Author Archives: Shivanee @ Novel Niche

“Mirror, Reflect Our Unknown Selves” – Tlotlo Tsamaase

10 Friday Aug 2018

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Image: WILLPOWER AFRO, posted at Flickr by WILL POWER under a Creative Commons License.

Where better can we trace our own origins than in the roots of our hair?

Tlotlo Tsamaase’s “Mirror, Reflect Our Unknown Selves” is a multiple series of journeys, made in hair and bone, blood and sex, strife and sisterhood. It reads like a fable of self-conjure, and brings us, in echoes of “Daphne”, the female figure excavating herself from inertia, through the effort of pain: “Her afro traced her scalp / Like patterns of poetry. / She dug her nails deep / To carve out the self / And lay herself in a cloak of snow.” So many of the best speculative poems I’ve read are about the self-rescue of women; Tsamaase’s poem is about rescue, and also about the ritual of bringing oneself forth.

“Mirror, Reflect Our Unknown Selves” presents us with a hybridized principal speaker, one who is both ‘she’ and ‘I’, ‘myself’ and ‘her’. In her first-person voice, the speaker claims sovereignty over her beauty, but a line later, we see ‘her’ titrations of doubt: “Her make-up, a ghost’s mask, / Buries ethni-cities in layers of bone / ’Cause isn’t it so tidy to be the color of bone / Unwrapped of skin / Instead of the color of sin— / Skin?”

Look, the poem might be telling us through the mirror of its own structural apparatus, nothing about claiming yourself is easy.

The poem pulses with images of gestation and procreation: “belly is full of unborn worlds”; “a womb where oceans beg to seal earth with sea-skin”; “phallic caves”; “a sex digger, mining her loins.” The most startling of images comes when the poem’s speaker has her uterus pinched, by one who is “begging the blood to stop:
“Go back. No, we don’t want children.”” What a darkly conjured reward is Tsamaase’s poem: a pelt, mapped tight, to show a planet, to sound a drum.

Read “Mirror, Reflect Our Unknown Selves” here.
Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana writer of fiction, poetry, and articles on architecture. Visit her website here.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the tenth installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“Daphne” – Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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Image: Rome – Galleria Borghese – Apollo and Daphne – Bernini, posted at Flickr by damian entwistle under a Creative Commons License.

Do you love and revere a powerful woman? The odds are good, and terrible, that she’s been chased.

Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada’s “Daphne” leapt at me while I read the poetry offerings in Fairy Tale Review. You may know the tale of Daphne the naiad, pursued with aggressive lust by Apollo — which is a classicist’s way, perhaps, of saying he was chasing her to rape her. She pleads for mercy, and is transformed into a laurel tree by either a rivergod who is her father, or Gaia, depending on source. Much in the manner of men who venerate that which they cannot conquest, Apollo comes to cherish laurels, which then crowned victors at the Pythian Games. We continue to associate laurels with plaudits in popular culture, from the Olympics to film festivals, heraldry to university graduates.

What of Daphne? isn’t the only question this poem asks. Rodriguez-Estrada gives us a grafting: a splinting of the Daphne myth with the tale of another, immediate speaker, one who can measure their coming-of-age through violence: “I will think of all / my greatest hits / my father’s belt against my ass / la fajiada que te voy a dar / the leather-lash and cattails / the eight-fisted whip / the blistering tumescence / of the warped tree I did / become”. The poem is a discomfiting, tautly lyric reminder that we are a world full of Daphnes, still: folk who flee, flinch and transmogrify ourselves in order to evade trauma, the tyranny of the lash, and more violations than can ever be put into poems.

I love this poem for all the reasons that a poem can keep me up at night and crowd my complacency into a corner (then defenestrate it) by day. Rodriguez-Estrada has reined in their use of the line so sharply: this poem flows, yes, but it also bridles.

Read “Daphne” here.
Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada is currently working on a collection of stories that riff on myths and fairy tales, taking place between Nicaragua and California in the wake of war and natural disasters.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the ninth installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“Space Oddity” – David Bowie

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Image: Astronaut, posted at Flickr by Jenni Konrad under a Creative Commons License.

What does this one, blue earth of ours look like, from space? You could ask Major Tom. If you can find him.

