There are so many things to fear in life, but punctuation is not one of them. That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.
This story, in which the bullied children age into a world clamoring for the flavors they grew up with and come to embrace the cuisine they tried to reject, is true for many. But in its retelling and fictionalization, it’s been filed down to its most obvious and recognizable parts. There is no nuance to the “lunchbox moment,” and while the trope-ification of these real-life experiences conveys trauma and discrimination to often white readers or viewers, it leaves no room for the people whose lives did not fit that template. Yes, we can’t be what we can’t see. But what are we seeing? And what do we lose when we reduce our culinary experiences to one story?
Zorrie Underwood, the titular character of Laird Hunt’s lovely new novel, is a woman alone. Orphaned at an early age and forced to live with an aunt who has “drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness,” Zorrie cultivates an awareness of the natural world that anchors her grief-ridden life. By some measures that life might be considered insignificant. Zorrie spends all but a few weeks of her 70-plus years in Clinton County, Ind., a farming community where the women are “as scratched-up as the men.” In Hunt’s hands, however, this rendering of a woman lauded as “a giver of gifts and a gallant defender” becomes a virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself — physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike.
The word “innocence” is not easily applied to Seidel’s work. His poetic credo, articulated in a Paris Review interview, is: “Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.” He’s the Dark Prince of American poetry, a writer of glittering malice, one who cuts against the grain of almost every variety of community feeling. He’s not a poet for everyone, but no poet worth anything is.
The year is probably too young to make this kind of pronouncement, but the new novel I know I'm going to be rereading in the coming months and spending a lot of time thinking about is Vendela Vida's We Run the Tides. It's a tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in — and at the same time am relieved to have outgrown.
In both political and personal spheres, messages of “peace and love” or “love wins”—or even the now-popular “love is love is love is love”—can sometimes come across as empty platitudes. Yes, love wins in the movies, and we want to believe in its power, but such statements are often interpreted as presenting love, falsely, as a conclusion rather than a starting point. They, too, can fall into a cliché of positive psychology, and, worse, sometimes seem to make light of the lived experiences of suffering and oppression. But when a writer approaches the topic with the earnestness of a lifelong devotee and the fierceness of a skilled lawyer, a word as fraught as “love” can gather up its full gravity, its revolutionary potential. In See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (2020), attorney and activist Valarie Kaur reframes the message of love so that it becomes the starting point, the guiding light, and the infinite wisdom-source for transformative action.