The Hopkins Review Vol. 15, No. 1 by Johns Hopkins University Press

Winter15.12022 literature & culture

Stephen Towns I Am the Glory 2020 Acrylic, oil, and metal leaf on panel. Courtesy of the Artist and De Buck Galler y. is piece references Stephen Towns’s two art practices—quilting and painting. e title is a play on the term “Old Glory,” used to reference the American ag. e gure in the painting represents the creativity and ingenuity of formerly enslaved Black Americans. is painting is part of the exhibition Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance, which examines the American dream through the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th century to the present time. Using labor as a backdrop, Towns highlights the role African Americans have played in shaping the economy, and explores their resilience, resistance, and endurance, which have challenged the United States to truly embrace the tenets of its Declaration of Independence. is exhibition is on display at e Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA through May 8th, 2022. 48 x 36 in. more about Volume 15’s Featured Artist at HopkinsReview.com

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Winter15.12022 literature & culture

THE HOPKINS REVIEW Volume 15, Issue 1 Winter 2022 ISSN 1939-6589 New CopyrightSeries2022 Johns Hopkins University Press The Hopkins Review is a literary quarterly published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. It features fiction, poetry, and personal essays; criticism and public-facing scholarship; interviews, visual art, and translations; and reviews of books, performances, and exhibits. The Hopkins Review thanks the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University for their invaluable support. Address all editorial correspondence to: The Hopkins Review The Writing Seminars Johns Hopkins University 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 TheHopkinsReview@gmail.com Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted using our online submission manager at TheHopkinsReview.Submittable.com/Submit during the month of October. Visit us online at HopkinsReview.com for more information and content. This publication was designed by Sevy Perez and typeset by Johns Hopkins University Press, Desktop Publishing Department.

Winter 2022 literature & culture 15 Becky Hagenston gets political 72 Carl Phillips calls in love 75 Afaa M. Weaver awakens 106 Adrienne Su addresses a mentor and much more in this issue 15.1

The mission of The Hopkins Review is to publish today’s vital voices and visions in literature, culture, public-facing scholarship, and the arts. The Hopkins Review is committed to creative excellence and its dynamic, diverse, and inclusive present and future.

Love from Baltimore,

Dora editorMalechinchief The Hopkins Review Letter from the Editor

If you’re new to The Hopkins Review, welcome. You’re joining us at an appropriate moment, as this issue—my first as editor in chief— launches our new look and website, designed to be fresh, functional, and representative of the journal’s dynamic present and future. If you’re a longtime THR aficionado, you can expect your support to be matched by our continued commitment to creative and critical excellence. Threequarters of the authors and artists you’ll encounter in this issue are first-time contributors to our pages, but you’ll likely recognize plenty of familiar award-winning names, alongside emerging writers we’re excited to champion. In this issue and beyond, you’ll cross languages, borders, and cultures; you’ll also experience the rich artistic life of THR ’s home city. This juxtaposition of global and local reflects our belief in conversation across real and perceived distances—art and scholarship, tradition and innovation. Our community includes readers, writers, artists, and scholars; the staﬀ of the Hopkins Press Journals Division; esteemed advisory and contributing editors; and a brilliant editorial team of mfa students in the Writing Seminars at jhu. We hope the issues in 2022’s volume—our 15th in THR ’s “New Series,” founded by John T. Irwin in 2008—provide both escape and connection. Visit HopkinsReview.com to learn more about both THR ’s history and its new initiatives, including our first literary awards—the Stephen Dixon Fiction Prize and the Anne Frydman Translation Prize.

editor in chief Dora Malech senior editor Maya Chesley managing editor Kosiso Ugwueze lead assistant editor Spencer Hupp assistant editors Josiah Cox, Regan Green, Phoebe Outhout readers Journey Fetter, Landen Raszick, Megan Robinson, Brianna Steidle senior administrative coordinator , The Writing Seminars Amy Lynwander production coordinator , JHUP Journals Division Wendy Early faculty advisory editors James Arthur, Nate Brown, Anna Celenza, Danielle Evans, Kyeong-Soo Kim, Brad Leithauser, Andrew Motion, Katharine Noel, Richard Panek, Eric Puchner, Shannon Robinson, Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, Greg Williamson, David Yezzi (Editor in Chief Emeritus) contributing editors Gina Apostol, Max Apple, Melvin E. Brown, J. M. Coetzee, Louise Erdrich, Rhina P. Espaillat, Shane McCrae, Alice McDermott, Jean McGarry, Wendel Patrick, Mary Jo Salter, Dave Smith, Ernest Suarez, Rosanna Warren, Afaa M. Weaver, David Wyatt advisory editors Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, John Astin, John Barth, Phyllis Berger, William Breichner, Logan D. Browning, Robert L. Friedman, Christine Jowers, Edward Perlman, Wyatt Prunty, John D. Rockefeller V, Winston Tabb, Susan Weiss, Karen Wilkin new series founding editor John T. Irwin (1940-2019)

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 poetry Stephanie Burt “In Kansas it is Against the Law to Catch a Fish with your Hands” 1 Rosehips 2 poetry Lindsay Turner In February We Drove to the Atlantic 3 poetry Yuki Tanaka Anatomy 5 Afterlife 6 poetry Steven Leyva Halo: A Corona Pastoral 8 fiction Becky Hagenston Divided House 15 poetry Mary Jo Salter Jury Duty 31 Man-Barbies 34 poetry Hannah Sanghee Park Desert Highway Pantoum 36 e Animal 37 e Hares 39 poetry Jalen Eutsey Sonnet #3 42 Sonnet #5 43 Sonnet #7 44 Flight to Portland 45 visit HopkinsReview.com for more literature and culture

fiction Jane Lewty Spartan 46 poetry Sylvia Jones Perpetual Resin 59 First Black Cop Bop 60 translation Stella N’Djoku Poems Translated and Introduced by Julia Pelosi- orpe 61 poetry Jenny Johnson Silver Maple 70 poetry Carl Phillips Silver Bell 72 art Jill Nathanson Introduced by Karen Wilkin 73 memoir Afaa M. Weaver From Steel Inside Cotton 75 poetry Andrea Cohen Acapulco 88 Nightshirt 90 Madrid 91 At the Memorial Service 92 fiction Samuel Kó. láwolé. Aperture 93 essay Adrienne Su e Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956-2018 106

booK booKreview Jean McGarry Autumntide of the Middle Ages 119 booK booKreview Spencer Hupp Solitary Ducks: e FSG Poetry Anthology 131 booK booKreview Erin Redfern Leading All Our Voices to rum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening 136 booK booKreview Mark Halliday Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere 142 booK and Kosiso Ugwueze music musicreview Joy and Grief in Tandem: A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Jubilee and Crying in H Mart 153 multimedia Elijah Burrell Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones 158 film filmreview Eileen G’Sell In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood 169 review

In Kansas It Is against the Law to Catch a Fish with Your Hands, Stephanie Burt

poetry

For a while I wanted to live with you on land, if you would let me, though in the dimmest hours— when the crepuscular shore resembles the top of the sea that raised me—nothing would surface to show me whether to breathe the air, or turn and drop back to where I came from, whether to accept your invitation, whether yes meant no.

I was unusual, to be sure, a sh—thick but otherwise normal—with your hands, a ne nd you could choose to hide, or show. I could be an old-style monster in rotogravure at the edge of an old-style map, or an almanac. I might grasp, and crawl, and point, but never stand. I was fascinated, desiccated, inept.

Stephanie Burt

poetry

Rosehips, Stephanie Burt2 taste best at the beach, where their parents, beach roses, bear the last few pinks before the open sand. ey would taste pleasantly tart if they contained fewer seeds. Such tough esh even when ripe, they mean to teach the other salt-tolerant ora what it’s like to wait what seems like forever for something to breach your shelter, your rind, your pretense that you could choose what your own evolution would come to favor as your defense. ey can scratch your thumb. ey can leave your tongue numb. e seeds stay there instead of a pith, or a core. We can pick them and bite them or chew them or leave them in place, still hidden among thick stems, still vexed by our own mixed intentions, as if they agreed that they would always be too sour, too open, too full of need. e petals separate. e leaves connect.

How can we know what we were made for? Rosehips

In February We Drove to the Atlantic, Lindsay Turner

Season of there wasn’t and there hadn’t been. She walked in and said, it’s over. It’s over and it wasn’t anything you said or did at all, hence the snowmelt and the snowfall, the hawks perched at intervals on the fenceposts.

In February We Drove to the Atlantic Lindsay Turner

poetry3

Season of there wasn’t a heartbeat and there hadn’t been. When you’ve reached the ocean, then you’ve gone somewhere, like a river empties onto the great ats—take that, stagnant time— the bridges at night swoop up to the moon, the land slopes down hard to the blue winter sea. (2) At Napatree we saw some kind of seabird. I thought at rst they were gull chicks, but those don’t hatch until the summer. From dry sand they looked like rocks down on the other rocks, but in the picture now they’re pu y oblongs, the pointy ends all pointing out to sea. Imagine their little skeletons: they looked like they might have needed parents. e cold wind ru ed them and all the ocean.

(1) Season of the cold hard no, the snowmelt then the snow, the snapped-o branch and the dead one— in February we drove to the Atlantic.

Lindsay Turner

Ropes of barnacles, ordinary pebbles wet to shining, it never does stop moving, does it.

(4)

(3) No, I do like it— the colors are di erent almost every day:

“You,” I wrote to you when you weren’t there so many times that there you were, like I had made you. Furred with rust, a giant iron cage has washed up onto the dry sand.

How does the pale and bubbled seaweed end up in the middle of the gravel path?

What breaks the big shells into purple-edgèd shards?

turquoise, jade-ware, blue like a jay, gray gray gray gray gray forever, clear over the sand, black beneath clouds, white-edged, plain silver, fog lifting, a gull skittered sideways in the wind.

In February We Drove to the Atlantic, Lindsay Turner4

A little poem as dense as the sea, as dense as the mud from the snowmelt churned up on the trail, as the shine on the inlet seen at night from the dock, as the powdery lichen on the lowest of the rocks, as close as the feathery kelp in the harbor sway, as the air full of sand and the damp in the morning, as the storm rolling in and the water rolling under it, as dense as the shoals of sh under that or at least as they used to be, as dense as the brackish winds you could cut with a knife, as the dank night when there are no stars and there is no horizon, a little poem as dense as the dark at the bottom of the ocean.

poetry

Anatomy, Yuki Tanaka

poetry5

Shallow river with my right foot in it. e river has no sh, but a dozen sundown snakes nibble at my toes. I feel no poison. I am strong. My toenails hang onto me like lovers. When I am tired, I leap up to relax the muscles or squat to dip my buttocks in the water. My left foot dives in the river, like a child. e bright snakes welcome him. Under the watery roof, my feet are brother and sister. From their viewpoint, my face is smooth as otter skin, which gives me the con dence to say, You are both invited. Man with a liquid face, they call me, but refuse to come out. My face streams, carrying dirt. e evening turns my eyes to geranium. I gulp to beautify my voice, and say, Come home. ey whisper, He can’t get his own feet back, is he a Havingghost.nofeet, he must miss the smell of crushed grass.

poetry Afterlife, Yuki Tanaka6 1 my body thinned to a mirror re ecting others back mrs mashino stumbled and fell and I helped her up saying you are a scarecrow tumbled by a ood she said she was and I felt bad I should have said, You were happy on the cloud and fell down with heavy thoughts how her mood shifted from rain to storm to magnolia her small face had a pockmarked cheek but sweat made it a beautiful riverbank mice music from the buoys unbraided hair her reworks don’t feed stray cats or they’ll make light of you she had the voice of grass and I imitate the wind passing through her haha she laughs haha I echo mingled with the shells of Ishikawa Afterlife © 2022 Yuki Tanaka

poetry The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 7 2

I wait for her return sitting in the distance of forty pebbles slow rain from the icicles it is windless the horse hoof print becomes a sunlit pool my tree blooms and bears plums and lets them fall like guests knocking on earth unable to come in does that mountain have a chin where a bird could perch and tickle him if the mountain speaks up the bird is shaken o and needs to nd a home my smoothed arm is a desirable branch come y to touch me are you too a reincarnator you have that forsythia look

1. e accordion of icicles has paused its torch song and the snow-blind cardinal sings the red from its back into the dawn’s plaintive daylight, which rubs a thumb across the sagging gutters of row homes and alleys without considering a single lily. What is cruel here? No favor given to the green hills scratching the belly of Cumberland, MD. Abandoned mills kick in their sleep like dreaming dogs. No meritocracy can save Ellicott City from another ood. e Orioles’ o -season has all of Baltimore in a beer glass. Does anyone remember the name of the last mayor sent to jail? At the car wash down the block, gra ti separates one water from another. O God of the voided year, of the indi erent sunlight, give us the daily bread of quarantine: the longing to be touched by a letter in the mail, the bald cry in the bathroom, the music of snow.

Halo: A Corona Pastoral, Steven Leyva

8poetry

Steven Leyva Halo: A Corona

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 poetry9

By a letter in the mail, the bald cry in the bathroom, the music of snow, love has learned its last arpeggio. What good is it to sing in the empty amphitheater of winter? And yet the sparrow drags the diva of spring back again. Encore after encore. e blue jays evicting the other birds from a hollowed-out gourd, the inconsistent applause of cookware coaxed from the back of a cabinet, the exhaust fan whistling a round. Love is a chord we cannot pluck out of morning air. Not alone. Every instrument must be touched, held aloft on the crown of a shoulder, kissed, or left mute. Old tabula rasas of bay windows manifest our breath, asking, Won’t you write your name? Anything to be touched. e chime of noti cations no one confuses for a love song, but notice the sincere chorus of crocus accompanying the crepe myrtle in the yard, and the stubborn rosemary bullying the garden, and the scrape of the postal truck weighed with late mail, all these altars burning in our eyes. Look at how much we don’t know about loneliness.

Halo: A Corona Pastoral, Steven Leyva10poetry 3. All these altars burning in our eyes. Look at how much. We don’t know about loneliness sought. Cities no longer coughing on suvs. Let me clear my throat. e ringlet of lampposts on Main Street as useless as a rosebush in winter. e Sold Out hangingsignsonthe grocery shelves. Give me a break. e land makes a hymn without lyrics. No sense in mumbling. Shenandoah sung like a ghost of hallelujah in the praise the Potomac negotiates. Every kind of hum arrives on the bones of derelict bridges below Harper’s Ferry. Rust by any other name. e dead stars hang like a DJ’s poster saying Coming Soon. And the turntables of sun and moon scratch the sky’s vinyl. How can we not dance in the kitchen alone, making toast, frying an egg? Every day we are forsearchingtheperfect out t, a few y boots, a coat that won’t quit, to enter the club of memory, slipping the bouncer a 20-dollar bill from our childhood. e petty cash begged at a parent’s knee. Anticipation. e fear of walking home emptyafterhandedasking for a lover’s number. e deft touch of a porch light across the cheek.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 poetry114.

After asking for a lover’s number, the deft touch of a porch light across the cheek is like the angler sh, whose luminosity and ugliness coexist. Amen. After asking for a lover, number the deft touches of a porch light across the cheek. Is there enough to ll the wolf’s mouth and see what it eats? Amen, after asking for a lover’s number. e deft touch. A porch light across the cheek is like any other kiss. Tender but never enough. Shameless. Amen. After asking for a lover, number each deft touch. A porch lights. Across a bonecheek-sohigh it forms a balcony for birthmarks, heat leaps at your palm. AfterAmen.asking for a lover’s number, the deft touch. A porch lights across a likecheekaborrowed Zippo. Flash and then gone with the scent of faux Chanel. Amen after asking for a lover’s number, the deft touch of a porch light across the cheek curves summer into the shape of an apple. Still, there is curse enough for every amen.

After asking for a lover’s number, the deft touch of a porch light across the cheek is like horizon’s blushing grin in the daily aubade of dawn. Amen.

Curves. Summer. e shape of apples. Still, a curse breaks. Every amen uttered is a sign of hunger. Simple weight. But what of the stem we twist and discard, what of the core made svelte by teeth, what of the seeds black as coal whatbriquette,ofthe skin barely holding in its sweet, what of the heat of cider, what of the disobedience required to know anything, what of the evenings alone hanging overripe in the air, what of being put in a barrel, what of enduring the press, what of the hesitancy to blush? Who can answer for a season of being disposable? What of the willingness to rot, What of the hospitals brimming like an untended orchard? Simple. Go and ferment, August announces. Go and caramel yourself, September shouts back. Take a synthesisphotoback to its source. e nerve of the Sun, the laziest God of all, to go on shining, while a whole year’s plans have fallen underfoot, like forgotten apples. And what of returning to the earth? Fuck it, says the worm. I can eat anywhere Yes, worm, and feed the sh that make a miracle of replication, as the days do cruelly. Isn’t there another way to know that we need one another?

Halo: A Corona Pastoral, Steven Leyva12poetry 5.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 poetry136.

Cruelty isn’t there. Another way to know that we need one another to live: My son eager to fry an egg for his sister, or he and I playing forchessthe rst time. I’m no good at this, he says, slumping his cheek in his likehandamandarin orange in a ramekin. Slip. Sweep. e board astonished and clean. We bust up. Obsolete high-school dance moves scu ng the kitchen oor. e kids unimpressed, and having never seen e Wiz, circle like crows. You Can’t Win. Easy, now. Am I too early to every elegy? My wife lifts a half-grin watching the kids pretending to sing karaoke while a sleeve of macarons evaporates like mist. How did we manage to x a leaking fridge and a basement light socket by the grace of AndYouTube?thisisthe easiest of our questions. We don’t talk of the third day without water my mother endured in Texas. What is the opposite of Wecruelty?scrubour teeth with any comfort: co ee, laughter, an illuminated text. If not comfort, then the common sense of beauty.

Halo: A Corona Pastoral, Steven Leyva14poetry 7. If not comfort, then common sense. Beauty shifts its weight like a grifter meeting a mark. Soon we will pull up the ga er’s tape from all our impromptu stages: the hobbies we started, the friends we blocked with our bay-window curtains, the tomatoes that refused to grow, the small district of new stretch marks on our bellies. And the counsel of cold weather will come back with its banal advice, Baltimore streets wilding with holiday music once again. e recycling trucks running on time, slapping their polyrhythms among the mourning doves. e mosquitos either dead or mourning. e crepe myrtle in the yard nodding yes. We account for what we’ve lost by cooking the ledger. We wake, to touch the thermostat remembering an infant’s foot. Conductor’s baton. e accordion of icicles stretches its torch song.

M egan’s work was su ering. e scholarship les were mislabeled, she was taking 15 minute bathroom breaks, and she answered the phone with “What?” Diane knew she had to say something: it was impossible to supervise someone who didn’t give a shit. Today, Megan returned from a 30 minute bathroom break and lay down on the oor behind the work study desk, arms spread like she was trying to make a snow angel on the carpet.

Becky Hagenston Divided House 1.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Diane had been practicing that sentence in her head so it would come out stern yet friendly. “You’ve been a mess all “Nothing’sweek.”

wrong,” said Megan. She peeled herself from the oor and stood, all six feet of her. When Diane was in college, in the ’80s, students weren’t nearly so tall. Megan was 20 years old. History major. She’d been a reliable employee for the rst three weeks of the semester. “I just have a headache. Don’t you ever get a headache?” Diane gave her a look like, Really? “Seriously, what’s going on? Is it a case of the love sickness?” She was aiming for sarcasm, but it came out sounding like something a witchy fortune teller would say. Megan laughed, then burst into tears and fell into Diane’s arms. It was very dramatic. She was heavier than she looked. Diane pushed her upright. She didn’t say, “Oh, spare me.” She said, “It’s almost noon. Let’s go somewhere for lunch. I’ll treat, and you tell me all the goryShedetails.”didn’t think of Megan as the daughter she never had; she’d never wanted kids or dogs or cats. Her brief marriage two decades ago felt like a movie somebody told her about once. He was a car salesman from Tupelo. ey’d met at a truck stop outside Boston where she was waitressing, and two weeks later she followed him to Mississippi. Now here she still was, 45 years old, business manager in the history department of a small religious college, even though she wasn’t religious. is town was full of churches and bars and boutiques selling wedding and prom dresses.

fiction15

Divided House, Becky Hagenston

Diane asked gently: “What’s his name? Let’s start there.” But who was she kidding? She knew exactly who he was: maybe not speci cally, but generally. One of the khaki-pants-wearers, ruddy and pale-haired, wore Dockers, drove a white pickup truck, business major, grew up in Mississippi but once went on a mission trip to Guatemala or Bermuda, drove home every weekend to see his family. Maybe he was sexually repressed, secretly gay, or already involved with a girl back home. at was still no excuse for Megan to be a terrible worker. “Well,” said Megan. “I suppose it’s kind of a secret.” She pursed her lips, suddenly prim. Two girls walked a schnauzer down the sidewalk, and they waved at Megan, who waved back.

But she was young once; she remembered heartbreak. Also, she was nosy. She was bored. She took Megan to a café on College Avenue and ordered a glass of chardonnay and ignored Megan’s raised eyebrow. Megan, she’d learned last week, belonged to one of those churches where if you drink alcohol, you go to hell.

fiction Divided House, Becky Hagenston16

“No! I didn’t meet him on campus at all.” Megan stabbed her lemon with her straw, ignored the veggie burger deposited in front of her. “He’s married, so I guess it’s a little not-ideal. And that’s all I’m saying. I don’t want you to re me. I need this job.”

“I suppose you’re red then!” Diane said, irritably. She took a big sip of wine. “All I can say is get over it. Boys are idiots.” She wanted to be helpful, but Megan was making it di cult to be helpful. “He’s older,” Megan said. “ ere. I’ve probably said too much.” “Dear God. Not one of your professors?” Although this would be more interesting than a khaki-pantsed boy.

Diane didn’t say: “You’re a fool.” She said: “ en do your work and answer the damn phone.” But she said it kindly. e girl’s situation was unfortunate, but in the way a kidney stone was unfortunate. It was painful, and it would pass. Someday Megan would forget about it. Of course things could get worse before they got better. Diane would monitor the situation. at was all she could do.

Haley’s parents bickered in the front seat as they drove down sun-spackled country roads. “No wonder you wanted to take my car,” her mother said as the Toyota jounced along. e road turned from gravel to red dirt; the trees rose up thick and twining on either side, turning all the light to shade.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 17 2.

“Where are the lambs?” Haley asked her mother, who ignored her. en she was being introduced to people she’d never seen before— smiling while they said how nice it was that young people were getting involved in politics these days: “You’re the future, you know!” said far too many of these not-young people, until Haley wanted to turn and run across the elds.

It was her mother who’d insisted she come with them to the candidate meet-and-greet, even though Haley was 16 and couldn’t vote. “But you can be informed,” her mother said. “Also, it’s on a farm—you can see baby lambs!”Haley did want to see baby lambs. e canopy of trees opened like the exit of a tunnel, and Siri told them to continue for a mile, then turn left. “ anks, Siri!” said Haley’s father. ey were 15 miles from home, but this part of the county was country-country: tiny brick houses with a mess of tireless cars in the yards. Confederate ags. Little white trailers and rusty tricycles. ey turned at a mailbox with two white balloons tied to it and crunched over a circular driveway that went past a pen of yellow chickens, a pen of goats. Cows lowed and chewed in a eld beyond a wooden fence. e promised baby lambs were not in evidence. Haley’s father pulled up behind a Volvo plastered with the candidate’s bumper stickers. e late afternoon sun painted everything gold; the sky was cloudless. Her parents paused at a folding table and signed their names to a sheet of paper, then they all continued around the side of the house to a wooden patio where a gray-haired man was playing guitar and a lot of middle-aged people were holding wine glasses. It was like one of those commercials for men who can’t get it up.

“Behave yourself,” said Haley’s father. “Your mother thinks he’s a silver fox,” he “Hereadded.Igo,” Haley’s mother said. “Don’t come looking for me.” And she was gone; Haley heard her say, “Why hello, I don’t know if you remember me!”“I’m going to check out the food inside,” said her father. “You want to comeAinside?”wrinkle-faced woman with gray braids said, “When you’re in there, try the meatballs. Made with their own beef.” As if in response, a brown and white cow lifted its head and mooed.

“Are there lambs?” Haley asked, and the woman said, “I know they’re around someplace. I’ve had the lamb stew and it’s delicious.” And she wandered o . Haley felt her stomach churn. It had as much to do with the lambs as it did with everyone grabbing her and telling her she was the future. Her father had gone inside. Her old babysitter was here, for some reason: Megan, standing with Haley’s mother and the candidate, laughing and tossing her hair like she was determined to out- irt everyone. “Hey.” Haley turned and a skinny red-haired guy stepped in front of the sun. “Have a sticker. Here, have two.” His name was James, and he was in the college Democrats club: “Or I was, until I unked out of college. But I’m still a Democrat. How old are you?”“Sixteen,” she said. She lifted her chin a little, as if he might challenge her. e boy smiled. James. His eyes were amber.

fiction Divided House, Becky Hagenston18 e candidate was schmoozing his way around the porch, tall and smiley and silver-haired, in a blue button-down shirt and jeans. “Oh, there he is,” said Haley’s mother, squeezing her arm. “Hubba hubba.”

“It’s great that you’re getting involved,” he said. “Did you go to the march last year?” She didn’t know which march he was talking about, but she nodded. She had never marched, or canvassed, or walked out of class, or shouted in the cafeteria, or made videos, or handed out stickers. Her parents would yell at the TV or shake their phones and say things like, “ ank God for kids

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 19 like you, Haley,” as if it were up to her to solve the problems of the world, when she was just a girl with a C average.

“Come nd me for more stickers before you leave,” James said, saluted, and disappeared through the crowd. e group of fawning women surrounding the candidate had grown even larger. Megan saw Haley and waved. Haley waved back, then went through the screen door into a dim dining room. Her father was holding a plate heaped with meatballs, nodding at something an African American man was saying, and he waved her over so the man could tell her she was the future. “She’s a good egg,” her father said, beaming. She felt a twinge of pity for him: so chubby and bald, his khaki pants both too baggy and too tight. His shirt was stained with sauce. She extricated herself and traveled through the house to the front door and out onto the lawn, which was full of long shadows. e air was growing cooler. James was putting signs into a red truck. He smiled as she approached. “So hey,” he said. “Give me your number. You can help me canvas“Okay,”sometime.”shesaid.

JesusWhenChrist.Diane and Megan were alone, Diane shut the door and said, “So what’s going on?”

Once her father had asked her, “What are your big goals?” and she said, “To have a normal life.” He seemed disappointed by this, so she added, “Far away from here,” and he smiled.

On Monday, Megan was all smiles, greeting the professors with a cheerful “good morning!” and asking them about their conferences as if she really cared. “I’ve never even been to Toronto!” she said to the new hire, a young woman who taught Civil Rights and the Media. She told a retiring curmudgeon that he didn’t look old enough to retire, even though he absolutely did. “What are you ladies smoking in here?” he said, and winked.

“He’s very careful about not being seen,” she said. “Plus, it’s so exciting!”

Megan provided a very graphic description of what went down the previous evening with her boyfriend—she called him that—in his car, in the parking lot of her apartment complex.

“I loved it,” said Megan, in a tone that implied: Who wouldn’t?

Divided House, Becky Hagenston20

Megan leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “And? What if that’s exactly what I want? We bring out each other’s fantasies, Diane. He can’t be himself except with me. You don’t have to understand it, but don’t give me that look like you’re judging me.”

“Of course I’m judging you,” Diane said, and then the phone rang and Megan plucked it up with a cheerful, “Hello history department can I help you?” and a student knocked on the door looking for a stapler.

fiction

“A blow job in a car is not careful or exciting,” Diane pointed out. “And this was something you enjoyed?”

When Diane was 20 she was involved with an older man, too. He wasn’t married, but he was an asshole. When he told Diane he was seeing other women she said it was ne, even though it wasn’t ne. Had women made so little progress? For the rest of her three-hour shift, Megan kept her headphones on and sat at her desk dutifully licking mailings, then she stacked them up and took out her homework. She answered the phone when it rang. At noon, she gathered her backpack and said, “See you on Wednesday,” very politely, and Atleft.just before ve, Cecile from the French department called Diane to cancel the dinner they’d planned for two weeks—Cecile, whom Diane had comforted during her divorce, whose dog she’d walked when Cecile had back surgery. Cecile had promised Diane a girls’ trip to Paris, but then she met a man online, and that was the end of talk of trips, and apparently now the end of meeting up for dinner. “Everything okay?” Diane asked sharply, so Cecile would have to lie: “Just feeling a little under the weather.” She gave a very fake-sounding cough.

Diane was never a blow-job-in-the-car kind of person. How could that be anything but uncomfortable and humiliating? “He’s treating you like a hooker,” she said.

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Haley wondered if she should tell them that James texted her and asked her to a movie. Her mother would say: “Isn’t he too old for you?” and her father would say, “Delete his number.” And then she wouldn’t have to talk with James about all the canvassing she’d never done, all the protests she neverButjoined.herfather said, “He’s a good kid. I used to work with his father at Extension.” Haley’s father traveled around the state and talked to farmers about their crops. Haley could not imagine anything more boring. “Anyway, you should go.”

“But he’s a college dropout,” Haley said, and her mother said, “You can’t be so judgmental, honey. Everyone has their own path in life.” Her mother was an optometrist who spent all day shining bright lights into people’s eyeballs so she could see their optic nerves.

Annoyed, turned on, and lonely, Diane went home and masturbated, thinking of that parked car, the windows steamed up, the married man crying out, the girl smiling. 4. “We should have him over for dinner,” Haley’s mother said. She meant the candidate. e silver fox.

“You mean him and his wife?” said Haley’s father. “Oh, her. Sure, she can come, too.”

Later, in her room, Haley took o all her clothes and stood in front of her mirror. She turned right and left and around, trying to see herself from the perspective of a college dropout. e only boy she’d ever made out with had stuck his tongue down her throat, his hand down her pants, then sighed and shuddered and cried a little on her shoulder. He was still crying when she went downstairs, where his mother was frying spam in a skillet. Her phone dinged and dinged and dinged. Ashley was texting her about a boy she liked; Katelyn was texting about the Spanish test. ey were not impressed when she told them about James. Ashley texted a poo emoji and Katelyn wrote what a loser u can do better!!!

Haley had once broken a boy’s heart by accident in the seventh grade. She’d once ridden a horse in Tennessee. She’d sung the National Anthem in a fth-grade assembly. She got a 74 on her last Spanish test. She had a Twitter account but there was nothing she wanted to say: she didn’t want to tweet about her teachers or her stupid parents or the cafeteria food, or the latest celebrity feud. She stared at James’s text: Wanna go see a movie? A movie? Who the hell went to movies anymore? Her parents might be idiots, but she wasn’t. A movie meant he’d come pick her up in his truck and they’d drive somewhere, maybe back to wherever he lived. He might have beer. Still naked, she sat on her bed and crossed her legs, feeling like a grown woman, as if this was something grown women did: texted while naked. Nude, that was the word. Nude, she wrote: A movie sounds fun! anks! en she changed the exclamation marks to periods. Keep it chill. A movie sounds fun. anks. 5. Megan called in sick for two days. Which was bullshit. On the second day, Diane found her address on the hiring paperwork and drove to her apartment after work. It was 90 degrees at 5 p.m., the leaves wilting and crisping on the trees. Students rode their bikes in the bike lanes, walked in pairs down the pavement, staring at their phones. Diane felt a ash of nostalgia for the northern shopping malls of her youth, the stacks of records at Sam Goody’s, the black velvet posters at Spencer’s Gifts. Why did the past seem like another planet? On Megan’s second day of work, she’d pointed at Diane’s watch and said, “How can you tell time on that?” And Diane listened, stunned, as Megan explained that nobody her age used an actual clock. “So you have no idea what the big hand and little hand mean?”

