Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

Despite being just under eighty pages, Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai is surprisingly hard to summarize. It’s a book essentially about two lives: Julio’s, which doesn’t end, and Emilia, whose does. The two young scholars develop a relationship while studying for exams and part of the book is about the blooming and withering of their romances. It’s a simple ‘slice of life’ but I felt the book to be funny, tender, creative, and grounded.

The young Julio has two meaningful relationships—one with Emilia and, later, one with Maria. At the time in his life when he meets Emilia, we are told that “Julio has avoided serious relationships, hiding not from women but from seriousness, since by that point he knew that seriousness was every bit as dangerous as women, if not more so” (5). I like that idea of trying to avoid seriousness, and I can’t help but feel like Zambra’s approach to writing is infused with a humour that puts theory into practice. For instance, there’s a funny part in which both Julio and Emilia have lied about reading Proust and have to act as though they’ve read In Search of Lost Time. In another part, Julio pretends that he has become a translator for a writer to impress Maria and that lie leads him into inventing a book and lying about its premise, only for him to be thwarted by the truth. There’s a real comic element in Bonsai that is hard to resist but also that elevates the darker threads of the text. 

I’ve left out the second half of the passage about Julio avoiding seriousness. The passage continues as follows: “Julio knew he was doomed to seriousness, and he tried, stubbornly, to thwart his serious fate, even as he stoically awaited that frightening and inevitable day when seriousness would come to settle in his life for good” (5). Zambra balances the light and the dark, the satire and the serious. The ending of the book, which I won’t spoil, concludes on a somber note and driving around in a 30, 000 peso cab ride. It’s touching and beautiful and ‘serious’—it is, in Zambra’s words elsewhere, “a light tale that becomes heavy” (13).

I think the real core of the book is the relationships between the characters, who are relatable and likable in all of their flaws. Zambra has a particular talent for capturing the spirit of young love. For instance, when Emilia and Julio start their relationship it “was a relationship riddled with truths, with personal disclosures that quickly built up a complicity they strove to see as unassailable” (13). That characterization rings true—there are those couples that come to orbit only one another and there’s a sort of metanarrative about the writing of their lives: “This is the story of two student enthusiasts of the truth, aficionados of deploying words that seem like truth, of smoking endless cigarettes, and of enclosing themselves within the violent complacency of those who believe themselves better and purer that others, than that immense and detestable group called everyone else” (13). The grandiose language serves to both elevate and belittle them at the same time. I liked that because it feels so much the way I ought to have been treated as a young lad.

In another scene of the young couple, Emilia’s friend does not like Julio and says that she has changed since being with him. Emilia defends her relationship, possibly not believing her own words: “Why would you want to be with someone if they didn’t change your life?” (18). Zambra’s description of the incident is that “She said that, and Julio was there when she said it: that life only made sense if you found someone who would change it, who would destroy your life as you knew it. Anita found the theory a little dubious, but she didn’t argue. She knew that when Emilia used that tone there was no point in contradicting her” (18). The grand pronouncements of lovers serve as the groundwork for the book and put Bonsai alongside the literary precedents it references (Madame Bovary, for instance). It feels connected; classic in its own way.

I also have to say, I really like the way the book we read has interjections and uncertainties from the narrator and comes to parallel the book that Julio improvises when “translating” from a successful author. There’s a haphazardness to the narrative that mimics Julio’s own unprompted inventions. Even the fact that the story is not strictly about Julio and Emilia but also jumps to Julio and Maria seems unplanned. The quick transition into new narratives and the short chapters places us in the middle of invention.

I don’t have a ton to say about this book, but I really liked it. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and the voice of the writing and it’s always impressive when an author can navigate two distinct tones (somber and comic) and make me feel for the characters so deeply in fewer than a hundred pages. I commend Zambra’s Bonsai—looking forward to reading more of his work soon.

Happy reading!

