Quarterly Journal, no. 21: Epistolary Issue by lareviewofbooks

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no . 21 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : EPISTOLARY 9 781940 660400 5 1 2 0 0 ISBN 978-1-940660-40-0$12.00

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Shakesplish How We Shakespeare’sReadLanguage Paula Blank SQUARE FIRST-ORDERONE: QUESTIONS IN THE HUMANITIES Housing the City by the Bay Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco John Baranski Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright Will Slauter Waiting on Retirement Aging and Economic Insecurity Low-WageinWork Mary Gatta STUDIES IN SOCIAL INEQUALITY After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism Taking Back a Revolution Lynn S. Chancer The Border and the Line Race, Literature, and Los Angeles

—George Chauncey, author of Gay New York COLUMBIA U NIVERSI TY P RESS CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

essays 17 CECI N’EST PAS UNE LETTRE by Rachael Scarborough King 22 THE SLUTS AND THE SAINTS: A LETTER TO ZÉZIM by Caio Fernando Abreu Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato 31 HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL: THE DOROTHEA PUENTE ARCHIVE by Kim Hayden 42 CHANGE OF ADDRESS by Julie Schumacher 55 “I DON’T KNOW IF THIS LETTER WILL REACH YOU”: THE LETTERS OF HANNAH ARENDT AND GERSHOM SCHOLEM by Nathan Goldman 77 POPPY/FRIEND by Juliana Chow & Gillian Osborne 95 MEMOIR, ANNOTATED: NOTES ON MY GRANDMOTHER’S STORY by Katya Apekina 126 Excerpt from GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN by Hanif Abdurraqib 131 A REQUISITE TO REVOLUTION by Julietta Singh 139 IMPERFECTION by Michael Donkor fiction 48 LETTER TO A THIRD by Shiv Kotecha 67 TO CAROLINE, ON THE OCCASION OF MY AUNT’S DEATH by Sara Davis 110 Excerpt from THE NEW ME by Halle Butler 120 THE BLACK MARK by Sara Davis poetry 29 AGAINST THE SORROW THAT ADMITS NO JOY by Cecilia Woloch 40 GO BIG OR GO HOME by Stella Wong 45 LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN ON TIMEDEPENDENT EFFECTS AND ATTENTION by Airea D. Matthews 52 DEAR DONALD, by Cortney Lamar Charleston 64 COLLAR OF MOSCAS SET IN IVORY IN 3023 by Analicia Sotelo 91 THE SECOND FRONT DOOR by Maureen N. McLane 106 IN THE FIELD BETWEEN US by Susannah Nevison & Molly McCully Brown 109 LETTER TO THE OLDEST LIVING LONGLEAF PINE IN NORTH AMERICA by Matthew Olzmann 115 From DEAR WHITENESS, by Charif Shanahan no . 21 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : EPISTOLARY CONTENTS

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Dear LettersReader,arefull of worry. People fuss about receipt, timeliness, the legibility of the writing. It occurred to me that some anxiety might lend these formal letters a little personality. That is to say, I hope this letter reaches you in time. I hope you can read it, particularly since we only know you as “Reader”. I hope it hasn’t been lost, or stuffed and crushed in your mailbox.

This is the Epistolary Issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal , and it is dedicated to letters, missives, messages and correspondence of every kind. In “Ceci n’est pas une lettre”, literary critic Rachael Scarborough King provides a brief history of the epistolary form and its current resurgence in pop culture and media. Kim Hayden, an archivist from Sacramento, offers a glimpse into the letters of serial killer Dorothea Puente. Juliana Chow and Gillian Osborne share personal letters they have written to each other — a beautiful archive of female friendship. Julietta Singh offers a letter to her daughter, Isadora, in anticipation of the difficulties in this world. Hanif Abdurraqib writes about a Tribe Called Quest. The novelist Halle Butler offers an excerpt from her upcoming book, The New Me . Fiction writer Sara Davis gives us two letters for Caroline, a very unresponsive pen pal. This issue proves how expansive the epistolary form really is: The letter is self-reflexive, manifold and dynamic. And let me clear up any concern on your end — this is a letter you don’t have to answer. You can just sit with it and rest.

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We have even projected our interest in letters into imagined futures: in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, the job of the hero, Theodore, is to compose letters for paying customers through a website, beautifulhandwrittenletters.com. The AI system with whom he falls Shirin Aliabadi, Girls in Cars 4 Color photographic print, 70 x 100 cm. Ed.of 534 Courtesy of The Third Line, Dubai.

RACHAEL SCARBOROUGH KING

This is a common scenario. Few people write or receive “real” letters anymore. And yet, despite this fact, we are surrounded by the form. Epistolary writing has mounted a comeback in popular culture. Whether it is in the advice columns that have prolif erated across the internet, a new host of self-aware epistolary novels (from Where’d You Go, Bernadette to Dear Committee Members to I Love Dick), the emails and text messages that float through TV scenes, or political memoirs-cum-manifestoes — TaNehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele come to mind — the epistolary seems to be having a moment.

The only “real” letters I have are in a box somewhere in the attic. These were written by an ex years ago, when I was working as a camp counselor during a summer in college.

CECI N’EST PAS UNE LETTRE

Pre-smartphone, we had no other way to communicate for those eight weeks besides brief calls on a communal payphone. This stack doesn’t take up much space in my life, and I have mainly kept it for the novelty factor. At this point, my personal archive is digital, not physical.

In the 1690s, a strange, argumentative printer named John Dunton started the first periodical — one of the first periodicals full stop — to answer reader questions with ad vice and information. His paper, The Athenian Mercury, used the stamp of the London Penny Post as its emblem and published on the post days of Tuesday and Saturday. Just two months after beginning the project, Dunton claimed that he had received more than 4,000 letters and appealed to readers to “hold their Hands and Pens, and let us take Breath a while, and get rid of those CART-LOADS of Questions which are yet upon the File, and are likely to press us to death under their weight.” The questions Dunton received ran the gamut, from “What sort of Government is the best?” to “Why doth the Hair and Nails of dead People grow?” to “Whether, since Mermen and Mermaids have more of the humane shape than other Fishes, they may be thought to have more Reason?” to more familiar requests for advice about love and marriage.

There is a conventional wisdom about why the epistolary would seem particularly evoc ative now: the interest in letters represents nostalgia for something we have “lost” what we think of as the personality and privacy of handwritten letters. This is also how Lara Jean, the protagonist of the Netflix teen rom-com To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, de scribes her penchant for writing letters, which she does not intend to send, to her love interests. As a projection of one of the boys sits behind her shoulder watching her write, she narrates in voice-over: “My letters are my most secret possessions. I write a letter when I have a crush so intense that I don’t know what else to do. Rereading my letters reminds me of how powerful my emotions can be.” Although Lara Jean has addressed each of the letters — leading, of course, to them being mailed to their addressees — they represent the purely personal, even solitary. But our instinctive sense of letters as intimate and individual could be inaccurate. In fact, a closer look at the history of epistolary writing may illuminate our own society’s obsession with media shift. The particular cultural and historical moments when letters dominate public and private writing — as we see today and as was the case in the 18th century — have much more to do with an awareness of technology than with a desire for authenticity, which letters have never really had. Letters offer a shortcut to thinking through the possibilities and problems of written communication, signaling a height ened awareness of the medium over the message. Recognizing the charged status of the letter can actually help us better understand both our current and previous media moments.  History dates the heyday of epistolary literature to the late 18th century. At that time the market for novels boomed and, in many ways, “novel” meant “epistolary nov el.” In some years during the 1770s and 1780s, epistolary novels accounted for half or even two-thirds of all novels published. But the trend peaked in the 1790s, and by the Romantic period epistolary novels were considered overly sentimental and even scandalous. This literary tradition focuses on women writing — most epistolary novels feature a fe male protagonist, often writing to a female confidante — and emphasizes the personal, private dimension of letters. The letter is a stand-in for the writer’s body, and when a man intercepts a woman’s correspondence it is a sure sign of potential bodily peril, too. These works often anticipate, if with higher stakes, Lara Jean’s desire to control the circulation of her letters (Lara Jean even faints when she learns that her letters have been mailed, a trope of the epistolary novel that Jane Austen savagely parodied in her juvenile novella Love and Freindship [sic]).

But focusing on the epistolary novel as the precursor to today’s letter-based literature can be misleading. It was common to see letters in print well before the publication of Samuel Richardson’s groundbreaking Pamela (1740) and the takeoff in epistolary novels that followed.

After Dunton, all periodicals would find it necessary to include reader correspondence, whether real or fictional. Daniel Defoe complained in his Review about being “Letter baited by Querists,” while the first issue of The Spectator in 1711 welcomed letters, noting, “those who have a mind to correspond with me, may direct their Letters To the Spectator, at Mr Buckley’s in Little Britain.” The letter to the editor immediately became a conventional element of print.

In some ways, the prominence of reader correspondence in these publications is easy to interpret. Letters were the only long-distance form of communication at the time, and the new institution of the London Penny Post offered eight to 12 daily deliveries, making the exchange of mail within the city almost as rapid as some of our own text message interactions. But at the same time, letter-writing was still a relatively limited activity: it’s likely that less than half of the population was literate, and for people living outside the city, mail was slow and expensive (postage was paid by the recipient upon Despitedelivery).this, almost as soon as newspapers and periodicals appeared, people started writing letters to them and expecting to see letters printed in them. This seems so natural, even obvious, to us now that it is hard to return to a time when it was new. But refocusing on the letter to the editor as a nonfictional epistolary genre tells us something about the role letters played at that time. Rather than only representing the personal, letters seemed to be the best way to navigate a changing media environment. They provided a way to conceptualize the strange new relationship between author and public that the periodical represented.

RACHAEL SCARBOROUGH KING

20 21 los angeles review of books in love, Samantha, sends a collection of the letters to a publisher, which turns them into a volume, Letters from Your Life

RACHAEL SCARBOROUGH KING



22 23 los angeles review of books

The huge growth in newspapers and periodicals at the turn of the 18th century marked a moment much like our own: one focused on how changes in media were altering the nature of communications writ large. While the machine technology of the printing press had barely advanced in the 250 years since Gutenberg, periodicals changed the meaning of print. Literary scholar Dror Wahrman calls this the era of “Print 2.0,” char acterized by interactivity and impermanence. Letters focused attention on this shift while offering readers a foothold with their familiar, concise form. Printing letters was a way of writing about writing — turning awareness to the means of communication as well as the content. The high visibility of printed letters was a sign of 18th-century readers’ interest in analyzing the conditions of their own media environment.

I am certainly not the first to make this connection between 18th-century media shift and that of today. Scholars of early print have jumped on this analogy, sensing an alltoo-rare opportunity to proclaim our relevance. We have located examples of early modern information overload, fake news, viral stories, social media, and trolling. In this way, the “print revolution” is seen as a precursor to the digital — that is, we believe that if we better understand the past we will have a new insight into the present. This of course makes sense, given that we tend to conceptualize history as a linear process of Butinfluence.attention to the new epistolary literature can work in the other direction, too: using our lived experience of the present to gain a fresh view of the past. The current revival of the letter form raises doubts about the revolutionary nature of media “rev olutions,” showing instead how “old” media often don’t die out but, rather, offer new meanings and adaptations alongside the “new.” Contrary to our reigning paradigm of tech disruption, in the 18th century print didn’t replace media like handwritten letters — instead, the form of the handwritten letter gave the “print revolution” a manageable, human-scale dimension. Our intuitive feeling for the multiplicity of media we en counter every day can counter the idea that technology has always followed a straight line of development. As we live through another moment where we seem particularly fixated on talking about the relationship between form and content — or medium and message — we can reinterpret similar points in the past. But while this sense of similarity between the 18th century and today is central to my own research and teaching — to my scholarly identity as an 18th-centuryist — I’m also wary of making a facile analogy between past and present. Do we really get more out of seeing print through a digital filter than by working to understand it on its own terms? My sense is that the latter may be impossible, so we should use the tools at our disposal — which include our own experience of media shift. The epistolary circuit of communication about the nature of communications can run forward and backward, as our present-day interest in epistolary literature corresponds to the 18th century’s attention to the letter as both vehicle and metaphor for writing.

Reader, this essay is not a letter — but in saying so, did I just turn it into one? It’s tempting to infinitely expand the concept of the epistolary. Jacques Derrida, for exam ple, wrote that the letter “is not a genre but all genres, literature itself.” This is beauti fully evocative, but wrong. If we lose sight of the specificity of the letter genre then we can’t see the particular work it’s doing in any era. By turning attention to these ongoing attempts to transmit writing, we get a better understanding of why so much of our present media commentary is about media shift itself. At moments of transition, the familiar form of the letter becomes a way to theorize communication.

One of the most common features of letter-writing is a tendency to write about the process of writing. From apologizing for slow replies, to commenting on bad handwrit ing, to lamenting the difficulty of putting feelings into words, correspondents reflect on communication as they are composing (much as in our own standard email opening, “Sorry for the late response!”). This self-reflexive quality is also one of the hallmarks of epistolary literature, in which the reader becomes attuned to the many intermediaries between letter writer and recipient — as when the “writer” is an anonymous newspaper correspondent and the “recipient” is the reading public.

And more: I’ll admit that I, too, have thought, what if God breaks down? And it’ll happen, it’ll happen because you said, “God is my last hope.” Zézim, I care so much about you, please don’t think of me as unbearably condescending for saying this, but you’re too stubborn, Zézim. There’s no last hope besides death. The one who seeks doesn’t find. You have to be distracted and expect nothing at all. There’s nothing to expect. Nor unexpected. It’s all maya / illusion. Or samsara / vicious circle. Right, I’ve read too much Zen Buddhism, I’ve done too much yoga, I have this thing where I have to keep playing with magic, I’ve read too much Krishnamurti, you know? And also Alan Watts, and D. T. Suzuki, and this often seems a bit ridiculous to people. But I’ve taken for my personal use at least a certain tranquility from these.

In 1982, Caio Fernando Abreu published a short story collection called Moldy Strawberries. By then, Abreu was already one of the most prominent writers in Brazil, known for his lyri cal short stories told from the perspective of junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, beggars, and drag queens who have stopped trying to please the dominant culture and have sought solace in their own communities. Much like them, the characters in Moldy Strawberries have lost their faith in government and authority figures at large. This loss however renews their faith in the arts, and the characters revel in music, cinema, and literature. In one story, two friends talk about the end of the world while finding comfort in Satie’s piano pieces. In another, two men who work together in an oppressive government agency discover their love for one an other through their shared love of boleros and old movies. Written at the height of the AIDS crisis and the military dictatorship in Brazil, Abreu’s work is about repression as much as it is about forms of consolation. His stories model how it might be possible to find one’s voice in spite of the world’s dangers. In this letter, penned in 1979 to his friend, Brazilian journalist José Márcio Penido — Zézim for short — Abreu moves quickly from subject to subject, writing about his visit to the beach, his love of other writers like Clarice Lispector, Adélia Prado, and Dalton Trevisan, his inter est in meditation and yoga. In his passion for writing itself, he advises Zézim to keep moving and creating, and confesses that his unabating need to create and his love for the creations of others are the only things keeping him afloat. He writes, “I’ll quit all my jobs out there the moment I feel that this, literature, which is all I have, is under threat.” He might as well be saying, “I’ll quit everything the moment my life is under threat.” For Abreu, writing is a form of salvation: from madness, from death, from invisibility, and, especially, from the self.

Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

THE SLUTS AND THE SAINTS:A LETTER TO Z É ZIM CAIO FERNANDO ABREU

So here: out of the few lines in your letter, twelve sentences end with question marks. They are, therefore, questions. I answer some. The solution, I agree, is not in re straint. It never is, nor will it ever be. I’ve always thought that the two most fascinating kinds of people in the world were the sluts and the saints, and they’re both entirely unrestrained, right? You don’t have to abstain; you have to eat of the banquet, Zézim. No one will teach you the way. No one will teach me the way. No one has ever taught me the way, or taught you, I suspect. I move blindly. There are no ways to be taught or learned. In reality, there are no such pathways. I’m now reminded of a verse from a Peruvian poet (is it Vallejo? I’m not sure): “Caminante, no hay camino. Pero el camino se hace al andar.” [sic]

2425 Porto, December 22 of 1979 Zézim,Ijust got back from the beach, I was there some five days, completely alone (amaz ing!), and found your letter. These few days here, ten, and it already feels like a month, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’m worried, Zézim, and want to talk to you. Please be quiet and listen, or read it, rather, you must be full of Adélia Pradian vibes and therefore a little too focused on small mysteries. It’s a long letter, so get ready, because I already got ready over here with a cup of Mu tea, cushion under my butt, and a pack of Galaxy, the pseudo-intelligent decision.

You ask: what do I do now? Don’t do, I say. Don’t do anything, while doing every thing, waking up every day, making coffee, making the bed, walking around the block, listening to music, feeding the Poor. You’re anxious and that’s not very religious of you. Shocking: I think you’re not very religious. Really. You’ve stopped burning smoke to find God. What on earth? You’re replacing weed with baby Jesus? Zézim, I’ll tell you a deplorable cliché now, here we go: you won’t find anything outside of yourself. The way is in not out. You’re not going to find it in God or in weed, or moving to New York, or. You want to write. Right, but do you want to write? Or everyone demands it from you and you feel that you have to write? I know it’s not that simple, and that there are thousands of other things involved here. But maybe you might be confused because everyone keeps asking, what’s going on, where’s the book? Where’s the novel, where’s the novella, where’s that play? Fuck them, demons. Zézim, you only have to write if it comes from the inside out, otherwise it won’t work, I’m sure of it, you could fool a few, Translator’s Note

Then I took notes, a lot of notes, for other things. The mind boils over. It’s so great, Zézim, it’s great, it isn’t dead, and that’s all I want, I’ll quit all my jobs out there the mo ment I feel that this, literature, which is all I have, is under threat — like it was, at Nova.

CAIO FERNANDO ABREU

Zézim, I think it’s so good. I was completely blind while I was writing it, a character (an adman, former hippie, who insists he has cancer in the soul, or brain damage caused by too many drugs, from past carnavais, and the symptom — which is real — is this persistent taste of moldy strawberries in his mouth) stopped in his tracks and refused to die or go completely mad at the end. It has a beautiful ending, positive, joyful. I was stunned. The ending made its way into the text and wouldn’t let me interfere. So weird.

And I read. I found out I love Dalton Trevisan. Boy, was I screaming while I read Knife in the Heart, it has some incredible stories, and so meticulously faceted, polished down to its gleaming essence, especially one of them, called “Woman on Fire.” I’ve read almost all of Ivan Ângelo, I also really like it, especially The Real Son of a Bitch, but then the title story put me to sleep and I stopped. But he has such a text, oh that he has. And a lot of it. But the best thing I’ve read these days wasn’t fiction. It was a short article by Nirlando Beirão in the latest Istoé (from December 19, please read it), called “The Rebirth of a Dream.” I’ve read it so many times. The first time, I was moved to tears — because he contextualizes all the experiences I’ve had in this decade. Of course he’s talking about an entire generation, but then I realized, my God, look how I’m so ordinary, so typical of my generation. It ends in utter joy: reinstating the dream. It’s so beautiful. And so bold. It’s new, healthy. A light bulb went off in my head, you know when something lights you up? Just as if he’d given shape to what I, confusingly, had only ever groped for in the dark. Read it, tell me what you think. I couldn’t refrain from it and wrote him a letter saying that. I’m not his friend, only an acquaintance, but I think we should say certain things.

26 27 los angeles review of books but you wouldn’t fool yourself, so it wouldn’t fill this void. There are no demons between you and the typewriter. What there is instead is a matter of basic honesty. This simple question: do you really want to write? Ignoring the demands, do you continue to want it? Then go ahead, search deep, as a gaúcho poet once said, Gabriel de Britto Velho, “stub out the cigarette on your chest / tell yourself what you don’t like to hear / tell everything.” That’s writing. Drawing blood with your nails. And it doesn’t matter the form, it doesn’t matter its “social role,” nothing, it doesn’t matter that at first it might merely be some self-exorcism. But you have to bleed abun-dant-ly. Aren’t you afraid of this surrender? Because it hurts, hurts, hurts. The frightening loneliness. The only reward is what Laing says that is the only thing that can save us from madness, from suicide, from self-erasure: a feeling of inner glory. This phrase is very important in my life. I knew Clarice Lispector fairly well. She was the unhappiest, Zézim. After the first time we talked I cried all night, because her whole existence hurt me, because it seemed to hurt her too, out of so much bleeding understanding of everything. I’m telling you about her because Clarice, to me, is what I know best of magnificent, literarily speaking. And she died alone, cheated, unloved, misunderstood, known as “a little crazy.” Because she gave herself entirely to her job of creating. Dove deep in her own trip and went inventing her own ways, in the greatest loneliness. Like Joyce. Like Kafka, crazy too, except that in Prague. Like Van Gogh. Like Artaud. Like Rimbaud. Is that the kind of creator you want to be? Then give yourself over and pay the price. Which, too often, is too high. Or do you want to write a competent little book to be released with hors d’oeuvres and suspicious whiskey on a pleasant afternoon at Livraria Cultura, with everyone you know celebrating? I don’t think so. I’ve known and know too many people like that. And I won’t give a penny for any of them. You, I love. I’m rarelyZézim,wrong.search through your memory, your childhood, your dreams, your passions, your failures, your sorrows, your wildest hallucinations, your most unreasonable hopes, your sickest fantasies, your most homicidal desires, in everything that’s seemingly the most unutterable, the most abominable guilts, the stupidest lyricisms, the most general confusion, the bottom of the bottomless well that is the subconscious: that’s where your workMostis. important of all, don’t go looking for it: it comes to you, when you and it are ready. Each writer has their process, you need to understand yours. Perhaps, this thing that seems enormously difficult is simply your sub or unconscious’ gestation. And reading, reading is food for anyone who writes. Many times you’ve told me that you couldn’t read anymore. That you didn’t like reading anymore. If you don’t like reading, how will you like writing? Or go ahead and write to destroy the text, but then feed yourself. Lavishly. Then throw up. To me, and this might be personal, writing is sticking your finger down your throat. Then, of course, you sift through the goop, mold it, transform it. There might even be a flower. But the defining moment is the finger in the throat. And I think — and I could be wrong — that this is what you haven’t been able to do. You know, when you’re drunk as shit, no one else’s finger is willing to go into your throat. Or then go to therapy. I mean it. Or try swimming. Or modern dance. Or a radical macrobiotic diet. Anything that will take care of your mind and/or body and, at the same time, will distract you from this obsession. Until it’s resolved, by force or on its own, it doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to see you choking like this, my dear friend.

AsPause.for me, I was telling you about these past few days at the beach. That’s it, I woke up at six, seven in the morning, headed to the beach, ran some four kilometers, exercised, at around ten I headed back, to cook my rice. I rested a little, then sat down and wrote. I’d be exhausted by then. I was exhausted. I spent my days talking to myself, submerged in text, I managed to force it out. It was a shred that had come to me in September, back in Sãopa. Then it came, without my planning for it. It was ready in my head. It was called “Moldy Strawberries,” it’ll have an epigraph from Lennon & Mc Cartney, I have the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” here waiting to be translated.

Sometimes I think that when I write I’m just a transmission channel, say, between two things totally alien to me, I’m not sure you know what I mean. A transmission channel with a certain power, or ability, selective, I don’t know. This morning I didn’t go to the beach and finally finished the story, I think already in its fourth version. But I’ll let it sleep for at least a month, then I’ll reread it — because I know I could always be wrong, and my current eyes might be unable to see certain things.

CAIO FERNANDO ABREU

A kiss from Caio PS — Hugs to Neilo. To Ana Matos and Nino, too.

I can at least listen to you. And please don’t mind any harshness on my part. It’s because I care about you. To quote Guilherme Arantes, to finish this off: “I want to see you healthy / always in a good mood / full of good will.”

