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The opening poem to Harél’s Let Our Bodies Change the Subject prepares the reader for what is to come—a meditation on mortality, the passing of the baton, generational knowledge, and existence itself. And somehow Harél faces these existential questions head-on, with care and grace. He casually introduces us to the “Sad Rollercoaster” the speaker’s daughter discovers—and which we all reckon with: 

That night and the one after,
my daughter dreams of bones—how they lift
out of her skin and try on her dresses. So silly! she laughs,

 until later, seeing the massive skeleton of a retired rollercoaster at Coney Island: 

she sees a giant wooden spine,
this brownish-red maze traced in decay. She calls it
Sad Rollercoaster, then begs to be taken home.

After my family’s corgi died when my daughter was four, she asked, “Is Cordie a pile of bones?” I didn’t know what to tell her about death or about what happens to a body once it is no longer useful to the life that inhabited it. She had seen piles of bones outside on lawns in our Queens neighborhood—decorations for Halloween. One plastic skull was left out in a flowerbed all four seasons. As a parent, and an atheist, I wanted to do as little harm as possible to this young psyche that was—somehow!—in my care. I don’t remember whether I skirted the issue or if I was gentle and direct. But I did crawl into her toddler bed, our skin touching, arms open. Any of us confronting these difficult subjects either internally or with a child or parent will feel communion with this beautiful book, with Harél’s yearning to Let Our Bodies Change the Subject.

It was the bones in “Sad Rollercoaster” that stirred up this memory of my daughter’s experience, but the collection as a whole examines what the questions of children—or our inner child—reveal within an adult. How we cobble together facts and comfort and whatever philosophy we have internalized, or wish to, to answer these quintessentially human mysteries. 

But it is not just the looming question of mortality that Let Our Bodies Change the Subject raises. That would be too neat for a poet like Harél, whose nuance and ability to weave the casual everyday details of life into larger more universal experiences is how he gets his hooks into the meat of us. This collection is as much about being parented as it is about parenting. The shockwaves and ripples that move through generations. This collection examines what it is to parent. How do we teach lessons we still haven’t learned? How do we learn them? How do we reconcile the choices that were made in our own rearing? Are we doing it right? And the few poems sprinkled throughout questioning religion and god reinforce these themes—another search for something elusive that doesn’t have exact answers.

One thread throughout this collection that really spoke to me was the sense of unease that lingers in difficult decisions. The speaker appears insecure in their happiness and good fortune—and in parenting. This is something we can all relate to. We first see this in “The Sweet Spot” on page five—a brief and lovely poem that gives voice to the universal insecurities that grow like weeds inside all of us. The speaker proclaims, “. . . we have hit/ our sweet spot, the best it’s gonna get . . .” But don’t believe it, reader. I refuse to. Later on in “Plastic Butterflies,” we are told:

. . .Nowadays
I can’t tell who I’m meant to help,
or how to help, or if anything really helps
anymore, although I guess that’s me

Set in contrast to his past, childless self, confident in youth, our speaker questions themself. This niggling insecurity weaves through the collection as a whole, making the speaker and their life relatable—and likable. In “Too Soon in San Antonio,” this echoing worry is stark: there are things the speaker should know, that maybe others do, but they do not. The vibrating insecurity behind the heart of this collection is brought to the fore: Are we doing this right? And miraculously, there is the acknowledgment that we can only do our best with the information we have. “The Other Side of Desire” gives us a slightly different take on this. The speaker is disenchanted and restless with the life he has found himself in. But even as he longs for a break in routine, we see the tenderness with which he loves his life. The care put into parenting and being a spouse. This poem is perhaps the one most full of love and contentment, despite the confession—that sliver of desire to escape that all of us feel and at times may even nurture. 

We get our most interesting insights when we see the speaker through his children—their voices, their questions, the way he second-guesses himself, like all parents do. How daunting to find oneself a fallible parent with people who need you to be invincible and all-knowing. In “The Perimeter,” we hear our own inner thoughts in the voices of the speaker’s children—Harél skillfully draws parallels between generations:

My excitement hurts, my daughter sulks
at Columcille Megalith Park, where stones stack
on stones upon a great big stone circling
the sun. It’s mid-July, muggy, and my excitement 
hurts too, though somewhere along the line
I lost the right to say so. Or the nerve. . . .

