Becka Mara McKay. Photo courtesy of McKay.

Becka Mara McKay once asked me to make a list of things one would never find in a poem, the lesson being that an exploration of lawn mower parts or the muscles used while bowling or natural marble patterns might yield some wonderful language, and if we’re not putting wonderful language in poetry, then where will all this wonderful language end up? A lot of wonderful language has found its way into McKay’s latest collection, The Little Book of No Consolation, which is structured around seldom-used terms such as scorse, inhabitiveness, wood want, and donkey’s breakfast. In “from the Dictionary of Misremembered English” she writes, “I can only bless you once, says the Angel / of Syntax, who believes we are born among / words the way birds are born among wings.” These poems investigate the layered intricacies of language itself as much as they plumb the depths of their subject matters, which tend toward the intersection of the animal, the translatable, and the mysteries of faith, locked together like calcite crystals in mizzi stone, expertly sawn, sanded, and polished to a mirror finish. —Christopher Notarnicola  Read More

César Aira. Photo: Nina Subin. Courtesy of New Directions.

César Aira’s latest book to appear in English, The Divorce (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), brings to mind an older approach to fiction—that of pure fabular storytelling, unencumbered by character development or realism. The plot is essentially nonexistent: a freshly divorced academic travels from Providence, Rhode Island, to Buenos Aires in order to distract himself from his emotions, and spends a day sitting outside a café around the corner from his guesthouse. While sitting there and chatting with a video artist named Leticia, he encounters Enrique, the guesthouse owner, who is holding a bicycle and appears to be freshly soaked from a large amount of water that has just been splashed upon him. Multiple stories quickly emerge: a surreal childhood encounter between Enrique and Leticia, the impoverished background of an acquaintance of Enrique’s named Jusepe, the strange life of Enrique’s mother (including the time she narrowly survived a mob killing), and the mysterious origins of the love of Enrique’s life, who is connected to the water with which the narrator finds Enrique soaked. These are tall tales in the most pleasurable sense of the term, looping and linking around one another as though to echo the strange circularities and synchronicities that so often repeat themselves in the course of a human life. “And with one hand,” writes Aira of Enrique, “he went on holding the delicate machine at his side: that ‘little steel fairy,’ the bicycle, from whose spinning stories are born.” —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

James Brandon Lewis. Photo: Diane Allford.

James Brandon Lewis has quietly become a legend in edgy jazz circles over the past decade, picking up where Albert Ayler and David S. Ware left off under the sign of John Coltrane and adding his own highly lyrical sense of song into the mix. I hadn’t known about him, but the recent buzz (including this New York Times profile) tipped me off, and I’m deeply grateful. Lewis’s compositions and solos always feel like they are about something, even if that something is veiled or just beyond the reach of words. Lewis’s amazing new record, Jesup Wagon—his first with his Red Lily Quintet—takes inspiration from the work and life of the Renaissance man George Washington Carver. The music is alternately beautiful and jarring, anxious and clear-eyed. I especially enjoy the musical conversation between Lewis and the cornet player Kirk Knuffke. And I’m absolutely in love with the drumming of Chad Taylor, whose sound is paradoxically anxious and steady. William Parker on bass and Chris Hoffman on cello hold down the low end and add plenty of flourishes and surprises. This is a not-unfriendly way into the challenging fringe of the jazz universe, and after a few listens, Jesup Wagon becomes a good friend indeed, a record equally suited to headbanging and meditation. —Craig Morgan Teicher  Read More

Hazel Jane Plante. Photo: Agatha K. Courtesy of Metonymy Press.

Just as there are an infinite number of stories to be told, there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Take Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) as case in point. When the narrator’s best friend dies, she decides to write an encyclopedia about her friend’s favorite television show. While Plante’s novel takes the form of an A-to-Z guide to the fictional one-season TV series Little Blue, it also tells the story of a queer trans woman mourning the loss of her straight trans best friend, for whom she felt an overwhelming, unrequited love. Through her thorough examination of the show, the narrator creates a beautiful, holistic homage to Vivian’s life. At the end of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), I found myself in awe of the book’s author. Not only has Plante imagined an incredibly complex TV show from scratch, she’s written an entire encyclopedia about said show, and somehow told a deeply heartfelt story of mourning, love, and friendship in the process. —Mira Braneck  Read More

Kate Zambreno. Photo: Heather Sten. Courtesy of Columbia University Press.

Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic. Ostensibly a study of the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991 and became famous for work such as the 1990 novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, To Write As If Already Dead divides itself into two distinct parts, both focused on questions of intimacy, interpersonal relationships, and the human body. In the lightly fictionalized first half, a woman working on a study of Guibert ponders an old internet-based friendship that ended abruptly after her anonymous friend deleted her blog. In the second half, Zambreno writes of Guibert, the book’s “ghost, the projected shadow, the echo,” and also her second pregnancy, the failures of the American health care system, correspondences with friends, and the frightening early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I worry to her,” Zambreno writes of a conversation with a friend, “I’m not cosmopolitan enough or queer enough to write about Guibert, that I would never have been included in Foucault’s circle. I am a mom on a couch!” But literature is slippery; To Write As If Already Dead, in its pairing of fact and fiction—a technique that Zambreno has used before, most notably in Screen Tests and Drifts—elides these boundaries, instead working to create parallels between relationships, spaces, and historical moments. “I wonder if death is the ultimate betrayal, not writing,” she questions near the end. “Writing as a way to mark an ‘I’ before it is extinguished.” —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Joss Lake. Photo: J. Aharonov.

Part sci-fi, part fantasy, part trans Brooklynite millennial saga, Future Feeling revels in its own chaos. Joss Lake’s debut novel kicks off when Pen, a trans man who works as a dog walker, enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to place a hex on Aiden, a trans influencer whom Pen resents. Rather than falling on its intended target, the hex sends Blithe, an adopted Chinese trans man raised by white parents, to the Shadowlands, a dark landscape one goes to when they have “completely lost their shit.” The Rhiz, a highly elite underground queer organization, enlists Pen and Aiden to bring Blithe back from the Shadowlands, where he’s struggling emotionally with his transracial upbringing and gender transition. Am I doing the plot justice? Not really—I told you this book revels in its own chaos, and chaos and coherent narrative summary don’t tend to mix. But I love how Future Feeling lingers in the mayhem. More than linger, Lake embraces it, forgoing the neat narrative of before and after in favor of the messiness of process and becoming. Plus, this book is fun: hexes, moonlit rituals, a pet plant named Alice the Aloe, and well-placed critiques of gender, capitalism, and the alienating nature of advanced technology all abound. I’m still not sure how to classify Future Feeling—but defying neat categorization is kind of the point. —Mira Braneck  Read More