I have a very detailed memory from when I was a kid of placing all of my t-shirts from my dresser into an extra large trash bag and plopping it right into the empty corner of my bedroom in hopes of making a “designated book drawer.” My mom was not too thrilled with that decision, and a few weeks later gifted me with a brand new bookshelf to place in that empty corner for my birthday.
I spent the next few years perfecting that shelf. At first, I was just organizing it by color or by what cover photo matched my room the best – which at first was the classic Pinkalicous written by Victoria and Elisabeth Kann. However, as time passed and I grew taller, I slowly became very selective about what books I wanted to show off, one of my all-time favorites being The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas.
Moving from my Illinois suburban neighborhood to Tennessee for college, my bookshelf quickly turned from a carefully organized collection into what is now a few dusted-over books scattered throughout my quaint apartment bedroom. Because of this, I have been forced to become quite selective with what books of mine stay, and what books have to go back to Illinois when I make the road trip for winter break.
As someone who unfortunately has a low attention span, it has always been a bit trickier for me to find long collections of books I can dive into. Perfect for me, my roommates adore fictional collections, so I usually just give them those books to keep.
I have found myself cherishing any poetry collections I find, whether that be in my free time or for my creative writing classes. Some honorable mentions are House of McQueen by Valerie Wallace and Kinky by Denise Duhamel. These books are a bit harder for me to hand over to my friends to borrow.
Since my bedroom at school only has enough room essentially for a bed and a desk, my designated bookshelf is now a suitcase under my bed filled with books that slowly collect dust. But hey, just because they aren’t gorgeously displayed for everyone to see doesn’t mean the words aren’t tattooed into my brain with hot pink ink.
Hannah Dettmann is currently majoring in English with a minor in Secondary Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is originally from Chicago, Illinois. In her free time, she loves spending time with friends, trying new foods, and going on walks.
Knoxville, TN—The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the November installment of our reading series: poets Abhijit Sarmah and Jasmine Flowers. Join us on Thursday, November 21st, at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00 to 9:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic! Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Abhijit Sarmah is a poet and researcher of Indigenous literatures with special emphasis on Native American women writers and writers from the northeast of India. He holds an MPhil degree from Dibrugarh University, India, and is currently an Arts Lab Graduate Fellow and PhD student at the University of Georgia, Athens GA. His poems are published in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, The Margins and Lincoln Review.
Jasmine Flowers is a well-watered writer from Birmingham, AL. Like her namesake, she loves to smell heavenly and bloom widely. Her debut poetry chapbook, Horizon, is available from Flower Press. Previously, she served as poetry editor for Variant Literature. Now, she is an MFA student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her BA in English from the University of Alabama. Her poems appear in River Mouth Review, Cypress Literary Journal,perhappened mag, and other publications.
Our community partner this month is Second Harvest Food Bank. Second Harvest’s programs work to serve those who are experiencing hunger across East Tennessee by distributing nutritious food to all corners of the community. To accomplish its mission, Second Harvest has partnered with over 670 food pantries and community centers to serve a total of 18 counties in Tennessee. By giving to Second Harvest Food Bank, donors support the fight against poverty and ensure no adult, child, or senior goes hungry. To learn more about donating to Second Harvest’s mission please visit their website.
Jen Knox’s We Arrive Uninvited (Steel Toe Books, 2023) is a captivating exploration of intergenerational trauma as seen through the perspectives of a family with mystical powers. The novel alternates between the viewpoints of Emerson, the youngest granddaughter, and her grandmother, Amelia, weaving together the stories of multiple generations of women. This structure reveals the complex dynamics of a family haunted by both psychological and supernatural forces. By examining the intricacies of legacy, mental illness, and healing, Knox offers a thought-provoking narrative that challenges conventional views on mental health.
Amelia’s backstory, including her relationship with her own mother Kat—a woman pressured into motherhood and disconnected from the family’s “magic”—offers a layered view of how generational trauma manifests. The story begins with the unexpected suicide of Emerson’s mother, Celine. As Emerson navigates her grief, she fixates on a prediction Amelia made the day Celine died, claiming to have foreseen her death and attempting a ritual to prevent it. Five years later, Emerson seeks answers by attempting to re-forge her relationship with Amelia, who is now estranged and institutionalized in an elder psychiatric facility, The Lavender House. Amelia, diagnosed with schizophrenia due to her behavior, continues to claim possessing magical qualities, and seeks to teach Emerson about the traditions passed down through the women in their family so that Emerson can tap into her full potential.
With parallel narratives, Knox paints a vivid portrait of a family grappling with intergenerational trauma plagued by mental health stigma, misogyny, and the burden of their mystical gifts. Emerson visits Amelia in secret, where the story is told through alternating narratives: in the present, Emerson deals with panic attacks, grief, her emerging queer identity, and reconciling her inherited “powers,” and from the past, Amelia recounts how her own complex family dynamics lead to her own realization of her magic as a young girl. Emerson sees Amelia’s mental illness not as a pathology, but as a misunderstood gift.