David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” hones in on Major Tom, who’s lost communication with Ground Control. Tom’s already a tradeable commodity, back home – the newspapers want to know whose shirts he wears, and tell me you can’t picture his professional astronaut photoshoot before leaving for space: square jaw, big white teeth, patrician nose. Blonde, like as not. The poster child of the sort that human international superpowers saw it fit to send out there, first. Tom’s probably the kind of intergalactic emissary you’d still see being sent to represent us all, at the next roundtable meeting.

Why do we put the record on to play “Space Oddity”, time and time again? It’s not because we know a hell of a lot about Tom, that’s for sure, or where he’s gone since his feed went blurry and staticky. Bowie’s lyrics are at once spare and haunting. They flood you with space: you can float in them, imagining Tom’s motivations; the way his wife looks as she sits in front the TV, watching his space rocket launch; his bottle of protein pills hovering in antigravity, within his tin can. Tom doesn’t do much of the song’s speaking, but what he says is enough to fill scholarly essays and stoners’ notebooks with vast reams of speculation:

“This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today”

There is so much that is bleakly, absurdly beautiful about Bowie’s lyrics, like the way the countdown to liftoff is interspersed between systems checks and platitudes. Wherever Major Tom is tonight, I hope the stars shine on him sweet.

Read the lyrics to “Space Oddity” here. Listen to the song here.
David Bowie released “Space Oddity” as a single in July 1969. He died two days after the release of his final album, Blackstar.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the eighth installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“All Dead Things Shall Come To Me” – Eleanna Castroianni

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

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Image: Shadows and Bone, posted at Flickr by Matthew Baldwin under a Creative Commons License.

What’s dead might still show up on your doorstep, if you live near the sea.

In Eleanna Castroianni’s “All Dead Things Shall Come To Me”, the speaker of the poem has been charged with an uncommon gift in the ways of death-alchemy. The old inhabitations and spectral jettisons of the lives of others wash up nightly on their shore: “Trinkets and glass, ivory masks / Heart-shaped lockets, diaries, maps / Smashed toys and silver, shiny stones / Beads, bottles, buttons, buttercups, bones / Of whales”. These are the leavings of strangers, the castoffs and curiosities attached to people who they don’t know… but their skill in reanimation precedes them, and they are sought after for the talent of making new life from what is lifeless.

Do we live through our objects of good or bad use? This elegant, mechanical question whirs at the heart of what Castroianni has made here. The poem operates much like one of the creations of the seadwelling architect: it is a construction of hybridities, a vessel laced with sargassum and angelwings, leviathan bones and hopeful monsters in the manner of Frankenstein. Isn’t every poem this, speculative or not? Aren’t we always patching fates and stages and tenses together, shivering over catgut thread, hoping what we make will live into the dawn?

Castroianni’s speaker might be creating objects to keep their visitors going – “Porcelain dreams, cicada husks / Heart-shaped keys and bird-song dusks” – but like all ferrymen between liminal states, we’re left to wonder who brings them gold coins for their own eyes? What is this “gardener of graveyard gods” given, beyond a legacy of grafting new life onto old death? I love this poem because it makes me dwell on an ultimate architecture, of what we say we hold close for its beauty, when we want life to ache less.

Read “All Dead Things Shall Come To Me” here.
Eleanna Castroianni’s writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle and Eye to the Telescope. Visit their website here.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the seventh installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“Witch’s Brew” – Lev Mirov

06 Monday Aug 2018

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Image: Art board cooking – Credit to https://toolstotal.com/, posted at Flickr by John Jones under a Creative Commons License.

If you’re going to trust anyone who beckons you to an unfamiliar table, trust your local witch first. Sure, it didn’t work out so great for Hansel and Gretel, but that’s only one, sanitized part of the story. Me, I always like to hear the witch’s side, and to drink the witch’s brew, too.

Lev Mirov’s poem is an invocation to the table. What’s on offer is “Grandmother’s old bone-broth soup, salted with the tears of the dead / smoked from the resin of dream-trees growing when the world was young”. I love “Witch’s Brew” because it’s seasoned and peppered with what seems like incredible suggestion, but also tastes like the meals of home. It’s a reminder that the best speculations are often in the very place where your navel string is buried. Surely, your grandmother’s soup can raise the dead. It might be said in jest, but you know there’s a part of you that believes it. Mirov’s speaker leans into that gustatory openness, hands you a wooden ladle, asks you to inhale the richness of the fare. All you need to pay for it is your unburnt tongue, your faith in grandmother-magic.

