Book Review: On Matthew Baker’s The Sentence

Image of diagrammed sentence

The Sentence by Matthew Baker. Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2023. 140 pages or 1 page, depending on your definition of a page. $31.95. (Accordion edition.)

—. Berlin, GER: Round Not Square, 2023. 1 page. €170. (Scroll edition.)

A sentence diagram. It reads, "The Sentence is a masterful synthesis of form and content."

Matthew Baker’s The Sentence is a gripping graphic novel – if you put the emphasis on graph, as in a sentence diagram … and if your definition of “novel” is based on page rather than word count, because this engrossing work is a single diagrammed 6,732-word sentence. The setup may sound gimmicky, but the “gimmick” and the story itself are completely inseparable, coming together to make a work of art much greater than the sum of its parts (and the diagram form is much easier to read than it appears!)

The narrator, grammar professor Riley, has a fraction of a second to grab one item from their office as they are suddenly rushed into the unknown, away from the new dictatorial government’s unfounded treason charge against them. That one item they instinctively lunge for: a book, “the seminal text in the art of the sentence diagram … (a system for imposing order over chaos, for mapping the rough terrain of the language (the secret trailways that logically linked the words together,) for depicting the hidden architecture of a statement (the structural supports that prevented a collapse in meaning) …” This system serves as an anchor for Riley as they try to adjust to life on an off-grid anarchist compound as a very organized autistic person. Putting the story in diagram form embeds the reader under Riley’s skin by presenting reality in the orderly way they process it. The contrast between Riley and the community they come to care for is a very compelling conflict. Trying to decide between the lawless vision of their friends and the oppressive but lawful government they resist, Riley laments, “I would be forced to choose between friendship and chaos and loneliness and comfort and might die either way …”

Even the book-as-object mimics Riley’s thought process and brings the story to life in your hands. The hardcover, 70-foot-long accordion-folded sheet of paper that accommodates the diagram structure resembles Riley’s brain: neat, focused, and fragile. While toying with the book (naturally I unspooled sections across my apartment floor a few times) it occurred to me that the book is like a single thread that you pull at or comb through as you read, that continuously unravels or untangles Riley’s brain.

I just cannot get over the craft features of this form. It’s surprisingly well-equipped for pacing. As you trace through a long tangential clause, the line on the left-hand side tying it to the relevant upcoming story beat continues steadily downwards, often building suspense and always providing the assurance of order that sets Baker’s narrative apart from other stream-of-consciousness styles. At the end of a long tangent, I would follow the trail back to the point that triggered it, assess the action again in light of the new information, then flip forward once again with the background neatly compartmentalized. This back and forth motion held the story together like a backstitch, securing every lengthy description in place. It reminds me somewhat of the chronological back and forth I enjoy in Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez’s writing, but the motion is spatial rather than temporal.

The Sentence asks us, what happens to an orderly system (of language or law) when it is stretched to contain an entire life? An entire people? Not only that, but the book offers itself as an exhibit of its own study in such a clever way. As a poet and poetry reader (not to mention a book arts geek), the novel struck me as a textbook example of how form and content can work together, and I’ll now be using it in the creative writing class I teach this fall.

Book Review: On Barbara Ridley’s Unswerving

Yellow book cover with colored circle

Unswerving by Barbara Ridley. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024. 227 pages. $19.95. Paperback.

Barbara Ridley’s novel Unswerving is a journey through perseverance and the importance of community. Tave, a delightfully judgmental character, is introduced as a bitter young woman who recently broke her neck in a car accident, losing her ability to walk, function in her arms and hands, and, perhaps more importantly, contact with her girlfriend Les, who was also in the crash. Tave begins the novel as a grumpy protagonist struggling to come to terms with her circumstances. As she slowly regains control of her hands and arms, but not her legs, Tave needs to push herself to recover both physically and mentally. Enter Beth, her 30-something year-old primary physical therapist, who serves as a counterpoint to Tave. Having a more optimistic outlook, Beth is the kind of person to enjoy the reward and teamwork of working in rehabilitation. As a fellow lesbian, Beth identifies with Tave’s mental turmoil and isolation and goes beyond the call of duty for her.

From there, Ridley tells a brilliant story of what it means to live with a disability. The novel is open about the hardships being paralyzed can bring, yet never dramatizes what it means to be disabled. Instead, the story crafts a cast of disabled characters who are independent, joyful, and find fulfilling hobbies within the disabled community, such as handcycling. With these side characters who invite Tave, and the readers, into their world, Ridley shows the importance of a dependable community to survive. This community is pivotal to Tave’s mental recovery and well-being, helping her find new sports, having previously been a softball player, and independence. This means day-to-day independence in the form of mobility and independence from her homophobic, extremist-Christian family. By spending time with colorful characters Maddy, who Beth introduced to Tave, and Billie, a former patient in Tave’s unit, Tave is made to question her own preconceived notions about being disabled. As she becomes more comfortable around Maddy and Billie, Tave also becomes more comfortable with herself. 

