radiant fracture

(Edited as I go)

1. When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Singing Hills Book 2)- Nghi Vo

An excellent Scheharezadesque fable -- the Lady and the tiger. The tigers are very tigerish. The novella length is perfect. I have put more on hold.

2. The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Singing Hills Book 1) - Nghi Vo

I got this on Kindle because I was so impatient to read another book in the series. (I quite like reading books in a series out of order. A habit from growing up with network television and libraries.)

I liked this a lot. I like the convention of the objects as a means to tell the story, and they were very beautiful objects. I liked that I knew a secret was going to be revealed, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. Feeling myself set up deftly, but also allowed to see the setup from the corner of my eye. And I cried a little at the end of the story. I'm not even sure why. Something about recognition.

As I said to yarrowkat , I think I like the tigers best so far, but that might just be because I read them first.

3. A Fine and Private Place - Peter S. Beagle

I thought this would be my first book finished of the year. It's been on my list a long time in a vague way. I liked the ghostly premise, but for me, the execution bogged down in pontification. I did like the ending; I certainly felt a kinship with Rebeck's inability to live in the world.

( older notes on A Fine and Private Place )

I also thought my first book might be Day of the Triffids, but its misogyny and its version of human nature are even more irritating than the flaws of Place. Don't know yet if it's a DNF or a FWA (Finished With Annoyance).

4. Into the Riverlands (Singing Hills Book 3) - Nghi Vo

Book 3! This was vivid and fun, full of cartoony action and immediately vivid characters. Each of the books in the series is about how stories are told and transmitted. I think this book is about stories that are fragmented, interrupted, and multiple -- and that's also how the book is structured. So that was clever! But in the end, when the stories all came together, I thought: hmm, I don't think I understand why this is supposed to have weight for me. So I went back over the book again – you can do that with novellas – and I saw most of the moving parts, but I still didn't really understand quite what the point was.

I think possibly that while the novella form was a strength for the first two books -- they used the confined space flawlessly, made it feel vast -- brevity may have been a limitation to this one. For me, this would have been a richer experience if I'd gotten more backstory and motivation for several characters (who are the sworn sisters? How did they get sworn? What is it that's driving the bandits so powerfully?)

Still, really glad to have finally encountered these books.

5. The Brides of High Hill (Singing Hills Book 5) - Nghi Vo

I started Book 4, Mammoths at the Gates, but I wasn't connecting to it, so since this came in at the library, I skipped to it and read it in a morning.

I think I liked this. The story structure was quite interesting. What happens when one story of oppression is false, but it masks a deeper story of a more complex conflict?

( spoilers )

6. Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Book 4) - Nghi Vo

Do you ever use one book to help you with another? I started reading The Bear and the Nightingale, and was enjoying that quite a bit, and when I switched back to finish this I liked it better.

I liked the core idea here. It seemed like a fairly direct analogy for being trans and having that identity rejected by your family, but that's not really where Vo took it, which I liked.

I was very tired when I finished it, and rushing a little. I found the solution clever but not emotionally compelling. I thought Cleric Thien's secret was oddly generic and I'm not sure I think it was fully emotionally addressed.

There were a couple of places where I thought the copy-editor had missed a step -- a pronoun switch, and a weird timeline.

7. good woman: - Lucille Clifton

t is a quiet pleasure to watch Clifton's voice evolve, to see her refining the tools of her work. I think I can see that incredible ethical command of language that she will later show, taking shape across these early collections as she experiments with syntax, with repetition, with expanding and contracting her lines.

And these collections come bundled with a lyrical memoir, a braiding of her family's history back to her great-great-grandmother, who held in her memory their family history back to before slavery: "the woman called Caroline Donald Sale born free in Afrika in 1822, died free in America in 1910" (223).

Often telling the story in the voice of her father, Clifton layers short chapters to build up the story of her father's funeral, of his great grandmother, of his grandmother, his father, then Clifton's mother and finally herself and her two sisters.

8. The Bear and the Nightingale - Katherine Arden

I've discussed this book in more detail elsewhere. I think Arden is incredibly good at creating a setting and a cast of characters within it. The figures were as vivid to me as in the best historical novels.