Diane asked, and Megan laughed: “Big hand, little hand, that’s hilarious.”

fiction Divided House, Becky Hagenston22

Megan lived behind the Walmart, in a brick apartment complex with tiny balconies. She opened the door in her sweats, wearing glasses. She didn’t ask Diane what she was doing there. She just let her in and sank onto the sofa and crossed her arms. Diane went to the kitchen and stacked the

“Oh, you poor thing,” Diane murmured. She wanted to reach out and hug Megan, but she also wanted to slap her, so she did nothing. Instead, heart pounding, she asked, “What’s the most fucked up thing you ever did with him?” Her mind spun with scenarios. She couldn’t stop thinking about scenarios.Megan chewed, stared into space, swallowed. “Besides the blow jobs in the car?”

“Goddamn that motherfucker, give me one of those beers.” ey ate on the living room oor like picnickers. “Did you tell your mother about him?” Diane asked, even though she knew the Megananswer.laughed. She seemed thoroughly revived now, her cheeks ushed. “About blowing a married guy in my car? Or the time we fucked at the Comfort Suites on game day, or met up in Jackson and went to the zoo?”“ e zoo?”

“Fine, whatever,” said Diane. “I’m going to run get us something to eat.” She drove to McAlister’s for chicken salads and the Food Max for a sixpack of Guinness, and when she returned and let herself in, Megan was still on the sofa, but her eyes were bright with rage.

Diane asked: “Did you eat today?” Megan was huddled under a blanket like the survivor of a sea disaster. “Did you go to class? I know you’re not actually“I’msick.”inhell,” Megan intoned.

“I know, right? For some reason—” She paused. “For some reason, I thought that meant he loved me.”

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 23 dirty dishes, poured some curdled milk down the sink. It was easier to think when you weren’t surrounded by lth: that was her mother’s mantra.

“I guess hell hath no fury,” Diane said, trying to sound cheerful. She stood in front of the TV: a show about a big man trying to decorate a tiny house.“It’s nor hell a fury,” said Megan, perking up a little. “Everybody gets that wrong. Everybody thinks it’s Shakespeare but it’s William Congreve.”

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“What does that mean?” Diane asked. But Megan didn’t seem to hear. “He knows a lot about wine. His wife likes champagne.” She rolled her eyes. “I dated a terrible person once,” Diane said, because she wanted Megan to say, “Oh, really?” or “What happened?” but she said nothing. Megan had never asked Diane a single thing about herself. “Sometimes,” said Megan, “I think the only way out of this is to tell his wife. Like, I’m on a crashing plane and that’s the parachute, or something.” “Yes.” Diane nodded. “ at’s de nitely an option.” She wanted to say: But not yet. She wanted to say: is is the most excitement I’ve felt in years, but what did that say about her? She didn’t want to know.

Megan said, “Yeah, you too.” Still staring at her phone, she opened the front door for Diane, shut it behind her.

Megan’s phone buzzed. “Don’t,” said Diane, but Megan ignored her. “He misses me.” Megan downed the rest of her Guinness, texted furiously,—oh, these young people and their quick thumbs. “He’s coming over. Shit.” Megan was rising to her feet, grabbing up her plastic salad bowl, the packet of salad dressing. “I’ve gotta throw this stu out and get dressed. And can you take the rest of the beer with you? I don’t want him to know I was upset.” She stared down at Diane, still cross-legged on the oor, still chewing her chicken salad. Diane said: “Yeah.” She felt foolish, banished. She pulled herself to her feet, knees cracking. She waited for Megan to say thank you, but when this didn’t happen, she found her purse on the kitchen table, put the two remaining beers in their plastic bag. “Have a good weekend.”

“Does he go down on you in the car, too?” Diane asked. “I mean, it’s only fair.” at was just one of the scenarios. Her heart was lodged in her throat. e chicken was too dry.

“Well, it doesn’t work like that,” Megan said, as if Diane were a small and stupid child. “I do drink sometimes anyway,” she added, as if remembering this for the rst time. “Don’t tell my grandmother that. She thinks if I drink, I’ll end up like my mother.”

e candidate and his equally silver-haired wife arrived with a bottle of champagne and Haley’s mother said, “Oooh! Fancy!” and giggled like a fool. e candidate wore a sports coat and jeans, like Haley’s father; his wife wore a summer dress, like Haley and her mother. Her mother had made fried cat sh and hush puppies; she lled water glasses, she o ered wine, she o ered beer. “I’d love one a those ipas!” said the candidate. “Crack me open one of those, too,” said Haley’s father, beaming. When they were all seated at the dining room table, Haley’s mother said to the candidate, “Will you do the honors?” and Haley stared, shocked, as her atheist parents bowed their heads while the candidate murmured: “Dear Lord, bless this meal and these ne people. Keep us in your loving grace in these trying times, and may we continue to do your work here on earth, amen.”

“Speaking of which, may I have another liberal helping of hush puppies?” She wondered what James would be doing if he were here: probably telling them about the movie he and Haley had seen last night—he actually had wanted to see a movie. He’d picked her up in his red pickup and said, “You look nice,” and she felt her heart pounding, but then he just drove down Highway 12 to the Cineplex. e movie was a depressing documentary about civil rights in Mississippi. She’d listened enviously to the mu ed sounds of explosions and laughter coming from the next theater. He didn’t try to hold her hand. As he drove her home, he chattered on about something so boring she couldn’t even pretend to pay attention, and when he pulled up in front of her house he said, “I hope that gave you a lot to think about,” like he was her goddamn social studies teacher.

Her mother’s Amen! was loudest of all. e sh was too salty; the hush puppies too doughy. Haley was sitting next to the candidate’s wife, who seemed shy. She smiled at Haley and asked, “So what are you studying at school?” and Haley said, “Oh, the usual,” and stared at her sh. e candidate was talking about education, gun control, health care, getting out the Black vote. And Haley’s parents were nodding and chewing, nodding and chewing. “My opponent calls me a liberal like it’s an insult,” said the candidate, “but I think it’s a compliment!” He winked at Haley.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 25 6.

Now, the dining room seemed too bright; her mother was laughing too loudly. Haley had seen her drink two—or was it three?—glasses of wine before dinner. She knew her father had splashed on aftershave. ey were nervous, insecure people who wanted to make a good impression: they just wanted to be liked. She felt like she suddenly had X-ray vision.

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e candidate said to Haley’s father, “So you want to meet us down in the Delta sometime for dove hunting?” and Haley’s father said, “Sounds fun!”“You hunt?” Haley said. “Since when do you hunt?”

“I grew up hunting, honey,” said her father. “You knew that.” Did she? e candidate’s wife turned to Haley. She smelled of roses. She had smoker’s lines around her mouth. She said, “You’re so lucky to be young right now. It’s an exciting time. Your mom said you’re interested in politics?” Her mother was beaming, as if she believed it. Her father and the candidate had stopped talking and now everyone was looking at her, smiling at her, or some version of her. Maybe that’s all politics was: letting people believe what they wanted to believe, see what they wanted to see. Maybe she was already involved in it, just by sitting here calmly and not ipping over her chair and telling everyone to go to hell.

“Of course I am,” Haley said. “I feel like I can make a di erence.” She smiled. “ is was delicious, Mother. Let me clear the plates and check on the dessert.” She left them talking about what a wonderful young lady she was. In the kitchen, she opened the champagne and poured two slugs down her throat, wiped her mouth, and set about cutting the pecan pie.

By then, her rage had solidi ed into a ball. A bowling ball, perhaps, heavy and smooth with holes to jam your ngers into. She felt it gaining momentum. Maybe that’s why she did what she did—reached over and squeezed his crotch with her left hand. ey were parked outside her house; she could see the light on behind the front curtains. I hate us both, was what she meant, but he thought she meant something else. “Oh, okay,” he said, and unzipped and there didn’t seem to be any way to not keep doing what she was doing. He still didn’t kiss her. He laughed, said, “Well, that was unexpected,” and pulled some Kleenex from the glove compartment.

On Sunday night, she drank half a bottle of merlot and then drove, buzzed and stupid, back to Megan’s apartment. Her windows were dark. Her parking spot empty. Diane’s wristwatch—that anachronism—said it was 9:55, and that she should not be here. Big hand, little hand. Diane remembered being 20 years old, waiting for her boyfriend to call, the slow ticktock of the clock by the bed in her dorm. Time went in a circle; everybody knew that. Or so Diane thought. What did waiting feel like for someone like Megan, accustomed only to the digital ash of now now now? e next morning, Megan showed up to work on time, smelly and sullen, like she was daring Diane to re her. Diane didn’t ask where Megan was last night; she didn’t say anything when Megan started crying over the mailing labels. She shut the door and waited. Megan lifted her head and stared at Diane, mascara-streaked. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. “He never showed up that night. After you left? And now I’ve screwed this guy from my biology class? I don’t know what I’m doing.” “ is has got to stop.” Diane wasn’t sure if she was talking to Megan or herself. She wondered what Megan would say if she knew Diane had sat in her car outside Megan’s apartment until midnight, the big hand and little hand on top of one another, brief and tender, like lovers. “I know,” Megan said. She swiped at her eyes. When the phone rang, Diane answered it: “History department, please hold!”Someone was knocking. A voice outside the door called, “Is anybody in there?”Megan lowered her voice. “You know what? He’s all into like social justice and doing the right thing, but he won’t even keep his word.”

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On Saturday, Cecile texted Diane to say, “Let’s have a girls’ night!” Diane ignored her, and ignored her mother calling from New Hampshire to say she was getting that knee replacement after all. She ignored her brother’s email: How bout Disney for Christmas? She ignored the divorced math professor who wanted to know if Diane would “like to grab a drink,” and she didn’t bother looking up the Bible verse after his signature.

Diane waited for Megan to say something like: “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” but instead she leaned even farther away from Diane, her eyes hard. “Jesus,” Megan said. “Did you call the police on him when he hit you?”“Of course I did,” Diane lied. She had continued to sleep with him for another month or two until one day he said, “Yeah, I don’t think this is working out.” She cried for weeks, unked out and retook her classes and unked out again. Megan had turned back to the envelopes, stu ng and stamping, stamping and stu ng. e tears were gone. “Well, I’d obviously never put up with something like that.”

And then Megan was crying again, and Diane hugged her and said: “I’ll drive you. You have to be brave. You don’t want to end up like me, do you?” And she was grati ed and ashamed when Megan sni ed and said, “No, no, you’re right, I don’t.”

Diane pulled her chair around so her knees were touching Megan’s. e phone was still ringing. Her desk was piled with paperwork, travel forms, hiring forms, so many fucking forms. She said: “When I was your age, I was dating an older guy, too. When he hit me, I thought I deserved it.” She had never said this out loud before. “When he called me a slut, I thought it was true.” She reached for one of Megan’s hands, but Megan turned away.

“You said it yourself. It’s the only way out. Don’t just send an email. Let her see Meganyou.”looked afraid, and Diane realized that this was what she wanted.

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“Tell his wife,” Diane said now. Megan stamped and licked.

Diane wanted to say: You have no idea what you’d do. Later, she would wonder if she wanted to humiliate Megan or help her, and then decide it didn’t matter. e following week, Megan would quit without notice; Diane would interview fourteen eager students with resumes on thick old-timey paper and hire a shy business major, a khaki-pants-wearing boy who would leave at the end of the semester to go on a mission trip to Guatemala.

“She’ll hate me.” “Who cares? She’ll hate him more.”

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fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 29 8.

Canvassing, it turned out, was a lot of standing around feeling stupid. It was waiting on porches while dogs barked; it was sticking iers on doorknobs and watching them blow away; it was saying, “Have a nice day!” when people slammed the door in your face. And yet here Haley was, waiting for James to come pick her up to do more of it. It was a windy Saturday afternoon; the heat of the summer had broken; the ginkgo trees outside her bedroom window were like yellow ames. Her father had gone to the Delta to hunt doves with the candidate, and her mother had just come back from the grocery store, and her Spanish homework was spread out neatly on her desk, as if she intended to do it.

Last weekend, she and James had gone to a neighborhood behind the hospital, tiny clapboard houses, swing sets. He had an app on his phone that showed what registered voters lived in each house: reds meant Republicans, so they avoided those. Blue was Democrat, and they were generally nice, taking the iers and saying, “Good luck!” A blue and a red was a divided house. e man, James said, was usually the Republican, and the woman was the Democrat. If you got the woman to answer the door, she’d probably at leastSometimeslisten. they didn’t, though. One woman said, “ ere’s no way,” but took the ier before she slammed the door. Another one actually looked afraid, her eyes darting around her own yard as if she was seeing it for the rst time. “You shouldn’t be here,” she murmured, and shut the door gently. James said they were doing great service for the Black community, which made Haley squirm—especially when he said it to the Black people who answered the door. “We’re blessed to be able to help spread the word,” he actually said. en later to Haley: “It’s important to be able to speak theirAfterlanguage.”twohours of this, James had said, “I think we’ve done our civic duty,” and took her back to his house, a duplex on College Avenue. Someone was playing guitar next door. He kissed her this time, but that’s all they did. His lips were chapped and sticky. When he dropped her o at her house, he took out his phone and showed her the app. “Isn’t that cute?”

Divided House, Becky Hagenston30 he said. “Your parents are both blue dots.” She got out of the car before anything could happen, and when he drove away she had the feeling like when you wake from an annoying dream. So why had she agreed to canvas again? What the hell was wrong with her? His last text had seemed desperate—Would love to save the world with you again tomorrow!!! Pick u up at 1? She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She didn’t want to be rude. He was probably on his way right now, his truck full of signs with the candidate’s name in big blue letters, iers that would litter the Beforeyards.she could talk herself out of it, she texted: Turns out I can’t, sorry! Spanish test! and a frowny face, because that was kinder than the truth, that she didn’t like him and didn’t give a shit about saving the world, only saving herself from another insu erable afternoon. Downstairs, her mother was singing loudly over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Outside, a blue car was pulling into the driveway. Haley watched from her window as her old babysitter Megan emerged from the passenger side, her hair blowing in the wind; a blonde woman sat frowning behind the wheel. e doorbell rang; the vacuum cleaner stopped. Haley heard her mother saying, “Why, hello!” in a loud, surprised voice. Haley had the odd thought that Megan was also canvassing; that she’d forgotten who lived here. She thought there might be laughter: Oh! I don’t need to tell you who to vote for! But there wasn’t. Later, Haley would nd bright yellow ginkgo leaves that had swept into the house with the wind: she would nd them under the kitchen table, and in the corner of the living room, and in the hallway outside the bathroom. ey would seem beautiful but dangerous, as if they actually were made of ames, as if they could burn everything to the ground.

fiction

Mary Jo Salter

Jury Duty

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Mary Jo Salter

Jury Duty, Mary Jo Salter

In the great hall of the War Memorial Building the jurors are waiting. ey’re on folding chairs, and wearing their sticker-badges; it’s all so boring sitting there till your number’s up, not knowing if you’ll be serving at all, and if so, for weeks on end or a day, that in the beginning some of them nd themselves leaning back and squinting to read the (“Meuse-Argonne;engravings79th Division”) on the massive moldings lining the thirty-foot ceiling, although by now the words mean nothing. * Most people are checking their phones. Not many books. One woman is chuckling at a cat video in her palm, and one old fellow who was neatly folding and unfolding his actual, physical newspaper gets up: he’s walking along the polished marble walls to study the bronze plates listing

poetry Jury Duty, Mary Jo Salter32 by county (for easy reference by family members, not one still living) all the dead doughboys of the state; he stops, he reads, keeps going. * And now, forced television. A football movie about guys grunting and slamming helmet to helmet; then there’s one, if you aren’t looking when the opening credits run, or are hard of hearing, which seems to be something about the Nazis, until the special e ects con rm you’re watching Captain America, a futuristic soldier from the past of cartooning.

Even the most resistant among the jurors are caught consulting the exploding screen now and then; after a while they all are paying so much attention, the clerk seems rude to call them: he’s interrupting.

It’s time he escorted some jurors across the street to another looming old edi ce, the colonnaded courthouse, its white face baking impartially in the sun. Fresh air! e jurors can’t help rejoicing. A man sleeps on a bench. Past a boarded-up shop some trash is blowing. e jurors are still happy. ey’ll never complain again, they’re thinking, if they can get o ; on such a nice day, who would opt to spoil it hearing about people hurting each other, or to have to say which ones are guilty?

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Man-Barbies, Mary Jo Salter34 at’s how my two daughters referred to their two Kens— just two of them, among the legions of leggy, big-haired Barbies, each of whom went to bed alone and had plenty of room in her own sedan-shaped box of Kleenex.

poetry

One by one, not meaning to skew the ultimate balance of the sexes, I’d bought girl-dolls for birthdays and Christmases, or because it was nobody’s birthday or holiday but my girls wanted something new. Me too. I tired of hacked-o hairdos after the games of Beauty Parlor; of tiny high heels without a mate; of permanently tiptoed feet smeared in nail polish like bloody excuses for shoes. Yet rarely did buying a fresh Ken seem any kind of solution. And since Man-Barbies didn’t even care what they wore, why get them extra clothes? Besides, my girls were clearly growing too old for dolls. I was shocked one day to overhear a Barbie had had an abortion.

Man-Barbies

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Which Ken had been the father? Or was that even a question? Man-Barbies were an enigma. Maybe each Ken was a token husband for my girls themselves, in which case there mustn’t be more. Could it be that one Man-Barbie stood for their dad, and the other for the brother they’d never had? Too much interpretation, surely. My daughters liked girl-Barbies, being girly. Which meant they chose one day to sashay out as women in their own Barbie heels and looked around amazed, as I had once: how many Man-Barbies were out there, each of them wanting something new!

I drive from Point A to a point the highway slims to. My future is this bright aperture, this needle-eyed beyond. e highway slims to a lone lane. Gauges limit me— this need will lie beyond the road, to the siren singalong alone. Language limits me lately. I’ve lost the pulse of the road to the sirens signaling move to the shoulder. I wait. Lately I’ve lost the pulse containing me. Later I left (coward move) to shoulder the weight. Grief grew long in me, containing me later. I left, coward to chance, and the wild vining of grief grew along with me. How I couldn’t go back to chance, and the wild vining of my fear without break. How I couldn’t go back in time. Begin.Sun’swell down, low. Answers my fear. Without break I drive from Point A to a point in time begging,Sun, swell down slow. And swear my future is this brighter aperture.

In the way these animals come circling, even after they’ve seen the worst of us— blood plugging up our heads, soaked in what’s theirs. But they forget. Foot before foot to salt and bait, the outstretched hand smells so good. God, that could drive a body.

The Animal, Hannah Sanghee Park

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Fast I have already forgotten what hurt me. I bow to the new like a cut ower, hangdog.

Everything that makes me up left violently— star and hominid and warring ancestor.

To burn the land until every tree is turtlenecked in char, wind carrying out its worst, until the air stinks of something we’ve killed and can’t stop killing. e animal was opened to the sky like a grand piano. Its maggots pumping their oily bellows in hunger.

Whatever it was, went fast. Felled wet by one gunshot. e ground listened through its sour mushroom ears. e kill fell spilled and they darkened alive.

And everyone rubbernecking, a slack weakness the jaw wants to crush. To lure each eye to sleep—that’s the trick— to comfort, and then the god comes down.

Taught to lunge for the throat, throttling breath, body from head, voice from thought still shaping on the tongue.To end a thing requires steel and every nerve to never stop. at’s the trick of it.

I hate the world too wild and yet I am here.

poetry The Animal, Hannah Sanghee Park38 e promise of hope over cruelty. at what feeds you has already fed. It is what moves foot before foot toward you. Somewhere my end is marked but I will not know it. I will only know this mercy. So faster and faster I feed, unafraid. And if this is really the ttest of me, what’s fated, what survived of me— forgive me. But look: I do not inch. I eat, believing in this that I am being loved, and ll the eyes of my body until I forget.

theyLong-eared,hadlong heard of the boys: the threats of their hands: the wantedboystheir pelts: the winters unkind to their kind. is thesenature:wasalwayslittlewars for resources. e boundedharesfrom them in a wisdom. ey would lope up knowingmountains,their legs at birth were strong: come spring-loaded with kick and bolt. Born with their eyes as open as tree rings, they saw the boys: hobbled by the known thunder of their treads: asshoutingtheytried to follow: failing stealth. Born helpless and themwhateverweak,madehumanwas taught over years. Hares, Hannah Sanghee Park

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The Hares, Hannah Sanghee Park40 is dominion:was that no mountain was greater than want: that want was the mission. Now older, they chased the hares but this downtimethe mountains. And the hares ed: haste ustered them: their couldlegsnot nd ground: their heads, their ne backs kept rolling down betrayinglandthem.enthemenpounced. Dashed them until they were still. e men were proud: they brought back the small corpses: they bragged over the shine of their beers and tongues: we have done what eludedonceus.eylearned: but the hares could not: so they andwarmer,grewfuller:theharesscared, and the hares scarce.

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poetry The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 41 Back then they all believed in the abundance of the world: it madewas for them to take: the budding, the breeding: none of wouldit end. It was made for their pleasure: don’t you see: none of this will run out. y will: to outrun: and be done with it: to Nowoverrun.toreign over the rest. Now theyforgettingwere powerless: forgetting the terror of when they met their limits: can you imagine a world like that.

In the dream of the life you did or did not live, disease spins eddies in the blood of your kin and bullets do what they will in the dark. Yet the repast still smells of fried cat sh and ham hocks—someone must make a run for more hot sauce. In the dream that is memoir, you died before a king tide swept through the city and reshaped coastline and inland escape without bias, before anyone could solve the brutal mystery of blue—you never gave Maggie Nelson the time of day. What about gray— the brain’s subtle decay, another coast left lifeless, left longing in rank silence.

Like the perfect bend of a switch, the turn takes time to master. In the dream of life, this sonnet is the sole box you’ll sleep in.

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e story always starts with slaves, a sucked-up swamp, some ill-placed railway, and generations worth of loot overstu ed into bags & bull-knotted around the ankles of the not yet dead. Later, the capital starts to play its bloody melody. Song of Solomon, your choice book in the good word. ere was a poet deep inside you when you said, you got to bring yours to get mine, when you curved orange and road, and planned a grandchild’s whooping.

poetry Sonnet # 7 , Jalen Eutsey44

For Biker Boy Will How could America ever love you?

She don’t know what to do with all your swagger and braggadocious bluster, the gum- apping

wolf—pronounced woof—tickets. You said, the losing team’s son aint gon eat tonight. You said the game was for ve racks. You could lie your ass o . You said, this shit is really really hard But of course, there is a mother’s protection— my old girl kept me in the house and I thank her for that.

She misunderstands your fresh pressed white T, the gaudy ticking gold on your left wrist, the swim trunks and tted, the retro Js gracing the grimy pink-red outside courts.

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Flight

Flight to Portland, Jalen Eutsey to Portland

We all have weak, uncontrollable bladders, brutally boxed in on this Boeing Airbus. e head ight attendant is a whip of a man, tall and southern, his brisk walk only bested by the tempo of his tongue. His quick wit I suspect is both weapon and shield, from what I wonder? e itter in his voice when he says down, makes an older gentleman chuckle and reminisce on a past lover. All of us on this full ight have named him I’m sure— Boy Wonder, Rude Boy, Waylon, maybe. I’m a ight attendant, I’ve had it all, he says. Any other questions?

It wasn’t the usual Saturday morning. Chris had received four letters through the post, by way of Car Craft, answering his query of a couple weeks ago. One was of particular interest: Mine looks like a minor grade but it gives a torque and speed of a hobby grade.. I’m going to do my other builds.. an RC motor with the speed of a hobby grade stock... another scale crawler, my second prototype.

“I’ll give someone a slap for you,” Chris replied. He walked away, thinking, how little their eyes were. How little and grey.Fifth match of the season—against Everton—and leaves on the ground today. Chris loved this time of year, the quickening cold every morning. We (the Service Crew, I mean) get enlivened by this drop in temperature, he thought, and imagined saying it to a posh TV reporter. A right proper English tradition like clockwork, he elaborated. e rst time I got rounded up and herded back to the cop shop, I remember being congratulated by older

Chris felt around in his coat pocket. ank God. Still there, didn’t forget.“

“Paint job on the house. Vans, ladders, stu everywhere. . . . ” “Polish. From Poland,” said Chris, quietly. “ ey’re blocking the whole street.”

One of the children glanced quickly into the room, then withdrew.

e whole fucking street,” Dean repeated. And then said it again.

“See you later, right?” Dean was saying, and didn’t wait for an answer.

“We’ll meet in the Regent at 11. Hang on for some stomping, mate.” Chris nodded and left. e children were sitting on the doorstep. He handed them the fake fruit, hard balls of sugar, from his pocket.

“Go, Crew!” they said in unison.

“What the hell,” Chris had moaned. “Two prototypes?” He’d gone into the shed and stared at what should look like a car by this time. After ten minutes he read the letter again and realized that the person was talking about model miniatures, not a home-built vehicle. It was getting that bad.

t was odd how Dean ate. So thought Chris, sitting opposite. e fork was all askew, waved to the left. e knife did everything.

“ ose fucking whatever-they-are in number 33. . . .” said Dean.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 47 lads of the rm and feeling top of the world. It was great, sitting there with long-time casuals, feeling like part of them. e reporter was a serious young woman from the south, intrigued and terri ed. What a thrill, interviewing a real-life hooligan! Chris extended the fantasy to a long interview in the drizzling rain. e cameraman gave them an umbrella and beneath it they felt like friends. e main problem is getting all the lads drunk at the same level, at the same time, Chris explained further, in a con ding tone, but this silent conversation was replaced by genuine worry. All drunk at the same time? Equally snappy and wanting more, not dulled. Not staggering up bruised and happy, seven pints down before the o cial round-up. Once, Murph—Dean’s lieutenant—had appeared at the last minute with a bleating under-ager from somewhere in London at the end of his shoe. Dean had been enraged. Dean was into the ceremony of the whole thing, said it was kinky sex to the head if you just waited. Watching Dean seek out a war was something else. Remarkable, said/thought Chris to his new reporter friend. Something else. e street had that edgy yet aimless feel; the odd open door, sound of radio. Chris was home in ten minutes via the corner shop where yet another kid stared as he bought a copy of Car Craft. Outside, he turned to the problem page. His query would certainly be o cially printed this week. It was. Fourth in line, and in terrible company. People asked the stupidest questions: My break calipers have rust on them. It’s noticeable. Is it the alloy or the aftermarket rim? Should have used high-heat engine paint to begin with, Chris guessed. True.His own question hadn’t been anywhere near as ridiculous. Once he got home, he made a cup of tea and skim-read his advice from the agony uncle, Bob Q. Recall: You ask what everyone’s experience with unsprung weight is, when you nally go on a test drive? Well, . . .fully laden weight. . . .most valid basis for comparison. . . .650 pounds. . . .tire/wheel assemblies (exclusive of brakes, axles and suspension linkages. . . . 1,000 pounds. Using the two-up weight. . . .500 pound unsprung mass. . . .lower. . . .acceleration forces. . . .Rgds, and good luck, Bob.

fiction Spartan, Jane Lewty48 Warm and energized, Chris reread this morning’s postal replies. You daft wally, someone called “Shep” had written. It depends on road irregularity!!! Chris liked Shep’s tone—exacting yet indulgent. He liked his/ her handwriting, which was spiky in some places and looped in others. He imagined Shep also drinking tea, reading kit car magazines and letters from invisible new collaborators. He created a pressing issue for Shep which only he, Chris, could solve. Shep needed reassurance after laying out for a Locust 7 chassis. You don’t need a whack of money, wrote Chris in his head, I’m building a Spartan Roadster, and it’s slow but steady. 10:02 a.m. Chris could feel the inching of threat, his threat, his own power rising then lessening, rising again. He screwed up the other letter, the misinterpreted one about the toy car, and noticed the postcode. Derby. Blue scum, he mouthed. Weak. A weak rm. He went to the shed and peered in. ere was sandpaper and rivets all over the cold oor. e vehicle looked carved,Deanunfamiliar.hadphoned him at six a.m. asking for his Diadora jacket and so Chris had gone round and got chatting, and now time was ticking on. He felt the swell in his throat again, the anticipation. He needed this ritual— more tea, choosing clothes, revving himself up. He’d been mocked last week for wearing a Benetton T-shirt. Fila, yes. Tacchini, okay. Stone Island meant you were serious about having a ght. Benetton? Don’t bother. Chris pulled a Lyle & Scott V-neck sweater from a drawer. It was the wrong color. en a pair of Farahs. Also not quite right. He felt a bit stuck. If it was a late afternoon game, they’d all go “shopping” beforehand, mainly for Lacoste polos, but not today. Chris wondered how you could steal a buttondown shirt. Ben Sherman, to be precise. ey were always on hangers, not folded. But people had started to wear them; there was new garb on the terraces. It had started to confuse everyone including the police. Evil rioter or nicely-dressed gent? Dean had been wearing a deerstalker hat all season. It was funny to watch him slide over to unprotected groups of two or three casuals, saying, “Please do you have the time, boys?” and their nervy look of bewilderment.Chrisgot the iron out, enjoying the methodical pressing up down, up across. He admired the straight seam, the hot folds, and felt better about the

Last week a van had driven into the stadium forecourt, and there was an impromptu strip-and-search. A few Service Crew members had got caught out, which was annoying since it meant they were being watched more than usual. e best retaliation—Dean had said—was not to change anything from now on. Tool-up like fuck. Always. More each week. And use what God gave you. And whatever’s lying around. A kick or a brick. Brick. Odd how the mind works—Chris was suddenly remembering that empty patch of land years ago, where a car dealership used to be. A place of sweepings and clutter, where grass and the strangest of orange owers grew a little, fell, and became the veins of the ground. Or like marks left by the tide on a beach. ey’d called themselves a gang then, before they joined the Crew and it all became formal. ey’d wait for other gangs to pitch up. Skinheads. Chris would hold cool and jagged objects in his hand, and lope towards a body or a face like his own. Loping, that’s what it was. A slow motion control, a slight tensing of the thigh muscles. Ideal for swinging a whip cord with ve tails, then a homemade chain whip. Once, he’d pushed one of those other faces into barbed wire and made diamond shapes in the skin, watching the blood well up, then recede, then smear. He stopped by the shed again, before he left, and brie y wondered how he would feel if the next time he looked the car was gone. Nothing left but a dusty square. I live with my mother, he told Shep. She has the bedroom. I have the room downstairs. e car of course is outside, undercover. e street was becoming restless. More people, fans moving east towards the stadium. More radio sound. rough habit, Chris quickened his pace, moving his eyes fore and back. He felt a subtle shift in his chest. Here I am. en, the slotting of recognition at Murph and the rest, arranged in a strange tableau against the white walls of the Regent. Almost immobile. Some sitting, some standing. Barbour jackets, Ellesse.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 49 Farahs. He stared in the mirror, and felt that his forehead was too small. He tried to ick up the front of his hair, was that right? Bending to slip on his shoes he pulled the leftside parting back into place. He combed it, using the blade he’d probably take along today, and then felt silly and clichéd. When younger he’d thought the Suzie Quatro posters on his wall were looking at him. He felt as much now.

fiction Spartan, Jane Lewty50

“Bad out t,” said Murph, staring at the Farahs.

“It’s going to be a lively one—are you loaded up?” asked someone else. “Not really. Light stu . Blade. Coins.”

Chris re ected on how he’d spent ages sanding down edges of two pence pieces, when the car got too much. Very e ective from two feet away, thrown and arced towards the eye. On contact with esh they’d make a sound like a wing. A delicate rustle. Something settling in its nest.