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When I’m writing, I talk a hell of a lot, don’t I? Things are good at home. It’s always a great energy, it’s no use criticizing it. Their good energy doesn’t depend on any opinions I might have on it, isn’t it amazing? The house is kind of under renovation, Nair is building a kind of winter garden out back, will connect it to the living room. Today she was pissed because Felipe won’t be apply ing to college anymore: he failed his senior year again. My sister Cláudia got a Caloi 10 bike for christmas from her fiancé (Jorge, remember?), and I took it and just earlier today went on a great ride around Menino Deus. Márcia looks pretty, more grown up, sort of with an air of a younger Mila. Zaél is cooking, today made rice with raisins for dinner.Other people, I haven’t seen. I’ve heard that A Comunidade is in theaters now and I have a paycheck coming up. Tomorrow I think I’ll check it out. I’m so lonely, Zézim. So me-me-with-myself, because my me with family is only in passing. It’s good like this, I’m not afraid of any of my emotions or fantasies, you know? The days of total loneliness at the beach were especially healthy. You’ve seen the new Nova? There is mister Chico, stuttering, and a very funny picture showing everyone at the newsroom — me looking like “I don’t want to get involved, I have nothing to do with this.” Check it out later. Speaking of which, Juan stopped by, I was at the beach, he talked to Nair over the phone, he was getting off one bus and getting on another. He said he’ll be back on January or February third, Nair doesn’t remember, to stay for a few days. Will he stay? And nothing will happen. Someone told me once that I would never love in a way that “would work,” otherwise I would stop writing. It could be. Small miracles. When I finished Moldy Strawberries, I wrote in the margins, without realizing, “creation is a sacred thing.” It’s more or less what Chico says at the end of his article. It’s mysterious, sacred, wonderful. Zézim, give me updates, many, and soon. I didn’t imagine I would miss you this much. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but I go on staying. I want to write more, go back to the beach, document everything. I’ve even thought: later on, when I’m about to return, wouldn’t you like to come join me? We could do that same thing again, we’d return together. My family loves you madly, today there was even a bit of commotion because everyone wanted to read Chico’s article at the same time. Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to strawberry fields nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about strawberry fields forever strawberry fields forever strawberry fields forever That’s what I wish you for the new decade. Zézim, let’s go. No last hopes. We have brand-new hopes, every day. And none, besides living fully, more comfortable inside ourselves, without guilt, that’s it. Let me take you: I’m going to strawberry fields. Tell me about Adélia. And take care, please, take care of yourself. Any darker waters, dial 0512-33-41-97.

for Jesse The flowers are mums and Queen Anne’s lace. They’re coral and purple and milky white, thick stems suspended in murky water, caught by their throats in a vase I’ve pushed to the corner of my desk. What I want to tell you is that, all day today, the light was miraculous here: golden and slanting into the room, full of frond-shimmer, leaf-shadow, breeze. In the early evening, I walked through the neighborhood, thinking of nothing, of everything. How I’d have shown you the gardens I passed — their fuchsia and bougainvillea, their birds-of-paradise, half-winged, unfurled. How you’d have run ahead of me, in your boyish restlessness, then rushed back to catch me up. How there was still such a future, once. How my own life means suddenly less to me than the life of any child. How you’ll always be young, but won’t come when I call.

AGAINST THE SORROW THAT ADMITS NO JOY CECILIA WOLOCH

Sophie Calle, The Sleepers - Gloria K et Anne B., 1980, 5 black and white photographs, 1 text. 6 ¼ x 8 ¼ inches (each photograph)

© Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris, 2019. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. To answer questions. To each participant I suggested an eight hour stay.

HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL: THE DOROTHEA PUENTE ARCHIVE KIM HAYDEN

December 22, 1985

The note John Sharp flashed to a detective while police were searching Puente’s house.

Everson and I got married early Dec. We are quite happy. We will stay here with his longtime friend until Dec 29th, then go to my family in Tulsa. I have three grown children. Hope this finds you well. Everson will write after we get settled.

Irene & Everson Every sentence of this short note is untrue. There was no wedding, and certainly no happiness. Irene and Everson were not staying anywhere with a longtime friend, nor were they going to Tulsa. Irene, the letter’s writer, did not have three grown children. Everson would not write after they got settled, because at the time this letter was written, he was dead. Irene was not in fact the writer’s real name. That was the alias of Dorothea Puente, a serial murderer who had killed Everson and dumped his body in a box alongside the Sacramento River only a few weeks before she wrote this note. Dorothea Puente seemed an unlikely killer. She appeared to be an innocent, grandmotherly woman, who, in the 1980s, ran a boarding house out of an old blue-and-white, two-story Victorian at 1426 F Street, a lovely tree-lined street in one of Sacramento’s oldest neighborhoods. She had a reputation among social workers for taking in their most difficult cases, surely a sign of compassion. Her front yard boasted roses and oth er well-tended flowers. Her appearance was very important to her; she spent a lot of money on beauty products and treatments, clothes, and perfumes. If you look her up, you’ll find pictures of a petite person, with groomed white hair, a shrewd face, and large glasses. She would not, in most cases, appear frightening. Over the course of the 1980s, however, several of her tenants disappeared. Seven were eventually found buried in the yard. She was also ultimately implicated in the death of her boyfriend Everson as well as the overdose of a former roommate.

April 19, 1986 Dear Sir, On March 13th I received a letter dated March 10th from you stating you will mail my check to me here at the house. I have not received it, and have closed my account at the Bank of America at 8th & I streets. My account no. at the bank was [redacted]. But the checks should be coming here at the house: 1426 F Street. My social security number is [redacted]. I need my check and would appreciate it if you’d send it to me.

Everson Gillmouth [Letter to Social Security Administration, written in Puente’s handwriting] Everson Gillmouth, or Gil, was an expert woodcarver. There is a photo in the collection that depicts him standing proudly with one of his carvings. This photo, out of all the materials I handled, made me tear up when I first saw it, and it still does today as I write about it. I know very little about Gil, aside from what I see in his photographs. He looked like someone’s sweet old grandpa. He had white hair and large glasses; he wore a big smile, smart button-ups, and a silver or gold watch. While processing the collection, I was able to identify his unlabeled autopsy photographs using that watch, which was still on his wrist. Gil met Puente while she was in prison, and they exchanged letters until her 1985 release. He picked her up from prison in his red truck, and they planned to get married. She suggested they open a joint banking account. Shortly after Puente’s release, Gil’s family and friends stopped hearing from him, and started hearing from Puente — or “Irene” — instead. Puente killed Gil in late November

Almost all of the investigative evidence and trial exhibits from Dorothea Puente’s 1992–93 criminal court case files — including this letter and many others like it — are housed in a collection at the Center for Sacramento History, the official Sacramento city and county archives As one of the Center’s archivists, I processed the entire Puente collection over the course of six months starting in January 2018. Though I had access to a large range of documents dealing with the entirety of Puente’s wrongdoings, most of the records felt remarkably impersonal. Murder, mental illness, and elder abuse were all presented clinically and coldly: evidence collected during the investigation, crime scene and autopsy photographs, diagrams of Puente’s house and yard, testimony and interview transcripts, cashed checks, handwriting samples, toxicology reports, shovels, pill vials. But the letters were extraordinarily revealing. Puente was a serial liar in addition to being a serial killer. She had lied her entire life, whether or not it made strategic sense, and often her lies were the kind that could — and would — unravel easily over time. She lied big and small. The number of children she had changed constantly. She claimed to know the rich and famous and powerful. She once told a reporter she’d been a Rockette. Was her lying calculated or delusional? Perhaps both. The letters she wrote and the letters she forged, as well as the letters written by others about her, reveal the elaborate network of deception and scheming that allowed her to steal from and eventually kill nine elderly people. These people lived mostly solitary existences, on the outskirts of society. In some cases, they were forgotten while they were still alive, and their deaths could have easily gone unnoticed, as Puente had Puentehoped.had a long history of forgery, theft, and involuntary drugging. In the 1970s, she ran a boarding house for the elderly and needy at 2100 F Street — a large, gorgeous Victorian just six blocks east of the house where the deaths in this story took place. By 1978 she was arrested and convicted of forging her tenants’ signatures on their benefits checks. She was placed on five years’ probation, which expressly forbid her from operat ing a boarding house. Puente instead began working as an in-home caregiver. In April 1982, her friend, roommate, and business partner, Ruth Munroe, died in an apparent overdose, which was then ruled a suicide. A few months later, Puente went to prison for drugging and robbing a man she met at a bar. Puente was released in 1985, under the terms of parole that she not handle other peo ple’s social security checks or work with the elderly. She immediately began doing both of those things. She once again opened a boarding house — this time at 1426 F Street — and began taking in vulnerable tenants, targeting those without strong social networks or people to look after them. Her boarders were usually elderly; they often had problems with addiction or mental illness. She targeted those who had recently been released from jail, or had experienced homelessness, or were, simply, alone. Once tenants moved in, Puente started stealing their money under the guise of managing their finances. She would either set up a joint account with a tenant, or forge and cash the tenant’s checks and keep the funds in her own account, subtracting room, board,

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Within three years of her 1985 release from prison and the opening of her second boarding house, at least seven of her tenants had died at her hands. Their social security checks continued to come in, and Puente continued to forge their signatures and collect the cash. She drugged all the people she killed — Dalmane, a sedative used to treat in somnia, was one of her drugs of choice; it was found in every one of her victims’ bodies. It’s unclear, as far as the coroner’s reports, if the victims were killed by the drugs alone, or if Puente finished them off by smothering them with a pillow while they were in a stupor. In many cases, she left her victims in an upstairs room for a few days to either let them die slowly from the drugs or to prepare the body for burial, wrapping them in sheets or tarps and waiting for a good moment to sneak them outside. In one case, for reasons unknown, she dismembered a body, and the discarded parts were never found. She buried six of the tenants in her backyard and one, boldly, in her front yard.

KIM HAYDEN and other expenses and giving the tenant an allowance from the remainder. Incidental ly, she did quite a bit of her banking at Joe’s Corner, a dive bar down the street at F and 15th, writing checks to “cash” in exchange for money from the bar’s till.

I’mBrenda,supposed to go to Social Security next week for you. Don’t know if they will accept the power of attorney. Will try. I’m going to say you are sick … Anyhow, don’t ever mention to anyone about this, that way you’ll always be o.k. Not your mom. No one.

Take Dorotheacare,  KIM HAYDEN

April 26, 1986

los angeles review of books or early December 1985. She then hired a handyman to build a man-sized wooden lid ded box for some “books” she wanted to store. Puente placed Gil in the box, nailed the lid shut, and, when the handyman returned, asked him to drive the box to her storage unit. On the way, she suggested they just dump the books by the river and offered Gil’s truck to the handyman as payment, saying her boyfriend was in Los Angeles and didn’t need it. Puente then began corresponding with Gil’s family and friends and the gov ernment on his behalf. They all thought he was still alive, and Puente cashed his checks.

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[TelegramEverson to Everson Gillmouth’s sister Reba]

November 2, 1985

Brenda Trujillo [Letter to Social Security Administration] Before sending this letter to the Social Security Administration, Brenda had talked to the police about Puente’s crimes, trying to use what she knew to her advantage during one of her frequent arrests. By the time she filed her complaints with the SSA, Puente had been stealing money from her tenants for several years without anyone else catch ing on. Living on the fringes, in and out of police custody for heroin and prostitution, Brenda wasn’t taken seriously.

Leaving for Palm Springs at 11:30 a.m. today. Tried to call but line busy. Decided to go on. You’d try to stop me. Will return to Dorothea’s for Thanksgiving but will be in touch with you before. Please don’t worry.

WeHello,came to Sacramento to pick up the rest of Everson’s things from storage. They told us you had been worried and had the police come over. We are O.K. He had a small stroke in January. He can’t drive anymore. He sold his trailer and truck, but we have a new car. I got it in Dec. We love the deserts and the warm and dry weather. We are going to Canada in August, so will stop and see you. Everson wrote to you in Feb. When we get the phone in June, we will call. He’s lost about 15 lbs. And feels much better. We are both health nuts, so we are doing O.K. And I work, so our income is pretty good. We go to church each week. It was 90 all week and he did not care for Tulsa Okla. at all. But guess we will buy a small home with the money from my home. Take care, Irene & Everson [Letter to Everson’s sister Reba] When someone disappeared from the boarding house, Puente told the other tenants that the person had moved out, or that she had thrown them out because of excessive drinking. People came and went frequently, so it wasn’t unusual that the other tenants didn’t question the disappearance of one of their housemates. If they did have suspi cions, they didn’t press them or follow through. And no one outside of the house really noticed — except Puente’s former prison cellmate Brenda Trujillo, who had briefly lived at 1426 F Street. November 29, 1987 To whom it may concern: I believe that my SSI checks were being cashed by a woman by the name of one Dorothea Gray, Dorothea Montalvo, Dorothea Puente, is all the same person. I am right now incarcerated at Rio Cosumnes, waiting on transportation to CIW. I spoke to two of your employees there, they ask me to write you. This letter I file for SSI in January 1987. I was at that time renting a room at Ms. Dorothea Gray’s home and my SSI checks were going to her address, which is 1426 F Street, Sacramento, Calif. She has never told me that my checks were coming. I had to ask my doctor to check into it for me. She told me that my checks were being sent there in the beginning of July 1987. The first check was worth $3,000, which the social security man I spoke to inform me also that I was getting a check each month after that for $500. I have been incarcerated all this time and would like to take further action concerning this matter. The woman is on federal parole for the same offence. So thank you for your time.

January 4, 1988

The families of Puente’s first two victims tried to find answers to their deaths, which might have inspired her to be more prudent when selecting her other victims. The sons of Ruth Munroe, Puente’s first apparent victim, checked on her while she lived with Puente in 1982. They noticed that her demeanor and health had rapidly changed. After Munroe’s overdose, they went to the authorities and accused Puente of murdering her. Puente was cleared at the time, but they testified at her 1992–93 trial and Ruth was added to the list of victims. Gil’s family also noticed that something was wrong. They also contacted the police, but Puente kept writing letters to them with plausible excuses for why he wasn’t getting in touch. Gil’s body was found the month after she dumped it, though it wasn’t identified until after she was arrested and implicated in his death by the handyman three years later. There’s no mention of friends or family of any other victims in the collection.

38 39 los angeles review of books Puente was ultimately caught because of a persistent social worker. Alvaro “Bert” Montoya was Puente’s most vulnerable tenant — developmentally disabled, practically silent, and mentally ill. Bert was often homeless and largely defenseless, described as having the demeanor of a child. It’s likely that Puente used Bert in her crimes, enlisting his help in dragging bodies down the narrow back stairs to their graves, which she may have also had him dig. When Bert’s social worker, Judy Moise, couldn’t find him in late 1988, Puente gave conflicting stories: He was in Utah, or he moved back to Mexico (Bert was from Costa Rica). Judy filed a missing person’s report, and the police came to Puente’s house looking for him. Though they searched the house, they didn’t find anything suspicious and the oth er tenants seemed to back up Puente’s story about where Bert had gone. Then a tenant named John Sharp quietly flashed a note to a detective, taking advantage of a moment when Puente left the two men alone. The chilling note — which I filed in the collec tion along with the video of Sharp’s compelling witness interview — read, “She wants me to lie to you.” The cops were now suspicious. A few days later, they came back and asked if they could dig in the backyard. Puente said yes. They found a femur, and then seven bodies. Letters and notes had allowed Puente’s murderous scamming to go on for years. In the end, it was another brief written message that landed her in court, and then prison, where she died in 2011. Her case is notorious in Sacramento and to serial killer buffs everywhere. But who the victims were and the horrible way they spent the last months of their lives tends to get glossed over. They’re forgotten about, the details of their lives seemingly less important than the manner in which they died. At the beginning of the project, I knew them all as coroner’s ID numbers without names. I saw photos of the excavations and autopsies, meeting their decomposed corpses before I ever saw photos of them as living, smiling people. As I familiarized myself with the collection, I kept a list of names I came across, along with coroner’s ID numbers, burial site numbers, and other little details that al lowed me to piece together who the people murdered at 1426 F Street really were. At the end of the project, I knew their names and faces, their problems, their financial situations, and sometimes their personalities. I was able to match the burial site with the coroner’s ID with the name with the face. They went from unknown bodies to real people, who lived complicated lives, who smiled in pictures, who didn’t deserve the hor rible deaths Puente meted out to them. They were almost all isolated by mental illness, addiction, bad luck, bad decisions, or just plain orneriness. But Dorothy Miller was also a veteran. Leona Carpenter, the oldest of the group, had already made her funeral plans before she was killed. Ben Fink, the alcoholic former sailor, made everybody laugh. James Gallop helped Puente out around the house. Bert Alvaro was a tender man who almost never talked, and when he did, it was mostly nonsensical. Two of the victims, Betty Mae Palmer and Vera Faye Martin, are still just faces to me. But faces I’ll always recognize.

Long before I was an archivist, I was a teenager writing the obituaries for my home town newspaper. When I started, my editor stressed the importance of the obituary and the need to write each one with care. For most people, it would be the only time their name would be mentioned in the newspaper, a public record of their existence. Puente’s victims’ names appeared as part of a gruesome news story. They were lost — though hardly anyone knew it — and then, suddenly, they were found. I never saw any obitu aries for them. But now they live on through the archives, where the Puente collection contains more details about their lives than probably any other source. There aren’t a lot of details, but they’re there. And they can be found again, and again.

KIM HAYDEN

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. So I decided to follow him.

Sophie Calle, “Suite Vénitienne” (Detail), 1980, 81 elements: 55 B&W prints, 23 texts, 3 maps. 6 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches (x 55 prints), 11 ¾ x 8 ½ inches (x 23 texts)

4243 Have you noticed recently that due to an influx of money and science or money and the human need to rhyme themselves a disproportionate number of film stars are having twins? Maybe it’s more financially efficient, like a two for one deal or when you cry extra hard at therapy to get it all out in one go. Therapy, one of the few places I can’t escape the music that other people push the buttons to my future. Husband, GO BIG OR GO HOME STELLA WONG maybe I don’t want to bury my body, I’d rather have a headache, Zeus styled and brain a birth. The therapist said I’d need a disorder to keep talking and insurance wouldn’t count marital problems as one. I thought despair came in twos, paired off like a missing period, pregnant with loss. See, despair is really born from sperare, hope blistered as Athena’s spear. Inject my pain here. To birth two brains, two for oh, it’s not one heart for me and one for you, it’s more — oh, love is at no cost to you, and it falls on me to be the hero.

4445

JULIE SCHUMACHER

Letters are intimate by nature. Sealed, they need to be opened on receipt, undressed. And their primary mission isn’t news — which bombards us every hour from our myr iad devices — but rumination. “Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?” Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra. Austen’s letters recounted mundane activities; but they also offered insight into her character and her sense of humor, a vivid self-portrait of the person she was.

My mother’s letters — I have a 40-year collection of them — weren’t typically long or philosophical. “Arrived home from Florida by train last Monday,” she wrote, in a letter that is probably from the 1990s but is dated only “Sunday evening.” “The pool is open here, and your father went in today — he is one of the few brave ones.”

To those who might claim that letters can be windy or boring: don’t confuse the reg ular practice of correspondence with the holiday card. The holiday card is more like a decorative Facebook post than a letter, consisting of approved-for-all-audiences an nouncements of family whereabouts and successes: the granddaughter’s dance recital, the nephew’s barefoot wedding in Maui, and the continuing adventures of Pirate, the elderly one-eyed Siamese.

Though she had access to email and to a computer, she didn’t much like them. She preferred handwriting to type, and I’m glad that she did: her graceful blue cursive sub tly defined her. I didn’t want to open her final letter because, well, it was final. Until it was open, it seemed my mother, still capable of sending me a message, was in some sense alive. Now my most regular correspondent is a writer friend who doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram (which causes me to admire her). She and I rarely speak by phone and almost never find one another by email; but about once a month, or sometimes less often, I receive from her a stamped envelope with my name in the center, in her very recognizable scrawl.

Letter-writing, furthermore, is Zen-like and pleasantly tactile; it involves paper, pen, envelope, stamp (sealing wax and/or embosser lovely but optional), and the entrusting of the final product to a post box that resembles a sturdy blue robot with legs. A few days later, a human being wearing a uniform will deliver the letter to its destination, after which a response might (or might not), following a period of reflection, be sent within the week, the month, or the year.

I cashed the check and spent the $25 on something. The card and its envelope contain ing my mother’s writing live on, in a drawer.

At the end of her life, at age 91, my mother sent me a letter, which reached my house in Minnesota via US mail the day after she died. For a long time I didn’t open it, but studied her writing on the cream-colored envelope. Instead of writing MN — the postal code for Minnesota — she’d written the older abbreviation, Minn.

Eventually, several months after my mother’s death, I opened the letter she had sent me. It contained a check for $25 tucked into a Happy Anniversary card in which she’d written, “You can spend this on something, I guess! Love, Mom.”

An email says: Meet 4 coffee Weds 10:15 ?

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Anticipation — the leisurely pace of a physical correspondence — is a significant aspect of the letter’s appeal. The lag time and distance allow for a candor that can be hard to accomplish via emoticon or in person. Consider the slow food movement: a letter is to a text or email what a gourmet dinner is to a boxed burrito with freezer-burn.

My friend writes her letters by hand, usually on lined notebook paper with a ruffle of torn fringe on the left and the date at the top. Her most recent letter begins, “Sorry it’s taken me so long to write back…While I’m apologizing, did you happen to see Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Melissa McCarthy? If not, please see it.” I don’t always open these letters immediately, either. A letter discovered among the J. Jill catalogs and real estate flyers in the mailbox feels like a small personalized gift, so I will sometimes prop it on my desk for a day or two, before breaking the seal.

E-correspondence is one-dimensional. Letters are three-dimensional; they exist in space and acknowledge the passage of time.

A letter says: I remember the last time we met for coffee. You wore your favorite red shirt, the one with the ink stain on the pocket; and we gossiped and then pretended to regret gossiping, and you said you’d never felt so alive.

We laughed seconds before I raced past a yellow stoplight and sirens wailed behind us. I told you to stay calm and fear nothing. It was all routine, a simple mistake. We’re human. I placed both my hands on the wheel white knuckling as the officer asked questions: Where are you heading? Home. Why didn’t you stop? Laughter. Is it funny to break the law? When you are with your friends, notice if they ring a rope around a tree. Don’t step inside.

AIREA D. MATTHEWS

LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN ON EFFECTSTIME-DEPENDENTANDATTENTION

I saw a poplar in the woods near our home, felled in the last windstorm, two hundred years old, if it was a day. Laid to rest in the quarry below its roots. Two robins nested in its soft hollow. A blue jay perched on its gnarled bark. Our coonhound, walking with me, broke away to dig a larger hole underneath that tree. When he emerged, a spider’s web sprawled across his nose. Further up, a white birch had fallen into the taller limbs of a black ash. Conceivably, they might hold surrender for lifetimes, or until some element dared them free. You see, there’s life inside the willed thriving, triumph despite gravity’s force and pull. Beauty, yet and still, in that damn near fatal embrace.

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48 49 los angeles review of books as for this life, you’ll find shrapnel ages after impact. as if a rain-laden oak limb swooped under the husk of morning and crashed through your empty car’s windshield. years later, you’ll be driving nowhere special and feel a shard wedged in the crevice when that one song you never wanted to hear again plays on the radio from the same year the levee burst, and the engineer who built it vanished. you’ll recall the rising waters and how you held the sea in your lungs until names drowned. best to keep driving. forgetting is better; ask the faintly-etched relief of a satyr mourning a nymph on a bed’s spalliera, leaning against a ruined palace wall, hidden, in a fabled city no one ever visits since no one remembers it even exists.

ceaselesslyPray for lonely animals: stray bitches who growl at other bitches or the queen who shuns her workers. Pity the feral aggrieved and ponder how sad the lot to be who you despise. Our kind don’t become ghosts. Ancestors, yes, but not ghosts. We die and, when finally offered rest, we rest. I’m sorry you are always late because I am perennially in thought. Blame physics.Timeslows near heavy mass, resists movement.

The problem with hours is every clock cries wolf which is not to say every moment doesn’t matter

&turnsHowbecome.minutesobservedrift,dusktodawntomorrow& … AIREA D. MATTHEWS

Sunlight barges through our windows, lands across my cheek as forceful as a slap. I place my morning news down sorrowed by some other mother’s loss, some other mother’s loves will not return home the way they left. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong clothes, wrong color as if any of those things matter. What matters is knowing the distance between a wink and a blink, a variance measured in milliseconds.

Defy

50 51

I’m on a train right now from Montreal to Toronto. Michael sleeps next to me, his handsome head resting against the window, a half-eaten cheese baguette clutched in his left palm. I wish I could nap like that, but as you know I’m not that kind of person — not today (Besides, how could I nap and miss the chance at railway love?) Prairies stretch between these two cities from end to end; they’re all covered in snow today. Across the aisle, through the window, I can see a thin layer of fog hovering over Lake Ontario, blurring the horizon. Dear Michael sunk into his seat a long time ago, and has been drifting between being extremely friendly to me — I, as you know, have been sleeping on his couch for the last couple nights, and finishing his wine and yogurt, and he is a very hospitable guy who never complains — and sleeping. Rather than sleeping, or reading, or looking out the window, or texting, or reading the garbage news, I have been taking this time to wait for trying to write —  The afternoon has gone on like this, as was planned, and we’re about halfway there. I looked both ahead and behind me, searching through the shuffling commuters filing in and out of our car for Guy — let’s call him — who, though we had never met, I knew I would not miss. I’ll report: Michael’s still sleeping, the conductor’s walked away, and it is still a quiet afternoon spent in a train car plowing between two sides of a field, thick snowy pastures. I would only perceive the afternoon’s muteness and swiftness after

I tried to write about a lover’s back. When this failed to make me happy, I wrote down a few other prompts for myself that might result more pleasantly. Like writing a letter to you for instance, or catching up on my email, or a go at some kind of Canadian erotica, say, like an updated version of Strangers on a Train, in which a handsome hockey player (who in both Highsmith’s novel and Hitchcock’s movie is named Guy Haines — can you believe his name is Hanes?) travelling by train from Montreal to Toronto for a tournament finds himself in the dining car with an equally handsome but psychotic socialite who troubles the hockey player with conversation, a theory of how to commit the perfect murder, a threat, and then a spiral of mismanaged collusion. The two hand some men “criss cross,” perhaps over the course of a few digressive sequences, maybe a series of letters like this one, addressed to you, X, my love. I promise, as Highsmith’s Bruno does to himself, something to you: I’ll ape Bruno in the dining car with Guy in the bathroom, followed by a cut to a crime of passion, etc. “I’m your friend. I like you.

