Barrelhouse Reviews: The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter

Review by Rachel Cribby

Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
$17.99
ISBN: 9781937512811

Sarah Rose Etter writes beautifully, but don’t let that fool you: she does not fear the grotesque. In fact, the very premise of The Book of X is enough to induce a physical cringe in the reader.  Cassie, the protagonist, was born with her abdomen twisted in a knot, in the most literal of ways. This means that her body is twisted in a visible way. It is a malady that has affected both her mother and her grandmother before her, and although the aesthetic implications would be premise enough for a compelling novel, the knot’s effect is not merely superficial. Indeed, every woman who is born this way experiences excruciating pain that only worsens as the knot’s host ages. The reader feels a sense of impending doom throughout the entire novel as it follows Cassie in the footsteps of her tortured matriarchs. 

As a young child, the knot is far from Cassie’s only problem. Her mother is grumpy and preoccupied, with no time or patience for her only daughter, and her father and brother completely exclude her from participating in the family business. This family business, by the way, happens to be a highly prolific “meat quarry” where the family rips animal flesh off the walls to sell for money. Cassie explains: “each day, my father and brother pull meat from the quarry to sell in town like my father’s father and his father before him.” It is dirty work that leaves its harvesters with pungent smells and bloody residue, but it is also a livelihood – one that Cassie not only wants to be a part of, but feels a connection with. 

The style of writing in The Book of X is dizzying, switching back and forth from the tangible present moment to hazy visions where the events are unclear. For example, in one vision, Cassie shows a schoolmate the meat quarry, which results in an exchange that places the novel’s magical elements front and center: 

“What is this place?” he asks. 
“The Meat Quarry. My brother and father discovered it. It’s ours.” 
“What do you do down here?”
“This is where we harvest the meat.” 
“Weird,” he says. “Smells like hell.” 
“It’s my favorite place.”

While some aspects of The Book of X create concrete symbolism, such as the literal tearing of flesh from walls in the meat quarry juxtaposed with the endless commentary on Cassie’s body, other elements are left to the imagination. Etter leaves both the time period and geography of the novel’s world unspecified in a way that tantalizes the reader and creates an uncanny experience. It is like our world, but different. On the make-believe side, there’s the aforementioned meat harvesting. But events that happen in Cassie’s world could be lifted directly from our own – she dates disappointing man after disappointing man, and her boss tells her that she should smile more. 

This novel is so delicate in its absurdity, in its mixing of time periods, that it captivates. The Book of X signals a bygone era, including archaic medical practices and long rickety train rides, but some elements seem to place the characters in a modern world, such as modern cities and colloquial dialogue. Given the book’s hefty themes of isolation and self-image, the reader has to be comfortable with the fact that there may be no decade more synonymous with the dystopian than the current one.  

It is difficult for a book to touch upon the story of women’s bodies in a way that feels original and refreshing. But The Book of X succeeds in making the reader just uncomfortable enough that they feel called to think about, and to feel, their own inner knot. 

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Rachel Cribby is a musician and occasional writer from Montreal, Canada. When she’s not reading a book or cuddling with her cats, you can find her drinking tea or listening to sad music.

Barrelhouse Reviews: I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych, by Nina Boutsikaris

Review by Samantha Rich

“I’d never failed at pretending before.”

 In the first piece of narrative in her fractured memoir I’m Trying To Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych, published earlier this year,  Nina Boutsikaris sets readers on notice that she will be talking about identity and performance, particularly as it relates to women having sex in contemporary America—and that we will have a sense we have heard this story before. A fragile woman, introduced to sex too young and in unequal relationships with older, careless men, strives to find her identity and repair herself as she moves chronologically into and through womanhood. 

And we have heard this story before, in its broad strokes, but the details are always different. A strong writer can draw connections that remind us of the essentials of dialing into the humanity of this story of the way our society and culture continues to fail vulnerable young women and leave them to find healing and understanding for themselves. Boutsikaris is such a writer; the first section of I’m Trying To Tell You illustrates the process of a young woman being damaged, used, and shaped by cultural forces and the people who enact them with indifference or delight, while the second and third show the consequences that carry on through the rest of that woman’s life, long after the people who hurt her have moved on. The writing itself also shows these consequences: while Boutsikaris is indeed a strong writer, that doesn’t mean she never flinches, and the format of those flinches tells the reader even more about the her psychic scars.