A kid on a bike was shouting that the SC-Troop boys had jumped the rst trainload of Everton fans. Nothing to be jealous about. e rst wave was usually novices, interspersed with dads and lads. Another type of community. I’m an avid soccer supporter, continued Chris, in his head, to Shep. It’s a nice way to relax after working all week. Work? I do a bit of this and that. It was regular for Crew boys to hop on public transport at city limits and get a few scu es going. ey’d run up the aisles slapping faces. Or simply stand by the doors and chant. Chris had never done it but he envisaged the trains being like the one in that lm, e Cassandra Crossing. Filled with fear and pestilence, hurtling towards certain disaster. Chris followed the others into the pub, where Dean was on the payphone. Mu ed voices, heads crowding. Analytical orientation. e roundup’s at Norward Street. Hand out a little treatment on the way, nothing serious, don’t crack o yet. Someone will be there with bottle crates. Tool up but not so you can’t move. When we get in the ground, nd the top rank, they’ll be at the front. ey want glory. What have you got? Darts. Blades. Put a knife to anyone’s neck who charges late, you’ll have time by then. Get into their end early but stop short of the north stand, they won’t expect that. row whatever we can tear up, it should rain down. Annex the cunts. Shout ready, aim, re. Make them look the other way. Always good to end with a severe bricking they don’t expect.

“Fuck o ,” said Chris.

Dean put down the receiver, straightened, said, “Just remember they’re only human.” Laughter. en drinks. Pints, three, quickly. Cigarettes. ey stood, arranged as they always were, tense and foot-tapping, arguing over strategy, reliving the glory of out-of-town wars. Like the time they lost to

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 51

“Listen to this,” Murph was saying. “ ree Service Crew mice are sitting in a bar, going on about how tough they are. e rst mouse says, I walk into traps, then I bench press them and eat the cheese. e second mouse says, that’s nothing, I snort rat poison pellets, I’m o my head, I am. e third slams his pint down and says, I’m o home to fuck the cat.”

Shrewsbury Town with a twice-taken penalty, and ran into the English Border Front lads afterwards. ey were outnumbered when they reached the old mining shaft, but hurled railway ballast into the darkness anyway and caused some damage. And the time those mad Millwall bastards hid in a graveyard and ambushed them on the way to the station, waiting with everything you could imagine, hammers, sticks, you name it and the whole lot of them—both rms—dancing around like ghouls, tripping over urns, kicking each other in the balls. A knife went into someone’s arm. Right place, right time, it was concluded. More laughter and almost crying with it. e dinosaur bullies were propping up the bar. All in their 40s or 50s with cropped hair and denim jackets, somewhat mysti ed at the Pringle and Slazenger-wear. Dinosaur bullies were only useful for rear guard action. Some had a classic story or two, but they couldn’t really ght all morning or run with a mob, snapping antennae o cars and throwing canisters. Once, last season, they’d smacked a few civilians, including an old lady, and that was getting taboo now. ere were new rules of engagement. Violence was only legit against someone just like you— rm against rm, town against town. Splits had appeared, though. e SC-Troop faction in particular. Little plastic wannabes with their Sta-Prest trousers, like a TV advert. ere was no hierarchy, no intergroup order. ey were all talk and no action. Getting away with it, calling themselves football casuals without incurring injury or accepting that sometimes you just lost out. Weak devotees of theory, thought Chris. He liked that phrase but didn’t say it out loud. He nished his beer and immediately started another. My Spartan is on its way, he told Shep, minus the rear fenders, taillights, grille and hood ornament. en he realized how defeatist that sounded. He tried again. I saved up for an old engine that came with a carburetor from the factory I used to work at. How did you feel, Shep, when you saw that detached framework for the rst time, and knew you had to ll it with stu ?

Police were milling around outside. Cone heads. Pigs. All pu ed up in their vests.“We don’t want chaos today,” said one, as they walked past. “Our streets!” shouted Chris, surprising himself. In formation, he and the rest instinctively spread out, making their group seem larger. It was balletic. Other casuals merged into their route, from other pubs and out of doorways: a beautiful outnumbering ow, nameless and interchangeable. at was the beauty of these times. e dinosaur bullies had been a minority group in their day. A close-knit mob where the liaison cops knew them on rst-name terms. Oh Terry, you again? Give me that knife. Get in the car, “Rememberson. when they took our fucking laces away?” Dean said, over his shoulder. Chris remembered well, a particularly good smash-andgrab day in the ’78 season, around the time that Doc Martens were still being worn. “Over here, boot boys,” the copper had said. An old bastard, committed to the rules: remove the laces, remove the problem. ey’d all stood around blankly lifting one knee then the next. en, as in one body, they all kicked their useless shoes away, turned and ran. Ran screaming towards the walls of the ground, scaling feet of terrain. Lighter and vicious, ripping the electrical wires that hung down from the fencing. Non- rm Everton fans were out in force now, moving the same way. Lots of to-and-fro. Chris wondered how long. How long until. He felt watched again, like the posters, but it was a good kind of watching. Coins in his pocket instead of fruit candy. I’ll nish the car, he thought. It all felt like the same thing now. I really lose myself for hours, Shep. He circled a lamppost, moved closer to Dean and felt their bodies imperceptibly ex in tandem. ere was a wedding party on Kilburn High

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Spartan, Jane Lewty52

Widespread mirth in the bar. Chris observed that the joke was a bit tame for Murph who was irting with English supremacy these days and not because of social credit theory either. Murph hadn’t a clue. It was more about his sister’s boyfriend Jaswinder and other personal grievances. It had to end somewhere. Chris didn’t want to think about it. Time to go. Shut up, come on, shut up, shut up, said everyone to each other. ey made their way in single le out the side exit of the Regent.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 53 Road. It was very incongruous. Casuals in their button-up high-necked shirts weaved amongst the guests who smelled like violets and Lambrusco. A half sentence swerved into Chris’s head—And others it killed. Where from? Where had he heard it? Television? A newspaper? He was in the midst now. Not long. And others it killed. He heard distant shouting from streets away. Smashing. Too much beer too soon. “You’re a fucking disgrace,” said a man in a blazer as they moved by. ey crossed the junction with Norwood Street. A line of red terraced houses, no gardens and a blind alley xed with a police car, its occupants staring left to right. A cordite aroma hung in the air, and from afar, in those other streets—audible now—the Everton Cutters, screaming their phrase, We’ll have you. Chris followed Dean sharply into a side street ere were crates and crates of bottles stacked against a fence, and a young girl handing them out, silent and watchful. Cold glass tucked into the waistband, and they were out again—running across the road that circled the town and beneath the underpass, with its dual carriageway above. Momentarily, Chris caught sight of gra ti on the inner walls: knob and pussy and born a bitch, die a seagull. He wondered if that last phrase was written by someone like him. Someone who spoke into the recesses of his own head, half-sentences, letters to people who listened with ease. And others it killed. Upon emerging into the light, Chris felt his rm strengthened on each ank, two streams of bodies, coming down the foot-ramp and grass banks. e stadium was in front of them as were hundreds of faces, Service Crew and Cutters, locked in a world. ere was suddenly vomit and there was blood and there was pain. And wolves and scum. “Stand up!” Dean was shouting, his neck rigid. Mob up. Hook them, hook them. Chris thought no, there’s too many. We can’t. He reached for the coins, the blade. But why now? “ is wasn’t the plan!” he heard himself saying to the Crew casual next to him, who was rotating and sweating in panic. ere was an immense crush of Cutters. Nicely turned out in the best terracewear, as well. He heard Dean’s voice again: “Stand, don’t run.” e Crew never backs down. ere was something odd in the way the mounted police were poised. Motionless. Usually they’d strike at the rst hint of a riot and you’d nd yourself pressed organ-to-organ against a creature that could kill you. But

fiction Spartan, Jane Lewty54 they were two horses deep, lined against the entrance, just watching. Chris felt something solid y overhead: a gas canister. His shoulder gave way and he felt the familiar surge of red-blinding rage, his wrist becoming metallike as he grabbed and hit, his own voice shouting above all the others. He saw Dean—elegant and curiously slow—bend to the ground and make a downstroke from left to right on a fallen body. e canister ignited and hissed through the crowd, skewing the surge. en another. Where from? Not the police, impassively corralling. Chris backed leftward, towards the concrete bleachers separating the underpass from the edge of the ground. He leaned against them, taking raw painful breaths. Someone came running over with news, shouting. ey’d thrown canisters into houses as well, there were res. Chris felt a a null kind of acceptance, then exhilaration, and then guilt. He almost heard the splintering and the ssshh, threaded into his immediate surround sound. A window, a baby crying, the distress. “Got to give them this one,” he said, and wondered if he should laugh. A pale blue ash: Dean’s jacket, as he disappeared into the underpass with Murph and a few others. Chris followed. ey were holding a young boy, de nitely a Cutter, but not valuable. He was wearing a Ben Sherman polo. “You cunt, you little cunt,” Dean kept repeating. His voice was a refrain over murmuring phrases that seemed to be on a tape loop: I don’t know where. Where are we going? Shall we bother? e match is delayed, that’s why. e cops had us, they let this happen. e boy spat in Dean’s face. Dean smiled and was quiet. He folded his hands across his stomach in an almost monk-like bene cient gesture. ere was a bloodstain around his crotch. Chris suddenly felt panic. Why do we carry bottles? en, a sensation he couldn’t place. A faint nausea. Echo of arousal. Electric. e thing is, he explained to Shep, the whole football culture is derived from instincts that have been with us for millions of years; they won’t go away overnight, and they also come in handy when war, disaster or con ict is upon us. ey have their rightful place in the modern game.

“Broad daylight,” Dean said, “Broad daylight.”

White wisps of smoke were unfurling into the tunnel. “Can you hear the dogs?” said someone to the boy. And yes, there was barking now and the sound of car horns. en, they stopped talking. Chris counted eight Crew members, some bending down with their hands on their knees. Murph was pacing behind Dean, and gave Chris a icker of a glance. Here we go. A line arranged itself in Chris’s head, from another magazine he’d not bought but icked through in the shop. It was about Bloody Mary and all those people she’d burned at the stake for going to the wrong church. On one day, the wind was slow and the martyrs su ered. He felt ashamed for being so literal. Like dreaming of your teeth falling out after a battle in real life.

“Where’s your crew?” said Dean and kicked the boy in the guts. Everyone stirred into life, but there was a mutedness, as if no one knew how to carry on. It only lasted a few seconds, with di erent gradations of thud. Chris hung back, a noise building in the depths of him. His body, such a strange machine. A tightening and then hardness. Blood coursing. Dean’s blood in that area, too. e boy was trying to crawl between peoples’ legs, grabbing calves that had kicked him seconds before. He was in tatters, he was screaming all the wrong things. Light bodies ran past, no one stopped. Fiorucci, Stan Smith, Burberry, Adidas, Le Coq Sportif, Armani, Allegri. e town had broken up, and Chris knew how the streets would seem after this. I was a right charmless little shit, a magnet for trouble but I grew up, he said/thought to Shep who was fading, as people who never answer always fade. Instead, an image of Dean and himself swung into focus. ey were dinosaur bullies, much older. ey were walking on a patch of waste ground against an illusory sky that had no day or month attached to it, just blankness, grey and deadened. An abandoned fridge was standing upright. Dinosaur bully Chris bent down and shifted his perspective so that the fridge was aligned with three towerblocks in the distance. Look, he said gently to dinosaur bully Dean. Look. It’s all the same thing, he said.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 55

And with a slow turn, here he was. Nowadays Chris. Not there. Breathing like some kind of heavy animal, dizzy and hurting so much for the broken town, and then for the boy who needed it to stop, to stop right now.

fiction Spartan, Jane Lewty56

Someone started whistling “Start!” by e Jam. ere was snu ing laughter and an instinctive, collective, step backwards. Cars were jammed nose-to-tail on the overpass and the sound of stalling engines fused into a underground hollow note that made the space seem bigger. “ ere’s Chris for you, there’s a stand-in,” said Dean, simply. e boy became very small. Chris expected coughing or some kind of retaliation, however futile, but the mouth and the body seemed to slip away and merge underfoot. Chris was borne away by the others, his own body shuddering. He looked back but as he re-entered the light all he saw was shards of gra ti. die a. bor. kn. e sirens were veering closer. ere was still disarray, but it felt like anti-establishment de ance. Generally destructive rather than brutish and controlled. Lone gures were being

“You want to get killed?” he, Chris, said suddenly, moving forward. He repeated it, shouting. He hadn’t meant to, it just came out. ere wasn’t an immediate knowledge of what was about to happen. But now it had to. ere was a suspended moment of confusion before Dean pushed everyone away and dragged the boy to a kneeling position, saying to him, “You think I’m bad? You think we’re bad?”

“I won’t tell anyone,” the boy gasped. His voice was high and helpless. Dean continued, swaying slightly; the patch of blood had spread to his thighs. He pointed at Chris. “Want to see what this fucker does on a Saturday?”en, for Chris, there was little but a chorus of noise. He saw that very phrase, chorus of noise. Perhaps it would become a line spoken later, in the Regent. Recounting a story of Crew members in assent, how they’d all got carried away. Go for it. Do him. How the head of the boy was pushed and pulled closer by other hands, and then only Chris’s hands after he’d unzipped his jacket, thinking, he has a buzz cut—knowing later that would be the only detail he’d allow himself to remember, amid the, yes, chorus of noise as he threw his whole self towards the boy’s face. He wouldn’t remember that it was Dean’s blood that got him going most of all, as he acted it up for the Crew. Going like a jackhammer, st-punching at the tunnel’s ceiling, swinging the kid around and around, pulling his pants down, pants up, t-shirt o , mud in face, stones, gravel. en it was over.

“You need to get that shit out of you,” he said, guessing that small shards of glass were embedded in Dean’s groin.“I’m not getting arrested after all this,” said Dean decisively, which wasn’t the right answer but it encapsulated the conversation that would never be had.

ey’d be playing Millwall again. “Yep,” said Chris.

Behind them, a crowdswell noise from the stadium. Kicko . ey got up, and cantered alone, through the straggled small sets of casuals, through the streets and byways and back alleys. e afternoon had lowered to dusk, and the ground seemed overlaid by leaves moreso than earlier. Chris waited for Dean when he had to pause a couple of times, banging his hand to his head and swearing, his mouth a pained rictus of repetition. Occasionally he said, “ anks for taking over back there,” and Chris knew he meant in the tunnel, when everyone was alone in a di erent way. His silent epistolary voice suddenly came back. Shep, he said, I take a dim view on violence. Deviance is a freedom enjoyed in a city of lightly engaged strangers. I wear my wartime jacket in the sun, rain, wind and sleet. But I take a dim view on violence. Alone and slowing, they turned into Dean’s street. ere was no radio and the doors were closed.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022

“Not your usual scrap,” Dean said quietly. “Not your usual Saturday. We’ll get plenty of skin on the 15th. Smack a few more cunts to make up for it.”

Dean persevered. “Fuck stitches,” he said.

Dean was pale now, a vein was pulsing beneath a scar at the base of his left ear. Chris watched the skin swell and contract in the tiniest of ways. ey were alone. ey lay close to the ground, on the grassed bank.

slammed against any solid surface, and Chris saw the tail end of a Crew sub-section bolt over the dual carriageway. e word “Scatter!” was rippling everywhere. Each individual dropped noiselessly from the group enclosing Chris, and each one joined the landscape of fragments, of jolted cells. Chris locked eyes with Murph before he turned away. It was strange. Murph carried no recognition in his gaze. It was null and opaque. A pre-epiphany? It was strange and couldn’t be read.

Spartan, Jane Lewty58 ere was a movement at the window of Dean’s house, and Chris saw the shape of a small head, contoured by a dim electric light behind it.

“So I’ll see you tomorrow?” It wasn’t really a question. “I’ll come round and watch the highlights,” Chris said, “Just go to hospital. Go to hospital.” He backed away, feeling sick. He watched Dean edge awkwardly through the door and imagined the man keeling over, blasted with agony in his hallway.Andothers it killed. Would there be others? Chris cupped his head down into his chest and counted the steps to his own house, thinking he might fall too. Sixty-eight, 69, 70. Eighty-three. It was 83. 1983. Many wars, and everywhere, thought Chris. And something else. His mind was ricocheting to all parts, it had to stop. His own house was narrow, contained between two others of equal height. Chris went inside to nd it unlit. No movement from upstairs, which was normal. He sat for a while, feeling around for pieces of paper on the table, but there was only hard space. He rose and went to the shed. Okay, Shep. Best wishes from Chris, he mouthed. And PS. PS. . . .this is DIY heaven. e Spartan was weak, it looked weak. A weak luxury, a secret. If this were a lm, I’d be hitting it with an iron bar, not unscrewing the whole thing, he said to himself. He began to lay it out in fragments on the oor, and did so for hours. 3x white leds, 16 pin and 18 pin base, burg strips, double tape, 1x red led and 1k resistor, 16 gauge wire, soldering rod, soldering ux, 4 volt batteries. He put his hands around his own throat. He ran the coins from his pocket across his face. It began to get truly dark and he rubbed sawdust into his eyes. e car nally became just a shape. He moved to sit inside the frame of the chassis, and the space-within-the-space of other types of wall. Should he begin again? Or end? Whatever is next, he said without sound: whatever is next, is next, is next.

fiction

Perpetual Resin: A Cento

For a gripping narrative that was itself perpetually given because the day demanded money the bill arrives as a eulogy: itemized with the ancient genitals blacked out our faces a chocolate bar, facing the night but when I need to die, who will light the fire? night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning like seeing like things the same dim through the misty panes and thick green light a harpoon in my flesh I nodded to shave your face you took o your wig zigzagging through who wakes first, and from which dream is Paradise an island of perfection? the house bristles the future bursts there is a ghost its height pierces the low cloud my steps toe to heel to toe counting the lengths of air from each palm with girls for hollow stamens ribbed with joys two cesarean scars takin guitar lessons and what ceases to tick just before dawn cannot be my heart being hung as in we grow as we are but can’t I imagine her high, thin song when she returns from the hunt

Sources: Lyn Hejinian, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, D. A. Powell, Howard Nemerov, Lynne ompson, Jacques J. Rancourt, Donald Revell, Roxane Beth Johnson, Fanny Howe, Wilfred Owen, Ishmael Reed, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Geo rey Brock, Roger Robinson, Kay Ryan, Gwen Head, Donté Clark, Henry Dumas, Layli Long Soldier, Graham Foust, Owen Dodson, Camille Guthrie, Reginald Lockett, Robin Morgan, Victoria Chang, and Robert Whitehead.

Sylvia Jones

Perpetual Resin: A Cento, Sylvia Jones

First Black Cop Bop

First Black Cop Bop, Sylvia Jones60

poetry

At Patapsco State Park with Frederick Douglass mining lithium out of fossilized Beanie Babies, in the switchbacks o the Chevrolet trail. Ever colder a slippery slope takes hold atop a ludicrous anachronism. Gadda opens an envelope and I ran like a cheetah with the thoughts of an assassin into a mosh pit at a house show in Shockoe Bottom where Harriet Tubman begets an image of Andrew Jackson donning a neck tattoo of Lil Wayne with the locks pulled back, hence I ran like a cheetah with the thoughts of an assassin All mystery, attened and sanded down into stereotypical jive, broken windows speaks of blight. Me? I’m in a di erent room trying to interview Abner Louima for a true crime podcast I ran like a cheetah with the thoughts of an assassin

Notes: e italicized lines in “First Black Cop Bop” are from “N.Y. State of Mind” by Nas from his debut studio album Illmatic (Columbia Records, 1994). e Bop is a poetic form coined by Afaa M. Weaver. Jones

Translated from the Italian by julia pelosi-thorpe

A cross the pages of her collection Comet (Ensemble, 2019), human bodies and natural bodies fuse. Especially vibrant are the parts of us that communicate and, in doing so, connect—“[s]ounds / and knots exist amongst throats wind / and mountains,” and “ elds of quivering light” are paired with “lips that tremble.” Our vocal organs and the sounds they generate are central to Comet, which explores individual and collective voice across communities and spaces. “Is the mouth enough for narration, / a piano’s keys?” asks the speaker of one poem. Another poem’s speaker compels the poem’s reader to communicate, to “[w]hisper me your / enthusiasm like surprise,” closing the circle with reciprocal speech acts.

An ever-reproducing (ever-dying) echo, we are ultimately left with the links, From Comet, Stella N’Djoku, trans. Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

Just as N’Djoku’s speakers both address and request address from their readers, we occupy a split existence opposite a poetic speaker (as “you”) and with a speaker (as “us”). In one elegy, we rejuvenate the soil from dual perspectives; implicated in the burial of a person, we are also the buried: —chance, a strange word for us throwing roses upon you as rain strengthens the earth. Drawn inside the planet, we are a body that, once our life ends, continues to spawn life in the world. Here, the role of loss—loss of loved ones, of this earth, this cosmos—is key for renewal. We simultaneously give and lose. Simultaneously, we are alone in our bodies but connected to other bodies in a complex, multi-corporeal existence where “our resemblances / in eyelids and evergreens” reveal the likeness between our shape and plant shapes. rough observations like this, Comet’s speakers link us to rhythms beyond our perception, in which, as we resurrect ourselves, we fall further into nature. roughout these seven poems, human, earthly, and celestial bodies spiral in and out of intricate dances, joining and rejoining. ese are the bodies that depart, the bodies that arrive, and what lingers in the interim.

Introduction: Stella N’Djoku’s Modern Elegies Traverse Cycles of Intergenerational Grief and Rebirth

translation61

Stella N’Djoku From Comet

From Comet, Stella N’Djoku, trans. Julia Pelosi-Thorpe62 the resemblances, the hum of so much metamorphosis, “the intensity of what remains.” As old and new life intertwine across the universe, N’Djoku’s elegies reckon with the threads of continuity spun by regenerating ux: “life doesn’t nish, / you’ll come home.”

From my very rst encounter with N’Djoku’s verse—in an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic (Dal sottovuoto: poesie assetate d’aria, Samuele Editore, April 2020)—I was enchanted. In interpreting Comet’s beautiful, elusive rhythm, I hope to match N’Djoku’s movements as closely as I can while accepting their ultimate untranslatability. It never ceases to inspire me to watch my English reach a place of such elegance through correspondence with N’Djoku’s words.

—Julia Pelosi- orpe

translation

translation The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 63 is wasn’t what I meant —a chance to meet again— I preferred metaphor. Instead you’re here fallen before me—chance, a strange word for us throwing roses upon you as rain strengthens the earth. Non era questo che intendevo —occasione per rivedersi— preferivo le metafore. E invece ci sei caduto davanti—occasione, che strana parola per noi che ti gettiamo rose addosso mentre la pioggia rinsalda la terra.

translation From Comet, Stella N’Djoku, trans. Julia Pelosi-Thorpe64 Love is exiting the burrow catching in the act love a nosing for the right moment. Amore è uscire dalla tana cogliere sul fatto amore uto del momento adatto.

translation The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 65 e sky does not explain the winter thenightslinethat strokes mountain spines the glimmer of dusk kisses. is night so blue has sounds of steps a Christmas wait. Non si spiega il cielo delle notti d’inverno la linea che s ora la schiena alle montagne il chiarore dei baci alle ombre. Questa notte così azzurra ha il rumore dei passi l’attesa del Natale.

translation From Comet, Stella N’Djoku, trans. Julia Pelosi-Thorpe66 But hands taste all the tang of stars have memories of meteorites of the luminousmostslipstreams and sounds. Whisper me your enthusiasm like surprise. Ma le mani sentono tutto il sapore degli astri hanno ricordi di meteoriti di luminosissimescie e suoni. Sussurrami l’entusiasmotucome sorpresa.

translation The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 67 Now you too can hear what crickets narrate rubbing distancedforewings,betweensecond and pointer. Is the mouth enough for narration, a piano’s keys? Only tendons know mystery it’s an echo. Ora puoi sentire anche tu ciò che raccontano i grilli sfregando le ali anteriori, a distanza tra secondo e lancetta. Basta la bocca a raccontare, i tasti di un piano? Solo i tendini conoscono il mistero è una eco.

translation From Comet, Stella N’Djoku, trans. Julia Pelosi-Thorpe68 I’d found it simple covering same corridors each day sitting bedside I’d put my hands again in yours our resemblances in eyelids and evergreens life doesn’t nish, you’ll come home. What does the dangler of a sword by one horsehair over Damocles’s head know of all this. Trovavo percorreresempliceognigiorno gli stessi corridoi sedermi al lato del letto Rimettevo le mie nelle tue mani le nostre similitudini tra le palpebre e i pioppi la vita non nisce, tornerai a casa. Che ne sa chi ha appeso a un unico crine la spada che pende sulla testa di Damocle.

translation The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 69 ere are instincts that end rainbowedeldsofquivering light lips that tremble. andSoundsknots exist amongst throats wind and mountains. I saw boughs stretch androotlikenights call to you with the intensity of what lingers. Ci sono istinti che terminano con conecomeHoeeEsistonolabbracampil’arcobalenodilucevibrantechetremano.suoninoditragoleventomontagne.vistoramiespandersiradicinottichiamartil’intensitàdiciòche resta.

e two women are back in the red pickup. It’s their third truckload of rewood today. is time I say, Hey, while unloading groceries, seeking an a rmative head nod or something.ey’re back to haul free wood after a storm took down a silver maple that used to branch like an open palm outside my window.

poetry Silver Maple, Jenny Johnson70poetry

Look, I know there’s a too-easy metaphor here about what they lift together into the atbed and haul home, how it will warm them— how it does warm them twice— here as they work, heating the skin beneath their clothing, and a second time when the wood is dry enough to burn. e heat between them isn’t what draws me back. It’s the choreography they have down: how the taller one shifts her hips as the two study the stacked pile. en, her partner, restless to get the job done, hikes her jeans up by the loops and reaches with ambition for a wedge of the rough-cut trunk, intuiting as she loses balance that a second set of hands will be there for the assist. And she’s right.

Once I showed you how to build a camp re beginning with kindling. Or you humored my performance of mastery, as we built a pyramid together out of sticks, cupped the ame, kept it going as long as there was fuel for it.

poetry The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 71

Now, I am the clumsy partner to my own grief. I circumvent what’s missing from many paces away— It must have been a large tree once, the taller woman says to me squinting up, trying to picture it from below.

Carl Phillips

As long as it’s still possible to say I love you to one person while— as if right in front of that person— fucking someone else in a way that, if it doesn’t look like love, exactly, at least resembles, for a time, commitment, I refuse to commit, he said. Why were we talking about this, or even talking at all, me and this stranger whom, in better light, or more of it, I might’ve kept looking right past: up to where the thunderclouds (but without the thunder) had begun clambering over the mountains like sluggish bears just done wintering, or down, to the view beneath us— a ock, or part of one, of wild turkeys hunting for anything useful left in a wilderness I used to call the lawn, once, when I believed in lawns, back when su ering still seemed a thing worth singing about. Why not call it love— each gesture—if it does love’s work?

poetry Silver Bell, Carl Phillips72poetry

Karen Wilkin Jill Nathanson

Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin

F rom the very beginning of her life as an artist, when she was a recent graduate of Bennington College, Jill Nathanson’s paintings have been notable for their commitment to abstraction and, above all, for their highly individual, unpredictable sense of color. While she has explored diverse possibilities over the years, in a logical progression, from brushy allover eld paintings, to more disciplined geometric, grid-based compositions, to the lyrical, clearly de ned structures of overlapping planes of recent years, her work has always depended on the multiple associations color triggers in us. Nathanson orchestrates complex relationships of unnamable hues like a composer writing for nontraditional combinations of instruments, searching for new harmonies and new moods. rough color, she plays wordlessly on our emotions, experience, and intellect, allowing us to revel in the meeting of gorgeous hues, some of which we feel we are encountering for the rst time, triggering thoughts about what these colors might allude to in our own recollections, and then, just when we are focused on these associations, forcing us to concentrate on the evidence of the history of the paintings’ making.Nathanson has spoken of what she calls “color desire,” which, for her, is a kind of shorthand for the way a hue set down in one part of the painting demands the presence of another hue elsewhere and will probably in uence what happens in between. In her recent work, these relationships are made more complex by her wish for the color in her works to be what she describes as “light-like—active, transmitting, and quicksilver” and by her interest in the ranges of color generated by di erences in translucency.

73 art

“I think often,” she says, “that there is material color—paint—and color as light, and that each color painter revels in that dualism in his or her own way.”Until very recently, there was little visible evidence of Nathanson’s hand in her paintings, which she builds with thin, translucent, carefully controlled pours of specially formulated acrylic paint. e edges of the planes of color have generally been made to carry the burden of drawing, so much so that her works can seem to have come into being almost magically, without physical e ort. Yet we are also very aware of Nathanson’s will and agency

art

Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin74 in constructing them. Generous planes of unexpected hues are arrayed and overlapped in sensuous, rhythmic expanses, unfolding sequentially like a classical frieze, sometimes solemn, sometimes irtatious and playful. We are led across the painting by a rhythmic chain of events. Suave curves confront blunt angles; intervals expand and contract. e overlaps become mysterious zones that now seem to belong to one adjacent color, now to another, while equally mysterious shapes with similarly ambiguous connections to the dominant shapes are created in the same way. Some of the energy of Nathanson’s recent works derives from these subtexts. e instability of the overlaps, combined with the advancing and receding properties of warm and cool hues, the nuanced edges of the poured planes, and the diverse associations that colors provoke in each of us, animates and enlivens the progression of planes. In some very recent work, uid brushstrokes and imposed line add yet another note. I use the word “note” deliberately. Confronted by Nathanson’s recent works, it is impossible not to think about musical analogies. e slow progressions of colored planes in horizontal paintings suggest complex chords, even orchestral crescendos, while the coiling, upward thrusts of the occasional vertical picture trigger thoughts of chamber music or virtuoso solo ri s. Or not. Each of our responses will be di erent. Yet it seems impossible, as well, not to consider Nathanson’s expansive, harmonious, and (that much maligned word) beautiful recent paintings, many made in 2020, as challenges to our constricted lives or as paradigms of calm and order, antidotes to the stresses of the pandemic. But whatever associations they elicit from us, Nathanson’s paintings, like all art worth taking seriously, stimulate our imagination and enlarge our experience.

art The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 75 Sway Chorus (2020) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers on panel, 74 x 40 ¼ inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin76 Counter-Ayre (2019) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 77 Cadence (2017) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 55 x 72 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin78 Tan Transpose (2020) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 90 x 44 inches. Collection of Telfair Museum of Art. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 79 Light Measure (2020) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 49 ½ x 80 inches. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin80 Of Substance (2016) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 81 Card Monte (2014) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 40 x 50 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

art Jill Nathanson, Karen Wilkin82 Brass Instrument (2015) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 60 x 60 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

Like a baby eagle pecking at the last pieces of the egg that had held him, I was looking to be free. Eagles, when ying, can be free, but the egg that held me would only let me think I was free, lled as my egg was with fears arising from hurt I buried so deeply I did not know it was there.

“ at which shrinks Must rst expand…” 36

—Laozi

B altimore sits at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, a quiet jewel the Confederacy desperately wanted, and tried to get with the support of a broad base of southern sympathizers in the city, so many that Ft. McHenry became a detention center during the Civil War, with Union cannons on Federal Hill, and Union encampments all over the city. e Mason-Dixon line is the northern boundary of Maryland, and the state song is an homage to plantation culture. After the War, Baltimore became a mecca for supremacists from the Old South, including faculty at Hopkins and Peabody. When I was born, Black folk had their own world inside this white world, and I looked out at the white world from the safety of Blackness. We understood white folk as other, but we never discussed them in derogatory terms in our home. I knew, without asking, why my father stretched across his bed on Saturday afternoons and listened to the Orioles on the radio, and never mentioned going to Memorial Stadium. On the way home from the junior high school, I watched from the bus as a white man tried to attack us with a garden rake, until his wife pulled him down from the fence. Segregation in Baltimore was more southern than northern, rooted in the unful lled promises to Blacks that were the city’s history, with the e ect of overcrowded neighborhoods and schools, and police brutality.