The plot I found a little less sure-footed -- it never felt quite in focus. I ended up enjoying the book, but I don't feel a lot of propulsion towards the rest of the series.

9. True Grit - Charles Portis

I did think this was well-written and gripping, though I didn't fall in love with it the way many people seem to. @

10. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

A reread. Incredibly readable and satisfying. I do have some questions about it which I may address in another post. I went over at this time and wrote down some notes about the structure, since it works so perfectly.

11. Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Iona Datt Sharma, Katherine Fabian

Ably written cozy fantasy, but not for me. I appreciated the focus on networks of care in queer communities. It's not these authors' fault that I dislike plot developments where the characters pretend to be somebody else to gain access to some institution. Still, I feel like some of the choices were weird. (The book spends almost no time in fairyland and quite a lot in a church. The two biggest emotional scenes happen offstage.)

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Let's do one of those podcast Fridays frandroid came up with and I'm stealing via sabotabby. [Edited to reflect accurate citation]

Here are two retro pop culture moments to enjoy.

Imaginary Worlds - The Nine Lives of Red Dwarf

The Imaginary Worlds podcast has a Red Dwarf episode devoted to hugging the show and its fans.

I saw RD on PBS, baby. I am (if it were not already tragically obvious) one of those minds shaped by whatever British TV North American public broadcasting could buy in the 80s and 90s. I had every single Red Dwarf shirt PBS offered as a promotion during pledge drives. I wore them to shreds.¹

The IW guest is creator Doug Naylor. The host, Eric Molinsky, clearly has true affection for the show and some poignant reflections about actors and therefore characters aging across several decades of filming.

I was a bit perplexed by the conversation about how comedy and scifi were Thought Not to Mix, only because of the wild popularity of HHGTTG. They do sort of address this (it was good radio but bad TV, which ok, no one can say the TV show was high art) -- but I still feel skeptical that Red Dwarf was groundbreaking in this respect. (But again, I was highly conditioned by HHGTTG from an early age.)

-- I'm far from an early Dr. Who expert -- was it always serious for the first couple of decades? It was at least, for budgetary reasons, always pretty camp.

The episode is a love-fest, so they don't address ( negative thing about show I love. )

Endless Thread - Artist: Known

I can't remember who first posted the question of the unknown A Wrinkle in Time cover artist, but thank you. I just saw in a recent post by vass that the artist has been found! The Endless Thread podcast took on the quest.

The episode gives some pleasurable glimpses into the history of science fiction publishing and art; I would have happily listened to another full hour just going into all that background, and I would propose that this is the Real Story. (The mystery itself, while genuinely mysterious, doesn't have a particularly dramatic solution. It's the people we meet along the way.)

And a quick reading note

elusis, the Kindle has been an absolute godsend -- in general, and especially while my back's been out.

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1. I ship Limmer (Rister?) and I don't care if that makes you feel queasy. Me too! But the heart wants what it wants.

It's Wednesday somewhen.

Somewhere recently -- (searches) -- oh, on The Poetry Magazine podcast, the terrific June 20th episode on ""queer use, cynicism,and falling in love" -- I ran into the work of poet Omar Sakr and went to look for more of his writing.

This is from his essay "Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet," from the collection This Arab is Queer: an Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers, edited by Elias Jahshan. It's a numbered list -- like tweets, of course, but also like a religious text.

4. All things being equal, be a fox or an otter; the former for its cunning, its dashing color, and the latter for its softness, the ability to sleep in rivers holding onto each other, a lesson in holiness even the prophet Isa never learned.
5. Do not mistake cynicism for criticism, or criticism for intelligence. Rid yourself of cynicism, which is self-loathing projected outward. It's an inability or unwillingness to account for one's actions and intentions without condemning yourself, and so you damn everyone.

I like it a lot -- it's aphoristic, as you can see -- sometimes lyrical, often urgent. He quotes, and wrestles with, Ammo Adonis throughout, from An Introduction to Arab Poetics, so I have impulsively ordered that from a reputable online used bookstore. Which is the sort of thing a friendly corrective hand (antique-style pointer) can direct me to when I puzzle over why I am always broke, but I am just now convinced I need it. For research.

