dangerous.

 

Chelsea Alice: As dangerous and not their problem.

 

Carolyn Forché: Right. And when Americans travel, even to Western Europe, they’re scared. I’m much more scared in the United States than I am in most places. We have the guns and the mass killings and the craziness, which you don’t have in many other countries. You worry about pickpockets in Paris. You worry about machine guns in American cities.

 

Chelsea Alice: How was your experience different with the memoir versus everything else you’ve written?

 

Carolyn Forché: I’ve written since I was nine years old. I have lots of notebooks, lots of poetry. I’ve published five collections of poetry, and I’ve published plenty of essays. But the memoir was, of course, the most challenging, the most sustained, my first book-length prose work. And I’m writing a second that has nothing to do with this subject. This next one is about friendship and poetry, and a lot of it takes place in central Europe, where my family is from.

 

Chelsea Alice: And is this nonfiction?

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes. It’s nonfiction again. I would love to try a novel someday.

 

Chelsea Alice: I want to talk about your experience with the Spanish translation. How much of an active role did you take?

 

Carolyn Forché: None. I was surprised. When I’m translating the poetry especially, I get all kinds of questions from translators. With the memoir, they didn’t get in touch with me, and I worried about that because the translators were not Salvadoran.

 

Chelsea Alice: This was in Spain.

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes. I worried that they might not get the flavor of the culture, the special qualities of Salvadoran culture because, as you know, every country in Latin America is distinct, and all are distinct from Spain. So, I worried about that, and I wondered whether they would understand all of the terms. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. I opened the book, and it was my dream Spanish. They caught the tone, voice, everything. They were professional. They didn’t make any mistakes.

 

The book is now being translated into Mandarin in China. I can’t imagine how the Mandarin will be. I’m just hoping they find an equivalent way of conveying this memoir.

 

Chelsea Alice: I’m interested in the cultural reception in China as well.

 

Carolyn Forché: China’s changing now. I don’t know how it will be. I wonder how they’ll respond to it. It was a twelve-year civil war that was beginning as I left El Salvador. Twelve horrific years, but also twelve years in which people opposed a dictatorship collectively. And there was a lot that was very moving about that. What I was trying to show in my memoir is what led up to this civil war and why it was inevitable that they would take the action they took.

 

Chelsea Alice: When I was growing up, when they taught us about World War I or World War II, they said, “Oh, well, this world war started because someone shot someone else.” And it’s like, really?

 

Carolyn Forché: Right. No, no.

 

Chelsea Alice: There has to be more.

 

Carolyn Forché: They leave everything out. They like that. They like that assassination in the carriage, you know, they like that. But that’s not why wars start. That might be the last thing that happened before a formal declaration, but that isn’t why.

 

Wars are distinct. They’re not alike. They feel alike in their suffering. In a certain period, they feel alike in the kind of munitions that are involved. But they’re about failures, really, a series of accumulative selfishness, accumulative intransigence and stubbornness, and accumulative unwillingness to respond to the pain of others. I’m describing Salvador specifically.

 

A sense of uprising doesn’t come from nowhere. People don’t leave their countries, leave everything behind, the graves of their parents, everything, easily. They don’t make the decision to walk through Mexico to our border easily. This is their last resort, the last thing they can do.

 

People don’t take up arms against their government lightly either. It’s very dangerous. It’s a process. There are many factors, and it isn’t fun. It’s not. Imagine what it would take to do something like that, and you’ll understand how complicated it is to come to a decision like that, a grave, consequential decision. These things are complex, and they happen for a long time before they burst into our awareness. They don’t happen overnight, ever, though they seem to. We love to say, war broke out. It’s a strange expression, when you think about it, like describing the weather. That’s not what’s happening.

 

Chelsea Alice: In my experience growing up, any time we watched a film or read a book about the Cold War, the stress that you feel watching or reading those stories that you can’t quite pinpoint the reason for, that’s often due to the setting, the time period. Living through such times reminds me of your memoir and the years leading up to war.

 

Carolyn Forché: They’re stressful. You feel it. Right now, we’re in that kind of period. We’re in a period of foreboding. Something worse might happen, we suspect. And we don’t know what. But the future doesn’t look terribly bright.

 

Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World(Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History(1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us(1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.

She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance(Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.”  She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award.

