Monkey Business: A Review of Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

The blurb by Aaron T. Beck, “father of cognitive therapy,” on the cover of my advance reading copy of Monkey Mind reads: “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” This is high praise indeed. From the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets comes a memoir with descriptions of anxiety to which most will relate to, including a full blow-by-blow of the phases of anxiety and how it affects posture and fingernails.

Smith’s writing captures the feeling of anxiety so well, one feels their throat close when he describes his panic attacks. Maybe you don’t have a hypochondriac brother or therapist mother, but if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, you’ll relate. Smith describes what happens physically when we don’t breathe deeply enough—one of the hallmarks of anxious people. The book made me want to stop torturing my fingernails, try some deep breathing exercises, and get over my anxiety.

There’s one part that I want to share with the world, one part of the memoir that everyone needs to read at least once, so as to have the compassion for the self or someone they know suffering from anxiety. I had a couple of friends in mind to share the moment with as soon as I started reading it. In this scene Smith describes what’s happening to him physically when he starts to panic on the way to therapy during his first session as a freshman in college. He writes in a detached manner about the body, as if he were a doctor fascinated and removed from the experience of anxiety. Yet, just sentences later, he writes about what happened to his body in the moment from the perspective of someone utterly immersed in the experience, drowning in it as the panic takes over his body.

Another feature of the book I enjoyed was his description of the solace of the campus library. I relate to that. Any other library-people out there feel me? All I can say is that while I didn’t go to the library to practice breathing techniques as Smith did during his first semester in college, I did lock myself into one of the basement rooms of Dexter Library at Northland College so no one could find me when I needed to be alone to freak out and study. So I spent at least four hours a day in there. In fact, it’s become one of my hallmarks of success at a school—when I attended UT-Austin, I went to the library once. I was not happy there. But here at UWM, I practically live at the library, just as I did at Northland. But I have a carrel now!

In these ways, Smith doesn’t just write about the signs and symptoms of anxiety: he also shares valuable solutions. From profuse sweating to shallow breathing, he shares his experiences with and solutions for the plagues of anxiety. There’s an analogy toward the end of the book that struck me. It’s about being in a house on fire, likening that to the physical pain of anxiety. I’ll repeat what Smith’s therapist said about this metaphorical house-on-fire: don’t you want to put the fire out before figuring out what caused it? I’ll be giving copies of this book to the people in my life suffering from various fires, counting on Smith’s honesty and directness to help them recognize their situation and learn how to recover their health.

Reflections on Sapphire’s Visit to Boswell Book Company, June 27, 2012

So it is now well after the fact and I’m just now coming out of it enough to remember what it is I wanted to ask her. The whole bike ride home I languished, looking up at this phase of the moon and wondering where that first half went so fast. There were the usuals, despite the Wednesday night: frat boys on summer corners shouting at a girl on a bike because the beer tells them that’s a good idea. All I can think about is her and her pull on my little life. Her, in a bookstore what must be now seventeen years ago when I was almost seventeen myself, but at this time in the past, it was her face staring back at me from the one shelf that made up the LGBT section of the bookstore. Let me get to that in a minute.

Now I’ll ask it, that which I forgot to ask when the lady social worker was talking about how it’s important to remember that perpetrators don’t become so in a vacuum. What went right out of my head when the white guy in the back starts to ask what sounds like that old song-and-dance question, but ends up being something way different. In that moment I see her posture change, watch her hand push out against the energy crossing the room. How many times has she had to answer that question? How many calls before she became that response? So here is what I wanted to ask her and forgot because for one single goddamn minute I was sitting in front of a woman who has had a major impact on my little life and I didn’t feel compelled to say a damn thing about it.

It goes a little something like this:

Sapphire’s lyre styles

plucked eyebrows

bow lips and legs

whose lives are lonely too

my last nerve’s lucid music

sure chewed up the juicy fruit

you must don’t like my peaches

there’s some left on the tree

Okay, y’all. That’s the first two stanzas of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. For years I’ve wondered if this was her, if Mullen invoked the goddess Sapphire for Muse & Drudge and what Sapphire had to say about that. See, all this goes right out the window when I’m looking at her fielding questions like an old pro, thinking about what she’s been through, thinking about what she really wants to say at times like these. Sure, she’s candid. I can tell. She’s telling all over the page for those with eyes to see, ears to hear. She’s not holding back. She never did.

