Love is an Ex-Country / Randa Jarrar / 2022

I read this book at the recommendation of my friend Casira, although it’s been high on my diaspora literature list for years. This memoir is bookended poorly, starting with an eat-pray-love-esque road trip across the US searching for purpose and ending with a hardly believable scene of “healing” her troubled relationship with her father. 

In a creative writing class once, a poet once told me good writing requires at least two of the following: 1) incredible personal experience 2) astute observation or 3) excellent fluency and artistry with language. Of course, a master writer would have all three. Jarrar mainly has #1 with a spark of #3 sometimes. The memoir is compelling because of the unenviable amount of abuse Jarrar suffers, which she narrates bluntly and painfully. We get glimpses of child abuse, overcontrolling parents, abusive partners, and even dystopic scenes with Israel locking her in a holding cell and preventing her from returning to Palestine. Her descriptions of kink are clumsy, however, as well as some of her expression of her own feelings around the messy bits of race, gender, and queerness. The narration of kink especially reads as the journal of someone who just experienced something, not someone who has thought about the discourse around it and is entering that discourse thoughtfully. Even so, it was a captivating read, even as it fell into so many traumatophobic tropes.  3 out of 5.

Pornografía para piromaníacos / Wenceslao Bruciaga / 2023

I picked this book up at a Guatemalan bookstore based off the title and premise alone, and I was blown away. My interest in erotic literature started with Anais Nin earlier this year, where I was surprised that something that was ostensibly smut could have so much to say about intimacy, queerness, and relationships, veering into the unsayable aspects of human experience. I entered Pornografia para piromaniacos piqued by its inciting incident: the suicide of a gay Latinx porn actor and closeted trans woman that rattles the industry. The novel follows two characters, Pedro and Jeff, in the aftermath of this loss. Both are aging porn stars struggling to adapt to a gentrifying San Francisco, an ever-evolving queer culture, and unsatisfying relationships. 

Pedro sees himself as the breadwinner for a nonbinary trophy husband, who is also a porn actor, who manages Pedro’s social media platforms, as well as his own up-to-date queer influencer channel. Through their relationship, porn scenes, and flashbacks we learn about the traumatic origins of Pedro’s queer discovery and the dark circumstances of his migration to the United States from Mexico. Pedro lives his life in fear of cancellation, as he has seen many of his peers go down for a mix of different toxicities. His precarious economic well-being depends on his reputation, and the pressure makes him act out violently periodically throughout the novel. 

Jeff, on the other hand, is reeling from a heartbreak with a closeted baseball star. While Pedro’s excellence and hotness provides him with a sense of power and purpose, Jeff’s relationship to pornography and sexuality feels more reflexive, an escape he cannot wield with discipline. Interestingly, Jeff was raised by two lesbians who hate pornography. Jeff and his parents make faint efforts to rekindle their relationship, as Jeff’s musical stardom begins to rise. Jeff’s musical allusions flood the novel, providing several playlists worth of listening material that will dizzy anyone unfamiliar with 90s rock. I spent a lot and not enough time looking up songs and listening to the soundscape they provided. Like Pedro, Jeff also violently lashes out against those who betray him. 

The novel is full of sharp observations. Porn scenes have the bawdy, campy language of porn scenes, but manage to do more than simply convey raw masculine lust. The scenes often intersect with challenges in the actors’ personal lives, frequently include complex and/or traumatic dynamics between actors and directors, and trigger devastating and soulful flashbacks. Bruciaga manages to say something heartbreaking and ugly about masculinity through these scenes. Bruciaga conveys brutality with tenderness. 

Pornografia para piromaniacos ends with pessimistic conclusions on masculinity and its toxicities. There is something about Jeff and Pedro’s many rants in the book, however, that give me a sense of hope. If the voices of aging queers continue to be silenced or disappear as times shift and their voices become inconvenient to some, the book provides a space where the voices of some of our queer elders can be heard. They provide some well-argued critiques of contemporary queer culture, even if they as characters fall victim to their own toxicities, ultimately proving themselves wrong. 