And it is magic. One bowl has the power to let the “gods of misrule take the faces your mother knows them by / and hail you with the family names as a friend.” The closeness of the poem’s speaker, addressing you in second-person present, curls into you like the wafting of that Sunday kitchen aroma, and no matter the kind of soup you grew up on, you can smell it while you read these lines.

Food might be natal magic. We eat of and from our mothers, our they-who-bore-us, to stay alive. Sometimes we need to eat into that remembrance, to find our own brew, and swallow.

Read “Witch’s Brew” here.
Lev Mirov’s poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Liminality Magazine, Through the Gate, and other places. Visit his Patreon here.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the sixth installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“Gently chew to soften the ridges” – Bogi Takács

04 Saturday Aug 2018

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Image: DNA?, posted at Flickr by Thomas Wensing under a Creative Commons License.

What is the code of how we come together? What alchemy or biology makes us fuse, sunder, reignite?

Bogi Takács’ “Gently chew to soften the ridges” is an open window to interspecies coupling, consensual and warm and so intimate you swear you can scent the tenderness. There’s pain here, but it’s sanctioned. In fact, in the hands of the lover administering and conduiting it, it feels welcome. Takács’ speaker is inhuman, and addresses their companion in the familiar ‘you’ of second-person present. ‘You’ are there, gripping your beloved’s protrusions, wiping the sweat on your trousers and swearing. ‘You’ are there, and you “rasp your tongue against my palate, push / fingers inside my mouth, reach inside, trigger / my gag reflex it is the most intimate please“.

These small, italicized pleases synapse through the poem, and they work like any faithful transmitters do, conveying urgency and heat, compulsion and fear. Absolutely, fear. I think fear might be the most astounding part of what Takács is doing here. Isn’t a naked, gnarled kind of terror at the door of us everytime we strip before the one(s) we’ve chosen? Sometimes it shrieks; sometimes it mutely scratches, but always it seasons the sweat we give, the come we leak, the wings we hide, then splay.

It’s the fear this poem doesn’t talk about that makes it so extraordinary. Fear at the wolves of orthodoxy at the door, perhaps — but a real, gripping fear that this ritual might not be completed is at the core of the work. Will these two reach their fluid-bond? Can the bones be telescoped, can those limbs be hung from the ceiling in the name of love? You should read the poem to find out, pulling yourself loose from your human moorings as you do. You should reach for the protrusions.

Read “Gently chew to soften the ridges” here.
Bogi Takács writes, edits and reviews speculative fiction. Visit their Patreon here.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the fourth installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“The Sea Never Says It Loves You” – Fran Wilde

03 Friday Aug 2018

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Image: The dark and destructive deep blue sea, posted at Flickr by Michael Greenhill under a Creative Commons License.

Marriages between humans and the natural world are how we make sense of the ungovernable loves within us. I understand how people can yearn to pledge their troth to giant sequoia, and I feel deeply for would-be selkie children who must be dragged, blue-fingered and yawping with need, from the sea.

Fran Wilde’s “The Sea Never Says It Loves You” gives us a human-ocean relationship that begins as a high school romance. This kind of anthropomorphism isn’t new to speculative writing, and Wilde layers the world of the poem, in which sea and mate court, procreate and share a life, with a bittersweet kind of indulgence. Notice the prevailing tense here is conditional: the poet isn’t telling us this is a definite life, but frames a world of sargasso and Sunday night drive-ins, where an exceptional kind of love is possible… not without cost.

Sometimes, Little Mermaid-esque, the price you pay for incredible beauty is utter silence. In the final stanza of the poem, the object of the sea’s affection finds themselves stranded on the shore of a lifelong quietude: “And you are bathed in salt spray, wishing. / Wishing you were water, / or that the sea would whisper from a shell the name of the first song / you danced to / Or say the name it gave you before it swallowed you up.” 

