It’s not perfect. The edges are folded with near precision. More rolled than folded in spots, not quite the crease you’re meant to aim for.
I know how small the hands were that folded this crane.
I know the room where it came to be.
There was a lesson connected to it. The simplicity that could become art. The care that it takes to think & create in honor of a loved one.
The teacher says it’s meant to be one of a thousand. An insurmountable task, a severe & demanding ritual, the boy thinks, though he doesn’t have those words for it yet.
But, she says, the work can be shared.
At some point, the ritual in the class becomes automatic, hands moving independent of the mind. Eyes looking across the table at loved ones, looking back across at you.
The first folds the easiest. Paper pliant & crisp. You get the feeling you could do anything with it. And then the working area gets smaller, the sharpness muddied. That’s the other lesson.
How hard it is to bring a thought into being, how much work it takes to honor a memory.
In fourth grade, I had a teacher that was passionate about environmentalism — she talked about recycling, about turning lights off, about just not buying things if we didn’t really need them, about species & rainforests, floods & droughts. It’s forty years later, and we need the same lessons, we need to learn & act.
We’ve had nonfiction works galore to persuade us, documentaries & journalism of all types. Several novels that fall under the (new to me) subgenre Climate Fiction, or Cli-Fi — that is, fiction that deals with the effects of climate change on human society. From head-on nature-as-protagonist stories like Richard Powers’ The Overstory to more subtle horror stories about a world mid-crumble like Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. Now, one of the best I’ve read.
In Eleutheria debut novelist Allegra Hyde tells a provocative & personal, imaginative & realistic story of the challenges & consequences of the Anthropocene era. The novel’s two questions are big ones: “What hath man wrought?” and “What now?”
Hyde writes with historical, sociological, and emotional precision all centered on a well-meaning young idealistic protagonist Willa Marks. Homeschooled by environmentalist preppers, Willa becomes drawn to a utopian project called Camp Hope – a carbon negative sustainable compound in the hurricane-battered Bahamas poised to be an example for how to survive our environmental choices.
In Eleutheria Hyde crafts believable near-future realities (a Green Republican party, Freegan-fueled riots in Cambridge) and sobering actual realities (scholarship weaponized by the eleite, mass natural catastrophes, the consequences of imperialism and consumerism) in a suspenseful and readable blend of a coming-of-age and a falling-out-of-idealism stories. But it’s not all Willa’s story — her story fits into so much more.
In weaving foils & historical echoes, Hyde demonstrates what’s at stake, who benefits, and how we are led astray: from social media to 17th-century history, from global politics to campus politics, from eros to gaia. The last chapter was riveting & moving – as Daniel Peña said in a recent Zoom with Hyde, I don’t think I’ve read a better ending to a novel in a long time.
You can buy Eleutheriahere, and you can read about other stuff I’ve read here.
When you enter the gym, you'll recognize
a lot -- the shine of the floor, the height
of the rim, the high squeaks of feet
picking & rolling. A whistle will pierce
the air, and you'll gather, a rough
semicircle, hands on hips, game faces.
A face not unkind, a voice slightly
too loud, dressed in colors you hope
to wear. He'll tell you (probably a he)
that some of you won't make it.
And maybe for you, it's as if he's
teasing, mocking, as if he's certain that
you won't make it. So you
run and you throw
your whole body in.
Focus, push,
pass, repeat.
What you fear will not go away. Let
me take it on for you. Let me worry
and sweat, all nerves & hope seated
among the other dads, watching the next
team assemble.
Go. Play.
This is more a mantra to future-me than a message to my unafraid athlete son. Shamelessly modeled after William Stafford's "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid".
Race in our age is admitting that we respect advantage, that progress is grievously laid aside. Society developed, yet man senses proof of a force all our fault — degenerating, criminal, rapid.
Children shown the existing body learn and work the new body.
Work and honor free entire groups. Unorganized people govern not. The body politic is taking labor, light, and care. How are profits superhuman? If all ages withdraw cooperation, a fair and free home should make all rise.
Today I’m posting my first ever blackout poem–that’s it up there. Seven sentences gleaned from eight pages. I’m not wild about it.
As a high school English teacher, I’ve been tempted to do blackout poetry projects, but I’ve wanted them to mean something, to be an exercise of true rewriting of text rather than a “fun” standalone lesson on an anodyne subject. As a high school teacher, I’ve also taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” a lot. But I didn’t want to blackout a feminist text. Instead, I worked with Gilman’s 1908 “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem“, an eight-page article in which Gilman imagines an enforced labor system of certain African Americans, those who can work factories & fields “without the strain of personal initiative and responsibility to which so many have proved unequal..”
