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Saturday, December 31, 2022

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 24: Christopher Brown

 


The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022

by Christopher Brown

 

“Many fires burn under the water.”

 

That quote from the proto-Socratic philosopher Empedocles provides the epigram, in Spanish, to the Catalan poet and encyclopedist Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s introduction of his Diccionario de los Ismos (A Dictionary of Isms), originally published in 1949. If you look for the quote in English, you will find it as “[m]any fires burn under the surface,” a difference that cannot be explained away by the quirks of translation, nor by the fact that the copy you are reading is a 1954 second edition revised and augmented by the author.

 

My own experiences as a translator a decade ago, of a book that is now disappearing for reasons unrelated to its contents, made me suspicious of that under-considered art and the way it always alters the truth. It gave me the persistent urge to seek out the original texts, at least in those languages with which I have enough conversance to be able to experience some of the voice of the actual author. That’s how I started the year reading Ricardo Piglia’s El Camino de Ida (translated as The Way Out) on a Central American beach, a terrific university noir about an Argentine expert on William Henry Hudson who gets recruited to spend a year as a visiting lecturer at a thinly veiled Princeton, only to find himself drawn into an affair with his patron, a radical scholar of Dickens “who knew how to fight as well as think,” and then into a murder mystery. The narrator’s description of the contrast between the barred windows and security kiosks of Buenos Aires and the “luxury psychiatric clinic” of suburban New Jersey has a truth in the Spanish that the excellent official translation just can’t match, a perfect warm-up for the engaging characterization of the darkly charismatic and insanely smart woman who carries the story as both muse and mirrored protagonist.

 


Austin’s most wonderful bookstore, Malvern Books, which for nine years has confounded commercial wisdom by selling exclusively small press literary fiction, literature in translation, poetry, and an eclectic selection of graphic novels, and is sadly closing at the end of this year following the death of its proprietor, Joe Bratcher III, from complications of Covid-19, has an entire section devoted to titles from New York Review Books, the imprint affiliated with The New York Review of Books. And one of the titles I discovered there last year was NYRB’s new edition of Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, with an afterword by the late author’s daughter, the scholar and medievalist Victoria Cirlot. We all, I think, enjoy those books that provide compendiums of the interconnected marvels of the world and the mind, and Cirlot’s is not the first such Jungian bestiary I have acquired over the years. But it is the first that compelled me to find the original, only to discover that there are many varied editions that could pass as such, and that it is not the only such compendium the author created, just the only one that has been translated into English.

Reading Cirlot’s syntheses of omnivorous erudition, one is struck by the reminder of how much more work and time it took to accumulate such knowledge and reading in a world before Wikipedia and online booknets that enable you to order an obscure tome from a tiny shop in Barcelona and have it arrive at your home in Austin a week later. These are books made from the material of other books, and from the dreams and digressions they triggered, so beautiful and inventive you sometimes find yourself wondering how much of their contents may truly have been invented. Especially when you read about the author and find his own biography reads suspiciously like a Borgesian fiction that includes years as a customs agent, the selling off of other assets to accumulate a collection of swords, and an obsession with a mid-1960s Charlton Heston movie so intense that it became the core theme of his poetry.

 When a friend asked me why I was reading Spanish-language encyclopedias of ephemera when I am supposed to be researching a book about urban nature (The Secret History of Empty Lots, forthcoming from Timber Press), I realized it was because I am looking for ways to better convey the dreamlike experience of encounters with wild nature inside the realm of human dominion—animals and plants as marvels and signifiers as much as objects and sources of scientific understanding.  

 

It may be that search that found me ending the year reading Katherine Rundell’s The Golden Mole, a collection of essays about the wonders of selected animals, some of which were originally written for the London Review of Books and others for the book, and which I learned about from an LRB podcast replay of the book launch talk. A scholar of Renaissance literature at Oxford who got much more attention this year for her new book about John Donne, Super-Infinite, and before that for her children’s books, Rundell shares Cirlot’s gift for lyrical reweavings of diverse facts and sources into Marzipan-rich distillations of enlightenment, ranging from her riff on the possibility that Amelia Earhart was devoured by hermit crabs to her observations on why the peculiar marsupial adaptations of the wombat kept that source of Victorian adoration from showing up in Winnie the Pooh. She is also, like Cirlot, one of those authors whose biography makes you wonder if it has been invented (in her case involving a childhood without shoes, a proclivity for tightrope walking, and the claim that she starts every day with a cartwheel).