The first piece in her triptych, “Nepenthe,” is the strongest. Boutsikaris tells us the etymology of the word: “Literally, the ‘anti-sadness’” to show how she has tried to be this for her lovers, for her mother, for figures in power throughout her life. The dangerous, seductive magic of the concept is shown in narrative pieces about how she lost herself in trying to be “nepenthe” for all of them. She gives up her desires, her autonomy, her self-protection, her very sense of self in bits and pieces, in order to comfort, please, and pacify men who show no interest in giving her anything in return. Not anything equivalent, to be sure—nothing at all. Shaped from childhood to accept this as her due, she does, each little narrative fitting into the greater one with another example of how a young woman learns to be content with always giving and never getting back. 

 The following pieces, “This One Long Winter” and “Sons and Other Strangers” offer less impact and less cohesion, respectively. “Long Winter” follows her through a period of undiagnosable illness, when doctors tell her nothing is wrong, and she forces herself through a winter of self-destructive partying in New York. She fades away, and welcomes it: “He must have liked how little space I took up; starving, demure in lack.” In “Other Strangers,” Boutsikaris leaves New York and writes from an unspecified desert, near a train line. Here, there is more human connection, and relationships that are more tender than the indifferent, trauma-infused sex and drama of the first sections. There is a sense of growth, of not-quite-yet-blooming. The last lines of the book build up to the word “proof”:

 “I will send my friends the video he took of me shooting the rifle, and then later I will send it to other boys, so that they will also understand, so they will see how tough I am, how fearless. Someone once stood behind me and recorded the proof.”

 Proof of existence, proof that Boutsikaris not only lived and breathed and acted, but that she took the specific action of shooting a rifle. She now has the potential for violence, in self-defense or otherwise, and she puts that into the world as a notice and a warning. This ending is in sharp contrast to the lost sense of self from the beginning and the blurry, uncertain sense from the middle sections. In other words, by the end, the writer’s voice has found a place to plant its feet.

 Boutsikaris has a repeated structure throughout the book—so consistently that it appears to be an intentional tic, intended perhaps to create an inner rhythm to the pieces. The structure itself, though, illuminates the insecurity that runs through the narrative, the fear of that absence of self. She makes a statement, then follows it several times with variations on “meaning” or “this meant…” The cycle of statement and elaboration or explanation is exemplified here, from “Nepenthe”:

 “…and there he was, leaning on the doorframe asking me where I’d been.
Which meant I was powerful again. Which meant that I wasn’t.
Meaning after my English test I would follow him up the hill to his room with the Tibetan bedspread where I lay on my back in the June afternoon because I wanted to be enough.
But he was not real. Meaning he was real.”

 Even recognizing the presumed intentionality of this, it grates in reading. I found myself wanting Boutsikaris to make a statement without immediately redirecting and dressing new images and language around it. Just one clean, standalone statement. One image, even if it means giving up the internal rhythm.

But she doesn’t, this time. And so, ultimately, the “Intimacy Triptych” is just as much an insecurity triptych, where clever and well-crafted language coils around an anxiety that the reader might see what the writer fears is true—that there isn’t substance at the core. This fear is as encouraged and fed by our culture as the abuse and damage that created it: that women who have been hurt are hollow, that they cease to exist. The strength of Boutsikaris’ writing, around the places where she flinches, show this to be a lie. 

Another thread woven through the text is references back to art (Renoir, Kiki Smith) and philosophy (Derrida, Kristeva), coiling around the matters of subject and object, the actor and the acted-upon. The deftly sketched connections between these references and the sex, trauma, illness, and healing arcs of the narrative pieces demonstrate that at the core there is a vivid, beating heart. Future work from Boutsikaris that grows into the confidence of its own strength will be welcome additions to the canon of women’s unflinchingly honest voices.

