Category Archives: Book Reviews

Staff Picks: And China Has Hands

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Celia recommends And China Has Hands by H.T. Tsiang:

Here’s a book I was delighted to discover, reprinted in a lovely edition by Kaya Press: And China Has Hands, by H.T. Tsiang. It’s something of an unrecognized classic: written in 1937, it follows two Chinese Americans living in New York City. The heroes of the novel are Wong Wan-Lee and Pearl Chang (who Tsiang always refers to by their full names, never by a given name alone). Wong Wan-Lee is a recent immigrant from China in New York City, the son of a naturalized American citizen, who, having barely escaped an illegal deportation, buys the lease to a laundry business in order to try and pay off his legal fees. He’s a dreamer, a little bewildered by the country he’s immigrated to, but street smart in a gentle way. When a group of white school boys taunt him outside his laundry, he throws them some fruit and hopes to make friends. When various New York bureaucrats try to pressure him into paying bribes or protection money, he takes refuge in pretending that he doesn’t speak English. He can’t pay if he can’t understand, and he hopes this will protect him.

Pearl Chang, on the other hand, has grown up in the American South, the child of a Chinese father and a black mother. Having lived under segregation, she’s used to concealing her mixed-race heritage, in the hope of avoiding the worst anti-black sentiments thrown at her. She’s an outspoken would-be actress, and she and Wong Wan-Lee meet when she takes his side when he’s being harassed outside of his laundry. He quickly falls in a kind of love with her. It’s the 1930s, after all, when Chinese women were severely restricted from immigrating to the United States, a policy intended to prevent the Chinese men who came to build railroads or work in America’s cities from building communities and putting down roots in their adopted country.

As a result, Wong Wan-Lee barely knows any Chinese women in New York, and, lonely as he is, his feelings for Pearl Chang teeter between love and obsession. She likes him back for his gentleness, which is different from the white men she’s known, who have harassed her or treated her badly, and for the connection she feels with her father’s homeland, which she’s never been to. But while Wong Wan-Lee feels immediately connected with Pearl Chang, he’s also a little ashamed of her. She exoticizes him, imagining him as a foreign prince, and he takes her very American habits for evidence that she’s a bit of a fool. When they go out together, she sometimes teases him with the same racial slurs that his white customers use, and he refuses to hold her hand or walk beside her, lest anyone guess that they’re a couple.

Their elliptical, unsteady romance plays out against the backdrop of Depression-Era Manhattan, which seems at first to be a world in which anyone can make it—from laundry worker to millionaire, or waitress to movie star. But the game is rigged in ways that aren’t at first visible to the naked eye. Tsiang uses a light touch in painting the social and economic struggles that his heroes experience—he spends as much time on the intricacies of Wong Wan-Lee’s friendship with his cat as on his decision to make a deal with a loan shark—but slowly, the noose tightens, and Wong Wan-Lee and Pearl Chang descend into harder, more straightened circumstances.

Tsiang himself was a radical and a performer, a devoted Communist who worked as the secretary to the secretary of Sun Yat-sen, played bit parts in a dozen odd films, including the original Ocean’s Eleven, wrote and staged his own plays, and remained deeply involved with the leftist movement after immigrating to the United States. Having fled China in 1926, after his radical politics got him into trouble, he enrolled at Columbia University, only to face recurring problems with his student visa that nearly saw him deported under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In his original introduction to And China Has Hands, he credits the ACLU and the International Labor Defense with the legal aid that allowed him to remain in the United States.

Tsiang self-published a number of books before finally convincing a commercial publishing house to take a chance on And China Has Hands, a piece of autobiography that Tsiang turns into a good-natured joke on himself in one of the novel’s minor characters: a charming but rather hapless and self-absorbed “proletarian” novelist, who self-publishes his work and keeps getting kicked out of restaurants for trying to hand-sell copies of his book to pay his printing bill. Near the end, he finally secures a publisher—who, learning that he plans to attend a restaurant workers’ strike (at one of the restaurants that has tossed him out), keenly hopes that “the author would get his head clubbed so his picture would appear in the papers and, by-productingly, his books be mentioned.” Tsiang’s own publishers don’t seem to have taken offense, although they did, perhaps somewhat backhandedly, refer to his “[rather startling] artless habit of calling a spade by its given name” in their jacket copy for the original book.

Tsiang’s contemporary critics also seem to have not entirely known what to make of him. In his afterword to Kaya Press’s edition of And China Has Hands, Floyd Cheung quotes one reviewer’s assessment that Tsiang’s written English was “functional and surprisingly effective, though not always ‘correct.’” In reading Tsiang, I was pleasantly reminded of the prose of Barbara Comyns, another rather brilliant prose stylist whose writing was dismissively received in her time as a kind of naïve art—and who takes a similarly fresh, playful, irrepressibly hopeful tone even when describing situations of acute isolation and hardship.

