Book Review – Mid-American Review Blog

Book Review: On Alex Pickett’s Camera Lake

Photo description: Alex Pickett featured left and front page of Camera Lake featured right

Camera Lake by Alex Pickett. Madison, WI: The University of Washington Press, 2024. 189 pages. $17.95. Paper.

Alex Pickett featured left and front page of Camera Lake featured right

Photo description: Alex Pickett featured left and cover art for Camera Lake featured right

Photo credit: @alex_pickett1 on X

Pickett’s short story collection Camera Lake has characters that feel human. This should be a given for any story, but Alex’s characters feel like anyone you might meet on the street. As a reader, you share with them their regrets, their anxieties, and even their loneliness.

The first short story in the collection “Practice” displays this wonderfully. The coach tests his teams’ fathers as a punishment for them, but it’s never anything embarrassing. Just the words “I love you Dad.” From this and a conversation with one of the team members we can feel how these are things the coach has probably never said to his own dad. It leaves the reader with a lingering feeling of things maybe they wish they had said to their own parents or even friends. There’s a sense of regret in the story that sits with the reader long after the story ends.

That feeling follows us into our next story, “At the Twin Pines Motel”. Our narrator who has run from her family to the motel is someone who seeks out thrills. Her old life bores her and she is currently lost with no idea where she is going. So much so that she begs Richard (A stranger) for any answer for who she is and what she’ll do next. She makes the reader confront their own feelings about what they want in life and who they want to be.

Finally, we come to the titular short story “Camera Lake”. A story in which our narrator thinks they’re being observed at home. We dive a bit into his past as a school counselor and begin to understand his need to move from a city to a small house on a lake in Wisconsin following the deaths of 3 of the students he counseled. We see his fear and the hesitation to get back to a normal life when he feels that everyone around him thinks he’s responsible for the deaths and the way he thinks he might have ruined his wife’s life because they moved so far away from their home of 16 years. When the main character finally lets out the breath he feels like he’s been holding, the relief for the reader is equally as satisfying.

Throughout the stories in this collection, there’s an ominous feeling that follows you. Like at any moment a twist could happen and the stories could turn into a horror film. Then the reader is

caught off guard when these expectations aren’t met. It’s interesting for the reader to be surprised by their own unmet ideas. Maybe Richard will be that creepy guy who murders our POV character…maybe the coach’s dog who goes missing was stolen by a student who was embarrassed by the texting punishment or their angry father who heard about the prank. Maybe our narrator in “Camera Lake” is really going crazy. There’s no one there with a camera watching them or his wife is gaslighting him or maybe he really is causing all these deaths. Then, we never have our fears confirmed. It should be something that leads the reader wanting for more excitement, but every time it feels satisfying to realize we’re jumping to conclusions and should just let Pickett’s stories carry us where he wants us to go.

Alex Pickett’s story collection Camera Lake plays wonderfully with the reader. Trying to tempt them into their worst fears and then always comes back to the human. Of course the dog wasn’t murdered. Of course Richard is just a normal guy taking over his uncle’s business. In fact, our POV character makes Richard uncomfortable.

Each story in Camera Lake excites you, making it hard to put down till you’ve read all 14 stories. The collection is gripping, powerful, and so human. A must read for fans of short story collections.

– Liz Barnett, Mid-American Review

Available for purchase: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/6240.htm

Book Review: On Matthew Baker’s The 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.)

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

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: On Blair Hurley’s 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

Book 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