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084) Now We're Getting Somewhere by Kim Addonizio, finished on August 27
I only knew Kim Addonizio from a very short story and its accompanying photo—but that was enough for me to remember her name and to allow the back of the book to hook me.
I love this collection. The poems are sharp and vernacular. They're recursive in interesting ways (references to Keats, sonnet-like sonnets) and they speak with complexity without pushing away. I enjoyed it immensely. I should have carried a pencil and then I could now be quoting lines.
I did not however. Alas.
Incidentally, I picked this up because it was in my 40ish-strong collection of recent collections that I've been acquiring from my neighbor's Little Free Library (everybody hopes she'll write them a review). For the first time, I dropped this stack of books on my AP kids, just to see what they would think. I'd assumed they would find the poems oppressive and impossible, but they settled right in and read. I had to interrupt them after an hour so we could talk about what they'd discovered. I was hella impressed, to be honest.
Good job, poets.
I only feel bad sneaking this one out for myself.
(Monday it goes back on the shelf for next time.)
085) I Am Young by M. Dean, finished on August 30
Is it a novel? Is it a short story collection?
Sure.
It walks that line in a slightly more interesting way, however. All the stories are connected thematically (young people in love, with music) as they stretch over the Twentieth Century. One story in particular keeps getting revisited (they meet at a Beatles concert, they end up living together, they end up separated, they keep bumping into each other as Beatles die), largely in the form of letters written (or, finally, not written) to each other, their lives in parallel. Between these looks in, we visit other characters who struggle with mussy relationships.
Anyway, I liked it fine. It did some interesting things with form and color, but I rather doubt I'll remember it. Here the moment after a sudden wedding that should not have happened:
under a week
086) The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye presented by Sonny Liew, finished on August 31
HOLY SMOKES, YOU GUYS.
So, first, I loved this book. It's the story of a Singaporean comics artist who has spent his entire life struggling to do great work without money or acclaim. He tries on style after style and, although he executes them all with excellence, he ends up, to my Western eyes, as merely derivative of Tezuka of Pong or MAD or Carl Barks. But although he's borrowing other artists' vernacular, his uniquely Singaporean use of his talents is mindboggling. You want him to find success, even if the recognition comes too little too late ala Jack Kirby. His 1988 visit to San Diego Comic-Con International is particularly heartbreaking.
And through it all, Sonny Liew is our guide. It helps to have a native.
Anyway, it's a beautifully designed volume, generously including swathes of Chan's art through the various stages of his career.
But, it was a brilliant book—until I finished speedreading the endnotes and the acknowledgements and realizing halfway through this was the same author bio on the back of the book—and then I read the copyright page and it changed from merely a brilliant book to a work of genius. But please, don't start with the copyright page. Don't start by reading anything out there about the book. Just start at the beginning and make your way through.
087) The Oven by Sophie Goldstein, finished on August 31
It's the distant future. Our heroes, man and wife, arrive at some galactic outpost to live in a trailer park where they will be free to live in the old way. To farm and have children. It's a wild and alien existence for them, even if to us it seems only fifty years past.
Of course, the plot thickens, etc.
I love the orange monochrome of the art. I like the simple character designs—one character always has closed eyes, like a Syd Hoff character. The book is very short, but it finds depth in its ambivalences.
088) Witchlight by Jessi Zabarsky, finished on September 3
Here's a fantasy novel that knows what themes are important to it but pushes them so hard that it confuses whatever the point was supposed to me. Which is too bad. Witchlight has plenty of cool and interesting elements (my favorite is the candle) but the hiccups in worldbuilding result in a largely confusing exercise.
The best example of what I'm talking about is its excision of men. Except at the very beginning and a couple moments near the end, there are no male characters. All characters are either female or female-adjacent genderqueer. Which could be fine, but then, with the introduction of a male character at the end who inflicts violence and it's supposed to mean something, the meaning is muddled. I could provide a couple interpretations but they would be contradictory.
I'm sure reading Witchlight will give the YA segment it's targeting some good feelings, but intellectually it's a bit vapid.
089) Loverboys by Gilbert Hernandez, finished on September 3
This takes place in the same town as Marble Season although it's decidedly less kid-friendly. It deals with a divorced-woman stereotype. In this case, a teacher starts sleeping with men who were here students in their recent high-school past. It's a complicated thing. The most serious of them is the son of the widow who ran off with her husband, for instance.
Some of the moments near the end felt very familiar but I don't have a record of reading this book. Maybe it was excerpted in a Best American Comics.
I do love how Gilbert's smalltown stories feel so real while maintaining the ability to incorporate fantastical elements—sometimes big, sometimes small.
Previously . . . . :
