Archive for the ‘poetry’ Tag
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng starts slow; initially it’s too easy to put down, until, well, it isn’t.
Much has to do with the mystery surrounding the absence of 12-year-old Bird’s mother who his father refuses to acknowledge while insisting his son to do the same. They live in a not-too-distant dystopian world where fear and suspicion rule based on safeguarding America’s culture known as PACT.
It’s a time when children are removed from parents suspected of seditious thoughts and behaviors. Those of Chinese, and by default all Asians, are considered threats. Bird’s mother Margaret is Chinese American and a poet. Her work goes largely unnoticed until one day PACT protesters use a line from one of her poems for their cause: Our Missing Hearts. To protect her son, she leaves the family.
Despite his father’s pleas, Bird’s curiosity about his mother becomes a driving force. These efforts to find her are where the narrative revs up.
Margaret’s story catches the past up with the present. This includes her childhood in the neighborhood’s only Asian family, later surviving on the streets when the economy collapses (blamed on the Chinese), and meeting Bird’s father and becoming a mother.
It’s been years since Margaret has written poetry, but she embraces a new passion based on the protester’s slogan: she tries to meet and interview as many parents as possible whose children have been taken from them.
Ng’s writing is vivid and frightening in its depiction of how self-preservation is manipulated by fear.
Out Missing Hearts
Four Bookmarks
Penguin Press, 2022
335 pages (includes author’s notes and acknowledgements)
Hive-Mind by Gabrielle Myers is labeled a memoir, but it’s slightly more than that. Written in diary-like form, Myers describes her summer of 2006 on a farm in Northern California. This is no kiddie account, though. While it’s the focus of her narrative, Myers alternates the chronicle with a look back to her relationship with her mother and growing up in Virginia. As if this isn’t enough, she also includes poetry.
It’s evident that sharing the earlier memories is cathartic; this is true of the latter ones, but is less obvious until the end. Myers’s descriptions of life on the farm, from early spring to late September, are vivid and stunning. I can practically feel dirt stuck in my fingernails as she, Baker (also working on the farm) and Farmer (the woman who owns the land and decides the daily chores) sow and weed and sweat and harvest. The author is also impressive in describing meals prepared from food on the farm.
Farmer is an enigma. This may be Myers’s point: Farmer never reveals enough about herself to know who she is. Myers shares her own thoughts and reactions, but that isn’t enough to make Farmer compelling. Baker is an open book and, consequently, is more interesting.
Myers isn’t writing about coming of age, but of becoming aware. This is evident as she connects the different phases in her life following a 1995 conversation with her mother: “… how I feel can become how someone else feels.”
Hive-Mind
Three and three-quarter Bookmarks
Lisa Hagen books, 2015
299 pages
Jess Walter takes satire to a new level in The Financial Lives of Poets, a look at marriage, social media, unemployment and breaking the law. Matt Prior is an unemployed financial journalist and a would-be poet. His senile father lives with Matt, his wife and their two young boys. Matt is convinced his wife is having an affair. When he isn’t busy writing poems about the direction of his life, he stalks his wife’s online activities.
Walter instills humor and pathos in his characters. In fact, these elements are so evenly balanced it’s difficult to choose a preference. It’s funny that Matt meets two young hoods late at night at a 7-Eleven; it’s pathetic when he continues the relationship. It’s amusing when Matt comes up with an idea to save his home from foreclosure; but it’s sad to realize the extent of his debt and desperation.
The novel’s title comes from another of Matt’s bad ideas, although this one is completely legal: a website with financial news written in blank verse. Matt left his job at the local paper to pursue this not surprisingly unsuccessful venture. It’s not that the poetry is weak, only that, for better or worse, poetry simply doesn’t appeal to everyone; and as it turns out, particularly not financial types.
The Financial Lives is suggestive of a Breaking Bad Lite. The motivation for making ill-conceived choices is understandable, even if it cannot be condoned. The farther Matt sinks, the less intriguing the story. It wears thin.
The Financial Lives of Poets
Three Bookmarks
HarperCollins, 2009
290 pages
The Blue Page Special 