No Sweet Without Brine by Cynthia Manick

    My favourite poem in Cynthia Manick’s No Sweet Without Brine is “A Particular Truth About Grown Folks’ Grits.” I’m sure you’ve seen poems that use seasons as a framing device to depict the passage of time and growth of a narrator. Manick here uses a similar frame, but combines it with formative moments of eating grits. Here is the poem in its entirety:

I have eaten grits in the summer.
Boiled the water first, prepping for a type
of colorless baby, not too far from sun-
flower seeds and peanut shells.

What it must feel like to be salt,
a wooden spoon knowing there is beauty
in the life of flowers — no I mean
natural things with a “best used by” or

expiration date, as if we’re born waiting

to go back to ground — no I mean Disney talks
about the circle-of-life but no character

has both parents alive enough to pay rent.

I have added grits to barely black pots

in fall, after hearing a blues melody of debris

and gauze, a woman, and her dog. My half-

southern heart is a bruise shaped like daffodils.

My half-southern heart is full of names

shaped like smiles. The best cooking pot,

on the stove’s front left eye, takes all
the ugly and all the song.

I have filled a plate in spring with grits
and mushrooms, or my mother’s salmon patties
that taste like an eclipse — or catfish dropped
off by Frankie J cause he always has a hat
turned to the side. I have sat on cartons, stoops.

lawn chairs, sofa arms, and kitchen tables filled

with ceramic napkin holders and fake succulents.

I have spooned up years of grown-folk business
while keeping company with the moon. (42-43)

There are a number of elements to the poem that I think work really well. First, there are some great continuities between stanzas. The first stanza discusses sun-flower seeds and the second refers to the “beauty in the life of flowers.” Similar echoes in the separated stanzas offer a great throughline as the speaker reaches new levels of maturity. I also like the way the speaker interrupts herself with contradictions and possibilities. To me, that seems a useful device to parallel her deepening understanding of the world. The second stanza in particular interrupts with “no I mean” and the second occurrence is one of my favourite lines in the collection: “no I mean Disney talks / about the circle-of-life but no character / has both parents alive enough to pay rent.” What a great, dark, pithy line.

    In the third stanza, there’s another echo of seeds coming to flower, albeit with a hint of darkness: “My half-/southern heart is a bruise shaped like daffodils.” It’s somewhat worth noting that the flowers are distanced a little from authenticity: we don’t get a flower directly, but instead a bruise shaped like a flower. The final stanza goes even further—away from nature, away from the body—”ceramic napkin holders and fake succulents.”

    I particularly like the blend of the grounded and the fantastical. We’re grounded with the tangible reality of the food, but it is juxtaposed with ideas like “salmon patties that taste like an eclipse,” a synesthetic idea that is undermined by yet another option (“catfish”). I also like the way the poem adds life to the lifeless: “The best cooking pot, / on the stove’s front left eye, / takes all / the ugly and all the song.”

    I’ve spent a significant chunk of this review commenting on one particular poem because to me it represents the best of Manick’s work. 

    There’s a second poem that I would quote because it’s the second time this year that I’ve read a book where I find something I wrote first years ago. By no means am I accusing these other authors of stealing my ideas, but it’s starting to weird me out. Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades has a passage about how wind chimes are the sound of death, which was the premise of one of my published poems. Manick’s poem “Requiem for Sea and Chains” has a line that reads, “count heartbeats and swallow / mouthfuls of dusk” (59). I wrote a poem with the title “mouthfuls of dusk” about 12 years ago. I can’t remember if it was published, but I’m just very weirded out by these echoes of my past poems creeping up on me.

    In any case, Manick’s collection No Sweet Without Brine was a reasonably engaging read, but I felt I lacked connection to it. The poems are often about a page or less and I found that by the time I was engaged in the poem it had already passed. The other piece of this is that I am not likely the intended audience for the work. I hate to contribute to the discourse of white reviewers commenting on the lack of relatability of Black writers. That is such a nonsense perspective, so I hope not to reinforce it here. That said, there are a significant number of references to Black experiences that I am unfamiliar with. I miss out on the cultural references, and it is my own failure to engage that means I passed over these poems quickly. I often missed the evocative symbolic or allusive qualities of the poems.