In what must have been 1995, I stood in the tiny LGBT section of a bookstore in Dallas, wondering who I was, thinking everyone walking by knew more about it than I did. I thought people would be able to smell it on me. I had no idea what it was. Listen: this was years before I would be able to say what happened way before all of this, and years still before I’d find out that there were too many people in the world with stories like mine, and all of them wanting different things, and all of this happening not in a vacuum. Years before Loyal and I fell in love and learned to relax about shit we no longer felt the need to have control of. Years before I knew that my mother carried suffering like a basket of fucking clothes, loathing it and need it to be done, but carrying it because that’s what you do with dirty laundry.

Some things are so difficult you do them over and over and over again just to know you’re alive. So listen. Here I am listening to Sapphire read it out—all the difficult parts that people aren’t supposed to talk about in polite circles. And at the same time I’m in a room with Loyal when he first says it out loud. And in the room when I tell my sister. And I’m also sitting at as Sapphire gives a reading like a fucking call down into the origins of soul. She’s echoing through the hollowing caves and I feel like it’s performance that absolutely resists performance.

Slowly people get into it: the mmmHmms and the unh-unh-unhs and the UMmmhh. She’s calling and we are responding. She says we’ve taken the language away from kids: that we need to give it back. What do we call it when we don’t know what to call it? How are we supposed to ask for help when we can’t even say what it is we need help with? In 1995, holding onto American Dreams, I didn’t have the words lesbian or victim. I didn’t know that the two weren’t related. I thought men made me what I was and that I was a freak. Years after that, I found the words bisexual and survivor and learned that not all men are rapists. The words I wear like tattoos. I own them. They are a part of me. I have the language.

In American Dreams, Sapphire taught me how to say rape. Tori Amos taught me how to sing it. My family and friends loved me through my struggle to get past it. I look at Sapphire and thank her for being the catalyst. I think about how well I know her face. About how many Black women I have loved are there. About how I am there, too. I look at her before the crowd gathered and think: her hands are small. Like mine. She is not ugly. Power radiates from her. And there is grace and poise. She’s shorter than I thought she would be. She’s not wearing a white wifebeater. Her mouth is working on saying things that people would call “shocking.” Her eyes are steely. It’s not that she doesn’t care—it’s that she cares so very much. She is unabashed about it. This is how I imagine bell hooks to be. This is how I want to be when I grow up.

There are things I cannot explain to you: what it feels like to be lost, and then to feel at home for a fleeting few hours in a Black Gospel church where I can be the visitor instead of the victim. What it means to identify with a person I’m not supposed to be able to identify with. What it means to be rejected by the pretty white girls who don’t want to be seen with a fat white girl who is eating her problems. What it feels like when the Black girls say, yeah—sure, we’ll teach you how to dance, and you don’t want to be around those stuck-up white girls anyways. What it feels like to say the damn thing you’ve been so scared of saying, and years later to keep saying it so people who need to say it themselves will be able to later on, maybe after many years.

This I can explain: years ago I was lost and looking for lifelines. I bought American Dreams and hid it with my other gay books on the shelf at home. What happens if my parents find them? I think now I was ashamed then. There was Sapphire’s face staring out at me from the cover of the book, trying to get me to say these words, and I covered her face with less threatening books, books I wouldn’t have to explain if someone plucked them from my childhood bookshelf. I can tell you that despite all the covering and smothering, I fell in love with a girl, and then another girl. Nothing has come close to that in the years since. Except when I found a scared little boy who had been through more than I had been through and we pulled ourselves along, not asking more of each other that what we could ourselves give. I shaved my head. I let my hair grow back out again. I pierced my nipples to regain ownership of my breasts, to clear the muscle memory of a teenage boy trying to figure out his own sexuality years before I even knew what sex was, years before I wanted to. The scared little boy and I went to Africa. In Africa, we were reborn. I didn’t need the barbells anymore.

I was a victim and I have victimized others, including myself. I have let go of the pain in hopes of helping myself just be myself. I have started talking about it and I haven’t shut up because I want live in a world where people have the language for pain, and for healing. Tonight, I bought a new American Dreams. I bought The Kid. I sat shoulder to shoulder with my boss in our bookstore and listened to Sapphire speak of pain and healing. We both MmmHmmed and UMmmhhed, knowing. I tried to thank her, thinking these things are beyond language. I asked her to sign her name to the books, to mark the moment.

I’m keeping my marked American Dreams. I’m sending The Kid to my mother because no one deserves to have that ripped away before they’re ready. There is no Kid in a vacuum. Sapphire’s lyre styles? Whose lives are lonely too. My last nerve’s lucid music…who gives a fuck if you don’t like my peaches. It’s my goddamn tree.