The simplicity of Tsiang’s sentences is deceptive. Throughout the novel, the straightforward, declarative way that Tsiang writes out his characters’ hopes, fears and dreams conceals the careful eye with which he captures the wider social and political context of his world. Their lives are not only their lives, but the precious components of the collective to which Tsiang devoted his work as an activist. Excluded from power, their lives are still invisibly and inexorably shaped by the actions of the rich and powerful around them. If Tsiang’s hopes for a world that is more just to the poor, to immigrants, and to refugees have not yet been realized, his work remains all the more relevant today for the clarity with which it foresees the questions of justice and belonging that the United States is still struggling to address.

Staff Picks: Little Glass Planet

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Claire recommends Little Glass Planet by Dobby Gibson:

Poet Dobby Gibson is a gondolier, your most trusted confidante, a stern assistant principal who has taken you, a troubled student, under his wing. In Dobby’s poems, you can feel the tenderness with which he treats each line, examining each trinket and bauble of the world as though they were talismans, investigating every subject as if it were an injury on our collective body. He gives us the diagnosis, administers the salve and wrappings. In Little Glass Planet, Dobby writes as if we’re having a heart-to-heart with him, jocular at times, but never shirking the difficult conversation:

“The most horrible person
has been elected president.
The hardest thing to fathom
is the present.”

This kind of odd near rhyme is an instance in which we feel the terrifying comedy injected into everything in this world. Dobby’s lines often linger on the precipice of platitude, but don’t fall. He’s interested in truth—a real kind of hope, since most of us have become so skeptical—and the poet’s diligent eye will follow any spark of veracity unto its end, even into the eely crevices where we tuck away the worst parts of human nature.

From the first poem, titled “Dear Reader,” we know that Dobby is on our side. In a time when it’s difficult to assure anyone of anything, Dobby manages to put my heart at ease in the last line of “Prayer for November”:

we can be loved after all.

Even in his truth-seeking, he reaches toward the ineffable, for a sign—from cherubim, from the powers of ten, from a dog with one eye, from arsonists with no matches. This book surveys the pieces and shards of this world in all their shabbiness, and it is in them that we find the shades of real beauty that we can hold on to:

a lemon tree dressed in December ice
like a girl in her grandmother’s jewelry

Dobby is a poet who is engaging with the social issues and climate change in earnest, nuanced ways, never completely turning his gaze away from the parts of humanity still connected to mythos, and eternity. But he’s not afraid to make bold declarations about the true state of things. This feels especially poignant, after reading a new report by Australian climate experts which warns us that “climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat” to human civilization. This prognosis, endorsed by the former chief of the Australian Defense Force, warns that human civilization could face complete destruction by the year 2050 due to the destabilizing societal and environmental factors caused by a rapidly warming planet. This, of course, is difficult to picture, let alone to truly believe, as we walk through the alarming fog of calamitous news each day and yet, the next day always comes. But as Dobby warns in his easy, yet ominous way:

When our great fire finally arrives
it will make no sound

As we look down the barrel of the next few decades, it is difficult to even process these possibilities. The small, personal actions we can each take to do our part in prevention don’t even come close to shutting down the sensation of inevitable doom. I find that the times when I feel the most hopeful are in small instances of humanness, our persistence in preserving the mysteries of this life, presumably our only, and as Dobby puts it in a title, “Inside the Compulsion to Wonder Lurks the Will to Survive.”

Dobby’s tall intuition is eternally reassuring, offering a kind of knowing that can’t be taught. His poems do not hesitate to gesture toward the eternal, even as they inhabit the irreverent humor of adolescence:

All of time is with us here,
each next moment waiting right where we left it
when we last felt safe inside our heads
wondering what kind of leathery faces
they might grow into as we held
the flashlight beneath our chins
to say the one funny thing we needed to
while leaning into the dark.

These poems have an irresistible way of reaching out to us as the reader, of drawing us in, and showing us compassion. As the reader, I know that I am part of this conversation, and that it continues far beyond the last poem in the book. I feel loved, taken care of, seen. This is the particular magic of these poems, one that creates the sensation of peace in a time of chaos, that pours us a glass of wine and offers to talk it out:

This is my love letter to the world,
someone call us a sitter.
We’re going to be here awhile.

Staff Picks: Sabrina

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Julie recommends Sabrina by Nick Drnaso:

There doesn’t need to be another review of Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina; it was heaped with praise when it was published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2018. Zadie Smith said, “Sabrina is the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment.” And if you come across as many Zadie Smith blurbs as I do, you can spot the difference between a lukewarm this-certainly-wasn’t-the-worst-book-in-the-world Zadie Smith blurb and a glowing I-actually-loved-this-book Zadie Smith blurb. Sabrina also caught the attention of the Man Booker judges, becoming the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the prize. Suddenly, Sabrina was a book everyone wanted to read, and booksellers were forced to say “sorry, we’re sold out.”