    Conversely, Manick’s work is wonderfully unapologetic. I appreciate that it does not cater itself to me, specifically, and that the poems have such a personal touch and intimacy. There’s a kind of communal focus in the experiences she shares, replete with local references and names of specific people as if they were our neighbours. It gives the poems a sense of hyperrealism that is difficult to ignore. The same is true, too, for the series of numbered self-portrait poems that Manick includes in the collection, made even more real by the fact that there are missing numbers. It’s a nice subtle commentary on the continuity and discontinuities of our identities and the gaps that don’t make the final cut in our self-curation.

    —I need to interrupt my own review here. I was flipping through the book to look for some other sample poems that would document some of its core components. I flipped randomly to a poem called “3 am and the Moon is Curled like a ‘C’”, which is an enjoyable poem in its own right but BAM lo and behold! there’s a repetition of the line “mouthfuls of dusks.” What are the odds that I would open to that random page with that random line that I randomly wrote years ago. What the heck!!!

    Anyway, No Sweet Without Brine has some good poems in it. Many of their central conceits were out of my frame of reference, but the personability and realism of the poems are effective draws. There’s an understanding of the craft that explores identity and place in clever ways through subtle echoes in between stanzas and across poems. It’s worth the read, but it is not likely going to be the standout poetry collection for me this year.

Happy reading! 

The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi

This book is a lurid and prurient piece of fiction. I don’t think my sense of humour is bleak enough to see the “diabolical fun” or the “funny [and] farcical” book the blurbs on the back advertise. Hanif Kureishi’s novella The Nothing is a miserable nightmare.

I see this novella as somewhat of a departure from Kureishi’s work, which I’d previously considered as being focused on the challenges of a postcolonial Britain. For instance, a number of his plays and short stories focus on the immigrant experience of assimilation and second generation immigrants wanting to reclaim their cultural heritage. 

Here, though, the concept is much different. The Nothing focuses on an infirm old man, Waldo, a generally well-praised filmmaker on his way out, winning “lifetime achievement awards” as a polite goodbye. He is married to a younger Punjabi wife, Zenab (Zee), and the first scene of the book is Waldo listening through the wall as she has sex with their friend Eddie. There’s a masochism to the scene that compels Waldo to want to hear more, diving into the pain with the deluded belief that by bringing himself closer to the source of his pain he can gain mastery over it. As such, Waldo seems to engineer situations to allow the affair to continue and to gather more and more evidence (or, at the very least, engage in some cuckoldistic voyeurism).

Following the first scene, the book is an episode revenge plot replete with complex mind games and psychological nuance. At least initially, Waldo seems to actively court Eddie on Zee’s behalf and manufactures scenarios that allow their intimacy. It is implied that he has held onto hedonism from the 60s and that he revels in the thrills of the novel—as such, he’s willing to be betrayed as a distorted kind of pleasure [think also Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom]. In any case, Waldo allows the couple to continue their amorous trysts so that he can listen, listen with his hearing aid, and eventually film them in his own kind of self-abuse. There’s a brutal scene in which Waldo is consulting his friend Anita, who accuses him of being paranoid. Waldo demands that she root through Eddie’s things and they find sexually explicit photos of other women and, I think, Zee. It’s a scene that churns the stomach in its raw depiction of paranoia and jealousy. It’s a moment Waldo is forced to confront the facts that the line between pleasure and pain is essentially indecipherable and that we cannot master our sorrow by exposing ourselves to it.

The novel is also a novel about devotion, though. Waldo can accept Zee’s infidelity; his wheelchair-bound body is incapable of much more than staring at her privates or using his mouth on her breasts. What Waldo cannot accept is that Zee is not completely devoted to him; he demands that her love be absolute. It’s a cringeworthy perspective that he demands her complete commitment to him, no matter how awful he is to her, which is reversed later on when Eddie refuses to do what Zee demands of him. I won’t spoil that moment, but it is a powerful one that reinforces just how awful every character in this book is.