When Life Gives You a Topeka Snowplow: A Review of Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

Sometimes the right book shows up just when we need it: this is how I feel about Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. It all started with an email. Our fearless leader at Boswell Book Company, Daniel Goldin, sent around an email to booksellers asking for readers. I thought the book was going to be about working in hospice, but I threw my hat in the ring for it anyways, remembering that fellow Boswellian Shane Papendorf had been talking up Evison’s West of Here for months. A few weeks ago, Shane put a copy of West of Here in my hands. I started reading a few paragraphs and got sucked in. So I thought I’d give this book a try, regardless of the title. A few sentences into The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, the same thing happened: I got sucked in. I spent the next week wrapped up in the world of Caregiving, falling progressively more in love with the book every fifty pages.

Now, I should let y’all in on one of my dirty secrets. True Confessions time! See—I loathe disaster narratives. The film “Money Pit” makes me horribly anxious. I can’t sit through it. I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin when movies, books, or TV shows take audiences through disasters that start with something small and get progressively worse. This is why I prefer films like Blazing Saddles to the National Lampoon movies: less stress involved, not as much shit hitting the proverbial fan. Thus, I am not at all the kind of person who should like The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Which is crazy because I enjoyed it very much!

Here’s my Recommendation Shelf review (to be posted when the hardcover is released in July):

“Benjamin Benjamin had the perfect life as a stay-at-home dad raising two adorable children. Readers find him just after this perfection has past, when Ben struggles to find purpose. Evison takes off the kid gloves in this engaging work of fiction, reminding us that life is cyclical, that one day you have it all and the next day you catch yourself running from the fallout from the explosion of it all. Evison’s characters demonstrate the range of lessons a range of losers can teach the average person, even when said average person thinks he’s too old to learn anything new, or too tired to care. Some say life is about the journey–I’ve learned from Evison that the journey is important, but the revision and caregiving matter most.”

The novel follows protagonist Ben through various stages of fallout and many flashbacks leading up to the moment of fallout, which leads to the eye of the storm. This moment in the book, which is a page-long chapter, made me cry. It reads like my father speaks when he’s giving advice: not ungentle, but completely real and honest. Imagine Sean Connery reading the copy from that 80’s anti-drug campaign: “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” That’s my dad’s advice-giving voice and the tone of this chapter. So I read the chapter and cried. Then I called my Dad about getting my ass in gear while I still have a chance and he gave me more utterly real advice and I cried. And then I finished the book and cried some more.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite Flaming Lips songs (Fight Test) is a gentle reminder: “There are things you can’t avoid. You have to face them when you’re not prepared to face them.”

I’d love to quote some lines from The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving that convey this same message—hell, I’d love to put the entire eye-of-the-storm chapter right here in quotes—but the book doesn’t come out for another couple of weeks.

Instead, let me simply ask you to read this book. Please read Jonathan Evison’s new novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and then love until your heart bursts. But before your heart bursts, tell everyone you know about this book and ask them to read it too. And stop by Boswell Book Company on September 12th to get your copies of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving signed by Evison!

Maybe, given reminders like these, at the end of our individual disaster narratives, we’ll all make it back home knowing that love is all that matters.

Something Other Than Brainlessly Extruded Entertainment Product: A Review of John Scalzi’s Redshirts

Lean in…I want to tell you a dirty secret: I’ve never read or seen Dune.

This is the behemoth burden I carried with me through the prologue of John Scalzi’s newest novel Redshirts. This shouldn’t matter, but at the time, it mattered greatly.

See, I had been handed the galley by a fellow Boswell bookseller whose taste in books I respect a great deal—the Sci-Fi and Fantasy guru, Jason. Dude’s read more sci-fi and fantasy in his lifetime than I have even heard of (even though I’ve read a few Tor titles in my day). He’s also been following Scalzi’s blog for years. I didn’t even know anything about Scalzi before he handed Redshirts to me.

So after my third bout of frustration with the prologue, I finally decided: to hell with it.  Jason read the book and loved it. Loyal read the book and loved it. Maybe I wouldn’t understand 100% of the jokes and allusions, but dammit—I want to see what’s so loveable about this book! At which point I gave up on complete understanding and read on in search of sheer entertainment and cheek. I was not disappointed.