I’m on the lookout for more erotic novels this brilliant. Sex undergirds far too much of human life to not read writing about it seriously. I would love to translate it one day… it’d be a dream.  5/5  

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Danez Smith been one of my favorite poets. In Bluff, they reflect on their meteoric rise and the tokenism that they tried and feels they failed to resist. In some of their best poems yet, they criticize the “hope industrial complex” and feel embarrassed about having written poems for presidents. I laughed out loud at the line “they untapped my phone / found no threat, the shame i felt.” Despite this, Electric Literature still insists Smith “Sculpts Pessimism into Hope”, which isn’t exactly wrong but feels like it misses the critique, as if readers can’t stomach the Afropessimism intrinsic in the project. I can’t say I’m well-read in Afro-pessimism, but as a neophyte to Marxism, I did feel disappointed in Smith’s inability to articulate much of a vision throughout the collection. The poem “principles” is particularly underwhelming: it argues against “all lives matter” as if Smith is trapped in some racist white woman’s facebook page; it puts its most radical position--a desire for a stateless society--into parentheticals, not giving it much space to breathe and develop meaningfully. No doubt Smith’s life as a poz nonbinary Black artist has not been an easy one, but still, Smith has been granted lots of money and time and connections to develop their ideas and be heard, so it’s a bit disappointing to read poems from a dude in their 30s still writing about “three soulmates” that they lost. The essay “My End of the World” about BIPOC relationships to nature, for example, merely seemed to catalog introductory talking points of Black and brown environmental thought. The highs in Bluff are great, but Danez sets a high bar for themself and at times I feel like they gets lost in the sauce, flinching when they could choose to grow into new territory.    

April Round-up ft adrienne marie brown, Dayna Patterson

WE WILL NOT CANCEL US / adrienne marie brown / 2020

What a challenging, compassionate book! I’m glad our social justice movements are amplifying voices as brave and nuanced as brown’s. I read this book in one sitting, and it took maybe two or so hours, carried through by her lucid and urgent writing, her asking the questions we need to consider to continue to grow the abolition movement.

I’ve grown a distaste for some of the prison abolitionist communities I’ve known, only because some seem to know much more about what they’re against than what they’re for. Sometimes they too gleefully launch obvious critiques against our current system while not actively seeking to build up alternatives to carceral justice. There are abolitionists who don’t give people in their own communities the resources and time to work through conflict or harm. Abolition demands that we build systems that truly care for and protect people, which means we need to get used to giving our time and mucking through the yuck of our comrades decision-making, traumas, and so forth to gain enough clarity to understand what needs to be healed, because that’s the only way to prevent violence instead of simply exiling it to another community.

I give this book a 5/5. I recommend it for anyone interested in social justice, social work, Black studies, feminism, and queer lit.

If Mother Braids a Waterfall / Dayna Patterson / 2020

Perhaps feeling limited by all the stereotypes and connotations of bitterness and fury that ride along with ex-Mormon, Patterson coins a new terminology and in doing so carves out a new space for herself in what she calls the post-Mormon. Becoming post-Mormon is a process of grieving, where Patterson writes letters to her ancestors in attempts to honor or decipher their legacies, where poignant moments in Mormon history are unfolded from their origami shapes, and where Patterson finds not only sorrow but relief. My favorite poems are “Still Mormon,” “Our Lord Jesus in Drag,” “When I Beach,” “Thirty-Three Reasons Why: A Partial List,” and “I Could Never Be a Jehovah’s Witness.”

