My dad once told me that his school music teacher told him not to sing. Mouth the words, pretend to sing, but don’t. Every time I think about this, it hurts. Last February I was visiting my parents when they called my brother to sing him Happy Birthday. I secretly took a video of my big dad, phone clutched to his mostly-deaf ear, leaning forward in the lamplight and straining out the words.
How many songs are locked up inside each of us? When I read this beautiful poem below I wished I could go back in time and tell that little boy to sing as loud as he wanted.
A Lao Jia Song Is a Song of Home, by Stephanie Niu
There were two times I heard my father sing. Once from behind the camera, panning to my brother’s birthday cake, his happy birthday a key off, so bad it is valiant, my brother blushing before the table.
The second was at a feast—a mountain village south of Kunming where, my father pointed out, people readied for winter like animals, mixing butter into their tea.
There was something there, his eyes watching the long-haired buffalo graze the cold hills as our little bus wound up and up. His favorite American books were the Little House series, with their descriptions
of simple tasks, how they churned butter from cream. At the dinner, roast lamb, dark pickled flowers, a strong tea, and before long his song: the haunting rise of an attempt at melody,
his voice breaking before it can carry. Somehow they recognize it, the mountain family, and they lean over and whisper “This is a lao jia song,” because we have never heard it
in all these years, we are sitting with strangers trying to imagine what he is mourning.
Paco! Our new little guy, elegant, lively and full of curiosity and affection. An athlete too — no matter how fast we run the leash never slackens, and every dash through the living room involves catlike leaps on and off the couch. Everything interests him, but when I’m working, he turns into a quiet little comma and burrows close to me and the laptop. He’s supposedly about a year old but seems younger to me, a funny little puppy who rarely barks and reminds me of the dog in the poem below, a poem I loved years ago at first reading, just like we loved Paco at first sight.
I’m no dancer but I love to dance anyway. So many memories of dancing. A ballet studio on the second floor of a frame house: First position. Second position. Plie. Arabesque. Releve. The Alibi: a bar in Vermont, my best friend and I waiting in the entryway every weekend until the cover dropped to half price. The tiny dance floor where every song, in my memory, is by the Police.
A swing dance party in Maine: me a newbie unable to follow the tight rhythms until a dark-eyed man curled my fingers around the tips of his: Resist me. Follow me, and at the same time resist me. A friend’s wedding: rainy night under a big tent. Boards laid across mud. The band strikes up and a laughing man holds out his hand: Come on, Alison, let’s go. Mud-soaked red shoes: one heel broken by the end of the night.
It’s been a while since things didn’t feel so messed up, politics and the planet melting down and movements bad and good rising up simultaneously, a future in which so much feels so uncertain. Been a while since I danced things out late at night in the living room, or thought of this poem.
To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr
To be alive: not just the carcass but the spark. That’s crudely put, but. . .
If we’re not supposed to dance, why all this music?
Four years ago my family and I flew to DC to protest cruelty, bigotry, and oppression. My memories of that day, the people I met, the signs I saw, the peaceful and profound determination I witnessed, have stayed with me through the years and the marches since.
None of us are responsible for the world we’re born into, but all of us are obligated to right the wrongs we see. I used to think I was a pretty enlightened person when it came to the baked-in racism and sexism and fundamental unfairness of life in this country, but I wasn’t. My eyes are fully open now. Amanda Gorman’s fierce grace and power as she delivered her poem last Wednesday transfixed me.
The Hill We Climb (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman
We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation Our blunders become their burdens But one thing is certain: If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left with
When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid The new dawn blooms as we free it For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it If only we’re brave enough to be it.
When someone in my family almost but doesn’t triumph at something, one of us might say But you didn’t, a phrase that goes back long ago to our friend Kareem, who almost but didn’t score an incredible soccer goal, and his mother who, after the fourth or fifth time he reminisced about the almost-ness of it, laughed and said “But you didn’t!”
It’s a code phrase known to all of us, the way Okay see youuuuu is what my younger daughter and I say instead of goodbye, the way the father in Kim’s Convenience, a show we both adore, says it to his customers when they leave his store. The secret codes between people who love each other, and how they can last a lifetime, are what I thought of when I read this beautiful poem by Yalie Kamara.
Besaydoo, by Yalie Kamara
While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,
their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just beyond our sight. Moments later, their Schwinns head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the milky, John-Waters-mustache-thin foam on her upper lip, Wetin dem bin say?
Besaydoo? Nar English? she asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. Alright. Be safe dude, I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yah, dem nar real padi, she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call
thugs. Besaydoo. Besaydoo. Besaydoo, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones after I leave California. Besaydoo, she says as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones in newfound sobriety. Besaydoo, I say years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen
treatment at the ER. Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like some word from deep in a somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous, sun.
Yesterday I listened to a news commentator tell me that in a few weeks things will have died down and we’d be “back to normal.” Really?
Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people. Normal, in my grandmother’s day, meant she couldn’t vote. Normal, when my mother was pregnant with me, meant she had to hide her pregnancy to keep her job. Normal, when I was a kid, meant if you were gay you pretended you weren’t. Normal right now means, among many things, that most citizens live paycheck to paycheck while a few make a billion dollars a month.
Normal is a prism that shifts and changes over time, depending on your skin color, your sex, your gender, your age, your job, your money or lack thereof. I don’t want to go back to normal. Where I want to go is forward.
the demons were never, by Shilpa Kamat
evil just regular people who prayed and were granted
thunderbolts ethers before their hearts were grown enough to keep up
As a kid I used to wake up at dawn and walk down the road to a small concrete ledge over a watering hole. There were never any cars, and I used to sit on the ledge and watch the sun come up over the valley. Sometimes, far up the hill, through the mist, the sound of cowbells (the nearest farmers were Swiss) came drifting down.
Back then I used to take photos in my mind of things I wanted to remember forever. The lone tree that stood in the field halfway up the hill. The pink and yellow dawn sky. That herd of Holsteins chiming their soft way down the hill to the watering hole, the way they looked at me with their velvet eyes. When I found this old-timey poem in an old-timey book of poems and quotes and aphorisms I pulled off my bookshelf a few weeks ago, those mind-photos came back. Happy New Year, everyone.
Swift Things Are Beautiful, by Elizabeth Coatsworth
Swift things are beautiful: swallows and deer, and lightning that falls bright-veined and clear, rivers and meteors, wind in the wheat, the strong-withered horse, the runners’ sure feet. And slow things are beautiful: the closing of day, the pause of the wave that curves downward to spray, the ember that crumbles, the opening flower, and the ox that moves on in the quiet of power.
A couple of days ago I went looking in my files for a long poem by Li-Young Lee, two lines of which were haunting me. The poem popped up in a journal from twenty years ago, a journal I have no memory of keeping, and I spent the afternoon reading the entire thing. All the questions that bedeviled me then still bedevil me, and I ended up shrugging and thinking Well, I guess you’ve always been who you are, Alison.
That same day, a friend sent this beautiful poem. It felt familiar to me the way some poems do, as if you were born knowing them, so I went searching through my emails only to find that I’d sent it out as the Poem of the Week almost ten years ago. Another mental shrug. All the dreams we carry, and keep carrying.
This Is the Dream, by Olav Hauge, tr. by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin
This is the dream we carry through the world that something fantastic will happen that it has to happen that time will open by itself that doors shall open by themselves that the heart will find itself open that mountain springs will jump up that the dream will open by itself that we one early morning will slip into a harbor that we have never known.
(in the original Norwegian)
DET ER DEN DRAUMEN
Det er den draumen me ber på at noko vedunderleg skal skje, at det må skje — at tidi skal opna seg at hjarta skal opna seg at dører skal opna seg at berget skal opna seg at kjeldor skal springa — at draumen skal opna seg, at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn på ein våg me ikkje har visst um.
Ohhhhh I am so behind with my 2020 mini-book reviews. My lofty goal of a round-up review each month entirely fell by the wayside, along with so much else in this overwhelming year. Let me partially remedy that right this minute with mini-book reviews of books I read in the last few months, written on the spot just now.
Note that I only review books I loved or that, even if I didn’t love them, have stayed with me in inexplicable ways that somehow merit attention. Note also that all these books were ordered and bought from indie bookstores, the beautiful lifeblood of readers and publishers. Please support your independent bookstores. You can find yours right here at this handy-dandy link: https://www.indiebound.org/
Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Lameris. Oh, I love this woman’s poems. The first time I read Small Kindnesses, I wrote it out by hand and then copied it into my Favorite Poems files. And then scurried over to Magers and Quinn to pre-order Bonfire Opera, the book from whence it came. Lameris writes of ordinary life the way our greatest writers do, the way that allows us to see that no life is ordinary, that our every smallest action ripples out. A beautiful, beautiful book.
Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson. I’m late to the party with this lovely book, a memoir in verse-like prose written for middle grades readers but which really, like all great books ostensibly for children, is written for everyone. Woodson writes about her life, from birth through middle school, dipping down into small details the way a hummingbird alights on the sweetest flowers. Each chapter is so brief, so full of love and wonder and subtle commentary on life as a brown girl in the 60s and 70s, and every few chapters is one consisting solely of a haiku that somehow punctuates and coheres the entirety. Such a beautiful book.
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. This woman is such a good writer. I loved her first novel, The Mothers, and this one is equally absorbing. Identical twins Stella and Desiree, born in the 60s into an almost-mythical small town populated entirely by light-skinned Black citizens, leave home at age sixteen to make their way in the wider world. Stella chooses to “pass” as white, a decision that haunts every aspect of her life thereafter, while Desiree gives birth to a daughter as “black as tar.” Bennett infuses her fictional people with such specificity that their pain, joy, and unbreakable sisterly bonds reveal the intricacies of our nation’s historical racism and sexism while pulling the reader so deeply into their personal life struggles that they will be with me forever.
Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell. This is my first dip into the vast array of books by renowned Swedish writer Mankell (the man who writes the Kurt Wallander detective series), It’s an intensely serious, quiet novel narrated by a former doctor who, after a tragic surgical mistake, chooses to isolate himself on the island his grandparents left to him, where he is the sole inhabitant. He cuts a hole in the ice of the bay every morning and plunges in – the only time he feels truly alive. Over the course of the novel he encounters, for the first time in decades, a past love who comes in search of him, sparking a small but profound reconnection with the wider world. While I did not love, or even particularly like, the narrator of this book, I remain both haunted and heartened by his inherent sadness and gradual, slow, opening back up to his fellow humans.
Watch Over Me, by Nina LaCour. I loved Nina’s novel We Are Okay and I loved this one too, for the same reasons – her uncanny way with the small, perfect detail that bring both setting and people to life. LaCour writes of the Bay area the way that only an observer with a poet’s eye can, so that the landscape becomes as much a character as the people. Set on a farm for foster-to-adopt children, Watch Over Me follows teenager Mila as she gradually, painfully begins to place pattern to the trauma of her past. LaCour’s descriptions of The Farm are like a dream, the kind of farm where everyone is loved and cared for, where there’s always plenty to eat, plenty of blankets, flowers everywhere, warmth when you need it, solitude when you need it, and, I imagine board games everywhere. The foster parents surround their traumatized charges with the kind of love and support that would heal the entire world should we all be so lucky to experience it. A lovely novel, full of hard-earned hope.
Now We Will Speak in Flowers, by Micki Blenkush. I read this slender book of poetry in one sitting, and felt as if I’d been given a glimpse into the poet’s entire life. Set in northern Minnesota and dipping down into childhood, young adulthood, middle age, town and country and church and work, this is a work set firmly in place and time. The poet’s perspective, wise from experience and innate understanding of how the small and subtle inform the wider world, is captivating in a quiet, gentle way. Lovely.
Open City, by Teju Cole. Set entirely in New York City and almost exclusively in Manhattan, this slender novel follows its main character, a young Nigerian scholar, as he walks about the city. As I read, I kept having to remind myself that it was a novel and not a memoir, so intimate and quiet is the voice of the narrator. As a lifelong walker who soaks up the world through the soles of my feet while silently thinking and observing, the book felt deeply familiar both in its perspective and its essential loneliness. Toward the end, a small scene in a tailor’s shop shocked me. I did not love the main character but I will be thinking about him, and what he has to say about the world we all live in, for a long, long time.
What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland. How I love this man’s poems, and how I wept and wept when he died, too young, of cancer. There are few poets whose poems I almost universally love and treasure; Hoagland is one of them. This book was published in 2003 but no matter, any Hoagland poem lives in its own time and place that transcend the current time and place of the world. Hoagland aches for the world, and life, and his place in it, the same way my own heart does. Go forth and read him.
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite books of all time. So far, he has not written a book I haven’t loved, although there are several I haven’t yet read. It takes me a while to work up to an Ishiguro novel because I know that a few chapters in, he will have inexorably taken hold of me and pulled me into whatever world he’s created. This one is no exception. Set in London and (mostly) Shanghai in the 1940s, this novel follows Banks, a celebrated London detective, as he attempts to discover why he was orphaned at age nine. Nothing is as it seems in When We Were Orphans, and every small revelation leads the reader further down a path of no return. Quintessential Ishiguro in his understanding of loneliness, longing, and transcendent love.
Look at my mother holding my baby sister in this old photo, how impossibly young and unafraid she looks. I used to carry my babies everywhere like that too, the way every parent does. Cradled in my arms, or with their legs straddling my hip. Hoisted onto my shoulders. Swung across my stomach like a football. Piggyback. Twice I flipped one daughter over onto her belly, half-vertical along my extended arm, to force out a piece of food she was choking on with the heel of my hand.
It’s the most natural thing in the world to carry your baby with just your arms. And at the same time, holy crud, it’s almost unfathomable. How all of us balance on two legs on this floating planet suspended in space, hoisting babies around like footballs. As if they didn’t depend on us for every single second of life, and us on them.
Gravity, by Kim Addonizio
Carrying my daughter to bed I remember how light she once was, no more than a husk in my arms. There was a time I could not put her down, so frantic was her crying if I tried to pry her from me, so I held her for hours at night, walking up and down the hall, willing her to fall asleep. She’d grow quiet, pressed against me, her small being alert to each sound, the tension in my arms, she’d take my nipple and gaze up at me, blinking back fatigue she’d fight whatever terror waited beyond my body in her dark crib. Now that she’s so heavy I stagger beneath her, she slips easily from me, down into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed, fixed there like a second, dimmer star, though the stars are not fixed: someone once carried the weight of my life.
Alison McGhee 