This storyline is mirrored by the significance of both Tave and Beth being gay. Beth acutely sympathizes with Tave’s lack of support system and refusal to rely on her unaccepting mother. Because of this, Beth feels a greater personal responsibility to helping Tave discover how she would live meaningfully with her paralysis, which leads her to introduce Tave to other people who are disabled, help her go on outings away from the hospital, and help her find more information about Les and the crash. The bond between the two is in part fostered by this sense of queer solidarity. Through this connection and Tave’s slow but welcomed entrance into the disabled community, Ridley underscores the importance of having a community to rely on. To Ridley, independence and community are inseparable, both in queer and disabled communities, despite how a starkly individualist culture would define the terms.

–Haley Souders, Mid-American Review

Book Review: Minor Prophets

Minor Prophets by Blair Hurley. Ig Publishing, 2023. 286 pages. $17.95, paperback. 

Minor Prophets, the exciting second novel of accomplished author Blair Hurley, is one of the best books I’ve read all year.  

The novel tells the story of Nora, the former child-mouthpiece of a Pentecostal, doomsday-prepping cult led by her father in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as she attempts to heal from the violence and trauma of the childhood she escaped by becoming a palliative care nurse in Chicago. Her tenuous sense of peace is threatened by the community she grew up in, which, upon her father’s mysterious death, tracks down Nora’s whereabouts and pushes her to return to their reclusive community to help usher in the end times, which she “foresaw” as a child under pressure from the community to speak in tongues as a vessel for God.  

Set alternatively between the backdrops of Northern Michigan’s serene and dangerous forests and the hustle and glitter of Chicago, the novel moves deftly through time, oscillating between Nora’s childhood and adulthood, which allows the reader to draw parallels between the gendered violence of the cult and of “the world,” as Nora calls secular society. This book is a thoughtful exploration of the complex, nonlinear deconstruction process of a former fundamentalist, and it doesn’t shy away from tough conversations surrounding motherhood, family desire, security, abuse, and love.  

Nora often stumbles throughout her healing process, and when she does, Hurley uses her character’s mistakes to build tension that left my heart racing, and to create resolutions that are simple and profound. In its aching tenderness toward child-Nora and a good chunk of her fellow other cult members, I found myself moved by the way Hurley confronted the humanity of Christian fundamentalists in a way that did not excuse their cruelty, but which critiqued with compassion.  

— Debbie Miszak (she/her), Mid-American Review

On Sara Moore Wagner’s Swan Wife

Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner. San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2022. 88 pages. $18.95. Paper.

A book of poetry that simultaneously frightens and beguiles is a rare treasure; and Swan Wife, by Sara Moore Wagner, does precisely that. These original poems are often startling in their fearlessness and beauty. Each piece resonates with the astounding strangeness of everyday life and creates shifting worlds that are both fairytale and madness. The sheer weirdness of metaphor drew me in immediately, and Wagner reveals herself as an expert craftsman of the surreal image, the internal metaphor, and the spellbinding complexities of impulse, intimacy, and desire. 

Sara Moore Wagner seems to have a secret window into perception and experience, and in Swan Wife, she unravels what she sees. The poems are organic, physical, archetypal, and supernatural. The voice is startlingly honest and precise. Swan Wife examines wildness caught; but only for an instant—as a sparrow, a tensile wing, or an unsettling dream. Wagner pulls apart how we are trapped by domesticity, intimacy, gender roles, relationships, and our bodies.  

The book is built around the traditional heroic narrative structure developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Swan Wife, Notes.) The poems build themselves on metaphor borrowed from fairytale and myth to explore realms of the body and the psyche of the “housewife”, Swan Wife, or woman who is half wild creature and half tethered by pacts of domesticity. The result is a world fraught with surreality; a continuous pushing and pulling of the self and the psyche as the speaker navigates the realms of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, beauty, permeability of the self, and autonomy.

The opening poem, “Licentious,” begins “When spring comes, I go naked to the lake / near the hospital where I was born” and captures a highly physical sense of intimate and psychic tension. The speaker commands “Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint / of my skin, how it looks like a knife” and conjures the ambivalent strangeness of the possum, “long-nosed, a jawful of teeth” to create a sense of being half-hidden, “playing dead” with a “pouch full/ of babies, thick as disease.” It’s a startling, visceral vision of self-mythos and quiet power. 