 


Closer to home, the human biographies collected in Joseph C. Russo’s Hard Luck & Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas might seem similarly fabulist to those who bring educated preconceptions about the lives of those mysterious rural Americans who, among other things, enabled the implausible truth of the Trump presidency. Russo’s book is an anthropology of the present, an ethnography of the white working class inhabitants of the petrochemical wetlands of Southeast Texas, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ life in that region, religion and humor, economic hardship under late capitalism, the connections of contemporary life to Anthropocene ecology, and the hard luck archetypes that provide the narrative engines of the best country songs. The book is beautifully written, charged with empathy and understanding, and a really exceptional contribution to understanding our cultural moment and its tethers to the American past.

 


 My research this year has also found me reading a lot of writing about walking, from Rebecca Solnit’s excellent Wanderlust: A History of Walking to Iain Sinclair’s densely mapped Lights Out for the Territory. I also re-discovered the work of the English writer Merlin Coverley, who seems to have cornered the market on writing about writing about walking with his survey of Psychogeography from Defoe to Sinclair, The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker, which reaches into wider literary territory, and Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past, which is more focused on wanders of the mind. Much of this material explores, in diverse ways, the very writerly art of getting lost on purpose, usually in the city, as a way to jumble the semiotic landscape and make fresh connections and revelations in its reassembly. None of these books do a very good job of getting off the pavement and into the interstitial wild that the city hides, which was the focus of my interest, but they get much closer than they realize.

 

Thinking about the ways urban space partitions the land into a labyrinth got me reading about the deep history of enclosure, from Maurice Ashley’s England in the Seventeenth Century to the more recent work of the Canadian historian Allan Greer, whose Property and Dispossession: Native Empires and Land in Early Modern North America provides a fascinating correction to the conventional wisdom that the European colonization of North America embodied a clash between private property regimes and a vast continental commons. Greer shows what an important role communal property held for the early colonists, and how the commons they shared with Native peoples was the primary means of those peoples’ dispossession. Not through the imposition of private property regimes, at least initially, but through the alien practice of animal husbandry—free-range ranching on the shared commons that wrought rapid ecological destruction, essentially contaminating the lands in advance of the plow. A very different tragedy of the commons than the one the economists used to want us to believe, and rich fodder for thinking about how we could do things differently. 

 


I did read a little bit of new fiction this year as well, including two collections of note, both from writers who are also friends of mine: Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, and Fernando Flores’ Valleyesque. Two very different voices, but ones that share a capacity for allowing the fantastic to shimmer in the margins of the observed world, with stories the lyrical symbologist Cirlot might appreciate. He might have trouble keeping up with the symbols and archetypes that those of us who grew up in a cathode ray and then digital media culture populate our minds and our fictions with, but part of the genius of Richard and Fernando is how they tether the totems of contemporary popular culture to the mythic past and the rich literary heritages they build on. 

 I have one more trip to make to Malvern Books before they close. It’s a store staffed by writers (including Fernando), who were encouraged and aided every step of the way by their day job boss, who also helped many other of us emerging and established writers in Austin. And before Joe Bratcher opened Malvern, he ran Host Publications, a small press that started out focused on literature in translation and in 2018 shifted emphasis to underrepresented American voices—primarily women, people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ writers. I hope to end the year reading one of their most noted 2022 books: But for I Am a Woman by Sophia Stid, a book of poetry in conversation with the writings and life of Julian of Norwich, who I mentioned in last year’s roundup. On last week’s trip to Malvern I learned from the Host team that their press will continue on without Joe, and I’m excited to see where they will take it.