It is exactly when the speaker has the nerve to be his most frank that we see his thoughtfulness, his tender application of parenthood and even personhood. And this poem is a shining example of just that. In “A Moving Grove,” Harél writes: 

. . .  All year
I’ve been tring to say something
real, or at least really clever, which
might be my undoing. The kids
want answers about death and God
and if the Muppets are alive and why
is it sunny and when can they stop
hiding in closets at school? . . .

We know that the speaker, too, wants answers. About death and God and the relentless queries and how to know that our choices matter. I know how it feels for time to stop while formulating the answers to the unknowable. The weight of the words as they are parsed. And the poet gives us both the frozen moments of indecision and also the rushing of time, as the rug is pulled out from under us. In another poem, the speaker watches his child moving away from him. In “Overnight” we see a daughter racing “unencumbered/ toward her friends”,  while the speaker reminisces:

Just yesterday she clung
to the nape of your t-shirt,
begging to stay.
Just yesterday
she was yours, and you,
you gave her away. 

Harél excels at depicting this motion—the inexorable movement of generations spinning forward as they only can.

In Harél’s examination of parenting and replacement, another refrain rises to the surface in this collection. The speaker considers his own childhood, acknowledging the replacement of one generation with the next, tying poems together, as parent and child, thematically. In “Beer Run,” the speaker is a child and is pulled from an unsafe vehicle at the last minute. The fear and anxiety of parenting—that has been so precisely described from the speaker’s perspective as a parent—now from his own parent’s perspective, is only something of which he is aware in hindsight:

“. . . How could I have guessed
why my father was sprinting, screaming after us
down the middle of the street, or why he wouldn’t stop
shaking as he ripped me from the truck?”

All of us who make it to adulthood have had to face our parents’ humanity. The full depth of it. Harél is generous in his poems—all of these parents are doing their best. Even when they aren’t perfect. We see the reckoning of the passing torch of parenthood in “Kin” and “Behind the Painted Guardrail,” but in other poems the poet goes even further, considering what is passed down through multiple generations. Jared and his speaker recognize that no one parents alone—behind all of us are our ancestors and their lessons, those we are trying to unlearn, mitigate, or continue. In “Cordoba,” we learn about the speaker’s grandfather, and the poem allows that we may all end up like the titular Cordoba— 

. . . moved 
to my parents yard
where it sat rotting
on deflated tires: a relic.
An eyesore. A pit of wasps
writhed under its hood.

The speaker doesn’t preclude himself as the possible someone who hands down what ought not be handed down. In perhaps the most musical poem in the book, “Ruins,” Harél deftly delivers a rhythmic poem in short-lined tercets about trying to teach a son about safety. He concludes:

—if I confess
terror casts me as a father
to son, like a shadow
that outruns me,
am I well overrun?

Ultimately Let Our Bodies Change the Subject teaches us that parenting is not done alone—even when it is full of what feels like recklessly choosing, in the moment, what we believe to be correct. In these choices are the experiences of parents, grandparents, and echoes of ancestors, just as the speaker tells their daughter in “Birthday” of aging and the self when “she didn’t want . . .  to leave herself behind”:

[I] said, You take it
all with you, you bring all
your selves with you
into the future. I don’t know
what I believe, but I think
she believed me.  

Looking back at the second poem in the collection (“All I’ve Ever Wanted”) we read: “what humbling work/it is to haul kids toward thoughtful—the kind/ in humankind.” And later in this poem the speaker says: 

. . . My point about discovery
has escaped me by now, though I know
the old chorus for thwarted desire. My cereal
will be dry. Coffee taken black. I will try
against hope to be better than myself, which is all
I’ve ever wanted and everything I need.

By the end of this collection, the point has not escaped us, the reader. And it is clear that the speaker is striving for “better,” and from this reader’s perspective, succeeding. These poems speak to the connections between family members and generations, the powerful and versatile force that is love, and being exactly where you are, even as the ground shifts beneath you.

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Let our Bodies Change the Subject, available September 2023 from University of Nebraska Press.

About the reviewer:

The Predestined Fiction of Naira Kuzmich 

There is an Armenian belief known as jagadakir which translates literally to “the writing on the forehead” and it is the idea that one’s destiny is predetermined and therefore for the world to see. This superstition lives in the protagonists of Naira Kuzmich’s short story collection titled In Everything I See Your Hand. They are Armenian-Americans who struggle with dispossession, domesticity, and generational differences. They wonder about exile and the difference between leaving the motherland vs. leaving one’s mother while chasing grander things in far away places. 