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Mormon studies, the West, religion, and genealogy through verse. 3/5

The Desert Hides Nothing / Ellen Meloy and Stephen Strom / 2020

This book is precious for the way it helps others appreciate and understand the beauty of the Southwest in all its hot, sandy, and dry beauty. Quick vignettes of Meloy’s startlingly poetic prose seduce readers into the landscape with odes on flowers, remoteness, liquid silence, ancient sea beds and more. As someone who somewhat grew up hating our desert, Meloy’s words invite me in, tell me what to look for, help me see the richness where my eyes once only saw thirst and sunburn. Strom’s photographs invite deeper meditation and contemplation, at once realist and abstract. Anyone living in the Mountain West knows it’s immensely difficult to capture the beauty of this place on camera. Strom’s photographs have a detail and breadth that lulls your eyes to meander over its pixels. I’m grateful for this book and will be using it to help my friends understand the beauty in this stark, dehydrated place.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in landscape photography, the West, environmental literature, and poetry. 5/5

Index of Haunted Houses / Adam O. Davis / 2020

Fans of John Sibley Williams rejoice! Here comes another moody lyricist with an eye capable of seeing in the darkness. These poems read bullet-fast if you let them, passing by like ghosts, leaving you shifted—troubled and intrigued at the same time. There’s an interesting wrestle with the hauntings of racism in “Pacific Americana,” where the poet moans “Forgive us, History. We orphan everything we touch.” Those curious of whether or not they’d vibe with the poetics and imagery of this book, here’s a litmus test: Can you appreciate the haunted stillness of this image from “Ghost Story, 2020”:

The Earth a blue penny in a black pool.

My biggest beef with this collection is that when I interviewed Adam O. Davis for the Utah Book Festival in 2020, he seemed to imply that he didn’t really believe in ghosts. As someone who regularly communes with the religious, psychics, poets, spiritualists, and mystics, it seems clumsy to write a whole book using ghost as a lyric metaphor for your grief if you have not been haunted. The ghost seems boiled down to something abstract, rather than something visceral here.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in lyric poetry, contemporary American poetry, or someone who just needs something moody to play in the back of their skull.

The Rise of Kyoshi / F. C. Yee / 2019

The Rise of Kyoshi / F. C. Yee / 2019

Those protective of the Avatar universe have little to fear and much to look forward to in The Rise of Kyoshi. F. C. Yee grafts Kyoshi’s story skillfully onto the universe, exploring new possibilities in the world of bending, as well as developing an Avatar more vengeful and hardened than ever before seen. Unlike Avatars Yanchen, Kuruk, Roku, Aang, and Korra, Kyoshi is not easily identified as an Avatar and subsequently raised in the lap of luxury. She’s an orphan, who ends up working as a servant in service of Yun, a talented young earthbender mistakenly identified as the Avatar. Kyoshi doesn’t receive the training and support Avatars are supposed to receive and she is forced to break many traditions in her struggle to survive. Gone is the privilege and naivete of Korra. Gone is the commitment to tradition and peacefulness of Aang. In its place, we have an Avatar familiar with the struggles of the most downtrodden and overlooked. Instead of elite bending masters, Kyoshi’s first lessons as an Avatar are with a gang of criminals she joins for protection. In battle, Kyoshi is predictably sloppy, except when she accesses the Avatar state. This seems appropriate for someone with her lack of training. Her first major villain is Jianzhu, an earthbending master whose grip on the Earth Kingdom and whose worldly standing make him a powerful political force. Rather than confront Jianzhu to bring him to justice for his war crimes, Kyoshi wants to murder him in vengeance for murdering her mentor Kelsang and getting Yun killed by a spirit. Where other Avatars are motivated by justice and world peace, Kyoshi is at first motivated by her own survival and safety.

Kyoshi is strong-willed and risk-taking yet feels distinctly different than Korra. Unlike Korra, Kyoshi is not much of an idealist. Unlike Aang, who feels innately innocent and pure at his core, Kyoshi lost her innocence early and has no problem getting her hands dirty. So far, Kyoshi is shaping up to be my favorite Avatar because of her sense of practicality and determination (getting things done by any means necessary), her principledness (her loyalty to those in her circle), and her toughness as she grunts and hobbles her way through pain. Kyoshi has the energy of a cornered fox.

While it is true that The Rise of Kyoshi features more violence than typically featured in Avatar, Yee did a great job preserving the cute anime comedy of the television series. For those curious about the violence, early on, Jianzhu uses bending to make small rocks serve as bullets. A few deaths happen in this first book.