 


 Christopher Brown is the author of the novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and most recently Failed State, which was a finalist for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. The Secret History of Empty Lots, a new work of narrative nonfiction about urban wilderness and rewilding the American future, drawing on the material of his popular newsletter Field Notes, is forthcoming from Timber Press.

 

Friday, December 30, 2022

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 23: Isabel Schechter

 

 


Reading to Connect

by Isabel Schechter

 

 

I started a book club at my local Puerto Rican culture club this year and have been enjoying learning about and getting closer to my heritage while expanding the type of reading I do.

 Everyone in our group is Puerto Rican, but we all come from diverse backgrounds. We are split roughly in half by gender, and there is a 20-year range in our ages. Some of us were born in Puerto Rico, some were born on the mainland, some started in one of the two and moved to the other or keep bouncing between the two, and some of us have never visited the island. And, like any group of Puerto Rico-loving puertorriqueños, some of us are pro-independence, others pro-statehood, and some want the island to continue as a Commonwealth. Our differences have made for some very interesting discussions.

 We read works with a Puerto Rican-related theme: works set in Puerto Rico, about Puerto Rico, or written by a Puerto Rican author. We have read a variety of genres: fiction (historical, contemporary, fantasy, and literary) and non-fiction (memoir). When I first started the group, I wasn’t sure what kind of books we would read or if they would appeal to non-Puerto Ricans, but as I’ve told friends outside of our group about the books we’ve read, it is clear that they touch a chord even with people who have no connection to Puerto Rico.

 

The book club’s first selection was the historical fiction novel, The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera. The novel tells the story of a young couple who were a part of los hambrientos, the thousands of poor Puerto Ricans whose lives were upended after the Spanish-American War and the San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899, and who were recruited to work in the sugar plantations of Hawaii.

 Lured by promises of a better life, many died due to the inhuman conditions on the packed ships before making it to Hawaii. Of the ones that survived, they realized once they arrived that not only were the promises of good housing, schools for their children, and a decent wage all lies, but they were treated as slaves.

 It was difficult for us to read about the way these Puerto Ricans were treated, especially given that Puerto Rico’s population comes from a mix of not just Spanish and Indigenous Taino people, but also enslaved Africans. None of us in the book club had any idea about this period of our own people’s history and wanted to learn more about it.


  Our next selection was Velorio by Xavier Navarro Aquino, which tells the story of a fictional group of survivors of the 2017 Hurricane Maria. A velorio is a wake, the kind that precedes a funeral, and that is very much the setting created by Aquino when showing the despair and hopelessness created by the destruction that leads to the death of thousands of people on the island.

 The group of survivors escape the lack of food, electricity, and water and trek to the mountains hoping for refuge. Instead, the charismatic leader of the promised utopia gradually becomes a dictator and molds the children in the community into a maniacal Lord of the Flies-style gang to help him keep his hold on power.

 The resilience of the group of survivors from helpless victims to individuals taking back their agency and power to build back their island resonated with all of us in the book club, whether we had loved ones who lived through the tragedy of Hurricane Maria or watched in horror while our people were left to die by the ineptitude and lack of concern in the United States’ response to the humanitarian crisis on the island. The book sparked painful conversations about Puerto Rico’s treatment by the United States as little more than a colonial possession whose people were not considered to be worth saving.

 

Our third book was the National Book Award Finalist, The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré. The novel is a beautifully told story of successive generations of a wealthy family in Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th century. The novel shows how the different generations of the family are affected by some of the many divisions in the lives of Puerto Ricans, most of which continue to this day.

 The patriarchal system that allows men to be unfaithful yet punish their wives if they try to speak their minds or exercise any decision-making for themselves is questioned as we see how the women in the family are expected to live under the rule of the men in their lives.

 The concept of a parent’s absolute authority and a child’s duty to their family comes into conflict just as the Puerto Rican pro-independence and pro-statehood movements tear families apart. Some of this conflict derives from class distinctions between those born in Spain and those born on the island and the struggle to escape the restrictions these roles place on the opportunities available to the characters. Race and colorism are also inescapable factors in how people are treated and allowed to be recognized as members of the family.


