They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (535 pages; Black Lawrence Press), edited by Simone Muench and Dean Rader, is an ambitious, immersive collection that challenges readers and writers alike. Breaking out of traditional ideas of authorship, the book gathers hundreds of pieces of multi-author writing that span multiple genres and formats. At the end of each work is a blurb written by the authors that describes their unique writing process. In the spirit of the collection, we decided to collaboratively read and review the work in the form of a conversation. Claire Ogilvie: What stood out most […]
Contributor: Caleigh Stephens
Secretly Wishing for Impossible Futures: ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ by Heather June Gibbons
by Caleigh Stephens
Her Mouth as Souvenir (88 pages; University of Utah Press), winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, is a breathtaking and lyrical debut collection from Heather June Gibbons. Gibbons’ voice is a strong one, as she leads the reader through well-crafted and captivatingly honest free verse. Pressingly urgent and timely, Her Mouth as Souvenir is a study of action in the face of anxiety. The poems’ context includes larger societal trends, such as the technologizing world that presents “a strange kind of convenience, / to access at the tap of a fingertip / so much information without […]
No Escaping the Entanglements: ‘Certain American States’ by Catherine Lacey
by Caleigh Stephens
A self-described “not-widow” brings a newlywed couple to the grave of her ex-husband; a cartoonist with a massive trust fund tries to teach law students to watercolor as his marriage falls apart; a recent divorcee obsesses over whether his ex-wife’s latest fiction is about him. The characters in acclaimed novelist Catherine Lacey’s debut story collection, Certain American States (208 pages; FSG), grapple with grief and their own loneliness. The collection is a deep dive into the human psyche, focusing on a memorable and flawed cast of narrators and their connections to others. There’s an emotional richness to these stories as […]
A Long Postponed Homecoming: ‘This Mournable Body’ by Tsitsi Dangarembga
by Caleigh Stephens
Set in the wreckage of a devastating war for independence, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s latest novel examines the impacts of race, class, and gender in post-colonial Zimbabwe. This Mournable Body (296 pages; Graywolf Press) returns us to the story of Tambudzai, the protagonist of Dangarembga’s previous two novels –– the critically acclaimed Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. The novel opens with Tambudzai barely getting by, living off the remains of her savings from an advertising job and desperately looking for accommodations. Her goal is to move out of the ragged youth hostel she’s stuck in (despite being past the hostel’s […]
Discovering Warmth Among the Desolation: Bernardo Atxaga’s ‘Nevada Days’
by Caleigh Stephens
In Bernardo Atxaga’s autobiographical novel Nevada Days (352 pages; Graywolf Press), the gaudy emptiness of the Biggest Little City stands as an insufficient guard against the encroaching desolation surrounding it. Upon arriving in Reno, the acclaimed Basque author is struck by the suffocating silence of the place. Often enough, Reno appears just as much a ghost town as the actual ones Atxaga visits. To use the Daniel Sada metaphor he frequently invokes, the city appears as a stage-set version of the desert and, by extension, reality. Nevada Days (which was first published in 2013, but now sees an English translation […]