Are You Mad At Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You by Meg Josephson

  It feels like most people I know would benefit from reading this book. Either that, or I overestimate how normal the feelings explored in this book are. How many times do we find ourselves asking the titular question of Meg Josephon’s Are You Mad At Me? The book is part self-help and part psychology book, outlining the unhealthy compulsions so many of us (am I projecting?) feel: perfectionism, self-doubt, overcommitment, and so on. The experience of reading the book was pretty wild because I started off taking a lot of notes and decided to stop suddenly when I realized there were too many relatable quotations to document them all.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze—but the central focus of Josephson’s work is on the fawn response. For some of us, when we face a threat, our nervous system compels us towards appeasement and Josephson challenges us to consider the question: “when did I learn this was helpful or protective?”. Something I appreciate about Josephson’s approach is that she does not reject the feelings that arise or send us into shame spirals over how we should behave. Instead, she reinforces a narrative in which we thank the part of our brain that is trying to protect us before considering next steps. 

When we consider fawning behaviours in adult life, Josephson identifies the following: -Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you -Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries, and then feeling resentful -Avoiding conflict at all costs -Constantly fearing getting in trouble or being seen as “bad” -Constantly fearing that you are bad and you’re just fooling everyone -Constantly seeking external approval or validation -Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else -Feeling hypervigilant of peoples’ emotions and moods -Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel heard or understood -Feeling like everything is your fault and then overapologizing -Being indecisive because you don’t want to disappoint anyone or because you genuinely don’t know what you like or prefer -Not trusting yourself to make decisions -Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them -Never feeling good enough -Feeling unworthy of your accomplishments -Constantly feeling like you’re performing and trying to impress others and prove yourself to them -Feeling like you’re a chameleon in relationships

You can treat this like a quiz in Cosmopolitan and I’ll let you check off your own cues while I add up the 13 I count for myself. Again, I think it’s worth noting that Josephson thanks the brain for its protective habits. They may be maladaptive, but the intention is to keep ourselves regulated.

Throughout the book, Josephson goes through some case studies from her clinical experience. She writes about “Sophie.” Sophie “spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.” She discusses being an adult that “overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful.” She “struggles to set boundaries and gets all of her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful.” I couldn’t help but think back to reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving, Homer’s desperate need to feel “useful,” and reflect on how I should probably not have identified so closely with his sentiment. Josephson then elaborates on Sophie being a parentified child—not everything is relatable directly to my experience. She talks about how Sophie “grew up to be a hyperindependent adult [who] feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens.” Josephson elaborates on how “Sophie got the message that she could receive love and attention by alleviating other people’s stress but now when she’s stressed or overwhelmed she feels like she needs to hide those feelings.” The passage continues, “No one ever thinks to check in on her because they assume she always is fine and has it together. She unconsciously seeks out romantic relationships in which she needs to mother her partner because that’s the dynamic that feels familiar to her but it leaves her resentful and exhausted.” She has a harsh inner critic that has been a stand-in for parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was caring for everyone else. Moreover, “she also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly.” Josephson’s list of descriptors is compelling as a kind of character study, but simultaneously hits a bit close to home in some of the mindsets of her clients. 

Carter is another compelling case study. Josephson talks about how Carter’s challenging emotions were discouraged or ridiculed by her parents and “she learned to believe that something was wrong with her for having such emotions.” In response, she “adapted by taking on the perfectionist role—she was the high achiever, the golden girl.” One detail in her story could have been lifted directly from my life: “She cried in middle school when she got an A on a history paper, instead of an A.” Just replace middle school with elementary school and history paper with presentation about classical composers. I haven’t engaged in enough self-reflection to really conceptualize this, but it felt true when I read that “she’s a charmer who morphs her personality to match that of whomever she’s with and wants to be liked by everyone, even if that means not always liking herself.” More apt for me is the sentence that follows it: “She’s terrified of making a mistake and of having people find out that she did.” For her, it was about heavy criticism while she was growing up, like when she accidentally broke a glass or missed a goal at soccer practice. Josephson continues: “She feels crippled by any sort of negative feedback because being seen as anything but perfect has felt entirely unsafe” and—here’s the really problematic stuff for me—”she needs people to think she’s always productive and if she hears someone walk through the door, she’ll quickly swap the TV remote for a book so they don’t think she was gasp relaxing. She’s very hard on herself and never feels like she’s doing enough. She walks around with a deep sense of shame for not being the perfect person she expects herself to be.” I think I’m revealing way too much of myself here, but I also bring it up because these characterizations felt like finding connection with these strangers. Josephson also considers the nuances of the catch-22 that Carter “often feels like she’s putting up a front so that people won’t see the messiness underneath” but that “as a result, she feels like people don’t know the real her.” Being flawless is an isolating place to be, but “she learned, ‘I need to be perfect to be loved.’” 