So being di erent meant rising above in a culture where conformity was so adhered to that it felt oppressive. e proliferation of industrial jobs that lured people like my parents to the city with its sameness seemed to support this conformity in the way industry succeeds when machines obey, ironically, the necessities of a machinist’s tolerance, of measurements. Now I was the only Black person I knew of in Baltimore who was studying Taiji.

Now, on the East Side, we were in another house built for two families, but my parents were buyers this time. When our last tenants, a lovely young couple with no children, moved out of the house, I was waiting to move into the room that would be my rst cave. It had been designed as a small kitchen, so there was a space for a small gas range and a refrigerator. ere was a sink with a cabinet, and in the small space opposite the sink, my parents put in a twin size bed with the head pointing to the window looking out over the gigantic eld behind us, a eld of the dead waiting for life, Baltimore Cemetery, the gates to which stood at the eastern endpoint of North Avenue. In the light of a full moon I could look out and see the granite headstones glistening, or even when the moon was less than full I could still see the sparkles. Imagining Judgement Day, I thought of the ground opening and the rotted bodies taking on new esh, and this vision was driven by my deepest fears of breaking any of the commandments, especially the Baptist explanation of adultery as sex outside of marriage, and second to that was telling lies. I had so much to be afraid of, and when my fears collected enough to make me feel very anxious as I lay in bed trying to sleep, my mind would leave my body, the force of it pushing me open until my mind was in the ceiling, and it was the strangest thing to see, as my mind had no body. But there it was, and it was seeing itself with its own self. I had no idea of me, but I could still concentrate, and with that I left the room sometimes at night, soaring up to the stars, looking down at the earth until it was just a bunch of glistening specks on a blanket, and when I was tired, I came back to the room. Or I stayed in the room, frozen in terror until, with the force of prayer and concentration, my mind came back to my body. at was not freedom. I could y only in what felt like a prison, where I was the only captive. Still I valued my own space, this room above

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver84

When my grandmother advised me to go out and play under the lamplight behind the house, the lamplight that would shine on a myriad of misdoings, some more criminal than mischievous as Baltimore changed over the years, she did not know I was learning how to y. I started in junior high school, pressing the normal three years of seventh, eighth, and ninth into two years. It was in the room that was my rst room of my own since I was an only child and we lived in a two-family house in West Baltimore.

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 85 the bedroom on the rst oor, just below mine, where my mother had these wooden stairways to the moon tacked to the wall, some kitsch she bought at one of the local stores, like Epstein’s, her favorite. ey were tiny stairs for a tiny gure, some little ghost maybe, to walk to the stars. Above the room, I ew, and in class I looked to the ceiling and said the 23rd Psalm in my mind, asking God for protection. My faith in Taiji was building on what appeared to be the fruit of my faith in the Dao De Jing, the courage to dream the possibilities of developing my poetry in this life of production lines, tow motors, forklifts, and tractor trailers. I saw beyond the pounding of production lines in the main part of the plant, the spiraling smoke from the tower where powdered laundry detergent was made, the seemingly in nite number of ball bearings whistling in the conveyor systems bringing product to the warehouse where men called out for more soap from the doorways to their trucks, the great empty silence of the truck yard in early morning. In all of this I found a faith in a philosophy that said my environment was not a eld of contradictions prohibiting my life as a poet. Instead, it was the fertile eld of possibilities that turned the yellow steel guard rails into signs signaling corners where I could meditate on a stanza, or think on the substance of books that laid knowledge of the literary landscape of Black folk in front of me, a living map that emerged to guide me on the way to ful lling the prophecy Langston Hughes wrote of the rst great poet to emerge from the less privileged sections of the Black world, a poet who believed in the Black world and was not afraid to be himself.

Four years before jogging in the snowstorm, in my spring semester at Morgan, Valerie told me to read Langston Hughes more intently, especially that signi cant essay of his, “ e Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in e Nation magazine in 1926, when he was barely in his mid-20s. Many readers had interpreted it as Hughes speaking to Black poets who want to be white, as opposed to Black poets who want to be Black, and I understood that even as when growing up I was not given lessons in the living room at the feet of my parents as they read from this giant leather-bound book called e Oracle of All Blackness. ere was no such thing, but what Hughes spoke to was a poet who would arise one day

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver86 from the “lowdown folks” and be the rst great artist. I read that essay over and over, wondering if my family was “lowdown” enough for me to be the great artist he said would arise, the one. I wondered what he meant by an artist knowing themselves, and I thought there were many souls moving in my one soul, like clusters of Qi broken o from a oneness to be multiple engines inside of me. e most important factor was the sense of having failed in all things. I felt this way when my mother took me to the park with my son and the twins, not long after the rst crashing in the rst marriage, a crashing everyone seemed to know about, a crashing that made me feel as if I was always naked, that I had failed in every sense of it. It was 1976, three years before jogging in the falling snow. I was hospitalized twice that year, once voluntarily in the spring for depression, and again late that summer for a panic attack that morphed into a full-blown breakdown, after Ronnie and I had to abort a pregnancy when doctors said she was not healthy enough to carry the child. My mother had taken me to Clifton Park with Kala, and my youngest siblings, the twins, Martin and Margaret, who were born in the spring of 1969, my freshman year at College Park. We were sitting there, while the kids played in the sandlot next to us with its swings and small jungle gym.

“You already famous.”

“I want to be a famous poet,” I said to my mother, as she played with the kids. She answered without looking up to meet my eyes.

In her inimitable way, she was referring to the fact that my mental health challenges were public knowledge. All of this I let swirl inside me, even as I had not spent time poring over the possibilities of de ning and being one’s self, and how it was complicated by the imposition of race and racial oppression, the strategies that fed a continuous stream of prompts to Black folk. is rst great poet had to know there was much more than race and racism to who we were, as I believed the greater part of our humanity resisted being de ned by racism or our responses to it. ere were greater aspects of us that this poet had to show by embracing this wholeness, and writing out of it. First, I had to become whole, a journey that lay ahead of me, veiled by time and distance.

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 87

“Shifu” is the word for teacher that is used in Chinese martial arts. ere are several words for teacher, but Shifu is most often used. However, Tony was rather informal. His studio was an old storefront, one of several in that area. He had installed mirrors along the length of the wall where he stood while teaching so that we could see ourselves and begin the process of self-study that is traditional Chinese martial arts pedagogy. In that tradition, the student must understand the teacher, and asking questions is taboo. You take what you are shown, go home and practice it, and in your next class show how well you have learned the form. When Taiji was still private knowledge inside families and schools, Taiji was studied one technique at a time, but when it was introduced to the public those techniques were put together in what is sometimes called a linking form.

Working the cycle of three shifts, I avoided what most people wanted, the daylight shift, when the bosses, the white shirts, were all around us. e reward was being in ow with the schedules of most people, or at least thinking it was that way. It was a time to get home to your family in time for dinner, and have the evening to spend with them, at least ideally. e second shift was my preference, as it gave me the better part of the day to read and write, and now even more importantly, to go to my Taiji classes on Howard Street, just two blocks above the old Greyhound bus station, where a few years earlier I caught the bus to and from College Park. Now with my beaten-up Gran Torino, I parked at a meter near Tony’s studio, and walked into it, sometimes imagining myself in the maze of the Tien Shan Mountain range, where the snow glistened in the afternoon sun, and I absorbed the teaching of adept monks, me the one Black face, settled back in the place my spirit knew before I was born.

For now, Taiji promised what God had failed to give me, a method for developing and using my gift, to be the poet. I stopped the jogging and poured myself into learning the six sections of the solo form of Yang style Taiji. Poetry had agreed that it lived in me, and its rst major lesson was not trips to a library but a dashing against the rocks where the ocean slapped me until it grew tired and waited for the next storm. e solo form would be a safe space where my mind and heart, my whole self, could feel free.

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver88

Taiji has always felt like something like a past life memory for me, even from the beginning. As I began to learn I watched Tony as he went from facing the mirror to facing me. Our apartment was too small for me to do the entire form, but I could do individual moves. My space limitations were the determinant, and not my desire to do things the old way. It all seemed quite strange to Ronnie, and my parents. e six sections of the form should take thirty minutes to perform, with the proper focus on breathing, inhaling and exhaling in coordination with the unfolding of the techniques that grow progressively more di cult until the third section, where there are turns that should be done on one leg. When you learn Taiji as a younger person, there are successes you can only have with youth, and when you grow older there are successes you can have only with wisdom and a deepening knowledge of Qi, the internal power, or so I believed when I was the 27-year-old poet who mentally drafted lines of poetry while riding my sweeper through a warehouse with enough space for a million boxes of inventory. Whatever perceptions lay ahead of me, I had put my faith in Taiji as a way of life. It helped me hold onto the dreams the way many of us dreamed, of buying farms in the counties around Baltimore or across the state line in Pennsylvania, or helping our children who wanted to build theaters. e dreams let us live with the machines. When I practiced with the breath coordination, I felt myself settling back into my body, fastening my soul more securely inside me. I learned to direct my breath with mind concentration, lling my lungs from the bottom until my stomach swelled, and then compressing my abdomen and exhaling, the breathing we know instinctively when we are born. Even when I was not practicing the techniques, I practiced the breathing, and as I learned the techniques, I put the basics to work while working. Moving and stacking boxes, I paid attention to the shifting tension in my legs and focused on the breathing. I began to feel a naturalness that let me feel free. In the space where I was weighed down with shame, I began to feel I could have a serenity that was a shield against what other people thought of me, as I acquired a power that would let me live more deeply and securely. It was not so much a defense against a real attacker, as I had learned that while growing up, but rather a defense against a diagnosis that led me to

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 89 think my mind would always betray me, whenever it decided I needed a comeuppance.ejoyof these revelations came with an increasing speed, as spring began to anticipate summer. My grief over my maternal grandmother, whose death was only a few months behind me now, was stu ed into some canister in my heart, where it began to fester, and I felt the old anxieties that lled me eight years earlier. In the spring of 1971, I came home from basic training to learn my rst child was terminally ill. is time I fought the anxieties by making real plans. I bought a new 35mm slr camera to replace my old one. Along with being a poet, I also dreamed of being a photographer. ree years earlier, a professional photographer in Washington, DC, who had a show up at the Corcoran gallery, took the time to teach me how to use black and white to focus on geometric composition and compensate for my color blindness. is new camera was rather fancy and expensive, and along with my strange way of moving, Ronnie and my mother began to worry that I might be going o the deep end again. Now that my grandmother was no longer a focus for my mother’s caretaking, she and Ronnie formed an alliance where my mother turned her caretaking energies and strategies onto me. I was still taking the medicine, but in the mixture of hope and anxiety, I began to believe I could function without it. However, the old nightmare scenarios emerged when my father joined forces with Ronnie and my mother in enrolling all of us in a family therapy program at University hospital, the place where I was born 28 years earlier. When they decided I was too close to the precipice, they took me to the emergency room at the hospital. In that state of extreme anxiety where fear takes over, I went with them, but intent on negotiating my own terms. I was not going to be hospitalized again, put away on a ward where I would be at the mercy of people who knew very little about what they were being paid to do. Some years later, a psychiatrist friend would explain that this period in American psychiatry was barbaric, but as someone subjected to the system, I knew at the time that people were fumbling in the dark to understand what drives people over the edge. Very few mental health workers understood or believed the problems were often rooted in childhood, where the unspeakable enters the lives of those of us unfortunate enough to be chosen by whatever forces drive evil in our lives.

It was the hospital where I was born, during the Korean War, where my mother and father celebrated my rst breaths. I was the rstborn, a child they hoped would take care of the others, and be a guiding light. In the morning edition of the Baltimore Sun that day, it was reported that the bodies of 13 soldiers from Maryland were headed home on board the Allegheny Victory, one of the Navy’s cargo ships. In Korea, the war fought inside America was revealed in the G.I.s’ preferences for ags. On the day after I was born, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that white G.I.s were ying the Confederate ag, so many that the Koreans mistook it for Old Glory. Two weeks after I was born, Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide: e Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” e racial problems, in the next two decades, would bring Black people against one another, the anger and frustration expanding the pressurized space of cities with diminishing opportunities as jobs were outsourced to other countries, and urban populations became customers for drugs deemed illegal. As I stood in the emergency room waiting for my parents and the hospital sta to consider whether to let me go, I knew the atmosphere of desperation in Black neighborhoods, where the war against drugs seemed more like a war against Black people. e homicide rate for the year was hurtling toward another horri c sum. By the end of 1979, 245 people would be dead, the majority of them Black men killed by Black men, a drama I knew all too well, having survived confrontations with angry Black men with guns. Sometimes all of us were intoxicated, lled with alcohol, drugs, or some combination. I knew how quickly chaos could explode, and situated as it was in the middle of the city as a trauma facility, anything could develop in the emergency room. I had enough knowledge of Taiji to apply it with more con dence than when I tried to go into stillness when my grandmother died. With my focus on my breathing, I endured my time in the emergency room with a calmness that overcame my agitation. e social worker assigned to us was a white woman named Kay. Some years later, I would learn that she seemed to believe that going back to work meant I would lose my job once the supervisors determined I was unhinged, and losing my job would awaken

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver90

“I think you should read e Tao of Pooh.”

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 91 me. My awakening was already in process, and it had nothing to do with anything the western medical system could do for me. Standing against the wall near the elevators with security guards on either side of me, I could think only of how tangible my dream of the poet in me was becoming, and even as I knew my anxiety was real, I was con dent that what I had learned so far about focusing my thoughts and calming myself would serve me well. In fact, the tangible dream could most certainly become a reality. ey released me, with my agreement to take the medicine. e next day I was back to work. Berry, a good friend who had been promoted to management, made a gesture that was as signi cant as the gift of a copy of the Dao De Jing I had received six years earlier. We were standing next to the computerized carousel the company had installed to increase our e ciency.

“Yes,“Pooh?”Winnie the Pooh.”

Amused but not amazed, I bought the book. e playfulness of it I took as an a rmation of Taiji, as it seemed to me that play was an essential part of the art, one which set it apart from other arts whose martial aspects were more apparent. Walking without leaving footprints seemed more playful than knocking out a bull with one punch, as it was said Mas Oyama, a famous karate adept, was able to do. I had no desire to be so unkind to bulls.

“No problem,” I said. “ e Dao De Jing has been a great help to me.”

“Mike, why don’t you start seeing my doctor? He’s Black.” Indeed he was. I made an appointment, and within a few days we were sitting in his o ce. His name was Herb. I was very clear about my belief that I could do without the medicine, and to my surprise he made an o er I could not refuse. He would take me as a patient, but if he decided I needed it, he wanted my assurance that I would take what he prescribed.

It“Really?”seemed I had found a psychiatrist who shared my enthusiasm, but when he made his recommendations for readings a few weeks later, I was not sure how to respond. After he listened to me expound on my perception of life, my struggles, my hopes, he leaned back and stared at me.

I thought I knew what he was talking about, but my unfolding understanding would take years. Practicing under the trees occasionally felt wonderful, and the art had given me the victory of establishing a boundary with my family, a precious freedom. ere were ve of us siblings. As I approached my fourth birthday, my rst sister, Mabel, was born, and as Mabel approached her third birthday, Melissa arrived. We were a trio when the twins arrived, in 1969, just four years before Kala was born. It was enough to keep my mother busy, so

“You already know more than most Chinese people,” he said. He went on to say, “ e teacher gives the student the outline of the dragon, and over his lifetime, the student must ll in the details.”

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver

At Lake Montebello, summer mornings were enticing, and I took to practicing under a grove of trees at the western edge of the lake. It was a space so quiet that I came to call it the Sacred Ground. It is a rest stop for migratory birds making their long seasonal journeys. At the time that I began practicing under the trees, squirrels were plentiful, of course, and occasionally deer would wander that far into the park. Behind the grove there was a hill that led to the stream going under the bridge on Harford Road, where in the winter I took Kala, Martin, and Margaret to ride their sleds down the steep hill to the road that led to the long walking trails through Herring Run, a beautiful park that was part of the Baltimore that was overshadowed by the image of a crime-ridden city that lled the news. ese idyllic spaces existed in the city, and not just in the counties surrounding the city that gave Maryland its reputation as a place for horse lovers.Tony moved his studio to the opposite side of Howard Street to save money on rent, and the building had a basement where his students who were training combat techniques such as the iron palm could pound the bean bags and make all sorts of extraordinary noise. e building was not attractive, to say the least. Tony was restless, as this was his livelihood. Chinese martial arts did not evolve according to the western business model. In Chinese culture, self-study and practice took years, and Americans were hungry for more and more knowledge, as well as validation along the way. When I nished learning the six sections, I wanted to learn more.

Shift work took a special toll on my family life, and to that toll I added my ambition. Eight hours in a factory was at least nine hours away from home with 30 unpaid minutes for lunch, and traveling time. It took only 20 minutes to get to P&G’s plant in South Baltimore from where Ronnie and I lived. When her health permitted, she was a Civil Service worker, an administrator rst at Ft. Meade and later the large Social Security complex in Woodlawn, an area just outside the western edge of the city. While my favorite shift was the second, from four in the afternoon until 12:30 in the next morning, Ronnie always worked the daylight shift. On weekends we sometimes had Kala with us, as his mother and I shared joint custody. Ronnie and I had a marriage with a feeling of detente, as she watched me doing things she either did not understand or did not care to understand. We were not an anomaly, as we knew other couples who did not connect with each other in deeper ways. However, while some other men at work talked about what they were building with and for their families, I had my one dream, and one day a coworker disabused me of the feeling of being special.“Everybody’s got dreams, Mike.”

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 93

Grandma Gracie’s death left a space in her heart my mother could not ll, even with the ve of us, and my father, who called her Bessie. Kala was often there with her, as she was his babysitter. However, none of us could take the space of her mother. e special bond between the two of them had much to do with the love my mother felt her mother withheld from her. As summer faded into fall, and the rst anniversary of my grandmother’s death approached, it seemed the house was still full of her spirit. Bessie went in and out of sadness, still holding onto her sense of humor.When I called her by the nickname my father gave her, she would reprimand me with a smile. “I’m your mother, boy.”

It would have been enough if all I wanted was to be the rst great Black poet in Langston Hughes’s prophecy, but I wanted to master Taijiquan in the process. Taiji alone requires a lifetime. Claiming a prophecy on one hand, while simultaneously committing to studying an Asian system of cultivation, I occasionally sat on my sweeper in an empty truck door

memoir From Steel Inside Cotton, Afaa M. Weaver94 in the warehouse looking out at the world, wondering what it was like in places invisible to me, places where poets were born in circumstances seemingly more suited to a literary life, poets such as people I got to know in Washington, DC, Black folk born to educated parents and in closer proximity to the middle class. At those times, I had moments of feeling unreasonable, as if I was asking too much of a God I no longer trusted, one I was beginning to see more as the unspeakable Dao, or its origins. At other times I thought the emotional pain of my life gave me a right to aspire to the impossible, not understanding that maybe my being born had broken a rule made by a system that consumed people and threw them away. Coming to Baltimore just after wwii, and the rst deployment of nuclear bombs, my parents traveled northward to struggle in a system designed to defeat them. ey were determined to reach beyond themselves and build a family. To dream is to be human. I understood that, but some other parts of me believed my journey was my soul work, what I was born to do, which might have seemed like a peculiar arrogance to other people. Each move in Taiji has objectives. e most obvious is to get to another part of your practice area. e less obvious include opening passageways for the body’s energy to ow, to allow the major organs to move against one another as in a massage. e heart is the body’s generator, so it provides the necessary ingredient for major functions, such as the brain and nervous system’s workings. Done as meditation, keeping one’s mind on the movements enhances these functions. Much of the orientation of the body in practice has to do with Chinese theories of how the human body is connected to and works with the natural world, from the more obvious air required for breathing to more seemingly esoteric ideas of how the actual functioning of the body is a microcosm of the way matter and energy move in the universe. If practiced into old age, should life be given that long, we see the movements are quite ordinary, the reaching and turning, even the small leaps, the grabbing and twisting that are so subtle they are given names such as plucking the guitar, when in fact they are for locking and breaking joints if need be. Without knowing it, we get ourselves in places with doors and windows we did not know existed, and before long we have to learn the broad science of how the world is made, with all its hidden

memoir The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 95 dangers, and how we are made to do what we do when doing it can cost more than what we want to pay. So it is with anyone wanting to be a poet, or believing themselves to have been born that way. Either way, we are gardens that need tending.

poetry Acapulco, Andrea Cohen96poetry

He was talking about the random axe of God, his hand slamming the table like a battle axe, and though I was a nonbeliever, I believed (I knew) we were sitting, against all odds, together, with nothing but a checkered tablecloth between us, in North Bay, where the maître d’ embraced him and seemed to want to hug me too. e man had written to say he’d known my father would die one day, that he’d been preparing nearly forty years for that, since he was seventeen, and had needed a psychiatrist roughly his father’s age, Jewish, and on the right bus line. By then, he said, his father had been dead ve years. My father, he said, was the rst person he confessed his love of men in dark suits to. How gentle he was, the man said. How wise. He was the father I didn’t have, the man said, and I thought, he was the father I didn’t have either. e man was a public defender and when the waiter brought the wrong cut of beef, he said, Everyone is innocent of something. We were sitting like two people who had met in another life and were trying to catch up. I asked what had happened to his father and he said swimming and Acapulco. He said shark. And it occurred to me that we were breaking breadsticks together because a sh had mistaken a man for something else. It’s a big, random axe. “It Never Entered

Andrea Cohen Acapulco

poetry97The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022

My Mind” was playing above and around us––a sea of Sinatra. at was your father’s favorite, the man said, which surprised me, because I always thought my father liked music unburdened by words, the way he liked his evenings with us. I didn’t tell the man about the app you can get now, how it tells you where sharks are in real time. I didn’t tell him about the woman who reaches into the mouths of hammerheads to cut hooks out, how after she’s pulled a hook from one shark, others approach, sensing ––no, knowing––she means to help them. at’s a belief system. e world is teeming with them, and leaving the restaurant, the man pointed out, as men tend to, the stars comprising Orion’s Belt––as if it were the lustrous sparks and not the leveling dark that connects us.

poetry99Madrid, Andrea Cohen Madrid struggles with record snows, with roses and rowboats, with the center of all roads and even e Triumph of Death snowed in. Meanwhile, I sit with my chipped plate of burieslips.fromonenos,beeneat?eggs. Whowith mychurros, broken can erehavesomanybutthisfellherItme. Madrid © 2022 Andrea Cohen

At the Memorial Service

For Scott Harney

poetry

At the Memorial Service, Andrea Cohen100 I wanted to steal something from the bathroom at the cathedral––a basinet or plastic hand towel dispenser––anything that wasn’t nailed down, though, in the sanctuary, I was eyeing those things too: the pews and oak podium, the organ pipes and bright eyes in the faces of stained glass saints. I contemplated taking the hammereddown hands and feet of Jesus in a painting that was faded and sad and anatomically incorrect. Of course, what I wanted was faith––faith in the mysteries, faith in some life after this one, faith that we might still see him kneeling up ahead on the cooled path to Mt. Vesuvius, still handsomer than Sal Mineo, pretending to tie his shoe, making it a double knot, while we catch up.

T ijani was an avid watcher, the only child to a single parent with no sibling to look up to, no one to play with. His mother, Mama Agnes, was a social studies teacher and a disciplinarian. Going out to play was often not allowed. When Tijani was not in school or doing homework or thumbing through his father’s old books, he busied himself with whatever was around, playing with what he could get his hands on— empty milk cans, bottle tops, the soft tube inside an abandoned tire. ere was the old camera that Mama Agnes said used to belong to his father.

Although it didn’t work, he used it anyway, spying on the streets through its crackedeylens.lived on the second oor of a tenement building and from the louver window he could see the street bustling with life. Every morning he woke to the barking of mongrels and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery across Adamu Street. Sometimes the smell of goat fur and feces came out before the aroma of cheap pastries. e revving of commuter buses invaded his dreams as they began their early morning shift before daybreak. He watched store owners clog the gutters with trash when they thought no one was watching. He watched people lose their money to pickpockets and muggers. He watched bus conductors ght bloody over passengers. rough the other window, he watched neighbors brush their teeth vigorously and spit red foam into the gutter in the backyard before lining up to use the outhouse and bathroom. At the outhouse, towels and wrappers hung on walls or acted as drapes to shield naked bodies, and sometimes he saw women in ways that gave him impure but pleasant thoughts. He took it all in—the noise, the people, the depravity, the smells.

Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé

“Work hard and make money so your children won’t have to live in a place like this. No child deserves to grow up like this,” his mother would say. He knew his mother was ashamed to show people where they lived. He was sometimes ashamed too and often wondered why their family was not like others in his school whose parents sent drivers to pick them up and lled their bags with expensive snacks for their lunch breaks. His mother never missed the opportunity to remind him how fortunate he was to be enrolled in Montessori school on a scholarship. Tijani saw her face burn

When he turned ten, his mother’s work yielded results. She came home one day the happiest she had been in a long time. She told him she made headteacher in school. Her promotion came with a housing loan from the government, and she said that they would be moving to a new house in an estate. It would just take a few months. In the end, they moved to the estate in Ikorodu, a house with no plastering—his mother’s government loan had only gone so far. She threw his father’s things into a polythene bag: the camera, his books––Encyclopedia Britannica and Americana, his dusty pile of Dickens, Hardy, Fitzgerald, Dickinson and what not. She intended to have the bag incinerated, but Tijani tucked it away while she was busy packing. ere had been no photographs, only the broken camera. It was like having a mind without memory. Had his father bothered to leave some pictures behind he would have had something besides a broken camera and mildewed books to hold on to.With three bedrooms and a spacious living room, the house was in a gated community. Some of the properties were still empty and his nearest neighbor was in the next section. It didn’t matter that she moved the dusty furniture from the old house there. It didn’t matter the shower wasn’t yet

Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé102 with life’s frustration whenever she returned from work. Sometimes she took her frustration out on him by throwing a backhand slap.

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In those times, he disliked his mother and wished his father never left them. His memory of his father faded as he grew older. He remembered running his ngers through his coarse beard as his father laughed. He remembered how his father would sit with his friends in the living room and burst into side-slapping and uproarious laughter like a generator with a faulty engine, gurgling into life, spluttering and dying before roaring back again. He also remembered the ghts between his father and his mother, how the screaming matches escalated into the throwing of shoes. He remembered how terri ed he was even though he was too young to understand what was going on. His mother also said, “Make sure you marry well so you won’t have to carry the burden of life alone.” at was the closest he heard her talk about his father other than he was a bumbling drunk who abandoned his family.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 103 working and the toilet plumbing wasn’t right. It didn’t matter that the electrical wiring of the house was out of whack. It didn’t matter that he looked through the window from the room upstairs and saw trees and tile roo ng hemmed in by tall fences. What mattered was that he no longer lived in the bad part of town just like she always wanted. Part of him was unhappy to leave the house on Adamu Street, but part of him appreciated his mother’s struggle to pull them out of poverty. As he grew older, he became more appreciative of what she had done. She started allowing his friends to visit from time to time. She even decided to throw birthday parties for him.

e groom’s full, well-oiled beard catches the candescence pouring from a uorescent light above him. Tijani notices happiness in the groom’s eyes but no smile on his lips, as if he is trying to contain something bubbling inside him. His black, three-piece suit is almost spotless. ere is a little of what’s on the bride’s gown on his lapel—crystal dust. As Tijani clicks away,

* * *

Tijani is one with the camera as he looks through the lens with his right eye and jostles for space amongst other photographers hired by the couple’s relatives and coworkers––the bride’s father’s photographer, the groom’s mother’s photographer. e photographer from the bride’s place of work. e photographer from the groom’s secondary school Boys Scouts club. Tijani, the bride’s photographer, twists himself into the right posture, aiming his lens at the couple. e bride wears a owing white gown with sprinkles of crystals, her nervous face bright with makeup, and her smooth hair held tight with a glittering hairpin. Her veil is the length of her torso.

How could he forget that Christmas Eve, when his mother drove to Elegushi Beach and let him play, making his heart burst with joy. How he ran close to the waves and dug his toes into the wet sand. How he closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun. How he cupped water in his hand and tasted it. He searched for pebbles and pearls, gathering some into his pocket. He took fake pictures of the cobalt blue sky with his father’s broken camera.

Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé104 he wonders who will be the rst to let loose—that expression of joy after solemnization, that burst of relief, that overwhelming happiness that knows no bounds. It’s a little game he plays in his head. He predicts the groom will be the rst to release ungovernable peals of joy. Click! Click! Click! rough one eye, he visualizes the photo before he takes it, sees everything in the same two-dimensional manner the camera will record it––clear, sharp, focused. He wants to capture every tiny detail of this auspicious moment. Telling the story of love is important to him. He doesn’t really have to know them before he tells the story of their love. at’s why he thinks his job is important. ey will open an album lled with his pictures ten years down the line, and the photographs will bring smiles to their faces, tears to their eyes. eir household will be lled with children. He wishes them well. He always wishes them well. e priest approaches the couple as the entire congregation stands. Tijani directs his lens at the crowd. Click! Click! Click! Colorful clothes. Mostly happy faces but clammy with heat. Hand fans ap stylishly. A lady with a wide brim hat is beyond decorous. She dabs the corner of her eyes with a handkerchief, tears washing the mascara down her face, her mouth contorted with a sweet, bitter smile. He turns the camera at her. Click! Click! Click. He wonders what her story is. e couple exchanges their vows. Click! Click! Click! Tears form in the eyes of the bride and the groom. Click! Click! Click! More people in the congregation tear up. Click! Click! Click! e priest blesses the couple, joins their hands, and says to the groom, “Do you take her as your lawful. . . .” He then faces the bride and says the same thing. More clammy smiles, more tears. Click! Click! Click. ere is the exchange of rings and nuptial blessings. e recessional song lls the air; slow music streams out from a keyboardist, drummer, and guitarist. Choristers in red berets then sing praise songs. Click! Click! Click! As the couple makes their way down the aisle, the bride sways her arms slowly in the air and snaps her ngers. en suddenly, the music turns to something upbeat, and she tugs at her skirt to adjust to the rhythm, snapping and swaying joyously. Well-wishers with BlackBerries swarm

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fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 105 around them. Camera lights glare into her happy eyes. He smiles behind his camera. e bride wins his little game. . . . After wiping sweat from his brow, he chases the couple down the aisle, clicking away, pressing through the crowd. e day is just beginning. He captures their special moments all day—the post-ceremony photography session, moments before the reception, the reception, the time after the reception. e wedding ends, and when he nally puts his camera into his pouch, tired to the bone and ready to eat, he still sees the world through one eye. e other can’t see. * * * ree days after Tijani’s thirteenth birthday party, he heard gunshots, the impact of which threw him o the living room couch. He had heard the faraway sounds of gun re in his former neighborhood like the distant sounds of the train but nothing this close, nothing this relentless. He heard screams and more gunshots and went at on the ground, his cheeks feeling the cold, rough tile of the oor. His mother screamed his name, and without thinking he sprang up and ran to her bedroom.