Lastly, The Rise of Kyoshi does an excellent job navigating queerness. Whereas the Legend of Korra only softly hints at its queerness, Kyoshi engages it head on. The reader watches Kyoshi navigates what it means in real time as her relationship becomes known to others.

I recommend this book to all Avatar fans, anyone interested in YA and fantasy, especially with LGBTQ+ representation.

After Rubén by Francisco Aragón

Foremost among the writers whose work has showed me the most about intimacy and pace is Francisco Aragón. You cannot read a Francisco Aragón poem in a rush. As someone raised on slam, hip-hop, and the beats—you know, on a verse known to Howl—I needed a writer like Aragón to teach me how to slow down and really pay attention to a moment.

In After Rubén, Aragón braids his careful reflections with lo-fi remixes of Rubén Darío poems. I say, lo-fi, because Aragón’s English translations of Darío poems don’t try to preserve the rhyme and rhythm that make the poems magical in Spanish, but rather frequently breaks up stanzas and even lines to make you linger on each phrase. This gives the poems an intimate, relaxed lo-fi quality. Aragón’s “Symphony in Gray,” for example, begins:

Like glass

the color of mercury

it mirrors the sky’s

sheet of zinc, the pale gray

a burnish splotched

Whereas the original poem begins with the noun “el mar,” letting you know that Darío is describing the sea, here we do not get an explicit hint of the sea, until the fifth stanza, where “leaden waves crest / collapse—seeming / to groan near the docks.” In the translation, we are too close to the object to see the whole; note the short lines, really breaking each image down piece by piece. The effect is to create an almost hyper-real version of the original, which in this case compliments the intent of the original: to draw the reader through hypnotic shades of gray.

The collection generously includes the Spanish versions of Darío’s work in the back of the book, allowing word nerds to flip between the English and Spanish versions and savor the different nuances between form and diction, as well as a non-fiction essay discussing his relationship to Darío’s work. In the essay, Aragón explains how his mother and father had, despite their limited education, memorized Darío poems from their schooling in Central America, which they cherished and passed down to Aragón. This collection is Aragón’s way of preserving Darío’s work for another generation of Latinx writers and re-introducing him to the English canon. While I have known about Darío from my forays into Spanish literature, I deeply appreciate Aragón’s ability to take his dramatic, virtuosic voice and make it seem down-to-earth and plainspoken. Aragón has offered me a completely new window into his work.

Aragón’s own work doesn’t play second fiddle to Darío’s in this collection, either. Rather, Aragón carefully sets Darío up as a queer Central American elder and by the end of the collection, the relationship between them feels spiritual. Darío and Aragón strengthen one another in this collection. Whereas Aragón mines aspects of Darío’s life, line, and legend to speak to the present, he also uses his own openness about his queerness to open up this once silenced aspect of Darío’s life and work. In “Winter Hours”/”De Invierno,” Aragón transforms an image of Carolina into an image of Amado, and in “I Pursue a Shape”/”Yo Persigo Una Forma…”, Aragón transforms an image of Venus de Milo into an image of the David. Darío was closeted during his lifetime. As Aragón writes in an essay in Glow of Our Sweat, he himself was once shy about his sexual orientation, but has moved towards highlighting and being open about his queerness as a way of denouncing homophobia. These on-and-off-the-page moves on Aragón’s part are acts of inter-generational healing, creating a path for future queer artists of color to authentically present themselves to the world and define themselves on their own terms.

Lets put it another way: In my favorite poem in the collection, “Nicaragua in a Voice,” Aragón writes,

More than the poems

—the fruits that sang

their juices; dolls, feverish,

dreaming of nights,

city streets—for me it was

the idle chat between the poems:

cordial, intimate almost…

like a river’s murmur

as if a place—León,

Granada—could speak,

whistle inhabit

a timbre… as if, closing

my eyes, I had it again

once more within reach:

his voice—my father

unwell, won’t speak.

In After Rubén, Aragón finds a way to retrace many voices that were once crushed, once silenced, whether they belong to his father or one of the greatest Latin American poets in millennia. And that is a reward worth “more than the poems.”