After accepting on my inferior knowledge and experience of all things sci-fi and changing my attitude about what the book was supposed to do and mean, I discovered that the book is brilliant from the onset for readers hailing from all backgrounds. The book pulled me in immediately with the humor and meta-fictional elements present in the prologue. I was delighted when I reached the end of the prologue and started to get “it.” This delight carried through the first “level” of the book, in which the meta-fictional elements take center-stage.

Scalzi’s writing in Redshirts is tight and flows quickly from one short chapter to the next short chapter. Although some characters go undeveloped, this is part of their charm. After all, this is Redshirts! The book, despite the fast-paced plot and the frenetic characters, blends humor and meta-fiction better than any book I’v read to date. Scalzi pushes the limits of believability, but at no point did I feel the writing was too over-the-top. At no point—and I can’t say this about many books—was I pulled out of the text.

Indeed, I couldn’t put the book down. I found myself preferring to check in with my Redshirts instead of completing daily life tasks. That is, during every free minute (and especially during the occupied minutes) I wanted to check in with my loveable cast of misfits and see what the text had to offer next. The book is addicting, and as easy to get lost in as a great episode of your favorite TV show…but unlike your favorite TV show, Redshirts provides an intelligent and subtle critique on modern first-world living.

The book has three codas. In addition, there are three meta-fictional levels in the novel. Loyal didn’t like the codas, feeling them superfluous. He felt the three levels and the story itself were enough. I, however, loved the codas and felt like they added important perspectives to the story. Some of the most enjoyable moments of the text for me were in the codas. Jason says he plans to tell people that the codas are optional. I plan to recommend them to readers interested in sociopolitical critique and character development.

You don’t have to see Dune first. You don’t even have to read Dune first. But if you have seen/read Dune or BSG or TNG, you’ll have a deeper appreciation for and richer experience with Redshirts. You don’t have to be an expert on sci-fi tropes to love Redshirts.

I believe the novel has something to offer every single reader who gives it a chance. I quite happy I didn’t let my frustration with the prologue get the best of me, and I accept full responsibility for bringing expectations to that prologue. Those of you who go in with an open mind will be delighted. Those of you going in with a background in sci-fi may end up with a dissertation topic.

Thank you, John Scalzi!

Redshirts is currently my favorite fiction book of 2012. 

Thanks for the Break: A Review of A. J. Jacobs’s Drop Dead Healthy

I wasn’t going to write about A. J. Jacobs’s Drop Dead Healthy. I didn’t feel compelled after reading it, didn’t feel the need to add my voice to the din.

And then I saw a blurb about this book in Entertainment Weekly magazine, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few months of bookselling, it’s that when people see books in magazines (and hear about them on NPR), they tend to go ape-shit for them.

So now it is imperative that I review this book, lest my fellow EWeekly subscribers get the wrong idea about this latest Jacobs crusade. That said–this will be my shortest book review of the year.

I do not recommend this book. If you must pick it up, out of curiosity (which is–I confess–what drew me to this book) or whatever compels you (the power of Christ?), score a free copy from the library or a friend. That is, of course, unless you are a die-hard Jacobs fan. In that case, nothing I have to say will dissuade you.

For the non-die-hard set, please understand that Jacobs includes appendices full of  his “findings.” Given that this is the eighth memoir I’ve read this year, I should have been all about his anecdotes and personal stories. But I just didn’t care.

Instead, the anecdotal information, which tends to take over most of each chapter, was distracting from the science and the findings. Jacobs gets two paragraphs into a great discussion about how to keep the inner eyelid healthy, for example, and completely derails his flow with some nonsense about one of the other books he’s written, or what a dog did at the dog park that morning, or the funny thing his wife did the other day.

The biggest issue for me is that the health stuff should be front-and-center in a book like this (or at least well-balanced with the anecdotal stuff). Instead, Drop Dead Healthy reads like part half-assed memoir and part half-assed health quest. He claims to do research in every other sentence, but rarely shows his work. He claims to share results, but then goes off on unrelated (and uninteresting) tangents. It was perpetually frustrating.

I dunno folks: I’m just not sold. Maybe I’d like the book if I were a Jacobs fan from way back, or maybe if I hadn’t read so many excellent memoirs already this year, or maybe if I didn’t *really* care about getting healthy…that’s just too many maybes for this reader.

To All My Dervishes: Give It Up for Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish

“I’m going to tell you about a dervish. That’s someone who gives up everything for Allah.” (101)

First order of business. I gotta get this off my chest: the title American Dervish is aces. I can’t wait for the soundtrack, which I imagine to have sitar-heavy riffs abounding over some seriously funky drumming. PuffyDiddyDaddy will steal the title for his Madonna-esque conversion album, which will sample tracks from the original, I’m sure. This is all happening in my head as I think about how fucking awesome this book is, and as I reflect on how perfect the cover art is for the first hardcover edition. Maybe I’ll take up collecting the book in every language available…I digress….