One of the fawning responses that I felt was most engrossing was the sense of chasing accomplishment and overextending. I hadn’t considered that drowning yourself in responsibilities is a protective experience, but one that doesn’t serve its victims long term. The fawn response, she says, “is about finding safety by doing more.” Josephson talks about the sense of accomplishment and the sense of relief and considers its implications. She starts off by talking about how “the inner critic, which is trying to protect you, tells you that no accomplishment is enough, because it’s stuck in a time when you had to constantly impress in order to achieve a sense of safety.” It’s a paradox. If you reached a point where you felt “good enough” the protective part would feel scared “because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.” Fawners often struggle with low self-esteem and so “no accomplishment is impressive.” If you are able to achieve it, then it couldn’t have been that hard, and this mindset leads you to “constantly undervalue your milestones.” There is no satisfying the inner critic, “who’s trying so hard to find safety through perfection.”

The reason I was initially drawn to this book is because I saw someone on TikTok post about the relationship between achievement and relief. It was this passage: “Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to complete to continue to prove yourself.” Ouch. Right in the heart. It seems so unfair that achievements can be so stripped of joy. It also creates contradictions for us in that when you receive compliments, it challenges our sense of unworthiness, and to maintain our sense of self, we push away such compliments. Another of Josephson’s figures, Ari, “wants to reject herself before others can reject her. She doesn’t think she’s enough, so it feels absolutely unbelievable to her when someone else thinks she is.” Yet, Ari also “desperately wants to be taken seriously” and “feels frustrated by her inability to accept praise.” The question remains: how can we learn to appreciate and celebrate our own achievements without that sense of guilt or unworthiness?

There’s another passage that feels true about ‘filling our cups.’ Josephson says, “Maybe it was impossible to receive nourishment without also receiving something that didn’t feel good, like being guilt-tripped or controlled.” The notion of receiving care and criticism in equal measure feels awful. Nourishment came with a price, and so we can’t resist nor fully absorb it, and no amount of reassurance or validation will feel like enough. External validation can never satisfy us, though: “True long term safety arises internally through validating our emotions, soothing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to receive validation from someone else.”

I can’t help but feel my review of Are You Mad at Me? has done little more than provide quotations and summarize some of the things I found relatable. I don’t think I’ve done very well considering the book as an aesthetic object. It was an informative one, for sure, and one that I connected with a lot.

Happy reading; happy healing!

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

        I’ve been continuing my journey of reading the books nominated for the International Booker Prize, which has brought me to the deceptively-covered A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. Despite the whimsy of the cover, the book is absolutely crushing. It’s essentially a book-length character study of Fanny, the Narrator’s friend, as he recounts their lifelong friendship, cut short by her death at forty-three years old.

In terms of events, there is not really much to tell. The book is primarily snapshots of their friendship, which are dripping in melancholic beauty. In one scene, the Narrator and Fanny are sitting on a hill and she is talking a mile a minute and the Narrator reflects on feeling exasperated but in retrospect misses her intense excitement. Later in life, the Narrator is on a trip with Fanny and her father and recalls being left out of their card game, which is both tragic to him but it’s also a moment when Fanny’s connection to the world is restored.

There are two main reasons that the book is so devastating to me. The first is that early on in the book you can infer that Fanny takes her own life, so every moment revealed in flashback is imbued with the sorrowful knowledge that the signs of depression are overlooked and the moments of joy are fleeting. The second reason the book is so devastating is because, despite the fact that we get to know Fanny so intimately, there is always a distance from her.