A better life in America, education at faraway universities, and even love in marriages to foreigners. These are people who struggle with the belief that the story of their lives have already been written and the only possible escape from that destiny is through death or departure. Kuzmich writes with power and precision that influences both her characters and her readers to see the beauty of this fleeting life’s pain and forces one to reckon that they must go on despite the hurt. 

All ten of the stories in this beautiful, haunting collection take place in the “Little Armenia” neighborhood in East Hollywood, California. These are immigrants and the children of those immigrants who fled to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. The stories are all influenced by Kuzmich’s own experiences and she uses this honesty to portray deep truths about Armenia, America, and what it means to be an Armenian-American. 

Several stories live along the blended borders of the motherland and the new land of America. One in particular, “Woman Amid Ruins” leaves a deep impression on the reader. It tells the story of Zara, the lone child survivor of the 1988 Armenian earthquake in the town that was its epicenter, Spitak. While the story is literally taking place in the bedroom of Zara and her new husband, it bounces between time and place with fluidity. She is processing her trauma and her life and how her destiny has led her to America. Having been the lone child survivor in town left Zara with a feeling of both that she was special, and that she had somehow cheated her destiny. This leaves her searching for answers that led her across Armenia, in the arms of different men, and finally to America. Zara’s desire for answers for her self-fulfillment culminates in an interaction with a former lover of hers, a painter. Zara asks, “Can you paint my face,” because “what she wanted to see was her forehead, just to see what was written there, once and for all” (Kuzmich 35). This is a woman who lost her connection to her family and her ancestry and is yearning for cultural identity and assurance. 

While some characters are searching for the culture and heritage, others are tired of the constant reminders of the tragedies that have followed their people. The Soviets. The earthquakes. The genocide. It never seems to end and the protagonist of the final story,  “Transculturation, or: An Address to My American Lover”, is tired of it. While her lover is trying to learn as much about her culture as possible, from learning facts such as the number of people who died in the Spitak Earthquake (over 60,000) to how to say “I love you”. This desire that he has wears on the protagonist despite the good natured intention behind it. Ultimately though, she doesn’t appreciate it. She knows 

“that there is nothing more to my people than tragedy. That this is what you see every time you look at me. That this is what is written clearly on my forehead. Don’t you dare go giving me another reminder, lover. I have enough.”

(Kuzmich 176) 

The deep truths that this story and it’s protagonist talk about range from cultural touchstones such as the duduk or famous Armenians. She treats everything as it is, most powerfully the blank page that represents her thoughts on the Genocide. The white space a gut punch that Armenians must feel whenever it becomes the topic of conversation. This protagonist and her forehead represent more than just her personal destiny, but rather the history of her people. While it is bold for an author to speak for an entire culture, Kuzmich brings us outsiders into the fold of the Armenian-American world in which she was raised. 

Jagadakir plays a large role in this collection, as the word forehead is found 14 times across the ten stories. One story in which it is not mentioned, is perhaps the most eerie and predestined of the bunch. This story in the opener, titled “Beginning Armenian”, follows a young woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer in her twenties. Kuzmich herself was diagnosed with lung cancer in her twenties and lost her battle at 29. Heavy is the head that wears the crown bearing representation of their culture, and Kuzmich wore that crown above her destined forehead with pride and a sharp eye. 

Kuzmich was searching for more meaning in her work and felt it is what counted above all else according to her mentor and friend Josie Sibara, who wrote the introduction to the collection. This meaning centered on the idea of continuing on the beautiful tragic journey that is life despite all of the roadblocks and signs telling you to give up. A lesson that we all need to be reminded of. Kuzmich made sure her characters never lost hope and through the page it is palpable that she never did either. 

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In Everything I See Your Hand is available now from University of New Orleans Press.

About the reviewer:

Curing Season: A Look at a Lyrical Memoir

Curing Season is a lyrical essay, a segmented essay, and a hermit crab essay, all in one book. It is written in the container of a book but explores the various forms given to creative nonfiction. With essays like “Shadow Box” which is written in squares and rectangles to be contained in a shadow box, “Mädchenfänger” a list essay, several segmented essays, and a photo essay, this collection is not a straightforward narrative.