Queer use, also mentioned on the podcast, itself seems like a beautiful way of thinking. I would like to order that book (Sara Ahmed's What's the Use?) but cannot find it for impulse-buy prices. (The University library does not have it, though they do offer access to an e-book of Ahmed's Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (2006). The college library doesn't have it either, but they do have Complaint! (2021) and Living a Feminist Life (2017). But it's this idea of queer use, strange use, repurposing, beyond bricolage, that appeals to me.

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But first, a brief writing update. I made two submissions in one day! I submitted a poem to The Deadlands on the advice of sovay, and another to a friend's project on craft.

My short story "Four Hauntings" is still sitting on read in Submittable -- I guess I'll leave it until I get the actual decline, but I'd like to try it someplace else.

* * * * * *
Finished this week

Ducks, by Kate Beaton

This is comics artist Beaton's graphic memoir about her time working at the oil sands. It's very good – it's Kate Beaton – and it's very bleak. The book is well-crafted. It's sometimes almost an illustrated poem in the way it sets scenes against one another. Occasionally I did wish for a little more sign-posting about how much time was passing or when a new scene had begun. The titular ducks -- maybe you remember the famous story -- are used perfectly.

Ducks is agonizingly good on the forces -- of economics, of misogyny, of small closed communities -- that constrain our actions and our speech against our own well-being and integrity. When the protagonist does speak out, it's not quite cathartic, but it's something. Ducks is generous to those who deserve it, and even to those who don't, and it's still gut-wrenching.

Beaton writes in a few almost-easter-eggs about the origins of her career as a cartoonist; there aren't quite enough of these references to make a full thread, so I think I would have included more of that or less of it -- more, for preference, as it gives the reader hope, at least for her.

Content notes for sexual violence.

Vita Nostra, by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

This is the best book I've read in a very long time.sabotabby called this a perfect book, and I see why: it beautifully fulfills its own concept.

[ETA]I realize that my praise below is oddly peripheral to what's actually great about this book, which is the convergence of craft, style, and subject. I don't really want to spoil any story details, but here is what I wrote to sabotabby the other day, when I was about to finish Vita Nostra:


Now the secondary praise:

I've never seen the pleasures and agonies of learning a new skill, akin to music or mathematics, described so well in an only slightly allegorized way. I identified painfully with the protagonist, Sasha, except that I don't work hard.

Vita Nostra gets called dark academia; I'd call it cosmological¹ horror, but maybe that's also what dark academia is.

What is a book you consider quintessential dark academia? The Secret History? Donna Tartt is a very fine writer, and I loved that book, but I liked this more for being more ambitious.

I am fascinated by the authors' control of pacing. As I read, I would reflect that a long slow passage had been allowed to unfold without being rushed, and then realized a tremendous amount had happened in only 25 pages.

The translation seems miraculous in its richness and clarity. There are one or two places where the wording made me wonder about the choices, particularly towards the end, but otherwise this felt seamless. An incredibly absorbing experience. All the stars.

elusis , have you finished this? What did you think?

New Reading

I am excited about having downloaded yhlee 's Brain Games for Blocked Writers (cover by telophase !) -- it is just the kind of thing I like, with a lot of cross-genre and playful prompts, like
-- I find this much more congenial than the other craft book I've been reading, which in contrast offers prompts like

-- Which I understand, even appreciate, the purpose for, but which also immediately stumps me because (and I know this is precious) it seems so counter to the way my characters think, feel, and speak about themselves. I would first have to imagine a situation in which one of them felt called on to make such a strange declaration.

(But after all, that question is designed for earlier in the process than I am. That's probably the only real issue.)

Michio Kaku's The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything is, as hoped for, a very light, accessible review of string theory to help prime my ideas for the novel. I'm almost 1/4 through. Having refreshed myself with this, I can go on to something more in-depth if it's called for.

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1. Specifically cosmological rather than cosmic.

Rachel A. Rosen & Zilla Novikov's collation of camaraderie and compassion, The Sad Bastard Cookbook has arrived!