I’d do anything for you” I would write, I would say to him. This was definitely the best option! I found myself very excited to write that scene. I rubbed my hands together in anticipation while I thought about the moves the two characters, Guy and I, might make on one another. While I peed (so as to make sure that I didn’t have any disturbance to my writing time) I thought about how fun it was going to be to compose the pivotal conversation before or after their lusty encounter: seeing one another across the platform, finding a seat, helping one another lift their bag into a compartment, share a window, maybe a baguette…

LETTER TO A THIRD SHIV KOTECHA

Guy’s arrival, otherwise I would have totally taken it for granted. But he walked in an hour before I expected him — and from the wrong stop. It was him alright; mousey, and petit, and with a sort of humming quality to him. It seemed that if his humming was even momentarily disrupted, he might short-circuit, or kiss me, or even shatter, like a mirror. His premature entrance onto the car was so remarkable that it almost had the power to warp time into thick viscosity, allowing me to indulge my thoughts as a drought welcomes a flood. It was a physical sensation, the desire to record the strange ineffable associations that are remainder to these primary reactions. Writing might leave me sated or at least, properly represent the experience in the dramatic flush of real-time. So it was an encounter that compelled me to my pen, X! To write to you. This desire to write had (for once) the effect of completely relaxing me — a first. I made myself a list of possible avenues I could take: first to write the plot of a novel I thought I’d enjoy writing, which basically ended right where it began, as has happened before. Then I wrote down a title, “The Chastisement of Love in Chicago,” which was the end of that. The train attendant who comes by with a miniature cart with the beer and other beverages came and went several times. I tried then, to write about the night before, the reading — who came, what the bookstore was like, how good it felt to be in Montreal and eating baguettes with Michael again. I got to see Helen — she sends her love, dear X. We got talking about the past two years of lovers without losing a breath. Of course, it took us no longer than the two-block walk to the bar, really.

I thought changing the perspective a bit from Highsmith’s would be a good idea, so I planned to write from the perspective of Bruno the murderer. He’s an introverted type, and a little bit nervous. The attraction that he develops for the hockey player, even before the diner car scene must be demonstrated in the story (by description, maybe metaphor) to be both somewhat unsure, but willing to plod along, cautious perhaps, but playful. Not entirely unsure of what he wants, nor what he wants to do. The afternoon has gone on like this, as was planned, and we’re about halfway there. I looked both ahead and behind me, searching through the shuffling commuters filing in and out of our car for Guy — let’s call him — who, though we had never met, I knew I would not miss. I’ll report: Michael’s still sleeping, the conductor’s gone away, and it is still a quiet afternoon spent in a train car plowing between two sides of a field, thick snowy pastures. I would only perceive the afternoon’s muteness and swiftness after Guy’s arrival, otherwise I would have totally taken it for granted. He walked in an hour before I expected him — and from the wrong stop. It was him alright; mousey, and petit, and with a sort of humming quality to him. It seemed that if his humming was even momentarily disrupted, he might short-circuit, or kiss me, or even shatter, like a mirror. His premature entrance onto the car was so remarkable that it almost had the power to warp time into thick viscosity, allowing me to indulge my thoughts as a drought welcomes a flood. It was a physical sensation, the desire to record the strange ineffable associations that are remainder to these primary reactions. Writing might leave me sated or at least, properly represent the experience in the dra matic flush of real-time. So it was an encounter that compelled me to my pen, X! To write to you.

After returning to my seat I pulled my computer out of my bag, and placed it on my tray table. I rolled both my shoulders forward and back, tilted my head from side to side, cracked my knuckles and stretched my hands so high that I even teared up, opened my mouth, gave out a yawn.

52 los angeles review of books

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54 55

Because I wish ill toward no one, I hope this note finds you well enough to read it, I guess. Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately; there is not a day, not an hour, not a minute that passes like a cable news ticker I’m not counting off with your infamously minute hands, and though elders have always told me a poet is entitled to their obsessions, this attraction, dare I say, is of an entirely different nature. And we are of different breeds, which I imagine is phrasing you favor using since it evokes animal as animal evokes, say, the African savanna or Central American rainforests, places where people, too, live and love on each other and maybe even laugh, though in expressing this, what I mean to make clear is that one of us is the type of person who stares directly into the sun and the other is the type of person who stares directly into the sun, but the misalignment in our thinking, the disagreement that, perhaps, damns us to mutual antipathy, is in regards to what the sun actually is. I say a star and you say a star and we’re not remotely saying the same thing; your name’s been on wet lips all my life, has been tucked into urban radio braggadocio, talked about on television and in checkout line tabloids for decades, DEAR DONALD, CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON you, nearly as ubiquitous in the supple minds of this country as Jesus is, and who is Jesus Christ if not a superstar? This is precisely what you’re considering, I gather, staring singularly at yourself in any given situation, the whole world a full-length mirror-mirror on the border wall transporting you through time back to the peak of your playboy days, a certified star reaching for what he shouldn’t but believing it belongs to him inherently, by sheer audacity. And since you’ve already said goodbye to science, already fictioned fact, I’ll spare you the astronomical details, won’t stoop to lazy labels of stupidity on your part and play along, as the lasting effects on these dreaming eyes of mine are functionally the same no matter what sense of star is used: in any event, I can’t see clearly. Me, blacksighted beyond physical ability, my hands still on the proverbial wheel till they cuff me or cut me down — it wasn’t so long ago that I was a car-length behind the life ahead of me when all the lamps hanging above the highway went out. And, to my misfortune, that model, though fast and sporty, had no orange or redglowing lights on the rear (budget cuts, I hear), the make American like both you and I are constitutionally, but when I say American and when you say American, I know we aren’t saying the same thing. One of us is saying make this country great and the other is saying make this country great; one of us means praise me and one of us means save me, and to that I can only provide cautions to both of us, honestly, because people that need saving will eventually make moves to save themselves. But something tells me you know that, are banking on it, literally, somehow. Because you ain’t slick, Donny ― and my peoples don’t slip. They don’t sleep. They can’t sleep. Not with the sun still out.

In the letter that follows, a year and a half later, Arendt finds herself tasked with the duty of passing on the news that her fear has come to terrible fruition. She writes: Dear WalterScholem,Benjamin took his own life on September 29 in Portbou on the Spanish frontier. He had an American visa, but on the twenty-third the only people “I DON’T KNOW IF THIS LETTER WILL REACH YOU”: THE LETTERS OF HANNAH ARENDT AND GERSHOM SCHOLEM NATHAN GOLDMAN

The language of letters is rife with its own banalities, small talk tics endemic to the form. Profound tragedy throws the mundane into sharp relief. In some cases, the trag ic trivializes the ordinary, sends it shriveling up into its own smallness. But in other cases, the aura of the tragic exposes the tragedy within the mundane. Such is the case in the second letter in the correspondence, such as we have it, of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, two of the 20th century’s leading German-Jewish thinkers. (Though Arendt and Scholem died in 1975 and 1982, respectively, their 25-year-long correspondence, edited by Marie Luise Knott, was not published in Germany until 2011; it arrived in the United States in 2017, in Anthony David’s translation.) When Arendt composed this second letter, Scholem had already moved to Israel, and Arendt was on her way to safety in the United States. In the first letter, from 1939, Arendt had written of her concern — and her hope — for their mutual friend, Walter Benjamin: I’m really worried about Benji. I tried to line up something for him here but failed miserably. At the same time, I’m more than ever convinced how vital it is to put him on secure footing so he can continue his work. As I see it, his work has changed, down to his style. Everything strikes me as far more em phatic, less hesitant. It often seems to me as if he is only now making progress on the questions most decisive for him. It would be awful if he were to be prevented from continuing.

Kori Newkirk, Rhythm and Warmth , 2013, C-print and acrylic, 35 ½ x 27 inches each Courtesy of the artist.

HannahYours, Arendt

NATHAN GOLDMAN

In one sense, Arendt writing this line is an easily understandable, practical matter. The uncertainty of receipt haunts every letter, but in this case, the particular conditions of World War II exacerbated the anxiety. Arendt did not know whether the letter would reach Scholem, and the sentence straightforwardly presents this fact. But the sentence also conveys something stranger at the core of this common sentiment. What is the sense in writing a sentence that will lose its meaning if the letter is, in fact, not received (in which case it will not be read by its recipient), but that, if it is received, will prove irrelevant (in which case it will have reached its recipient after all)? The semantics of the sentence are such that either possibility negates them. What can be made of an expression that contains this kind of dual illegibility? It is, perhaps, a gesture toward the fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the inti macy established through letter-writing. Epistolary correspondence is always an act of reaching out in which the letter might not reach its intended recipient. Of course, this is true in the literal sense to which Arendt’s sentence most obviously and immediately refers, especially in the war-torn time during which Arendt and Scholem began their correspondence. But beyond this, the line highlights the way in which a letter is always an attempt for a person to come across despite distance — not only the distances of time and space, but also the subtler ones that separate us. If it weren’t already clear from the circumstances of their lives as Jewish émigrés who had fled Germany (Arendt settled in New York City, Scholem in Jerusalem), both cor respondents are explicit in their letters about the value of the communication as a salve for the world rupture through which they felt themselves living. In a 1942 letter, the first to Arendt after she made her way to New York, Scholem sets the stage for their correspondence to contain more than matters of historical or intellectual interest. He writes, “And don’t disdain writing to me about your daily goings-on. The world has become so torn apart that each and every detailed report from a different country is cause for great joy, especially when it comes from you.” In her response, Arendt echoes and advances Scholem’s sentiment. “It is a real comfort,” she writes, “to still be hearing from friends. Such letters are like minutely thin, strong threads. We’d like to convince ourselves that these threads are able to hold together what remains of our world.” She ends this letter with the request that Scholem should “be certain to write, and in de tail,” and with a re-invocation of the analogy of letters to threads. “Until we see each other again,” she writes, “we don’t want these thin threads to tear.”

58 59 los angeles review of books the Spanish allowed to pass the border were those with “national” passports.

I don’t know if this letter will reach you. In the past weeks and months I had seen Walter several times, the last time being on September 20 in Marseilles. The report of his death took nearly four weeks to reach both his sister and us. Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs.

The story of The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem is the story of these threads stretching, holding strong — and ultimately tearing. Perhaps this was, and always is, inevitable. One of modernity’s great letter writers, Franz Kafka, in a rightly famous epistolary passage that seems to presage Arendt’s “I don’t know if this letter will reach you” (which, shed of its mundanity, acquires the grave resonance of a Kafka aphorism), questions the possibility of letters’ ability to reach anyone. In a letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka writes (in Philip Boehm’s translation): How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. Writing letters, on the other hand, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. Here Kafka conceptualizes letter-writing as a futile communicative pursuit in the shadow of what is possible in physical proximity to another person, whom “one can hold on to.” (Despite his gloomy vision of what can come across in a letter, Kafka con ducted his love affair with Jesenská almost entirely through epistolary encounters; the two met in person only twice.)

This letter is a brutal, bracing document: the report of a mutual friend’s suicide that doubles as a dispatch from the midst of the ongoing extermination of European Jewry. When I first read it, the sentence that cut me the deepest was neither the grimly restrained report of the suicide that opens the letter nor the poetic, almost biblical, flourish with which it ends, but rather the utterly banal, epistolary readymade at the missive’s heart: “I don’t know if this letter will reach you.”

Scholem and Arendt, too, understood letter-writing in relation to the face-to-face en counter, though their analyses of the relation tended to be less dire than Kafka’s. In a diary entry, a young Scholem mused about the possibility of the “messianic moment” in letters, which are, as editor Marie Luise Knott describes, “simultaneously the place of both deferred and expected encounters.” Indeed, both kinds of encounters play a role in Arendt and Scholem’s correspondence. In the early years, while the war still rages, they look forward to meeting immediately after its end. Arendt, in a letter from January 1945, writes that she has sent Scholem some copies of articles that they might discuss when they’re finally able to see one another. She adds, wistfully, that “the only question now is in which cafe [they’ll] meet,” and that the meeting will occur at “five o’clock sharp.” She goes on: “This is gallows humor, for the question of when we’ll see one another again is beginning to play an ever-greater role for me personally — the Greeks rightly located the dramatic heart of tragedy to be the scene in which people recognize each other again.” She ends the letter with an acknowledgment of the re lationship between letter-writing and face-to-face encounters and a reminder of the

A few letters back and forth later, in August of that same year, Scholem mis-alludes to Arendt’s meeting time in a comment about the meeting’s unfortunate deferral. “As you can see,” he writes, “our plan to meet five minutes after the end of the war must be postponed, even though the war is already over in Europe.” Even in this gesture toward the relationship between written correspondence and encounters expected and deferred, there has been an error that shows something of the havoc that distance can wreak on communication. Arendt, for her part, picks up Scholem’s mistake without comment. She ends her response to this letter, in September of the same year, with this: “It’s now five minutes after war’s end and we still haven’t managed to make a date at the cafe around the corner.”

60 los angeles review of books playfully set time: “Write soon—letters are a kind of surrogate. And don’t forget: after the war, five o’clock sharp!”

In a long letter from January 1946, Scholem acknowledges the receipt of Arendt’s essay “Zionism Reconsidered” (which he tellingly mis-names as “Zionist Reconsidered”), thanks her, and writes, “I find myself in the extraordinarily disagreeable position of having to give you my opinion on the essay ‘Zionist Reconsidered,’ though I really don’t want to get into a life-or-death squabble with you.” He goes on to say that the essay “disappointed [him] so profoundly” and “somewhat embittered” him. Most of the rest of the letter is spent cataloging critiques, which range from the particular to the fundamental — for instance, he rebukes Arendt’s position on nationalism, writing, “I am a nationalist and am entirely unfazed by ostensibly ‘progressive’ denunciations

In a letter from November 1946, Scholem reports back from a trip from Europe: My experiences in Europe were very gloomy and depressing, and I was ex tremely despondent by the time I returned home. In my opinion, there is a cat astrophic chasm opening up between various Jewish communities in Europe, America, and Palestine. There is no overcoming this through any conceivable theory. Everything is falling apart, and people don’t understand one another. This chasm gaped between Arendt and Scholem, too, as formerly European Jews who had left for the United States and Palestine, respectively. The greatest source of tension between the two friends — and, ultimately, the source of the dispute that put an end to their friendship — was rooted in this distance. Arendt’s increasingly critical rela tionship toward Zionism clashed with Scholem’s increasingly uncritical relationship to it. This disagreement irrupts into the otherwise companionable correspondence twice, each time as a result of something Arendt has published with which Scholem takes is sue. The exchanges around these disputes, in which these two profound Jewish think ers wrestle with what is likely the most historically important Jewish idea of the 20th century, contain the most interesting material in the correspondence. Sadly, though perhaps not incidentally, they are also the exchanges in which the two thinkers, in their inability to come across to one another, wear away at the threads that bind them.

Kori Newkirk, Drift , 2014, Aluminium/tin, paper, cotton, particulate, glitter, feather, 43 x 6 x 3 inches

When Arendt responds, she also does not mention their impasse, and she expresses her desire to be with him: You are probably already in Frankfurt. The sadness of Paris must have been nightmarish. I wish I could have been there with you. Even if it wouldn’t have helped at all, sometimes a witness from earlier times can at least help a person snap out of the unreality of melancholy. Their disagreement lay dormant for nearly two decades, during which time their epistolary friendship flourished, until the publication of Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, to which Scholem responded in a letter from June 1963. Scholem writes that, though “the book is not lacking in misunderstandings and errors,” he will concern himself only with its fundamental flaw, which is that, in Scholem’s view, the book unfairly treats the behavior of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. For Scholem, this reveals a deficiency in Arendt herself as a Jew. He writes, “There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete — what the Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, […] there is no trace of it.” Beyond this, Scholem takes issue with Arendt’s analysis of the justification for Eichmann’s execution and, crucially, with the very con ception of “the banality of evil.” Near the letter’s end, Scholem writes, “I regret that, given my sincere and friendly feelings toward you, I have nothing positive to say about your theses in this work.”

I don’t love myself or anything I know that belongs to the substance of my being. At the same time that Arendt describes this great gulf between herself and Scholem, she also emphasizes their closeness by including a parenthetical remark that draws upon their intimacy as friends as well as their intimacy as thinkers engaged in complemen tary intellectual projects: “(by the way, I would be extraordinarily grateful to you if you could tell me when this expression began to play a role in the Hebrew language and literature, when it appeared for the first time, and so on).” This closeness is clear, too, in the way she signs the letter: “In old friendship.” This disagreement — again over incompatibilities in their visions for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust — carries on, unlike the one that preceded it, and continues to develop in the letters that follow. It is clear that the old friends are having difficulty seeing the matter from one another’s point of view, though the warmth between them does not appear to dissipate.

In light of that warmth, the final letter in the correspondence, from Scholem to Arendt, comes as something of a shock. In a letter from July 1964, he writes to Arendt to tell her that he’ll be in New York to deliver a lecture on their friend Walter Benjamin. He is anxious that he has not heard from her in some time. He writes, “I don’t know how to interpret your silence — I haven’t heard from you since last fall.” He seems hopeful that a face-to-face encounter might restore what they’ve lost. “If we want to see one another again,” he writes, “this will be the opportune moment, if you are in New York at the time.” He gives her the details of where to reach him and writes, in clos ing, “So perhaps we’ll see one another again!” As far as we know, they never did. The distance between them proved insurmountable. If letters exist, as the young Scholem had written, in relation to encounters expected and deferred, it seems fitting that this

62 63 los angeles review of books of a position that people repeatedly, even in my earliest youth, wrote off as obsolete.”

Three months later, Arendt sent her response, in which she passes over some of the particulars to which Scholem attends and strikes straight to the heart of the matter: their disagreement over “nationalism” in theory and over its practical application to a Jewish nation-state. She asks, “how is it possible that someone can spend his life in the serious study of philosophy and theology and, ignoring all possible insights that can arise from these fields, can present himself as a believer in an ‘ism’?” On the issue of nationalism in practice as it pertains to Zionism, she writes: [T]here is a very real danger that a consistent nationalist has no other choice but to become a racist. […] The metamorphosis of a people into a racial horde is an ever-present danger in our times. And you’ll surely agree with me that a racial horde has precious little to do with renewal, but it has a lot to do with ruin and destruction. […] I strongly believe that a Jewish nation-state would be a stupid and dangerous game. Despite her directness, Arendt, too, ends her letter warmly. “So,” she writes in closing, “you should make your way here as soon as you can […] and let’s do our best to remain friends.” They do. In fact, their next exchange is among the sweetest in their corre spondence. Scholem writes to Arendt from Paris in a letter that begins, “Mes chers amis — what a melancholic sight to be again in Paris and be reminded of the past days.” He does not mention their conflict, and it is easy to hear a meaning other than the explicit logistical one when he writes, “You will always reach me through the above address.”

The next month, Arendt responded at length, offering a point-by-point rejoinder. She agrees with Scholem’s assessment that she lacks ahavath Israel. She writes: How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective. […] The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. Second, this kind love for the Jews would seem suspect to me, since I am Jewish myself.

NATHAN GOLDMAN

Scholem ends his letter with a mix of warmth and sarcasm. He refers to himself as “a longtime religious reactionary,” an ironic reappropriation of Arendt’s criticism of Zionism as reactionary. But Scholem is also frank about the rift this matter has caused between them and his desire to overcome it. He writes, “I’m counting on hearing from the more noble abysses in your heart. But we’ll never be able to connect through the arguments evidenced in your essay.”

The tragic irony is that, in their final failure to come across to one another, Scholem and Arendt have begun the work of coming across to others beyond them. Now that their letters have been published nearly in their entirely, this is their legacy. They are no longer letters as such, but letters as literature. I have come to think of the central drama of the letter as crystallized in the question: Have I come across? If this is so, then what question might capture the central drama of the published correspondence, of the epistolary exchange as for someone other than its participants? Perhaps it’s this: Has what might have come across between these thinkers come across to us? Of all that passed between these thinkers — these friends, these writers of letters — what has reached us? The risk of not reaching and of not being reached is the very basis of the epistolary form. When Arendt, in her letter to Scholem reporting the tragic fact of Benjamin’s suicide, wrote, “I don’t know if this will reach you,” she inscribed the danger of illeg ibility that grounds legibility, the distance that makes intimacy possible. What comes across in her words is the uncertainty of coming across. Might this suggest a standard by which to evaluate a correspondence as a literary text? What reaches us in the letters of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem is, in part, the sense of how they could not reach one another and cannot quite reach us either. What arrives is precisely the non-arrival. But this is not nothing. It is even its own kind of triumph.

At the beginning of every letter that deserves the name stands the Schechinna [the presence of God] and, imperceptibly, sings the most audible song.

NATHAN GOLDMAN

64 65 los angeles review of books correspondence reached its wrenching end in a meeting one party expected and the other, through silence, deferred indefinitely — and thus eternally. Scholem, in a postscript to his letter critiquing Eichmann in Jerusalem, dated the day after the composition of the letter itself, writes: Dear Hannah, I wrote the above yesterday evening, and I hope it reaches you somewhere. Do you have anything against my publishing this letter, perhaps by removing its epistlatory character and printing it in the third person? These questions relating to your book are of interest to far more people than just the two of us. In her response, Arendt assents but “advise[s] against transforming it using the third-person voice.” She is, she says, “not at all opposed” to the publication of Scholem’s letter as long as it is printed alongside hers, with the epistolary character of the ex change preserved. For her, “the form of letters” is inseparable from any insight to be found in the words therein. “The value of our debate,” Arendt explains, “is that it takes place as an exchange of letters and is carried out on the foundation of friendship.” Here we get a glimpse, in the moment in which Arendt and Scholem’s epistolary re lationship — and their friendship — begins to collapse, of the transformation of their correspondence from a private matter to a public one. Though there is no way she could have known this, by insisting on the unique characteristics of the epistolary form, which cannot, as Scholem had suggested, rightly be simply “removed” from a piece of writing, Arendt was reminding Scholem of something he had, as a young man, known well. In the diaries of his youth, he had extolled the letter form in no less than exalted terms. Scholem writes (in Steven E. Aschheim’s translation): Among the greatest and most elevating phenomena is the liberation that a letter produces in one, like some absolute religion. The freedom of the letter is perhaps the highest freedom that writing which is not the Bible can achieve.

6667 You don’t know as I do my mind. I am lemon rind. Bitter.Brilliant. You are like I know more than you I have been alive for longer. But you are just a brick in frost, prickling. Hush now. I am a border town garden invaded by native bees. Can you hear them stirring? I wake with the sun on my side. Sometimes: a slight, pearlescent fly hovers at my screen door, spitting up clichés. You know? You! My academia,mySherlock,mywantedman.Here, a riddle: The earth cracks in the one hundred COLLAR OF MOSCAS SET IN IVORY IN 3023 ANALICIA SOTELO and fourteen degree heat I favor. You think that is weak? I am better than a child because I disagree better. Let’s count the heads of these dried roses of 1863, 1904, 1952, 2025.Who will get polluted first? I bet me first: My memory: a sieve with a hundred family members to draw blood from. I drink when I can stomach it when I can taste what we have left what we have left is this screen where the flies forget the number of times they’ve circled back to our silver netting. I can look them in the eyes from underneath, a parallel of seeing, a useless advantage. The white trapeze continues. What is the point of your indignation? That I could have a home and like it? You land on my neck with sick curiosity. You insect. You equally dying thing.

Alex Olson, Reply 2015, Oil and modeling paste on linen, 71x50 inches. Photo: Brian Forrest Private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Altman Siegel, San Francisco

You didn’t know my aunt, of course. It’s not that I expect you to feel sad, and we weren’t close really, so it isn’t that either. But she didn’t just die of old age; she wasn’t old, for one — it was more complicated, and on the flight back to Paris there was a little goblin I couldn’t shake, the idea that I hadn’t treated her fairly, that there was some unfinished business there. And what better confessor than a pen pal who never responds? But ugh, all this preamble! What I really wanted to get down before bed was this: The summer after fifth grade, I was nine years old and in love with my swimming teacher, Steve. The best-looking man I had ever seen, Steve lived with his mother in a cul-de-sac off my street, and taught swimming lessons out of his backyard.

My aunt died recently — I had to go to Pittsburgh for the funeral, a big mess, mainly because of a sudden, debilitating wave of heat — imagine Hoopers of all shapes and sizes, melting on their feet. Not a convenient time to die — late summer in the Rust Belt. I don’t mean to be cavalier; I’m just trying for a little levity at the start of my tale (so maybe don’t begin with aunt death, you are probably thinking).

I always like to know what people looked like, don’t you? Steve was tall (though it’s true that at the time many adults must have seemed that way) and lean. He had a short, tawny beard that stuck out from a simian face, and hair a shade darker. He drove a maroon pickup truck, and when I saw it, on my street, for example, when I walked with Mrs. Gaja to and from the park in our neighborhood, the sight filled me with intense anticipation (to this day, show me a man with a pickup truck and I will show you sex before anyone expects it).

TO CAROLINE, ON THE OCCASION OF MY AUNT’S DEATH SARA DAVIS

The other thing happening that summer was that two days a week after ballet class I went home with Katie Robertson, a pretty girl with a high-pitched, wheedling voice, and stayed at her house until my mom could pick me up after work. We spent every

“I know,” I yawned. “You already told me.”

The next morning my mother came into my room and sat beside me on the bed. “We gave Mrs. Gaja the week off,” she said. “Dill is going to take care of you.”