One of the novel’s most striking aspects is its portrayal of Amelia, whose schizophrenia is framed by Emerson’s father and the staff at The Lavender House through a lens of misogyny, echoing historical stigmas surrounding women’s mental health. The tension between Emerson’s father, who fears Amelia’s influence on his daughter, underscores the stigma around mental health, especially in how her father dismisses the women in the family as “insane.” Knox writes, “My diagnosis was schizophrenia, which is what the doctors labeled anyone they didn’t understand. Years earlier, the word had been mania. Before that, hysteria” (16). Knox also associates Amelia’s schizophrenia with her wisdom, magical powers, and deep connection to the earth. This portrayal is quite refreshing in contrast to the negative stigma perpetrated by popular media, and a welcome one at that.
The mystical elements are balanced by the very real emotional landscape the characters navigate, giving the novel a unique tone that blends magical realism with slice-of-life storytelling. In moments throughout the novel, for example, Emerson’s panic attacks blur these lines. Emerson often recalls the “chill of death” (Knox 21), indicative of the day when her mother died, along with her mother’s voice apparently calling out to her. The deeply realistic depiction of her panic attacks adds a rawness to her perspective. Within the writing, a link is made between Emerson’s episodes and her own intuitive premonitions. This leaves readers in suspense of how she will eventually come into her own magic, and how the magic relates to the messages that were passed from past generations. In one scene, Emerson reflects:
“I gripped the bed. I could see Amelia in that moment, navigating her world each day around being told what she needed to suppress. My sensation was not imagined; it was information. It was telling me I wasn’t on the right path” (127).
Here, Emerson connects with her grandmother’s struggles, realizing that what may seem like irrational feelings are actually profound insights into the turmoil of her inner world. The nature of the inherited powers remains ambiguous but seem to stem from a heightened sense of empathy and limited ability to predict the future. Both Emerson and Amelia can intuitively feel the emotions and desires of others, accurately assessing their character and future life paths.
By the end of the novel, Emerson learns to navigate her path, armed with the insights of her grandmother and the memory of her mother, as she steps into a future where she can fully accept herself. Emerson’s journey toward healing and self-discovery stands as a testament to the strength passed down through generations of women, inviting readers to reconsider the boundaries between madness and magic, illness and insight. We Arrive Uninvited is not just a novel about mental illness—it’s about empathy, survival, and the ways women navigate the world’s attempts to silence them in the name of embracing one’s full self.
Claire Melanie Svec is a writer, poet, and singer-songwriter whose work is primarily focused on social dynamics, morality, and uncovering both the beauty and ugliness in mental health struggles. She published a short story piece that has won the first-place prize in fiction for The Ear Literary Magazine‘s Linda Purdy Memorial Prize. In addition to her editorial internship with Sundress Publications, she is currently serving as a fiction reader for West Trade Review. Progress on her upcoming work, projects, and adventures during her year-long stay in Paris, France, can be found on her Instagram @_clairedavila.
This summer, I moved to Boston to stay with my sister and start a local internship. While packing, I had extremely limited luggage space and no idea of the size of my sister’s summer dorm. So I only brought one book—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—gifted to me from a dear friend. This has since been joined with the first volume of American Short Fiction, which I picked up from the used book store Brattle Book Shop for $3. Over the last month, I’ve been slowly working my way through both on my daily commutes.
At home, our family’s bookshelf (photos courtesy of my mom!) is flush with books pressed up against each other. But in all honesty, it’s a facade. Most of these books are from my childhood: dozens from the Magic Tree House and Boxer Children series; a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that’s been read so many times the cover has been torn and the spine literally split into two; even some rhymes by Dr. Seuss.
Because to my own disappointment (just think of the aesthetic!), I haven’t been a fan of purchasing physical books for years. I probably wouldn’t have enough books I’ve bought to fill up a single row. In April, I won a $50 gift certificate for a bookshop that I have yet to even feel tempted to use.
Instead, I adore electronic books, particularly pdf copies. There’s something about the mindless scrolling that a pdf allows for—the blurring of time—that in combination with my terrifying screen time addiction, makes electronic books intensely more satisfying for me to read. And when I really felt the need for a physical book, I’d put in a request at my local library.
So while I no longer (or never did) have physical copies of these books, they’ve still played a pivotal role in my growth as a reader/writer. I fell in love with reading via the fantastical animals and worlds of Redwall. But it was in 5th grade, when I read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club that I first saw my own life and experiences as a Chinese-American daughter reflected in what I was reading, when I resonated so deeply with a character’s experiences that I physically hurt, and in turn, when I understood the power for human connections stories and words could hold.
In middle school, I went on an enormous memoir kick. Think The Glass Castle, Wild, Angela’s Ashes, and more recently, I’m Glad My Mom Died. I still love memoir and draw inspiration from these books and more for my creative nonfiction.