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Samantha Rich is a writer, reader, and history buff. She lives in Maryland with a (bossy) cat and a (nervous) dog.

Barrelhouse Reviews: A Girl Goes into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell

Review by Ann Davis-Rowe

Dzanc Books
July 16, 2019
Paperback / 200 pp / $16.95

Readers are easily swept away by an epic narrative with characters they truly get to know, their histories and thought processes completely laid out over 500 pages. But in A Girl Goes into the Forest, Peg Alford Pursell creates characters equally complex and real, whole worlds—sometimes in less than a page. This 240-page book contains 78 stories. It is altogether a different sort of feat from epic storytelling for an author to communicate all she wants to say in such a limited fashion and to trust that the reader will follow with her. 

One method Pursell uses to guide the reader through her forest is to group the stories into sections, each section with a dramatic and haunting title that poses its own questions. The first is “How Far She Has Come in the Wide World Since She Started Out in Her Naked Feet,” and the majority of the stories in it deal with the struggles of mother/daughter relationships. 

In “Smoke, Must, Dust,” the maternal narrator states of her daughter that “she and I were always in opposition, barely managing to tamp down the conflict when others neared.” In “A Man with Horses,” the mother acknowledges conflict with her daughter more obliquely, her daughter “who had always seemed, from the start, too clever to choose comfort.” The mother has great hope for the future—“I was contented, even triumphant” as her daughter prepares to go away to college, saying, “but somehow we’d made it through, and she was on the verge of making her own way in the world. I imagined talking deeply in the days to come, learning what made her feel empty, what made her feel full.”

Different mothers, different daughters, same struggle. Both mothers are left by their daughters, one as expected, one as a surprise. Despite their different relationships with their daughters, the mothers are similarly resigned to the future. The story reflects back to narration in “Old Church by the Sea,” the first story in this section: “I always think I’ll circle around to the exact explanation for what went wrong. Having and wanting at the same time—that’s what it was to carry my daughter inside me.”

The last two stories of this section are narrated by women whose romantic relationships are as fraught as mother-daughter ones. In “Astronomy at Desert Springs,” a woman’s lack of warm clothing under the cold night sky is a metaphor for a coldness that has crept into her marriage. “She thought she had [dressed warmly], but the clothing (long sleeves, down-filled vest) wasn’t enough, like so many things lately.” 

And in the story that closes this section, “Unknown Animals,” a woman ruminates on how her partner’s face—and perhaps her own, as well—has changed. “Only momentary beauty existed, an instant of respite with the sole purpose of demonstrating its elusiveness.” In one of the more direct moments of the entire collection, the narrator says that “Love was like rainfall, either softening the ground or washing it away.”

Two particularly successful stories are both in the “She Only Dabbled in Magic to Amuse Herself” section. One tells of a cake that does not appreciate being in a story that gives it “consciousness without agency.” The cake feels bad for the woman who will soon come out to find a squirrel has gotten into her tomato plant. And despite the story’s title being “Under the Accumulating Sunlight,” the cake feels its icing melt, not from the sun, but from empathy with the to-be-disappointed woman. Meanwhile, we are told that the squirrel “just wants what it wants” as it eyes the pink icing. How rude for the creature with no deeper thought to be able to do what it likes, whereas the cake has all the feelings but none of the power. 

The story that immediately follows echoes the idea of lack of agency, of a life where things happen to one instead of by one, and not just through its title, “Gilded Cage.” The main character “was believed to be a witch because of her hunched back” and also “because she was alone and no one had ever been inside her cottage at the edge of the forest and no one knew what she did there.” The woman, nicknamed Birdie by her father many years ago, keeps canaries; as she keeps them in their cage, she is kept in hers by her disability and solitary nature. But her life wasn’t always solitary. The story is less than three pages long, but it describes her rough-but-gentle father, her faithless lover, and the devoted woman who helped the family keep house. It also offers observations about human nature—how once children learned to tie their shoes before kindergarten, but perhaps those parents who put their kids in Velcro are the same ones who don’t care about cursive; how death can be kind, keeping people from seeing pain come to those they love. 