I think about that summer, it seems like I spent the whole time sitting in that giant chair, the soles of my feet on the cool leather, Michael Jackson’s glowing eyes and eelish jaw floating like a hologram before me. But my heart was al ways, always (from a young age I have leaned toward preoccupation) in the swimming pool behind Steve’s house, which, despite Steve’s deep, dark, and permanent tan, was never sunny. All around it were tall trees that plunged it into gloom and darkness that had never felt the warming ray of the sun. Not only was the water ice cold, it was also filled with prickly balls that fell from the trees — brown and brittle in the summer, green and rock-hard in the spring. And that was my whole universe: my house, Katie’s house, swim class, ballet. Weird to think about. That and the sheer endlessness of summer: June and then July, July and then August, an eternity stretching into forever, no end in sight. As for Mr. Robertson, I never saw him, not even a scrap of evidence that he existed. But between you and me, Caroline, and with all due respect for your situation, everyone knows that fathers are irrelevant. My swim class was small, only five girls including me: two pale sisters, Eva and Siobhan, Priyanka in her baggy suit, myself, and my special enemy, Aya Ben-Ami, the only girl whose mother let her wear a two-piece bathing suit to swim class. In my memory, no one was particularly good or bad at swimming. It’s hard to say what was being taught, exactly. We spent a lot of time doing warm-ups, and stretching before getting in the pool — a lot of standing on the patio and windmilling our arms, while Steve counted slowly to 10. But you probably have swimming lessons in England, too, or at least have seen them on television, so I won’t go any further down that road. I could spend more time on Aya, I guess; she was, I think, the daughter of Israeli immigrants. She still had her baby fat, but somehow made it look womanly, whorls of dark blond hair at her temples, a charm on a thin gold chain that dipped between her non-breasts. One of her front teeth had a very minor discoloration. Try as I might, I can’t remember her saying one thing of interest all summer. What else can I say? Have I set the scene? There was a day when we saw Steve’s mom: we were standing on the patio, stretching our sides, or touching our toes, when there was a sudden scrabbling noise from the sliding door to the main house, and like one organism we all turned to watch a big, pale shape emerging — a large woman in a gray night gown holding a thermos in one hand. This was Steve’s mom, undoubtedly, though none of us had ever seen her before. It was something of a shock, how haggard and unattractive she was, this person who had gestated Steve. “Mom?” said Steve. “What are you doing?”

We watched, frozen, as he escorted her back into the shadowy room that lay be yond the screen door. Aya, I noticed with irritation, was barely paying attention, pick ing chunks of foam out of a moth-eaten part of her lime green pool noodle.

70 71 los angeles review of books one of these afternoons doing the only thing Katie ever wanted to do, which was watch Michael Jackson videos on the enormous screen in the Robertsons’ extremely dark and powerfully air-conditioned home theater. She did the moves along with him, grabbing her crotch with gusto as I watched uncomfortably from my large, black leather chair, shivering and eating candy served by Katie’s mom, who was a kind woman from the AmericanSometimes,South.when

“She’s…” said my mom, and then she shook her head and started again. “She got some not very good news.”

When Steve re-emerged, the look on his face was different in a way I could not quite put a name to. Angry? Tired? I couldn’t say. Whatever it was made my heart constrict but also grow; it made my limbs heavy and filled me with power. “Power,” you say, “is probably not the word I would have used.” But you’re wrong.

SARA DAVIS

“What kind of not very good news?” “It doesn’t matter. Just do what she says.”

“Okay,” I said, and she leaned forward to kiss the part in my hair. Then she got up, left the room, and went to work. Some not very good news, I thought. It was beyond the parameters of my imagina tion what not very good news would be to someone like Dill, who was sort of an adult

Power is exactly the word I mean. Two summers before that one a small brown bird flew into the living room window and fell like a rock to the deck below. It spent the rest of its life (it died before morning) lying in a shoebox I’d lined with cotton balls, fear rising off it like steam.

I dreamed about that bird for three nights in a row when my aunt Dill first came to stay. Do you not think that at least somewhat remarkable?

“Oh hello girls,” said Steve’s mom, pushing a lock of gray, greasy hair behind her ear, as if she were a perfectly normal hostess, greeting us for a party. “Are you enjoying yourselves?”“Mom,” said Steve again, more sharply. “Let’s get back inside now.”

Dill was my father’s youngest (that summer she was 32, I think) and only unmar ried sister. She was having some kind of crisis — that was clear — what exactly I didn’t know, but there were things that would have clued anyone in — the way she came to us shiny-eyed at the airport, with her suitcases full of dirty clothes. I saw it in my mom’s face too, as she extracted grubby socks and underwear and put them in the washer.

“Well,” said my mom. She looked at me more closely. Sometimes it seemed possi ble she could see into my brain, into its secret corner, where I kept the tiny altar with the idol of Steve, and the doll shaped like Aya Ben-Ami stuck all over with pins. “Are you going to be good?” she said, her eyes suddenly serious. “Yes,” I “Good,”said.she said. “Because Dill isn’t feeling well.”

“What do you mean she isn’t feeling well?” I asked. Dill always had an air of gen eral disarray, but she had not looked sick, at least not to me.

And then I was walking down the sidewalk with my Aunt Dill, feeling the slick of my suit against my skin and marveling at myself. My plan. My capacity for deceit. But a plan can be a tricky thing when you are nine years old — some parts you see clearly, others not. I could see ahead to put on my suit, to put the towel in the tote bag by the door, but not far enough to Steve’s garden gate, a gate which was always unlocked on the days of the actual swimming lessons, and so it never even occurred to me that it could lock. But I am getting ahead of myself. There is one more little thing I want to tell you before we’re at the gate, and that is that as my Aunt Dill and I walked down my street and turned left onto the cul-de-sac where at the end was Steve’s house, and there was a moment when something weird happened to the sky — it got brighter, somehow, and we were passing a yard full of star jasmine and for a second the whole Kori Newkirk, Dow, 2013, Cotton, polyester, feathers, rubber, tape, bandage, Approx. 165 x 41 inches installed Dimensions variable

los angeles review of books but somehow not really, so I was relieved to find her looking just as she always did that morning, sitting at the breakfast table, buttering a bagel and looking completely normal. She smiled at me and pointed with her knife at the puppet theater that had materialized on the living room floor overnight.

These words, once they had exited my mouth, sounded obviously false; I was sure I had gone too far, and that Dill would call my bluff. But sometimes life surprises you, and instead Dill said, “Okay, let me get my shoes.”

It turned out that Dill had another suitcase, filled with things for a puppet show, actually very beautiful puppets she had made herself out of lace and brocade, and buttons, a collapsible stage and a velvet curtain. I was an audience of one that day, to a puppet show staged by my aunt in my own living room. All the puppets’ voices were my aunt’s, and I could see the top of her head above the curtain on its wooden dowel. But that was fine. Sit through a puppet show, if that was what Dill wanted, I could do. Because I was not going to be good. I had already made up my mind about how I could use her. “What do you want to do now?” said Dill breathlessly. She was patting with a napkin at her forehead, which was shiny with sweat. “Well,” I said. “What about the Science Center?” “Oh,” I said. “Um, well, actually, I have a swimming lesson.” Dill looked up from where she had been disassembling the puppet theater. “Really? No one said.” “Yes,” I said. “See?” and pointed to the tote bag that was leaning against the wall, a rolled-up towel peeking out the top. I lifted up my T-shirt to show her the swimsuit I was wearing under my clothes. “Oh,” said Dill. She looked uncertain. “Maybe I’ll call your mom.” “Why?” I asked, surprised by my own boldness. We looked at each other, Dill and I. “Just…” said Dill, and swept her eyes toward the telephone. First rule of child care (obviously no one told Dill): never explain. “We’re late, actually,” I said. “We should probably go now.”

Steve and Dill looked at each other, then at me, then away, because it was obvious that I was about to cry. (And I did cry, a lot, later, on the sidewalk walking home, in front of the house, in the moss-colored armchair by my bed — I drenched Dill’s lap with tears, but that’s to be expected, and I know that you, having a reasonably intelligent head on your shoulders must have already moved on. As soon as you saw: swim coach, nine year old, swimming pool, you were thinking: molestation angle. And guess what? You were right.)

I looked at him but couldn’t speak. “She’s here for her swimming lesson,” said Dill. “Are you the teacher?” “Yes,” said Steve slowly. “But there’s no class today.”

Both adults looked at me but I remained mute. “What do you mean?” said Dill. “It’s cancelled?” “No,” said Steve. “It just isn’t today. Swim class is Tuesday, Thursday.”

74 75 los angeles review of books world seemed magical and full of promise, and Dill, as if the words had leapt from her lips without her meaning them to, said, “Ooooooh, California. Everything smells so good here.”

He looked at me, and in a teasing, but tired voice, and said, “You know that.”

Because the next week, or maybe the week after, my mom came into my room with a funny look on her face, sat down on my bed, blew a weird little puff of air out from between her lips, and asked if Steve had ever touched me. “Touched me?” I asked, thinking of his hand on my hip, his brown feet standing on the floor of the pool, a pale band of white flesh where the strap of sandals went. “Inappropriately,” she said. Inappropriately, I thought. My skin prickling all over. “No,” I said. “Why?” “A girl in your class,” my mom said, twisting one hand around the other. “Who?” I asked, but I already knew. How did you know? you might ask. What did you see?

I looked up, surprised, and saw my aunt’s small, weak, girlish face turned upward to the sky — she had stopped completely on the sidewalk, as if the sky was going to lean down and kiss her on the mouth, and I wondered again about Dill’s not-verygood news, but that was just a little flash of something I did not understand, and I decided to ignore it. Then we were at Steve’s garden gate, and despite my intense desire for it to stay the same the “Oooooh, California” spell had broken, and my aunt was saying, “Hmmmm, is it usually locked?” “No,” I “Maybesaid.weshould try the front?” “Okay,” I said, but when I saw Dill go back down the driveway, heading for the path that led to the front door of the main house I said, “Maybe we should just go.” Dill “I“Why?”stopped.sheasked.don’tfeelwell,”I said. Dill gave me a long, surprisingly shrewd look. “Is that true?” she asked. And I guess what turned out to be true, Caroline, is that I could tell one kind of lie but not another (and as you know, I have been a dissembler from an early age), because the second she asked me I knew I could only answer “no.” Here’s what’s true: sometimes adults love children because they are the mom or the dad, and I think, actually, for the most part, that’s pretty much it. Any other adult loves you, I mean really loves you, and it might be worthwhile to consider what is going on exactly. My Aunt Dill really loved me! But she loved me like a placeholder, because she did not yet have children of her own. And I loved her too, because at that age you give your love easily. But I knew it had an expiration date, and that when Dill’s first child was born it would no longer be quite as relevant that I was her favorite niece. But now I bet you’re rolling your cornflower blue eyes — a child can’t know a thing like that. But I would argue that it can — not, maybe, in a way that I could have explained out loud, but in my bones, the same way I knew that if I crawled into her lap to cry, as I did later, she would like it. Though it’s only now that I am older and au pair to two impossibly good-looking French children, that I have known firsthand the pleasure of holding a small, warm, defenseless human being to your breast and brushing away tears from its hot cheeks.ButI’m getting ahead of myself — 10 years ahead! We rang the doorbell. Dill did. For a while there was no answer — if he were not at home, I prayed, then we could escape — I could hear the doorbell ring tinnily inside the house. Still there was a tiny unextinguished part of me that thought my plan could still work. Steve could still answer his door, understand in a second why I had come, and winkingly say yes, this is the day for swim class, you can pick her up in an hour. No one likes to think about what a child thinks will happen in an hour alone with an adult man — but children are manifold creatures! Desire is desire, and at any age it Justprevails.notthat day — one look at the Steve who came to the door was enough to tell you that.He looked a way I had never seen him look before, like he had pushed up through the earth of an early grave. Hair greasy, skin sallow, bags under his eyes. He was wear ing huge, shapeless gray sweatpants and rubbing his face. He said my name, and not in the way I had imagined him saying it, over and over again under the blankets of my bed. “What are you doing here?”

Dill looked at me uncertainly. My dupe, she was still carrying the tote bag, and then I saw her through Steve’s eyes: a short, thick-necked woman with pasty, unshaven legs bare beneath her wrinkled sundress. I thought of her saying, “Ooooooh California!” when we walked by the star jasmine and the sky did its strange, shimmery move.

SARA DAVIS

76 77 los angeles review of books But no no, Caroline, that’s not what I mean. I hadn’t seen a thing.

“I just got off the phone with her parents,” my mom said, and I didn’t hear what came after Caroline, because a strange thing happened: I started to cry. I can see you through your window, Caroline, 314 kilometers away, shaking your golden head. “No,” you are saying, “that isn’t strange. A pedophile is always sad or scary, depending on how you look at it.”

Well, Caroline, I think that’s all. The aunt died, I explained why (Turner syndrome is the official name of what she had), the pedophile was jailed, the controversial explana tion of the child’s tears implied. I think I can go to bed.

I have seen the most glamorous mother in the whole school buying non-fat yogurt at the budget supermarket — I kid you not.

One afternoon my wanderings took me to a corner of the yard that I had never been to before (though, I mean, it was not an especially big yard, so I’m not quite sure how that’s true) and saw a small wooden cross sticking up out of the ground, next to a big, sickly looking rhododendron. A weird and creepy thing, even if it was only for a cat.A cat? You say — did I fail to mention? That even before this story begins Katie Robertson was famous at our ballet school for having accidentally stepped on her new kitten and killed it? It’s funny, I meant to put that at the beginning, but now I see that I didn’t, and that there was only some limping description of her voice, and allusion to her attractiveness and no specific details whatsoever. I guess I am not as good a pen pal as I thought. For the record, Katie’s hair was brown, her face sweet and dusted with freckles, her eyes blue and ringed with dark, thick lashes, but there was also a kind of essential whininess to her that somehow made it all less appealing.

Swim class was over forever, of course, and Steve went to jail. His mom moved away. A young couple bought their house and had a baby. My mom made me go to a psy chologist named Margaret until everyone agreed that not much was happening there, except Margaret and I staring each other down over a battered set of Connect Four. As for Aya Ben-Ami, that snake in a two-piece swimming suit. Who knows? It was far too many years than I would like to admit until I could think of her without the green-eyed monster rearing its ugly head. But back to that summer: the upshot of Steve’s arrest was that I had to spend four after noons a week at Katie Robertson’s house, instead of two. We had grown a little sick of each other, Katie and I, or perhaps had never really liked each other in the first place, and overnight I found I couldn’t stand to be in the home theater, not even for a second, could not stand Michael Jackson’s face grimacing at me in the dark. I played outside, alone, and by played I mean wandered aimlessly by myself through the Robertsons’ backyard, waiting for sixth grade to start.

You thought I knew? That Dill was missing a chromosome? That she “experienced non-working ovaries,” was sterile, that she had a single, horseshoe-shaped kidney on one side of her body? Those are not the kinds of things you can know about someone just by looking at them. “But you knew she was sick, didn’t you?”

What is the age at which people begin to tell you things of consequence? How are you supposed to know, before it’s too late? And more importantly, how much should you rebuke yourself for self-absorption?

“Yes,” I said, absorbing sweat from my upper lip with a cocktail napkin. The wake was jam-packed, I guess she had a lot of friends, or the room was small. “But I thought she had “Oh,”diabetes.”saidmy mom, taking a pack of Kleenex from her bag and passing me one. “Well, she did.” So that was what that was like. I can only conclude that no one bothers to tell you anything of value when you’re a child, or even when you’re a newly minted adult.

But! I am letting it get away from me again! Because it’s not any of those things that I wanted to tell you. It was to the child in the backyard that I wanted to direct your attention — the child looking at the wooden cross in the yard by the big halfdead rhododendron. Now make this girl bigger by eight or 10 years, pack a black dress in her suitcase, make her an au pair, fly her across the Atlantic to Pittsburgh where her aunt will be buried. Make the cross bigger, too, make it stone, make it in a graveyard in a shitty part of town, with a view, across the river, of the casino. Scatter her relatives around the grave, make it a billion degrees, and there you have it: the thing that hap pens to a family when its youngest daughter dies at 42. This is the point: my Aunt Dill never had children. All those things I said about placeholders, and just knowing; I’m not ashamed to admit it: I was wrong. Dill never had kids, and in fact it was not a question of love or opportunity, but of pathology. Of physiology. And that raises the question: how come no one told me? Which I asked my mother at the wake. “I don’t know,” she said, her forehead furrowing: “I guess we thought you knew?”

It’s February in Paris. Even the tourists make less noise, and then, because there isn’t as much pressure to put on a show, the real Parisians can come out and do the boring things that grown-ups everywhere have to do. I have seen them, filling pre scriptions, pumping gas, buying toilet paper, eating stale little cakes out of plastic bags.

Caroline, we are now only 200 miles from each other, 200 miles as the crow flies. Come and see me some time. May King Faisal’s ghost keep you safe.

To which I say, “Well Caroline, touché, then it’s obvious you haven’t been paying attention at all.”

SARA DAVIS

In California, as we both know, our poppy is prolific. It will grow through pavement, or around the feet of grazing cattle. Its shape is more triangular than those species with which it shares a common name. It twists shut at night, curling around itself into a beak-like cone. And it sits on a small reddish saucer, which is as stiff and circular as its petal ends are ragged and pliable. At its center, a small tuft of orange or yellow repro ductive fluff. And it is itself yellow or orange, rarely white, or some gradation of these.

It is not a plant native to New England. And yet, we know that it was cultivated there with some regularity in the 19th century. By the 1830s, Eschscholzia californica is pre sented in New England periodicals as a common, though somewhat troublesome, cul tivated plant. The plant appears under the heading “New Plants” in May 18, 1833, issue of The Genesee Farmer and Gardener’s Journal, and makes entries into three editions of the Horticultural Register and Gardener’s Magazine during 1835 and 1836.

POPPY/FRIEND

JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN OSBORNE

Karon Davis, Mary (Detail), 2016. Plaster, wire, plastic pipe, and glass eyes, 33 ½ x 44 x 38 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles. The selections that follow are pulled from a longer series of letters written between 2014 and 2018. Dear Jules, Let’s begin with poppies. Eschscholzia californica is not a true poppy, though it shares with Ranunculales a frilly, parsley-like leafage, and with Papaveraceae an apparent fragility and love of roadsides.

Its genus is named for one German botanist, Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, by another German botanist, Adelbert von Chamisso. These two flower-friends trav eled together to California, among other exotic locales, from Russia, sometime during 1815–1818, and published their results in 1822.

For a few decades, then, the California poppy serves an additive function in New England gardens: an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space. By the second half of the century, however, Eschscholzia ceases to appear primarily as a garden plant; indeed, it disappears from Eastern periodicals almost entirely. The inclusion of an “Embroidery Design” based on the poppy’s frills, triangles, and flame-like colors, ideal for “the end of a bureau scarf” in the New York based Harper’s Bazaar in 1894 signals the plant’s increasingly ornamental nature in the East.

Recently, Theo Davis has described an ornamental aesthetics in 19th-century literature that attends to the artifice of beauty as it animates, rather than describes or determines, history. This also accurately describes the presence of the California poppy in New England 19th-century gardens, where it projects the wild rather than being synony mous with wildness, and makes history happen — gives Emily Dickinson a page of flowers to press; later, gives lady-readers of Harper’s a design to embroider at the end of a scarf. Later still, the poppy becomes an emblem for the state from which it hails: our flower. All of this contributes to an aesthetic that gives a surprising agency to this plant. Davis develops her notion of ornamental aesthetics from, among other examples, the lilies Henry David Thoreau describes during his river-paddle in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Thoreau looks at these flowers, but they also elude him, as does the ornamental itself, always glinting and growing. Davis describes this encounter as an “adjacency” that “does not reach communication or even recognition.” That not quite communicative adjacency is evocative, also, of letter-writing, and of friendship. The letter is a sub-literary, supplemental genre. Its intimacies are indirect. Sometimes its vectors run straight through their mark and are more beautiful than the bull’s-eye and so detract from intention or attachment. An ornamental affection: attachment in motion.  Dear Gillian, I am back in California where it is hot, dry, and just a tad chilly when the wind blows. We spent the last days in Montreal and back to New Hampshire slogging through a warm summer rainstorm. Last summer there, we found black trumpets all along a back trail behind a ski mountain that had probably flooded with the rains and then receded, oysters sprouting from trees stumps in front yards, and chicken-of-the-woods.

80 81 los angeles review of books In Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, assembled in the 1840s, our poppy appears at the bot tom middle of a page including seven other specimens, two without names. The other plants are Nodding Trillium; a purplish Common Garden Tulip; Starflower; the downy false foxglove — which Dickinson labels Aureolaria pedicularia, common name fernleaved foxglove — and the fern-leaved foxglove — which Dickinson labels Aureolaria flava, common name smooth false foxglove. Between these two erroneous foxgloves: our California poppy, whose four yellow petals are wrinkled like unsmoothed cotton, the top two dog-eared over on the center like pages of a tiny, unreadable book.

If this poppy was on its way to becoming a domesticated ornament of New England, it still retains for Thaxter something of wildness — and weediness. Its “spread every-

In the descriptions of Eschscholzia in New England in the 19th century, the plant is prized both for its ornamental showiness and its invocation of an otherwise inaccessi ble, sunnier, clime. “Scarcely any plant produces a greater degree of splendor than this,” one author writes; “when the full sun is upon it, it makes a complete blaze of color. It is a most suitable plant for producing a distant effect.” One of Emily Dickinson’s textbooks while she was at Mount Holyoke, Alphonso Wood’s A Class Book of Botany, describes Eschscholzia as “[a] very showy annual, common in our gardens.”

No mushrooms here, and we have given up our arugula to turn into dry chaff. For 19th-century New England gardeners to grow a poppy suited to dry, hot weather is a miracle; and yet they did. Perhaps Dickinson grew them, or a neighbor somewhere in Amherst. Celia Thaxter, another New England poet, grew them on Appledore Island of the Isles of Shoals off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. “Dear Feroline Fox,” she writes on June 16, 1874, My little garden sprang into such life of a sudden; all the seeds I planted, and a million more beside, came rushing up out of the ground so fast that I hardly knew how to manage them, and have been obliged to throw away enough flowers to stock half a dozen gardens, in order to let the remaining plants have room to grow. Such mats of pansies! And that flaming California poppy has spread everywhere. It breaks my heart to have to pull up a single one! Ranks of sweet-peas I have, and mignonette by the bushel. If I can only keep the weeds Thaxteraway!decorated her father’s hotel salon with the poppy’s golden flares and the blooms of all the other rampaging plants from her garden. In a little guide book on the isles, first published in 1873, John Scribner Jenness points to climate as the reason for its popularity as a summer resort, noting that “during the period from 1831 to 1843, it turns out, that while there are during the year, on the average, fifty-eight rainy days at Portland, and nearly fifty-eight at Boston, there are but twenty-five at the Piscataqua,” by which he means the Portsmouth harbor area out of which one would sail for the isles. Though it may have been occasional and brief, a spell of dry weather in the mid dle of June, along with the rocky and barren grounds of the island, may have been just enough to coax profusions of California poppies far from home.

JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN OSBORNE

What am I coaxing out of this letter? To Mrs. Horatio Lamb on March 13, 1893, Thaxter wrote: I send you one of Farquhar’s catalogues, marked, as I promised, and I want to say about the marks that they stand against flowers that I know about inti mately; and the more marks you find, the more charming and desirable is the flower! I dare say you know about them all, and I know there are many that are as beautiful, perhaps, which I have not marked, but these I have indicated are all old friends and dear, and I am sure of them.

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I have made a clearing here, sitting in a chair next to the door that opens out to the af ternoon sunlight. It would be too easy to conclude that an enclosure such as this makes room for a letter to be written. In her 1894 Island Garden, Thaxter advises “of Poppies, Plant them in a rich sandy loam, all except the Californias (Eschscholtzia), which do best in a poor soil.” Pages later, of all the flowers she names, the California poppy is the one which Thaxter takes up as a prismatic emblem of the isles: As I hold the flower in my hand and think of trying to describe it, I realize how poor a creature I am, how impotent are words in the presence of such per fection. It is held upright upon a straight and polished stem, its petals curving upward and outward into the cup of light, pure gold with lustrous satin sheen; a rich orange is painted on the gold, drawn in infinitely fine lines to a point in the centre of the edge of each petal, so that the effect is that of a diamond of flame in a cup of gold. Like her friend “Feroline Fox,” whose alliterative name has a pixie ring to it, the flower is a fairy presence. Its elegance, however delicate, is too fine and too bejeweled in her de scription. Yet it is true that this diamond flame more brilliantly captures the California poppy than any other shade of orange, and if one must churn out words like cups of gold, it is better to be precise and piquant than staid and undistinguished.

