Back Bay Books, 2005

Reconfigurations of the Self
Review by Shannon K. Winston

Lori Lansen’s The Girls: A Novel is a subtle and carefully crafted investigation of what it means to be human and to engage with others in the world. It asks important questions such as: what does it mean to be “normal” and human? Where do the borders of one self-end and where does that of another begin? How do we relate to others, our bodies, and space?

The novel deftly addresses these difficult questions by narrating the story of Rose and Ruby, conjoined twins who narrate their story (stories) of their lives together who are abandoned by their biological mother and adopted by a hospital nurse. The girls are two fiercely different individuals who inhabit the same body. Rose begins the narrative by stating: “I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon” (Lansens, The Girls, 3). These lines establish three of the central themes of the novel: the gaze (and unique perspectives), companionship, and life experiences, for this story is told by two girls who conduct both unusual and quite ordinary lives: they are defined as much by the experiences they have not had as by those they have.

One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the range of experiences and emotions it addresses. The sisters often describe their feelings towards each other as continuations of their feelings towards themselves; the line between self and other thus gets blurred in interesting and complex ways. The narrative describes what it is to feel someone’s presence—as the sisters do—without every seeing the other. Girls: The Novel thus proposes an alternate way of being in the world, in which there are alternative ways of experiencing the self and others. Rose explains: “I’ve never set eyes on my sister, except in mirror images and photographs, but I know Ruby’s gestures as my own, through the movement of her muscle and bone” (5). Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Lansens probes the deeply familiar and the foreign and shows that the two terms are not always binary opposites; in fact, they often coexist. In short, this book is an understated attempt to challenge so-called “normal” lived experiences and to propose, instead, that we reinvestigate our own position in the world.

Finally, and interestingly, The Girls is also a meditation on the writing process itself and what it means to create a narrative. The story unfolds as we read it and each girl shares her side of the story. Each chapter, therefore, presents a shift in point of view. It posits the difficulty and advantages of a double narrative just as it describes the many joys and hardships of a doubled existence.

KRITYA Publishing, 2007

A Passage to India
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

Hindi poet, translator and Sanskrit scholar Rati Saxena believes that, “To write a poem / you have to / walk on fire.” In her second book in English, One Window & Eight Bars, she seems to do just that. It is apparent why Saxena has won major awards, including the prestigious Indira Gandhi National Culture and Arts Fellowship. Saxena is on fire with her gift for language, readily igniting admiration in her reader.

To read Saxena’s poetry is to be transported not only to a physical country, but also to a spiritual one where, “The taste of last night’s dream / persists on the tongue.” In the journal Kritya that she edits, Saxena provides insight into the philosophical basis for her work: “…poetry is not just words. There is something which gives life to poetry, something more than words…Vedic philosophy equates the ‘kavi’ (Poet) to Brahma. Thus ‘kavi’ could be the creator of this universe.”

Saxena’s universe is informed by ancient tradition, yet attuned to contemporary, especially women’s, issues. In “I, in Udaipur” she contrasts a peaceful setting with a painful reality: “By that tree, that temple- / thick with gods, drums and bells / longing for an offering, a cow waits- / with fly-flickering tail.” Then: “At the shore of this Lake / in some middle class family, / a fourth daughter is born. / No applause- / No drumbeat- / Only the shadow of a silence.” Forster portrayed colonial India; Saxena probes her own post-colonial India and bravely questions tradition: “A woman, have I / nothing to offer / my ancestors?”

Saxena explores the role of women across a lifetime. A mother responds to her daughter’s maturation: “She says / ‘Mother, I am really grown up’ / She catches a piece of cloud / spread across her face / I am worried / cover her with a red chunneri.” A daughter cares for her mother with Alzheimer’s –“It is my turn. / I shall comb your hair now”– even as she struggles with role reversal: “Oh! Is this my mother / or a careless little girl?” In the final poignant image the daughter acknowledges losing her mother as she has known her: “Like a flying kite / she is slipping from our hands.”

Women are also lovers. Some poems are deeply sensual: “I…have given you warm kisses on your feet / and stroked your whole body with my eyelashes.” Always there is the recognition that the body, for all its pleasures, is moreover, “a long bridge / from soul to soul.” Caress of the sea, taste of mango, scent of spices, tinkle of anklet bells, flash of a parrot’s wing: sensuous details such as these render the book a feast for body and soul. Saxena won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for translation. In this book she translates the mysteries of the heart for an international audience. One Window & Eight Bars opens a view on a world at once familiar and exotic. No passport required.