The subtitle of Curing Season is “Artifacts” which accurately describes this essay collection. Kristine Langley Mahler has collected artifacts from her life and presented them in a way that reads like a collection of her life. Each essay is its own artifact as they reveal something about the author in a way she is trying to reveal her past self to her current self. The subtitle Artifacts refers to the essay and artifacts Langley writes about while the title Curing Season is a reference to the tobacco curing season in Pitt County. This book is a preservation of her time in Pitt County, just as curing tobacco is a preservation of the plant. 

I love creative nonfiction in hybrid and lyrical forms. Curing Season hits the right intersection of writing with brevity. I know what Langley Mahler’s life was like in these short experimental essays, without the need for long descriptive scenes. This book allows the reader to pause and reflect on their own lives. I found myself relating to my own adolescence and the challenges it brings. The short chapters pull the reader through this coming-of-age memoir.

Langley Mahler is obsessed with place. So much so that much of her book is exploring what a specific place means to her and to her adolescence. She opens up her segmented essay “Club Pines,” with a section titled ‘My House,” where she reveals her family had moved to an upper-middle-class suburban area in North Carolina from Oregon. Though her childhood was spent in Oregon she felt displaced as an adolescent in Club Pines.  The segmented essay moves on to discuss each one of her friend’s homes and what each one means to her. In visiting each home Mahler reveals her discomfort in being in a new town. In Michelle’s house, Mahler states that she is never invited back once Michelle realizes that Mahler is being bused to an urban school in an effort to desegregate. In other friend’s homes, she visits families that don’t eat dinner together, kids that don’t have rules, and homes that are filled with tobacco smoke. When faced with homes Mahler doesn’t feel comfortable in, she calls her mother to get her. On another occasion when her friend Heather curses in front of adults she leaves. Mahler has a specific idea in her mind of how her friends and their families should behave and if they don’t act according to her ideas about family she doesn’t stick around. Each section signifies how badly Mahler wants to fit in with the girls in her school, but she doesn’t know how, and her experiences don’t match up with her expectations.

Kristine Langley Mahler continues to explore her obsession with place and turns it into art on the page. Her essay, “A Pit is Removed, A Hollow Remains” is a clever title derived from the author living in Pitt County, North Carolina. Mahler, who is the pit in this essay, leaves Pitt County and as an adult obsesses over living there. It’s a place of her life that is hollow because she keeps coming back to those years to make sense of them. She also tries to make sense of a girl that was her friend but has since passed away. 

She writes “I have not physically been to Pitt County in fifteen years. It doesn’t matter. I have been there fifteen hundred times in my mind.”

She takes her own personal obsession of tracking Pitt County down to googling what people’s homes look like and she turns it into a personal narrative. The author is very self-aware that her obsessive behavior is the fuel behind her work. The four years of her youth living in Pitt County informed her whole life. It took over her adolescence in being displaced and it’s taking over her adulthood as she tries to unmask this location and tries to find the root of why she can’t let it go.

“I arrowed through Google Maps on Street View; I narrowed to my neighborhood on Airbnb and broke into houses, wandering through rooms I’d been in and houses I’d biked past.” 

It almost seems as if Langley Mahler has gone too far in her quest to search her past. That thought brings great tension and gives the reader a moment to consider their own past and how they handle researching who they used to be. Not everyone will go as far as tracking down specific homes and looking at photos on Airbnb. This adds to the level of obsession Langley Mahler has and it adds to her strong desire to make sense of a confusing time. It’s as if she has no choice to but go to extremes in order to find what she’s looking for. This plays into her as a writer and an artist. She will go to great lengths in her self-discovery. 

Curing Season pushes boundaries on what a memoir and an essay collection can look like. There is no one specific way to write an essay or an essay collection and Langley Mahler lets her exploration of form provide a new way to explore the self.

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The Curing Season is available now from West Virginia University Press.

About the Reviewer:

Woman with a Fan is poet Diane Kendig’s historical inquiry and personal journey into the life and career of turn-of-the-century Spanish painter María Blanchard. Although Blanchard worked in Paris among the modernists, she was little celebrated in her lifetime, nearly forgotten after her death, and only recently rediscovered. Her quintessential Cubist painting,

Woman with a Fan, is now prominently displayed in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, “a floor above Picasso, next to Rivera,/ where we see her work large as theirs for the first time.”