When we visited you in Santa Barbara in May, you said you learned discipline from training in gymnastics, and it is with that same discipline you now approach your writ ing. But this discipline — and we all have own versions of it; mine is to wake up by seven every morning, walk the dog, breakfast, and write until lunchtime, no more — is like turning dirt without fertilizer — “feeding / A little life with dried tubers.” So far I have been lucky. The arugula and collards we planted last year sprang up again on their own after a thicket of spring rains in April. Perhaps the ones we leave to run to seed this year will turn the trick again. But somehow, I am less sure of it now that it isn’t a surprise. The bloom has worn off. Writing feels the same once one must write the same thing over and over again as one does for a dissertation. I thought moving to Santa Barbara sounded like a lovely writing retreat, and your new home seemed a quaint treehouse filled with old enamel kitchenware, tea trays with floral patterns, and the leafy arms of your rubber plant and fiddleleaf fig. It reminded me of Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago de Chile — all these little rooms winding around tree trunks, and every part of the house like a well-turned piece of driftwood strung with whimsical mobiles. But how can we write if all our will must go toward sweeping the floors and washing the dishes, and making a home of the place where we have come to? How can we write, even with all the discipline mustered, if the verdant enchantment of our lives is so much work to sustain? One could say the same thing of these texts that we turn over in our hands — there is a kind of dry academic parapher nalia of citations and critical trends that surrounds every word. Dutiful housekeeping of these hairy beasts that merely shed more every day — new facts, connections, and

I am sure you’ll have tulips and peonies (don’t forget the single pink and white varieties of these) and lilies of all kinds, and don’t forget the heavenly perennial larkspurs, — the divinest azure, rose, and saffron tints — and sunflowers and hollyhocks and single dahlias (superb), kings’ flowers, I call them, all colors; and the Oriental poppies, hardy and never failing and gorgeous beyond descrip tion. Perennial phloxes, especially the pure white and the rose color. Hydrangea grande flora — all these you know; and the tall Japanese anemones that are heavenly beautiful. Dear me! I get out of breath with the perennials before I think of reaching the dear flower seeds for annuals. She has, in her exhaustive list (and this is not the end of it), produced a dog-eared seed catalog of her own; a kind of to-do list of a scrupulous gardener or accountant

Somethinginterpretations.makes me want to throw it all away — though I fear that any new direction would yield the same vanity. I need little for inspiration — sometimes just a glass of water, a pencil, and paper — anything more would be distraction. Other times, it feels as though everything has gone dry, and even the novels I read to lead me astray are filled with familiar detours. When Charles Darwin marvels at how “the greatest amount of life diversity can be supported by great diversification of structure,” he cites the example that “[i]t has been experimentally proved, that if a plot of ground be sown with one species of grass, and a similar plot be sown with several distinct genera of grasses, a greater number of plants and a greater weight of dry herbage can thus be raised.” If we were to simply throw a greater diversity of things into our little plot of land, I suppose I am not sure if “a greater weight of dry herbage” is exactly the result I want. If we took Celia Thaxter’s garden and pressed all the different species of flowers in an herbarium, she wouldn’t have that certain heft of light that we know Dickinson by. But then, it is possible that neither would Dickinson. And what we are on the lookout for are these moments when a spark catches and burns, dangerously, vertiginously with wild growth.

where,” its bright orange petals warning of fire season in California, is in her New England garden similarly untamable. Along with “the million more beside,” Thaxter’s flowers are growing as wildly as the weeds she wants to keep away.

 Dear Jules, I often wonder how many times Hawthorne read Melville’s letters (that we have read so recursively for over a century). Did he jam them into a drawer and draw back his hand from the shock? Or did he sit around in the evening by the fire, Sophia painting, or reading, turning their pages over one another, savoring. I think of all genres, the epistle’s dishonesties are the most upsetting. It’s all very well for an outsider, a hun dred years in the distance, but how terrible for the persons caught in these convoluted discretions. Some letters feel like pins in pretty dresses, mocked up for an unrealized body; whether the pins are there for pricking or for keeping the folded cambric in place, what does the body know? Generally, when I am the body I don’t read well, wincing and dancing too much to keep still. This restlessness feels appropriate to poppies. It is spring now, and I have been amiss and inattentive. It has taken me months to respond.

In her first letter to Abiah Root, the late girlhood friend toward whom Dickinson would compose 22 letters between 1845 and 1854, Dickinson brags: “My plants look beautifully. Old King Frost has not had the pleasure of snatching any of them in his cold embrace as yet, and I hope will not.” Later in the letter she writes: “We’ll finish an education sometime, won’t we?” February 23, 1845. What plants was Dickinson preserving from the frost? What were these girls learning? I have an image of you from our first year in school together. Standing among the fruit at the Berkeley Bowl, taking a piece and smelling it, touching it, how deliberately you Karon Davis, George Bush doesn’t care about black people...and neither does Trump (Detail), 2018, Plaster strips, chicken wire, steel armature, glass eyes, wood, distressed wallpaper, plywood, and roof shingles, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles.

JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN OSBORNE

The green of California’s winter hills is drying away into barren gold again. And orange transfusions have returned to the slopes.

85 with the most conventional flourishes. “Charming,” “desirable,” “beautiful,” “dear,” “di vine,” “heavenly,” “gorgeous” — these words add nothing even as they lengthen out the sentence. To Thaxter’s credit, her selection reflects an eye toward an impression ist color palette and her enthusiasm propels the circulation of botanical knowledge, botanical pressings, and seeds among lady correspondents. This American bourgeois continuation of what Theresa Kelley calls “the aesthetic pleasure and invitation to figure that move just beneath the surface of global botanizing as a commercial and imperial venture” retains its ulterior motives. Her interest in the California poppy is both ec centric and conventional by the time of the 1890s, when the poppy had become that embroidery pattern in the Harper’s Bazaar. Her garden list betrays the decorous quality of extraneous and typical pleasantries, ornamental exclamations, and breathy but wellpaced Flowerssighs.are“dear old friends” that may be marked up on catalogs and bought, econom ical, profuse, and portable. Pick them by the dozen; throw them out by the dozen. With these things we adorn our lives. On occasion I have felt so, measuring friendship by flowers, sorely used and accessorized.

The real flowers that accompany Abiah as she writes — or so Dickinson imagines — are replaced by imaginary ones. And Abiah “cannot imagine” Dickinson’s delight in the letter that arrived from this friend. “I can imagine just how you look now,” Dickinson writes. These declarations of a powerful imagination are offered as terms of endear ment, but they also draw a wedge between this budding poetess and her flowery friend.

By 1850, Dickinson’s herbarium is finished. Her garden is still in good health. But her mother is ailing and her formal education is finished and her wilderness requires words to wound it and keep it sufficiently imaginatively stoked.

los angeles review of books moved through the aisles, and how I had to swallow half of every step in order to keep pace. I don’t remember the fruit. Your fingers and face compose much of the frame. We had plans for dinner. And afterward we sat at that black table in the rough center of my mostly empty studio apartment and talked. Deliberately, too, I imagine. The details are occluded, but I remember the rhythm of our exchanges because they unfurled dif ferently from my regular patterns and surges. I bluster, Jules, when you linger. I shatter Sèvres (recalling another of Dickinson’s poems, about sharing a life). And perhaps, for that reason, a tea tray has begun to seem like a stay against chaos, much as Robert Frost thought a poem was. An evidently elaborate notion. A sentence pulled from Woolf. When I read Rhoda or Lily Briscoe I remember you. But perhaps friends should not remember one another, or find one another in works of art. “Dear Remembered,” Dickinson addresses Abiah in May 1850 after their intimacy has slowed. Perhaps friends should not write letters at all. At times, Dickinson speaks of her flowers as friends, and of her friends as flowers. Writing to Abiah, among other things, of the death of her friend Sophia Holland, Dickinson explains: “She was too lovely for earth & she was transplanted from earth to heaven.” Sophia’s death is figured in flower terms, death as the gardener and loveliness the boon. Of this friendship, before one half of it roots fast in heavenly soil, Dickinson writes: “I have never lost but one friend near my age & with whom my thoughts & her own were the same.” Sophia was one flower and Abiah, now, another. “It was before you came to Amherst,” Dickinson reassures her young friend, Root. May their thoughts be ever the same and the gardener and frost aloof. Flowers are friends Dickinson can directly tend, misting and tucking them, bearing away their yellow leaves, coaxing perfumes. Frequently, she tells Abiah of the health of her charges and asks after the being and well-being of Abiah’s own flower friends. In August 1845, Dickinson reports with pride: “My House plants look very finely now.” A month later, “Have you any flowers now?” And, “I have had a beautiful flower-garden this summer; but they are nearly gone now.”

In Dickinson’s letter to Abiah, two thirds of the way into their correspondence and after a major turning point in which Dickinson seems sure of the end of the friendship, she asks for remembrance, and for flowers: “Remember, and care for me sometimes, and scatter a fragrant flower in this wilderness life of mine by writing me, and by not forgetting.” Forget-me-not was one of the flowers Dickinson earlier offered to send her friend: tiny blue things with black and orange eyes. “Have you got any Forget me not in your garden this summer,” she inquired five years earlier. “I am going to send you as a present in my letter next time. I am pressing some for all the girls and it is not dry yet.”

JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN OSBORNE

Melville performs in his letters to Hawthorne. Dickinson performs in her letters, too, teasing and fierce by turns. These are flashy documents. They stand on the edge of liter ary history and glitter and blink. But Dickinson’s letters to Abiah are less ornamental; she is still working out the role of imagination when it comes to friends. In August 1845, she writes, I have now sit down to write you a long, long letter. My writing apparatus is upon a stand before me, and all things are ready. I have no flowers before me as you had to inspire you. But then you know I can imagine myself inspired by them and perhaps that will do as well. You cannot imagine how delighted I was to receive your letter.

This efflorescent context is the foundation of their friendship, at least so far as Dickinson is concerned. In an early letter, from January 1846, she writes, “I can hardly wait for spring to come, for I so long to see you,” as if the very shift in season would usher along her friend, pulling crocuses from the bulb along with Abiah. In her penultimate letter in May 1852, Dickinson declares a long association: Oh, Abiah, you and the early flower are forever linked to me; as soon as the first green grass comes, up from a chink in the stones peeps the little flower, precious “leontodon,” and my heart fills toward you with a warm and childlike fullness! Nor do I laugh now; far from it, I rather bless the flower which sweetly, slyly too, makes me come nearer you. Dickinson and Abiah had not met for years; their correspondence has had room for entire years of quiet and apartness. Dickinson approaches her friend through the little leontodon along the garden walk. She does not leave her father’s house. The flowers are all the more real and personable to her.

In November 1851, Melville asks his friend, his “fellow human,” “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life?” In May 1850, Dickinson asks, “Where are you now Abiah, where are your thoughts, and aspirings, where are your young affections?” Melville says he and his friend have become tangled: “And when I put it to my lips,” he writes, “lo, they are yours and not mine.” It is the only letter written to Hawthorne that Melville signs, simply, Herman. One of the last.

86 87

The recurrence of now, now, now, echoes through the distance of epistles. When is the now that flowers were, and that letters left behind? In September of the next year, she asks Abiah, “Have you any flowers in Norwich?” And crows, “My garden looked finely when I left home.”

Dickinson recounts a dream in which she searches for her friend in a crowd. “Slowly, very slowly,” she writes, “I came to the conclusion that you had forgotten me, & I tried hard to forget you, but your image still haunts me, and tantalizes me with fond recol lections.” Their friendship has begun to turn on memory rather than imagination, and so the danger of being forgotten, or the necessity of forgetting, a willful erasure that the positive nature of imagination endlessly fills in, arrives: “if you don’t want to be my friend any longer,” Dickinson writes, “say so, & I’ll try once more to blot you from my memory.” The now, now, now of first letters resolves into a then.

What are we to make of this shift in tone? Dickinson writes to Abiah six more times across the course of four more years. References to rupture, demands for remembrance subside. After Abiah’s marriage, they write no more. Is Dickinson fighting heartbreak with splendor? The fact of being forgotten by an amplification of indirection? She signs this letter: “Your very sincere, and wicked friend.”

 Dear Gillian, A few months ago, my copy of Thoreau’s Journal volume one was recalled to the library, so I began instead with volume two, or the “Long Book [Fall 1842] - March 1846,” with the river trip with his brother and the sighting of a rare hibiscus of which they send news to a friend: “[B]y the monday at least while we shall be floating over the bosom of the Merrimack the flower’s friend will be reaching to pluck the blossom on the water of the Concord.” The friend is not Thoreau’s and his brother’s friend, but the flower’s friend; we know our friends well enough to know their truer affinities.

I have never been so vain as to imagine any friend to remember me before their own trou bles and their own loves; I refuse birthday celebrations because they too strongly tempt disappointment if no one comes and prefer the surer embrace of the one person twined fast to me as the grasses that we wound and braided into bracelets by the edges of the Hetch Hetchy. If Thoreau never married, it was because he had already given himself over to his brother and to his passing. We are, today, at my sister-in-law’s wedding. I am like one of those plants that loves the sun closing and opening its petals to the light. I go to bed early and rise early. The summer makes me tired. Summer is the season of weddings.

How can we deny that our lives are drawn in tighter and tighter orbits like a zoe trope flashing its few images that suffice to create motion, and that is all we need. Our thoughts turn round and round and every time we turn it is to those same loves over and over, the moon, the sea, the pine, the dog, and my love, my love, my love.

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JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN OSBORNE

I am your friend because you are the flower’s friend and not mine. In the glow your eyes cast upon me when I came to your apartment on Alcatraz Ave — you introduced

I miss you very much indeed, think of you at night when the world’s nodding, ‘nidnid nodding — think of you in the daytime when the cares of the world, and it’s toils, and it’s continual vexations choke up the love for friends in some of our hearts; remember your warnings sometimes — try to do as you told me sometimes — and sometimes conclude it’s no use to try; then my heart says it is, and new trial is followed by disappointment again. I wondered when you had gone why we didn’t talk more […] You astounded me in the outset — per plexed me in the continuance — and wound up in a grand snarl — I shall be all my pilgrimage unravelling.

In the next letter to Abiah — two years later! — Dickinson writes while under the in fluence of a fever. The document is wild and fictionally drenched. She talks of taking a stroll with “a little creature” who rides and wearies her, an illness come all the way from Switzerland. But the little monster, unlike Abiah, is demonstrative; it kisses her “im moderately, and express[es] so much love, it completely bewildered me.” It lives with her and in the town. The letter is plumped with literary reference — Macbeth, Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” and Dickens’s Christmas book of 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Its author flexes: not so much a friend here, but a voice that can deflect far beyond the bounds of bodies or actual loves. “Now my dear friend,” she writes, let me tell you that these last thoughts are fictions — vain imaginations to lead astray foolish young women. They are flowers of speech, they both make and tell deliberate falsehoods; avoid them as the snake, and turn aside as from the Bottle snake, and I don’t think you will be harmed. Neither Dickinson’s warnings nor her affections seem fully sincere. Perhaps it is the fever talking, or perhaps exaggeration itself has grown a kind of seductive sheen: Wont you read some work upon snakes — I have a real anxiety for you! I love those little green ones that slide around by your shoes in the grass — and make it rustle with their elbows — they are rather my favorites on the whole, but I would’nt influence you for the world! There is an air of misanthropy about the striped snake that will commend itself at once to your taste […] Something besides severe colds, and serpents, and we will try to find that something. It cant be a garden, can it, or a strawberry bed, which rather belongs to a gar den — nor it cant be a school-house, nor an Attorney at Law. Oh dear I don’t know what it is! Love for the absent don’t sound like it, but try it, and see how it goes.

In these effusive early letters, Dickinson’s assertions of her imaginary powers feel play ful, like winking sleights of hand. But by October 1848 something has damaged this friendly ease. “My own Abiah,” this October letter begins before its author sets to fret ting: “For so I will still call you, though while I do it, even now I tremble at my strange audacity, and almost wish I had been a little more humble not quite so presuming.”

OSBORNE

JULIANA CHOW & GILLIAN

Marriage and a river, two Thoreau boys rafting, provisions of melons and potatoes, and hibiscus woven into the dwarf willows with the grapevines. We are friends because our love is reserved for another, because the words out of our mouths are eaten up by the air, not for our ears, but for our dreams in which we write letters and send messages by way of a farmer in the adjacent meadow to someone who will care more — into our own caring — a self-circular message. Or I am the weaker planet drawn into the ellipse of your thoughts; the adoration of planets and green things growing. Still we grow. What is a California poppy doing in New England? Growing, growing. I write this to you, the 21st of June in the year two thousand and fourteen, from Brattle boro, Vermont, in a little attic room with a stained glass window of a lotus and cattails on water. It is past midnight, they are playing lawn games in the dark and eating pizza, talking about how the ceremony went. We are surrounded by green hills of trees and shadows, and a sky mottled with silvery clouds — not visible now, but I see it there as I saw it this afternoon, the grass brightening and darkening with movement of the clouds over the sun, and in the distance a red barn in a clearing. Brightness shifting into shadows, shifting into light, into dark, into light, into dark, into night.

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 Dear Jules, The truth is I have never known how to read or respond to your letters. With other friends, I’ve walked in circles, up and down hills, in city streets, or at a kitchen table, and our language fell on air and disappeared. With you, there was a postcard once, or

several. An old photograph of two girls with the corner torn. And you are right that this is not a letter. We went on walks, bent over stoves, but didn’t say what we were thinking. Perhaps none of the earlier ones — the envelope filled with poppy seeds — were ap propriately epistolary either. Of what is our friendship composed? Words, words, words That we stand on opposite banks of some river and see the same glinting things drifting past. A feeling of and, and a feeling of but, of if, of blue, of William James. That we have loved those languages under similar conditions, and have offered them, once upon a time, to one another. A sentence, an image, a word. Someone else’s letter written for someone else. I miss those easy exchanges that inaugurated this era of our education. But not the half empty apartments. Turning to a book as to a friend. If it’s only in written exchanges, or only through the writing of others, that we constel late our affection — but I do not think, finally, that it is only that — then we are both typical letter writers and miscreants of the genre. Then we demand to be read but not to be heard.

los angeles review of books me to fennel in salad — and you had those two paintings, the large black and marigold vase with flowers and the disheveled puppet with Japanese characters scrolling down in columns upside down, that you still have now — that glow was light rubbed off from Whitman or Dickinson. And when you told me that you were reading Villette or Shirley it was because you were reading what Dickinson had read, absorbing the gold she had imbibed as fresh as seeds placed in water. You never told me why you loved the boy you brought to my apartment seven blocks down from yours, I forget what I made, but you made brussels sprouts with nuts or seeds sprinkled on top, he had steely eyes and had bought you a gallon jar of capers or some extravagant volume that left you wordless. After he died, you told me about dreams of him moving rocks by a river, a methodical displacement, one after the other, that left you chilled cold waking into the night alone. It was not for me that you spoke of dreams, of poems, or of poppies. You felt instead your own displacement, like the river rocks shifting suddenly, the filling in of black water into the absented space. An upstate New York, somewhat Quaker girl-poet who went to Paris, Manhattan, and Japan, and then moved to California. What was she thinking about? He found her writing a poem when he climbed up the wall to her window. Where was he going?

THE

after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony

Emily Jacir, 6 June 1967 , 1998. Ink on tracing paper, 12 x 9 inches. Photo: Joerg Lohse © Emily Jacir, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

What is a house if not a home a horror a whore could leap out any time from a virgin’s skin so they said before burning the hand over her mouth knock knock who’s there what is a door if not a way out only a way in oh you can never leave the way you aftercamewe’re finished the overhandyour mouth what is an attic what a basement and knock knock the family room the trophies the TV the hearth in the ’80s there are certain options the cable box knock knock SECOND FRONT DOOR MAUREEN N. MCLANE

94 95 los angeles review of books MAUREEN N. MCLANE

there’s a tightness in my unraped chest a drunken flex in his anus the best of the best what is between us between men & boys and girls pejorocracy rising polis oikos eros eris why don’t you look at me look look at me at look at this second front door I do not choke down these words the schoolchildren draw a modal house and never oh never in the house that jack built the schematic house with one or two floors some windows, a roof, a door is there oh is there a second front door no no never before had anyone heard of a second front door don’t you see it now see it now built in the mind the second front door who’s there no second door and a hand over her mouth no second door & no clear way out from the bedroom on the second floor and a hand over her mouth the bathing suit a single piece the birthday suit a single piece a butcher could scan for places to joint knock knock who’s there a terrible thing at the edge of a laughing eye even you see it you there in the room you there looking away can we work this out at the gym can we score and score again and always win can we work this out through the law can we unveil a truth in the agora and when the architect says what what do you want & oh you want an irrational thing no design no plan includes it never knockbeforeknock who’s there at the second front door

I also wrote this so that they wouldn’t repeat my mistakes, the mistakes that I made [The family mythology around my grandmother was that she was not a person who admitted mistakes.] But it looks like I have not succeeded at this. You see, I wasn’t able to type my notes for a long time, because I did not have a typewriter, and they were not satisfied with my handwritten notes, and they did not find the time to read them. [I can picture my grandmother at her dining room table, sitting in the shadows of the aloe plants, her jaunty gray bouffant bent over the notes she was making on the backs of envelopes with a craggy pencil she’d sharpened with a knife.]

More than four years passed, when Victor [My dad] finally gave us a computer that I could type on in Russian. During this time, my granddaughter grew from a 7th grader to an 11th grader, and my grandson was born, and the cares in the family increased. I began to study the computer, but then I didn’t quite type it right and again the process was prolonged. To be perfectly honest, I doubted that they wanted or needed any of this. Maybe only I needed this. [The guilt is laid on thick here, but it’s deserved. Why had I waited so long to read this? Why had I waited until after she was dead? I’m not asking myself this rhetorically, but genuinely. My grandmother had been presenting herself, her story, to me and I had been avoiding it. Why? It was not an absence of curiosity. Maybe I had assumed that whataver knowledge I gained, would come with an obligation. An obligation to take on

The evening after my grandmother’s funeral, on February 14, 2018, I sat down with these memoirs, which she’d typed and given me 18 years earlier, and began to read them for the first time. WhenPrologue:]Istarted writing these notes, I wanted for my son and his daughter [Me] to know a little about our ancestors, about our life, and the Jewish traditions that we observed in our home in Poland where I grew up and lived until I was 16 years old.

MEMOIR, GRANDMOTHER’SNOTESANNOTATED:ONMYSTORY

97 [11-11-99

KATYA APEKINA Khaya Shifrina, the author’s grandmother, pictured here in 1947.

As an adult, when I lived in Alexandrov, slowly, I learned to skate a bit at the ice rink, which we prepared and filled next to the club by the factory. Together with the director of the factory, Comrade Boris Rafailovich Stronsky, we mastered this rink. He, howev er, came to skate after our departure, at around 11 o’clock at night. [A Soviet bureaucrat, bundled and in a fur cap, skating alone at night — what an image.] I learned to skate with great difficulty. My legs twisted under me. I fell many times, but did not give up. I think what added to my difficulty is that I started learning late in life, and was tired after work and we were fed so badly. But I never learned how to play the piano, I must not have tried very hard, and it’s a pity, as it would have come in handy. At home we even had a grand piano. I remember that I wanted to learn how to play it, but I was tone deaf, as one teacher said when my father had invited him to our house. At the time, it had felt like a very big flaw in myself, and I tried not to come near the instrument. We were not so rich as to hire an instructor when a child did not have abil ities or any real interest. Later, when Victor was learning how to play and we bought a piano, I also tried to learn to play, but I had no time, and I couldn’t do it quickly [My mom said that my grandmother would grow furious with my dad over his bad playing and would call him names, including “fascist.” It makes sense that our frustrations with others are reflections of our frustrations with ourselves.]

98 99 los angeles review of books her worldview? Or to carry on an ancestral burden? It’s abstract, and yet something I can feel, weighted in my body, as I read my grandmother’s story.]

But I hope that one day they will read my notes and learn how their mom and Grandma Khaya lived in her time, what she lived through and how life is complicated, and some things you cannot prepare for. The most important thing is to be a mensch, work hard and hope that you can overcome anything, and to always remember your loved ones. And so, my maiden name is Pisetskaya. My father is Rubin Isaakovich Pisetsky. We lived in Vawkavysk. His father was Itzhak, his mother was Lea. I don’t know their pat ronymics as we lived in Poland where they did not use patronymics the way they do in Russia. I don’t believe my father’s parents were from Vawkavysk as I don’t remember anyone from his family coming to visit. I don’t even know if they had close relatives, since at grandmother Lea’s funeral nobody came. [Not many people came to my grand mother’s funeral either. There’s a Jewish tradition that you need 10 Jewish men to serve as pallbearers. I remember sitting in the car outside the funeral home with my dad, both of us calling and texting everyone we knew to find enough men to come out on a weekday and per form this mitzvah — they didn’t have to be practicing or religious, they could be atheists, but they needed to be Jewish along their mother’s blood line. Eventually, the funeral home loaned us a Jewish man, and we made the count.] I was a little girl then, though I remember the day of her death well. It was in the winter on a Friday. It was a sunny day and on the eve of her death she wanted us to bury her before noon so that we could prepare everything for Saturday. This is what we did. She was like a martyr. [Great-Great-Grandma Lea did not want her death to interfere with the family’s Shabbat preparations. Maybe she thought the routines of religious life would bring everyone comfort? This desire not to be a burden is so foreign to me that at first it struck me as passive aggressive.]

My dad was a tall, attractive man with gray eyes. He was fairly fit. He was a watch maker, like his older brother. Until 1935, we had a store selling gramophones, watches, spoons, forks, rings and other jewelry. He would repair watches and do nickel-plating. [My dad said my grandmother told him that she liked to tinker with watches too, but that she always found herself at the end, with extra parts. This detail does not jive at all with my childhood vision of her as someone competent and precise, who surely would never have loose parts! Or my mother’s version of her, which would be the kind of person who would not admit this, who would shove the loose parts in and pretend the clock worked fine.] But soon we had to close the store, because there was a lot of competition.