“Armed robbers in the estate,” his mother said, voice quivering with fear. She was on the oor behind the window, shaking terribly. He got to her and wrapped his arms around her to comfort her as she swallowed the fresh cry bubbling to her lips. ings became quiet for a few seconds, and he could hear his mother’s heavy breathing. He could feel cold sweat on her body. He tried to keep his breathing steady. He tried to calm his racing heart. He heard a crash through the door and within seconds three men barged into his mother’s bedroom. ey had long ri es. ey lay their guns on her bed and two sprang upon her. e other dragged Tijani away, screaming into his ears, spitting in his face. e smell of tobacco and rotten eggs assailed him. He called out to his mother as he struggled. e rst slap landed on his face, and he was ordered to lie at on the ground. His face burning, his tongue tasting his own blood, he succumbed. While lying

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Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé106 facedown, his whole body shaking, he heard one of them ask his mother where she kept her money. She said she had no money and that she was a civil “Youservant.have no money, and you live in an estate?” he said, and his mother said “Wenothing.will take something from you before we leave whether you like it or not,” he said. He peeped at them through one eye and watched as one of them wrapped his hand around his mother’s neck and used his palm to cover her mouth. Her cries became mu ed, but she didn’t stop crying. Tijani begged her to stop crying. He told the men his mother was telling the truth. His mother always told the truth no matter what. Why would she lie now? He now wept, fear tearing at his gut as his pleas went unheeded. His assailant held him down as he struggled to break free, kicking and scratching and spitting. Another slap landed on his face. He could hear his ear ring. e man who had been addressing his mother grinned as he watched her struggle. Disgust and rage coursed through Tijani’s veins when the man snapped his belt buckle free and kicked o his trousers. Tijani broke free for a few seconds, but his assailant caught him again. He sank his teeth into his attacker’s arm. e man screamed and tossed Tijani across the room. Tijani tried to stand but his attacker grabbed his ri e from the bed and marched toward him. e rst blow from the butt of the ri e hit the side of his face. He felt the ground shift under his feet; pain surged through his head. e second blow landed before he could gather himself, turning his vision white. Tijani raised one arm up in a futile attempt to block another blow, but the butt of the ri e rammed into his left eye. Blood rushed in before darkness engulfed him.Tijani drifted in and out of consciousness, letting out clipped groans. He knew he was in the back seat of a moving vehicle, but he did not know how he got there or where he was going. He heard voices. He saw blurred faces through his good eye. He tried to organize his muddled thoughts through the pain, the pain wracking through his body, the excruciating throbbing in his head. A certain feeling of danger gripped him. He opened

His nose caught the faint whi of antiseptic. He heard wheels groaning against the ground under him before drifting o into the dark again.

Traders gawk from stalls. Pedestrians gather on both sides of the road, seized by the spectacle. People sitting outside their houses spring up in surprise. A mother clutches her son close to her and quickens her pace. A group of women keep their eyes averted as they walk by. He catches a breath and takes aim again. Click! Click! Click!

* * *

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 107 his mouth to cry for help, but his voice sounded like the rasping of a sheep. Or was it his voice? He felt disconnected from his body. Warm hands gripped him, moved him out of the car. He lost consciousness, then came to again.

Tijani counts his cash for the wedding photos and gets into his car, his camera in the passenger’s seat. e tra c is horrible today as usual. A buzz runs through a group of men gathered by the roadside. From one end, a short man emerges, completely naked. He throws rapid punches into the air, his head jerking from side to side. Tijani quickly picks up his camera, his pulse racing.

Click! Click! Click!

ghters circle each other, their bodies glistening in the midday sun. e crowds chant. e two men close in on each other, hitting each other in the face and torso. Seconds later, the short guy is on the ground. e crowd roars. e tall one dashes back into the crowd and emerges with a bottle of water. He guzzles most of it and, with a supercilious air, throws the

On the other side, there is a rush. Another fellow comes forward, equally bare-assed. He is tall and has an athletic build that emphasizes the torso and shrinks the waist. He throws hooks and jabs at an invisible opponent, as if to foretaste what he wants to do to the real one. A motley crowd cheers. People watch, but they are not sure what is happening, and no one wants to move close to the two men. Lagos is crazy, he thinks, but this? Click!

“Hold him very well, okay, yes. Careful. Don’t let him fall. Call the doctor, please. Where is the doctor or a nurse? Any nurse.”

Click! Click!

e tra c doesn’t let up, and Tijani takes more pictures even though he is exhausted and slightly on edge––the calligraphical inscriptions on the back of trucks and commuter buses, a station wagon so overburdened by sacks of produce that it wobbles along sideways like a crab. He directs his lens away from a roadside beggar swatting ies from his gangrenous leg. Tijani heaves a heavy sigh when the road clears up soon after. He makes his way to his mother’s house, but not before stopping at the roadside fruit stall and lling a bag with mangos, guavas, and oranges. His mother’s house is now armed with burglar-proof doors and windows from the rst big money he earned as a wedding photographer––some senator’s daughter from the east who got married.

His mother is in the kitchen peeling yams for porridge. He drops the bag of fruit on the table and o ers to help, but she says no. Instead, she insists on feeding him before he leaves, complaining about how skinny he is before pinching his cheek. He feels his mother’s wet ngers and smiles through his exhaustion. He steps out of the house to fetch his camera from his car and casually scroll through the wedding pictures in the kitchen to distract himself. He weeds out the imperfect shots and zooms in and out. She asks how work went, and she comes to see some of his shots. She reeks of fried sh.

“I am praying and waiting for the day people will attend your own wedding too, my son,” she says as she walks back to the cutting board on the kitchen counter. It’s her roundabout way of saying life is passing by even though Tijani feels he is still young. He says amen, but he is annoyed. She always does this. Who wants to be with a one-eyed man anyway? She sees that his feelings are hurt and begins to pepper him with encouraging words, but her words don’t encourage him. ey su ocate him.

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Click! Click! Click!

e police don’t show up, but the crowd disperses as quickly as they gathered. It reminds Tijani of Adamu Street, where you never know what you’ll wake up to or see before the day ends. He sometimes drives through his old neighborhood, drives past the beer parlor down Adamu Street, past his old house, memories of his old life, his old self.

Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé108 rest on himself. He then faces the cheering crowd, holding up his hand like a champ.

“Just“What?”because you brought me some rotten fruits, you think you can call me names?”Herwords pierce through him. He opens his mouth to defend himself, but he thinks better of it. It would only make things worse, so he makes a half-hearted apology and goes back to scrolling. But he can’t stop thinking.

For a moment, he hesitates, but thinks he should leave. He thinks about many things. He tells himself that he doesn’t resent his mother. He knows he loves her more than anything else in this world.

“I should keep my dirty mouth shut, right?” his mother says. “ at’s not what I said, Mummy.”

* * *

When Tijani woke up in the hospital, his head felt like too much weight on his neck. en it all came back, trashing its way through his esh––the rage, the rancid breath of the assailant, the fear of his mother’s imminent

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On his way to his house, he realizes he is angry mainly at himself. He realizes that neither love nor time can thoroughly wash the anger and the self-pity away. Like the sand on Elegushi Beach, it will still be there. He feels a sudden lurch of guilt that he walked out on his mother. To distract himself, he thinks about the naked street ght. It’s funny what people do when they have no dignity left or are stripped of all hope, leaving what is primal and impulsive. But then what if the ght was to keep hope alive? What if their agrant display of shamelessness was an attempt to distract from their shame?

Finally, the pressure inside him bubbles, threatening to froth over, so he stands up and turns to leave. His mother calls his name as he approaches the door.“Where are you going?” she asks.

He tells her to stop, raising his voice, and his mother throws a vicious look at him. He knows that look, the kind that often comes before a backhand slap, but he is now a grown man. She uses words now.

“Now you are calling your mother crazy!”

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“It’s me, my son; I am here. I am okay.” It was his mother’s voice. She tightened her grip on his hand. Seconds later he was able see bright lights out of his right eye, but his left vision remained hazy red. en he saw the intravenous line taped to his arm, the bag with uid hanging on a rusty metal pole. en he smelled his blood, heard the beeping of the machines, and the shu ing noises against the linoleum tiles. A wave of recollection hit him and the relief knowing his mother was alive was soon replaced by the fear of considering the unthinkable. What did those bastards do to his mother?His

Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé110 danger. Kicking his legs about the bed, he became aware of a hand holding him still, calling his name. He tried to turn to see who it was but became gripped by so much pain that he screamed.

recovery took three months. Tijani battled with pain, headaches, blurry vision, and dizziness. He grieved the loss of his left eye and wondered if his life would ever be normal. He blamed himself for being reckless by ghting with armed men while scolding himself for not being strong enough to fend them o . He asked himself if any of what happened would have happened if they had not moved to that estate and had stayed in their lowly tenement apartment. Sometimes scenes from that night played repeatedly in his head. When the question of what happened after he passed out arose in his mind, he pushed it away. He did not have the courage to ask his mother about that day. During those three months of recovery, his mother hovered around him and kept vigil at his bedside. She did not go home or wash or change for days, and mosquitoes feasted on her. During the day, she bought medicine, collected test results and radiographic lms, and turned up with asks of food for him. Weeks later, she lost her job. He saw guilt written all over his mother whenever she looked at him, and sometimes little tears made the corner of her eyes glisten. He saw pity in her eyes. He didn’t want her to pity him. He wanted her to be proud of him, so he vowed on his sickbed to make her happy. He vowed to make something out of his life. e night before he was discharged, she held his hand and spoke to him with tear-laced voice.

“Have you joined a bad gang? Are you taking drugs? Why don’t you want to talk to your mother? You want to abandon me like your father.” She cried, her eyes glistening. Tijani saw the same fear he had seen in his mother’s eyes the day of the attack. He never thought he would see her like that again. He felt remorseful. And he decided then that he could no longer blame his mother Blaming her would compound an already di cult situation for her. at day, he reminded himself that he was the only person his mother had. Years later, when it was time for him to look for jobs, he realized that the one-eyed man was an afterthought in the world where the full-visioned struggled. At 28, he could no longer tell himself that his life wasn’t a total failure.Right after he graduated and returned home, he went back to his dad’s broken camera. at was one thing he had never forgotten. He tinkered with it again, trying to see if he could x it. en he decided to save for a new camera.erst picture he took with his new Canon lm camera was a mural close to the beer parlor down Adamu Street that had not been there before. It bore the image of Albert Einstein holding a sign with the inscription

“ at night you not only saved my life but saved me from shame. When the robbers saw what they did to you, they ran away. God intervened. ank you, my son.”

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Tears brimmed over his eyes in a great ood. He started wearing an eye patch to cover the damage done to his eye. His condition earned him a lot of ridicule throughout secondary school, even at the beginning of his study at the Polytechnic when he was 24. On campus, he was confronted with the feeling he had tried to deny since the attack. He had felt that if he went away for higher education, put some distance between him and his mother, then he would be able to shake o the bitterness. During his study, he threw her letters away unopened and ignored her midnight prayer calls. He would not have done that to someone else. No one else mattered that much to him. His mother’s responses to his behavior alternated between bursts of anger and concerned questioning. en she traveled to his school and barged into his dormitory.

fiction Aperture, Samuel K.óláw.olé112 FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS.

Hope is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words . . . He developed his lms with k foto, an establishment two streets away, and asked Kayode Ajisafe, the owner, to let him into the darkroom each time he went there. Although he could not see very well in the darkroom, he loved going there. He loved blending with the dark. He loved the focus that came from making prints from a roll of lm. He loved the darkness. He loved that in the darkroom he was unseen, and therefore he could temporarily shed his problems. In the darkroom he felt no shame.

He took a good look at the concrete wall. It struck him as odd that they placed such a mural next to a drinking establishment, but staring at Einstein’s mustachioed face, eyebrows that looked as though they were going to escape, and frizzy hair sticking out in all directions had a strange e ect on him. He couldn’t tell whether Einstein was happy or excited in the painting but found himself staring into his calm, dark eyes. A line from an Emily Dickinson poem, a favorite from one of his father’s old books, struck him.

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Now, Tijani drives Adamu Street and parks right across from the beer parlor near the power transformer. Everything feels familiar but also di erent— blackened walls, peeling paint, the Albert Einstein mural now faded by the elements. Einstein’s face is gone, chipped away by cracks running deep into the walls.Inside the beer parlor, glasses clink, and the air is lled with murmur and cigarette smoke. Tijani occupies one of the two empty bar stools and orders a drink. e night stretches as he keeps asking the bartender to ll his tumbler. en the time comes when without looking up, he breaks into a chuckle as he remembers the line from Dickinson’s poem. . . . that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words . . . e words, like Einstein’s face on the wall, no longer mean anything to him. He wonders if his father was ever here, in this bar. He curses him in his mind, wishes he gets syphilis or something. en he decides his

Tijani breaks into a crooked smile.

“What do you like to drink?” he asks the woman.

father is taking too much space in his muddled brain and scans the bar with his single eye to see which unaccompanied lady in the bar would talk to a photographer with an eye patch. He psyches himself up, smooths the wrinkles on his shirt, but he is interrupted by a female voice.

“I love your eye patch.” e woman sidles up to him and sends a mouthful of cigarette smoke towards his face. Tijani smiles and immediately thinks he should tell her that the eye patch is real. He should tell her his story. Maybe she’d see his bravery. Perhaps she’d pity him. Tonight, he doesn’t mind being pitied. Tomorrow, he will wake up with little memory of a night of drunkenness. He will have no bitterness and shame from the previous day. Tomorrow, he will prepare to take more contracts for wedding pictures, capture more happy memories, and make more money to care for his beloved mother. Tomorrow, things will be di erent, but tonight he doesn’t mind being pitied.

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The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956–2018, Adrienne Su114 Adrienne Su The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956–2018 © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

I met Lucie in the fall of 1988, my last year at Harvard. I had spent the previous year at Fudan University in Shanghai, where I hoped to nd a world of poetry more or less like the contemporary American one, but in Chinese. at was, of course, one of the many ways in which I was unwise; I did not appreciate how unfree Chinese speech was and how little space its population had for literary anything. Another unwise motivation was that I had convinced myself that the English literary canon didn’t want me and

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Now, the students having gone back to campus, Lucie and I walked out of the Starbucks and into the Target. One of the worst things about New York City, we agreed, was that you couldn’t bring home carloads of cleaning products, shampoo, and toothpaste from megastores. She piled her cart with daily things—most memorably, huge packs of paper towels and toilet paper. For me, for reasons I can’t remember, she threw in a multipack of Pringles. At the checkout, she joked to the cashier that I was the one buying the toilet paper, and wasn’t her friend going overboard? We piled everything into her car, I told her how to get on I-81 and thanked her for the visit and Pringles, we hugged, and she drove away.

he last time I saw Lucie Brock-Broido, we were shopping at my local Target, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006. e previous night, she had given a erce, and ercely funny, reading at Dickinson College at my invitation, and now she was about to drive back to New York. In addition to the reading, a class visit, and a party at my house, Lucie had agreed to an informal gathering with students, on the condition that it take place in a Carlisle’sStarbucks.onlyStarbucks is inside Target. My memory of that session is mainly of the late-afternoon sun making it di cult to see anyone, and of exhaustion from having stayed up most of the night talking with Lucie, whose nocturnal ways seemed both cause and e ect of the otherworldliness of her poems, after the party. No one but Lucie Brock-Broido had ever been allowed to smoke in my house; my tiny kitchen made it smokier. “I’m going to be 50!” she had said over the “wonton soup without wontons” she had requested. “Isn’t that an unbelievable injustice?” And I was going to be 40. It didn’t seem possible that just over a decade separated us. As my professor in college, she had appeared as wise and formed as I was unwise and unformed.

Lucie’s rst question, “What are you doing?”, allowed me to sum everything up. I explained that all I wanted to do was write poems. Would it be all right if I just didn’t write a thesis? It would make me ineligible for honors beyond cum laude, and that was a bit of a drag because I’d been doing well, but would it ever matter?

She urged me to take her workshop, which was, like many things at Harvard, by application only. And then she spoke to me as if I were an actual poet: “If you write ten good poems in the next year, it’ll mean a lot more to you than a thesis.”

Now a seasoned professor myself, I ask: Who says this to an undergraduate, especially one whose poems you have never seen?

I needed to connect with the Chinese one. Of course, true to everyone’s warnings, the People’s Republic of China in 1987 88 turned out to be an oppressed and oppressive place, bearing little resemblance to the China I had constructed in my head from the Penguin Poems of the Late T’ang, the Analects of Confucius, the folktales from my language classes, and my parents’ pre-Communist childhood anecdotes.

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Lucie was the person I needed to meet at that juncture, an unusual teacher willing to do the reckless thing on behalf of poetry: to bet on the

So when I met Lucie at a reception after a literary event at Harvard, I nally knew the obvious, that English was in every way my mother tongue and I was to some degree in the wrong major: East Asian Languages and Civilizations. It wasn’t fully wrong; I had simply come to understand that I had chosen it out of love for the study of languages, the point of which was to give more dimension to my use of English. I cherished my East Asian coursework, classmates, and professors, and had come back from China only to throw myself into the study of Japanese, which was completely unnecessary from a course-credit point of view but which deepened my understanding of syllabic verse forms, sentence fragments as a literary device, gendered speech, and a range of grammars (loose in Chinese, strict in Japanese, and strict with a thousand irrational exceptions in English). My proposed senior-thesis topics now kept getting rejected because they were Asian American rather than Asian, and creative rather than scholarly. If they belonged anywhere, it would be the English department, for which it was much too late.

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student’s ability, rather than her likely inability paired with grandiosity. She herself had done something far more drastic, and much earlier in life, in service to poetry. As she told Guernica magazine in 2013, “I came to poetry because I felt I couldn’t live properly in the real world. I was 13 and in Algebra class. at was the day I decided I would be a poet for all time. I walked out of class and dropped out of school. at doesn’t mean I became a poet, but I did have this absolute severance with one period of my life where I felt I was being made to live in the world I was brought into—Straight-A student, e Most Perfect Little Girl—that I couldn’t inhabit anymore.” e speci cs are a bit more complicated; Lucie did not technically drop out, but she seems to have made a decision to stop trying to please every teacher and administrator, eventually switching to an alternative school where she could work independently. It was probably not obvious then that she would one day be a celebrated professor at Harvard and Columbia. By Lucie’s standard, I was coming to my “dropping-out” awfully late, and it was not much of one, especially when you looked to certain famous Harvard examples—Frost and Stevens, for example, didn’t even get their degrees.

As it turned out, three of the poems I wrote in her class made it into my rst book, Middle Kingdom, which appeared eight years later, in 1997. ree poems may not sound like a lot, but all working poets know how many poems get thrown away, or at least led in an archive of failures, on the way to a nished manuscript. One of the three was later revised again, but the kernel of its origin—a prompt from Lucie to write a “selfportrait”—remained the same. Another generous poet-guide, Mark Doty, whom I met in Provincetown, convinced me years later to make that poem, “Address,” the opening poem to the book. Now that I have published my fth book, I can look back at the rst poem in my rst book and think of it as exactly what Mark called it—an announcement, a declaration of who I was going to be. I was going to write about what it means to be American, in all its confusion concerning race, language, class, and lore. I have not always written speci cally about that, but over 20 years later, it is exactly what I’m doing.

I have saved Lucie’s comments:

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Final version, as published in Middle Kingdom: Address ere are many ways of saying Chinese in American. One means restaurant. Others mean comprador, coolie, green army. I’ve been practicing how to walk and talk, how to dress, what to do in a silk shop. How to talk. American: Meiguo, second tone and third. e beautiful country. In second grade we watched lms on King in Atlanta. How our nation was mistaken: ey said we had hidden the Japanese in EveryoneCalifornia.apologized to me. But I am from Eldorado Drive in the suburbs. Sara Lee’s pound cake thaws in the heart of the home, the parakeet bobs on a dowel, night doesn’t move. e slumber party teems in its spot in the dark summer; the swimming pool gleams. Somewhere an inherited teapot is smashed by a baseball. ere may be spaces

Sometime after that rst meeting, I met with Lucie at the Paradiso, a spacious, well-lit cafe that disappeared from Harvard Square some years ago. Lucie had installed herself at a table for meetings with students. She must have been interviewing for her course, because I brought her a pile of poems. I was anxious to read all the Asian American poets I could nd, and as I talked about my journey to that category, which in today’s context seems as obvious as my trip back to English, Lucie said she felt similarly about being a woman writing to a predominantly male tradition. e way she said it was not dismissive; she genuinely felt like an interloper, too. I wished, after our conversation, that the poems I had turned in were more explicitly Asian-American; most were racially unmarked. But we ended up having plenty of opportunities to talk about those things. My journal from that year mentions many phone calls from her, to suggest a poet to read (Li-Young Lee’s rst book, Rose, had just appeared, as had e Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim), or to remind me to attend a reading. While it’s tempting to equate a phone call in 1989 with an email today, since the latter wasn’t an option, they are not equivalent; the former took as much time and e ort as it does today. At the time I didn’t think to wonder whether

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The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956–2018, Adrienne Su120 in the wrong parts of the face, but America bursts with things it was never meant to have: the intent to outlast the centerless acres, the wedding cake tiered to heaven. Every season a new crop of names, like mine. It’s di erent because it ts on a typewriter, because it’s rst in its line, because it is Adrienne. It’s French. It means artful.

Lucie’s class became a form of weekly worship for me—not that the sessions were perfect or all students fully committed to the cause, but I always took my poems as far as I could on my own and was anxious for a response. I was writing often in meter and rhyme and cutting mercilessly, hoping for gleaming edges and heightened intensity. One week, I spent so many hours obsessing over a single comma that when I used my “author’s chance to speak” after the workshop to ask about the comma, the class burst into laughter. So did I, once I realized what I’d been doing. Lucie inspired in us that perfectionism tempered with moments of sudden, self-aware levity. All that year, I kept going back to the only book she had published then—A Hunger, a collection su used with loss, thwarted desire, and speakers in extreme circumstances, but not lacking in humor.

Lucie was calling every student poet she knew. It seems impossible, but so do many of her achievements as both teacher and artist. Any time I have met other former students of hers, the same dreamy devotion comes up; we all seem to belong to a cult of Lucie. And it is thanks to one of her phone calls that I went to hear Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, and Ellen Bryant Voigt one evening, and later ended up following Rita Dove to the University of Virginia, where, not incidentally, Lucie had studied as well. It is because of the author bio in Lucie’s book, which listed a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, that I set my sights on the Work Center, where I eventually spent a life-changing winter and met writers with whom I still exchange drafts and have shared many milestones.

For instance, from “Autobiography”: It is only three o’clock & already I’m alone Listening to the lovers next door Like Patsy Cline & her Man rowing barebacked wooden furniture Like the real life bicker of true love.

e daring wink in the opulent, tragic “What the Whales Sound Like in Manhattan”:

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e confounding but hilarious aside in the ominous, otherworldly rst poem in the collection, “Domestic Mysticism”: When I come home, the dwarves will be long In their shadows & promiscuous. e alley cats will sneak Inside, curl about the legs of furniture, close the skins Inside their eyelids, sleep. Orchids will be intercrossed & sturdy. e sun will go down as I sit, thin armed, small breasted In my cotton dress, poked with eyelet stitches, a little lace, In the queer light left when a room snu s out. I draw a bath, enter the water as a god enters water: Fertile, knowing, kind, surrounded by glass objects Which could break easily if mishandled or ill-touched. Everyone knows an unworshipped woman will betray you.

Overall, it was the extravagant and inevitable-feeling tragedy that drew me to the poems, the four-and-a-half pages spent in the precocious head of “Jessica, from the Well,” the extreme dysfunction of twin sisters who lose touch with reality and edge toward violence in “Elective Mutes,” the vague “you” who evokes an economically and emotionally lost Midwest in “Ohio & Beyond.” Lucie could deploy the ampersand and the mid-sentence capital letter with an authority I still can’t muster myself; when I try either,

It is a sound that catches on the canopies of pre-war highrise buildings designed to keep out light & Latin music & the seeds of Chinese children eating kiwis on these handsome summer nights.

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It is a sound that tips the gryphons on the tops of buildings, one that spreads the concrete wings of gargoyles clutched to rooftops looking out for seasons. In Manhattan it is not that common to have whales.

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e letter gave me the strength to persist in the face of the routine rejection that all but the most blessed of writers face. Some excerpts:Iam certain, long since, that you are the Real Item. I’ve got this Faith (I’ve got this mystic streak in me . . . ). More & more, week by week, I am convinced of this . . . It is my business to encourage, enlighten, entertain, support — but I am not Merely encouraging you. I mean more than that. I know your Gift. It’s real & Genetic & true . . . Here’s the thing: I am, as you know, drawn often to the garish . . . the risky, the Bold, the Audacious, the long-winded, the High-winded. Drawn to that. And what delights me most about your work is how enormously coolblooded it is. Sometimes, nearly Bloodless. And so it shocks & astounds me! at these qualities of near-tepid detachment, of near-compulsive tightness, of lukewarmness in the poems draws (& gives o ) such heat. Small miracle? is is the gift. . . . Get thee to a Nunnery. Get thee to a Garrett.

the e ort looks amateur. I took A Hunger with me when I went home on breaks. I kept consulting it for years afterward, whenever life was cruel and inexplicable. * * * Lucie did not collect written comments from peer to peer but trusted students to give them to each other, and for the most part, everyone did. At the end of the term, Lucie told me that I would, in the course of my writing life, “be criticized by people who can’t see the orchestration beneath the coolness of the poems’ surfaces.” As I think she did for everyone, she gave me a handwritten letter in response to my portfolio at the end of the term. Over the years I have read and reread this letter, loving the distinctive, loopy handwriting that had skated all over my drafts, usually in three colors.

Because she did not collect the written comments, she had no way of knowing that I was already receiving, on occasion, the criticism she warned about, although some classmates must surely have vocalized them in workshop. ere was praise, but someone called my use of form “oppressive” and urged me to abandon it; another said the poems had no emotion and could I add some? is is indeed the risk of imposing a lot of discipline on a poem: withhold a hair too much, and rather than concentrating a feeling, you end up obscuring it. But if it was coming through to Lucie, maybe I was on to something.

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For a couple of years after graduation, I wrote letters to Lucie, sent poems, and sometimes called. I had moved to New York, where I loved the racial and linguistic diversity and unlimited literary events, but where I spent my days in a cubicle, had about $10 per week from my paycheck to spend on something other than necessities, and could not nd community; outside poetry, I was miserable. She called and wrote back, although she warned on a cat postcard I still have: “Forgive me for not writing back always & quickly – but know I think of you, reading your letters with pleasure. Don’t let New York drive you mad – it wd. me. is is why I live here in the beauty of the Provinces.” When I made my rst application to the Fine Arts Work Center, Lucie warned that my age, which would have been 22 or 23, was going to work against me; she had gone at 24 and found herself the youngest person there. Indeed, the Work Center describes itself as a place for emerging artists who have nished their formal training, and I had not yet been to graduate school. I was impatient, although not nearly as impatient as Lucie, who had been declared “audacious” by an early teacher, to whom she had submitted an 83-page poem. Another of her teachers, Charles Wright, who would also become my teacher, told me he wasn’t sure he had “taught” Lucie anything: she had, he said, come to uva already on her own self-made trajectory. I called her when the Work Center’s rejection letter arrived with a handwritten sentence at the bottom: “ e Committee admired your work.” Without hesitation, Lucie said, “ at means they are going to accept you later,” which ensured that I would keep applying. Plus, now that I have served on that selection committee, I know how rare such a note is; she was not “merely encouraging” me but speaking on authority.

I don’t know how she managed to stay in touch, because there were so many of us, more every year, and while not everyone intended to become a poet, the a ection seemed universal. On the last day of our workshop, when the students sat silently lling out course evaluation forms with Lucie out of the room, someone had broken the silence with the remark, “How can we ll these things out? It’s like critiquing your own mother,” and that same withheld laughter—as after the comma question— lled the room. at habit of withholding, then letting go, was a behavior she had cultivated in us; she projected formality in class, then broke it with an outrageous, hilarious remark—and this too was a lesson in writing well.

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I don’t love going to Target, but sometimes it’s the best place to shop, for those days when you would otherwise have to go to four separate stores, needing, say, a shower curtain, a workout top, a pen re ll, and a lemon. Not much of a poet when it comes to ca eine, I bypass the Starbucks. But since Lucie’s untimely death, Target—this Target—has taken on a certain sanctity for me. I think of Lucie as the automatic doors open to let me in, and again to let me out. I wonder where in the huge parking lot we packed her loot for its journey to the legendary apartment in New York, where her Columbia students were lucky enough to meet for workshops. I think of her negotiating the “real world” of tollbooths and dentists, that world she renounced as fully as possible to spend her life in poetry, and she seems— especially under the spell of her poems—a person loaned to us from another universe. I think of her Victorian-clad radiance every week in that class nearly 30 years ago and her graciousness in later coming to Dickinson for what must have been much less than her normal honorarium, as a kindness to me. I remember the day she came to workshop and complained that a boot had been put on her car; she was occupied with higher things than when to move the car, trivia that clutters the heads of us commoners, and literature is the better for it. I think with gratitude of that reception in 1988: what would my life look like if I, or she, hadn’t attended? And I hear in my head certain passages from that book I carried around like a talisman in the

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essay The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956–2018, Adrienne Su126 early years and nally thought to have autographed in 2006, in case it would be a long time until we met again: If I have something important to say I hope I live here long enough To say it gracefully. e wind moves Everything. Nothing is exempt. —from “Magnum Mysterium” Now you’re gone too & that’s one more Of us who won’t go ragging into old age. —from “A Little Piece of Everlasting Life” e earth opens for me as I always knew it would for a wish.—from “Jessica, from the Well”

It began nearly half a century ago, upon the purchase of e Waning of the Middle Ages, a yellow paperback, picked up probably at the Harvard Coop, in an e ort to ground my senior project deciphering e Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous painting, whose fever-dream agonies and ecstasies papered many a dormitory wall. I was then a student in Social Relations, a department now deleted from the catalogue, but I was already halfway out the door, tiring of the likes of the turgid Talcott Parsons, the wild omas Szasz, and the witty David Reisman, and the possibility of edging toward greener pastures opened up in a single course, Fine Arts 13, Harvard’s year-long survey of art. And I had the brass—or maybe just the foolishness—to think that I could master the swarming history of the 14th and 15th centuries in a few months: and, in those countries whose borders were uid, culture and politics devilishly complex, and where I had none of the historical background, and only one of the languages. If that weren’t brazen enough for a 21-year-old dilettante, then I’d add to the task a sweeping socio-psychological diagnosis of the artist and his times.

And for the cherry on top, my rst chapter was rendered in dramatic form, setting some of the characters: Philip the Bold, Philip the Good, Philip the Fair, along with Mary of Flanders, Mary of Burgundy, Mary of York—not to mention Charles the Bold and John the Fearless—as actors

Autumntide of the Middle Ages, by Johan Huizinga, edited by Anton van der Lem and Graeme Small, and translated by Diane Webb (Leiden University Press, 2020), 592 pp. R eading the newly translated Waning of the Middle Ages hit me like sudden death—not so much the dying part, as the instant review of a long life. Reabsorbing the antic contents of Huizinga’ s history (now entitled Autumntide) sparked a version of the search-and-recover expedition harkened by the sled called Rosebud, and the French cookie, Madeleine. e Dutchman’s freewheeling account of 14th and 15thcentury France and the Low Countries, now richly seeded with full-color illuminations, rang bell after bell, until I realized that it was the key to almost every chapter of my own life. How could that be?

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Do I need to say that—in the eyes of my three or four faculty examiners—my opus fell sublimely at? ese were the days when Freud was no longer on the collegiate menu, so I hadn’t taken a single course, nor read a word. e rst question at my thesis defense was what the father of psychoanalysis would have thought of HB. I oundered and fumbled, sitting before my inquisitors in the penthouse of William James Hall. How could I possibly know what Freud would have thought?

