Hello Readers,

It was tough to focus on this newsletter, even as an intentional respite, so I apologize in advance for this not having my best prose or criticism. But, I still wanted to get this out in the world, because the books I’m recommending deserve your attention, even if I’m not doing a particularly good job of describing them.

I also wanted to make sure this got out in mid February before the release date for One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This because I want this book to have an eye-popping first week. (Which is the only thing some people in books cares about.) I want it to demand attention. I want certain groups of people to see the public response to One Day Everyone…and be, as the kids say, “shook.” Bookselling legend Paul Yamazaki is also recommending it, so you don’t have to take my word for it. Book sales aren’t going to have much of an impact on a world in crisis, but they’ll do something. And we’ve got to find ways to do something.

Also, I’ve written a big old essay about how the publishing world should respond to Trump. It’s running in three installments on LitHub. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 

Josh

P.S. If you like what I’m doing here the best way to support it is to help grow the list of subscribers, so share the sign up link around. Thank you!

YESTERDAY

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn

There is a real risk of praising Karyna McGlynn that falls into the “not like other girls,” trope, a way to talk about her grittiness, her sensuality, her attitude, her sense of humor, in a way that codes it all as “masculine” and therefore “better” or “more serious,” than works that are more exclusively coded as “feminine.” How we talk about the books we want to elevate is just about as important as what books we choose to elevate. To put this another way, how we describe a book can actually undercut our own efforts to elevate it. Which is why you never hear me praising a book for “transcending genre,” to pick one very easy example.

The thing is, these poems are gritty and sensual with an attitude and a sense of humor. It does have a kind of leather-jacket version of film noir feel to it. Poems that seem to ask “whatchoo lookin’ at?” knowing exactly what you are looking at and exactly why you are looking there. There is, of course, a place for quiet poetry, for poetry that takes a step back and invites you to take a step back, but there is also a place for poetry that gets in your face. McGlynn gets in your face a little bit, but if you hold her gaze, you’ll get a smirk at the end.

Artistic and fun don’t always go together and I don’t think they always need to. “Fun” is just one type of human experience and not everything need to be “fun” to be enjoyable or pleasurable. But I found I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl both artistic and fun and I bet some of you will too.

Buy I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl from Porter Square Books

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TODAY

Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola

I do not remember enough of I Have to Go Back to 1994 to Kill a Girl or have read enough of Helen of Troy, 1993 with enough depth to make the case that one is the sequel to other, but, it’d be fun to hope. To find some other connection between them besides the fact that they’re both badass collections of poetry.

Anyway, Helen of Troy, 1993 was pitched to me a couple of different ways, including “Ducks, Newburyport meets that new Beowulf translation.” While that’s definitely true, that’s not the X meets X that I’ve been feeling while reading the collection. I’m seeing Leslie Jamison meets Lord of the Barnyard by Tristan Egolf.

I believe LotB (ha!) is one of the great working class American novels, because it executes a pretty impressive balancing act of mocking the aspects of American society that deserve to be mocked without slathering whole classes of people with derision. While Egolf recognizes that it took a lot of shovels to get this much bullshit into our world, he also understands many of the shovelers didn’t have much choice. It was either shovel or starve & the real villains in this scenario are the ones who created the possibility of starvation. There is also a certain kind of chip on an author’s shoulder when they’re able to intrude into our national literary conversation from milieus that don’t often get represented. I don’t know if Zoccola is intending to write from that space or with that sense of intrusion, but the collection has that electricity.

It also has the prosaic precision that makes Leslie Jamison’s work so compelling. I mean, hold on…”like someone’s deboning a xylophone” to describe the sound of a modem connecting to the internet (I can HEAR that sound throughout “helen of troy surfs the net”) and “brawling for froot loops and wielding skip-its like…morningstars, sharp shriek for each blooming bruise” a phrase that is able capture, with almost chilling accuracy, a…what?...8-18 month time period. It’s the moments of vivid precision that give a body to the growing and vague disillusionment of helen from her own life.

Zoccola’s titles are also just plain badass. I mean, “helen of troy cranks the volume on ‘like a prayer’ in the ballet studio parking lot” and “helen of troy tells her mother it’s a graduation girls trip and drives alone to the clinic in nashville” to share two of my favorites. You’ve got to be confident in your poems if you’re going to give them titles like that, and I think Zoccola has earned that confidence.

Buy Helen of Troy, 1993 from Porter Square Books

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TOMORROW

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

I’d read this book faster if I didn’t have to put it down every other page or so to recover.

It might be glib to describe this book as a hatchet job on Western, and specifically American political order, but what El Akkad reveals through the absolutely cutting prose style is that the political ideas that define and dictate the international (and domestic) policies and actions are as lazy, hackneyed, half-baked, and contradictory as any novel that is more buzz than substance. The “liberal order” or “the West” or whatever you want to call the political philosophy and institutions that have driven American policy since at least the end of WWII has always rested on flimsy ideological ground, but the Biden Administration’s approval of the genocide in Gaza revealed that flimsiness in ways none of the CIA led coups, the Vietnam War, or even the second war in Iraq seemed to do. To put this another way, if you can justify or apologize the murder of children anywhere in the world for any cause, the least you deserve is the hatchet,

But I think the most important idea in this book, for this political moment, and the one that is going to challenge the most people is that a political ideology that will allow Gaza to happen is inherently vulnerable to full on fascism. Once you quietly, sheepishly, maybe a little ashamedly, concede that some human life is expendable in service to the strength of your institutions, you are going to have a very hard time defending your position against someone who shouts with their whole damn chest that they’ll kill damn near everybody in service to the strength of theirs. And I don’t think this is theoretical at this point. The Harris campaign’s refusal to meaningful engage with the Biden policy on Gaza and its withdrawal from the fight for trans rights alienated tons of voters they clearly needed in order to win.

I have no idea how the literary world is going to react to this. One the on hand, numerous formal and information mechanisms have been engaged to prevent ideas exactly like these from reaching any kind of meaningful audience, but on the other hand, there is a pretty substantial market of white people who love to buy books that tell them how much they’ve royally fucked up the world. I mean, they don’t DO anything to help fix things, but they certainly buy books. It might be one of those books that gets reviewed twice from different perspectives in the Times, while getting tons of other critical coverage, or it might be met with silence. We’ll find out.

I think many of the folks who end up reading this, won’t actually learn a whole lot that is new to them, but the prose, the sentences, the phrases are so goddamn perfect, that you’ll see more depth and more solidity in those truths you already know and while also, having more ammunition to defend them.

Preorder One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against this from Porter Square Books

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FOREVER

Grave of Light by Alice Notley

There is just so much badass poetry in the world and that there is so much badass poetry in the world is something to feel good about.

Grave of Light came into my house much like Double Trio. It was a big old collection of poetry that looked really cool and also has a kickass title. (OK, not my most in depth literary criticism.) I don’t think I’d heard of Alice Notley before I stumbled onto the collection, but, as with Mackey, it quickly became clear that she was a poet that could be important in my life. Grave of Light even ended up not in the poetry section, but on the bookshelves above my desk, books that I have a slightly different relationship with than the books on the regular shelves, or in the rare books case or in the various TBRs around my house.

But, as I write this, I couldn’t name a single Notley poem. I couldn’t describe her project or her poetics with any real depth. I know she is experimental and innovative. I know I’d get to her at some point if someone asked me to list poets I like. I know Grave of Light is in the right place in my library. And I know there will be some of you thankful for being introduced to her.

Buy Grave of Light from Porter Square Books

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