I don’t care for buzz, nor am I the type of person who travels to the ends of the earth to read something that’s selling like hot cakes. Nearly a year after Sabrina’s release, I finally sat down to read this inked favorite, this game-changer, this magnificent addiction—and let me tell you, Sabrina is worth all the praise, and then some. If you, too, avoided the stampede to get a copy, I’m here to tell you, now’s the perfect time to read this superb creation.

The plot is basic: a woman goes missing. Her name is Sabrina, and Sabrina represents the archetypal MIA woman who intrigue swirls around. Out of the mystery of Sabrina’s disappearance, two old friends are thrown together. Calvin, a military worker whose family life is on the fritz, invites Teddy, Sabrina’s very depressed boyfriend, to live with him.

In my recollection, I haven’t come across a story (graphic novel, book, movie or otherwise) that depicts raw tenderness within heterosexual male friendships. We see women comfort each other—pick each other up off the linoleum floor—all the time but we rarely see men perform the same service. Calvin helps take Teddy’s pants and shirt off because he’s too depressed to. Calvin washes Teddy’s clothes, reminds him to eat, and routinely asks him if he needs anything.

As readers, we fear what Calvin has gotten himself into. Teddy vacillates between white hot rages and the fetal position. He’s in bad shape, real bad shape, and if you’re someone familiar with the fate of missing women, you might even begin to wonder if Teddy’s conscience is bothering him.

An element of mystery combined with depictions of an unhinged media make for a tense read. Teddy starts listening to an alarmist radio announcer. “The orchestrators,” the announcer says, “stir the pot, to keep us separate, suspicious and hostile… [T]hey manufacture tragedy. They deal in deception. They stage massacres. And murder civilians. This is the smoke screen.”

It’s surprisingly easy for Teddy (and the reader, too) to get sucked into the melody of the announcer’s warnings and rants. It’s the same black hole that can be found on Facebook, YouTube, and anywhere message forums pop up. Around the black hole congregate people who deny the Holocaust, 9/11, Sandy Hook, and accuse students who witnessed their classmates get shot in front of them of being paid actors.

As someone who doesn’t read very many graphic novels, I confess I’m at a loss for how to describe the drawings and the color palette of Sabrina. There’s an eeriness that I can’t quite place. The closest thing I can think of is an experience I had recently. I was approaching a bus stop at night. A man was sitting on the bench watching what I assumed was a Fox News type program. The man had his phone propped up on his stomach and his pale face was lit up by the glow of the screen. From the blaring volume, I heard clips of Trump shouting, and pundits throwing in their two cents, which is no sense at all. It was creepy, really creepy.

Sabrina is a bit creepy, too, but an artful, good kind of creepy. Creepy because it’s easy to recognize certain features of the current mess we’re in now. Creepy because the mess seems to be getting messier.

Staff Picks: Selected Poems by Dara Wier

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Claire recommends Selected Poems by Dara Wier:

Dara Wier is a poet whose work transcends the evolving cycles of American poetry. This collection, her tenth, offers a cross-section of her poetry, and if you’re looking for an entry point into her work, Selected Poems is the book. In it, Wier doesn’t suppress a thing—we are met with the full force of her weirdness, poetry that explores an intensity of experience that is unpoliced, full of humor, longing, and human fragility.

Right off the bat, Wier is like a flirtatious alien showing us her tail. In the collection’s first poem, “She Has This Phantom Limb,” the lines lean into one another, tracking some kind of perverse logic that feels at once completely unnerving and completely right.

She paints the nails.
She oils the hand and thinks
it is moving
down some man’s back.

When I read these lines, I feel the hand down my own back. I feel the alluring, slightly sinister way that Wier doesn’t quite write about the phantom limb, but infuses the poem with the phantom limb’s aboutness. It is an uncanny feeling in truly great poems, when your brain can freely enter into their consciousness, feel their patterns of logic, yet come out of them asking “What was that about?” But of course, the answer can’t be tweezed out with reason; it must be felt. The poems in this collection make meaning out of feeling, associative leaps, the paradox of consciousness, its nightmares, and whimsy.

Wier’s poems are jam-packed with the stuff of this world, full of dog shows and toothaches and snowfields. They offer us a cigarette in the sunflower field. Wier’s poems have an eidetic quality of image; they pass through the mind like ghosts in drag, elegant and unexpected. They resist the nothingness of abstraction, even as they abstract, as in “Colorless Green Ideas”:

We think how difficult it is for nothing
to remain nothing. Everything resists it.