The Narrator opens the book with the notion that we are separated from one another and from ourselves. There’s a version of Fanny that stole a whimsical leopard-skin hat and has a fun personality, but that version of Fanny is inaccessible most of the time. Instead, the Narrator talks about it being like there’s a rock inside her. In talking to her, he does not know whether talk to Fanny A (the fun Fanny hidden behind the eyes of the other, the person that could be there) or Fanny B (the Fanny actually there, the stone). Serre’s depiction of the doubleness rings true and relatable. It’s deeply personal and profoundly moving.

It is also deeply philosophical. Essentially, Serre provides a narrative dramatization of a posthuman argument that none of us is singular. She provides some explicit discussion of that in the early pages of the book. The Narrator (or rather the Narrator of the Narrator) explains,

From a faint wavering, now and then, in Fanny’s gaze, or in one of her intonations. At moments like these, Fanny would be slightly off-balance for a second---and happily so. Slowly she would stare up in surprise at the Narrator puffing on his pipe like Maigret. So there were three of them now: the Narrator, Fanny the old friend with the crippling existence, and this other woman, the one in the hat, the jovial ringleted one hiding behind her curtain, whom it would have been unthinkable to mention, to simply set down at the table—that was strictly forbidden—but whom it was neither prohibited nor authorized to throw a lifeline to. (10)

The description provides an account of Fanny’s duality and it identifies that there are three of them: the Narrator, Fanny, and fun Fanny. There’s a bit of an oversight here, though. There are hints that even the Narrator is not singular. He narrates about himself in third person, as though from outside himself. On the following page, he admits, “No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I’ve never felt this with anyone but Fanny” (11). There’s a shift from third to first person within the unit of the sentence. The blend of the Narrator’s description and inner narration points to the fact that there is a different person inside him, too. As a narratological experiment, similar to Beckett for instance, the Narrator recognizes himself as not himself. The Narrator continues, “And if I examine my conscience [...] I know that I myself am that character, the writer’s secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within” (11). The Narrator is both a third person observer, a first person participant, and a fabrication of the author—the writer’s “secret twin.” The fact that the Narrator is different from Anne Serre in, if not in other things, at least in gender contributes to the sense of multiplicity for each identity. At the same time, the Narrator recognizes that what compels his actions is beyond him: “When my master cries out to me for a story, even if I’m accustomed to not answering him at once, playing hard to get because I’m not servile, I always respond in the end because I would get bored otherwise and because it’s my role in life” (11). The fatalism of the Narrator’s position adds that tinge of darkness; yes we are plural, no we are not in control of our multiple selves. 

Much later in the text, the Narrator questions his own significance. Fanny takes her life, and the Narrator wonders how he could have acted differently to prevent it. He starts to justify himself, too, by saying that surely he is not the only friend who had an impact on her. Then, yet another voice—a Narrator’s narrator—steps in with a direct address to the audience: “The idea he might be serving a fictitious writer had often occurred to him” (109). The fact that the writer is fictitious is another matter entirely, but then the text continues, “Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on him: to be a narrator is tricky enough to begin with, you’re in a very awkward spot really, for you are a stranger to someone you live inside” (109). Suddenly, the reader is implicated in the narration itself and the use of the pronoun “you” gets swapped in for the narrator where it would really make more sense to say “he is in a very awkward spot.” We are alienated to ourselves. There is a duality to our position. Serre writes, “In some ways it’s quite pleasant: you’re hidden, no one can get at you, you’re often idle, you have a good life” (109). Yet, “You take down what’s dictated to you by this person who perhaps imagines he’s a writer because he’s pretentious, and living in cloud cuckoo land, is out of his mind. In short, when you’re a Narrator you don’t really know exactly who you are working for” (109). Further, “this other character is there, with his ideas and his energy and his insufferable—almost dictatorial—authority, forcing you to string together sentences that, with your native genius as a Narrator, you lend a certain elegance to” (110). 

The motif of writing and narratological practices serve as an effective vehicle for a discussion of depression. Fanny embodies the plurality of being a character, a narrator, a writer, but is not able to control her own life: “what she would like no doubt is to live, to climb over the railing, cross to the other side of the screen; but how can she possibly do this when Fanny has placed her under ‘house arrest’” (11). She lacks the capacity to control her own whims—and we do not have the capacity to understand her.

