Beth Bachmann
Cease
University of Pittsburgh PressBeth Bachmann’s poems in this collec-
tion resound like echoes of the highly
charged political and social environ-
ment that is today’s United States. Part
manifesto, part residual accumulation
of our national game of “telephone”
that endlessly scurries across social
media platforms, Cease is evocative in
its descriptions, provocative in its con-
clusions, and as timely as the text crawl
beneath your favorite talking head.Jim Barnes
Sundown Explains Nothing:
New and Selected Poems
Stephen F. Austin State University PressJim Barnes’s latest collection of poem
represents a fascinating intersection
between the importance of place, the
influence of culture, and the inescap-
able coordinate of time in which we are
all contexted. Powered by metaphors
repurposed from his natural landscape
and a wit made acerbic by the tenor of
our times, Sundown Explains Nothing
is a nutrient-dense volume that is best
savored in small but powerful doses.Nota Bene
fair. While there he seeks out an old artist
friend, Mohammed, whom he hasn’t seen
for thirty years. Mohammed is worried
about one of his sons, who is in the United
States trying to gain citizenship, and he asks
Rubirosa to read the contents of a memory
card that may offer clues about his son. The
plot spirals from there.
However, it’s not so much the plot that
captivates as the hall-of-mirrors-like nar-
rative allusions. Characters resemble fig-
ures from Rey Rosa’s empirical life (it’s
not accidental, of course, that the protago-
nist is named “Rubiorosa”), and the city of
Tangier takes on its own dreamlike quality.
When Mohammed is introduced to us in
the beginning, it’s hard not to think of him
as Mohammed Mrabet.
Then there is the American
artist John Field, who has
lived in Tangier for half his
life. Field could be a cari-
cature for Rey Rosa’s men-
tor and friend, Paul Bowles.
The problem is that both
Mrabet and Bowles make
appearances in the story,
further complicating pos-
sible readings of the novel.
On the surface, this
mash-up of the real and the
imagined can be read as a game of intertex-
tual dice-throwing, but in Rey Rosa’s narra-
tive, it becomes a mechanism for witchcraft.
Here everyone is not what they appear to
be. In fact, they are all much more. The
dreamlike quality of Chaos is linked to Rey
Rosa’s life in the way that all fiction is linked
to the life of the writer. But the danger is in
the attempt to place an authoritative reading
on the work, and this novel is careful not to
demand that from its reader. Instead, we are
left spinning in a world that both is and is
not real, is and is not imagined. Rey Rosa’s
true gift as a writer is to create magic from
language, to create worlds that resemble
the existence of numerous worlds simul-
taneously, in harmony and contradiction.
This is perhaps most tellingly articulated by
Mohammed in the very beginning of the
novel when he states, “Time doesn’t exist
anymore.... The world has gone mad.”
Chaos: A Fable may not be Rey Rosa’s
most accomplished work, but it’s an impor-
tant tributary off the deep river that consti-
tutes the work of a master storyteller.
Andrew Martino
Salisbury UniversityMaria Matios
Sweet Darusya:
A Tale of Two VillagesTrans. Michael M. Naydan & Olha
Tytarenko. New York. Spuyten Duyvil.- 224 pages.
Maria Matios is an award-
winning contemporary
Ukrainian author, widely
known for her authentic
writing style. She is cur-
rently residing in Kyiv, the
capital of Ukraine, and
has also been active on
the political scene there
since 2012. Her best liter-
ary work is Sweet Darusya,
written in the early 2000s.
Matios was born in the
late 1950s in the BukovynaWORLDLIT.ORG 91