Waldo’s philosophy of pleasure demands that he and Zee never have sex the same way twice, and he is seemingly a hedonist until he realizes that Zee is not absolutely devoted to him. He can live with her pleasure until her love is no longer exclusive. At that point, he starts sabotaging the lovers in increasingly twisted ways. I admit that I find the psychological nuances of the book somewhat difficult to follow (for instance, how Waldo gives Eddie money as a form of revenge against Zee). I suppose I’m too direct for these kind of games. That said, there are a number of tense and compelling moments where the screw is turned in obscurely villainous ways.

In one scene, Waldo is pressing Zee for details and he critizes Eddie. She defends her lover by justifying his behaviour with a recounting of his past. As it turns out, Eddie, as a young man, was sexually assaulted repeatedly by his teacher. The teacher continues to abuse him even years later and yet Eddie still feels compelled to meet with his former teacher. The chapter reads as a kind of short story of its own and escalates impressively. A scheme emerges where Eddie and his friend threaten to expose the teacher and their blackmail drives the instructor to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge. Eddie lives with the guilt and has not told the story to anyone else. Of course, Zee tells the story to humanize Eddie and, while Waldo does not initially believe it, he banks the information for later revenge.

Waldo exploits Eddie’s abuse later on in the novel. When Eddie and Zee are out at a restaurant having a great time and partying, Waldo calls and arranges for a waiter to deliver Eddie a message, claiming he will love it. The waiter goes to Eddie and whispers the teacher’s nickname for him, inspiring terror that this abuser is reaching him from beyond the grave. It’s a secret code that only a few people could know: Eddie, Zee, the deceased teacher, and only one other friend who is sworn to secrecy. The sheer terror the word inspires in Eddie is awful and forms a glorious parallel to his own torment of his abuser.

Without getting into the details too much, Waldo tries to expose Eddie as a fraud who exploits an array of women for financial gain. In a somewhat obscure little scheme, Eddie seems to have marked Zee as a last big grift, presumably waiting for Waldo’s inevitably prompt death to profit by proxy from Waldo’s will. It’s actually a little more sinister than that, since Zee and Eddie actively plot Waldo’s death. Waldo, though, tries to stay one step ahead of them and creates a final documentary about his own murder, which he forces Eddie to watch in a sadistic turn (Waldo really rides the line of sadomasochism, hey?). The climax of the book is pretty intense in that respect and Eddie is placed in a position between two contradictory forces, primed to but unable to murder his rival.

I would describe the novel as engaging, but not necessarily long lasting. The dialogue in the book is terse, probably more so than would be expected of a playwright. The characters are vile. The more enduring themes of adjusting to postcolonial life (there is some of this with Zee leaving her restrictive family and children behind…) give way to psychologically complex, if repugnant, considerations. I powered through the book in a day or two, but it’s not one that I think I’d be excited to revisit. It’s a kind of noir in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, but the elegantly dark humour of Nabokov is replaced here with more crass and abrasive vocabulary. 

I usually end with “happy reading!”, both an imperative statement and a kind of mantra. For this book, I don’t think that’s the best descriptor. It’s more like spending a few hours with the most miserable couple you know and then wanting to avoid them forever—that is, unless there’s a film adaptation (which I would definitely still watch). Happy reading?

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

I was going to start this review with an anecdote about my own moral outrage towards a once-inspirational artist. I typed a few sentences about a particular band, then erased them. I wrote and cut out a part about some poet that disappointed me. I considered a particular actor and then backspacedbackspacedbackspaced. Truth is, if I continued in that vein, we’d shortly have a laundry list of abusers, misogynists, and predators and Claire Dederer’s fantastic book would have been unjustly drowned out by my own ranting.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma explores a question that is increasingly critical in our contemporary discourse: what do we do with the art of monstrous men (and women)? I am completely confident that everyone reading this review (all four of you) has had an experience where learning about an artist’s biography has tainted your view of the work and you’ve had to decide: do you keep watching? Do you re-read that classic? Do you write a scathing review? What is our capacity for blindspots?

