{"id":135649,"date":"2019-04-19T13:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135649"},"modified":"2019-04-19T13:40:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T17:40:29","slug":"staff-picks-sapphics-scandals-and-skies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/19\/staff-picks-sapphics-scandals-and-skies\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and Skies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Richardson Bay as seen from Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)).<\/p><\/div>\n

In the May issue of Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Joe Kloc tells a story<\/a> about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live \u201con abandoned and unseaworthy vessels\u201d in California\u2019s Richardson Bay, \u201cdoing their best, with little or no money, to survive.\u201d The story is compelling, the prose unfussy and clear\u2014and the photographs, by Therese Jahnson, are the perfect complement\u2014but there is more going on here. The real miracle is how the article resists, gracefully yet firmly, the temptations of this kind of reporting, the very real traps it could have fallen into. It would be easy for an outsider to impose a straitjacket of meaning on this community, as writers have done for generations, or to see himself as a savior patronizing them with the boon of his voice, as more than one writer has seen himself; Kloc does neither. Gently, he suggests another way of looking at our world, maybe scarier but more honest, and another way of looking at those with whom we share it. \u2014Hasan Altaf\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I plucked Bruce Holsinger\u2019s The Gifted School<\/em><\/a> off the shelf a couple weeks ago, I didn\u2019t expect it to be such a timely novel alongside the unfolding college admissions scandal<\/a>. Likely, Holsinger couldn\u2019t have predicted it himself\u2014or could he? The Gifted School<\/em> is a consuming story about the community of Crystal Valley, Colorado\u2014where \u201ceveryone said or thought, we are happy, we are fit, we are woke, and even our streets are named for gems\u201d\u2014which unravels with the announcement of a new public school for exceptionally gifted students. The parameters for admission, and the coveted label of \u201cgifted,\u201d are just as controversial as one might expect, and the debate over who deserves a spot becomes inextricable from questions of privilege. Holsinger weaves the narratives of these families together to highlight tensions of class, perceptions of success, and the ruthlessness of parenthood in an insular epic that questions the notion of meritocracy, the hypocrisy of white liberalism, and the politics that trickle from the adult world down to their children. Holsinger\u2019s prose is nonintrusive; he offers up his characters without judgment, although each parental blunder evokes a gleeful schadenfreude and demonstrates the ease with which morals are abandoned to protect one\u2019s own. Last week, I began listening again to Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s podcast, Revisionist History<\/em>, and was reminded of the fourth episode, \u201cCarlos Doesn\u2019t Remember,\u201d which examines the need for early intervention to combat educational inequity and promote upward mobility\u2014a perfect pairing with Holsinger\u2019s novel. \u2014Nikki Shaner-Bradford<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hai-Dang Phan. Photo courtesy of Sarabande Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hai-Dang Phan is uniquely attentive. In his debut collection, Reenactments<\/em><\/a>, he recalls listening to his mother add a new detail to an old story. The detail is \u201csomething small\u201d: in this telling, she mentions losing her sandal as she ran to the boat in which their family fled Vietnam. The addition\u2014the sandal\u2014does not shatter Phan\u2019s memory, but it was nonetheless \u201cnot there before.\u201d There\u2019s a new sliver in the glass, and each new line matters. Phan startles the reader with this kind of quiet observation throughout. It\u2019s sometimes difficult to accept that our histories and ghosts are living things, but by beginning with the particular, with needle-fine questions, we might begin to unearth our textured, complex, animated lives. In the poem \u201cGet to Know Your Ghost,\u201d Phan recommends you determine \u201cwhether it is free Saturday night\u2009\/\u2009or Sunday afternoon for a visitation.\u201d This line, and the collection as a whole, is both gift and invitation. Phan\u2019s vantage point is wide, but it won\u2019t do all the work for you. You are going to have to \u201cdo something painful each day.\u201d You are going to have to ask the ghost something<\/em>. And every something will begin to make all the difference.\u00a0\u2014Spencer Quong<\/strong><\/p>\n

Toward the end of Gr\u00e9goire Courtois\u2019s brief, intense novel The Laws of the Skies<\/em><\/a>, there\u2019s a scene that made me avert my eyes when I first started reading it. A child dies\u2014but then again, a lot of children die in this book, which portrays a class of six-year-olds\u2019 disastrous school camping trip. The ensuing story has a whiff of allegory: adults abandon their charges, classmates turn against classmates, and nature, quite literally, swallows them up. It\u2019s unsettling. Along the way, Courtois raises pointed questions about the environment, the hereditary nature of evil, and the responsibilities of an older generation to the new. I felt absolutely nauseated by the end, and I have to admire that\u2014it\u2019s not every day that a book provokes such a strong physical reaction in me. \u2014Rhian Sasseen<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve owned more than one copy of Babette Deutsch\u2019s Poetry Handbook<\/em><\/a> over the years, initially buying it in Edinburgh when I got my first publishing job as a (volunteer) editorial assistant. The slush pile took up most of my time, particularly writing reader\u2019s reports\u2014a task for which I was wholly underprepared. Poetry, especially, was a challenge, and my early reports were met with silence from the editor, returned to me with question marks in the margins, and dropped on my desk with a sigh (on a bad day, my reports simply disappeared and were never mentioned again). Desperate for guidance, I headed to the local bookstore, and here, I found Deutsch. Her book opens with \u201cA Word to the Beginner\u201d and a declaration that \u201cthe meaning and the structure, cannot be separated without vital injury to the poem \u2026 Poetry as an art is intimately bound up with verse as a craft\u201d\u2014which was, of course, bad news for me, as I had previously thought that poetry as an art was intimately bound up with my own taste. But Deutsch was a more generous teacher than I deserved, and she gently introduced me to the fundamentals of meter, rhyme, and scansion and, in doing so, revealed a poetry all her own. Here were sapphics, sirventes, and Skeltonic verse; here were clerihews, cynghanedd, and chants royal. And here\u2014oh god\u2014was aubade <\/em>(see troubadour<\/em>, page 165). This was dangerous stuff for a young man who didn\u2019t know how to read critically, and I fear I got worse before I got better. In the end, however, the editor\u2019s question marks reduced in number, her silences softened, and I was, eventually, allowed to reply to submissions without supervision. It was a slow and healthy training. I could do with some more. \u2014Robin Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Babette Deutsch. Photo courtesy of New Directions.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 considers the gifted school, longs for poetic guidance, and retches at the deaths of fictitious six-year-olds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[52748,52736,21770,52738,52740,27685,52739,11424,71,52745,52741,52746,37514,136,52743,26829,188,25679,8084,112,486,26526,3539,7221,1447,52749,4590,272,52750,354,52744,52742,52735,52751,4155,1098,52752,883,52737,52747,176],"class_list":["post-135649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-babette-deutsch","tag-boat","tag-boats","tag-bruce-holsinger","tag-college-admissions-scandal","tag-colorado","tag-crystal-valley","tag-edinburgh","tag-fiction","tag-get-to-know-your-ghost","tag-gifted","tag-gregoire-courtois","tag-hai-dang-phan","tag-harpers","tag-inequity","tag-joe-kloc","tag-journalism","tag-liberalism","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-novel","tag-outsider","tag-podcast","tag-poem","tag-poems","tag-poet","tag-poetry-handbook","tag-privilege","tag-publishing","tag-reader-report","tag-recommendations","tag-reenactments","tag-revisionist-history","tag-richardson-bay","tag-sapphic","tag-scam","tag-scandal","tag-skeltonic-verse","tag-staff-picks","tag-the-gifted-school","tag-the-laws-of-the-skies","tag-vietnam"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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