As a child, I had no opportunity to learn to skate because of money and time, same goes for playing the piano. Sometimes on Saturdays, I went to see how other students skated in a private skating rink. In our school, the day off was on Saturday, and Jews are not al lowed to skate on that day. On weekdays, it was too far and too late to go to the skating rink after school. In all likelihood, I did not have much desire to learn to skate. [I don’t know that I entirely believe this. It’s so easy to picture her on the edge of the rink, hands deep in her pockets, full of longing, swaying as the other kids practice their jumps.]

My father dreamed of leaving Poland. He wrote letters to the Queen of England, and to the President of the United States, Roosevelt, asking for permission to enter, but of course he did not get permission. In the years 1935-36, my father went to Palestine, probably as a tourist. He hoped that he would settle there and then send for the family. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to bring us back with him and he was forced to return after a year or year and a half. [So, for a year and a half, with probably very limited commu nication, they lived without him. When I was little, I too had to live for a while without my father. When I immigrated to the United States, I came with my mother and her parents, and my father had not been able to come with us. My grandmother, the one writing these memoirs, needed to grant him permission so he could leave the Soviet Union and she’d refused to do so. My earliest memory is asking my mother, when I saw a bearded man on the street, if it was my father. It was not.] He came back by ship. I do not remember exactly what he told us about his travels, but I know that everyone was worried, because at that time such a trip was quite dangerous. There was no one to help him, because we were all too little, and so he returned home and again began to plan something, but soon the war started. 

 KATYA APEKINA

]

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We were worried about my father, who went to the clock workshop in the morning and during the day we didn’t know what was happening to him since we didn’t have a phone. Miraculously, he managed to make it back home that evening.

Once, at Aunt Ethel’s house, I found a copy of a book on learning Esperanto. [The language was created by a Polish ophthalmologist in the hopes that a universal second lan guage would foster peace and international understanding.] Aunt Ethel told me that the book belonged to my Mom, that before getting married, when she lived in Grodno, she had studied Esperanto. I, of course, became interested in the language and began studying its basics. I remember that it had a lot of Latin words, simple grammar, but alas, I didn’t have an opportunity to study Esperanto as I left for home during the vacation and the war started September 1, 1939, when Germany attacked Poland and the Soviet Union captured Western Belarus, and free travel was forbidden in that part. Everything changed, and I didn’t get to Grodno again, and the book disappeared along with all of my family and loved ones and I had other things to worry about. [The song my grandmother wrote is all the more jarring because it ends up being prophetic — the days of her childhood really are gone so abruptly.] 

It was necessary to learn Russian, which became the state language. I found Russian books in our attic, and started learning it in September. My mother showed me the Russian alphabet, and I read aloud to her. She corrected my pronunciation and thus I quickly learned to read. I remember that I read for such a long time that a white foam would form in my mouth. [What a writerly detail! Rabid with Russian.] 

Once the war started on September 1, 1939, classes in schools stopped. On September 17, the Soviet Union declared war on Poland under the guise of pro tecting the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples. The Polish troops left the city, but some stayed behind. For two days the city was lawless, and it was scary to go out into the streets. Polish soldiers turned against the Jews, pranced around the city on horses, shot and killed a 14-year-old boy. One evening they broke into a Jewish house on Tatarskaya Street, the owner was killed and his wife was wounded. In the square where the syna gogues were, shots were fired and people were threatened.

The stores had a limited choice of products, although different types of sausages, eggs, butter, sugar, several types of bread products, candy, fish, etc. were exhibited in the shop

In 1936, I came to visit my Aunt Ethel for the summer in Grodno. She introduced me to a girl who lived across from us. She was about my age, maybe a year or two older. She taught me some songs that her brothers apparently sang, but it wasn’t very interesting and it was rather sad for me. [I wonder if the implication here is that there was something sexual or “adult” in the song that was taught to her, something improper that made her feel this way. My grandmother was very conservative about sex.] I wrote a poem in Hebrew expressing how I felt: The good days have gone, have already passed, Only their quiet shadows remain The days of childhood are gone, those days of freedom and joy, Now the days are vague and sad It seems, these are the days of adolescence, of growing up. I’ve remembered this song for the rest of my life, even the melody that I picked out on the piano for it. [This moody song with its angst about growing up is so strange coming from my cheerful and pragmatic grandmother. It sounds like something I would have written. Nostalgia was an early emotion for me that I took to absurd levels — me at five grieving the loss of myself at four. Only now does it occur to me that this was probably related to immigrating at the age of three, severing with everything I had known right around the time that I was becoming a conscious person.

After leaving school, I became a student of the Minsk Medical Institute, where I need ed to go to fulfill my Mother’s dream of becoming a doctor. [This obligation to the dreams of one’s parents — I wonder if it felt like a burden to her. Her mother had not been able to become a doctor and ultimately my grandmother had not either, and then my father, when it came time to apply to medical school, was also thwarted because he was Jewish.] When I arrived in Minsk I was lodged in a barrack-style dorm with other first years on Belomorskaya Street. In our room there were 12-14 girls from different cities. For me, a new independent life began. It was unfamiliar and unknown and took getting used to. It was very difficult to adjust to the food. At home, I was used to kosher meals, fruits and vegetables. There was none of this here. I tried to go to the canteen at the factory but I couldn’t touch the food. Then I found a healthy cafeteria on the 3rd floor, where I could at least take milk soup, with fish or chicken. It wasn’t kosher, but I had to eat. As my grandfather said, “science demands sacrifices.” It was the Soviet Union. [I find it hard to believe that her grandfather said this — it sounds like such a Soviet aphorism.]

KATYA APEKINA

After September 19, 1939, our life completely changed. New Russian people came in, they made their own rules, looted our stores. The soldiers harassed the kids, forced them to sell their wristwatches for a pittance [In the Soviet Union, wristwatches were hard to come by so they took them from the kids]. Very soon there were long lines at the stores, sugar soon disappeared, all the good candies were gone, instead they were replaced by some sort of round suckers (disgusting).

I had to pass the last exam on June 24 and therefore on June 22 we went to the Chelyuskintsev Park, because the weather was beautiful and the park was not far from the dorm. The girls and I settled away from the center, far from people, where we could study for the upcoming exam without distraction. However, I was feeling restless. There were planes circling in the sky and I felt like they had something to do with the up coming war, although the girls told me that in the summer it was always like that, that it was just flight training. I decided to come closer to the center to find out what was happening. As I approached the park entrance, it was about 11 o’clock, when we heard the voice of Molotov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, saying that today the Germans attacked the Soviet Union on June 22 at 4 a.m., bombed our cities, Kiev, etc.

The last time I was at my parents’ home was from April 11 to April 15, 1941, when they invited me to come home via telegram, which was the only way the school would issue a pass and release me from the institute. By then, you needed permission papers to go from Western Belarussia to Minsk. As usual, my parents were very happy about my arrival. They gave me a lot of delicious Passover dishes and the address of our distant relatives from Minsk that I’d had trouble finding before. The international situation was tense at that time and they were very worried, since they lived 40 km from the border with Poland, which the Germans occupied in 1939. My parents warned me not to return home if the war with Germany began that summer. They gave me the address of my mother’s uncle from Moscow and said that they would try to come to me in Minsk. Thus, they said goodbye to me with a heavy soul. They had probably summoned me for Passover to see me and give me my uncle’s address. Being young, I wasn’t able to assess the situation and believe that something very scary could Ihappen.returned to Minsk and continued to study without giving much thought to what my relatives had said, as the mood in Minsk was completely different. Only starting June 18, 1941, did we begin to get seriously worried when our classmate Masha received a call from her mother in Brest. Lucy Beguze and I went with Masha into the city to the telephone station. Masha learned from her mother that her father, who was the director of a printing house in Brest, was taken away and that there was talk in the city about war with the Germans. When we returned to the dorm, we discussed this issue with the guys from Baranavichy. They somehow reassured us, referring to the fact that before the harvest there can be no war, and that Masha was prone to exaggerated panic. Of course, I didn’t want to believe that “the air smells like a thunderstorm” [This is a line, my father tells me, from a popular song about the war.] and that the war was coming.

KATYA APEKINA

102 103 los angeles review of books windows. [I have never gone hungry. This is the exacting list of a person who has been hun gry.] I was so naïve to think that the store carried all the things that were on display since that is what the stores did back in Poland. My friend Tsilya from Minsk explained to me that the food in the windows — those were just props made of clay, sand and cardboard, and the stores did not actually carry them. I soon figured this out for myself when I went in to buy something. By the way, even after the war, what was displayed in the Moscow shop windows was not what was actually in the stores. [American su permarkets completely blew my grandparents away. The oranges! The toilet paper! The cereals! After they immigrated to the United States, nine years after I did, they’d structure their days around going to sales at different supermarkets.]

While I was away from the dorm that morning, my acquaintance from Vawkavysk — Eli Ruchik, had come looking for me. Since I wasn’t there, he promised to come back. I didn’t want to go anywhere, because I didn’t want to miss him again. I thought he’d come from Vawkavysk and had a message from my parents. But he didn’t come back.

Of course, we immediately became scared. Studying no longer seemed important. We went back to the other girls, told them and quickly gathered our things and went back to the dorm. Everyone there already knew and was worried, but the ones who were worried most were other “Westerners” like me, whose relatives lived close to the border.

By that evening, Sunday June 22, there was a command issued to the dormitory, for all students to gather on Monday June 23rd, 1941 at 9 a.m. at the Institute. Since the tram lines near Komarovka were destroyed and the trams were not running, we left for the institute on Monday, June 23, at 7 a.m. to arrive by 9 a.m. Already in the morning, German planes were bombing the city, so we couldn’t go directly through the center of town, but had to take an alternate route [I can imagine her, shorter than the rest of her classmates, struggling to catch up, all of them walking quickly with their heads down, the smell of smoke and dust in the air.] By 9 o’clock we got to the institute. We had time to gather in the Assembly Hall of the Faculty of Chemistry, where they told us that we could be drafted into military service, and that that we couldn’t leave without getting permission. As they were telling us this, the building suddenly trembled, and the windows blew out. We were forced to go down to the basement room. Soon we learned that the bombs had hit the Physics building and the train station, located near the campus neighborhood. The guys were sent to the station to unload the trains with the wounded, and we girls were told to sit in the basement. Thus, began the continuous bombing of the city, main ly its center. Only at about 3 o’clock, when there was a break in the bombing, did they let us go back to the dormitory and wait until they issued the next order.

[The confusion, the misses, feeling frozen in place. I want so desperately for her to hear what the message had been, if there had even been a message.]

KATYA APEKINA

I thought that if a little Russian boy came to the house it would be safer. The boy went to the house, but very quickly returned. He said that the people in the house had turned him away saying: “Do you want all of us to get killed?”

We walked back as a group using a more direct route. The trams were not running, and we were surrounded by evidence of the bombing, but we didn’t linger — we hurried back to the dorm. Soon another round of bombing began, but we were already approaching the dormi tory. When we got to the dorm, we decided that evening to dig a ditch in the yard to hide in during the bombing. We waited for further orders from the school adminis Ontration.June 24-25, the bombing of the city continued, but there was no news from the school. I was waiting for someone from my family to contact me, so I didn’t go any where with the groups that disappeared into the forest. There were fewer and fewer of us left, and when we were bombed we mostly hid in the ditch. [In these situations, how do you know when to stay and when to go? It was luck that saved her, but also I believe there was a survival instinct. I think this survival instinct is what saved her later in Soviet Russia, but in a Soviet context it seemed to become more morally complicated.]

Suddenly, much to our good luck, a cargo military vehicle stopped nearby, and I asked the soldier for a ride. The soldier put us in the back, passed us a piece of bread and the car rushed on. After some time, the car stopped, and we were dropped off. The soldier said: “We are not going further, why did you not ask where we were taking you? And weren’t you afraid to sit with us?” I told him that when I saw he was in the Red Army I was no longer scared. [I wonder if this is how she learned to present the story in the Soviet Union or if this this truly how she felt at the time.] The soldier showed us how to get to the train station. The station was crowded. I heard somebody call my name. It turned out to be my friend Tsilya Leybman with her mother and younger brother. They left Minsk on the first day of the war and now they were heading back. I explained to them that Minsk was on fire and that the Germans were approaching. Then they decided to go to Mogilev. And the boy I’d been travelling with decided he wanted to go to his parents’ house in Bobruisk. We went between the trains, asking the workers where they were headed. We learned that one of the trains was going to Bobruisk and the boy decided to go on that freight car, so we said goodbye and parted. My friend and I were looking for a train that was headed to Mogilyov or Gomel. My friend’s mom invited me to go with them to Mogilyov. I do not know why, but I decided to go to Gomel and from there to Moscow to be with my relatives [Did this save her? I can’t imagine making this decision. I wonder if the choice felt arbitrary at the time, or if she felt guided toward it in some way.] There was a feeling of unrest at the station, as we boarded a freight train headed towards Gomel. We were bombed several times on the way. The train would stop, and we’d all have to get out of the cars and lie down on the ground, then climb back in and keep going. It was not easy and it was very scary. [I can picture them all, lying in the dust in their summer dresses, getting on and off the freight trains, shaking.]

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On the way, I said goodbye to my friend, her mother and brother. I did not know then that it would be forever. In Gomel, at the station I found a train to Moscow. I lay down on a top shelf and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

On July 3, our train arrived, but instead of Moscow it arrived at the station Mikhailovka, Stalingrad region. [It’s about 1,000 km south.] Here we were greeted as evacuees, fed, taken to a bathhouse and then carted off to the collective farm.

We left and started walking, but since the planes were flying very low and dropping bombs, I suggested that we hide in a bush by the side of the road and wait for evening to come, and then go, but he didn’t want to do this. We started walking in the ditch along the road and when airplanes flew by, we lay down on the ground.

On June 24, we heard from students we knew from the Polytechnic Institute, which was not far from our dorm, that they were talking about evacuation, but we hadn’t heard anything about it. At 11-12 o’clock on the night of June 26th, a 5th-year student from our institute came to our dorm. He might have been an acquaintance of one of the students. He quickly assembled us and said that the Germans were coming to the city and he would lead us out. There were 10-12 students. We packed very quickly, since we didn’t bring anything with us. I remember that I only had candies and cookies, which I brought along on the Ourroad.friend led us into the city center. We saw that the city was on fire, and people walk ing towards us shouted: “Don’t go there, everything is on fire.” But we were led by the student to the river, which we had to cross. Me and the shorter people were carried on other people’s shoulders. [She couldn’t swim then. She learned as an adult.] Unfortunately, I don’t know the first or last name of our student who saved us, I only knew that his girlfriend lived in the room next door to mine. So he led us through the army territory, where they checked our documents. They led us out through the gates to the Mogilev highway and told us to go quickly and keep going without stopping. We did that. We walked all night, and in the morning, we went into the forest to sleep. In this group with me was my friend Lucy Beguze, Aaron Weil, Sarah Khaikin, and other female students. Exhausted from walking, I immediately fell asleep. When I woke up, I saw only a boy, and nobody else. The boy was the younger brother of a student from Bobruisk, who came to visit his sister in Minsk. I woke him up, explained what had happened, and asked him to go to the house, which was visible not far away and find out if his sister and other students were there.

After great difficulties, but thanks to the many good people I met on my way, I man aged to get to Bashkortostan, to my aunt, who was only 28 years old. I remember and tell my loved ones about everyone who helped me along the way. Yes, I must say that back then there were other people, better than now, they empa thized with our situation and tried to help. I’ve always remembered this and this is how I taught my son and loved ones to be. [This way of thinking about “the good old days” is completely baffling to me. I understand the gratitude she felt toward the people who helped her, and that extreme situations can bring out extreme kindness, but how could she say people were better in the context of the horrible atrocities that were happening? How can people have been better when Nazis were gassing her relatives, turning people’s skin into lampshades, perform ing science experiments on children? How do you live through this kind of evil and not come to the conclusion that people, overall, have gotten worse? It’s almost as though she thinks of the war as a natural disaster as opposed to a series of man-made decisions.]

I was put in a room at the collective farm with a young woman and her little boy. They immediately put us to work on a plantation near the river, where they grew various veg etables. In August and September, I worked in the field, harvesting grain. I worked all day there, they’d bring us lunch: dumplings, bread, tea. That’s how we lived. We worked and wrote letters, searching for our loved ones. This was the summer, it was hot, and you could go barefoot.

When I arrived at Bashkortostan and started working, I wrote to Buguruslan, looking for my relatives and friends. I didn’t find Lucy Beguze and knew nothing about her fate. Unfortunately, only in 1990, when I was visiting Israel did I get the phone numbers of some of my classmates from Minsk. I found out that all those years, Lucy Beguze had been living in Brest and had just died a year earlier. So I never found out the answer to what happened, why had they left us in the woods, why had a sister left her brother and ran away. Perhaps the situation forced them to flee, and we had slept peacefully through it, not suspecting a thing.

KATYA APEKINA

[For years my grandmother searched and searched for her family. She heard that they had died during the evacuation, in a bombing. Their names had not appeared on any lists though, and so she held out hope for a very long time that someone had survived. Stories like this were possible. She had a friend who found out her younger brother had survived and became the president of Israel. Could my grandmother’s older sister be alive somewhere, working as a seamstress? Or her younger brothers, who’d once run so wild their mother fed them dinner in their sleep, could they have grown up into adult men? Even though it was unlikely, I think she held on to that hope until the end.]

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I wrote to my relatives in Moscow and found out my mom’s younger sister had come to Bashkortostan and I received her address. I immediately wrote to her and learned that of all our relatives, she, by pure chance, had managed to leave the city, and now was happy to help me. Since she was going to be called up by the army [she was a nurse], she promised to leave her coat and dress for me with her friends from the hospital and they would help me. Since I had no warm clothes and it was already autumn, I decided to go to my aunt in Bashkortostan. On the collective farm, they gave me some flour and honey for my work there. Nobody objected to my departure. The leadership and the collective farmers saw that I had nothing, no warm clothes or shoes and I wouldn’t be able to withstand the winter. There was nothing for me there, especially since the Germans were advancing.

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This is how we thrive, when we spread across the field, the sky, when we’re cut down to root and stub, the unlikely weed we try to pull but then become, and everything is ours to take, surround with vines, and everything that’s left in the dirt or left behind is ours to lift, is us, new bodies we make of bone, shards, hurt, of loss, twine, trash, and so much grime the sheen of us runs gold, runs dry until we split our piecemeal skins, and what we’ve taken spills at our feet, spills before our eyes, and look how we lift ourselves from dirt — THE FIELD BETWEEN US NEVISON & MOLLY MCCULLY BROWN Dear S— In this elsewhere where we’ve landed, bloomed beyond our stitches — on this other shore, where we have disembarked our bodies like the boats they are, and watched the shine that rises from the drying wood and called it ours for the last time — in this place beyond the maps they made, the logbooks where we read that we should know ourselves as error, element, and remedy — here, will we watch the started-selves we spilled out on the earth take root, lift from the dirt, stretch out in their new skin, and test their bone and sudden boundedness? Will we watch them raise a hand to touch their brand-new mouths, their shoulder blades, their shins and spines and easy joints and know themselves as they have always been? Will we call it grief or something brighter just to watch them go?

Dear M—

SUSANNAH

Four hundred sixty-eight years is a long time when, at any given moment, someone like me could stumble across you and toss a cigarette butt from the window of a minivan. And just like that: history is a cloud of smoke, an ash-whitened field, a twenty-square-mile arc of unremarkable flatness in a space where some ancient breathing things once stood (the way I now stand) with their limbs outstretched, to feel the wind weaving through their fingers and branches.

Southern Pines, North Carolina I expected a God, a titan towering above the rest of the forest. Instead, you were only a tree. Not a sequoia or redwood with their legendary torsos, thick as the stone turrets of another continent’s medieval castles. Just a regular tree.

LETTER TO THE OLDEST LIVING LONGLEAF PINE IN NORTH AMERICA

Emily Jacir, 13 September 1993, 1998, Ink on vellum, 12 x 9 inches. Photo: Joerg Lohse © Emily Jacir, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

After outliving centuries of witch trials and slave ships, genocides and confederacies, logging industries and men from Maryland sent to harvest your sap for turpentine.

MATTHEW OLZMANN

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An unusually tall and dignified tree, certainly, but also one with a bend in the spine like a thin man with a bad back. Fragile. Limping toward some medicated tomorrow. You looked exhausted. And who wouldn’t?

I’m too humiliated to open the shelter’s newsletters to unsubscribe. They go out twice a month. A weird reminder of my failures.

The designers in the office mill around, not chained to their desks like I am. I look at them, wondering who I should approach first. Today, I will find some work to do. I will be Fearassertive.keepsme in my seat. I check my email for any life-changing news. I’ve been sent another newsletter from the women’s shelter.

I volunteered there for two weeks last year as part of a misguided emotional re modeling. The job was frightening and difficult, but also very boring, and I must have known I hated it because I overslept one day and woke around noon to five missed calls from the shelter, which I did not return, and they emailed me daily for a week or so, desperate, but I never checked the emails, and I never went back, and I tried to forget I’d ever done it, and I never mentioned it, except for one time at a bar with Sarah, trying to impress a stranger with my worldliness and sophistication, I said, “Well, I actually volunteer at a women’s shelter, so…”

I get up and think about my body as a tentative, vulnerable thing, clasping my hands in front of my crotch, and I try to act out “peeking” around the cubicle wall be hind my desk. I knock on the corner of the wall and say, “Hey, I’m the new reception temp. The phones have been quiet, and I have extra time if there’s any busy work I can help you with.”

I wake up ill. I feel trapped in a loop. I stare at the big pile of clothing on the floor. I eat some dry cereal. I wash my armpits. I go to work. I think things on the train. I ride the elevator. I walk to Karen’s desk. I am either calm or hollow, hard to say. I ask, “Is there anything extra I can do today? The phones have been pretty quiet, and I finished thoseKarenpackets.”seems caught off guard. “Well, you can make more packets. We really need you by the phones. I’ll try to think of something for you if you’re bored, but I’m just trying to finish up all of this work I have here.” She gestures to a slim notebook. “Oh, okay, great!” My voice is weak. “I’m not bored, I just want to be helpful.” As I walk through the showroom, I recognize my gamble. I make $12/hour, the best paying job I’ve had in over a year. If I’m making $12, they’re paying the agency at least $15, up to $20, so in the middle let’s say $18, times 35 is $630 a week, times two weeks is $1,260, times two is over $2,500 a month to have me, the idiot, sit in a chair, doing about four hours of work a week, 16 hours of work a month, which puts the rate for my actual services at around $80/hour. I see a big brown vase shaped like a jug, rudimentary, meant to evoke some kind of tribal thing, filled with dried stems, sitting on a metal sideboard. If I could compress and stretch time at will, at $80/hour, I could buy that jug just to make fun of it. At $80/hour I could probably even dress seductively enough to make new friends. No donuts in the break room today, just stale bread, which I eat with gusto. I say, “Good morning,” to one of the designers. She must think I’m talking to EXCERPT FROM THE NEW ME HALLE BUTLER someone else, and that’s fine. I liberate some bread from behind my right upper molar, and I realize I might still be a little drunk. I walk to my desk. I turn on my computer and the phone rings, another angry person in the middle of a project that gives them the illusion of progress. I transfer her to the textiles de partment. She calls back and tells me there was no one in the textiles department. She seems very angry, and asks if I could please connect her to an actual person. I apolo gize, a scream trapped in my chest, and say I’ll try someone else. She calls back and when she hears it’s me she sighs, mutters, and hangs up.

This woman has never registered before. She’s an actual adult, mid-40s with gray-

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Would she have liked that? Would that have affirmed her set of life principles? If I had done that, would I have had the courage to use the PA system? Maybe you can change the way you feel by trying out new personalities. I meditate on this.

The other email is from Credit Karma letting me know there have been some de velopments with my credit score, which, oh, who cares, what a plebeian trifle.

I wonder what it would be like if I handled things differently. I wonder what would have happened, when the woman called back, if I had said, “Jesus fucking Christ, are you fucking kidding me? I’m sorry, there’s supposed to be someone in the textiles department at all times. This keeps happening, I’m so sorry. We’re trying to run a business here, and it’s impossible to run a business when you have all of these girls running around play-acting like they own the place. Hold one second, I’m going to get someone on the phone for you. This is unacceptable.”

los angeles review of books less shiny red-brown hair and thick baubles around her neck. She says, “Oh no, sweetie, we’re all good here.”

The phone rings, I transfer the call. I sit. I make a gesture toward assembling a few packets. Karen comes to my desk, and I fear the worst. I turn to her in my swivel chair, my armpits wet with sweat, and I can feel how dry my lips and face are, how ridiculous I must look, how hungry I am from only having stale bread and dry cereal all day. I think she’s going to fire me. I’m not so much bracing for it, as I am having a kind of paroxysm, adrenaline filling me up, and a loud, deep voice shouting, “Yeah well fuck you too,” in my ears. “So, I have some extra work for you,” she says. “Oh, fantastic!” I say, really believing it to be fantastic in the moment. My expec tations so fucked up that my relief at having more clerical work is real and strong. Karen doesn’t smile, doesn’t react, maybe there’s a micro-flinch there like she thinks I’m a loser for being excited to do whatever it is she’s about to make me do. “Come with me,” she says. I stand to follow her, nervously eyeing the phone I’m about to leave. If it rings in front of her, I’ll pounce on it, and maybe impress her with my agility and dedication, my ability to multi-task. In the copy room, she bends down and brings out a small document shredder and pushes it toward me with her foot. She looks at me like I know what this means, like she’s just shown me the lord’s chamber pot and I’m supposed to understand. I push the thing back to my desk like it’s a tiny shopping cart, hands on both sides, and wait for her. She comes back with a ridiculously small stack of papers. I try not to interpret it too much. “I went around and collected these papers from everyone in the office. Do you know how to work a shredder?” she asks. “Oh, yeah, I’ve done a ton of shredding. I shredded a whole file room’s worth of documents at my last job,” I say, dying to impress. “This’ll be really quick.”

Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.

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Sweetie feels incongruent, as I’m pushing 30, hard, and I’m consumed with con stant subtle anger. I smile and say, “Okay, let me know!”

More time passes, and I watch a subtitled video about an AI robot named Sonja who wants to help out in hospitals and in customer service and hopes to have a house and family someday, and I think, Yeah right, Sonja

“Well, there’s no pressure to get it finished by the end of the day. Prioritize the phones, and let me know if you have any questions.” “Sure, thanks,” I say. “And let me know if there’s anything I can do from my com puter, if you need any filing done, or if there’s any other busy work that people need help with. I’m happy to multi-task.” She doesn’t react, she barely nods, and she tells me again to let her know if I have any Iquestions.plugthe shredder in and feed it a stack of about 12 papers. I pause, then put a few sheets in singly. I get a few more calls. I text Sarah to let her know that the scheme worked, that I have been given an extra task. On impulse, I include the small image of the lightning bolt, the rainbow, and the most pathetic looking face I can find. The worried one. It makes me feel old and uncomfortable. Sarah responds “nice” and includes the light ning bolt and a baby chick. We text a moment longer. I put another piece of paper into the shredder and watch it jerk around before it disappears.Mostof the documents are copies of checks, invoices, credit card numbers. None of this interests me. I pause when I see the word “shit” on one of the documents. It’s a printed-out email, containing rich “I feel” language, exclamation points, heated opin ions. For some reason, I don’t feel comfortable shredding it. There’s something dear about it. I put it in my notebook when no one is looking (no one is ever looking). The hours pass. I leave the majority of the shredding for tomorrow, even though I could have easily finished it in about 15 minutes. At the end of the day, I put my notebook in my bag, shut off my computer, and leave.

117 Alex Olson, Stack , 2015, Oil and modeling paste on canvas, 71x50 inches. Photo: Brian Forrest Private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. Early on The sun formed a borderless room. Colors Broke through the light In small patches Of body: a brown forearm, A tan cheek, a green iris, A ginger stretch of something and so on. We had been waiting, but did not Know we had been waiting. It was difficult to see the whole. It was, It turns out, a birthing room, my birth room. Still Forming, I lifted you up: Here, I said. Take this one. Let this one be my face Flat expressions, barely a reaction As if to say Of course. What else would you have chosen? I handed you over to the authorities Asking them, repeatedly, to hold you from

DEAR WHITENESS, CHARIF SHANAHAN

los

For me. They tried, they failed. You slipped through their fingers As you would through mine— Not like water, or sand, but like The air around us, yes, More like that: without The illusion of containment. In the unformed liver: static silhouettes, a depressive. In the middle distance: Brother, my brother—

CHARIF SHANAHAN

angeles review of books

Well what happened is I was walking down the street and I entered a kind of dream state, right? And in that dream I slept many nights and each night as I slept a spider crawled into my mouth. It lodged itself in my throat and in the morning no matter how much I coughed, how much water I drank, how long I held my breath, it did not budge. It was fixed. When I spoke my voice exited my mouth with a faintly visible gray hue. The room filled with that voice until it looked eventually as though the air had a color. On every wall of that school, Between each tile, On our shoes, in the nuns’ hair. In the milk glass, on the milky glass, On our bones, in our bones (even the jagged baby teeth Our gums kept losing), In the brightness of our sclera, On the notebook pages that once were Trees, we learned, on which we were Free to scribble our brilliant ideas About racecars-come-to-life Or the magic elevator that traveled To a plane of existence Recognizably human but not on any map, Our precious little right Brains, so certain then Of you: A radiant cloak, an aura The eye detects before it sees Beneath it.

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When I spoke I heard my voice at a distance, as though it were coming from another room. The sensation was strange until it felt familiar, which is to say safe, which is to say con tained, which is to say within my control. I spent my days sitting on a backless stool, looking out a bricked-up window. The voice from the other room told me things I did not know I knew, things I believed I did not believe.

los angeles review of books I chased you for twenty-five years. At the bathroom mirror. In the drug store thick. Feral, Obsidian, I held my breath. Pale. Blanched, paling. Where were you? At least half these cells Were you, were they not? And now

Of course what else would you have chosen it is like holding water in your hand

The teacher of life insists It is important to recollect The half of me That could never Despite my body and the need Of those around me Present itself as the whole, Not convincingly, In any case—The teacher explains After recollection, re-imagine: But how to make one See what one does not see With the vast ubiquitous discerning eye? How To dismantle a machine One cannot touch or even locate?

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On my body but not inside my body on my mind but not inside my mind Of you but not you Over here brother over here come sit with your sister come sit with your love Thank you but no thank you is a privilege for which I resent you

It is how I felt that I regret not what I said to myself or to anyone or what I believed not to know

Over here brother come sit over here with us come sit with your loves with yourself with your love

CHARIF SHANAHAN

Do you have any idea who you are what you have done and to whom Here take this one Let this one be my face If you could speak without aid what would you say what would you say without aid if you could speak

Are you ashamed Do you feel regret Do you feel at all

Do you know when you are in the room the air takes on color the air that enters our lungs our lungs

“Let’s play it by ear,” I said, moving away. “’Kay,” she said. This is how it works, Aaron Lemkin had said at the first meeting of the Genocide Reenactment Society. For each cycle there will be five genocidaires. You’ll get a list of victims and the dates on which to eliminate them. On those dates, you’ll present them with a notecard with the black mark on it. September will be the Khmer Rouge and the regular Cambodian people. October is the Hutus and the Tutsis. November is Turks and Armenians. December, he said, is the Nazis and the Jews. A Chinese girl raised her hand. “Excuse me?” she said. “I was wondering if…? Well, I’m really interested in endan gered species? Could those be incorporated… somehow?”

SARA DAVIS

People were dying. So what, you say. It happens. But in this case, when I say people, I mean high school students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, and when I say dying I mean approached in the hallway and handed an index card sharpie-d with a black mark. This is my first year of high school, Caroline, and I am beginning to understand what people mean when they say it is the most magical, terrible, humiliating year of a young woman’s life.

THE BLACK MARK

Aaron Lemkin looked stoic, or bored. He looked around like he hadn’t heard, then coughed softly into his sleeve, and said, “I think there is a club called Environmental Warriors. You might like it better there.”

I’m writing to you, Caroline, even though you are British and what they call a gentile, and let’s face it, not the most conscientious pen pal, but because I don’t have a sister, and maybe if you really thought about what you signed up for that afternoon in Saudi Arabia when I asked you if you wanted to be pen pals and you said “yes”—you could find it in your heart to fill in. On day one, at my new school, things were OK. I still had braces, but I also had con tact lenses, and if I was careful about smiling and moving my mouth when I talked, I could be fairly confident I was putting my best foot forward, appearance-wise. Despite it all I was still a virgin, but the preceding summer I had been to a sleepaway camp for gifted youth, and there I had given one awkward handjob. It was strange, long, and also disgusting, Caroline, but during it I felt an incredible maw of power yawn open before me. OK, I said silently to the open maw of power, while my wrist shimmied up and down, I accept. So, like I said, things were not bad. You could even say that when high school be gan, I was at the height of my potential as a young lady. Everything should have been good. My braces came off before Halloween, and there should have been some easy romance with an athlete: maybe not water polo, but track and field, surely, or wrestling. What happened instead was that I fell in love on the sec ond day of school at the Clubs Fair with a beautiful and serious boy named Aaron Lem

My heart thumped. The Chinese girl wilted. Another boy raised his hand, a tiny, big-eared boy. “Are we responsible for providing our own index cards?” he asked. “Yes,” said Aaron. “This meeting is adjourned.”

kin — incidentally, one of God’s chosen people — and it was not until I had nervously scribbled my name and mailbox number on his sign-up sheet that I realized that the laminated placard sitting next to him on the table read “Genocide Reenactment Society.”

Sheena Reddy was the first to die. Actually, it was I who handed her the card, in the second story hallway. “Hi,” I said. “I’m the Khmer Rouge.” “OK,” she said. She looked kind of hurt. “It’s not personal,” I said. “OK,” she said again. She folded the card in half and put it in her pocket. “Want to sit together at lunch?” she asked, hopefully pushing her glasses up her nose. “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t know if it was against Society rules for a member of the Khmer Rouge to sit with a Cambodian person I had recently eliminated. Also, Sheena Reddy had ovarian cysts that made her woozy and faint, and it was embarrassing and a lot of responsibility to pull her up off the ground and call a teacher.

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September bled into October and then suddenly it was Thanksgiving. We packed the car and drove to my grandma’s house. “You look terrible,” said my grandma to my mom, when we arrived. “100,” said my mom. “93. 86. 79.” A therapist had told her that a good way of ward ing off a panic attack was to count backwards from 100 by multiples of seven. Then it was the first day back at school, December 2nd. I’d written it on my calendar in my best handwriting: GRS, I’d abbreviated. Jews versus Nazis.

“Too late now,” I said, as I got out of the car. “See you at five.”

She was right; the house was nice, nice but also kind of weird. It was all white, and one-story, and at the front were a lot of white pillars and a dolphin fountain spewing streams of water. I rang the doorbell. An old, white-haired man answered the door. He had a big, high belly, and wasn’t wearing any shoes. Around his neck was a thin gold chain.“You must be Becky!” he said. “Aaron’s by the pool.”

124 125 los angeles review of books I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in bed and thought about the next day. Who would I be, I wondered? Would there be a piece of paper in my mailbox with the names of my victims? Or would it be empty, in which case I would probably walk around all month with a vague feeling of dread in my stomach. It was too much; I couldn’t sleep. I turned on my computer and logged on to AOL.

By the pool turned out to mean stretched on a lounge chair in the shade, ful ly-clothed; I mean Aaron, dressed in loose gray pants and dark sunglasses. He was looking up at the sky, which was overcast, an iced beverage on the ground beside him. He did not give any sign that he had heard me come in. Suddenly I was very nervous. With one sweaty palm I reached into the pocket of my skirt and took out my index card, the card I’d drawn a black mark on with my own personal Sharpie, and held it over him like a Geiger counter, and tried to tell whether under his sunglasses his eyes were open or closed.

Aaron Lemkin’s room was huge. It was bigger than my room and my parents’ room combined. But it had a weird, unfinished look to it, like he had just moved in. We sat down next to each other on the bed, and from this new, much closer vantage point, I noted several things about his face: pale, almost translucent skin, Caroline, and long dark lashes, and in the black pools of his pupils I saw, no, I felt, in some deep and spiritual way, the sadness of generations, the hot sand and sun of the Sinai, the unquenchable thirst. The tense spot at the pit of my stomach suddenly burst, and all my limbs felt loose and sluggish, like they were made of very heavy Jello.

Aaron reached out and ran one finger down my arm, and then stopped, as if he lacked the energy to continue. “Wait here,” said Aaron. “Take off your clothes.” So I took off my clothes, Caroline, and I tried to do it slowly, in a sexy way, even though I was all alone and the room was kind of drafty. I left my bra and under wear on, to preserve some mystery. I think honesty among pen pals is important, Caroline, so I will share that this did not really feel sexy, and even though I did my best to conjure up the same feeling of power I felt during the hand job I’d performed on my fellow gifted youth at sleepaway camp, that feeling wouldn’t come. I gave up and tried instead to think warm thoughts and arrange myself on top of the bedspread in a flattering position.

Finally, Aaron returned, carrying a small package of lunchmeat.

in case you did not pause to read the screenname carefully, let me make it plain. It was him. Aaron Lemkin had IM-ed me. With trembling fingers, I typed back: hi. He didn’t respond. Quickly, before I lost my nerve, I typed. what r u doing up? i don’t sleep, he wrote. y not? I typed. *shrugs* he wrote. i’m sad. Thump, thumpety-thump, said my heart. what r u sad about? I wrote. genocide, he wrote. c u tomorrow. All night I tossed and turned, wondering what he meant by “c u tomorrow.” The next morning, I put my hand in my mailbox and drew out a piece of paper. NAZI, it said, at the top of the page, but there was only one victim name, not five. The victim name was AARON LEMKIN. At the bottom of the page he had written an address and the words I won’t be in school today. Come at 4. All I had to do was convince my mom, and that was not hard. “I have a study group after school today,” I said. “OK,” she said, uncertainly. “What for?” “A test,” I said. She thought this over as she waited to make right turn. “You know, Rebecca,” she said. “If there’s ever anything you want to talk about, you can always come to me, right?” “What are you talking about?” I said. She sighed. Grandma was right, I thought, she did look terrible. Old, and so tired. “Nevermind,” she said. When we pulled up to Aaron Lemkin’s house my mom said, “Hmmmmm,” in a trou bled“Thisvoice.house is really…nice,” she said, frowning. “Maybe we should have picked something up? Like…I don’t know, cupcakes?”

I scrolled through the screennames of my online friends. No one good was online, not really, just some girls from middle school I was trying to shed. And then, Caroline, exactly like magic, a box popped open on my screen. KingLemkin3389 said, all in low er-case,Caroline,“hi.”

I cleared my throat and jiggled the index card a little. “Not here,” he said.

SARA DAVIS

126 los angeles review of books “What’s that?” I asked. “Ham,” he said, and got on the bed to remove my bra and underwear. Again, Caroline, it did not seem very sexy to me, the way he did it, though of course I don’t have a lot to compare it to. He didn’t even “fumble” with the clasp of my bra, but instead he undid it pretty efficiently, and with little fanfare. Then he took off his pants. “Where’s the card?” he said. “Here,” I said. “OK,” he said, opening the package of ham. “What are you doing with that?” I asked. “You’ll see,” he said. “Lie on your back and hold still.” He shook out one bright pink slice of ham. Quickly, squinting, he laid it flat against my breastbone, just below my chin. He took a second slice and laid it between my breasts. One more slice bridged the gap to my belly button, and two below that. The ham was sticky and cold, but not, if I am to be completely honest with you Caroline, totally“Ok,”unpleasant.hesaid,touching himself. “When I tell you to, hand me the index card.” Caroline, I handed him the index card sooner than either of us had anticipated. When it was over, Aaron Lemkin collapsed face first on the bed, naked from the waist down and not moving, one hand still holding the index card. Because no one had given me any instructions about the ham, I peeled the slices off of me and threw them in the trash and tried to wipe myself off with a Kleenex. I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. My mother would be there at any minute. Suddenly, I was angry. I gave the side of Aaron Lemkin a hard push. “I have to go,” I said. “Walk me out.” He opened his eyes. The look on my face said: do it. Aaron put his pants back on and walked me downstairs. In the kitchen was a slim young Asian man, doing the dishes and listening to the radio. “Hi Becky!” he said brightly, waving at me with a yellow-gloved hand. I waved back, uncertainly, and followed Aaron out the front door. “Who’s that?” I said, when we were in the yard. “My dad,” he said. He looked unhappy. “Your dad?” I said. “What about the first guy? The one with white hair?” “That’s my other dad,” he said. “I don’t get it,” I said. “They’re gay,” he said. “I’m adopted, stupid.” He looked mad, actually mad. His dark eyes bore into mine. They no longer looked like the sadness of generations, the dust and sun of the Sinai, but instead like regular old eyes, dumb and brown. From my beneath my shirt, I inhaled a smoky whiff of ham. “It’s not very nice to call people stupid,” I said.

The rest of the story is not that interesting. My mom came and got me not too long after. We came home and ate dinner and I watched some TV. Now I’m in my room, writing to you. You may recall that you never wrote back to my last letter, but hopefully you’ll see that this one is different. It’s what they call a cry for help, Caroline, in case you missed that. When we met you were thirteen, so now you’re sixteen, so the onus is on you, I’m pretty sure, to start dispensing the advice. What I want to ask you, Caroline, is what does all this mean? What does it mean? Is this what I have to look forward to? I don’t consider myself naïve, but it’s not quite how I thought things would be. Signing off now, Caroline, and just to reiterate: I really hope that you can shed some light on these events. I write to you not just as a pen pal, Caroline, but as one girl on the cusp of womanhood to another.

128129

I am a poet, like you. I came to your work as I came to so much work in the world of poetry: watching, admiring from afar. I first sat on the floor in a crowded New York room in some year when I had traveled to the city maybe listening to your son’s raps, as I often did. There was something about the rhythm he held in his voice and the slow crawl of funk layering the instrumentals that made me feel like I was truly in the city.

From Chapter Ten: Family Business. This letter is addressed to the mother of Phife Dawg (Malik Izaak Taylor), member of A Tribe Called Quest, along with Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammed. Phife Dawg passed away in March 2016. Ms. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, We are maybe each other, through two different mirrors. I know what it is to be a son and long for a living mother. You, a mother, now longing for a living son. When I heard the news, I do admit that I thought first of you. You are not obligated to believe this, of course, but I imagine there are ways in which specific types of loss make kin out of folks who are not kin. I had read the stories about how Malik was born with his kidneys half the size of a normal kidney—begging Him for mercy from the moment you brought him into the world. I had read the stories of how there was an older twin, Mikal, born into the world mere seconds before Malik was born, suffering from the same kidney afflictions. How he held on for eight hours before finally succumbing. Malik was your only, and I was my mother’s youngest. My mother wrote, as you wrote and still write. I like to think that I learned to write first from her, though she didn’t teach me English in my earliest youth. It was Arabic that I first learned, writing along the page in a direction I would later fight to unlearn—from the right to the left. I think there is a very particular mercy in being born to a woman who writes, or at least to a woman who sees a world worth writing about.

From the floor of the crowded New York art studio or coffee shop or narrow bar, I could only hear your poems, but not see you. I craned my neck to see early on, but the crowd was drawn so close to you that I accepted my fate, and leaned into the brick that was propping me up. I heard, from murmurs in the back, that you were wearing a Tribe Called Quest T-shirt underneath a slick blazer. Ms. Taylor, I think it might have been better this way, for me to clearly see what you are doing in your work, which I must say is transformational. You are transforming the space. I love most how you milked the ending of each syllable and let it sing in the air a bit longer. There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room. The way you, with impeccable rhythm, hung each bit of language from the lights in that room and let me see them, even with my eyes closed. There are beats that happen in between the breaks of words that I think most poets don’t tend to understand. There is a way for a reader to manipulate silence so that it is no longer silence but something drawing a listener toward a brief and breathless anticipation that, too, is a type of beat. We know how to read our poems, if nothing else. I say we and mean black people, sure. People who have, at some point, clapped on the two and the four. But you, especially, are carrying songs to the people. I found myself, in the back of your reading, humming lowly, as if receiving a spiritual. And I suppose I was, though I didn’t know it until now, when reflecting on the moment of that encounter and realizing how healed I was.

I have never been to the town in Trinidad where you come from, Arima. I have read that it is situated between bright red hills. What I love about you is how you fiercely write yourself into your poems and, in doing so, write the reader toward you. I love how richly you integrate Calypso—the social and political aspects of it along with the musical elements of it. I read a part of your poem “A Woman Speaks” out loud to myself often, when trying to figure out how to make language dance with its companions: Now and then I sit quiet cup ah coffee in meh hand listen hear de words hiss draw magic in dem breath rest crimson in de damp gauze of girlhood dem words weave faded straw into colorful baskets they hang heart and lungs teeth and bone meh head almost fall off de side ah meh face an fall fall on meh dauter womb

excerpt from GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN

There was always something about the way A Tribe Called Quest negotiated the noise around them, almost becoming it, until everything was awash with a sound you desired.

HANIF ABDURRAQIB

I am wondering what, if anything, you held in your hands after Malik died. What you still might hold in your hands today. I know it is different to lose a person who was distinctly yours but also everyone’s. What is that feeling? Is it better or worse? To have a loss be something you are mourning in a singular way, which is not the way everyone else is mourning, though perhaps they think it is. On the day I heard the news, I first sat down on my couch and then instinctively checked every corner of the internet I could, hoping it wasn’t true. Death is such a reckless and unexpected visitor, waiting to make a mess of our past, present, and future in equal measures.

I didn’t dig much of the grave—maybe none, if I recall. I do recall kicking the dirt around it, though. It seemed so odd to me at the time, to have a living person to hold a mere three days earlier, now having dirt heaved atop their body. Sometime during the kicking I got a dark stain of wet dirt on my pants. I remember staring at it on the ride home, and then while sitting on my bed after the funeral. I remember thinking that I had betrayed the fabric, this item that my mother had worked so hard on for me to wear and feel nice, or briefly wealthy. Focusing on the stain and mourning the pants, I think, allowed me to mourn the greater loss. I was mourning something that my mother had poured her heart into for me, because I was her son. And so, this is how I remember mourning my mother: by way of soiling something that she crafted for me with her bare hands. The stain came out after two washes, though I often wished it hadn’t.

I am not here asking for a reliving of the moment, but I am here, instead, to say thank you for raising a writer. I was raised by a woman who wrote, and I don’t know if that means anything other than the fact that I saw language as a way to get free at an early age. She wrote a book that she didn’t live long enough to finish. I have all of the books you’ve written, stacked outside of my bookcase, which has long since run out of room. I am saying that I love words, and I have long appreciated what you do with them. And all of this time I was listening to Malik rap, I was hearing your fingerprints. You raised a literary figure—someone who knew his way around verse and punch line and clever turn of phrase. At the heart of his writing and yours was the same driving force: themes of the vast black interior—hair texture, and skin color, inner and outer strife, and the small joys that must be unlocked to survive it all. I knew I would miss him when he was gone. I always did. But I thank you, particularly, for still living and writing. For the way you let the syllables dance around each other in the air when you read your poems. The way you let words hang above an audience and linger way up with the dimming lights in a room, until they fade and fade, and eventually fall away for good, a fresh memory.

dem words loop poems ’round moon neck and if yuh hear dem hear dem write dem down yes we ah write ah write dem down It’s all a song at the end of the day, isn’t it? I was at an open mic in the days after Malik passed, and an older black woman came to the microphone and asked everyone to close their eyes. She started into a poem of yours, in respect for your loss. It was such an honor to have you in the room then. The woman was a mother, she said. I imagine she understood a mother’s loss and didn’t want your name to be alone or buried. She read “Devouring the Light, 1968”—my favorite of yours. I recited a few lines along: The day they killed Martin we could not return to New York City our visiting senior class stuck in Huntsville streets blazed with suffering in that small Alabama town in the dull shroud of morning the whole world went crazy devouring whatever light that lit our half-cracked windows. In your son’s lyrics, I hear the rhythmic bounce between patois in his flows. The dance between punch line, politics, and boast. I see the Calypso in that, too. Like his verse in Whitey Don’s “Artical”: Everytime yuh see mi licked mushitup dancehall Mc’s big or small, mi nuh afraid it dem all

130 131 los angeles review of books of dress pants. My family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and I didn’t have many reasons to get dressed for nice occasions, and so I only had about one good pair of dress pants. A pair that, I imagine, was passed down from one of my two older brothers. My mother was skilled with sewing—she would sometimes sew together outfits I would wear to school. And so it was nothing to shorten a pair of pants for her youngest child who didn’t seem like he would grow past the paltry height he was given already. I cherished the pants, I think, because being young and poor, I maybe clung to what I was told was a nice thing.

HANIF ABDURRAQIB

The boyz, dem are jealous cuz see how I’m rock I try comb voice to represent non’stop Idiot bwoy, idiot bwoy, idiot bwoy step to side And in enough room, feature all in my ride

It seems, Ms. Taylor, that we are nothing if not for our histories, and so much of mine is tied up in the business of ghosts. I don’t want to burden anyone, but I consider anyone who has lost someone my kin, because I think we are all faced with the same central question of how we go on. How we live the life that best reflects the people who aren’t here and are still counting on us. A mother is never supposed to bury a son, I think. I don’t know who makes that rule, as if linear time is the only direction we all have to follow. But something about it seems particularly wrong. A cynic might say that it all depends on the length of life— who had the most fulfilling years and who didn’t. But I am not a cynic. I don’t believe much in any natural order. I buried my mother, but at least I was young. I don’t remember the day much, but for the dirt that remained on my good pair

133

I write to you under the magnificent awning of the black epistolary, of insightful men writing to their teenaged sons and nephews about what it means to be black and male in this time and place. Baldwin, reaching for his nephew and namesake James, repeat edly writes and tears up his letters until finally he states the plain, pitiless fact: “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” And later, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to a son who is learn ing the brutal truth of state violence against bodies like his, like theirs: What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the

A REQUISITE REVOLUTIONTO JULIETTA SINGH Alex Olson, For Levity , 2018, Oil on canvas, 11 x 8.5 inches. Photo: Jeff McLane Courtesy of the artist, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Altman Siegel, San Francisco

A letter waits to be written. This one has been simmering for seven years, just beneath the surface of my skin. At times it has seeped from my body, but more often it has stayed contained, an agitation that has made me want to itch, or cry, or protest, or sing, or Agitation,sleep. of course, is not a purely negative state of being. Agitation bespeaks anxiety, a state which most of us desire to mute or avoid. But it is also a requisite to revolution — to disturbing the state of things, to crafting other ways of living. Agitation requires mixing things up and being mixed up in the process.