I really admire the tact and nuance that Claire Dederer brought to this work. In the opening of the book, she admits that she began her research by looking to experts to help dictate whether or not we should still watch the movies of, in her examples, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. I admit that I turned to this book from a similar impulse. I wanted to know how to respond to the horrors of contemporary society and their relationship with art.

Dederer does not profess to be an expert (though I’d argue she is), but there are three main facets of the argument that I find particularly useful in considerations of flawed art. She does not separate the art from the artist, necessarily, but she does separate ethics from emotion. One of the key pillars of her argument is that when we are outraged at an artist, we experience an emotional response rather than an ethical one. It’s a tricky argument to make, but I find it plausible, and it does establish the capacity to discuss “cancel culture” in a different way.

A second key pillar of the argument is that artists’ work is stained by their biography, which is an involuntary and amorphous experience. Dederer’s work really resonates with me because she has such a strong grasp of literary theory, and she explicitly references the New Critics, who famously wanted to bracket artworks from their creators. Instead, the focus is on the internal logic of the artwork and whether the form and content function together and provide everything we need in order to appreciate it. Dederer exposes the limitations of New Criticism with the discussion of the Stain. Borrowing from Stephen Fry’s response to Richard Wagner, Dederer discusses The Stain of an author’s biography leaves on their work and affects our understanding of it. It’s like a tapestry with a stain that you can’t ignore—but you can try to appreciate the other parts.

I can hear Dederer’s critics rejecting the separation of the art and the artist. Dederer, though, offers two brilliant takes to dismantle that argument. For the first, she talks about how her own experience of art is already hard-won and how she refuses to let beauty be taken away from her: “My own ability to experience pleasure, specifically pleasure arising from consuming art, was imperilled all the time — by depression, by jadedness, by distraction. And now I was finding I must also take into account biography: an artist’s biography as a disruptor of my own pleasure.” There’s a certain kind of privilege in being able to simply let go of great art with a morally objectionable creator. The second piece that I find really compelling is her discussion of Mark Fisher. She refers to Postcapitalist Desire and Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher discusses the idea of recycling as a bit of a scam. Corporations who produce massive amounts of waste put the responsibility on individuals to recycle rather than changing their own practices or taking on the financial burden. Dederer draws the parallel with “cancel culture.” We can opt to not listen to a certain musician, we can choose not to stream a TV show, but ultimately that does not change the practices that allow rampant misogyny and abuse. The way she phrases the argument is perfect, but in my own words I would say that consumerism puts us into a position of divisiveness and supposedly ethical consumerism (no such thing) won’t get us out of this mess.

So in that respect, there are a lot of arguments that Dederer makes throughout Monsters that I find persuasive. Her reading of texts is stunning, as well. There’s a whole chapter about Nabokov that I find offers another brilliant reading of Lolita (showing once again how it is such a rich text!). You’ll be pleased to know that Nabokov, for all we can tell, is not a monster in real life—only in fiction. Dederer also gives a rich reading of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen films that add to an appreciation of their beauty. There are readings of Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, and Raymond Carver—but I have less experience with their work, so it wasn’t as resonant. 

More than that, Dederer is funny. Her prose is simply fantastic, with stunning turns of phrase—especially when she is insulting people. Some of the phrases that she applies to monsters are so hilariously scathing that I would never want to be on her bad side. She reviews The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. Incidentally, The Garden of Eden is, in my opinion, an underappreciated novel. Hemingway doesn’t do much for me, but I have a good memory of The Garden of Eden, which I learned was originally over 1000 pages and later abridged to about three hundred by an editor. But Dederer’s review is simply fantastic: “I’m here to say I’ve read it and it seems to be 90% about people getting haircuts.” She’s not wrong. She continues to discuss about the “ostensibly frivolous preoccupation with appearances” but how it’s a preoccupation that is worth considering in terms of gender. The central character is being feminized by his wife Catherine and I think there’s something interesting there, given Hemingway’s reputation as a man’s man. It’s worth considering how this text offers a glimpse into Hemingway from a different angle.