Most of the stories in this book have female protagonists, and while they are all flawed, Pursell treats them with more care—as in the mothers who lost their daughters—than the fewer male protagonists. In “Our Losses” and  “A House on the Market,” the men realize the errors they have made in their relationships, but do nothing to fix the issue. In “You Can Do Anything,” a man thinks he realizes where he went wrong and how he can fix it, but certain clues throughout, such as the way he imposes his worldview onto others—he is very proud to ask how much his financial clients are “spending” on entertainment when he really means “wasting”—that he is projecting. In “Love Carnival,” a husband is so focused what his wife does that he doesn’t like, he can’t appreciate what she is doing to work on their relationship. Rather than finding pleasure in his wife trying to seduce him, “she used her sex appeal to unfair advantage…once again, he hadn’t even finished what he’d had to say!”

Pursell’s economy of words often left me wanting more. This isn’t a criticism; instead, I feel it’s the key to this collection’s magic. I am normally a very fast reader, but I had to take a lot of time to pause and process. I often felt like I wasn’t smart enough to fully comprehend what I had just read, much less create a summary for you, the review reader.

And while I was, admittedly, sometimes frustrated, I was more often fascinated. Especially as rereading brought emphasis to new words, often suddenly unlocking a passage I struggled with. One such story was “Baby Bird.” This story begins with a sentence fragment and a question painting a grim picture—“Gray sheets, grime, chill of metal. Smell of ancient burned toast. What’s a home anyway?”—then moves on to the equally distressing picture of a nest fallen to the ground, empty, but with “the darkish down of the absent bird” still remaining. And then a young girl appears, alone, improperly dressed for the weather, and bleeding. When I first read this story, I could only focus on the girl, leaving bloody footprints as she traveled to and from a dismal house. Only upon rereading did it dawn on me that the title was “Baby Bird” and I was able to fully appreciate the connection between the girl and the missing bird. The story ends: “Where is the bird? Where did she go?”

Many of the characters in this book have no name. This may lead the reader to wonder if they appear in multiple stories. Are we reading about the same person in a different point in their life? Or the same event from another point of view? The first two stories in section six, “He Tried to Say His Prayers But All He Could Remember Were His Multiplication Tables” are especially evocative in this manner. “One Early Summer Morning” begins with a daughter mentioning her father as her mother lies dying, and “Unraveled” is about a man unable to put away the sweater of a woman no longer with him. Is this the same man from the first story, and the mother the owner of the sweater? Of course, Pursell doesn’t say the woman in “Unraveled” has died, just that she was recently there and isn’t now. 

When I got past the need to figure it all out, to create a cohesive plotline from these very different fragments, I saw that the through-line of A Girl Goes into the Forest is basic human longing. Even if it’s just a longing to know more. After all, in every fairytale we’ve ever been told, from Hansel and Gretel, abandoned by a cruel stepmother, to Beauty, trying to save her father, a girl never goes into the forest because she is perfectly content with life. 

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Ann Davis-Rowe has been a voracious reader from a very young age and holds a Masters degree in Library Science. She's also a secretary, actress, home cook, and co-guardian to the snuggliest puppies around.

Barrelhouse Reviews: Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton

Review by Eric Nguyen

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2019)
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-57366-069-3

The world can be a horrible place. Rivers can dry up. Friends can disappear. A plant can outgrow its pot and wreak havoc. It’s all the same in the worlds of Evelyn Hampton’s surreal collection, Famous Children and Famished Adults, which won Fiction Collective 2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovation Prize. That it was selected for the prize by Noy Holland is apt.

Holland, known for her satisfyingly bizarre and challenging stories, once wrote that the writers she’s “hungriest to read sacrifice ease and fluency,” that they “forego the temptation to add, resist the lure of convention, are wary of the strength of the will; [and] they believe in affect, the work the word does on the body.” Hampton's work fits this bill. She uses strange phrasing and surprising images ("almonds the color of skin, the boy's"), often in speculative settings that disorient readers. If, in a Noy Holland story, you are running through a maze led by a guide running paces ahead of you, in a Hampton story, the light is off as you stumble through an unrecognizable, fantastical territory. 