134 los angeles review of books question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. It is not accidental that Baldwin and Coates both feel an urgency to write to 15-yearold boys, boys who have surely known fear and threat in their bodies, but are beginning to grapple with it as they tip over into manhood, as they confront the mouth of a crim inal justice system that is designed to devour them. But you are not a pubescent black boy. You are a mixed-race little brown girl at the start of your formal education, and the mouths that will want to devour you are not the same as, though they are nevertheless sutured to, the systems that want to destroy them. And so, I write to you with a different kind of urgency than those awe-inspiring paternal voices. I write not with the intense and immediate fear that you will be gunned down by police in the streets, or that you will be metabolized by the prison industrial complex, but with an adjacent set of fears about what it means to be brown in America, to be a mixed-race girl, to be the product of an immigrant mother who is tethered to this place through her labor, to be growing up in politically disgraceful and environmentally devastating times. I write to you because the burden of history, the indispensable need to keep us all from coming apart, will fall on the shoulders of little brown and black girls. You are a new generation, born at the end of the world. You will need to break radically from me if your desire is human survival. I am your life’s most intimate and enduring teacher, your mother, and yet my lessons and my life are so keenly intertwined with the destruction of the planet that you will not only need to exceed me, but to overthrow my forms of living. You will need to study my teachings and then reject them in order to invent another world.

Alex Olson, For Grounding, 2018, Oil on canvas, 11 x 8.5 inches. Photo: Jeff McLane Courtesy of the artist, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Altman Siegel, San Francisco

A letter waits to be written, and then one day — like water, like blood — it finds a way to spill.  Dear Isadora, Last year at Thanksgiving, you learned a whitewashed story about how the first peoples of this land, whose brown skin is not unlike yours, were happy to give over their sacred spaces to European men in the name of civilization and progress. You came home one day from kindergarten and unzipped your backpack to reveal with artistic pride a picture book you had colored and stapled yourself. You had been asked by your teacher to color in a little Native American girl, then a Native American boy, followed by a pilgrim girl and a pilgrim boy, each one garbed in their traditional attire.

“What is happening in this scene?” I ask you.

“The rough waters and manatees are pushing the Europeans back home,” you say with

136 137 los angeles review of books I was proud of your art and loved the fact that you had colored all four children brown.

“Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a magical little girl…”

When we turn out the lights, our ritual unfolds. I whisper: “I love you for always, you’re my favorite thing.” Then you say, “Tell me a story, Amma.” And then, often together, we say, “Once upon a time, a long, long time ago…” before I break into a fantastical story I’m expected, night after night, to invent on the spot …

JULIETTA SINGH

Who is the teacher, and who the student, in this pedagogical game? You are giving me back my own lesson: always complicate the story, never foreclose, never reduce.

You interrupt me promptly and insist: “No! Not magical, Amma!”

On the sixth day of a nine-day work trip — the longest period of time I have ever been away from you — I FaceTime home and find you deeply engaged in an act of fruit sculpting. You are busy making a Native American village: people are represented by banana slices, and apple skins make up their shelters. Off to the side of the village, you have crafted colonial ships by slicing kiwis in half, gutting their insides, and attaching kiwi skins to the little boats to serve as sails. You have created “rough waters” and a “wall of manatees” that surround the kiwi ships from three sides.

And then, frustrated with prescriptions, you interrupt to assert that I should not “make the story so obvious…”

How to explain all of this to you? The layers of ideology that make up the collective sense of goodness and evil, of beauty and civility, that come to inform what we desire and how we live out our most intimate lives. I cannot shield you from these stories or from their effects on you, but I can complicate and unearth them with you. My role as your mother may be nothing more than an endless task of reading narratives against the grain, of resisting the consumptive ease of the mainstream.

This year at Thanksgiving, you tell me that you will be studying Pocahontas in school. You ask me earnestly whether we might watch the Disney movie together, understand ing that I will have some degree of hesitation. I’m interested in the fact that you have learned to anticipate my hesitation. Because I know you will watch the film in school, and because I would prefer to be there to guide you through its historical inaccuracies and racist depictions, we hatch a plan to have a “girls’ night.” We slice apples, pour chamomile tea, and fill bowls with popcorn before climbing into my bed to stay up late and watch under the covers before we fall asleep together. Early in the film you declare that Pocahontas reminds you of yourself. I pause the film and ask you in what ways you see this resemblance. Eager to get back to viewing, you briefly discuss her kindness and her connection with nature, and in a fabulous gesture that makes me smile, you suggest that her long shining black hair is similar to your own messy short brown locks. I am opposed to the ways that Disney encourages an appropriative desire for indigeneity — here through a little girl’s identification with an “Indian princess” — but I also felt touched that you could see yourself in the lithe brownness of this cartoon girl. Moments later — on the heels of your declarative affiliation with Pocahontas — you announce that you wish to be white. Once again — with more urgency this time — I pause the film and ask you why you feel that way. You say because I want to be one of the good guys. I remind you that the only expressly “bad guy” we’ve seen so far in the film is the white Ratcliffe. But, of course, you are intuiting and absorbing the representation of the “savage” that is propagated by the film, and so while there is one “bad” white man in this narrative, the “uncivilized” ways of the indigenous peoples of this film are present ed as the real problem. In other words, you are reading the film through its own lens: the white man is fundamentally good if we can just beat off the one bad seed, and the indigenous peoples are inherently misguided and belligerent, even while we are given permission to love the girl who loved a white man.

So I begin again, “…there was an ordinary little girl…”

So I begin again, and eventually you close your eyes and dream. 

Youearnestness.arecrafting an anti-colonial fruit installation, giving shape to a fantasy that or ganically reverses history. There has never been a clearer sign that you have absorbed a resistance to the official stories of this nation.

As you flipped the pages to show me the book you had made, you narrated a sad accom panying story about how much the pilgrims had suffered when they arrived. I praised the craft of your book but I also felt an unstoppable need to explain the oth er forms of suffering in this perversely singular narrative. I asked you to consider the cultural and ecological consequences of the arrival of those pilgrims, of everything that was before and everything that came after that arrival. You looked at me with bewilder ment and awe, trying to wrap your head around the magnitude of colonial conquest. I didn’t expect you to understand this all, but in following from your grandmother, it has always been my practice to lay bare the stakes of things. I’m sure I’ll never forget the way you looked at me then. We were sitting on the floor, the contents of your backpack scattered all around us, and you studied my face as you reckoned with the existence of incompatible worldviews. I was studying your face too, watching you traverse the gulf between your public education and your maternal one.

SINGH

138 139 los angeles review of books 

What I am trying to say is that in the sharp racial economies of this time and place, you will discover yourself to be everything and nothing.

JULIETTA

Last year, as we walked to school hand in hand through the endlessly lush green of Richmond, Virginia, you asked me whether you would have been a slave had you lived here in another time. The question was hard for me to answer because it extended in so many directions, requiring not a single answer, not a foreclosing no or yes, but a careful inventory of moving bodies. Some of those bodies came with colonial hearts, some were “discovered” here and brutally eradicated and displaced, some were captured from elsewhere and forced across the ocean, and others fled from far off lands to save or amplify their lives. At its root, your question was a way of asking where your body fits into the racial econ omy of this nation. And the answer to that question must be a dynamic one. Your question did not come as an absolute surprise, because I knew you had been learn ing about Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. You were learning a history that tells you that black folks were freed through the noble gestures of white presidential slave owners. You are learning a formal national history that refuses radical resistance, a history that will not tell you how hard and through what means black and brown peo ple have fought to be and remain free, how crushing the blows of European progress have been. As we slowed our pace, I tightened my grip on your hand and drew you close. I told you that people like us did not live here during the time of slavery. But already I was wondering about the words I used — people like us. Whom had I summoned to try and make sense of things for you? Did I mean to invoke people who migrated to this region of the world from non-Western nations by acts of displacement, fortune, or free will? Did I mean those whose bodies and minds had been irrevocably altered by the violence of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent? Did I mean the Jews who spilled into all the corners of the world, the ones who had not been exterminated? You are a mixed child, as was I, and we are laced with modern histories of unbelievable violence. Our blood is a strange brew, and you will feel this strangeness in your body as I have continued across my life to feel it in mine. In this moment, you are asking me to tell you whether you are black, and while it would not make any sense to say yes, there is also an affiliation of racial difference I want you consciously to inhabit. You are not black in America. Your histories are not those of the slave ship or the plantation, and the bodies of your ancestors are not tilled into this nation’s soil. But in your bones, you are made up of histories of imperial conquest, of extermination, of nearly unimaginable forms of racial and religious violence. Each of us who emerges from the racially subjugated ends of history, and who lives devalued by the economy of whiteness, shares something not only at the surface of our bodies but deep within them.

While it is no longer acceptable to identify as black unless some part of you descends from blackness, the history that Kapil summons reminds us of forms of affiliation that exceeded the hierarchies enforced on us from above. Kapil’s “black (brown) girl” is inex tricably laced into and affected by the economies of racial belonging and unbelonging, and in the face of that violence she reaches for affinity with others under the axe of racism. I tell you this because our hides and our histories matter. Because when the race riots roil up again to maim us, our affinities will need to come surging out of our bodies.

For all the ways you will have to break with me, I want you to remember that we are all, we humans, little creatures roaming the planet — some of us believing we are pure, others ready, willing, and wanting to embrace the fusion. I want you to find and be held by communities of everything and nothing. And I want you to know that being every thing and nothing is a critical position that holds infinite promise.

Reflecting on the place of brownness in 1970s Britain, Bhanu Kapil writes of an Indian girl in London who is subjected to the race riots, describing her protagonist as “a black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asian Brits self-identified as black.”

Nearly eight years ago. There is so much of what he said that I cannot remember.

Funnily enough, my excellent listening skills are a trait people often admire about me: I am constantly offered platitudes about how listening is an unsung virtue. I am not so sure my ears deserve praise, because I wasn’t listening hard enough to him, that final time, the last time we spoke before he died. He was “back home” in Ghana with his new wife. I was in London.

It’s fair to say he liked to think that he had a glut of pearls of wisdom. Pockets bulging with the iridescent stuff. Each shiny globe hard-won. He styled himself as a kind of Sophie Calle, L’inconnue , 2018. Color photograph, embroidered woolen cloth, framing. 28 ¾ x 22 13/16 inches.

141 IMPERFECTION MICHAEL DONKOR

I should have paid much closer attention. The final time I spoke to him, on the phone.



I wonder what expression my face made when his name flashed up on my phone’s screen just before I took the call. When I took his call, I was bundled up against the cold in an oversized coat, walking across Waterloo Bridge, stomping in the direction of the National Theatre ahead, where a blinking sign shouted about the virtuosity of that year’s production of Frankenstein The tone of our conversation was clipped, formal. Like we were both in the middle of pressing tasks. But I was just getting myself to Waterloo station, steeling myself for boring battle with other commuters. I was tired. His voice had an uncertainty to it I didn’t mention because he would have brushed my concern aside. At some point, he mentioned the logistics of the call; he worried I’d be charged too much for receiving it, was anxious about the temperamental nature of the line. More than that I struggle to recall if we laughed at all — because he was often cheeky, naugh ty, prying — or what made us pause awkwardly. I want to remember how we said good bye. All lost to me now. Would it be better, to remember? If, on demand, I could quote our last exchange verbatim? But what if the things he said to me — and I suppose it’s most likely they were — were not life-changing pearls of wisdom but perfunctory in quiries about my shit job and sheepish questions about mum’s well-being?

Because just at the moment my attention is wandering off, she walks into the courtyard of the restaurant where I’m Becauseseatingwithout ever looking at us, she takes countless shots with her phone Because she seems to be aiming at something above our heads, and there is nothing above our heads Because she’s wearing a simple black nylon outfit Because of her body Because of her spread legs Because of Goya

As I wrote I thought about the letters he sent to me and my sisters when we were children. Pastel blue Airmail from Ghana that we passed around ceremoniously when they arrived. He filled up every inch of the page with his fragile handwriting. He made emotive, shocking announcements, like the “surprise” birth of his new son and our half-brother, in brisk phrases, almost indecipherably compressed into the margins.

In my letters I tried my best to be open, not to hide difficulty and awkwardness. The trickiest thoughts to express were about the conflicts I had about not telling my dad I was — am — gay. How many times had I imagined his enraged response to hearing about who I was and who I loved? How many times had I suspected he would treat my sexuality as a matter of discipline, one that he could resolve with sternness or per Overall,suasion?

I think I’m right in describing my letters as pretty wandering. I could never find a neat coda to draw them to a satisfying close. Perhaps that’s why I quickly stopped writing them. I soon realized writing wasn’t shifting the pain anywhere and, in all hon esty, that was what I wanted — for the disorientation to stop. Not to gain some greater insight into my emotions. Just for the feelings to stop or be replaced with something else. 

Ghana for England in the ’60s; if he was swept along by bravura and ambition and hope or if anxieties niggled. And what bits of himself did he leave behind in Kumasi?

142 143 los angeles review of books maverick sage, a man never afraid to speak his mind or to share what life had taught Ashim.a teenager, when he was in town, I would visit his flat to collect my allowance (he didn’t trust checks or bank transfers) and to eat salty grilled chicken. During those visits, he would throw out Topics For Debate: the death penalty. Iraq. Racism. He was delighted when our points of view diverged but was happiest when rounding off the discussion with his big, vital laugh and a “philosophical” coda that put my “youthful idealism” in its place. I’d scowl or tut at that. On reflection, I now know his emphatic conclusions to the conversations were a way of steadying himself while being pulled between pride and annoyance at my recently developed willingness to answer him back and my new eagerness to attack his argu ments. I understand that better now. It’s so unfair, isn’t it, to be suddenly presented with the new, to have no guide for traversing that strange terrain, to be expected to conduct yourself with dignity while all around you is unfamiliar.  In the unmooring, queasy weeks after he died, I decided to write letters to my father. My then boyfriend and now husband — whom my dad never met — encouraged me. I was a bit skeptical to begin with. It felt forced and somehow false to address the dead. As I wrote, the sound of my own words boomed in the huge and uncontested silence. I couldn’t help but hear and wince at what seemed like the triteness of my sentences and sentiments. Who were these letters for? I was certain Dad would have thought the exercise “too white” or sentimental. But I recognized that the loss of my father had pushed me into a new world and into a different phase of my life. I was traveling through territory whose customs were alien to me, and so, for a week or two, I persisted in writing these odd letters. Sitting up in my bed with the radio warbling, I bashed away at my tiny laptop. I wrote three short missives to him. They were mostly about my sense of injustice that he had been, at times and in various ways, a little absent when I was growing up, particularly after he and mum divorced. And now, here, was the most irrefutable and aching kind of absence. I made an effort to not be maudlin. I remembered when I was seven and I begged him to take me — and only me, not my sisters — to the Science Museum so we could spend time together. We went and he marveled at the exhibits as I wanted him to and he bought me a cheap and oily chocolate muffin at the end of the day, which I thought was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. I’m pretty sure there were paragraphs bemoaning how much more we had to learn about and from one another. Questions I had about his childhood in Ghana and his young adulthood. I wanted to know — to really know — what it was like to leave

MICHAEL DONKOR

I apologized for not properly asking him earlier and told myself off for wasting time, promised to not make the same mistake with mum.

The preening narcissist in me loves looking over my old notebooks and scribblings so that I can admire my artful syntax and be surprised by the acuity of my observations. But I’ve never been tempted to open the folder hidden away in my hard drive that is called “To Dad.” I’m frightened by that folder and the files there. I don’t want to see who I was then. At university, I was often told that the origins of the word “essay” in part lies in the Old French word for “attempt.” Those letters were very much a garbled attempt. I was trying to say so much, too much. If I were being mean, I would wager that I avoid reading those letters because they would trouble how I think of myself as a writer; their shapelessness would offend my literary sensibility. More importantly, if I were to resurrect those documents, it would be hard to see myself struggling, hurting, knotted on the screen. I would not know how to console my former self. I’m not brave enough to do it. Even though I have never revisited them, I have also never dragged that folder into the Recycle Bin. Never heard the satisfying, final whoosh it makes. I have tricked myself and others into believing I have moved on, that I am no longer that person but some renewed, restored version of myself, enlightened by suffering and grief. A survivor.

Maureen N. McLane is the author of five books of po etry, most recently Some Say (FSG, 2017). Her selected poems, What I’m Looking For, is coming out from Penguin UK in 2019. Susannah Nevison is the author of two collections of poetry, Lethal Theater (forthcoming from Ohio State University Press, 2019), winner of the 2017 The Journal/ Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Teratology (Per sea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Molly McCully Brown, she is also the co-author of the collection In the Field Between Us (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2020). New work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tin House, Pleia des, Crazyhorse, and The New York Times. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College. Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books His writing has appeared in Best Ameri can Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brev ity and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and also in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College

erary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her stories, essays, and translations from Portuguese have appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares Online, BOMB, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She a 2018 A Public Space Fellow and a 2019 PEN/Heim winner.

Julietta Singh is the author of No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018) and Unthinking Mastery: Dehu manism & Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018). Julie Schumacher is the author of the novel Dear Com mittee Members, which made her the first female winner of the Thurber Award for American Humor. Her most recent novel is The Shakespeare Requirement. She is a Pro fessor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota. Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We En ter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in New Republic, New York Times Magazine, PBS News Hour, and Poem-a-Day of the Academy of American Poets, and anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems of Our Time (Graywolf, 2018), edited by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and Furious Flower Poetry Center’s forthcoming Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern Univer sity Press, 2019). A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he stud ied poetry at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University, where he earned his MFA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he is currently a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Stella Wong is a first-generation immigrant and a Chi nese-American poet in the MFA program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She grew up in New York City and received her English BA from Harvard. She is a recipient of fellowships from the POETRY Foundation Incubator and the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop. She was a finalist in the Narrative Below 30 Contest and won the Academy of American Poets University Prize. Most recently, she has been featured as a Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week and was a finalist in the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Danez Smith.

Rachael Scarborough King is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Or igins of Modern Print Genres (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). Shiv Kotecha is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and Extrigue (Make Now, 2015). Other writing appears in Frieze, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Be liever, among other publications. He is also a PhD candi date in the Department of English at NYU. Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and is working on her second book.

Halle Butler is the author of the novels Jillian and The New Me. She is a National Book Award Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Juliana Chow has published a number of essays on 19th century American authors and their connection to sci ence, and has spent some time as a library cormorant at the American Antiquarian Society. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri where she teaches courses in literature, writing, and the environmental humanities. Sara Davis lives in Palo Alto, California. Her novel, The Kindertotenlieder, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Michael Donkor was born in London. He read English at Oxford and later undertook a master’s in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Michael worked in pub lishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he re trained as an English teacher. Since then he has worked in various colleges and schools in London. In 2014, Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and was mentored by critic Daniel Hahn. In 2018, Michael was selected by the Guardian as one of their Top Debut Novelist of the Year for his first book Hold. Nathan Goldman is a writer living in Minneapolis. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, Literary Hub and other publications.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry col lection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble minded (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and a collection of essays forthcoming from Persea Books. With Susannah Nevi son, she is also the co-author of the collection In the Field Between Us (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2020). New work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tin House, Pleiades Crazyhorse, and The New York Times.

Gillian Osborne is a writer and educator. She is the co-editor, with Angela Hume, of a collection of literary criticism on ecopoetics. She works for the educational initiative Poetry in America, and, with Elisa New, teach es courses covering 400 years of American poetry at the Harvard Extension School.

CONTRIBUTORS

Caio Fernando Abreu (b. 1948, Porto Alegre) was one of the most influential Brazilian writers of the 1970s and 80s, despite his work remaining underrecognized out side of Brazil. The author of 20 books, including 12 story collections and two novels, he has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction a total of three times. During the military dic tatorship in Brazil (1964–1985), his homoerotic writing was heavily censored and he was soon put on a wanted list. He found refuge in the literary counterculture established at the time by like-minded writers and friends Hilda Hilst and Dalton Trevisan and eventually by going into self-exile in Europe. In 1994, while living in France, he tested HIV positive. He died two years later in his home town. He was 47 years old.

Kim Hayden is an archivist at the Center for Sacramento History and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Western Archives She has a background in journalism and worked as a copy editor for many years for a newswire, The Stranger, and various small publishers Bruna Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Bra zil. A graduate of Bennington College, she received her MFA in Fiction from New York University and is cur rently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Lit

los angeles review of books Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib latest book is on A Tribe Called Quest titled Go Ahead In The Rain (University of Texas Press). A new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don’t Dance No Mo’ (Random House, 2020) are both forthcoming.

Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin (Milkweed Edi tions, 2018) and the chapbook Nonstop Godhead (2016). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Boston Re view, FIELD, New England Review, and Kenyon Review She is recipient of the 2016 DISQUIET International Literary Prize, a Canto Mundo fellowship, and scholar ships from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Image Text Ithaca Symposium.

CONTRIBUTORS

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los angeles review of books FEATURED ARTISTS

Shirin Aliabadi was a multidisciplinary artist who lived between Paris and Tehran. She was widely recognised for her practice, which looked at the behavioral hybridity of her home country’s youth and the women’s empowerment expressions that emerged in the face of adversity. Shirin’s solo exhibitions have been presented at institutions such as The Farjam Foundation, Dubai (2012); The Third Line, Dubai (2010); and The Counter Gallery, London, UK (2006). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2015); Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2014); Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA (2009). Her work can be found in public and private collections around the world, including The Farjam Foundation, Dubai, UAE; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, UK; and Collection of Deutsche Bank AG, Germany. Sophie Calle was born in 1953 in Paris. She is a French artist who has exhibited extensively throughout the world since the late 1970s. She has been described as a conceptual artist, a photographer, a movie director or even detective; but has developed a practice that is instantly recognizable for a distinct narrative and the frequent combination of images with text. Each of these projects can be seen as another chapter in a vast overall system of references and echoes where Calle often blurs the boundaries between the intimate and the public, reality and fiction, art and life. Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has merged image and narration. Her work methodically organizes an unveiling of reality – her own and that of others, while allocating a controlled part of this reality to chance.

Try the digital edition of World Literature Today FREE Redeem a free 30-day trial at worldlit.org/digital-trial “The absolute best international literature and culture magazine out there.”–Bustle

Emily Jacir is an artist whose work investigates histories of colonization, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production. She is the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research and was recently the curator the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation. Emily Jacir has had recent solo exhibitions at Alexander and Bonin, New York (2018); IMMA, Dublin (2016–17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat al Funun, Amman (2014–15); Beirut Art Center (2010); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). Her work has been in major international group exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); five consecutive Venice Biennales; Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). Gelare Khoshgozaran گلاره خوشگذران is an artistwriter who was transplanted from the 2009 uprisings in Iran into windowless rooms where she and her cohort discussed politics and aesthetics for two years at the University of Southern California. Born and raised in Tehran and living in Los Angeles, she envisions the city as an imaginary space between asylum as ‘the protection granted to a political refugee’ and the more dated meaning of the word, ‘a mental institution.’ Her films, video essays, installations and performances have been presented at the New Museum and the Queens Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum, LA><ART, Human Resources, among others. She was a co-founding editor of contemptorary Kori Newkirk was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1970, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (1993) and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine (1997). He also attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1997), Cooper Union, New York City, Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton UK and SUNY Cortland, New York. His work has been shown in solo and group shows around the world and has been written about in various publications across the spectrum. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Alex Olson is an artist based in Los Angeles. Olson is the cover artist in this issue. Honor Titus was born and raised in Brooklyn. Titus is a multidisciplinary artist who now resides in Los Angeles. Titus’s formal introduction to the world of fine art was through his work in punk rock outfit Cerebral Ballzy which connected him with Raymond Pettibon. A poet and musician, he has performed and collaborated with the New Museum and Pace Gallery, among others and has been published in the New York Times. He cites Jean Genet, Miles Davis, Magritte, Lucky Luciano and Mariel Hemingway as major inspirations.

Karon Davis was born in 1977 in Reno, NV. She currently lives in Ojai, CA. Davis has had solo exhibitions at Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2016 and 2018) and the Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has been included in group exhibitions including PEOPLE, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York (2018); Homeward Bound, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Power, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles; Ours is a City of Writers, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (all 2017); and Young Blood, the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2016). Davis is also the co-founder of The Underground Museum, located in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles.

HANIF ABDURRAQIB CAIO FERNANDO ABREU KATYA APEKINA HALLE BUTLER MOLLY MCCULLY BROWN CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON JULIANA CHOW SARA RACHAELKIMNATHANMICHAELDAVISDONKORGOLDMANHAYDENSCARBOROUGH KING SHIV BRUNAKOTECHADANTAS LOBATO AIREA D. MATTHEWS MAUREEN N. MCLANE SUSANNAH NEVISON MATTHEW OLZMANN GILLIAN OSBORNE JULIE HONORKORIGELAREEMILYKARONSOPHIESHIRINFEATUREDALEXCOVERSTELLACECILIAANALICIACHARIFJULIETTASCHUMACHERSINGHSHANAHANSOTELOWOLOCHWONGARTIST:OLSONARTISTS:ALIABADICALLEDAVISJACIRKHOSHGAZARANNEWKIRKTITUS