Our book club then explored differences between living on the island and living on the mainland with When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, the first of three installments of a memoir of Santiago’s life. It is a coming-of-age story that starts in Puerto Rico when Esmeralda is six years old and ends after she moves to New York and becomes a high school graduate.

Esmeralda struggles to discover who she is and her place in the world as well as in relationships with her family, friends, and new cities that she is forced to move to as her family’s situation demands. Her father’s philandering, her mother’s ambivalent treatment of her children, her siblings’ need to be cared for, and the relief and guilt she feels for having been one of the siblings who were able to stay with their mother while her other siblings had to stay back in Puerto Rico with their father, all clash at various times. Esmeralda’s experiences elicited tales from each of us in the book club about our own childhoods and how we identified with aspects of Esmeralda’s life, and how that influenced how we judged Esmeralda’s parents. Several of us went on to read the other installments of Santiago’s memoir.

 

A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry was a way for me to sneak some genre reading into the book club. The poison in the story is Isabel, a green-skinned child born of a curse and hidden away in her family’s house. Several of the neighborhood busybody viejitas gossip about the tragic story from back in the day when the girl’s beautiful mother married a White man, causing the curse.

 Seeming to repeat her mother’s mistakes, Isabel begins a strange relationship with Lucas, the White son of an American mainlander who is busier building resorts for tourists than he is with parenting. Lucas throws a note with a scribbled wish over the garden wall hoping the stories that the cursed girl can grant wishes are true. He then starts receiving notes from Isabel in his hotel room. Lucas and Isabel join together to find out if the curse is responsible for a rash of disappearances of local girls and find answers that they weren’t expecting and that change both of their lives in ways they couldn’t have imagined.

 Although many of us laughed and told stories of busybody viejitas in our own lives, we also discussed how far parents will go for their children and the morality of their actions, especially when others have to be sacrificed to achieve the parents’ goals.

We then read A Woman of Endurance by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa. This was another historical fiction novel, this time giving us an insight into the Puerto Rican Atlantic slave trade. It was the most emotionally difficult book our group read.


 The main character, Pola, is an enslaved African woman who is used for breeding purposes. Pola tries unsuccessfully to escape after yet another child is taken from her, and she is then savagely beaten and sold to a different plantation.

 Life on the second plantation was a particular point of disagreement among members of the book club. Although we all wanted a better life for Pola, the benign, and even kind treatment of the plantation owners Llanos-Figueroa presents can be seen as a fulfilment of our hopes for Pola or the author’s attempt to pretend that there were places where slavery was not a heinous crime, but an institution that had some redeeming aspects.

 Reviews of the book are positive, and one even says it “will resonate with readers of strong African American feminist narratives like those of Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange.” I am still torn between thinking the novel is slavery apologism or a heart-wrenching tale of one woman’s struggle to make a life for herself by taking what happiness she can from a system that tries but ultimately fails to break her spirit.

 Our group has not yet finalized our list of books to read in 2023 but this coming year’s selections will dwell less on Puerto Rico’s unfortunate history and more about the joys of being Puerto Rican. I look forward to sharing the list with readers who may not be Puerto Rican but who are interested in learning more about La Isla de Encanto.

 

 


 Isabel’s essays on race and representation in SF/F have been published in Invisible 2: Essays on Race and Representation in SF/F, Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and several volumes of the WisCon Chronicles; and she is Co-Editor of The WisCon Chronicles Volume 12: Boundaries and Bridges. She is Puerto-Rican, feminist, child-free, Jewish, vegetarian, and a Midwesterner living in Southern California, and embraces the opportunity to represent the fact that no one of those identities excludes any of the others.



 

 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 22: Lynne Jensen Lampe


 

Reading for Wild Thought
by Lynne Jensen Lampe

 

If I were one of those people who kept a reading journal, this post would be much easier to write. My cousin Judy records every title and her reactions. She once sent me a postcard with a map of Wisconsin on the front and a neat scribble on the back listing her top 5 faves in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and classics. As kids, we played hide-and-seek in cornfields and skated the pond but never talked about books. Now we always talk about reading. Writing, too.     