The opening story, “Fishmaker,” pushes the reader into such a place with its unsettling first sentence: “Then I made fish.” The narrator goes on to describe how they “make fish” built from “windshield wiper fluid caps,” “dry fish-eye lenses,” and “a pinch of white pepper.” The world of “Fishmaker” is populated with familiar things: the bank of a river, a small den, a “little cabin on the beach” named Beachcombers Paradise (“the owners hadn’t made the S possessive”). Yet this world is not quite right. The nameless narrator is not human in the way we know it. “I am old,” they say, “I keep my skin in a zipped bag in the refrigerator.” Meanwhile, a tomcat becomes a female cat, which becomes a woman, wearing a captain’s vest commandeering a ship called Deliverance. 

Other stories follow similar surreal logic. A filmmaker encounters a mysterious door attached to nothing in “From Documentary Filmmaker Jurgen Grossbinger’s Journal.” The protagonist of “At the Center of the Wasp” returns to an island made of “shit and rot” to bury a perfumer. The coma in “I Carried My Coma” is something that can picked up from the ground and placed in a hand: “It was white and fuzzy and seamed, about to hatch.” And in “Since the Cats All Vanished,” the cats, well, vanish. 

Throughout the collection, Hampton remains confident in her world-building, however weird her worlds become. What she builds are worlds gone horribly wrong: climate change and rapid urbanization propel many of these stories. “Fishmaker,” for instance, starts off in a polluted river but the setting soon changes: the river dries up, forcing the narrator to flee. In “Rico,” there’s “a violent coup that had been preparing itself for months.” 

The more unsettling stories are the ones in which the apocalypse is quiet, anxious, menacing. “The End of History” features a writer buried in a cloud of content, a social media stream come to life:

As long as she has a mind, and senses connected to it, she will be unable to stop taking in the sights, sounds, feelings, odors, and flavors of her surroundings, and from these sensations her mind will be unable to stop inventing stories and ideas that occur to her one after the next, often so quickly that she has not finished making sense of one before the next one comes, then the next…

In “Air,” Hampton’s language loops around itself in long paragraphs to create a claustrophobic sensation as its protagonist plans to kill their houseplant, which is growing too big for its pot. “You reach a point and think, There’s no going back from here,” the story begins, only to end in, if not the exact same place, in a similar mind space of paranoia. The writing here is acrobatic, redundant, frustrating—a specific kind of verbal disorientation that has its own pleasure.

Ironically, Hampton distrusts words. “At the same time that I stake almost everything on language,” she says in an interview with Jared Daniel Fagen, “I also think that language is always going to be inadequate—language, being entirely conceptual, can’t touch what’s outside of concepts.” And this is partly true in her stories. Hampton’s stories investigate ideas and feelings, but never get to them directly. Instead of looking something in the face, we look at its ghost, which is sometimes more affecting than seeing its corpse. In “Cell Body,” a couple copes with one partner’s likely fatal illness. The narrator never specifies the illness and seems to almost refuse to acknowledge it. In one scene, the narrator willfully ignores the doctor: “While she talked to me,” says the narrator, “I looked out to the water because that was the biggest thing I could see; I wanted the water to cancel out something.” 

In these stories for the 21st century, full of horror and danger, where “we who live here rarely know our own motives until much too late, after our actions have had time to acquire a dire direction and shape,” Hampton asks us to do a specific kind of looking—not at the thing itself but at something else: the shadow it makes, the outline of an aura, the space between. As if to say that to survive whatever comes our way, we must be prepared to act differently: see differently, feel differently. Meaningful experimental writing needs to be more than writerly play. It needs to move beyond itself and its words. Evelyn Hampton does precisely that in these astonishingly weird stories.

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Eric Nguyen is a writer based in Washington, DC.

