What I\u2019ve Been Reading Lately:<\/strong><\/p> Two books that I bought knowing it\u2019d be a minute before I could get to them, but I was counting down the days until they came up on the schedule. Was I disappointed, despite months-long hype? No. No I was not. There\u2019s a lot to get to, because we\u2019re of course talking about Postcolonial Love Poem <\/em>by Natalie Diaz and Candelaria<\/em> by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. <\/p> Postcolonial Love Poem<\/strong><\/em> by Natalie Diaz: <\/strong>again<\/a>, the density <\/em>of these poems. I was reminded of what Jos\u00e9 Olivarez said in his <\/a>The Line Break<\/a><\/em> appearance<\/a> about treating subjects \u201cwith rigor.\u201d Everything in the title\u2014the concepts of \u201cpostcolonial\u201d \u201clove\u201d and \u201cpoem\u201d\u2014are all treated with such rigor here. Maybe unsurpring from. aguy who grew up on a river, but I was incredibly moved by all of the poems about rivers, particularly \u201cThe First Water Is the Body,\u201d about the Mojave tenet that \u201cI carry a river. It is who I am: \u2018Aha Makav. This is not a metaphor \/\/ \u2026The river runs through the middle of my body.<\/em>\u201d <\/p> Also, \u201cOnly water can change water<\/em>, can heal itself. Not even God \/ made water. Not on any of the seven days. It was already here. \/ Or maybe God is water, because I am water, and you are water.\u201d from the poem \u201cexhibits from <\/em>The American Water Museum\u201d could\u2019ve been the epigraph, if it fit. I wanted to put that stanza here in its entirety\u2014if that tells you whether you should pick up this book or not. <\/p> And of course, you will be unsurprised that Guy Whose Poetry Podcast Ends With Basketball Discussion was absolutely thrilled<\/em> with all the basketball poems. In poems like \u201cRun \u2018N Gun,\u201d and \u201cTop Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good At Basketball,\u201d there\u2019s all kinds of flipping and twisting of meaning\u2014Native players \u201cbecoming weather\u201d when they \u201cblew by [their opponents], we rained buckets, we lit up the gym\u2026,\u201d \u201cshoot\u201d turning to also evoke to Hotchkiss guns of Wounded Knee<\/a>, which itself gets flipped in \u201cTop Ten Reasons\u2026,\u201d about Indigenous basketball players whomping a visiting white team, who \u201cfalls on their wounded knees with torn ACLs.\u201d It\u2019s great. Basketball in poetry!<\/p> Candelaria <\/strong><\/em>by Melissa Lozada-Oliva: <\/strong>my two favorite writers are Aimee Bender and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. That\u2019s been the case since around 2010, and I don\u2019t see it ever changing. Gabo, being internationally famous, has his imitators. Bender, on the other hand, feels unique. People compare her to Kelly Link, maybe, some others\u2014that\u2019s fair, but there\u2019s something ineffable about what Aimee\u2019s prose does to me. It\u2019s like my favorite band, Chon\u2014sure, you can name a bunch of bands that use similar techniques or sound similar, but they remain somehow on a different plane. As such, it\u2019s maybe the highest compliment I can give a writer, saying that they remind me of Aimee Bender. There\u2019s a particular combination of effortlessly tasteful music in the prose, characters tightroping their way between sanity\/insanity, casual magic, and a wide-eyed embrace of the weirdness of life that would lead me to say that. It takes a lot. It\u2019s kinda like looking for another band that sounds like Chon: probably a fruitless search, go listen to Homey <\/em>again. Except: Melissa Lozada-Oliva reminds me of Aimee Bender. <\/p> So let\u2019s talk about the book, huh? It\u2019s bonkers<\/em>. You\u2019re dropped into a second-person narration of what Candelaria, the grandmother of the three main characters, is doing. The first section ends with her stabbing her boyfriend in the gut and tossing flowers at his corpse as she leaves her apartment for the Old Country Buffett. Then we\u2019re off to the main narrative, third-person and switching between Bianca, Paola\/Zoe, and Candy. It zooms back a year and shows us how this fragmented family of women regroups after ages of various scatterings. These are fascinating but frequently<\/em> unlikable characters. I enjoy unlikable characters, but that\u2019s maybe important to some people. As you\u2019re reading, you might think, \u201cwow, Bianaca, Zoe, and Candy are all so cold, they need to make some friends.\u201d But how should they be? Bad things cannot stop happening to these women. Going back to the time Candelaria\u2019s mother sold her to a man, it\u2019s been pretty bleak for these three generations. The ending sort of<\/em> gets to a \u201cfamily\u2019s all we got, we gotta take care of other\u201d without being saccharine about it, without losing its hardened edge\u2014in fact, it\u2019s pretty reductive to say that\u2019s the only place the book is going. All that said, if likable characters and world-building is, like, super important<\/em> to you? 1) grow up and 2) sorry if that was harsh, but\u2014try this book out, and sit with it if it\u2019s uncomfortable. <\/p> If I were the kind of pithy book critic that the New York rags employ, I\u2019d call this novel both postcolonial and post-NVIXM. There\u2019s all kinds of unreal stuff in this novel\u2014cannibalism, the undead knocking up the living, people going back for a second SPIN class\u2014but when considered through the lens of \u201cwomen are constantly under assault in 21st century US culture,\u201d then add the difficulties of being non-white and the child of immigrants with generational trauma? This nightmarescape feels a little like a Thursday. As I\u2019ve said before, I\u2019m growing weary of apocalypses and dystopia<\/a>, and I was a little wish-something-else-was-happening<\/em> in the world-collapsing scenes, BUT. There\u2019s no bombardment of world-building, there\u2019s no silly terms to learn (even with the cult!), and there\u2019s no heavy-handed metaphors. Bad things just happen to these women, and they figure it out. Sort of? I would advise against trying to make the apocalypse add up in your head, against trying to graft this book into preconceived ideas of zombie apocalypse stories, and simply hang out with Bianca, Zoe, and Candy. <\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> Something to listen to while you browse? How bout some Chon, since I mentioned them earlier? <\/p>![\"Postcolonial](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/0dcceb84-0d2f-417f-872b-fcd73b240d36.heic\")
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