Throughout Monsters, there is a discussion of what constitutes a genius and how men are able to engage in their craft despite (because of?) their monstrosity. Dederer makes a comparison between men and women in terms of monstrosity, with a woman’s prime monstrosity being abandoning or not having children. There’s an extensive discussion of how children hinder or alter genius, which is interesting, but drifts a little farther away from the moral quandary of the audience.

I appreciate, also, the tenderness of Dederer’s approach to Raymond Carver and the problem of redemption. We want to admire beauty, of course, but the capacity for forgiveness (through the recognition of the monstrousness in all of us) takes centre stage towards the end of the book. I really admire the humanizing principle of Monsters and allows it to serve as a wonderful testament to the idea of being hard on systems but soft on people.

There’s a fascinating section of the book that deals with antisemitism. Dederer documents Winifred Wagner in an interview, commenting on politics and art. Dederer notes that “to [Winifred Wagner’s] mind, things were not only better but realer in the old days when we didn’t pretend politics were so important, what she calls ‘the fuss.’” I think the anecdote offers some good insight into what is happening currently. Dederer explains how Wagner’s daughter-in-law “presents her antisemitism as a kind of realness” and how she and Hitler “used to laugh about all the fuss.” Winifred notes that she does not care about politics, she complains about the intellectualization and politicization of art, and she sincerely believes the racist things she says are true. Dederer notes that “she believes she is only saying what’s true and those who don’t say it don’t know it, or are simply not admitting the truth.” In Dederer’s words: “Like a good fascist, she believes she and her kind are the ones who are free of politics—free of ‘fuss’ [...] There is no regret, no sorrow, no compassion, no understanding: there is only this devastating impassivity interrupted by mischievous, chilling smiles.” In all of this, I see a funhouse mirror of Alex Jones, Q-Anon supporters, Trump supporters, and other conspiracy theorists. These people that claim that there are truths that you just don’t know about—but of course, this isn’t political. Reality isn’t political (or so they say).

To the credit of the interviewer, he interrupts Winifred Wagner to offer the quotation from Walter Benjamin: “Thus, fascism aestheticizes politics, and communism answers with the politicizing of art.” It’s a great way to interrupt this discourse that aims to suggest art as an apolitical haven.

When I consider the implications for Dederer’s argument, I find myself once again enmeshed in the discussion of whether it’s worth reading / watching / listening to artists that have done harm. I still have the same questions: is it different if the artist is alive? Is it different if I don’t pay for it? As much as Dederer exposes how we can’t simply bracket all biography, I do think there is a difference between consuming art that is created by someone awful but is beautiful versus art that is created by someone awful and also shows that awfulness. Comedy might be a good example here—a transphobic person in real life gets on stage and tells a transphobic joke—the content itself is reprehensible.

Dederer offers an amusing tone here in discussing Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, in which a middle-aged man dates [I use this word here, but manipulates and abuses is probably a better descriptor] a highschooler. “The really astonishing thing about this scene,” Dederer writes, “is its nonchalance: nbd I’m fuckin’ a highschooler.” She comments on the way that Allen as a filmmaker is “fascinated with moral shading except when it comes to this particular issue: the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics [...] suddenly becomes a dummy. [...] One senses Allen performing a kind of artistic grooming of the audience or maybe even of himself. Just keep saying it’s okay until somehow, miraculously, it becomes okay.” This would be a clear instance where the film itself is promoting a message that is itself morally reprehensible: the author’s biography is immaterial.

I highly recommend this book. To me, it’s the definitive book on this highly contemporaneous and fraught issue. Dederer is a model of insightful reading, thinking, and writing. Her style is precise, entertaining, and clear. I love how she incorporates highly theoretical influences into a practical context and offers personal anecdotes that are as intimate as they are relatable. It’s some really excellent work that is well-worth exploring, even when—maybe especially because—the issues of misogyny, abuse, sexual assault, and violence remain so pervasive in our media industry that it seems inescapable. Until the day that some non-problematic AI gets invented and we have no use for authors anymore, we should probably consider for ourselves how to best confront this issue of harmful artists and the beauty they nonetheless create.

Happy reading. May it be forever unfraught.