Barrelhouse Reviews: The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Review by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Copper Canyon Press, 2019
Softcover, $17.00
ISBN: 978-1556594861

Jericho Brown’s third book, The Tradition, is his most powerful, and his most technically accomplished, yet. Brown attempts to interrogate mythology, the news cycle, police shootings, racism, and the vulnerability of his body in this stunning collection. If Brown’s first book, Please, was a poetry narrative of a boy growing up among his family, his faith, and his history—and if The New Testament was a further examination of art, race, and faith—The Tradition is more complex. Grittier, more nuanced, more self-aware, wearier of the racism and violence around him, more aware of mortality and illness. The speakers of these poems have been betrayed: by the gods, by their own bodies, by their country, by their fellow humans, by the tradition they find themselves in. These poems are bitter, mature, sometimes funny reflections on our culture. They feel important without being ponderous, personal without being petty.

The collection introduces a new form of Brown’s making, the “Duplex,” a sonnet-like series of couplets that includes repetition and, here, is used to devastating effect. In an interview with Michael Dumanis, Brown explained how he came up with the form:

Since I am carrying these truths in this body as one, how do I get a form that is many forms? I was looking at sonnets, looking at ghazals. I got really interested in ghazals when writing my second book. In ghazals, you take couplets that are completely disparate, then juxtapose those couplets so that some kind of magic happens because of the juxtapositions. So I was like, “Oh, if I can take a sonnet and I can take a ghazal and I can take the blues—we’re not gonna get around taking the blues, since I’m black—if I take those three things, is it possible for me to merge them into a single coherent form?” And that’s how the duplex came to be.

The first Duplex appears on page 18: “Memory makes demands darker than my own:/ My last love drove a burgundy car…” and the last one, “Duplex: Cento” echoes lines from it (as well as other Duplex poems in the book): “My last love drove a burgundy car,/ Color of a rash, a symptom of sickness…” and ends the book with “Steadfast and awful, my tall father/ Was my first love. He drove a burgundy car.”

Along with this innovation, Brown’s poems still hum with their trademark lyricism – song lyrics and Bible verses and poetry verses show up in all of Brown’s books. His persona poems in this book, compared to the previous two, are a little more worn, a little less triumphant. The subjects of slavery and rape come up repeatedly in the poems throughout the book, which opens with a poem about a boy raped by the gods, “Ganymede”:

When we look at the myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape. I mean, don’t you want God
To want you?

The poet reiterates this question in several other poems. Brown makes use of mythology, but also writes of racism in light of current events. “Ganymede” ends: “The people of my country believe/ We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.”

In “Bullet Points” he writes about police shootings: “I will not shoot myself/ In the head…I promise if you hear/ Of me dead anywhere near/ A cop, then that cop killed me.” The reader cannot ignore the steady refrain of violence in this book, violence particularly against the bodies of people of color. Brown references blackness and darkness throughout the book as both his metaphors and his realities.

One of the most successful poems in the book is the self-conscious “Dark,” where he claims to be sick of himself, or perhaps he imagines his reader is sick of him. I wish I could quote the whole poem, because the sounds and the humor are incredible, almost like a new “Lovesong for J. Alfred Prufrock,” where self-pity and humor become an armor, a kind of beauty.

I am sick of your sadness,
Jericho Brown, your blackness,
Your books. Sick of you…
Consumed with a single
Diagnosis of health. I’m sick
Of your hurting. I see that
You’re blue. You may be ugly,
But that ain’t new…
Everyone you love is
As dark, or at least as black.

The Tradition is riveting and rewarding, and although I have been a fan of all of Jericho Brown’s books, this might be the most moving and the most stark. Yet he has not failed to maintain a romantic, hopeful glimmer throughout the book, as in yet another Duplex poem:

I begin with love, hoping to end there.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse…

Some of my medicines turn in the sun.
Some of us don’t need hell to be good…

In the dream where I am an island,
I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

A poet who works with a gift for lyric language to speak to pain, relationships, politics, and the flaws of our community and our bodies, Jericho Brown creates in The Tradition a new kind of song, a new kind of lament, for a country and a self. He’s a poet who sets out to create a space for himself inside the Tradition, and he succeeds.

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Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of five books of poetry, including her her most recent, Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets. Her website is http://www.webbish6.com and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @webbish6.