The Narrator demonstrates how, when everyone is multiple, we almost never see the person for who they are in the moment and how we can only understand (or project) their true feelings retroactively. There’s a heartbreaking description of their friendship when Fanny is in a dark space:

“when your great friend whom you love dearly and with whom you get along so beautifully and laugh so much and share so many memories with, starts doing or saying strange or inappropriate things—not senseless things, just things that are slightly off base—the word ‘mad’ never occurs to you. You can’t find a word for it in fact—you who know a thing or two about words. You rack your brains and come up against a conundrum: someone with no suitable word to describe them.” (100)

At every turn, we encounter barriers. Barriers of knowing others. Barriers of language. We run into the inarticulable sorrow at the heart of it all. Really, this whole book is an attempt to articulate the inarticulable. The narrator continues on to say how Fanny herself cannot be described in language. If someone uses the word “schizophrenic,” for example, “she stiffens slightly,  and the moment the word is behind her [she] falls silent. She herself never utters the word [...] You find a way round the word; Fanny does, too. It’s a rock. She has that same image in her mind of a mad person, a madwoman” (100). It’s painful to not be able to articulate ourselves.

The book is profoundly sad and I loved it. Fanny’s suicidal depression is dark enough, but in addition, it’s sad that you never really get to know things about other people. We’re all at least doubled and the fact that we might be the joyful person stealing leopard-print hats or the person trapping and being trapped by the darkness we cannot overcome is haunting. In the final passages, the Narrator projects onto Fanny an account of her death. She feels a piece of eternity hanging off of her and only feels free of it in death, feeling liberated while everyone left behind on Earth imagines a way that they could possibly keep living.

A Leopard Skin Hat is its own piece of eternity; one I’ll likely hang onto myself.

Happy reading is the wrong phrase, but maybe keep reading.

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…

The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play by Alexander Kriss

  In 2023, I read Getting Gamers by Jamie Madigan, which uses psychological principles and experiments to explain why people who play video games play the way they do and how they engage with one another. I found it a really illuminating text and I’ve been looking for other texts that delve into analysis of video games, their impacts on player behaviour, and so on. To that end, I decided to read The Gaming Mind by Alexander Kriss. Kriss is a clinical psychology with an interest in video games, but his approach is largely the inverse of how Madigan approaches interpretations of gamer behaviour.

Rather than taking a look at how games influence our behaviour, Alexander Kriss holds up the mirror: how do our gaming behaviours reflect our other habits of mind? For instance, how does a woman’s obsession with Candy Crush speak to the lack of control she feels over her life? How does our relationship with violence impact how we engage with games?

The best part of the book—or at least the part I found most engaging—was the opening chapter: “Me, You, and Silent Hill 2.” The opening chapter establishes Kriss’ experience as a psychoanalyst and how he is made responsible for the “gamer kid” who needed help, and whose therapist-group-assigned moniker required deconstruction. Running parallel, Kriss establishes his own coming to terms with the “gamer” label for himself, beginning with his experience of playing Mist with his father, his coming into the Tomb Raider series and Ape Escape. While playing games, Kriss developed a friendship with another boy—one less interested in gaming—who later took his own life.

From there, the chapter discusses Silent Hill 2, which I already find deeply engrossing and rife with possibility for analysis. Kriss provides a beautiful account of the game’s haunting premise and analysis of the characters. What is really most compelling is Kriss’ discussion of the eight multiple endings of the game. To unlock different endings, there are different conditions, including inconsequential actions like how many times you inspect the photo of your deceased wife in your inventory. One of the endings is James, the main character, killing himself. To unlock that ending, you have to play the majority of the game at low health. Kriss explains how he could never play the game that way and never cope with the prospect of the central character killing himself at the end. It’s a stunning and sincere discussion of our relationship to depression and mental illness and the way our game behaviours can give a window into the player.

That first chapter wowed me. From there, the rest of the book was good but didn’t quite hit the same highs for me. Perhaps because the case studies are more focused on the patient rather than critique of games, or perhaps because the games referenced haven’t been part of my gaming repertoire. The chapters deal with violence, addiction, health, treatment of others in multiplayer games, and so on. There’s a lot to work with, but your enjoyment of the book will probably depend on what resonates with you at the personal level.