Shame haunted me for years after this asco. I remember lying on the oor of my attic dorm room, wondering how I could go on living, let alone deposit the wreckage of this thesis in the library, a requirement for the degree.But, to my delight and astonishment, I have discovered—only half a century later—that Huizinga shares the blame for the collegiate debacle. He started it, with an account too brilliant, too confusing, too distracting, spiced with quotes from nutty clerics, poets, inquisitors, saints, and martyrs. He himself was burdened with too much reading—and too much imagination—to mount a clear structure for his opus. And now I know. I’m not saying his masterpiece reads like my thesis, but that its swarming, spinning, recycling, and all-too-expressionistic methods gave me license to forgo logic, coherence, factual reliability, you name it. I felt invited to do my thing, and sure enough, during my trial, one of the triune judges, who settled on my grade of “no distinction,” quipped that, perhaps, I was better o becoming a novelist. Although prophetic, that remark salved no wounds. I wore the dishonor like a coat of arms, a blazon, a device, proverb, motto for the minimum of a decade, but probably more like two. Not knowing, then, of course, that I would spend the rest of my life atoning for this school-day disaster. I haven’t become a historian, and I still have no sense of time: clock, diurnal, annual, era. But I now understand a few things. Why e Waning was so important to me, as—even to me at that time—it read like a kind of life story: my own.

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Autumntide Of The Middle Ages, Jean McGarry in a talk fest, imagined and staged by me. When—truth be told—I could hardly keep them straight and separate from each other.

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Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch polymath, an intellectual giant, and one of a kind, “competent not only in Dutch, French, and German, but in Middle Dutch, Middle French, High Middle German, and Latin,” as Diane Webb, his new translator, writes, warning translators and proofreaders of potential potholes. e original Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen hit the stands in 1919, and was translated into English in 1924. e subtitle, not always included, is A Study of Forms of Life and ought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Low Countries. Huizinga’s mission as a historian was to “allow minds of his own days to experience life in earlier times.” I’m grati ed now to note that his aim was not unlike that of a novelist. Autumntide, the product of ten years’ labor, was Huizinga’s magnum opus, an attempt to set things straight with regard to two centuries that were too often slighted as the sad, deluded, and hapless route to the Italian Renaissance. He struggled with the title, as he clearly didn’t see the Late Middle Ages in Northern Europe as a decline. As coeditor Graeme Small writes, “ e term Autumntide suggests both a turning point and a whole season,” denoting a “fully developed culture”—what Huizinga himself termed “a tree with overripe fruit.” e book was a sensation, immediately translated into languages European, Middle Eastern, and Asian. It was reprinted dozens of times, had ve separate editions in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Hungarian. e text, compacted in its rst English translation, was fully eshed out in its original Dutch, and in this latest English translation. e original had a handful of blackand-white illustrations, whereas Autumntide is a magni cent co ee-table book with hundreds of brilliant color prints. It comes complete with just the thing that the young Harvard student needed: a timeline, a genealogy, an epilogue, notes, bibliography—the whole apparatus of a scholarly tome, missing, alas, in its earlier English version. And yet, even in its full, footnoted dress, the history retains its intimate, vivid, and wayward charm. e very things I liked in 1970 are still there in the 600-page, doorstopper of this, the 2019 centennial edition. e editor also indicates why I might have been led astray by Huizinga’s peculiar approach. “ e work self-consciously eschews the

In what way? My second book, loosely organized around a tale of those brief Harvard years, was arrayed like a medieval hour book, with prose poems suggesting pictorial illuminations. Its title, e Very Rich Hours was a chip from the Limburg Brothers masterpiece, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. But, it was much later, and around the time of the writing of book ve, that the buried-but-not-lost Waning resurged. I had wholly forgotten that the prompt for and crowning glory of e Waning were the paintings of Jan van Eyck. ese paintings served as the fulcrum of Huizinga’s odd argument that the Late Middle Ages were and were not the foundation of the Italian Renaissance. Yes, but also no. e Late Middle Ages were a thing in and of themselves, a forerunner to, but also totally lacking in, Renaissance spirit. is is the kind of paradox that unsettled the college student, whose recent life experience had dislodged—if not exploded—a childhood of devout Catholicism, but also did not dislodge and explode it— just displaced it, driving it underground. Huizinga’s dilemma: what the Late Middle Ages were and were not, was familiar to me: were and were not.

Professor Small speaks to the dilemma’s horns: [T]he art of Van Eyck and his contemporaries, apparently so modern, was actually shaped by the very same forms of thought that can be traced in all the enervated poetry, religious thought and conduct of the age. Secondly, those very same forms can also be discerned in the Italian art and literature of the quattrocento.

Burckhardt ’s Italy was not so modern after all. Our concept of periodization—a fundamental issue in general. history—was in need of a revision.

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Autumntide Of The Middle Ages, Jean McGarry framework of political history.” It a ords “an empathic understanding” of the past, largely shaped by the art of the time. “Until very recently,” the editor concludes, “few would have dared to claim that [the history] followed any sort of method at all.”

Yes! And, “ e order in which Huizinga set out his ndings may not be immediately obvious to the reader.” Do I feel vindicated? Not exactly, more like sweetly grati ed by this late-life reckoning with the Dutch genius who set my life in motion.

But would Huizinga’s “revision” answer the question of why the two periods are so obviously separate and distinct? Or even why we need them to be so separate and distinct? Yes, but also no.

Johan Huizinga was a very good writer. Even his chapter titles are inviting or provocative—or both. e history opens with “Life’s Fierceness,” depicting the public attraction of gruesome executions, and the spellbinding sermons by itinerant preachers on the Four Last ings: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

One Friar Richard, confessor to Joan of Arc, “preached for ten consecutive days in Paris in 1429. He began at ve in the morning and nished between ten and eleven . . . standing with his back to the open charnel houses, in which the skulls were piled up in in full view.” Who came? “Six thousand strong according to the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris, “they troop out of town on Saturday night to assure themselves of a good place and spend the night in the open.”e nale to the Middle Ages was, in short, a “stupefying heydey of painful justice and judicial cruelty,”whose striking quality was not “morbid perversity but the beastly, dull-witted delight that common folk took in it— its fun-fair gaiety.”

In “ e Yearning for a Finer Life,” Chapter Two, Huizinga begins to unfold, in bold contrast to the hangings and cruci xions, the niceties of court life. “ e hierarchical arrangements,” he writes, “of the court hierarchy are succulently Pantagruelian,” its services “regulated with almost liturgical dignity, of pantlers and carvers and cupbearers and masters of the kitchen—was like the performance of a great and serious stage play.” If the history does nothing else, it serves a marvelous appetizer to the plays of Shakespeare, many of which draw their stories from these courts and this period.From this prologue, Huizinga launches into a long examination of courtliness, knightliness, and chivalry, as these ideals and prescriptions schooled the upper class in their relations to each other, to the monarch, and to God, reaching deep into statecraft and warfare, until these ideals arrive in their perfect and natural home: literature.

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Sins against the sixth commandment were front and forward in the sermons preached during our all-girls retreats, housed in a convent—otherwise, sex was never mentioned by name. But all of this is old news; what was truly shocking to this writer was to be found in two middle chapters of Autumntide: “ e Image of Death” followed by “ e Presentation of All ings Holy.”

“Everywhere,” Huizinga writes, “the lie leaks through the chinks in the full knightly armour. Reality constantly negates the ideal. is is why it retreats more and more into the sphere of literature, celebration and play: there and there alone could the illusion of the ne chivalric life be maintained; only there was one among kindred spirits in the only caste where all these sentiments have validity.” (Until Cervantes comes along to make fun of it all.)

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e Romance of the Rose, with its two authors, is the literary highlight of the era, wedding the courtly and religious ideals with the bestial. “ e entire epithalamic apparatus, with its shameless laugh and phallic symbolism had once been part of the sacred rites belonging to the solemnization of the nuptials. en the church came along,” Huizinga writes, “and claimed the sanctity and mystery for itself, by transferring them to the sacrament of holy matrimony.”Bythetime I was a child, in the very last and latest segment of the Middle Ages, the “epithalamic apparatus” had only one side: the sacrament. It was clear from everything preached from the pulpit, or drummed into us at Blessed Sacrament School, that the highest callings were to the clergy and the convent, and that marriage was a lowly—if necessary—third. We were taught that the nuns were married to Jesus (some wore wedding rings), and that the church was our mother, and the marriage “act” there solely for the production of new Catholics. Birth control consisted of the so-called rhythm method, even though the pill was available. Calculated contraception was, of course, a mortal sin. e word abortion wasn’t in our lexicon. “Expecting” was the term for pregnancy; “lying in,” for labor and delivery.

“No era has constantly inculcated the idea of death into the collective mind as forcefully as the fteenth century” . . . and into the minds of 1950s Providence, I might add. A new invention, printmaking in the form of

Autumntide Of The Middle Ages, Jean McGarry

review133The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 woodblocks, contributed to the e orts of mendicant preachers to “render the idea of death only in a very simple, direct and lively image—sharp and erce.” e end game had two features: the elegiac, “What is left of all that human beauty and glory? Memories, a name.” But, “the sadness of that thought is not enough,” Huizinga adds, “to satisfy the need to be acutely horri ed by death. So the times held up a mirror to a more visible horror, transience in the short term: the rotting of the corpse,” and to be precise, “terrifyingly varied depictions of the naked corpse, rotting or shriveled, with contorted hands and feet and gaping mouth, with worms writhing in its bowels.”“Remember, man,” we heard in church—and elsewhere—“that thou art dust, and to dust thou will return.” As children, we went to wakes, and stepped up before the open casket, to kneel down, and look into the pale and still face, and at the carefully folded hands (usually twined around the beads of a rosary). During Holy Week, the time from Palm to Easter Sundays, passing through Shrove Tuesday, Spy Wednesday, Maundy ursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, we were told to meditate on the ve wounds of the cruci ed Christ, one by one. After ursday’s ceremonials and washing of the feet, we witnessed the theatrical stripping of the altar of sacred host, candles, and ornament, and draping of all the statues in black or purple shrouds. On Friday and Saturday, instead of the altar bells, sacred moments were marked by the dismal clapping of wood blocks. e priests, often three of them clad in black, prostrated on the altar steps, face down. On Good Friday, the “Holy Joes,” and I was one, knelt for three hours to mark the time Jesus hung on the cross, then knelt some more for the liturgical dirges and lamentations that followed.

“ ere is,” Huizinga remarks in Chapter 12, “an unbridled need to visualize all things holy, to give every conception of a religious nature a distinct form so that it imprints itself on the brain like a sharp engraving.” To assist the visualization was “the rampant rise in the number of vigils, prayers, fasts, abstinences.” To me, six centuries later, all this ceremony was very exciting, injecting into the drab everyday a dose of spice. ere was a year, the Marian year, dedicated to Mary, and Catholic girls born then were not only called Mary, but were asked to dress only in the colors of the

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I laughed when I read that a 15th-century divine lamented that “few people go to Mass on holy days. ey do not listen until the end and content themselves with quickly touching the holy water, saluting Our Blessed Lady with a genu ection, or kissing the statue of a saint.” Likewise, men in our parish preferred, during mass, to stand in the back of the church, even after the pastor (“Siddown!”) called them out. As young girls, a friend and I liked to visit the statue of the Little Flower, St. érèse of Lisieux, and plant nger-kisses on her plaster roses. I don’t think, though, we assumed we collected extra points for doing so. We knew this was unsanctioned.Inachapter entitled “Types of Religious Life,” Huizinga begins to experiment with his far-reaching theories. While marking the cultural divide between north (the northern Netherlands) and south (France and lower Netherlands), he describes the former as strictly severing “pietistic circles” from worldly life, whereas lower down on the map, “lofty devotion remained part of general religious life,” concluding with the bold assertion that this

Madonna: blue and white. On the feast of St. Blaise, crisscrossed candles were pressed against our throats as a sign and promise that the saint would protect us from su ocation. A St. Christopher medal hung on the rearview car mirror to save us from accidents, just as he had carried the Christ Child safely across the waters. We wore cloth scapulars, so that when we died, we wouldn’t serve a long sentence in Purgatory. We pinned miraculous medals (with a stamped image of the Blessed Virgin) on our blouses. Every morning we o ered up “the trials and joys of our school days” to absolve some portion of our sins and their residue. We were told to “o er up” any pain, illness, or disappointment to God, for the salvation of souls, including our own. Release from our term in Purgatory, that limbic zone, was purchased through frequent vocalization of short appeals, ‘ejaculations,’ such as “Lord have mercy” or “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, ” which were readily converted to pungent (“God damn it, Isabel!”) curses. Some of these ejaculations were valued at 30 days, some more. Numbers were important.

Church bells rang three times a day for recitation of the Angelus. ere were seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, eight corporal and eight spiritual works of mercy, eight holy days of obligation, nine days for a novena. . . .

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What might sound like a mild form of eugenics was a view widely shared in my parish, where the south (Italian Americans from Sicily and Naples), were known to pay only their Easter duty, skipping Sunday mass (and accruing 51 mortal sins for doing so), contrasted with the Irish Holy Joes of potato-famine provenance, who trekked dutifully to church on Sundays, the holy days of obligation, and every day of the week, if they could.Addressing

what he reads as “barbaric ascesis,” Huizinga describes extremes of piety, unknown even in my neighborhood. One of the holy mendicants King Louis IX beckons to attend him on his deathbed is known to “ ee if he sees women . . . has never touched a coin . . . usually sleeps standing or leaning . . . never cuts his hair or beard . . . never eats food of animal origin, and accepts only root vegetables.” Annual vacations in rural Brittany gave tangible proof that this was no exaggeration. Certain of the one-room cottages with ve-feet- thick walls still contained tall cabinets—built in or freestanding—that served as beds, so that married couples, in the interests of purity, chastity, modesty, and diabolic temptation, could safely sleep standing up.

Huizinga delights in these extremes of ascesis, forever coupled with crude materialism, devoting a chapter to how 14th and 15th-century folks managed to tie every aspect of daily life together, all radiating from the deity. Once God himself was visualized, “everything that emanated from him . . . had to solidify or crystallize into formulated thoughts. And thus originate that grand and noble image of the world as one big symbolic nexus, a cathedral of ideas. . . .”

He nds his example in the walnut as a foliate symbol of Christ: “the sweet kernel is his divine nature, the eshy outer skin his humanity, and the wooden shell between them is the cross.”

e latter half of Autumntide is devoted to a closely reasoned argument for why art of the Late Middle Ages was more revealing, closer to the truth,

di erence “still distinguishes Latin people from Northern peoples: the former take contradictions less seriously, feel less strongly the need to draw the logical conclusion, can more easily combine the often cynical attitude of everyday life with the high rapture of the blessed moment.”

Autumntide Of The Middle Ages, Jean McGarry and aesthetically superior to all forms of writing, except maybe sermons and satires, which managed to elude eschatological strictures.

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“If a painter con nes himself to the simple depiction of an external reality in line and color,” he writes, “then he inevitably imbues that purely formal imitation with a surfeit of things unspoken and ine able. But if a poet aims no higher than to express in words a visible or previously pondered reality,” he loses “the treasure of the unspoken.”

Boiled down, what this means is that painters could ful ll the need to be observant and doctrinally correct by reverent treatment of the religious scene at the picture’s center—Mary and her baby, the cruci xion, adoration of the magi, etc.—but were free in the borders to depict extraneous things—things outside of the church’s jurisdiction: bluish castles rising up in the distance, a few round-tufted trees, and stone outcrops, all taken from life. Jan van Eyck is seen by Huizinga as the best the age could produce. In his few extant portraits, he plumbs “personality to its depths.” In the double portrait Giovanni Arnol ni and his Wife, Huizinga sees much to admire in the free handling of facial expressions and articles of furniture, but other scholars have ascribed every feature in this painting to its proper source in Christian iconography. Not much of a margin for freelancing.

He begins his argument by detailing the strictures: Art from the end of the Middle Ages faithfully re ects the spirit of the end of the Middle Ages, a spirit that had reached the end of its path . . . the portrayal of all conceivable things taken to their logical conclusions, the over lling of the mind with an in nite system of formal representations: this, too, is the essence of the art of the age. It, too, strives to leave nothing unformed, nothing undepicted or unembellished.” Later, he opines that an “art dominated by that horror vacui may perhaps be called a characteristic of spiritual eras nearing their end. His second step is to show how the all-inclusive mode served painting far better than poetry.

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When I had completed the manuscript for Above It All, my third novel, I took my mother to Belgium—to Bruges and Ghent, to have a look at the paintings to be found in Jan van Eyck’ s home turf. I had seen the Annunciation in the National Gallery, and had glimpsed some portraits in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, but key works were still to be found in what was formerly the Kingdom of Burgundy. What was the motive for situating this particular artist front and center in my novel? I had long forgotten e Waning of the Middle Ages, and even the thesis crisis had faded from mind. Until just now reading Autumnide, I did not recall the centrality of Jan van Eyck in Huizinga’s great work.Did I write this book in homage to Huizinga? No, but I can’t deny the book’s lingering in uence. When I researched hour books after nishing this novel, and was given, as a Christmas present, a boxed edition of Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, I turned to the two volumes of Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting, and read those again when working on the van Eyck book. Never, though—until now—did I see that the source for this lifelong obsession with the art of the Late Middle Ages, was that crucial collision as a college senior with e Waning. * Huizinga devotes his last chapter, “ e Coming of New Forms,” to the transition from Late Middle Ages to Early Renaissance, but it’s clear his heart lies in the Franco-Burgundian world of the 15th century, a world whose major keynote is one of “gloom, barbaric splendor, bizarre and overloaded forms, threadbare fantasy. . . . ” By the 15th century, of course, the Italian Renaissance was well begun, and northern Europe had borrowed and adopted something of this cultural rebirth, familiarizing itself with the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome, but only as “antique traits,” “ludicrous latinization,” delving no deeper than the trimmings. “ e French spirit of the fteenth century still wears the Renaissance like an ill- tting garment,” he concludes. e Renaissance, in short, never arrives?

Oh, but yes it does. In the last sentence of Autumntide, Huizinga celebrates the possibility (and ingredients) of full arrival at rebirth. “ e Renaissance comes,” he writes, “only when the tone of life changes, when the tide of the mortifying renunciation of life turns, and a fresh, gusty wind arises, when the happy awareness ripens that all the glory of antiquity, which served for so long as a mirror, could be regained.”

For this writer, Autumntide remains a marvelous book—truly a book of marvels, whose author was thrilled by the weirdness, perversity, fervor, credulousness, etc. of the time, its people and productions. is story and how he tells it had a lasting grip on my imagination that no number of trips to Florence and sightings of Michelangelo and Donatello, along with the multiple readings of Burckhardt on the Renaissance, could match. It is probably the reason I took so to the works of John Ruskin with his clear bias in favor of the Romanesque and the Gothic, and his disdain, if not disgust, with the classical revival in Italy, and sequelae. at rebirth in architecture and art was, in his eyes, a retrograde production of stale vulgarity, compared to what came just before. When I saw that e Waning of the Middle Ages, long forgotten by me, was returning to the shelves in this new, colorful dress, I knew I was in for a treat, but I couldn’t have foreseen the shock I would feel at every page, grasping how deeply this book had touched almost every era of my life as a writer.

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Autumntide Of The Middle Ages, Jean McGarry

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The FSG Poetry Anthology, edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robin Creswell (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021), 416 pp. O ne of the wonderful—and discouraging—things about poetry anthologies is that they’re almost compulsory; they scream “required reading,” and they often are. One could imagine a compendium of great anthologies, from Tottel’s Miscellany to Pound’s collation of the Troubadours and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry. e curatorial impulse haunts poets and poetry—since more than a couple dozen poems t in the space of a book, more and more books exist to house the memorable ones.

So the rst of this collection’s many names are the aging moderns Eliot and (Allen) Tate and their great students, direct or not, Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, and Robert Giroux’s Philolexian cohort John Berryman; his 22nd Dream Song, “of 1826,” in reference to the near-simultaneous deaths of John Adams and omas Je erson on the Fourth of July, opens this collection. More than the soft indignity of “teenage cancer” and the self-consciously suburban Hopkinsisme of “I am the auto salesman and lóve you,” this poem presents an historical imperative: It is the Fourth of July. Collect: while the dying man, forgone by you creator, who forgives, is gasping ‘ omas Je erson still lives’ in vain, in vain, in vain. I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers y. Perfectly burlesque—a poet-pussy cat on the hunt for material, but more omnivorous. Which works as a good enough substitute for this book’s mission.

In their FSG Poetry Anthology, Farrar, Strauss, and (inevitably) Giroux have supplied, through editors Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, possibly the best anthology in recent memory. Not that they had much choice; FSG arrived and came to ascendancy concurrent with the professionalization of poetry during the 20th century’s fat American middle.

Or Ange Mlinko’s tin miniatures: Rotted frames, rusted nails, show their age: the peeling backs, the glass glued now to them like glass-topped co ns . . . the water damage (my fault) that looks like ectoplasm which live in Karen Solie’s derelict (North) Americas: Unequivocal through Carolinian forests which have not wholly disappeared, and equally among rows of wrecked cars in the junkyards, hoods open like a choir?

Solitary Ducks: On The FSG Poetry Anthology, Spencer Hupp

Or Lawrence Joseph’s metaphysical cities: So you will be, perhaps appropriately, dismissed for it, a morality of layingseeing,iton. Who among the idealists won’t sit in the private domain,exchange culture with the moneymakers?

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But one tries, against hope, to live for the present. While our poets— new, formal, or not—have largely emerged from their little trenches to rally together against their craft’s present and for-now-ebbing obscurity, missing the dark woods for the trees. is isn’t to say there’s nothing written now worth reading; there’s enough and much of it from FSG. Ask where this hemisphere’s poetry lives today, and I’ll show you Ishion Hutchinson’s dowse and soot-haunted seascapes: . . . drift-pocked, solitary ducks across the bay’s industrial ruts, their stark white shapes moving like phantoms in the marsh, somewhere outside New Jersey.

Remember Larkin’s admonishment about “foreign” poetry (“If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or whatever”) and that Beowulf had to come to Britain—now to America—to furnish a written language, and that its translators are translating, as it were, from English. e collection speaks for translation’s place at the crosshatched center of American poetry—an unapologetically New York way of seeing things. Robert Giroux found the necessary aggregate—logroller, sometime money-spinner—in Robert Lowell himself, whose presence infects these poems, especially the many translations. With signi cant, mostly Soviet, exceptions—Joseph Brodsky, Valzhyna Mort, Charles Simic—American poets are mostly de ned in and by one language, as our graduate programs are, or de ned by a particularly American derring-do, like “battling” cancer or the extra point kick in (American) football. Galassi, one of this country’s most intelligent translators, manages to sneak in a few of his own rich and careful treatments of Montale—who’s been his life’s achievement: So much time has passed yet nothing’s happened since I sang you “Tu che fai l’addormentata” on the phone, gu awing madly. Your house was a ash of lightning from the train,

Far from being comprehensive—or even much of a survey— this anthology speaks for a cosmopolitan attitude recurrent, but not predominant, in American poetry. But anthologies exist to o er the diachronic view beside the synchronic, and the best thing about this book, its real curatorial genius, is in its translations, which constitute a little under a fth of the book’s pages. e sheer sweep of them alone, from Ashbery’s thunderous Max Jacob to Maria Dahvana Headley’s new Grendel-asCandyman Beowulf, which is just as fun as one dares to imagine: . . . Be it wizened vizier or beardless boy, he hunted them across foggy moors, an owl mist-diving for mice, grist-grinding their tails in his teeth. A hellion’s home is anywhere good men fear to tread.

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One particularly compelling section comes just before the book’s middle, when the bronze “elegance” of Lorca’s “Andalusian . . . olive trees”—trans. Christopher Mauer—catches int on Christopher Logue’s Iliad on the other end of the Mediterranean: “Fender their sca old pike-heads into Greece.” at exquisite verb, “fender,” ickers in Heaney’s Beowulf: “So the king of the Geats / raised his hand and struck hard / at the enamelled scales.” en the inverse of enamel—soft, gummy rubber—in Eliza Griswold’s “single ip- op grac[ing] the hardpacked oor.” Footsteps again in Michael Hofmann’s Durs Grünbein. “Incessant rain has softened the tracks, the woods are one long ambush, / and the barbarians in packs, the wolves, / bite pieces out of our rear guard.” en, decisively, “I walk the rainbow in the dark” from Frederick Seidel. And nally, another refraction prism though Lowell vis Montale: “this life / for everyone no longer possessed with our breath— / and how the sapphire last light is born again for men who live down here; / it is too sad such peace can only enlighten us by glints, / as everything falls back with a rare ash on steaming sidestreets.”

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Solitary Ducks: On The FSG Poetry Anthology, Spencer Hupp leaning over the Arno like the Judas tree that tried to protect it. e editors risk a troubling American naïveté about English—that translation is a bilateral e ort between the source language and the translator’s target language and universalizes rather than arrogates its object language into a “third code.” ankfully, the selected translators prove more often open to the gritty, idiolectic, sometimes cartoonish (mist-diving, grist-grinding) necessities of interested translation and help tongue the anthology’s grooves. As Creswell and Galassi outline in their introduction: We have aimed to single out poems that come alive as objects on their own, even as they rhyme—often at a slant—with other pieces in the anthology. ere are greatest hits here, but more frequently we’ve tried to select work that is perhaps less familiar yet nevertheless characteristic of the writer: renewed discoveries to hold up to the light again.

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ings aren’t always this easy—certain acquisitions tilt the scales a bit. Again, from the introduction: “ e poems are designated by the date of their rst publication on the fsg list, which occasionally makes for unexpected juxtapositions.” ere’s something weirdly compelling about Delmore Schwartz’s sneaking up on A. E. Stallings in the book’s home stretch. But they go on: “Above all, we hope this book is fun—full of surprises and delights that will lead the reader back to the wealth of extraordinary voices who have helped make fsg the house it is.” is is honest, as far as advertising goes, and brings to mind Lowell’s “Scream”: “you don’t have to love everyone, / your heart won’t let you!” But you can read them yet in this book, for fun if not always from love.

Requeening, by Amanda Moore (Ecco, 2021), 112 pp. I n Requeening, the 2020 National Poetry Series winner selected by Ocean Vuong, Amanda Moore uses the metaphor of the hive to examine the work we each must do to build, and rebuild, a life. A domestic hive is its own entity, humming with hidden, internal energies, yet it requires keeping—a steady, attuned involvement in the smooth running of its a airs. Requeening is thus a timely and fascinating tutorial in seeking a right balance between freedom and care. In the melodic rst sentence of “Afterswarm,” this balance is o : As for when my rst bees knit themselves together in a single sovereign self and slunk over the fence in search of a truant queen, I couldn’t say— not with my own house to mind. e stakes of such distraction in the handling of a hive—or a life—are mortally high, and the poem’s speaker learns her lesson, vowing in the nal stanza, “I will be alive this time / to what swells and roils the colony. . . . I will heed.” In poem after poem, this is what the speaker does. And while it does not frame every poem in the collection, the hive as both object and emblem allows Requeening to be both grounded in embodied experience and at the same time on the wing through ideas of labor and responsibility, resistance and relationship, making and grieving. Requeening moves uidly through a variety of forms (predominantly free verse but including sonnets, haibun, lists, as well as a palinode, an elegy, an essay, and a postcard). Despite deft tonal shifts, the poems maintain focus, pointing to hives—and by extension to hearts, houses, bodies, relationships, and, of course, poems—as working containers. (It’s no coincidence that Moore is a careful reader of Philip Levine.) Moore’s speaker locates her “own begetting” in “the exhalations and plumes / of midwestern work.” Her daughter’s dreams are “work that can’t be done in the waking world.”

Speaking both of spring and new grief in “Next Lines,” she rmly states, “it’s time / to help the season work its magic.” In “ e Worker,” a splendid

And while work in Requeening is fundamentally generative, it is not always pleasant or pretty. In “ e Dead ing” the speaker enjoins, “you house ies / and scavengers, you insects, mites, beetles, larva, / maggots and worms: do yourAbovework.”all, in Requeening it is our human bodies that do the work of experiencing and of surviving experience. “Don’t talk to me of a god: / it’s not what saved me,” we are instructed in the Whitmanesque “Gratitude,” “I thank nothing / but my body / for this life.” As hive-like containers of life and their own source of deep knowing, bodies get respect in Requeening Typical in its sharp-witted treatment of a lowly topic, “Haibun with Norovirus” demonstrates that a body’s work can even be funny, gross, and admirable all at once: Just as I became accustomed to her new independence, the privacy, her one-word answers, the girl croaks “Mom!” early one morning from behind the bathroom door and I come to nd her clinging to the lip of the toilet discharging a vomit so red and bright and brilliant it can’t have been made by the body, and I remembered the way, just before bed the night before and against my objections, she had upturned a bag of XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in her mouth. is vomiting is more than mere consequence, I can see, as her body works to purge itself entirely, throwing her head forward again and again.

review145The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 poem, a bee portrays its toil in and for the hive in words that could describe a healthyEachpoem:cell tidy and tight with brood, what’s mine now is sunshine and breeze a gyre of pleasure and labor within.

Leading All Our Voices To Thrum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening, Erin Redfern

Haibun” is another instance of such opening. Its short sentences arrive with battering speed as the speaker’s teen daughter is brought down and pinned all too realistically by a teacher-assailant before she begins to ght back and ends by repeatedly slamming his (padded) head to the mat, yelling “NO! ” One of seven haibun that track the shifting dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship, this poem in particular demonstrates the necessity of the form; it is with visceral relief that we, along with the near-sobbing speaker, take refuge in the controlled summary of its concluding haiku: Poison berry, potential weapon: within women a latent violence. It is not mere violence that fear has unlocked, though; like angry guard bees, her daughter’s good anger at being violated has released the energy required to claim her existence, whole and entire, in the world. “When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive,” notes Mary Oliver at the end of her poem “May,” and fear functions similarly in Moore’s collection. As panic opens her daughter to the body’s strong energy, fear opens the speaker to the inner workings of her own life. She admits as much in “Bad at Bees,” the creative-non- ction-cumart-history essay that concludes Requeening. Of a queen bee cage she puts on her desk, the speaker says:

At the end of “Calendula,” a gorgeous poem that visually links the orange ower, rings of re, the sun, and her body during childbirth, the speaker remembers both matter-of-factly and in wonderment, “How I worked to open.” In the context of the larger collection, this simple sentence is exhilarating. It portrays the work women do with their bodies not as just an involuntary e ect of mindless biological processes, but as deliberate, e ortful, and skilled. e sentence also captures the way love, fear, and grief, felt in and by the body, can open us to experience more deeply than the protective human ego allows.“Self-Defense

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I hope no one will see it there and ask me about it, though, because I hate how I sound when I say things like ‘Yeah, I keep bees in my backyard,’ or ‘Yeah, I surf most mornings,’ or ‘Yeah, I’m a poet,’ as if I’m any good at any of it. I don’t really know what I’m doing most days. I just like to touch fear.

While her daughter, the new swarming queen, is in the season of claiming, the adult speaker must learn to hold not only desire, power, and joy, but also relinquishment, fatigue, and fracture if she is to be nourished by the rich totality of her experience. To that end, those lyrics that don’t reach for the intensity of the most searing poems in Requeening instead carry forward its main themes, and they are well-orchestrated. “Postern,” a short meditation on the imsiness of car doors, sets up the later “Gratitude” by bringing its speaker to realize “the limits of safety / where we put our faith / what we allow to hold us.” e shelter of childhood home and family, in the anaphoric litany of what is “gone” from “1729 Maple Avenue Northbrook IL,” is backdrop to “Gone Song,” a lovely sister poem to Linda Pastan’s “To a Daughter Leaving Home.” e brief but powerful “Melanoma” is informed by “After the Phone Call I Teach Book 11,” in which readers join the speaker in the distraction of attending to a roomful of ninth graders, one of whom, paraphrasing Achilles in the underworld, “opines / even the worst life is better than the best death,” only to end with the speaker’s abrupt return to herself and the diagnosis she received moments before class begun: . . . I want to quibble with Achilles: it isn’t any life that’s better. It’s mine. It’s my life that needs to be saved. Even “Domestic Short Hair,” in which the family woos a tough San Francisco street cat, subtly raises its stakes when the speaker asks her husband “what it is to domesticate / and demand loyalty in return”—a fraught trade she seems to have already made in the utterly wonderful “ e Broken Leg.” In masterly syntax and tonal shifts, “ e Broken Leg” moves from rasping honesty—

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—to land in this stance, a kind of compromised, joyous rally, a bring-it-onto-the-end gameness that is the voice in Requeening at its most venturesome: And yet, I don’t despise the bike that broke his leg and dragged us into knowing. At night when I replay in dreams the afternoon that ipped us both to the curb, sick wail of ambulance and everything that followed, I don’t always say Stop. Don’t be a jackass. You don’t know what this will do to us. Sometimes I say Go faster. Let me see that trick you do again.