Night Beats easter eggs and all:



What is The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die?
I'm so pleased with it. Random highlight, from the recipe "Chips":

And from an annotation in "Apple Slices Yes":
All my favorite recipes are here -- for example, "Crackers."

Now I must decide who should get the second copy.

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Since the last books post, I finished Girl, Woman, Other, which I continue to admire. Evaristo's long poetic-prose line creates a clear yet rippling stream of consciousness. She handles pacing flawlessly. Each chapter immerses you completely in a character, their pain and happiness; then you move on, but this movement doesn't have the unsatisfying feel that such a device could have. Each new chapter is so absorbing that I was happy to let go of the last and be pulled along. I have put a couple more of her books on hold at the library.

Not all of the characters had the same clarity and vividness for me of the first two adult characters, Amma and Dominique, but those two are also closest to my own experience (activists, artists, theatre folk) -- and they were at the beginning, when the approach was freshest.

I liked Evaristo's affectionate skepticism about activist absolutes. I liked the way she dug into history to show Black British women with roots and ties to the land many generations deep, as well as invoking more familiar stories of immigration. I thought the non-binary character was convincingly drawn, though I think I wanted them to be more self-possessed -- which is just a want, not a flaw in the book. The book has expansive but not naive compassion.

Maybe I wanted a stronger sense of crystallization or revelation from the end of the book, something that turned the style back on itself? But, reflecting, I don't think that's the only way for this technique to resolve, or that such a moment was Evaristo's purpose. The party scene resolves the style formally, mixing perspectives and adding in further voices. I don't think Evaristo had pyrotechnic goals for that scene -- it's about connections and community, not revelation -- and it accomplishes that marking of a moment of community and change, the constant trickling of time forward, old connections shifting, new connections forming. It makes sense that there's no crest to that wave, just more waves. No particular need to climb Story Mountain; maybe more need to wash it away.

Anyway, great book.

I also read Murderbot 2 and 3. I got 5 next in the library lottery, but I think I'll wait for 4 because it felt disorienting stepping into the plot in the wrong moment. Still fun: like bingeing a great TV show, reasonably enough.

Quick book notes

• I read a book of poetry for review.
• I've not made much progress with Orwell's Roses, but I will stick it out a bit longer.
• I'm nearing the end of A Farewell to Arms.
• I have a bunch of stuff on hold that I got excited about because podcasts.

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I'm never reading anything of length at the right time to post about it, but I have mentioned that a friend loaned me her Don Paterson translation of The Sonnets to Orpheus, a slender turkey-red Faber, and while I am on the record as being suspicious of the freedom of Paterson's "version", his Sonnet 5 is -- well, here it is:


Raise no stone to his memory. Just let
the rose put forth each year, for his name's sake.
Orpheus. In time, perhaps he'll take
the shape of this, and then of that -- and yet

we need no other name. Orpheus, we say
wherever that song is manifest.
He comes and goes. Therefore are we not blessed
if he outlasts the flowers a few days?

But though his constant leaving is a torment,
leave he must, if we're to understand.
So even as his voice alters the moment,

he's already gone where no one can pursue;
even the lyre cannot ensnare his hands.
And yet in this defiance, he stays true ...


Here's my beloved Stephen Mitchell in contrast, being just a little bit stodgy:


Erect no gravestone to his memory; just
let the rose blossom each year for his sake.
For it is Orpheus. Wherever he has passed
through this or that. We do not need to look

for other names. When there is poetry,
it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes.
Isn't it enough if sometimes he can stay
with us a few days longer than a rose?

Though he himself is afraid to disappear,
he has to vanish: don't you understand?
The moment his word steps out beyond our life here,

he moves where you will never find his trace.
The lyre's strings do not constrict his hands.
And it is in overstepping that he obeys.

* * * * * *

I do not know where Paterson gets his ellipsis: it isn't in the German in my copy, and it reads twee to me. (I almost left it out.) He also gives it a wholly unnecessary title, "Leaving."

Both are beautiful; but trying them out loud gives the advantage to Paterson, I think, as more fluid and not less grave.