 In September 2022, Ice Floe Press published my debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane, poems about my mother and her severe mental illness diagnosed a few weeks after my birth. The process of writing and revising showed me how afraid I was of being considered wrong, different, broken. How little I really knew of my mother’s struggles. Much of my reading this year served to fill gaps in knowledge and memory, to help me break through my stodgy resistance to wild thought. I read poetry and books on mental illness as well as imaginative, off-kilter short fiction. Oh, and The New Yorker. I live in Missouri but still read the restaurant reviews, entertainment offerings, the poetry and at least one long-form reportage. I run a hot bath, set the timer on my iPhone and settle in with water bottle or wine and a hand towel so I can turn pages with dry fingers. One article I especially remember is “Finding a Way Back from Suicide,” by Donald Antrim, who voluntarily committed himself to a psych unit. The article came out in August 2021, but I reread it as I revised my manuscript.

 


My hunt for books that reflected what I knew (or thought I knew) of my mother’s illness and hospitalizations (incarcerations, she called them) brought me to several nonfiction books. W-3, by Bette Howland, is a reprint of the 1974 memoir detailing her time on Ward 3, the psych wing in a Chicago hospital. I’d been searching for hints of my mother’s experiences in public and private facilities, but she’s dead, my father can’t speak of it, and I lacked the courage to ask (or maybe had the wisdom not to) on social media for patients’ stories. Two elements of W-3 that meant most to me were Howland’s interactions with her husband and her descriptions of the other patients on the ward, the former because my father always visited no matter the distance or the conditions, and the latter because my mother always wanted to tell us about the other inmates (her word) and we never wanted to hear. In recounting her first day on the ward, Howland writes, “I should explain right away that I didn’t belong here. But that goes without saying, no one belonged here. …On W-3 you encountered the terrible force of a generalization, and it had to be resisted.” The ward is a soup of idiosyncrasy, illness, and intimacy. The main text and endnotes provide personal, social and historical contexts. 


 

In The Great Pretender, Susannah Cahallan (author of the memoir Brain on Fire) examines the 1970s experiment in which psychologist David Rosenhan recruited seven individuals with no symptoms and no diagnoses to each seek hospitalization at different facilities. Rosenhan and the other participants each related at intake they heard voices. All of them were admitted, at which time they stopped pretending. One of them was hospitalized for almost 2 months. Cahallan’s book questions the purpose, veracity, and ethics of the study, looks at the individual experiences of the participants, and ponders psychiatric and societal attitudes toward (in)sanity. As with Howland’s memoir, the endnotes are informative and well worth reading. Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness is Catherine Cho’s intimate, harrowing account of the onset of and treatment for postpartum psychosis diagnosed during a trip she and her husband made to the United States to introduce their infant son to relatives. Early in the book, Cho describes the Korean custom for a new mother and baby stay home the first 100 days, pointing out the ways it influenced her anxiety over travel, her emotional lability, and her increasingly disrupted sense of reality. Another factor was a past traumatic relationship, also discussed within a cultural context. Again, of great interest to me was the husband’s response to Cho’s psychosis at home and at the hospital, but even more important was the stab I felt, my heart recognizing my mother’s story more than 50 years prior.

 

How important is a sense of reality? When is it useful to loosen our grip and live in our imagination? To cut loose from rules? Several small books led the way for me. All had an unusual narrative structure and wild characters. Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, was a tangle of story and stereotype, enthralling and disturbing. It’s formatted as a screenplay and I wasn’t always sure where real life ended and the script began. But that was the point, I think—Yu’s book jolted me, forced me to wrestle society and self.  Heartland Calamitous, a collection of flash fiction by Michael Credico, carved itself into my heart, most memorably with the story “Killing Square” (first sentence: “It’s the manipulations that end you.”). I reacted similarly to Wild Milk, by Sabrina Orah Mark, with titles such as “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt,” “The Maid, the Mother, and the Snail,” and “The Stick Figure Family.” A surreal river of words that carried me so swiftly I never once asked why or how I believed. Then there’s Something Dead in Everything, by Lannie Stabile. Reading this collection, I had one foot in the everyday, the other in the fantastic. Even Stabile’s shortest story, “Eldredge Knot,” which opens with the words “The mortician couldn’t have known” and ends after two paragraphs, takes the reader somewhere unexpected, weird—and logical.


