After the Readathon
I’ve never read a book about a purgatorial burlesque show and strip club before. Kudos to Bianca Stone, the author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief, for making my first read of a purgatorial burlesque show and strip club a good and enchanting one with her pearlescent words.
I could ramble across many blog pages about the power of a good poem — the way the words contort themselves with bones breaking and skin sweating, the way their flotilla of words bobs elegant on a surface of blood and gore — because I have been fortunate enough in my three decades to read many good and haunting poems. Freeing poems. Poems that billow their star-chased fabrics across my eyes and brain. I have always loved Rumi and Hafez and Gluck and Mistral and on and on. Finding more contemporary poetry, like Stone’s, has been a wonderful gift, and I would number her among the constellation of lyricists. I also finished Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language; a feminist poetry collection, and it was suitable, because this was a feminist readathon.
In one weekend, I digested four books (two poetry collections and two novels) and sank my teeth into a fifth. Delightfully, all five have been worthwhile and engaging, even beautiful, reads. I love learning from women. Women teach me how to read, how to write, how to walk through this world with courage, grace, grit, and a sense of justice. The women in my life have taught me to appreciate that elusive thing called beauty, and thus I approach this readathon with a great purpose. Five women, five journeys.
On The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
I light incense before I write poetry. I make chai tea. I fiddle with my fountain pens. I pet my cats, feel the small bones of their skulls, brush my gaze up against theirs. Poetry is so steeped in this routine that I grow melancholy when my pen yields no ink; my soul has grown parched, thirsty like the deserts that cage me in here in the Southwest. Writing poetry is as difficult as giving birth. A skilled poetess knows how to strike words of fire and ash and winter winds and, in doing all this smoldering, make it look easy. And it seems easy until I lift my clumsy hand in an attempt to cup the cheek of something ethereal.
This is all to say that, yes, there is a routine in poetry, something one comes to expect when reading a good poem. This is also all to say that Bianca Stone does not make it look easy; she makes it look difficult, sanguineous, slick with afterbirth, and, underneath all of that gore, beautiful. Each poem in the collection comes into the reader’s mind with slow blinks, eyes adjusting to the darkness of death. I absolutely loved these poems and will be acquiring a copy of my own. Ninety pages and each one pivots around “feminist limbo,” ninety pages that come together like a hand with skin sloughed off to reveal the smooth scaphoids and metacarpals beneath. But what is even better is when Stone flexes that ghostly hand and hits you across the face with its inventiveness.
On Butter Honey Pig Bread
I tend to like my fiction listing toward the eddies of the speculative. Butter Honey Pig Bread appeared on my radar via Booktube. Watching a few women on that platform hold up their copy, chatting amiably about the sheer amount of food and symbolism in this book, I shrugged, wrote down the title and Francesca Ekwuyasi’s name, and before I knew it, I was sifting through the shelves in the library, looking for its orange-pink cover.
God bless you, Booktube and the introverts who carry on, waving a book in front of their camera and warbling beautifully about how wonderful it is, and this is key because Butter Honey Pig Bread is wonderful.
Ekwuyasi handles her language as one would handle an orchid, aware of each word’s precision, beauty, and deadliness. Braiding among three characters — a mother and her twin daughters — are sentences clothed in supreme compassion for the hurt that women drag with us like entire parts of us have carved out, spooned empty, and forced to carry on. Certain scenes left me queasy. This is not just a bland human story; it is a story of women, of resilience, and how family is the sinew that enables resilience. In a world where women are shamed into silence and isolation, Ekwuyasi reminded me of the importance of community for women because that isolation is the noxious gas that leaves vibrating, thriving bodies to lumps of moldy flesh disconnected from its own divinity. In the end, I read this book and talked to my mother, to the women who hang lights in my life.
On Hamnet
As I said in my Before the Readathon post, my mother was alight with excitement by the prospect of conversations about Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which is among her favorite books. “She can write the hell out of a death scene,” she said. “And that shroud scene…”
Yes, that shroud scene. For anyone who has not read Hamnet, what blew me away was not the death itself but rather the way that O’Farrell stretches it, massages it, twists it, pulverizes it. The first section of the book unfolds over a single day. How O’Farrell sustains that tension over over a hundred pages of text that simply sits, stones in the bottom of a fragrant well.
I would go a little further from my mother in that I think that O’Farrell wrote the hell out of flashbacks. Flashbacks, those tiny gnats that bugger the eyes of any writer, and the author moves information seamlessly out of the foreground and into the background and vice versa. Technically, each flashback is severed from the present action by white space, but that alone doesn’t account for her grace and lithe movement. I think masterfully crafted sentences are responsible for tossing us readers from one hand to another like a baton.
On The Dream of a Common Language
Somehow I have gone my entire life without having completed any serious reading of Adrienne Rich; somehow I have even gone thirty years not realizing that I was pronouncing her name incorrectly. My trip to the library brought me face to face with the poetry section, where I giggled and flipped through collection after collection. Would I take home some Mary Oliver? Some Robert Frost? How about Pablo Neruda?
I stuffed Rich into my laden bag because it was slim and slotted right in between the ribcage of Hunger and The Musical Brain.
Don’t mistake me — I loved and adored and ruminated on The Dream of a Common Language. Yet compared to Gabriela Mistral’s Madwomen, this one felt a bit more deflated than I was anticipating. Its words, far from tasting of gristle, tasted instead like rubber at times. Maybe I had too much hope for it, something that no one can accomplish. That has certainly happened to me before with other poetry collections. I will always love Rich and her movement “Not Somewhere Else, But Here.” But I think that Gluck’s “Trillium” will remain the divining rod by which I guide myself to something more sublime than myself.
On Americanah
Standing in the grocery store with my library copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in the crook of my elbow, a woman next to me motioned to my hands and smiled. “That’s a great book,” she told me.
I returned her smile. “I only just started it, but the sentence-level writing is so…superb.”
“Yes,” she said, scooping up her groceries and resting them in her cart. “I hope you enjoy it.”
A brief moment, with two women crabbing away from one another surrounded by fruit and potato chips, and it meant so much to me because I am beholding the power of this book that I have not yet finished reading. That brief moment of sameness is why I love reading, and why I love reading by and with women.
When I put the finishing touches on this blog, I will sit on my chair (uncomfortably — it broke yesterday) and fold myself into the pages of this book that all the women in my life have gushed about, awarded five out of five stars.
I love beauty.