Writing that often seems to reach for the most arcane, the most removed of speculative concepts, often tunnels deepest inward: this is what Wilde’s poem does. We might not all be able to conceive of the sea loving us, or of bearing its “fish-pale, seaweed-haired shell”. But surely we know more than we’re willing to admit, of the silences we’ve bartered in the names of a giant, toppling want. Surely that’s what it means, to sink or swim.

Read “The Sea Never Says It Loves You” here.
Fran Wilde’s most recent novel, Horizon, was published in 2017 by Tor Books.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the third installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” – Shastra Deo

02 Thursday Aug 2018

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Cane Fields Near Innisfail

Image: Cane fields near Innisfail, posted at Flickr by Andym5855 under a Creative Commons License.

Is the Devil a speculation?

He feels real, in Shastra Deo’s poem, which is set in Australia’s cane fields. I found this extraordinary, unsettling piece while I was researching for a previous reading series, and I found myself unable to let it go. Maybe I love it because it’s spare. Maybe I love it because it hints at brutality. Maybe I love it simply because it marries two things I’ve thought about my whole life: the devil, and the cane field. If you’re from Trinidad, and adjacent to, or a member of, the Indo-Trini community, you’ll understand how cane, the physical and emotional proximity to it, is never really far. I didn’t go looking for Australia’s cane fields, but Deo’s poem summons them, and I feel myself falling into this poem like it’s a life, or a shard of one, I could have lived. Devil and all.

If the speaker of the poem is afraid of the Devil, they don’t tell us much about it. Instead, we get to see speaker and ultimate sinner in gentle, familiar gestures: “The devil held my hair back / as I washed my face in the kitchen sink.” Soon after that, “The devil and I sat at opposite ends / of the tiny dining table and listened to the roaches / scuttle beneath the refrigerator.” What Deo leaves for us is an uneasy ample space for us to brocade finer details, if we wish it. Are there words uttered, between the Devil and the speaker, whose hands smell of burnt sugar, who we meet at the beginning of the poem, nose bleeding and bordered by solitude?

When the Devil goes walking towards Cairns, I’m almost sad to see him leave. I almost want to run for my own country’s cane fields, to see who I might meet.

Read “I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” here.
Shastra Deo’s first collection of poems, The Agonist, was published in 2017 by UQP.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the second installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.

“My God, It’s Full of Stars” – Tracy K. Smith

01 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Image: Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A (NASA, Chandra, Hubble, 02/23/11), posted at Flickr by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center under a Creative Commons License.

I think we see God through the aperture. I think that’s how we’re able to hold her on our tongue without burning up.

Tracy K. Smith’s “My God, It’s Full of Stars” gives us God through the peephole of the universe’s countless eyes. It’s a diorama-in-verse, of how to be open to wonder, to exhilaration, to the messy, catastrophically gorgeous parameters of the world, whether you are the child of a scientist who once worked on the Hubble Telescope, whether you are 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Dave himself, “whisked into the center of space, / Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light / Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid / For a love-struck bee”.

The poem takes its time on us, and in us. In its five moments, I feel less that the poem constructs atop itself, and more that it builds inward. It makes excavations of the very void we call absence, tunneling into it to taste, for example, “the blank / Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone”, “Atlantis buried under ice, gone / One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.”

Perhaps the very void we call barren, billowing darkness is itself a misnomer, as the poem’s third section asks. What if energy we can’t sense is cuddling up to us in every second? What if we can never adjust our personal scientific equipment — our head, our heart — to an aperture that allows enough God in? “My God, It’s Full of Stars” becomes the most extraordinary kind of coping mechanism that exists: a valve that measures both our inability to process the universe, and a route to stay wide-eyed despite frustration. We needn’t know the name of every star, to say we love and fear the night.

Read “My God, It’s Full of Stars” here.
Tracy K. Smith’s newest collection of poems, Wade in the Water, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press.

bon voyage.jpgThis is the first installment of Other Kinds of Men, a speculative poetry reader in honour of Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative writing, which encompasses the major genres of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, has often given voice to the most relentless and ungovernable urgencies of this age, and any other. Le Guin understood this: that to write about dragons, ice worlds and other seeming oddities was, in fact, to write into the messy, riotous complexity of ourselves. Here’s to dragons, and here’s to Ursula.