 On any given day, I’m in the middle of a poetry book. On the kitchen table are two by Mary Oliver:
American Primitive and Why I Wake Early. I pulled them from my shelf when our household was running low on hope. Oliver views nature—wild things and human—up close, in great detail and loved. “Morning at Great Pond” delivers a dawn moving and urgent:

 

forks of light

slicking up

out of the east

flying over you,

and what’s left of night—

 

Others I haul with me everywhere: Outskirts by Heathen (aka Heather Derr) and Wiregrass and Other Poems by Moira J. Saucer. These are strong poems. Startling, walking-on-coals poems. I read and reread these two books to remind myself of the way society—always and still—misperceives women, especially those who deign to defend their right to take up space, to champion their beliefs, to live.


 

Heathen opens their collection with “Uxor Pilate” (the wife of Pontius Pilate)—

 

I want no country, least of all

this one. Gather in the fields

on the outskirts of the village,

each of us a body turned to cloud

 

and “Joan, Director’s Notes”

 When the girl dies in martyr stories    her head goes on singing or testifies

 Silence is all we get from the dead in this century     or a ghost

 Stark violences and violations, women wresting control, standing firm.

 

Then there’s Wiregrass. Saucer begins with autobiographical poems of life after the onset of chronic illness, her words pointed as shards of glass. Angry, devastated, compassionate, beautiful. The poem “When you fall” starts out with “most people fall away. It’s human nature.” Saucer doesn’t judge the reader, even though “The world judged me harshly.” This change in health and circumstances, left her

 nowhere soft

to curl up

like any animal would

and mourn

the death of the woman

that was me.

 In “Homeless and broke,” she writes of “a tent of opaque anguish” and says “When pain takes everything, fear wraps you in his arms.” The male pronoun here shouts to me that as a woman, my comfort in society is an illusion, my power more tenuous than I thought. In “Loss,” Saucer fights “terror trains” and “dystopian theft” by creating:

In ugliness, I found evidence of beauty.


Pastels, beautiful colors

rolling onto the emptiness of

white space. I wept

 


Another intense, complex collection is  Peculiar Heritage, DeMisty Bellinger’s debut collection, taught me history, politics and protest, the blues. The moon. Freedom and what you can give, what you can take. In the titular poem, Bellinger demands of the enslaver,

if you look at her eyes and forget

the other livestock on your farm,

does it make it easier to take her

where your wife won’t see?

 

In “Sowing Season,” she feels her mother’s fingers

crossing corn rows

th-rip th-rip th-rip

plaiting Africa

into my hair

I know that a poem can have multiple meanings, and I know that no reader (or poet who’s written it) will realize them all. When I read Bellinger’s collection, I sensed meanings I can’t yet articulate and wonder if, as a white woman, I ever will. Peculiar Heritage, like other books in this post, calls for deeper reads and will carry over to next year’s list.

 

Other poetry books fed my thoughts, expanded my sense of self and view of the world—I want to share them, if only by title and author: Solve for Desire, Caitlin Bailey; Loss and Other Rivers that Devour, Gustavo Barahona-López; Partial Genius, Mary Biddinger; The Gleaming of the Blade, Christian J. Collier; A Map of Every Undoing, Alicia Elkort; Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, Barbara Harris Leonhard; Dor, Alina Ştefănescu. Music thrilled me too, especially The Shattucks, Daniela Gesundheit, Beth Bombara, and Johnette Napolitano singing “Take Me Home” (listening so much I finally wrote a golden shovel using a line of the song).

Nothing too soft or gentle here, but it’s comforting to know I can immerse myself in different realities and always return home. I think my cousin Judy would agree.

 

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and BOTN nominee, she lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic research. She designed a number of covers for Aqueduct books in the first few years of the press. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; on Twitter @LJensenLampe; or IG @lynnejensenlampe.