Either way: happy reading. Happy gaming!

From the Shoreline by Steffi Tad-y

         Hailing from Manila and residing in Vancouver, located in the territories of the Musquea, Squamis, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection of poetry, From the Shoreline, draws on a number of reference points related to place, race, and experience. It was really refreshing to see poems dealing with “Instapoet” topics in an actually poetic way. Tad-y elevates the types of observations found elsewhere by providing them with that necessary specificity to create a meaningful experience, which is especially impressive since the collection is only about fifty pages long.

I was drawn in early in the collection. The second poem in the collection, “Gising,” begins as follows: “I can’t remember / if it was barbed wire // or bits of beerglass / the bougainvillea towered over, // or an orange boomerang / then a scar under my eye” (4). I appreciate the violence of the image and all the possibilities for scarring. Even bougainvillea, which appears beautiful, is a thorny plant. The end result is the same: a scar under the eye. The fact that the origin of that scar is not really specified or clear reinforces the everydayness of these types of traumas. The lines that follow seem to offer a challenge to the glorification of these moments: “One day, I want to retire / from seeing only spectacle” (4). There’s a hopefulness that follows and sets an optimistic tone for the collection. The narrator wants to “Live long enough / to grow with [her] hands. // Press one’s fingers into the dirt. / Gather beans. Make of it a warm bowl. // Feed my child. / Muscle a cramped road” (4). In the middle of the poem, there is a short phrase that shifts the tone to an appreciatory, almost incantatory style. Tad-y writes, “This is my signal” (4). The rest of the poem celebrates her grandfather with specific details: “in a bucket hat, bobbing to ‘Purple Rain’” (4). There’s then a blazon of particularities: “Sunflowers from Sxόtsaqel / spring out of his car window. // A Basset Hound says hello. / Earlier, my nephew had a thread // around his two milk teeth. / His mother by the door” (4). Then, she continues to appreciate other seemingly mundane moments: “In our language, to wake up / rhymes with blessing. // The sun is / beginning to line my irises. // My niece, how she sings / “Baby Shark.” // What else can I tell you? / Let us go. // There is side-street parking. / The ticket machine // looks like a pair of binoculars / across an orchid mural. // Keys & raincoat are on the table. / I have been late all this time” (5). 

I’d like to comment on two echoes that I see in the work above. First, it’s hard not to hear an echo of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when you read “Let us go” in a poem. Rather than being crabs scuttling on the ocean floor, though, there are binoculars looking outward. There’s also something about the poem that reminds me of the work of Derek Walcott—indeed, much of the collection makes me think of his work. In this case, the image of binoculars appears in his poem “Prelude,” which is also a poem about missing time. The fact that this poem ends on “I have been late all this time” offers a counterpoint to Walcott’s “Prelude” where he seems to speeding through life and looking backward. In both cases, the force of the poem seems to live in its observational quality.

A number of poems have powerful closing lines that have a nearly aphoristic quality. In “Merienda,” Tad-y offers a precise and rich scene, and I’ll replicate the final three stanzas here:

We know what to do
when refined sugar starts
to scratch our throats.

Inside her house
we boil a kettle. Pour
mugs of oregano.

Silver door swings open.
We kill mosquitoes
that remind us we are meat. (36)

I appreciate the intimacy of the scene and the moment of boiling a kettle. Then, the final lines are a great reversal: “We kill mosquitoes / that remind us we are meat” (36). I like the phrasing of it and the ambiguity of it. Are they killing mosquitos because they remind them they are meat? Or is it the mere everydayness of it that matters? It’s also a nice juxtaposition of the human characters eating sugar and boiling a kettle and then they, too, are being consumed.