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—to quiet

In short, it’s unromantic, this child in the shape of my husband, this outstretched hand, rumpled head and hungry mouth. And the bright side? Well, talk to me another day.

Leading All Our Voices To Thrum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening, Erin Redfern

After the urry of surgeons and worry of permanent damage there is the carrying of urine the changing of bandages the creak of crutches and incessant talk of scabs. . . .

comprehension—enthereisthemomentwelookacrossthe bed at one another, mangled leg between us like a sleeping child, and understand this is what long love will one day be: a wheelchair, a diaper, a walker, forgetting, and then, for one of us, a solitude.

As I read and reread Requeening, especially the second half with its poems of diagnoses and loss, the nal couplet from Frost’s “ e Oven Bird” kept coming to mind. “ e question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.” I couldn’t immediately gure out why, because Moore’s poems portray, if anything, a rich resilience rather than diminishment. en I heard the famous lines anew: not “what to make of a diminished thing,” but “what to make of a diminished thing.” It would be a mistake to characterize Requeening as being narrowly “about” marriage and motherhood; these subjects supply the occasion for wide-ranging, inclusive, and resonant poems about making and how that relates to making a life. We are all contained by the limits of our past, our capabilities, and ultimately our mortality—“the queen must die,” as a famous beekeeping book puts it. Moore’s Requeening makes that containment capacious and rich, full of a bee’s “beauty and . . . churr” as well as the work of its life: circle and comb, tend brood, carry out the dead, lead all our voices to thrum.

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Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s We’re Getting Somewhere Now We’re Getting Somewhere: Poems, by Kim Addonizio (Norton, 2021), 96 pp. K im Addonizio’s eighth collection of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is alive with tension between the habits that dominated her earlier books and the emerging new truths of her later years (she was born in 1954). One famous inclination throughout her books has been to suggest that sexual romance is (though fraught with miseries) the only powerful escape from dreariness and dismay. At the same time, she has habitually presented her speaker as a jaded survivor of eros, someone who sees through romantic illusions. Addonizio can make both of those views convincing, but they become even more interesting when they intersect with other truths involving stoicism, humor, generosity, and hope; these attitudes have appeared in her earlier books but seem even more crucial for her in NowFatalism. about sexual desire and sexual role-playing and sexual disappointment has always been a central current in Addonizio’s books, so prominently and explicitly as to seem the necessary inspiring subject of her poetry. In my essay “Stuck in Desire: e Poetry of Kim Addonizio” ( e Hopkins Review 13.3, Summer 2020), I praised the clarity and variety of her representations of sexual longing and seeking and struggling and regretting and renewed seeking. All of this seemed courageously selfrevealing, encouraging the reader to accept and display one’s own midlife sexual energy with Addonizio’s nervy candor. A friend of Addonizio, however, soon told me I had mistakenly assumed that Addonizio is the speaker in all her poems that refer to sex. Maybe so. It is an assumption Addonizio has rendered tempting through many autobiographical details in her poems, as well as in her 2016 memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. So often, she has written in the voice of a woman who has sought happiness in many sexual relationships and su ered many disappointments—a woman who is explicitly a poet in California, like Addonizio. e cumulative e ect is to give readers the illusion of personal kinship with a writer whose persistence is like ours. To be a tangled mess is, she lets us feel, not only interesting but sometimes admirable.

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Now

review Mark Halliday Tangled

Sexual longing and sexual fatalism persist in Now We’re Getting Somewhere, but in a way less pervasively emphatic than in Mortal Trash (2016) and the books before that. Looking at Now on its own, we can see sexuality not so much as the maddening central force and rather as an inevitable part of a human lifetime. Addonizio’s compelling subject is herself—or the self, with whatever ripples in her relation to her speakers. She is driven to keep asking about the shape, pattern, meaning, value of her life.

Sometimes she gives in to erce cynicism about it all. e shortest poem in Now is “Résumé”—eight lines, based on Dorothy Parker’s poem with the same title:Families shame you; Rehab’s a scam; Lovers drain you And don’t give a damn. Friends are distracted; Aging stinks; You’ll soon be subtracted; You might as well drink. at poem is too easy to quote and does not give us insights except that we realize she could not resist including it in the book. She must have enjoyed its hyper-simpli cation. You could suggest that the poem satirizes the attitude it expresses, but I’m afraid it is instead a brief giving-in to the force in Addonizio that is repulsed by conventional lyrical a rmations and that wants to squelch them by saying Oh come on let’s face it. “Résumé” o ers the pleasure of neat summation; the wish to depict her life as a whole won the day too easily. Fortunately, “Résumé” is not at all typical in a book full of long lines that seldom rhyme. Still, we note the temptation of bon mot boiling-down that our poet must dodge to give us the sensation of having met a woman living in the minutes and hours of real watching and longing. In “Signs,” she looks from her window at passengers boarding a Brooklyn ferry and tries to resist heavy meanings in the images. Here is the rst stanza:

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Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday is morning the East River Ferry is just a boat pulling up to the ugly little park in Williamsburg & Manhattan isn’t the underworld projecting its eternal o ce buildings into those clouds e seagull landing on my balcony isn’t an image of transcendence or being destroyed by love She is weary of the poetic readiness to nd symbols out there, though at the same time the idea of a at world of obvious facts is frightening—“as each special, unique individual in the long line below my window steps onto the ferry / as rain slips down not representing the Many cleaved from the One & black umbrellas unfold”—and she remembers seeing the recovered body of a woman who died by jumping from the bridge; her ambivalence about heavy portent is caught in this three-line stanza: I’m sick of death & sick to death of romantic love but I still want to live if only to rearrange the base metals of my depression like canned lima beans on a mid-century modern dinner plate at stanza is one of many spots where Addonizio makes clear—with self-jabbing humor—that she is all too aware of the critique risked by her ongoing self-portrayals. e third section of Now We’re Getting Somewhere is called “Confessional Poetry” and consists of either one poem with huge white spaces or 13 very short (from one line to four lines) poems spread across 13 pages. e entries satirize the self-absorption of poets who are called Confessional, but at the same time Addonizio is de antly committed to her work of self-study and launches pre-emptive strikes against glib reviewers. Here’s one entry: All over the world, depressed, narcissistic little bitches are lling notebooks with their feelings Sloppy, boring, grotesque, unfuckable feelings

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A beef-witted male critic is indexing my sins in a highly regarded literary publication Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance ere and elsewhere Addonizio shows she is not at all oblivious of likely attacks; she does what she does because she believes in it as pursuit of human truth from which sexual energy can’t be separated. e truth she pursues would be a deep answer to How are you? and What makes you tick? Often, it’s as if you’ve asked her those questions and the poem is a half-bitter half-playful talky response. “I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full. . . . // I never learn from my mistakes. . . . Maybe you could be one of them. . . .” at’s from “Telepathy,” a poem about persistently undiscriminating attraction to men. It is funny but seriously worried, as are all the poems that lay out the aspects of a condition that hypothetically sums her up. Good poems of this kind include “Night in the Castle,” “In Bed,” “Song for Sad Girls,” “All Hallows,” “Ways of Being Lonely,” “Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions,” and others; she keeps looking for a fresh strategy to give an honest summary of her life. A series of self-portraits built of arrays of illustrative bits—this could be an unpromising recipe for a book by a weaker poet. Addonizio varies the pattern; there are in Now more than a dozen poems that depart from the task of gathering aspects-of-her-condition. One example is “Animals,” in which she argues against Whitman’s remark in “Song of Myself,” “I think I could turn and live with animals.” She knows that he was expressing an impulsive notion rather than a reasoned theory, but since she usually loves Whitman’s brash dismissals of propriety, she feels impelled to refute this insu ciently re ective one. What makes “Animals” work is not the rightness of her observations about animals being violent, voracious, or boring—it’s

Another “Confessional Poetry” entry (which I will assume does not refer to my 2020 essay) implies the poet’s pride in her sexuality in poems:

What makes that interesting is that we can feel how she both recognizes truth in the generalization and scorns its nastiness.

Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday our feeling of her emotional engagement, her wave of intelligent irritated realization that her own humanness is not placidly clear and simple like Whitman’s idea of animality. She says (in one of her pre-emptive selfdescriptions), “Walt, I actually like sweating & whining about my condition / Hot ashing & bitching in my cream satin sheets, lying awake drunk & weeping in the dark,” and the poem ends with these four lines: Walt, Walt, I don’t think death is luckier or leads life forward like you said I don’t think I’m going to grow from the grass you love I’m just going to have one last blackout in a dirty pink lace dress & be eaten by tiny ugly legless larvae (“Animals,” like many poems in this book, ends without punctuation.) ose larvae are driven by animal energy; her pink lace dress may be pathetic or absurd, but it re ects a human aesthetic choice. “Animals” is a clear and simple poem but not too simple, I think, because it gives us an exciting sense of listening-in-the-moment to our agitated poet who wants to nd her real view.Another simple clear poem I would defend in the same way presents her ri ng inebriated awareness of global ecological catastrophe, “ e Earth is About Used Up.” e topic is horribly unlikely to allow a good poem, but Addonizio manages it by staying convincingly in the ickering ow of her musing on the global reality. She thinks of a forgotten box of National Geographics in a shed, and ends the poem with these three lines: I’m standing on that box with my teeny megaphone, bringing you the news you know wildly virtue signaling waving my mortal handkerchief dropping it at your feet where it burns it burns here I don’t want it you take it please you take it

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Here again the meaning is simple and clear, but not boringly so, because Addonizio so swiftly and honestly hits the wall of her wish—like yours and mine—for someone else to deal with environmental devastation. In her many good poems you feel Addonizio wants to communicate genuinely, wants to reach you. at desire is fortunately stronger than her desire merely to impress or alarm you, and it generates clarity and convincingness in her self-portrayals, so that any element of narcissism is outweighed by her e ort to tell you the truth. In “Happiness Report,” she muses loosely on kinds of happiness for two pages and ends the poem with seven lines that brie y recall romantic ecstasy but then acknowledge the present pull of moody withdrawal: at day at the museum I thought I want to climb to a great height and then fall through myself the way a man falls through me when I’m happy and in love Now I only want espresso and a little foam To stay in bed all day, Christmas lights blinking against the August Pigeonsheat landing outside on the air conditioner walking around making soft noises and then fucking o Someone screaming in the street who isn’t me

We can feel that the poem has not pushed as far as it could into the idea of happiness, but there is something trustworthy in the un attering picture of herself in those last ve lines—they may be unfair to her, but they try to give the truth as she felt it in the moment.

And that truth of minimal irritable lonely survival is true in her reader’s life sometimes too. Addonizio is aware that she has a loyal audience, and in particular that thousands of women read her books, wanting to feel less lonely in their lives of desire and disappointment, “uncomfortable emotions.” Her wish to be helpful to her readers can prompt a too-easy encouragement, like the last seven words of “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”—“listen I love you joy is coming.” But even that histrionic

Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday avowal can sound real if heard in the dramatic context established by the poem’s title. And I think at the end of “Song for Sad Girls,” her sense of kinship with young women caught up in toils of romance and self-invention has some power because we believe she has herself made all their mistakes: ere’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave of minor thirds. ere’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you you’rethinkthat guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t anythingknow and I love you for that. I will admit the last sentence there lacks nuance and I’m glad the poem does not end there; four lines follow: Right now I feel like a menthol lter. I oat face-up in the toilet, my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect trying to y. I spin around and around for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song. What makes that work is the unexpectedness of the self-dejected metaphors of menthol lter and insect. Impulsive rather than nuanced, perhaps, but the sound is of a real person. She is not posing as a crusader of uplift. Indeed, depression and even despair have magnetic attractiveness for her—a compulsively recurring subject in all her books—and this force pulls against empathy and sympathy in a way she wants to recognize, wondering what in her life should be cherished. She wonders this in “What to Save From the Fire” (in Mortal Trash) and sternly advises herself to “look at all those rosettes of self-pity / adorning the cake of your depression: / let the journals burn.” In “All

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Ladies, women, darlings, bitches, you stop it right now & pay attention: Virginia Woolf is rising from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons nothing in her pockets but bread e poem does not o er other women a case for the lovely lovability of life—Virginia’s or their own—except insofar as the impulsive forwardleaning earnestness of voice itself becomes a kind of argument for vitality. It is a real argument, even if it was not enough to make Virginia Woolf choose to stay alive. Addonizio in “All Hallows” does not worry about being sentimental; she seems to feel she has fought her way to a spot beyond that danger, where she can in the last three lines instruct any women tempted by drowning:You have to take out the stones & put them back where they Youbelonghave to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them e moon weakening like a cheap ashlight while your heart blinks on e encouragement there is stronger for not sweetly promising happiness but suggesting that a sense of dignity in endurance will be reached.

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Hallows” she spends a page-and-a-half stewing in personal dismay about her own past but then rmly addresses a community of all “weird sisters” who have behaved self-destructively with alcohol and men. Here are seven lines that go from frazzled lament to imaginative undoing of Virginia Woolf’s Ohsuicide:my weird sisters, we’re not bad, just lost—look at Anne Sexton swirling overhead behind Plath & her impeccable broom, look at all the blottophiliac longinggirls to faceplant in Mr. Death’s crotch

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Now ends with encouragement, telling us to stay alive. e book’s last poem “Stay” risks being too simple as advice, but I think it is alive as a poem; here are the last ve lines: Now you can sob to an image of your friend a continent away & be Pleaseconsoled.waitfor the transmissions, however faint.

Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday

Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you, they’re meant for you.

ose white roses of mourning could be meant for you in the sense that you will die, but at the same time when you see them you are suddenly reminded of being still alive.

Unrelaxed and unrelaxing, Kim Addonizio seems like a di cult friend, but a friend. She is often disappointed, hungry for more to happen between people. e book’s title points simultaneously to our dying—we are getting somewhere but not getting younger—and toward the hope for exciting connection. e phrase comes at the end of “Small Talk,” which consists of ten remarks that you could try in the rst minutes of conversation with a new acquaintance, if your impatience with shallow politeness makes you daring. e poem begins, “Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.” “Small Talk” turns toward expecting complete failure of the encounter—unless conceivably the threat of failure inspires a sudden seriousness in the last of these four lines: How many self-important wounds do you have? Everything you say is tiresome. I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Alienation from zesty ripeness is an attitude in many honest poets after the age of 60. Yeats was only 58 when he said of Ireland, “ at is no country for old men”; he seems austerely isolated sailing to his dream-Byzantium, while Addonizio’s alienation seems to me (I am ve years older than she is) paradoxically sociable—her reader feels invited to join her in the wised-up group (in “August”) who have left the party “where the dancers blindside each other / with longing.” We won’t reach Byzantium, but we can enjoy the wit of our alienated friend.

And as I said earlier, her many self-deprecations tend to make us trust that her rejection of the thumping dancers is not a too-easy victory. She insists—with a bleak honesty like that of Philip Larkin in “Reasons for Attendance”—on acknowledging her own uncured wistfulness for the picnic of youth. She says in “August”:Whatever it is in me that crawls like a wasp over the remains of a picnic, used napkins blown over the senseless grass—tell me how to kill it.

Being no longer young, and almost no longer middle-aged, Addonizio seeks and imagines people—friends, partners, readers—who have grown beyond clueless young vigorous optimism. Her jabs at youthful naïveté come frequently in Now. At the end of “In Bed,” she describes herself as “like a marmot burrowed deep under the snow / who can’t wake up from hibernation / while others crawl out, ravenous for spring”; at the end of “Signs,” she resorts to a consciously unreasonable simile to express her hostility:the

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people who commuted across the river to work on Wall Street are still there, their eyes like suitcases of small, unmarked bills & everything is going to change for the worse

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Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Mark Halliday e pathos there is not funny, but tough humor is an element in Addonizio’s ongoing self-portrayal, audible in passages I’ve quoted, and humor is present alongside bitterness in the last self-portrait poem of Now We’re Getting Somewhere, “Little Old Ladies.” Here is the fth of its six stanzas: Soon we’ll be pissing vodka in our bedpans pulling the re alarm, wandering out into tra c No one will know about our epic journeys down the hall sailing to the dining room & back or the monsters we had to bitch slap to come this far & survive

Funny and brave and angry all at once, “Little Old Ladies” is an impressive achievement by a poet who for so many years wrote the poems of a young and almost-young woman a long way from Assisted Living. Kim Addonizio is a strong brave funny angry poet who does keep getting somewhere.

In interviews, Zauner has described Jubilee as a departure from her earlier works, an opportunity to write about joy and celebration after tackling grief and loss for so long. And it’s the re in Zauner’s voice, more so than the drums or the guitar or the bass, that conveys this sense of newness, of changingJapanesedirections. Breakfast has been called a lot of things: dream pop, indie rock, lo- . Yet on Jubilee, she refuses to be boxed in, to hue to one set of rules. “Be Sweet,” the second song on Jubilee, is all 80s nostalgia, drums

Joy and Grief in Tandem: A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Jubilee and Crying In H Mart, Kosiso Ugwueze

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Jubilee, by Japanese Breakfast (Dead Oceans, 2021) Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner (Knopf, 2021), 256 pp. M ichelle Zauner, who is more widely known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, has devoted years and albums to her mother’s passing. Her 2016 release, Psychopomp, recorded just months after her mother’s death from cancer, features a picture of her mom reaching for the camera, never quite touching it. e album centers bright and soaring instrumentals that belie a deep and complex pain. is light and the dark coexisting in a fraught space is a staple of Zauner’s work, and the same duality characterizes Zauner’s recent back-to-back projects, the memoir Crying in H Mart and the album Jubilee. rough both media, Zauner has reimagined what it means to be an artist, to grieve publicly, and to nd solace in the everyday things.

Zauner, who studied creative writing at Bryn Mawr, has spent most of her creative career making music; however, when e New Yorker published her memoir’s titular essay in 2018, she became an overnight literary sensation. e essay went viral, and anticipation for a complete memoir became part of literary news. Even before its o cial publication date in late April 2021, it became clear that Crying in H Mart would be a breakout success. Shortly after the memoir’s release, in June 2021, Zauner dropped her third studio album, Jubilee.

I experienced Jubilee rst, in my bedroom late one night, hiding under the covers with the lights o . ere was a ghostly quietness, the perfect time to sink your teeth into a new record. e album opens with the electric “Paprika,” and I was struck on rst listen by the strength of Zauner’s voice.

Joy and Grief in Tandem: A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Jubilee and Crying In H Mart, Kosiso Ugwueze and heavy guitar. While opener “Paprika” leans into the indie aesthetic that she is so well known for, “Be Sweet” is a throwback, a call to a bygone era, cheery and danceable with a singing style reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper at the height of her powers.

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“Kokomo, IN,” is the closest to a “sad song” on Jubilee. It begins with the lines, “If I could throw my arms around you / For just another day / Maybe it’d feel like the rst time.” Whether the song’s object is a lover is only partially clear. Lines like “Watching you show o to the world / e parts I fell so hard for” point to a romantic relationship. Yet the lyrics are ambiguous enough that anyone who has done a deep dive into Zauner’s body of work might be forgiven for thinking that this too is exploring the aftermath of deep grief.

If “Kokomo, IN” is the saddest song on Jubilee, then “Slide Tackle” is the darkest. “I want to be good,” Zauner sings in her trademark falsetto. “I want to navigate this hate in my heart.” e two extremes placed side by side, one tender, one forceful, more forceful than anything we have seen from Zauner so far, highlight the type of range that is so central to Zauner’s work, her ability to showcase a kaleidoscope of emotions and still have a streamlined and cohesive album. e star of Jubilee, however, is “Posing in Bondage,” which comes almost in the middle of the album. Here, the object is unambiguous, and the song is both dark and sensual. “Can you tell I’ve been posing / is way alone for hours?” Zauner sings. “Waiting for your a ection / Waiting for you.” An earlier version of “Posing in Bondage” was originally released in 2017. is album version is fuller, expansive. It rests at the intersection between longing and hyper-awareness. Zauner has called it a “fraught, delicate ballad.” e second half of the album also alternates between emotional highs and depressive lows. “Sit” sounds a lot like “In Heaven” from Psychopomp. Both songs share hazy guitar work, muted and fuzzy. “Savage Good Boy” is sonically the strangest song on the album. It opens like a children’s nursery rhyme, but one that has been co-opted to soundtrack a horror movie. It’s funny too, a skewering of a wealthy man and his stunted promises.

Jubilee closes with the slow and largely acoustic “Posing for Cars.” It’s a tting close to a whirlwind of an album, Zauner at her most poetic. e

six-minute song ends with a long electric guitar solo, cymbals crashing and crashing. It’s almost as though Zauner wants to cede the oor to her collaborators, to say, “And here is my team.”

I was struck, rst and foremost, by Zauner’s level of detail throughout Crying in H Mart. In fact, the details in its essays—“the Tupperware container full of homemade banchan” in “Double Lid,” “Bryn Mawr’s stone architecture upright against the early signs of East Coast autumn” in “New York Style,” “the canopy of trees and ferns and moss all growing into each other” in “Dark Matter”—make the memoir come alive, the people and the places so well-rendered that they might as well be frozen in time.

And time is rightfully of the utmost importance in a memoir about grief. It moves non-linearly, beginning with Zauner’s mother Chongmi’s death and then backtracking. Zauner zooms in and out of di erent life stages, illuminating, with each chapter, the people, places, and things that shaped her relationship with her mother, herself, and her heritage.

Crying in H Mart is as much about the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters as it is about food and identity, the three things braided together throughout the memoir in ways that are at once eye-opening and heart-wrenching. Early on, Zauner discovers that “our shared appreciation of Korean food served not only as a form of motherdaughter bonding, but also o ered a pure and abiding source of her approval.” Food is one of the only things that comes with few rules in Zauner’s relationship with her mother, and it becomes a way for Zauner to reach a mother who is exacting and strict.

It’s no wonder then why, in the aftermath of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Zauner looks to food, speci cally Korean food, as a form of solace. Some of the most heartbreaking moments in the memoir are the moments where Zauner, desperate to o er her mother healing, begins to cook for her. When her mother can hardly keep any food down, Zauner’s

I was so taken by Jubilee that I took the bus to my nearest bookstore the next day to get a copy of Crying in H Mart. I was sweating all the way home, where I sat on the oor and devoured the book in intervals over several days because the experience of reading Crying in H Mart was so visceral that I felt peeled as I ipped each page.

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desperation becomes an extension of her attempts to please her mother over the years, her struggles for approval. Like the light and dark of Jubilee, Crying in H Mart is also a book of contrasts: contrasts on both physical and emotional levels. We go from the Oregon woods where Zauner was raised, to the Bryn Mawr campus, to a house in Philadelphia that has plywood for shelves and a couch pulled from a touring van. In addition, the memoir takes us from the US to South Korea, where Chongmi was born. e contrasts between these two countries, and between who Zauner and her mother are in these di ering environments, are some of the most poignant parts of the memoir. In Korea, for example, Zauner’s mother becomes daughter and sister in addition to mother. Zauner herself is niece, cousin, and granddaughter. Ultimately these contrasts o er us a way into the more layered conversations around identity and race that are central to our understanding of the book. Zauner quickly discovers on her rst trip to Seoul that her “‘exotic’ look was something to be celebrated.” “I was pretty in Seoul,” she writes. is begins her complicated relationship with whiteness, a relationship marked by both a desire for it and a rebellion against it. In the end, Crying in H Mart is a memoir about death and dying. From the clumps of her mother’s falling hair to her gaunt and emaciated body, the memoir is un inching in its depiction of cancer, of her mother’s ght with the disease and her ultimate death from it. In the last moments, Chongmi is a ghost of who she once was, and yet we see her in her fullness. When Zauner turns to Korean cooking videos to feel closer to her mother in the aftermath, we see her too in full.

Joy and Grief in Tandem: A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Jubilee and Crying In H Mart, Kosiso Ugwueze

I had put o reading Crying in H Mart for months after its release. I’d nd it at the bookstore, reach for it, and withdraw. I’d see links to the original New Yorker essay and ght the urge to click on it. ere are a slew of books I’ve avoided reading because I don’t quite feel emotionally ready. Crying in H Mart was one of them. My own mother would take me and my siblings to our local H Mart and other international supermarkets like it when we were children, looking to nd the unique blend of ingredients— ai eggplant, pigeon peas—that we could not nd crammed in the “ethnic foods” aisle in your average

165 book and music review The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 supermarket. As I read Crying in H Mart, I felt the distinct recognition that happens when someone articulates something that you have held within you for soMotherslong. are complicated creatures. But the role of immigrant mothers like mine and Zauner’s is especially loaded with complexity. Food, the cooking and serving of it, becomes not just a practical exercise but a spiritual one, sometimes the only real connection the child of an immigrant mother has with their mother’s homeland.

Zauner, through Jubilee and Crying in H Mart, reimagines not only a creative playbook but the process of public grief. In these works, Zauner shows that art can be as big in scope as it is intimate. We can touch on large topics while remaining true to the details. Ultimately, art, in its many forms, has the power to be both a tool of expression and a means of healing. In an age when we are supposedly more connected than ever, it’s the everyday things—a stocked kimchi fridge, for example—that really bring us closer to ourselves and to one another.

In my rst months out of college, I took a job in Washington, DC and moved away from home for the rst time. I remember the distinct craving for my mother’s home-cooked meals, egusi soup with farina, jollof rice with goat meat, jumbo snails, yam porridge. I remember the sobering realization that because I did not know how to cook any of these foods, I was cut o from my mother in a fundamental way. ough distance is not the same thing as death, the pain of being cut o from one’s roots felt familiar as I read Crying in H Mart. I felt seen in a way that was both soothing and devastating. I connected with the complicated experience of a hyphenated Americanness, the struggle to reconcile parts of oneself that are often at odds with each other.

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t begins when a pickup truck pulls alongside the airstrip as the rst ngers of yellow-purple stretch across the treetops. Amra Boustani tightens the last nut on the new tail brace wire assembly she’s been working on since before daylight. Up all night preparing a sermon for some future Sunday, she’d poured one too many cups of co ee. e man steps down from the pickup and pulls the waist of his pants up to a suitable height. A local soybean farmer, he needs Amra to make a run over his eld. His wife would normally have this scheduled way out in advance, but yesterday he noticed soybean loopers on the undersides of his leaves and fears they’ll be the end of his crop if he sits and does nothing. ey stand beside the duster. Today would be as good a day as any if she can make it work. Amra has own his eld several seasons and knows she could mark the spray lines with closed eyes. She sets the wrench back in the box, wipes her hands on her pants. She glimmers as the sun rises behind her, and she sticks out her slender hand for his to shake. Amra Boustani never lived but in the imagination of Arkansas poet Greg Alan Brownderville. Her story is merely one element—albeit the subject of the central mystery—of the poet’s latest project: Fire Bones. A synopsis of the narrative, provided on the project’s website, tells us what we need to get started: No one knows what happened to Amra Boustani. A pilot and Pentecostal preacher from the Delta, she vanished on a transatlantic ight over a year ago and has been missing ever since. Enter a poet named Greg and a lmmaker named Bart, who pass through Amra’s hometown and get swept up in her story. Greg and Bart meet a host of colorful characters with clashing opinions about Amra and her mysterious disappearance. e townsfolk turn on each other in their confusion and frustration, but a breakthrough seems possible when a boy YouTuber in Lebanon unveils new information about “eerie, disappeary Miss Amra Boustani.”

Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell Elijah Burrell Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

Fire Bones presents a collection of poems and a fresh take on narrative and lyrical expression—something Brownderville has coined a “go-show.”

Because most of us reach rst for our cell phones, a go-show tells a story episodically via multiple media online. On the Fire Bones website, one will nd podcasts that provide context and backstory for the characters and settings, short lms, music videos (all music and lyrics performed and written by the poet and a few close friends), poems, visual art, and still images. Each go-show episode uses whichever medium Brownderville felt worked best for the story he wanted to tell.

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Some folks nd it hard to stay on the swath in the eld. It’s di erent from mowing the lawn, they’ll tell you. When you mow, you pick a point on the horizon or put a wheel on the edge line of where you’ve already cut. At ten feet above the ground and a hundred- fty miles per hour, it can be hard to tell where you’ve already sprayed. In the old days, some pilots had a man standing in the eld with a ag to mark out the rows for spraying. ese days, most pilots use a gps light bar that shows them where they need to open the hopper or if they’ve moved o their swath. Even with the gps, something Amra still refuses to use, some young pilots complain about task saturation—a kind of mental exhaustion caused by the danger from all the repetition in a day’s work. e truth of it is that Amra doesn’t feel exhaustion; she feels elation. She loves the repetition, sees the patterns come to life in the crops. She once heard someone say repetition is the signal quality in poetry and music. Maybe all of art, she’d thought to herself. To her, ying the lines is like meditation—like repeating a mantra. Faith and art bound into one. Amra is a god poet in the duster. She speaks life to the earth when her hopper opens, or, with a simple push from the same hand, utter desolation. Her mind unbuckles as she dips. It gapes wide open as she rises and rides the edge of a stall to swing back and hit the next swath in the precise spot needed.

Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell Prosimetrum, from Dante to Chaucer to Shakespeare, in its most basic description, blends prose with verse. e haibun melded prose and haiku. e go-show is not unlike Shakespeare’s prosimetrum or Bashō’s haibun for the digital age. Brownderville, whose poetry nds more common ground with Yeats, Stevens, and Frank Stanford than Bashō, has written pieces in prosimetrum before. I interviewed him back in 2016 and asked him why he used prosimetrum in his book A Horse with Holes in It. e melding of ideas, forms, and genres shone in the standout poem “ e Homemade Fireworks.” He explained:How does Shakespeare do it? How does he manage to give us such great lyric poetry, blazing and beautiful and free of narrative responsibility, within stories as complex and satisfying as the greatest novels? One thing I kept noticing is that Shakespeare rarely does his most di cult narrative spadework within his most lyrical soliloquies. at’s done by more pedestrian, utilitarian lines elsewhere in the plays. e stories are there, with all of their drama, all of their implications, underneath and all around the soliloquies, imbuing them with meaning, giving them extra lyrical launch. e prose sections of a prosimetrum allow me to set the stage, to get my narrative work done, and then break free into lyric. I can avoid the narrative-lyric compromises that are right for some poems but terribly sti ing in others. In the go-show, Brownderville builds on the foundation of the prosimetrum through ve general components. e rst two re ect the prosimetrum and haibun most closely: poetry and prose. is prose, though, is told in the ubiquitous style of the narrative podcast (think true crime and npr) and through monologue. Brownderville did not write Fire Bones for the page— it’s meant to be viewed online or via smartphone. Original music and lyrics tell part of the story as well. In the fth component of the go-show, we nd visual folk art. In “Will Travel for Ice Cream,” the fourth episode of Fire Bones, Greg tells his new friend Bart about the poetry he’s been writing:

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With her hopper full of the proper mix of water, methoxyfenozide, and spinetoram—a concoction suited to wipe out an entire population of soybean loopers in less than four hours post-spray—Amra starts her mental, pre-run checklist. Her eyes move over the instruments to make sure they’re online, showing the proper indications, and she moves her hands over the controls.

