Monday, July 21, 2025

Two Poets - Frank X Walker and Mosab Abu Toha

When I mentioned to coworker Michael - who was putting together a poetry exhibit at the library - that there were a couple of recently published books of poetry that I had found 'harrowing,' he raised an eyebrow at the word I used and suggested reviewing the books here.  

It is an apt word for the poems in these two books. The poems, based on fact, are full of bitter tales of family separation and longing, loss and displacement, and scenes of annihilation of people and places. Coming to terms with the daily threat of death before you have barely had a chance to experience life is an overall theme in each book.

Poets Frank X Walker and Mosab Abu Toha are from ethnic groups whose people have been viewed throughout history as disposable, and while the contexts of these two poetry collections are different in place and time, the themes expressed have such strong parallels that it made sense to review them together. One collection is set in the context of the American Civil War and the other in present day Palestine. 


Walker, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky and a former Poet Laureate of the state, has published 13 books of poetry. His poems often focus on specific historical events. His latest is called Load in Nine Times and draws on actual events while imagining the thoughts and emotions of Black Civil War soldiers and their families. These carefully composed poems give us a view of the horrors endured by men who eagerly signed up for soldiering in the Union army in exchange for the commonly understood expectation of emancipation from slavery for themselves and their wives and children. 

Walker often does many months of research on a historic event before writing a poem about it, and several of the poems in Load in Nine Times imagine the thoughts of real people whose stories he found in archival records. The horrors described take time to emotionally digest, and these poems often left me feeling haunted. The two poems "Unsalted" and "How Salt Works" are about the 1864 massacre by Confederate soldiers at Saltville, Virginia of 46 Black soldiers who had been inadequately armed for battle and then abandoned on a muddy, freezing battlefield by order of their commander after they had been wounded. Other poems describe equally depraved behavior by commanding officers of both armies.

The poems reveal that like so much else in the American story, the military experience was much worse for Blacks than for white soldiers. And yet I was left with the impression that this terrible experience of going into battle with all its terrors and risk was still preferred to remaining enslaved. This series of poems provides such a close look at our gruesome history that the book felt a bit sacred to me once I had finished it; there is deep respect due to the people who suffered these experiences. At the back of the book, a timeline of Civil War developments and turning points plus several pages of notes discussing specific events that inspired some of the poems provide a helpful interpretive context. 


Forest of Noise is a collection of poems by 32-year-old Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other periodicals. He has won several prizes for his poetry. Like most Gazans, Toha has lost numerous family members, neighbors and lifelong friends who have been killed in the onslaught of retaliation by the Israeli Defense Forces in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. He, too, writes of bereavement, longing and unfathomable destruction of the people and community he has known all his life. So many people are missing from the world he knew that he writes of "Frying pans [that] miss the smell of olive oil. Clotheslines everywhere pine for soap scent," the doorknobs missing the touch of human hands and the ubiquitous rubble where the homes, olive and orange tree groves, and gathering spots of family and friends used to be. Like Walker, Toha brings you right into the immediacy of deep grief and it stings. 

Here are some lines from his poem "Under the Rubble," which I first read in The New Yorker, before I knew who this poet was:


       In Jabalia Camp, a mother collects her daughter's 

       Flesh in a piggy bank, 

       hoping to buy her a plot

       on a river in a faraway land.


       A group of mute people

       were talking sign.

       When a bomb fell, 

       they fell silent.


       The scars on our children's faces

       will look for you.

       Our children's amputated legs

       will run after you.


       He left the house to buy some bread for his kids.

       News of his death made it home,

       but not the bread.


       A father wakes up at night, sees

       the random colors on the walls

       drawn by his four-year-old daughter.


       The colors are about four feet high.

       Next year, they would be five.

       But the painter has died

       in an air strike.


       There are no colors anymore.

       There are no walls. 


       Where should people go? Should they

       build a big ladder and go up?

       But heaven has been blocked by the drones

       and F-16s and the smoke of death. 


...Even our souls,

they get stuck under the rubble for weeks. 


These are important books at a time when American history is being suppressed, erased and deceptively revised, and when the people of Palestine are feeling abandoned by the whole world as the entire population of Gaza continues to be under relentless assault, and profiteers wait for a chance to redevelop the places Palestinians call home. These two collections of poems are treasures. 

- Marianne W.

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

 

Eight young women gather in a bare-bones boxing gym in Reno, Nevada to compete for the title of best teen girl boxer in America. There are seven matches. During each match, we alternate between the minds of the two competing girls, slamming from one to the other, but also flitting into the minds of the viewers. Time isn't linear, either, and we get glimpses of their futures (without revealing the outcome of the match). 

The energy is like heat coming off the page and I read this in a frenzied two days. Each character is specific and heart-breaking in their own way. Bullwinkel anchors them with phrases that repeat like a leitmotif, reminding you this is the character that never left her home town, this is the character who had a kid die while she was on duty as a lifeguard, this is the girl who has a "weird hat philosophy." 

Bullwinkel's narrative is kinetic and she has a gift for describing what it is to be embodied. I had so much respect for the young women these characters represented: women who are dedicated to a craft, devoted to challenging themselves, regardless of whether or not they are being watched. 

This was recommended on the New York Times book review podcast on the episode where they discuss the 100th anniversary of the publication of (my favorite novel) Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The guests were asked to recommend books to read after the experimental stream-of-consciousness narrative of Mrs. Dalloway. Both books are currently on the shelf at our library. I encourage you to check them out! 

-Michael G.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Kiss of the Basilisk by Lindsay Straube

To be honest, I'm not sure how to:

  1. review this book in a way that makes sense
  2. keep it somewhere around PG or PG-13
  3. not freak out my coworkers and our patrons by my reading choices.
But I'm going to try anyway!

If you're a voracious romance reader of any and all types and enjoy hanging out in the bookish corners of social media, then this book has probably come across your feed. However, if you aren't constantly online, prefer your romances fairly sweet, and/or think that a knot is simply how you tie two strings together, then this is NOT the book for you. Please scroll away now, and if you keep reading, don't say I didn't warn you.

Temperance (Tem for short) is one of 14 young women eligible to marry the prince. Tem has long felt like an outsider - she and her single mom live on the outskirts of their village, raising chickens. She has one best friend, Gabriel, and one mean girl enemy, Vera, who is also in the running to marry the prince. Marrying the prince would make life considerably easier for Tem and her mother, so Tem wants more than anything to be the one chosen. Except... well, Tem doesn't have much experience when it comes to romance and intimacy, and the prince is going to pick his bride based not only on her looks and personality, but also on how well she performs in bed.

Which is where the basilisk comes in.

You see, many years ago, when humans arrived in that part of the world, they found that basilisks were already there. In human form, basilisks are alluring and seductive, and well-versed in pleasure. But in basilisk form, they are huge snake-y predators capable of killing you dead in an instant. As the humans moved into the basilisks' territory, a great and bloody war broke out, and the humans only prevailed once they learned that the basilisks' greatest weapon (turning people to stone by looking into their eyes) could be used against them by simply brandishing mirrors and forcing them to look at themselves. In the aftermath, the basilisks agreed to help keep the monarchy going by training eligible young women on how to have sex with each successive prince, since that will ensure that a new heir to the throne is always born.

Have I lost you yet? No? Good.

As Tem and the others begin their sex lessons, Tem finds herself paired with Caspen, who the humans know as the Serpent King. In truth, he's the son of the Serpent King, but his students usually get picked by the prince, so Tem feels like she maybe actually stands a chance to win the human prince's hand. But her relationship with Caspen quickly moves beyond the confines of their teacher/student role and into something deeper. Meanwhile, as things grow more serious between her and Caspen, she also gets closer and closer to the human prince, Leo, who clearly wants to make her his bride, despite his father's disapproval. Soon Tem is torn between the two, and what would be best not only for her and her heart, but also the two worlds she is now straddling. Plus, there's this mysterious voice calling for help every time Tem visits the castle, which only she can hear...

There is a whole lot more going on in this story that I haven't even touched on in this synopsis, and honestly, probably can't, given the explicit nature of this book (plus some things are best experienced without prior knowledge, if you know what I mean). Looking at other readers' reviews of this book on Goodreads, feelings are split - most reviewers either loved it or hated it, with some in the middle who enjoyed it for what it is while acknowledging that work still needs to be done. I'm definitely with those who are somewhere in between - the smut was incredibly smutty, which was honestly kinda great, but the character- and world-building do leave a lot to be desired. There are moments where you can tell Straube came up with a plot twist as she was writing, which I can almost forgive, as she initially released this chapter by chapter, but edits to lay more groundwork for those twists should have been made once it was picked up by a traditional publisher. There's also a sorta feminist bent to the story that is completely undermined not only by the lack of character development beyond the love triangle, but also by some of the actions of both Caspen and Leo and how Tem responds to them. Yes, the story basically revolves around Tem embracing pleasure and gaining self-confidence through that (that's the sorta feminist part), but there are moments when both men emotionally abuse Tem and no consequences happen beyond calling them out on it and them apologizing and promising not to do it again. Tem's relationships with the other female characters in the book are also trash. Either they have some familial relation to the main three characters or are an off-page cipher and therefore aren't a threat, or they're competition and deserve her ire more than anything. While I'm not totally a proponent of the notion that all women must support each other, no matter what, it was glaringly obvious that Straube was more interested in making sure that the reader knew that Tem was the ultimate chosen one, and the way to do that was to make sure Tem was superior to all other women in the book in a way that was detrimental.

All that being said, this was a wild romp that I read in the span of 4 days and the bonus, alternate-universe scene inspired by the movie Challengers may or may not, in my estimation, have made up for all of its flaws. I would one hundred percent read this again, I am going to read the sequel, and I may go ahead and buy a copy just because (especially if I can get my hands on one of the last deluxe editions with the fancy sprayed edges). But I'm not sure I can recommend it to the average reader, because it does fit into a very specific niche that will likely only appeal to very specific readers, and I'm not sure what that says about me.