Gilman’s “suggestion” goes into some detail about the alleged benefits and procedure for the state placing those Black Americans that “do not progress” into organized labor. I blacked out each page, aiming to preserve one sentence per page — but it didn’t always work. This whole thing nauseated me — not just the “suggestion” argued but the realization that in blacking out the word “Negro”, I was merely preserving a sanitized version of the racist, self-servingly modest, clinical voice.
With students, I’d lay the groundwork carefully — at the very least, defining & offering examples of scientific racism. I’d also need to prepare them for the content of the article, maybe even looking at the publication itself, maybe even searching its current place within the academic discipline. I’m not certain that many students are used to seeing racism manifest in this way. Not sure if I’ll return to this kind of thing again, but I’m glad I gave it a try, even though it didn’t work. Or maybe it did — I truly cannot tell right now.
He rolls up his pajama top,
a signal to caress him,
to sing him to sleep.
Still young enough
to need touch,
still young enough
to ask to be touched
often.
I kneel & sing.
He luxuriates in the ritual,
one of his own design.
The field. March 8, 2022, between school & supper.
The boy stands before me, palming the ball,
wiggling it at me. "Dad. Outside?"
It's hot, I'm comfortable, but I succumb.
To the field.
Between our house & the field,
we toss the ball & watch for cars.
Then we're free. Surrounded
by the trees. Birds above nearly
drown out the leaf blowers.
He calls the play, & I
imagine a slightly future him,
throwing to an emptiness
he fills, an invisible target
he sees first.
I had almost lost the need to
sweat for fun, to daydream a
heroic me. Then the boy led me
outside.
The room is cold, and your wife is crying. And smiling.
There's a speck of blood on your cheek that you notice later,
one drop, dried brown, from the fibrous cord.
She wriggles in a shallow plastic box, cleaned & approved.
A striped hat, a diaper, a warm blanket, and an ankle bracelet
with a magnet in it, connecting her to only the two of you.
She weighs almost nothing. Comically small in the new car seat.
There's a room at home decked out for her,
a place that'll make us more than a couple. Now, a family.
In about 2014, my reading life changed with the establishment of Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing, a publisher at the time dedicated to literature in translation. They’ve since branched out, drawing in smaller imprints and recently buying the legendary catalog Dalkey Archive. But for me, they’ll always be a go-to place to read the world. As they were for me this week, when I read Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees.
Kurkov’s Sergey Sergeyich lives in Little Starhorodivka, a village in Ukraine’s grey zone, a region caught between loyalists & separatists. It’s a lonely village reduced to two inhabitants, Sergey a retired mine inspector & beekeeper, and Pashka his lifelong frenemy also retired. They visit each other out of boredom & necessity, eventually even deepening something of neighborly affection & concern for one another. The frequent shelling in & around the village, however, mean that Sergey must leave — not for his own safety primarily, but for that of his bees.
His journey to let his bees take wing draws you into the variety of the region & its people, and into the depths of Sergey’s emotions. The wartime checkpoints & worries, bureaucratic absurdities & cruelties had me on edge a lot — soldiers & militia, governors & petty officials alike wield the kind of control over Sergey & his fate, his friends & his bees, that make for apt comparisons to Vonnegut, Kafka, Bulgakov, and Beckett.
Relationships with women complicate & nurture this journey throughout. One that turns erotic, others that turn familial, and still others that were once familial & strained … Sergey isn’t the bravest or clearest heart you’ll read but he is one of the realest, needing nudges from women to love & to feel & to sacrifice when it’s needed most (for himself & for others & for his bees).
Oh, and the bees.
Don’t worry — Kurkov leans on the apiary just enough. In hands-on maintenance & in nightmarish visions, in liter-by-liter accounts of production and in (quick) allegorical meditations on belonging & endurance, rebirth & sweetness.
You can buy Grey Bees here, and you can read about other stuff I’ve read here.
In this house
I've learned the power
of patience. Of performed listening.
There are tears & there's anger. You're tempted
to solve it all or raise your voice around your children.
The fog of anger & the tear-stained eyes make them other beings.
And they're already good at turning the tables on you. They accuse, they
question, they recount quarrels in precise detail, each insult, each petty
unkindness brought to life anew. It all makes a frantic emotional sense.
So you listen & you soothe. If you're really strong, you make them
feel seen & loved. It's hard to live together sometimes.
It takes a power you didn't know you'd need,
you didn't know you had,
until it's there.
Inspired by page 115 of Candice Iloh's Every Body Looking. Really like the way this looks on a computer screen--not sure the lines ebb & flow the same way on a phone.
middleagedmiddlechild. 