One should imagine a lm in which a man has been blown to “smithereens” after lying on a grenade. Cut to a wider shot, and the person behind the proverbial curtain rewinds the scene in slow motion. e viewer notices all the pieces of Fire Bones’s splintered characters, forms, and genres come together again to re-form the whole man. It’s then we realize the man—and all those pieces—has all along been the poet himself. It’s then we realize he’s the one behind the curtain too.

e persona poems in Fire Bones feature di erent characters from the narrative. It should be clear that there is a component of Brownderville himself inside each of these speakers. e reader will notice a smithereen motif throughout the poems (and in the lyrics to one important song), echoing the explosions, destruction, and proliferation of selves through masking and experimentation with di erent personae. e characters engage in this during various episodes, and to some extent, the poet himself, in writing all these characters, has created a strange kind of autobiography. When Amra’s ex, the past-obsessed Ju Mon Poy, writes “Best Year Biscuit” (a lament in recipe format similar to Ferlinghetti’s “Recipe for Happiness Khaborovsk or Anyplace”) about the loss of Amra in the form of a recipe, we understand there are slivers of the poet in these lines as well.

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Each of them—the dump handle, which Amra calls the “money handle,” the

Lately I’ve been writing these poems about how you can feel like a play with a bunch of di erent characters in it, and you don’t really know whether you’re one of the characters or all of them, or maybe the playwright or the play itself, or maybe just somebody out in the audience feeling kind of lost.

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Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell power lever. ey’ve all got the play and feel they’re supposed to. She closes her eyes and breathes in through her mouth and nose in meditation. She pictures her sport-yellow duster rising against the sky like a raptor, its wingshadow casting a dark cross against the Delta elds it blows through. en, a vision of patchy grass, stones, sand, and re. Her eyes ash open to the runway awaiting her departure. e Plus Homeschool us. Teach us again about the plus. You ew your cruci x and drew the sky: one light, whole soul. Without you, how to mend our Whosmithereens?butyoucan help this fallen letter I that can’t remember how to stand, tumbled to thispondpage—driftingminus sign? “ e Plus,” a poem brooding on the language of loss—and the orthography of the plus and minus symbols and what they become when broken—does its best to mask depth in its use of short sentences and simplistic language. Part of the poem’s immense charm lives in this wondering voice, a voice that uses words like “smithereens” and “pondpage” (a reference to a moment in the episode “ ree Ways of Looking” where we see the image of a lone swan feather oating on a pond). e idea of a piece of something drifting on water also evokes the possibility—a clue toward solving the mystery—that Amra might have crashed or been shot down.

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Redwing blackbirds roost in ocks by the millions in these parts of the Arkansas Delta. Amra still remembers hearing about several thousand of them dropping dead on New Year’s Eve a few years back. Such a mystery. e scientists had explanations if you were inclined to believe them. Some of the locals whispered about a mystic poet who’d thrown a hex onto a girl that wouldn’t love him. e dark magic had killed the birds, they said. She believes in magic and has seen her share of darkness. Later, that poet went on to write a book and admitted he’d done the thing. She keeps it on her shelf and reads those poems sometimes when the satellite goes out. One thing she likes to do when ying is repeat lines from a poem about blackbirds. It’s one more thing to keep her mind sharp. She’ll begin, “Four: A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.” When she nishes the poem, sometimes she’ll say, “Wallace Stevens.”

e most likely speaker, Amra’s adopted daughter Gobody, acts as the collective “us” and conveys anything but a simple situation. Here Brownderville evokes the image of Amra’s plane (its shape like a plus, a cross, a cruci x, a little “t”)—and life—come undone. ese images consolidate the simple shape of a crop duster against the background of sky with the dismantling of language (the “t” like a plus) in grief, faith (the cross), and perhaps art itself. e plus, the plane, the cross, after all, “drew the sky.” Minus language, art, and faith—with Amra removed from the larger whole—all that is left is for the “I” to fall back to earth alone, identity blown to smithereens.

In writing “ e Plus” through the voice of the ever open-hearted Gobody, the poet seems to agree with Wallace Stevens’s famous idea that the nobility of poetry “is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” In this case, that pressure of reality can be found in Gobody’s sorrow, mixed with her admiration for, and almost dei cation of, Amra. Imagination can maintain us even under the most mysterious or awful circumstances.

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Recalling Stevens’s recurring declarative mode, the poem “Kooky Cookies” (found in Episode 11) assembles a series of preposterous announcements and proclamations: “Call your phone your ‘fun’ at all times. When people ask, deny you’re doing / it.” “Cutter-Morning Star is an Arkansas school district. Git you some of that.” We see this poem delivered on-screen, not as words on a blank page, but through disembodied hands cracking fortune cookies, each line pulled from its cookie’s rubble and delivered to us in succession. With each fortune, the lines turn sharply from ridiculous and comedic to devastating. e turn happens around line 12 when Brownderville writes, “You’ll never thrive. at said, a football player named Wonderful Terry will exist,” until, nally, simply, “Some world” slams the poem shut like the lid of a heavy co n. It’s here we understand there’s no line between Brownderville’s ludicrousness and his emotional ferocity. It’s all the esame.connections between Stevens’s work and several key details throughout Fire Bones are hidden in plain sight. In the project’s aesthetic statement, Brownderville writes, “Even as the story serves up serious social commentary and heartbreaking moments of love and loss, it is frequently bizarre, colorful, and humorous, underscoring the theme of play that runs throughout the show.” Like Hass said, no emperor but ice cream. Fire Bones’ narrative arc begins when Brownderville and friend Bart Weiss nd themselves on a quest to locate quality Delta ice cream (with the right

Recalling his time as a 19-year-old undergrad in his 1995 essay “Wallace Stevens in the World,” Robert Hass remembers his rst thoughts of Stevens’s “ e Emperor of Ice Cream.” He took Stevens’s poem as “permission to have fun, to live in the spirit of comedy.” As time went on, Stevens’s work budded then bloomed in Hass’s mind—his initial feelings adjusted. Hass found absurdity in “ e Emperor of Ice Cream,” but soon realized Stevens’s poetry and this poem particularly was “point-blank and very dark . . . mordant, sardonic, pitiless.” Hass also allows himself to read the poem in a way that “there is no emperor but ice cream, no real alternative to death but dessert while you can get it.” e poems in Fire Bones invite similar rereading, equal parts “horny feet,” cheap pine dressers “lacking the three glass knobs,” and the concupiscence one rightfully feels for homemade ice cream.

Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell

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173 multimedia review The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 texture and butter-fat content). In the nal episode we learn there’s an ice cream shop in Beebe, Arkansas, called (what else?) e Emperor of Ice Cream. Brownderville also telegraphs connections to Stevens’s work by way of multiple references to blackbirds. e poet has his own history and mysterious connection to the redwing blackbird, and listeners with a sharp ear will catch the abrupt note and trill throughout speci c episodes. In Episode 37, “ ree Ways of Looking” (a nod to Stevens’s “ irteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird”) we see ocks of redwing blackbird imagery come together—as the lumbering synths in Brownderville’s song “Beebe” rollick beneath—into the crop duster, into Amra’s own ight. * * * Many things can bring you down, she thinks—power lines, dead trees (because their leaves have fallen with time), exhaustion. Most folks don’t think about how dangerous it is ying a duster. Sure, everyone likes to tell a story about how one ew—couldn’t ‘a been more than a few feet—above their car that one afternoon, but it can be deadly. Quick turns make the job easier, but they take a lot of skill. Not every man with his hand on the stick can do it like Amra without risking it all. Quick turns mean more time to do the job, to drop your yield. at means you get more acres done, more money in your back pocket. She pulls up at the last second, the bare limbs close to slashing the belly of the duster. Each pass, she pulls above those branches, rounds the bend close to stalling, to dropping into a spin. She knows the plane’s limits. Today the duster shakes—she takes it right to the edge. e tail wobbles and knocks. e stick rattles in her hand. She smiles and pushes slightly on the stick to prevent the unthinkable. She recites a few lines from that book on her shelf: “I said the spell. I still remembered it.

I remember / almost midnight, / when it started raining blackbirds. Let the sparks go up / and the darks come down.” Another tight turn. She speaks to the dead trees before her again: “Let the sparks go up / and darks come down.” e hopper opens and the spray stripes down the eld.

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e Dragon She is the jaguar, born a moccasin, rst cursed in this worldtown. Never lost her swim. New legs. New fangs. A scriptured pelt. It’s Shetime.climbs the magic tree. Between her shoulders, one rosette the shape of a question mark rips open and sprouts wings.

Callfrompeelspoetryherbody.hercloud

Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell

In “ e Dragon,” the speaker, who is most likely Lucy, a political poet with an experimental bent, presents Amra as ruthless—a erce avenger. is far cry from Gobody’s description of her in “ e Plus” reminds us of Sylvia Plath’s phoenix rising from ash to “eat men like air.” ose taking Fire Bones in will wonder until the nal episode whether Amra Boustani will be Lazarus’d from the tomb or stay fallen from the sky after “ e poetry / peels / from her body.”

tornadovolcano—shecrescendo,isyour sky. She shuts her eyes and pictures her dad, her mom, her childhood without that bomb. Look up. Do you see? It’s the devil dragon. She is made of roaring and re. Best believe she will kill you back.

In “Best Year Biscuit,” we see the poem as artifact, written freehand on a piece of looseleaf paper complete with messy fringe and our-stained. e aesthetic presentation of this piece beautifully complements its tone, mood, and meaning. e poem begins with a list of ingredients (written by a speaker with an unruly, broken heart) as any recipe would: “1 fortune cookie, stale / 1 whole life / 45 memories Madre Hill / pinch of crazy.” e poem comes to life in the instructions for preparation. Here Brownderville again makes use of Stevens-esque declarative statements bearing equal amounts darkness and light—caustic and gleeful: Pulverize cookie and remove fortune without reading, drop fortune in skillet and sear on high heat. Rake ashes into urn and set aside. Knead life, roll out on wax paper, and cut into 51 years using wide mouth jar. Keep best year and place rejected life plus cookie smithereens in TIGHTLY sealed container and discard. Put best year in sugar bowl and store in icebox overnight. Pour Madre memories into brain and try to sleep, stirring constantly. Next morning, transfer best year to baking stone, sprinkle with crazy and place in oven. Turn on light but not heat and watch forever. When timer says forever’s up, remove from oven and serve on cracked red plate. Garnish with fortune’s ashes. (Feeds 2 but 1 is missing.)

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In the recipe format, Brownderville has chosen the perfect vessel for Ju Mon Poy’s unbounded grief. “Best Year Biscuit” is the most successful poem in the Fire Bones project, capturing the spirit of the whole undertaking and

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Zoom, Zoom into the Great American Dark: Reading the Smithereens in Greg Brownderville’s Fire Bones, Elijah Burrell distilling it into one deceptively simple bit of writing. Yeats wrote in “Adam’s Curse,” “… A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught,” and Brownderville aspires to this idea in every line he writes. He designed these poems to subvert our expectations at every step. e entire Fire Bones project feels designed to surprise us at every turn. I imagine Brownderville nds great delight in catching us o guard by ghting shy of the expected regional clichés, insisting instead on presenting the complexity of Delta society that shines through in this work. ough Fire Bones emerged from the mind of a single poet, we must remember he is a product of the great multiplicities of the Delta itself. Our romantic ideal of the creative writer has traditionally included solitude, a pen, and paper: the lone mind and its creation. But a go-show is highly collaborative. It involves directors of photography, producers, actors, musicians, and visual artists. anks to the remarkably diverse group of people who breathed creative life into Fire Bones, the go-show authentically re ects a complicated mix of geographies, histories, and cultures. is important collaborative dimension of the go-show form helps bring the art to life in new, compelling ways. * * * She is far from home. Amra Boustani is about to live or die. She ghts with the stick, says, “ irteen: It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / e blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs.” is is the end of that old poem she memorized. e ground rushes toward her. Or maybe she rises high above it, keeping the earth far below her like it’s always been. Let be be nale of seem. Somewhere, someone gets hungry for ice cream.

eline Sciamma’s Petite Maman is a movie that, in many ways, shouldn’t have worked. Made during lockdown with a cast of ve, two of whom are eight-year-old twins, it is a cross-generational, time-travel lm that outs the narrative framework by which crossgenerational and time-travel lms (Big, Vice Versa, Back to the Future) have been known to succeed: young person who nds parent hopelessly clueless visits the past and realizes 1) their parent was once young like them, with a comparably raucous array of insecurities, quirks, and lovable vices, and 2) the cultural circumstances that surrounded that parent’s youth were once, miraculously, cool in their own right. Petite Maman does not concern itself with how much “things have changed” externally from era to era, but rather with how little, if anything, changes between mothers’ and daughters’ interior landscapes. Girlhood, speci cally, is less an exuberant, and inherently super cial, stage of emotional and sartorial expression so much as an introspective period of discovery, resourcefulness, and signi cant loss.

In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood, Eileen G’Sell

Motherhood, too, is devoid of pat virtue and ready transcendence; who is mothering whom is of consistent debate. e plot is at once as austere and audacious as Sciamma’s signature cinematographic style: a girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) loses her grandmother and sets o from the nursing home with her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) to her bucolic childhood home, which Nelly has never visited, to clear the house with her mellow husband (Stéphane Varupenne).

After Marion abruptly departs the second morning of their stay, Nelly is left to entertain herself on her own, seeking out the spot where her mother once built a tree fort long ago in the nearby woods. It is there that she meets another eight-year-old girl (Gabrielle Sanz), her more delicate, feminine doppelganger, dragging timber to form a fort herself. After a few days festooning the cabin with ery foliage, Nelly realizes that Young Marion is, in fact, her own mother, and the woods an autumnal portal to the past. eir domiciles are identical, but for the presence of Marion’s in rm mother (Margot Abascal), Nelly’s grandmother in middle age, su ering from an unnamed hereditary a iction for which eight-year-old Marion must be treated in an impending operation.

In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood, Eileen G’Sell

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Much has been already made of Sciamma’s shift away from the erotic charge and scenic grandeur of her 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which chronicles an 18th century love a air on a Breton island between an aristocratic woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), and her portraitist Marianne (Noémie Merlant). But in so many ways, Petite Maman is invested in the same one-on-one interactions and hushed intimacies of daily life. As few critics have noted, Portrait did not indulge in the predictably decadent ballroom scene of obscenely formal yet debauched merrymaking between members of the noblesse, nor did it include more than a handful of scenes that included more than two or three characters. In both lms, the camera is xed the vast majority of the time on two or three women—if not one woman, or girl, willfully moving through the world on her own.

While Nelly and Young Marion’s relationship is familial and unequivocally platonic, the ways in which it tenderly ourishes—board games, cocoa drinking, messily mixing crepe batter—resemble the late-night rounds of cards between Héloïse, Marianne, and Sophie, their servant. What Sciamma is clearly concerned with is closeness between women, and girls, and how naturally female bonds, erotic or not, can blossom. In both Portrait and Petite, the camera lingers on the splendid tensions inherent in the vicissitudes of early friendship: pausing before asking another’s name, how old she is, whether she can play with you the following day—these risks are no less so in the platonic realm than the erotic. Sciamma insists on the seriousness of friendship, just as she insists on the complexity of childhood. Per her restrained mise en scène, extensive dialogue is swapped for potently auditory sensory experience. If timbre is a turn-on in Portrait of a Lady, in Petite Maman, common sounds often assume a companionate quality that o sets solitude. e clang of a tin of trinkets, the rhythm of teeth punctiliously brushed, the soft scratch a pencil slowly forming letters on loose leaf—Nelly’s tactile, tangible world is also a deeply sensual one. Foley, for Sciamma, achieves the level of song. roughout, the sounds of girlhood are blessedly free of contrived melodic levity. “Au revoir,” Nelly declares atly, in her corduroy overalls, to each old woman in the pastel rooms of her grandma’s nursing home. As in the director’s earlier oeuvre, Petite Maman’s pathos is daringly understated;

an almost Bressonian lack of a ect accompanies the delivery of the characters’ most relevant, vulnerable acts and admissions. “I have a secret,” Nelly tells Young Marion on a sunny afternoon together, gazing plainly at her friend as the leaves rustle beyond. “Promise me you’ll believe me. . . . I’m your child. I’m your daughter.” “You’re from the future?” her playmate counters, betraying barely a hint of surprise. Similarly, Adult Marion’s decision to leave her husband, daughter, and childhood home is deliberately played down; we are left to wonder, as Nelly must, just why she took o sans warning, why her a able, bearded husband is left to handle her dead mother’s stead on his own. As Nelly searches her grandmother’s property— in the past and in the present—she takes on a Gallic Nancy Drew quality, more stealthy than fearless, quietly self-reliant.

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An ’80s tomboy myself, born a year after Sciamma, I, like Nelly, fancied myself a solitary adventurer and always adored a good tree fort. I never dreamed in any speci c terms of being a mother, and indeed at some point felt a gnawing terror that my growing collection of dolls, which I admired for their attire but more so deemed a lucrative investment, were meant to groom me for the role. at my own mother, like Marion, had me at a very young age, and, like Marion, su ered from depression, felt patently imbricated in my brain from around the time I was eight years old. My own mother was not even 30 at the time, but I recall feeling a potent mix of pity and confusion at her mounting enervation, frustration, and intermittent rage in response to her boisterous brood of dramatic daughters, all four of us born by the time she was 26. By adolescence, wonderfully fueled with the ery indignation of riot grrrl anthems, any sense I had of my mother was de ned by negation; anything she was, I was not, and anything she wasn’t, I would surely become. Memories of any bond were relegated to our bus rides in the mid 1980s, before my mother obtained her driver’s license, when our afternoons were shaped by any number of fantastic errands to the grocers, library, or half-o bread store. Everywhere we went felt loaded with meaning—because, of course, it was. e dehistoricized semiotics of Petite Maman are bound to speak across generations, but perhaps especially to those who came of age before the digital era. Unlike Portrait, Petite Maman is—strangely, marvelously—bereft

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“I’m a 42-year-old woman, I grew up as a child in the 80s and 90s,” said Sciamma to the Hollywood Reporter after the lm’s 2021 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. “A lot in the lm I took from my own childhood. But from the response to the lm so far it seems people can relate to it, whatever generation you come from.” e woods, of course, are timeless, as is the waterpark to which, at the climax of the lm, Marion and Nelly joyfully abscond in an in atable raft to the sounds of Para One’s “La Musique du Futur.” As they paddle across Cergy-Pontoise’s lake—Nelly leading at the front, Marion in the rear—they seem, at eight, invincible and free, indomitable agents of their own unprecious fates.

To put two girls at the helm, charging ahead, with not another soul, adult or child, in sight, feels itself hopeful, though subtly skirting the trappings of “girl power” platitudes. Explaining why it was crucial to make Petite Maman during a global pandemic, Sciamma did not mince words.

Two weeks into the pandemic lockdown in 2020, March 31st commemorated my own loss—of a could-be child conceived in a French-speaking town with a French-speaking man in Canada. For the ten disquieting, exhilarating weeks that I was pregnant, the future felt imminently, wondrously lambent. I was almost 40 and the prospect of motherhood, however unexpected and duly terrifying, seemed handed to me as an act of largesse by a less than kind universe. Nearly three weeks after this discovery, on a bench in Montreal’s Parc Lahaie, the father of this could-be child—divorced and already a father to two little girls I’d never meet—gently and insistently repeated “No involvement” in English, my terrier curled below his legs. I was urged to end the pregnancy, as I was (less

In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood, Eileen G’Sell of conspicuous markers of time. Marion’s childhood stead could be a quaint present-day Airbnb. Nelly’s white-and-red-striped blue jacket looks like it could be from 1982 or 2022; iPhones are absent but an led headlamp carves a path to Grand-mère’s empty old home, the interior design of which looks at once stalled in the 60s and loyally maintained by an elder owner.

“How many grandmothers had died in nursing homes without their goodbyes? It felt valid, and even more urgent, to have this lm that was coping with loss,” she told Indiewire in March 2021, “It was a tool for the imagination. We need those to dream of the future.”

181 film review The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 01 Winter 2022 adamantly) implored, two days later, during a ve-hour walk in yet another tree- lled park, with my same scrappy dog. No involvement, no matter. My new chapter had nigh begun. Aren’t children forever the dream of the future? An escape from our own fractured, irredeemable presents? A tenuous promise of redemption for however we’ve failed ourselves, and the planet, for however many years we’ve trod and tripped upon it? Petite Maman somehow indulges this fantasy, while never blithely suggesting that having children will make us happy, or that being a child is itself a happy experience. “Did I want you?” Young Marion asks when learning of Nelly’s provenance. “Yes,” she responds. But it does not matter. Mothers can want their children and wind up miserable, just as mothers can dearly wish to avoid motherhood and wind up happier than they ever knew possible. In so many ways, Nelly plays “little mother” to Adult Marion after her mother’s death; on the drive from the nursing home, she hand-feeds her mother cheese sticks and a juice box from the back of their sedan as Marion focuses on the road, reaching her small arms around her mother’s neck in a consolatory hug. “I’m sad too,” she assures her mother later that night, when Marion struggles to fall sleep on the midcenturyWithsofa.Young Marion—the girl who does not yet realize what is to come, how hard things will be, what sorrows await—Nelly is equally nurturing. at Nelly presents as androgynous aside from a sublime bramble of a ponytail does not dilute her maternal instincts, but rather exempli es the fallacy that nurturing is naturally feminine and that the outwardly femme are naturally better nurturers. Toward the end of the lm, as Nelly helps Young Marion pack for her trip to the hospital for her operation, Marion inquires whether Nelly is worried that her adult mother will not come back. “A little,” she admits. “My mother is often sad. She is not glad to be around.” In response, Marion says stoically, “It’s not your fault. . . . You didn’t invent my sadness.” e self-possessed quality that both girls share feels entirely believable; Petite Maman does not infantilize girls, or mothers, in the way we are, sadly, primed to expect from mainstream cinema. Nor does the lm suggest that Nelly and Young Marion are naïve or innocent; they are, instead, keenly aware of the gravity of loss, how it a ects their parents’ hearts no less—but also perhaps no more—than their own.

Petite Maman does not suggest that mothers or daughters can save one another—from loneliness, heartbreak, the forests of woe—but it insists on a type of talismanic empathy that springs from acknowledging the other as an emotional equal. Nelly does not just imagine her mother as an eight-yearold, she physically interacts with her; she laughs at her jokes and towels her rain-sodden hair. She cavorts with not just her mother’s inner child, but her physical embodiment, a girl as creative and pensive as herself. A girl just as lonely.In the nal scene, mother and daughter a rm the other through simply, profoundly, uttering her name. “Marion,” Nelly says to her mother, who sits cross-legged on the oor of her childhood home, remorseful for her disappearance. “Nelly,” Marion says in return, pulling her close. During the end credits, the lyrics of “Music for the Future” appear at the lower left corner of the screen, as though to lead us all in existential sing-a-long. “Le rêve d’être enfant avec toi ( e dream of being a child with you) / Le rêve d’être en n loin de toi ( e dream of nally being away from you) / Le rêve d’être enfant avec toi ( e dream of being a child with you) / Le rêve d’être en n avec toi ( e dream of nally being with you). . . .” a choir of children

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In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood, Eileen G’Sell

I don’t remember exactly when I realized my mother was grappling with sadness, but I am grateful that I remember a time in childhood when this was not the case—when my mother was bouncy, opinionated, forthcoming in ways that would get her in trouble with checkout clerks or bossy men. When I lost my pregnancy a few days prior to my 40th birthday, my mother was not apprised of it, as she had not been apprised that I was pregnant in the rst place. And when she was apprised of both, she did her best to actively ignore the stakes of the matter. No involvement, for her, meant no possibility to make things even worse. Of course, she can’t be blamed for not knowing my degree of devastation, that, as a single woman in my late 30s, I had already, at great labor and expense, frozen my eggs not once, but twice, in hope that I would someday meet the right guy (she couldn’t be told, given her religious views). And it is also arguable that she could not be blamed for not knowing how to mother me at this time when she herself had never been well mothered. Would I (could I?) have been any better, had my pregnancy come to term?

sing. e dual dreams of connection to and liberation from the mother remain gloriously inextricable. And, vitally, they are dreams, not reality. “Si mon cœur est dans ton cœur, ton cœur (If my heart is in your heart, your heart) / Ton cœur est dans mon cœur (Your heart is in my heart) / Si ton cœur est dans mon cœur, mon cœur (If your heart is in my heart, my heart) / Mon cœur est dans ton cœur (My heart is in your heart).”

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Of course, the operative term here is “if”—and one must wonder, for how many daughters and mothers is this dream attainable? Perhaps it is enough to wish that it can be? To relish the gooey, claustrophobic fact that we, at some point, were one, however transitory or imperiled such a union might have been? Perhaps we must endeavor to listen—anxiously, tenaciously—for the beat of a heart worth comforting, worth frolicking to, if the future is ever to unfold for anyone.

Petite Maman puts great faith in the inevitable failure of motherhood as salvo, and in the decision to dip your oar in anyway—as though on a dare from an unkind universe—that the waters might deliver you onward.

EILEEN G ’ SELL is a poet and critic with regular contributions to LARB, Hyperallergic, DIAGRAM, the Boston Review, and other outlets. Her rst volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018; in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

JALEN EUTSEY is a poet, librarian, and sportswriter from Miami, Florida. He received an mfa in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from South Florida Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, storySouth, Harpur Palate, and others.

BECKY HAGENSTON is the author of four story collections, most recently e Age of Discovery and Other Stories (Mad Creek Books, 2021) which won e Journal’s Non/Fiction Book Prize. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University.

STEPHANIE BURT is Professor of English at Harvard. Her recent books include After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020) and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic, 2019). A new collection from Graywolf will appear in late 2022. Ask her about the X-Men.

Notes on Contributors

ANDREA COHEN is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, Everything. A new collection, e Sorrow Apartments, is forthcoming. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

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ELIJAH BURRELL is the author of e Skin of e River (2014) and TROUBLER (2018), both published by Aldrich Press. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Southwest Review, e Rumpus, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Lincoln University in Je erson City, Missouri.

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SAMUEL K ´ . OLÁW . OLÉ was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is on the mfa in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working toward his PhD at Georgia State University. His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins.

STEVEN LEYVA was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. He is author of e Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven is an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

JANE LEWTY is the author of two collections of poetry: Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form to Find Another (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2017), winner of the 2016 csu Poetry Center Open Book Competition.

SPENCER HUPP is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas. He works as an mfa candidate and graduate instructor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

MARK HALLIDAY ’s seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at Ohio University.

JENNY JOHNSON is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in e New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.

SYLVIA JONES lives in Baltimore. She is a 2021 22 Stadler Fellow and serves as an associate poetry editor for WEST BRANCH. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Shenandoah, e Santa Clara Review, Windfall Room, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She earned her mfa from American University in Washington, DC.

JEAN M c GARRY is the author of ten books of ction: No Harm Done, a collection of stories, from Dalkey Archive Press, the most recent, was published in 2019; Blue Boy, a novel, is forthcoming from Jackleg Press.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of en the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Carcanet/UK, 2022) and the forthcoming prose book My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale, 2022).

JILL NATHANSON belongs to the Color Field legacy, but her immersive and sensual paintings stand in a category of their own. Consisting of hues of overlapping layers of variable translucency, they create emotionally nuanced experiences with enough tension to engage our contemplation. Jill Nathanson lives and works in New York.

JULIA PELOSI THORPE ’s translations of Latin, Italian, and Parmesan poetry appear in the Journal of Italian Translation, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, e Poetry Society’s e Poetry Review, and more. She can be found at jpelosithorpe.com.

HANNAH SANGHEE PARK is the author of e Same-Di erent (lsu Press). She lives in Los Angeles.

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STELLA N ’ DJOKU is a Swiss poet, journalist, and educator of Italian and Congolese heritage. Il tempo di una cometa (Ensemble, 2019) is her debut collection. Currently completing her PhD in Philosophy, N’Djoku teaches high school and university students, organizes cultural events, and works with the Italian-language Swiss public-broadcasting organization rsi and the Italian Web Radio Giardino.

ERIN REDFERN ’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, and e Massachusetts Review. Her chapbook is Spellbreaking and Other Life Skills (Blue Lyra Press). She teaches poetry classes and workshops online. She can be found at erinredfern.net.

LINDSAY TURNER is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018) and the chapbook Fortnights (forthcoming, Doublecross Press), as well as the translator of several books of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

YUKI TANAKA holds an mfa in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. His chapbook, Séance in Daylight (Bull City Press), was the winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Contest. He teaches at Hosei University in Tokyo.

Salter is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

MARY JO SALTER is the author of nine books of poetry published by Knopf, including Zoom Rooms (2022). Her book Nothing by Design was recipient of the 2015 Poets’ Prize. She is a coeditor of e Norton Anthology of Poetry.

KOSISO UGWUEZE is an mfa candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is managing editor of e Hopkins Review. Her short stories have appeared in Joyland, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and the South Carolina Review. She lives in Baltimore.

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ADRIENNE SU is the author of ve books of poems, most recently Peach State (Pitt, 2021) and Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015). Recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches at Dickinson College.

STEPHEN TOWNS was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina and lives and works in Baltimore. He trained as a painter with a bfa in studio art from the University of South Carolina and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice. In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented his rst museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning.

AFAA M . WEAVER was born in Baltimore in 1951 and grew up in the neighborhood now known as Berea. In April 2023, Red Hen Press will publish A Fire in the Hills, his 16th collection of poetry. His several plays include Berea. Afaa is a 2017 Guggenheim fellow.

KAREN WILKIN is a New York-based curator and critic, recently cocurator of e Body in Question at the Painting Center, Chelsea. e author of monographs on Anthony Caro, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, she teaches at the New York Studio School.

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‘The translator has captured the poetic qualities of Huizinga’s authorial voice without sacrificing the readability of the text. (…) The result is a version of the text that captures Huizinga’s original voice better than either of the two previous English editions.’ − Benjamin Kaplan, the low countries. at: www.lup.nl ISBN 69.50 Hardback, illustrated 215 x 270 mm 616 Cover design Suzan Beijer LUP General

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A study of forms of life and thought of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and the Low Countries This new English translation of Huizinga’s Autumntide of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen) celebrates the centenary of a book that still ranks as one of the most perceptive and influential analyses of the late medieval period. The new and now unabridged translation of the original text captures the impact of Huizinga’s deep scholarship and powerful language. The translation is based on the Dutch edition of 1941 – the last edition Huizinga worked on. It features English renderings of the Middle French poems and other contemporary sources. Its colour illustrations include over three hundred paintings and prints, illuminated manuscripts, and miniatures pertinent to Huizinga’s discourse. A complete bibliography of Huizinga’s sources will facilitate further research, while an epilogue addresses the meaning and enduring importance of this classic work.

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Johan Huizinga

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Autumntide of the Middle Ages

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Published four times a year by Hopkins Press for the Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University HopkinsReview.com Jill HannahNathansonSanghee Park Julia Pelosi- orpe Carl Phillips Erin KarenAfaaKosisoLindsayStephenYukiAdrienneMaryRedfernJoSalterSuTanakaTownsTurnerUgwuezeM.WeaverWilkin Elijah StellaJeanStevenJaneSamuelSylviaJennySpencerMarkBeckyEileenJalenAndreaStephanieBurrellBurtCohenEutseyG’SellHagenstonHallidayHuppJohnsonJonesKóláwoléLewtyLeyvaMcGarryN’Djoku

The Hopkins Review Vol. 15, No. 1

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