For me, Mitchell's elegant version is much more about Orpheus as the spirit of art, or inspiration; the Paterson seems more deeply infused with grief. Orpheus in the myth is the seeker (and the sacrifice), but here Orpheus is the one being mourned or sought.

Rilke is one of the forces at the back of my novel, his strange poetic cosmologies, and I think of this as the epitaph for one of my somewhat-dead characters.

Does anyone else keep hearing e e cummings in this? What with all the roses and the hands?

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Welcome to the first Muñoz post of the day! If you're looking for the post where we draw fanart of Muñoz and Blackbonnet in a big queer hug, that's the next one.

This is part three of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz. We're looking at Chapter Three, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia.”

Note that this discussion of sexual avant-gardes includes mentions of sex work, AIDS, and police brutality.

* * * * * *

Remember how I mentioned Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water last week? This week’s chapter is all about it! I either had no idea that was the case or I forgot it was so.

(Somehow I no longer have my copy of Delany’s book. This makes me grumpy.)

( In fact, Munoz connects the memoir, gax sex clubs, stickering campaigns, and police brutality )

Anyway, on to the communal queer visions of Our Flag Means Death. Let's see what it can do for us.

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Does anyone else have that problem where if you really want to read something, like you think it will really matter to you and give you something you need -- you actually find it harder to begin? I have that very bad.

So I'm going to do it. I'm going to read Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. Here, one chapter per week, starting Tuesday, March 1 and posting for (checks ToC) about twelve weeks. You are welcome to read along / discuss. I have ideas about structuring these posts, but also just making them at all might be the entire victory I can manage.

I'm going to start, not with the introduction, but with Chapter 1, "Queerness as Horizon: Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism." This is, well, pragmatic -- I've bounced off the introduction twice.

Plus, since in an academic book the introduction is where you make it sound like you had a plan all along, I think it would be kind of cool to read the introduction last and see how Muñoz's summing up fits with my own.

M. gave the book to me for my birthday last year (last last year) and I'm just not going to get through it without a Plan.

(Thanks sovay for being encouraging about partial or indirect successes in matters like these.)

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*I am not looking for any suggestions about why not to read this. I am already expert in discouraging myself and require no assistance on that frint.

A few weeks ago, after being rejected by an online magazine, I huffily went to the site thinking "Well, what DO you want, then?" and immediately encountered a poem so miraculously good that I felt thoroughly fate-chastened: Roxanna Bennett's "The Winged Victory of Samothrace".

I didn't know Bennett's work at all, nor her, but I am captivated by the skillful formalism, the intellect, and the immediacy. She writes about embodiment, queerness, illness, disability, temporality, so precisely, deftly, and wryly.

On a whim, I searched to see if she could be contacted, and found that it seemed possible only via a comments box on her website. I wrote an effusive little note -- including, for some reason, a typo I thought I'd found¹ -- and sent it into no-space.

She wrote back! We've had a few really nice exchanges, and when I said I was going to order her book, she sent me a copy herself! It just arrived, and not only is the poetry wonderful, the book is a beautiful object:



I don't recognize the cards on the cover showing human-animal hybrids, and I haven't found a credit for the images. Do they look familiar to you?

[ETA: had to fix the formatting that dropped out - the placement of lines is essential!]

Here is just the first part of that first poem I encountered:


"The Winged Victory of Samothrace"
Roxanna Bennett

after “Bilingual Pathways” by Dominik Parisien

In Paris the air tastes like pain, ancient,

what holy is. Armless, headless, “right wing

“Does this soufflé contain gluten”

an offensive question in French,

myself bitching about the Eiffel Tower

crouching in a rat run parking lot.

French. I'm queasy on the Champs-

Élysées and throw up again in the Seine.

Next time I'm here might be never.


...so I mean. Look at that slippery alliteration, the sneaky round-the-corner rhyme, the visual play on the idea of wings. And "let my body be so in translation." Oof.



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1. When I went back, I couldn't find it, so I believe I actually misread the line. Luckily there was a missing capital letter, so that served. I mean, I meant to be helpful, but eesh.