In the sparely titled, Poem, Manivannan exudes sexual confidence that flirts with disaster: “thunderstorms should make love to me…they’re the most erotic things in nature and I think they might enjoy it.”Manivannan believes that “performance poetry is definitely more accessible than poetry on the page” (TELL Magazine). It would be difficult to read a book of poems in under half an hour, but this 24 1/2 minute performance of Ochre is over all too soon. Her delivery is intense and intimate. There is urgency and authority in the various personae she inhabits. Sharanya Manivannan’s voice has the clarity of a diamond; she has chiseled every facet of her presentation so that what we hear is a rare radiance.

-Kimberly L. Becker

One World Cafe Performance

How To Eat A Wolf
Witchery
Parampara
Cante Jondo In The Neytal Vein
This Hummingbird Heart
Clitoris
Linea Negra
Duende (The Gypsy Prayer)
A Horse Named Notoriety
Poem
Aquamarine
And If You Still Must Leave

Special thanks to Anand Krishnamoorthi, Sound Engineer, Prasad Studios, Chennai

More on Sharanya Manivannan

http://sharanyamanivannan.wordpress.com
www.myspace.com/sharanyamanivannan
http://ochreastheearth.blogspot.com
http://invokingfrida.blogspot.com

Bloomsbury, 2007
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The March of Dimes exists to help prevent birth defects, so, in theory, the child featured on the March of Dimes poster is the kind of child that mothers are hoping to avoid. This irony is at the heart of Emily Rapp’s wonderful memoir, Poster Child.

Rapp, who was the designated “poster child” in Albany County, Wyoming, in 1980, was born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Her condition was caused by something known as proximal focal femoral deficiency (PFFD), a genetic mutation for which Rapp’s mother was hardly responsible. Typically, PFFD is managed by amputation. Rapp’s leg was cut off and she learned to walk, run, ski, and dance in a prosthetic.

As poster child, Rapp is showered with attention. She writes “I felt like the winner of a beauty contest, although I had received my title for an attribute that was certainly not coveted by others. I didn’t care because I loved the attention. I felt like a star.”

In later years, Rapp continues to seek attention through academics, writing draft after draft of papers that other students might dash off the night before the due date. She becomes a high achiever, a young woman afraid of failure. Sometimes she even manages to pass as “typically abled.” Although she finds acceptance among fellow amputees, she is repelled by others with disabilities.

Rapp writes with wisdom and beauty about her on-going attempt to come to terms with her body. In doing so, she exposes us to a hidden culture and reminds us that there is no such thing as normal.

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Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

Tsar Books, 2007
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The group friendship novel is a staple of women’s literature. Typically, such a novel brings together several women who went to college together (as in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a classic of the genre) or women who grew up in the same neighborhood (as in Rebecca Wells’ best-selling The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.) Often the women in these novels are from similar socio-economic backgrounds, although their lives may have veered off in different directions. In her latest novel, The Writing Circle, South African expatriate Rozena Maart, who now lives in Canada, uses a writing group to bring together women of various walks of life. As the urge to writes affects people of all classes and cultures, it’s a clever ploy – one that allows us to see a dissection of multi-cultural South Africa.

The novel is told in five voices - those of Isabel, a counselor of sexually abused women; Jazz, a doctor of Indian descent whose parents are looking to marry her off; Amina, a divorced Muslim from a wealthy family who lives with her mother and son; Beauty, a Xhosa whose husband died at the hands of the police; and Carmen, an English woman who is in a relationship with Jazz’s brother. The book starts off with Isabel, who is hosting the writing group at her home in a suburb of Cape Town. She is brutally raped in her car while the others wait inside the house for her to come home. In her struggle to get free, she manages to grab the rapist’s gun and then accidentally shoots and kills him. The gunshot finally attracts the attention of the other women, who decide to dispose of the body and conceal the crime. Throughout the rest of the novel, Isabel and her writing companions, all of whom have been sexually assaulted at some point, deal with the emotional repercussions of this incident.

In South Africa, which has been called “the rape capital of the world,” women of all classes, ages, and cultures are at risk. Maart drives the point home in this compelling psychological drama.

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Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

The Permanent Press, 2008

Starting Over
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

Gayle Davies Jandrey spent 28 years teaching public high schoolers and this experience, no doubt, has enabled her to create an incredible cast of real characters in her debut work of fiction, A Garden of Aloes.

Jandrey does an outstanding job crafting six characters’ (all female) distinct voices, particularly twelve year old Sam, the character readers will have a chance to meet first in A Garden of Aloes. In this suspenseful, witty, and poignant page-turner you will not have to read several chapters before getting to the juicy scenes. A Garden of Aloes is straight off heartrending and humorous.