Share

Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades 

Review of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron. 276 pp. $29.99 

Review by Samuel Zammit

Equal parts true crime and an exploration of Florida folktales, veteran journalist Rebecca Renner weaves together a thought-provoking nonfiction debut with Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. Renner quickly delivers on the promise of the book’s provocative title, sharing truths more thrilling than fiction as she intertwines impassioned narratives and dispels myths surrounding conservation.

 

Gator Country follows the story of Officer Jeff Babauta, his involvement with Operation Alligator Thief, and his grappling with morality as he completes one last job. Despite being the action-packed story of a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) officer going undercover to catch alligator poachers, Gator Country also presents difficult philosophical questions, bringing painful truths about poaching to light. As Renner tracks down Babauta, and their narratives collide, the book dissects the real lives of poachers, humanizing them in stereotype-shattering ways and calling the law itself into question. As Renner says, “The poachers in my life would balk at the idea that they’re hurting nature. They love nature.”

 

Renner draws on her experiences to bring to life the parts of Florida that only a Floridian could, and she makes careful use of her upbringing. Unpacking Florida storytelling motifs, Renner deciphers the tales of her fellow locals in ways an outsider might misunderstand. As such, Gator Country takes readers on an intimate romp through Florida swamps while simultaneously taking them on an undercover mission that feels like something pulled from the pages of a thrilling spy novel.

 

The story of Operation Alligator Thief, alongside Renner’s search for another folk hero of the swamp, Peg Brown, are delicately intertwined. Like a gator sinking beneath the surface, the reader is transported seamlessly between worlds: Babauta’s tale of the past and Renner’s hunt for the truth about Peg Brown and other seemingly kind-hearted poachers like him. Ultimately, these parallel stories converge into a bittersweet and satisfying conclusion for one of the biggest busts in FWC history.

 

Renner takes care to discuss the indigenous people who have had their land stolen, the impact of man on nature, and the truth about what realistically drives people to poaching, all of which stands in stark contrast to the cartoonish images of the British on safari at the turn of the century that readers might conjure when they hear the word poach. She highlights the positive and negative ways that humanity has interacted with nature and the livelihoods of their neighbors. Renner tells the story not only of nature, but of the people who have shaped and been shaped by the natural world.

 

Gator Country is a book for anyone looking for the juicy mess of reality in pages so suspenseful they read like fiction. In the end, Renner writes about the blurry morality of the law, friendships, betrayal, loyalty, and family, all while expertly building toward the crescendo of the true villain’s reveal, all of which gives way to an incredible ride and a riveting read.

Share

Captive

Nicole Santalucia

 

for Lesley, Patty, Kathy, and Eileen

 

I woke up in a zoo feeding penguins
that looked like grandmothers I would’ve
knocked down to get a cigarette,
but I quit smoking two years ago
when I came face to face with
a skunk in my backyard. Monday
is garbage night—this I know.
There was a time when I didn’t
know I had a drug problem then
there was a time when I did. The knowing
trapped and released me. We fenced
in the backyard last spring to keep out
little critters, and now I have land sickness.
Anne gave us Jack-in-the-pulpits that have been
in the family for generations. I never thought
this scarlet, orange fruit would blossom again and
again and again—that I’d take responsibility without
taking blame. Taking has nothing to do with Mondays
and Tuesdays. I take the weekend to grow tomatoes.
I always take more and the devil’s ear listens
to my spiritual disease. So does Mr. and Mrs. Brown,
and Mrs. Jones down the street wants to put the house
in her name. If the loan doesn’t go through, she might
get drunk and I might get struck by lightning.
I thought it was just me, but it’s also the landscape.
Here at the river of denial, I refuse the weather,
and people who drank like me have been hiding
in the bushes this whole time. The people who
drank like Kathy just sent her a nice check from
a bar she invested in years ago. And my inner
Eileen says we won’t get struck drunk. She hated
zoos and every penguin in town knew it. She
also had pulmonary emphysema and was rescued
by inhaling and exhaling. She taught us not to think
about thinking and how to die without dying.
We are at war with the skunks. This inner protest
and hot head of cauliflower are part of the ritual.
I place my palm on the source of heat and prepare
to listen with my whole body. I begin with tubers
and work my way to the leafy greens then open
myself up to the rage and wild onions climbing
over the fence to choke out the tree-of-heaven.

Share