In the sixteen poems and three essays that comprise Woman with a Fan: On María Blanchard, Kendig meditates on Blanchard’s art, life, and character and explores other points of connection between herself and her subject. In Blanchard’s short lifetime (1881-1932), marked by poverty and ill health, she produced representational and abstract works of great poignancy. She was born in Santander, Spain, in the same year as Picasso, and she suffered from a congenital birth deformity: “a kyphosis, which is to say, a double deviation of the vertebral column with posterior and lateral curvature…with a prominent humpback.” Like her New England contemporary, the great neglected writer Katharine Butler Hathaway, who had a similar deformity, she developed a hypersensitive awareness of others. Like Hathaway, too, she was rejected romantically because of her appearance, and, like her, she channeled her unfulfilled yearnings into her powerful art. Blanchard’s painting, “The Ice Cream Cart,” features a debonair young man, walking away from the gaily decorated cart with his ice cream prize, while a tiny girl, appearing almost as a baby, strains in vain on tiptoe to reach the cart, her dress billowing over her back and her cane discarded on the ground, forever condemned to frustration.

In Kendig’s poem commemorating the painting, “The Ice Cream Cart,” she relates how, at first glance, she missed the figure of the straining girl, focusing instead on the satisfied boy. Not until her “friend, a nurse, said, ‘Look at the girl behind the cart,’” did she notice Blanchard’s depiction of herself as a child, “barely able to stretch/to hold the ledge of the cart.” Short in stature herself, Kendig identified with Blanchard’s physical frustrations:

                      …I remember that reach
                      to the shelf that held suckers at the bank,
                      to the bookshelf where the librarian waved for me
                      to get books for myself though I was not tall enough to.

Kendig also identifies with Blanchard’s attachment to her only sister. “In the depths of her penury, she bought back her painting Two Sister from a collector because she felt the collector could not appreciate what it meant to her, sister of two sisters as she was.”

There are poems about Blanchard’s individual paintings and her complicated connections to Picasso and Diego Rivera. Both notorious womanizers, Picasso and Rivera rejected Blanchard as a sexual partner because of her hunchback, yet Picasso admired her enough to attend her funeral, and Rivera, though he shared a studio in Paris with her, was unable to pressure her to wait on him, like Lupe, Frida, and the other women in his life.

In her poem, “The Communicant,” Kendig places Blanchard’s self-portrait as an adult wearing a girl’s first communion dress within the genre of First Communion portraits and the historical context of Spanish art, comparing it to Velázquez’s seminal painting Las Meninas.Blanchard painted

The Communicant, Kendig tells us, after her grant money ran out, and she “had to leave Paris/and settle with her mother on Goya Street in Madrid.”

Blanchard’s relationship with her mother was troubled. Now we know that “fetal injuries are rare in cases of falls…[and] her deformity appears to be more suggestive of osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease.” Yet Blanchard’s mother was blamed for her daughter’s congenital deformity: “María’s disability came from her mother’s fall from a horse.” As a result, her mother was “cold and distant…María’s mother felt the shame and guilt of creating an imperfect child…caus[ing] an insurmountable rift.” It must have been unpleasant for both women when Blanchard was forced by poverty to return to her mother’s house, yet in “The Communicant,” the subject’s expression is enigmatic.

In “Lorca’s Elegy,” Part One of her multi-section poem, “Speaking of María Blanchard,” Kendig offers a new translation of Lorca’s elegy of Blanchard. In her essay, “Afterword: Speaking of María Blanchard,” she relates how Lorca’s elegy introduced her to Blanchard and explains some of the creative decisions she made in her translation. For Kendig, Blanchard’s life offers an inspiring example of perseverance despite difficulty: “Perhaps just by being María Blanchard, she is giving…a lesson in getting the work done, despite disability and pain, despite poverty, despite gender and the lack of critical acclaim. Despite all that, an artist finally is not necessarily the one with wealth or health or fame: she is the one who creates art.”

Insights like these might seem self-evident, yet we constantly need to be reminded of them. Kendig’s Woman with a Fan: On María Blanchard is a poignant introduction to the artist and her life, as well as a living testimonial to the influence that one artist can exert on another, despite living in different eras, speaking different languages, and working in different genres.

Lady with a Fan is available now from Shanit Arts.

About the reviewer: