If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry.
But what a joy. Tension between two lovers in the kitchen of “Whole Foods” includes this gem: “It’s a shame I can’t bake bread / with gluten / to throw at you.”
There are handwritten bits in the shape of donuts. Miniature word-search puzzles with sass.
“A Discourse” presents the poet fantasizing “about annihilating / all the theories you admire / with logic, art, or gardening / but it doesn’t matter. / This is a love story.”
There are so many ways to use Cheetos that I never knew. Later, “Words started dropping / off balconies, hanging / onto preceding phrases.”
Then, there’s “Paradise Lot”. And a poem that “downloaded an iPhone app to learn to let go”.
Simina Banu should proselytize for poetry. Er, actually, I guess that’s what Pop is.
Teresa Dovalpage’s Death of a Telenovella Star (2020) is a novella that focuses on Marlene Martínez, who plays a significant role in the author’s book-length works, Death Comes in through the Kitchen (2018) and Queen of Bones (2019).
Originally, I was drawn to this series for its Cuban setting; Dovalpage was born in Havana and completed her PhD in New Mexico where she lives now.
In the novella, Marlene is travelling with her niece on a cruise, as a quinceañera gift, so the appeal shifts to the locked-room scenario. And because the title solves the mystery of whose body will be discovered, any further plot-appeal rests in resolution.
No matter, because the part of the story I most enjoyed was the intergenerational relationship between Marlene and Sarita, which is credible and occasionally amusing.
Although Marlene is not a detective in this novella (she’s running a bakery in Miami), there are no further spoilers, so beginning here could provide another entranceway to the series.
Reading Ben Okri’s The Famished Road introduced me to contemporary African literature.
I grew up reading stories about witches and sylphs, and Enid Blyton’s strange creatures were nothing like the hauntings in Ben Okri’s Booker-Prize-winning novel.
It’s common writing advice for teachers to tell their students that stories have beginnings and middles and ends.
But a novel like The Famished Road reminds us that, if one person’s idea of an ’ending’ is another person’s idea of a ‘beginning’, the stories those two writers will record will have very different shapes.
It also helped me understand that stories emerge from their environs in a way that I hadn’t recognized before.
Dangerous Love (1996) has fewer hauntings. Its genesis is the author’s first published novel, The Landscapes Within, which he finished when he was twenty-one years old. (It was published in 1981.)
“I had wanted to write a novel which celebrated the small details of life as well as the great, the inner as well as the outer. I had wanted to be faithful to life as lived in the round, and yet to tell a worthwhile story. The many things I wanted to accomplish were to ambitious for my craft at the time.”
This is Omovo’s and Ifeyiwa’s story. He is a painter. “What you forget returns in a hundred other shapes. It becomes the true material of invention.” What he paints is so powerful that it is confiscated by the authorities.
His mentor reminds him: “Don’t live only in your head. You are in the world.” But his world is increasingly consumed by Ifeyiwa, although she has been married off to another man. “She liked the way he stared into the distance, the way he seemed to enter another realm, when an idea possessed him.”
Their connection is powerful, but there are other fascinating relationships here too (particularly Omovo’s with his father and brothers, and his relationships with a couple of other men in the village).
There is a lot of sorrow in this story. “Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption, and hunger are the bullets.” And Okri’s prose forces you to slow down. There are very few commas but the sentences are phrase-soaked.
He is in the process of becoming, and that takes time. “In seeing clearly begins the real responsibility.”
Ben Okri is new to me–even though it sounds like he shouldn’t be–so I’ve added The Famished Road to my list! And Pop sounds like a lot of fun. I’m still nervous about poetry – sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t.
I kept thinking of you while reading Pop…I’m sure you would have fun with it!
It was amusing to see what came up in the library catalogue when I searched “pop”. 🙂
Hahaha…so of course I had to try it. And you’re right: it’s pretty funny. Also, who knew there would be books about Pop. LOL
I often think someone looking at my library account records would be confused — especially since I started borrowing loads of children’s picture books! And then my husband’s university library account is a mixture of his stuff (invertebrate biology) and mine (mostly literary fiction). I’d like to think my broad reading across fiction, nonfiction and poetry makes me a more well-rounded person, but other people might achieve that through, you know, leaving the house and getting life experience 😉
I’ve not read any Okri, but I have a copy of Astonishing the Gods on my novellas stack; I’ll see if I can get to it this month.
Hahaha – yes, that’s true. But it’s a nice theory, isn’t it! Once you start into children’s books, your card fills so quickly! This year, I’ve hardly borrowed any, and I miss them. Did I mention that I’ve started to borrow using Mr. BIP’s card too? With the returned books staying on cards for 8 days, after they’ve been returned (while they sit in quarantine), I couldn’t pick up my new holds before they expired, without spreading it around. So now his mostly-serious-NF or business-reading history or graphic novels has been infiltrated by literary biographies and backlisted women writers. I just discovered that his latest book is new in paperback right now too. I’m sure it’ll be hard to get to all the books in your stack of novellas though…
That poetry now has me wondering about cheetos 😀 Some great reading! Recently on my reading table at the same time was People’s History of the United States, Ledger: Poems by Jane Hirschfield, The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, Squirrel Girl: To all the squirrels I’ve loved before, and Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James. Oh, and a really good recipe book called Cool Beans 🙂
Yay: that’s an awesome stack! I especially like finding something like Squirrel Girl in the mix. For just a moment, an imagined onlooked would picture an 8-year-old reader instead! I’ll have a look for Cool Beans. Always looking for new ways to work them into the recipe mix.
I love the breadth of these books! The poetry sounds hilarious, I too wish I could through gluten-based dough at some people 🙂 I’d like to read more African Literature too, and not just so the super popular stuff that comes out with big presses, I feel like it’s impossible to really get a sense of people and place if we’re only reading the bestsellers, ya know?
LOL Well, I did giggle at that one because I also make my own GF dough (but still eat gluten-filled dough sometimes, too)! And I hear ya, I am always glad to see diverse voices gain attention in the publishing landscape, but I’d rather see that attention dispersed across a variety of titles/authors, and not necessarily whatever the Big 6 thought was worth throwing marketing campaigns behind!
I reckon any random selection of books pulled off my shelves would confuse people – I don’t know if many would expect to see e.g. Russian classics, Roland Barthes and GA Crime together! 😀
Yes, your stacks and shelves would definitely provoke people into a second-look and that’s without mentioning that Soviet-era sci-fi!
Re not belonging to the same reader: I keep my SF and Georgette Heyer in different rooms so they don’t offend each other. I can’t say Ben Okri introduced me to African Lit or even to sub-Saharan African Lit because I guess white South Africans did that (not to mention the horrible works of Evelyn Waugh and Joyce Cary) but I loved The Famished Road and I must read more. And despite occasionally running into collections that I like , I don’t read poetry.
Haha. Does it work? When you’re reading one of them, and carrying it into the “other” room, do you need one of those little cloth book jackets? Or, do they keep quiet and maintain a sense of decorum, so that no bookish feathers are ruffled?
Hmmm, yes, now that you mention it, one of the first fictional African stories (outside of stories like Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika!) I would have encountered would have been the film based on André Brink’s A Dry White Season, but I didn’t realize then, that it was based on a novel, so I encountered it on screen (and never followed up). Wasn’t The Famished Road incredible? It’s been a couple of decades since I read it, and I still feel as though I remember some scenes rather vividly. Maybe it’s time for a reread and then continuing on with the sequel.