In order to escape an abusive relationship, Leslie, along with her two daughters, twelve year old Sam and sixteen year old Audrey, trade in a well-to-do life and a big beautiful home in northern California for a poor life in Tucson Arizona. They move into a cockroach infested converted motor court, the Oasis Apartment, in a neighborhood swarming with winos, prostitutes, and crackheads. “The street is called The Miracle Mile. It’s a miracle all right—a miracle that we weren’t robbed or worse,” says twelve year old Sam about her new life and new neighborhood. The other three characters in A Garden of Aloes are Chablee, a biracial teen who befriends Audrey; Eden, a topless dancer and Chablee’s mother, befriends Leslie; and Dee, a 400 pound 40 year old with multiple personalities, befriends twelve year old Sam. Although the characters are somewhat dissimilar, they share something in common: abuse, abandonment, and life at the Oasis Apartment. But they “…learn to be like aloes—tough on the outside so they can stay soft within.” —Kirkus

Although Jandrey’s characters are fictitious, Sam does have Jandrey’s childhood fear of vampires. “On nights when I awoke too full of dread to go back to sleep, it was my very own sister who’d let me crawl into the safest part of her twin bed, no small sacrifice since I was a rather chunky ten-year-old at the time,” recalls Jandrey in her Acknowledgments.

A Garden of Aloes made me realize that I should take nothing for granted because what’s here today could very well be gone tomorrow, and just like the characters in A Garden of Aloes, starting life over can happen to anyone.

A Garden of Aloes will bring tears to your eyes and have you rolling with laughter. But do not get it twisted; the unfortunate state of affairs of the women who resides at the Oasis is no laughing matter.

Meritage Press, 2007

Pinning Down the Escape Artist
Review by Lee Kottner

“Listen to catch with intimate hooks the drift / of King James or a coroner’s conversation / nurse learned syllables as seeded fluff to Velcro . . .” Jean Vengua tells us near the end of her new poetry collection, (italics)Prau,(/italics) winner of the Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize. In a 2006 [interview] (http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/01/interview-with-jean-vengua.html), Vengua calls herself “an escape artist” when describing her poetics, and (italics)Prau,(/italics) named after an Indonesian sailboat, is all about being on the move. The book is divided into four sections: Momentum, Displacements/In Place, Ghost Vessels, and Rowing/Breathing. Despite all that movement, or in some cases, longing for movement, one thing anchors Vengua firmly, and that’s her language. Though her settings range from Mindinao to Monterey to Alaska, it’s the rich images of her poetics that give us a sense of the place her poems come from.

That place is the poet’s body, its memories and constituent parts, its own place in the geography of the world. In “Night Diary,” she tells us “In the night the body, the meat diary, remembers certain conversations.” Vengua has gone about recording them. She lets us know what we’re in for in the opening poem, “This Isn’t Kansas,” informing us “there is no more new. a lot of / nakedness around here lately, though. it shuffles, goes / everyday under the radar, shifts sightlines . . .” and when she’s done, nothing is quite the same because our own sightlines have shifted to include the landscapes of emotion and migration.

In her bio, Vengua says that most of these poems were written “online, afloat on the sea of pixels.” She has had several experimental poetics blogs in the past and her poems have that flavor of stream-of-consciousness that steals over us so easily when staring into the void of the internet, speaking through our fingers. There’s an intimacy to her poems that late-night online chat room conversations have, when it feels safe to say anything. As Vengua says in “Night Stammers,” “Syntax breaks up. Ice breaks. If you can just weather a night like this huddled with your own voice.” You sign off and realize it’s 4 a.m. and you’ve told a complete stranger everything about your affair with a co-worker.

Vengua’s poems are not only intimate but playful as well, in both form and content. “Glowrius “ is ten words long and takes up the whole page with outsized, all-capped, phonetically spelled, oddly broken, bracketed words in deepest black and pale gray that almost seem to glow like green pixels on a black screen. Often, she breaks words in half without hyphens, merely dropping them to the next line to discombobulate her readers, muddle the meaning, and make us rear back and reread. There’s something almost Dada-like in her visual poetry, but the content matters too. In “Debit” she uses the convention of strikeout to “erase” without erasing the first half the poem. Reading through the struck-out words, you realize they were two separate poems that, together, make a third.

That’s an apt description of this collection itself; there’s so much going on in it, both parts and whole. Time slips away, people slip away, homelands change, new places become home. The boat goes out with travelers on the tide and comes back richly loaded with experience and memory laid out in rich language.