When I was six, I found a Bible on my parents’ bookshelf. I was always doing this: looking for new books in the huge collection in the living room. I had already pilfered a history of Ireland and numerous textbooks. This particular Bible was physically impressive, with leathery cover, tissue-thin pages, and chapter tabs inscribed with interesting names—I was drawn to it for the sheer physicality of it.

I was raised without religion: the Bible was just another book to me at this point in my life. I remember reading Genesis over and over and over again and wondering why it matter that so-and-so begat so-and-so. I also remember thinking that it was strange people lived a couple hundred years of life and that the Psalms were gorgeous and made me long for something I could not yet name.

One day, my Mom found this Bible in my room and took it away from me. She didn’t want her daughter “joining a cult, speaking in tongues, or snake-handling,” and phrase I’ve long since come to appreciate for its gravity and humor. Yes: I did rebel by going to a Power Team performance and impressing my friends by pretending to speak in tongues. It freaked me out. What’s the deal with ripping up phone books for Jesus? I thought churches were supposed to be old and have stained-glass windows (not a 50-amp PA system and stage lights!) This was when I decided that I, too, did not want to handle snakes or join a cult.

By the time my Mom took the Bible from my hands, though, I was enamored of the idea of God and curious as to why this book was so important to so many people. I wanted to know more. I had also begun serious consideration about life in a convent, which at that point in time I understood as a life committed to goodness—one in which I was allowed to read most of the day away. Of course, that was an incorrect notion, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was a kid: I also wanted to be a pet detective (and this was yeeeears before Ace Ventura, okay?!).

As I read Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish, I felt like Hayat and I had similar formative experiences. Although I didn’t have a Mina-Auntie to induct me into mystic religious practice, and although I did not grow up in a first-generation Pakistani-American household, I had similar experiences of childhood guilt and ecstasy associated with covert religious practice. Akhtar’s description of worship calls to mind the irregular visits I carved into my own childhood. The most vivid are the Christian Scientist services my Grandmother took me to in Ohio where old women doted on me, the hushed, sylvan outdoor chapel at summer camp, and—my favorite memory—the Black Gospel church where music stirred my soul and I felt God in every cell of my body.

American Dervish gets everything right: the complexity of interpersonal relationships, and human relationships with faith and culture, the fundamental need for forgiveness, and the painful experiences of growing up. The book acts as a clarion call for those who would be swayed by extreme ideas and group-think, reminding audiences that all it takes is one relationship with another human being to change a person’s mind about something forbidden. Akhtar’s novel is full of examples of the grey-area that is life on this planet, and full of reminders that life is more complex than binary relationships allow. We live in such grey areas—Akhtar demonstrates that it is also possible to thrive in them.

Akhtar’s characters are round and dynamic. His writing is utterly real, and reads like he’s speaking the narrative in your ear with every turn of the page. He captures the feeling of absolute ecstasy for faith, and the utter despair that accompanies a crisis of Navefaith. Instead of feeling like I’m looking in on a family, I feel that I’m alongside Hayat during these formative years, sitting with his family during their highest, lowest, and all points in between. After discussing the novel with my Introduction to English Studies class, I must applaud Akhtar’s incredible talent: it is a testament to his skill as a writer that most of my students (myself included!) claim the philandering, alcoholic father (Naveed) as our favorite character.

I overheard a person from the Islamic community in Milwaukee saying that the community was pissed at the way Akhtar portrayed Muslims in American Dervish. I understand that this is a delicate subject, one about which my opinion matters little to people in the local Islamic community. But—for what it’s worth—I would like to say that at no point did I feel like Muslims are portrayed negatively in this novel. Instead, I felt very much like this kind of experience would ring true for anyone who has ever belonged to a religious group and has struggled with their faith, especially between the desire to be spiritual and the rigors of religious practices. I know fundamentalist Christians who are as exclusive as the more extreme Muslim characters in American Dervish, and I know people like the Shahs who struggle with the contradictions inherent in religious communities. The fact that Akhtar demonstrates with striking verisimilitude in American Dervish is that groups of people are not monolithic. I appreciate this honesty very much. There is no one single face of Islam, and no one single expression of any faith. And the take-away for all readers, regardless of faith, is that forgiveness is fundamental. We are all children struggling our way into the adult world, and we are all reaching out, asking to be forgiven. What’s more universal and more gorgeous than that?