Tad-y’s poems often address broader issues. For now, I’m going to set aside the diasporic piece to focus on mental health. In the poem “For Us,” the speaker notes that “For us who think in constellation / instead of consequence. // Open – a word we fear / for what swerves. // What fills. // Once, in a psych ward, / I traced small dents on the wall // as if each showed the earth / from a single cell to a dying beloved. // We root as much as we can and yet” (25). Of course, there’s the explicit reference to a psych ward, but it also emulates the way that people may think divergently—those who think “in constellation.” That phrase is a delight, given the way that tenuous points are connected to form a broader picture. Similarly, tracing small dents on the wall gives another visual to supplement the constellation. Then, it goes into the cell metaphor (and the doubleness of biological cells and prison cells is probably worth noting here). I appreciate the final lines as being another form of constellation, a set of roots. The difficulty is that the poem ends on an incomplete thought: “We root as much as we can and yet.” It’s an uncomfortable incompleteness. 

As I briefly alluded to, there’s a fair amount of diasporic discourse throughout the poems. In that respect, the poems often deal with language. In “Islands Along Mount Pleasant,” there’s a line that “you misheard flawed / as flowered and filled / what was missing / in the air with Yes / everywhere people flower” (46). I can literally hear that voice that says “flawed” for “flowered” and that notion that everyone is “flawed” being replaced with everyone flowering is a delight. Slightly later in the poem, the narrator writes that “We left an archipelago / whose elders weather / heart attack & heat stroke / as if illness / were a cluster of islands / we cross / so it crosses back” (46). The scene is beautiful and continues on to discuss how “Today is the fourth / day of spring / & we live / in a city that unroofs / as often as it rains” (46). The idea of a city unroofing is just gorgeous. Again, the poem ends on a great trio of lines: “Under a glass awning, / we trace patterns / on our palms” (46).

One poem, “English Lessons in a Former Colony,” offers a list of all the things that were not the ways English was taught:

Not cathedrals
or knuckles
outside its steel gates.

Not palms rushed
by need or else
pressed upwards

covering their children
with prayers
before the tricycles

& roosters.
Not classroom
letters as the law

& license plates
to shiny futures.
Not the Mayor

in a pineapple fiber
silver bulletproof
cruising,

“Do you know
who I am?”
or the robber

he ordered
to eat the stacks
of bills he stole.

not tetanus
straight into
the stomach.

Not the hand shy
& forgoing
what it thinks

in fear of how
it sounds.
Not nuns,

centipedes
or gym teachers
who move you.

Not is or are
drilled on blue red blue
until the chalk breaks

into a screech,
& elders tug
our ankles cold.

Not the whiz
of metal trays.
Furious spoons

& forks at lunch.
Not a hint
of cockroach on rice.

Not wrists
on desks like onions
on a chopping board.

Listens,
believing
it’s all in the mind. (31-32)

I think this poem is replete with an excellent set of images. I like the repetitive structures that guide the poem, as well. The pattern of “not / or” is fantastic, and the first image of knuckles wrapped around outside the cathedral gates is such a grim opening, especially given our colonial pasts. I also like the inversion of our normal ways of learning: “Not classroom / letters as the law // & license plates to shiny futures” (31). Learning from these common moments of language is explicitly denied as the way of learning in a colony. The layers of political corruption that go on in these contexts also gets a reference: “Not the Mayor // in a pineapple fiber /  silver bulletproof / cruising, // “Do you know / who I am?” / or the robber / he ordered / to eat the stacks / of bills he stole” (31). These political parables do not serve any purpose to learn English—it’s great to see all of the ways in which nothing is learned. Instead, it’s “tetanus / straight into / the stomach.” All the figures of institutional institutions—nuns and gym teachers do nothing; the pests (centipedes, cockroaches) also do nothing. The different chalks breaking over verb conjugation point to the meaninglessness of the lesson on the speaker. The image of “wrists / on desks like onions / on a chopping board” (32) points to the violence inherent in education as well, and it strikes me as such a haunting resonance to stories of abuse in residential schools and beyond.

Collectively, the poems do a great job of exploring issues in a resonant way without relying on the basic tropes that have been deployed ad nauseam in other forms of poetry. It’s a good debut that offers compelling images and some moments of specific intimacy that really help the collection work. It’ll be great to see where Tad-y’s work goes next; there’s enough linguistic exploration here that I’m sure there are many poems left in Tad-y’s well.

Happy reading!