In “Like I Won’t Take Something from You,” the speaker intimates the strange fluidity of familial love and romantic love, the ways her body resembles and become the landscape she inhabits, her “golden hair” “like new hay / rolled into tiny suns.” The poems delve into the intricacies of long love, troubled girldom, and childhood blurring into adulthood. The woman as swan emerges in “Ball and Chain,” where the speaker’s partner calls her “swan” when she touches a dirty lake where no one will swim; he observes “you’ll go where you want,” and the speaker allows herself the metaphysical embrace, and stops herself from running. 

In addition to themes of duplicity and dislocation, the poems also explore physical vulnerability, permeability, rot, disease, and birth. There is a fascinating compartmentalization and animism of the body as separate vectors, as in the gorgeous motherhood poems “Venus Complex,” “Nervous Condition,” “Postpartum II,” and “Reward.” These subdued yet powerful pieces exemplify the mysterious, ambivalent spirit of poems so rooted in the body. 

Swan Wife is also lyrical and musical, and in “Circe Complex” Wagner draws on her singular command of sound and diction to create an elemental incantation reminiscent in spirit and sound to Glück, Plath, and Sexton. Similarly powerful are “A Woman Like That is Not Ashamed to Die,” which envisions a terrifying landscape of motherhood and wifehood and “Getting My Body Back,” which invokes Perrault’s Donkey Skin to examine self-image, grief, and the strangeness of personal physical and mental metamorphosis:

       I try on each skin like a dress,

       each one lovelier than the next—stables

       in the heart open. They’re running.

The poems in this book will surprise you. In craft and in voice, they are original, relentless, and vulnerable. Sara Moore Wagner is a poet who sees the world through her own strange prism, and in Swan Wife, the reader is offered a glimpse into worlds both alluring and frightening—yet tempered with Wagner’s hyper-perception, sensitivity, and deep instinct. 

––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review  

Book Review: Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions

Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions by A. W. DeAnnuntis. Los Angeles, CA: Giant Claw, an imprint of What Books Press, 2022. 182 pages. $16.95, Paperback. 

From the first sentences of Magic for Martians, a particularly satisfying combination of personality traits shine through; this collection is delightfully strange, fresh, and, somehow, each piece of fanciful short fiction leaves the reader with a bit of unavoidable, poignant truth. DeAnnuntis has mastered the art of fabricating ridiculousness with relevance. These stories satisfy the craving for literature that feels new and current and will surely retain its contemporary feel in future years. 

Though the beautiful weirdness of these stories gives them the essence of unfamiliarity, many of the characters within reference character archetypes we have all seen before. But we certainly have never met these characters before. Each story is rooted closely enough to reality to be compatible with our reasonable expectations of logic and meaning, but the realities of the works in this collection veer into unexpected versions of those familiar roots. In “Henry and the King’s Missing Army,” the story plays on the familiarity of a fairytale-variety ruler, but the King’s personal concerns about his missing Army are peculiarly, vulnerably human in nature. DeAnnuntis parades the perceptive and kooky truths of bureaucratic power as a monarch deals with the disappearance of an entire military force, writing, “Such a thing had happened before and reflected poorly on him by marking him an object of humorous disdain for every other king. Anyway, besides a castle and a queen, having an army is the main way any of us know we’re king.” 

Like most real human beings, the King, along with the rest of the characters in the collection, has deeply interior personal concerns that engage in conversation with even the most stoic readers’ private issues and insecurities. Even the existential values of nonhuman characters force the reader to contemplate personal shortcomings, egocentrism, authenticity, responsibility, and even larger societal concerns such as bureaucratic institutions and the afterlife.  

In “Jake’s Backhoe Never Had a Chance,” a piece of heavy machinery is forced to experience embarrassment and feelings of inadequacy. Early in the story, the narrator explains why Jake’s backhoe was predestined for ineptitude: “That is, his backhoe would never be recognized by its peers for any of those qualities and experiences by which an inanimate object becomes a celebrity. Sort of almost resembling yourself, but more completely.” The backhoe experiences feelings of guilt for the impact of its deficiencies on the humans around it. Here, readers are curiously gifted with the opportunity to connect with a piece of dirt scooping equipment through one of the most common problems a person can have: a self-esteem issue. 

Each story in Magic for Martians is the perfect length for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. With forty-nine pieces of fiction, the works are just long enough to fully explore each new and strange emotional situation without feeling heavy-handed. This collection is astute, imaginative, and incredibly fun to read. 

–Meg Sharman, Mid-American Review