Book Review: Our Wives Under The Sea

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Flatiron Books, 2022. 240 pages. $16.73, paperback.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the lesbian ocean horror book I didn’t know I needed. Julia Armfield’s brilliant debut novel centers around the relationship between Miri and her wife Leah, after Leah returns from a six month deep sea submarine mission which was only supposed to last three weeks. While Leah was under, Miri was unable to communicate with her or even confirm she was still alive. While she is relieved her wife returns, Miri soon discovers that the ocean has changed Leah. Though they spend all their time together in the same apartment, Leah is unable to really connect with Miri about what happened and spends all of her time running the taps in their bathroom. As we move through the novel, each section titled after one of the four layers of the ocean, we alternate between Miri and Leah’s perspectives, learning about the intricacies of their relationship, the grief that comes from the loss of intimacy, and the truth about what Leah experienced under the sea.

Not only is this book a beautiful exploration of queer longing between two women, it’s also about the queer longing which has always been deeply tied to the sea. The whole novel works to beautifully highlight and reaffirm the many truths of the ocean. The ocean is shelter. The ocean is dangerous. The ocean is possibility. The ocean is a haunted house. The ocean is queer. The ocean is our mother. These truths and this book broke me open and I encourage you all to let it do the same for you.

—Gen Greer, MAR

Poetry Review: Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko. Flowstone Press. 2021. 33 Pages. Paperback. 

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight is Ken Letko’s tribute to nature and simple living. In these tightly crafted poems, the author utilizes his years of traveling and collected wisdom to celebrate a life lived authentically. In the title poem, Letko invokes the ancient Chinese poet Li Po as he contemplates whether he likes chopping wood at day or by moonlight. In the end, the speaker decides to let the owl show him “how / to glide through trees,” or, in other words, to follow their natural inclination, whatever that might be on any occasion.

In “Enjoying Illusions,” the speaker muses on a smudge left by a finger on their back door window. Each angle from which the speaker views the smudge reveals a different resemblance to a rabbit or a zombie walking their backyard. It is this playful meditation which makes the book so charming, as when, at the end of the poem, the speaker admonishes the reader to play their own games with perception, asking “how many windows / have you washed today?”  

The true strength of this collection, however, lies in its quiet, imagistic nature poetry. The poet’s home in the “redwoods of Del Norte” certainly helped inspire some of the collections most immersive meditations on nature and what it means to inhabit it. In one of the opening poems, “Bright Angel,” the speaker shares the revelation that every living thing is connected by using a symmetrical conceit wherein “ferns become deer” and later “deer become ferns.” In Chopping Wood in the Moonlight, Ken Letko invites readers to spire to insight by following him on his mystical journey through nature. 

—Christopher McCormick, MAR. 

Poetry Review: The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser

The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print.

The Track the Whales Make begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser’s poems themselves, the book’s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the reader steps back further into Saiser’s work, the world and its ordinary things and relationships continues to transform in beautiful reverse.

The new poem “Sometimes I Remember to Watch” explores not the sunset, but the pink sky it creates opposite itself. Saiser captures the feeling of an ever-shifting world, which shifts whether or not we pay attention: “It’s brief, no matter whether / I raise my glass or turn my back. / The glow is, and then is gone….” Saiser draws the reader’s attention to the pink sky, not to the “audacious” sunset or anything more obviously breathtaking, because there is something beautiful and unmatched in that fleeting quiet. Throughout her poems, Saiser takes the ordinary and the ignored and finds the innate beauty in them, found largely in the fact that they, too, are fleeting.

Saiser’s poems are ultimately about love. Whether that be love for nature, parents, children, or even love gone awry, the heart of Saiser’s work is love, which courses through not only the depicted relationships but also the ordinary, fleeting things that she so deftly captures. In “I Didn’t Know I Loved,” Saiser discovers love in unexpected, everyday things, such as the speaker’s mother’s “big hands / slicing iceberg lettuce / with a thick-bladed knife” or “the head of the nail, / the blow of the hammer, / blueprints become the shell of the house.” There is a sense of gentle and welcomed surprise at the realization of love for these small things. Again, Saiser creates a sense of something fleeting, as the love is only now realized and has gone unnoticed for so long. This poem blends the love of family and home with the love of nature, creating a patchwork of an everyday world with love woven into the little things, only to be noticed now, when the choice is made to look.

—Mary Simmons, MAR

Fiction Review: The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney

The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney. Columbus, OH, FORTHCOMING with Two Dollar Radio. 242 pages. $18.95, paperback. 

Many may fantasize about writing the Great American Novel, never working a nine-to-five job, and having constant unprotected sex without producing a child, but Kevin, the protagonist in The Red-Headed Pilgrim, fails in all of these respects. As a nervous, existentialist virgin who allows the possibility of sex to motivate all of his decisions, little of Kevin’s journey is new; he is a heterosexual white man hoping to achieve enlightenment by never working more than eighteen hours a week and entertaining every half-baked, drug-induced plan he cooks up. His privilege, ideologies, and frequent use of shrooms protect him from a meaningless reality that is always encroaching. 

In spite of his protagonist’s played out traits, Maloney finds a way to make his story and his perspective new. He posits fresh and disturbing concepts, like the idea that our “bones…are the seeds of our future skeletons.” Essential to his wit and insightfulness is the retrospective self-awareness he employs. Maloney satirizes the idolized nomadic lifestyle of the aspiring artist by filling Kevin with high-minded ideals and then sending him back and forth across the nation to follow women who typically reject him. Maloney often had me cackling. In describing his crying newborn daughter Zoe, Kevin says “She didn’t speak English. Probably she didn’t want to be born and I screwed everything up by having sex with her mom.” This idea encapsulates young Kevin; he projects his nihilism onto everyone and inadvertently develops empathy. 

Despite his efforts to avoid the mundane and the meaningless, Kevin often finds himself “cleaning liquid shit out of Zoe’s forearm crevices.” Once Zoe comes into his life, no amount of “praying without ceasing” can offer him greater meaning than she can. In The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Maloney envisions a hilarious reality in which we must give up on our dreams to care for those we love and begrudgingly find meaning along the way.

—Daniel Marcantuono, MAR

The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney will be released January 24, 2023. Preorder now at twodollarradio (dot) com. 

Poetry Review: A Cluster of Noisy Planets

A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty. Rochester, NY, BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001, 80 pages. $17.00, paperback.

A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty is an account of the melancholic passing of time, expressed through lovely observations of our world. Reading these prose poems aloud, one can sense the soft drumming of Rafferty’s carefully constructed sentences. He is a true syntactical master at work: the rhythm—generated with simple commas and full stops—magnifies the tender, slow beauty of this close attention. Not only do these words, spoken aloud, create intimacy, they create quiet. One poem from the collection that comes to mind is named, “The Satin Lining of the Casket Reminds Me of a Jewelry Box,” in which the speaker addresses the odd objects that are often buried with the dead; yet, as peculiar as the subject of this poem may sound, the last two sentences are magnificent in their scope and beautification of the mundane: “We pack them in like we’re burying pharaohs, like there’s a pyramid of grief above them. And there is—only smaller, and made of dirt, in a land that won’t stop raining” (Rafferty 17). This short quote, two of the many wonderful sentences from this collection, recalls another aspect of this poetry collection worth mentioning: the role of objects and monuments. Rafferty fixates on the various artifacts which have withstood time, such as the Great Pyramids of Giza, The Roman Colosseum, and the Moon. Above all, these prose poems show the ongoing, continual movements of the human imagination, exemplified by an excellent poet who writes these love letters from his corner of the world.

—Lucas Clark, MAR