One of the beautiful things about a collection of selected poems such as this one is the variety of the poet’s work that it encompasses. In this collection, we encounter Wier at her most bizarre, her most hypnagogic, in poems that invite a kind of meaning making based on the logic of dreams. We also encounter poems resembling vignettes, telling stories from the natural world, though always just an arm’s length away from some kind of linguistic sorcery. Throughout the collection, there is Wier’s anchoring voice, with an eye for hilarity even amidst disaster, a voice which seems to possess a knowledge of ancient mysteries, even as it describes a fly in your soup. In my opinion, Dara Wier is an essential voice in American Poetry, and if you’re looking for a book of poetry that is altogether sincere in its exploration of the depths of human experience, in all of its absurdity, pleasure and pain, here is one I can highly recommend.

In Praise of Careen

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If you’re looking for a wonderful weekend read, we heartily recommend the poetry collection Careen, by poet, journalist and educator Grace Shuyi Liew (published by Noemi Press, and on our shelves right now!)

Claire Bowman just published a review of the collection and an interview with Grace over on the Host Publications’ blog, and it’s well worth a read:

[Careen] captures the strangeness of our times, and the particular strangeness of being an Asian woman living in America. These poems are fierce. They are naked and unadorned, completely without fear even as they enter into the most unstable spaces of the mind, the body and the spirit. This book is a necessary handbook for all of us who are navigating the treacherous sociopolitical climate. It shows us how to remain human, even as we feel more and more alien in our own minds. 

You can read the entire review and interview here, and then stop by the store to pick up a copy of Careen!

Staff Picks: Paradise Rot

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Celia recommends Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval:

There’s a girl, you see. She’s away from home, in another country, in fact, where she’s a foreigner, a student, staying at a hostel where the mirror is cracked and she doesn’t know anyone. Things are normal, but dislocated. It’s her first semester studying abroad. She has to find an apartment, she has to find friends. She has to navigate how she might feel about adulthood, about sexuality, about what it means to go out and exist in the world. Sometimes men walk up to her and inform her that she looks like a lesbian, which isn’t a thing she’s thought about properly, and the suggestion, coming from outside of herself, with its undertone of prurient sexual interest, makes it impossible to think about. There is a woman that she likes, but mostly she’s a friend. It’s not like that. Things aren’t what they look like.

It took me some time to warm up to Paradise Rot, the debut novel by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval. Here, it seemed, was a quiet novel, a meditation on longing and revulsion, about a young woman who’s far from home, and lonely. There are the small disappointments of being in a foreign country, without friends, watching the people around you appear to fit in effortlessly. It’s affecting, but quieter than I expected from Hval, in whose music even the quietest moments always feel like there’s something menacing and forceful under the surface.

But, as it happens, Paradise Rot undergoes a transformation as you read further into it. More than plot, the novel relies on a kind of cyclical recurrence of images in different contexts, in a way that felt, to me, almost more like a piece of installation art than a book. Maybe this is because the book is so much about the transformation of a particular space—the loft apartment in a converted brewery where Jo, the novel’s narrator, moves in with Carral, a lonely, beautiful girl to whom Jo feels an attraction that she can’t quite articulate. The loft has been hastily converted. It doesn’t really have walls, only thin cubicles of pasteboard, that don’t reach the ceiling and allow sound to carry.

It’s a setting that forces its inhabitants to continually negotiate the line between intimacy and disgust—Jo and Carral hear each other when they wake up early, when they pee, when they turn the pages of the book they’re reading. Carral rescues an enormous bag of heirloom apples that have been discarded by the local grocery—and then the women, faced with more fruit than they can eat, leave them around the apartment to rot, attracting spiders and flies and filling the loft with the smell of decomposition. Mushrooms begin to grow out of the thin pasteboard walls of the bathroom, where they’ve been warped by humidity.

Apples, mushrooms, the smell of rot, the sound of someone pissing in another room—there’s a cycle of disgust that propels the novel, each image reappearing and becoming stranger, more dangerous and also more alluring. Hval is interested in the nastiness of bodies, the potential for revulsion, and also the uncontrolled creativity that comes out of decay. This is a queer novel that’s interested in the ickiness of things, whether that’s falling in codependent love with a straight woman, or reading embarrassing romance novels (another reappearing motif is a pulpy romance that has, uh, two of its more salacious pages mysteriously stuck together), or experiencing a transcendent vision in which the object of your affection starts growing mushrooms out of her skin. Hval tightens the loop of the novel slowly, so that what feels real, by the end, is not the outer world that everyone can see, but the mysterious, frightening, closed world inside the apartment, where the walls are alive and boundaries between bodies are porous.