To circle back to the quote at the onset of this post, I believe that Akhtar is an American Dervish. I think he gave up this story for Allah—that he risked his reputation to tell a story this honest and difficult. I believe this novel is absolutely important in this country at this moment, especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here is a person sharing a semi-autobiographical, first-hand account of life in a Muslim household, and he’s sharing it beyond the walls of his immediate community. There is much misunderstanding in this country about Islam, especially in the Midwest, and particularly among white readers.

What the novel teaches to such a readership is vital in this moment, in this country. Not all Muslims are extremists. Not all brown people are terrorists. Not all Muslims are preoccupied with Christianity. Some Muslims love the Quran and some want to burn the Quran for the group-think they believe it represents. There is no one way to be a Muslim: there are as many ways as there are people on the planet. These are important lessons that readers of American Dervish will learn, if they didn’t know them before coming to the book. This is so important, especially since many of the readers who bought the book from my bookstore are middle-aged, middle-class white people who have probably never talked to a Muslim, Persian, or Pakistani. What the book reinforces is that all families struggle, and that many of these struggles transcend religious and cultural boundaries. No—not all families in the United States are struggling with arranged marriages, but in each family there is conflict, and such conflict is as cyclical as the peace over the years. No family is perfect. No person is perfect.

Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish is vital at this contemporary moment for all audiences. I thank him for taking the risk to write it and publish it, and I am sad that I missed the opportunity to be one of the many charmed by his visit to Boswell Book Company earlier this year. I look forward to his next work, be it film, book, or play. In the meantime, I’ll be barking his novel from the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Natural Selections: A Review of the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize-Winning Collection By Joseph Campana

About a month ago, when creeping around the break room at Boswell Book Company, our book buyer Jason pulled out a bunch of poetry galleys. I kind of decided then and there that I would stop dragging my feet and take on the reading of poetry. One of the books in this stack was Joseph Campana’s collection Natural Selections, one of the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize winners.

The collection quickly becomes about Ohio, from first glance at the table of contents to the second poem, titled “Ohio 229.” But this is not just any Ohio, mind you: this is clearly Campana’s vision of Ohio, from the literal and political landscape, to what the name and state have come to symbolize in contemporary United States literature.

It was difficult to keep these Ohios from my own personal Ohios. Generations of Morrows have lived on acres of land in Hillsboro, Ohio–there’s even a Morrow lane in the neighborhood up there. For me, Ohio represents many things: the place where the other half of my family lived when I was growing up; a stark contrast to the city life I hated and needed escape from when I lived in Dallas; the place my mother wanted so desperately to reclaim and the place my father was always so anxious to return to; a place in my imagination that thrived, especially as the setting for many dreams; the setting of my first horrific trauma; the setting of my father’s first trauma; a place connected to my best friend from Northland, who grew up on a farm in Marysville.

So I already bring some of my own Ohio baggage to the collection. Nevertheless, it was clear throughout reading that Ohio is alive and well for both Campana, me, and many, many more.

The writing initially reminded me of Kay Ryan’s style with less flourished. Campana does craft his internal rhyme and rhythms much as Ryan does in many of her works, but it’s the play between the line and negative space that is often so Ryanesque in my opinion. Also present in Campana’s collection is the momentum from line to line that Ryan does so well. We get this from the first poem of the collection, “Crow.”

Campana draws from nature for many of his images, especially birds and weather patterns. Additionally, there is a theme of hands and creation. Of the politically-charged poems, I believe many will be drawn to “Democracy in Ohio.” However, I preferred “Rural Evening,” which delivers the political goods with more of the restraint I’ve come to associate with Campana’s best moments.

What I will take away from this collection is a renewed admiration for writing that combines plain language with striking images. Campana is not afraid to leap, sometimes offering microscopic views in one stanza and intergalactic views in the next. The collection, although tied to place, is inextricably about how living things interact with both time and place, whether they be birds or bats or people trying to find themselves. There’s a biophilia embedded in the book that I absolutely adore.

I can’t wait to buy my own copy of this collection, and to buy a copy each for my mother and best friend. Everyone has an Ohio of their own–I hope you’ll read Campana’s collection and look for yourself in it.

Here’s are my favorite poems from the collection:

• Fawn
• Hunting the Beast
• Kokosing (15)
• Creek
• Kokosing (20)
• Finch
• Jay
• Rural Evening
• Spring Comes to Ohio
• Ohio 661
• Firefly