During my junior year of high school, I read numerous books on Chinese history including women’s history, revolutions, and the Chinese Communist Party while researching a paper I was writing on the contributions of women in the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power. It was during this time too that I began to consistently read poetry. I discovered Ocean Vuong, then Chen Chen, then Ada Limón and Mary Oliver and Danez Smith and Ross Gay.
Most recently, I’ve been enraptured by Ling Ma. Severance was by far my favorite read of 2023. Its dissection of experiences ranging from alienation caused by capitalism to mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American diaspora fascinated me. They’re ideas that I hope to continue processing in my own creative work. Severance is the only book I’ve been tempted to buy with my $50 gift certificate. And as I’m increasingly exposed to talented and emerging new writers during my time as an intern with Sundress, I can’t wait to hopefully expand my physical bookcase.
Sophia Zhang is a Chinese-American writer from California. Her poetry and memoir—which centers around diaspora, joy, and womanhood—has been recognized by YoungArts, Columbia College Chicago, The Pulitzer Center, and others. In her spare time, she likes to browse thrift shops and binge movies. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Harvard University.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
Nocturne
The mountains hold their purple tightly to themselves. The sky is smudged by a finger dipped in pink. Under herons’ wings a shifting blue swoops in. The artists can’t keep up with its names: cobalt, cerulean, turquoise, cyan. While they talk, the bay keeps bluing and re-bluing, the moon widening into its whiteness like a growling mouth. A million-year-old croak lines the sky of the heron’s flight. We watch the blues blacken and the pinks dissipate like gowns dragged across the sky. We flick on our flashlights, step onto the path, poised for black bears and snakes, too late to settle on the color’s proper name, folded as it is into the forest’s throat.
Hila Ratzabi is the author of There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award and finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
Letter from the North
Is it spring in Philadelphia yet? I’m still waiting for the river to unfreeze. The buds must be poking up in the garden now. I put so many seeds in the soil, I have no idea what to expect. Were you in the lab all day? Do the cats have enough water? It seems like every day the snow melts, then freezes, then melts, then it snows all over again. You’re getting spring first. I’ve never been this far north this time of year. I came here to see what would happen. I buried myself in the snow, listening for something. It’s breathing quietly. I miss you. Don’t forget to take out the compost on Thursday. What are you making for dinner? I thought I would discover something here. The earth is so still. Someone said they saw an otter scuttling across the frozen river but I missed it. I think I figured out one thing: that quivering feeling in my heart comes straight from the earth’s mantle. And there are no metaphors. I’m sitting here waiting in the plain snow.
Hila Ratzabi is the author of There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award and finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Some Days the Birdby Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey (Beltway Editions 2022).
Richter’s scale
by Heather Bourbeau
Rains have brought mushrooms, softened a thirsty ground, mulched and heavy with greying leaves. My neighbor’s morning glory wraps round their trellis,
chokes trees that scratch my home, make roads for squirrels. The earth shook last night, and I slept soundly soon after. Should I worry—this messy line between accustomed and detached?
In my yard lie the remnants of my landlord’s neglect—fallen bits of roof, broken path lights, balls from children grown and gone, a green toy soldier kneeling, rifle aimed.
Nasturtiums never planted sprout and spill, twisting up my steps, covering what the oxalis cannot. The sun has come too soon. I feel my throat prepare to parch.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her writings have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. A contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, she has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
Originally from Ireland and living in Australia, Anne Casey is the author of five poetry collections including one co-authored book. Her work is widely published internationally in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, Rattle, American Writers Review, Nimrod, Australian Poetry Anthology and The Canberra Times among others. Her recent awards include the American Writers Review Prize, Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Poetry Prize. She has a Ph.D. in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from the University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Some Days the Birdby Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey (Beltway Editions 2022).
Our Prime Minister says the vaccine is not a silver bullet
by Anne Casey
Primordial monstera fronds list in the blistering shade, a solitary kookaburra silent between the flagging liquidambar branches scratching at my lofty perch—even the cicadas’ earlier vigorous castanet stilled to a relentless dull trill—a scorching waft occasionally riffling his breast feathers, downy white
as snow coating the slopes outside my father’s far-off window, dusting his muddled head; icy sleet piercing the winter -pruned olearia where his cherished blackbirds cluster on better days
and later here, the kookaburra will return with his one true love and their burgeoning brood to fill the swaying evening branches with their raucous laughter,
my heart rising to meet the updraughts, torn between émigré anguish and shimmering hope.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her writings have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. A contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, she has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
Originally from Ireland and living in Australia, Anne Casey is the author of five poetry collections including one co-authored book. Her work is widely published internationally in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, Rattle, American Writers Review, Nimrod, Australian Poetry Anthology and The Canberra Times among others. Her recent awards include the American Writers Review Prize, Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Poetry Prize. She has a Ph.D. in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from the University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Some Days the Birdby Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey (Beltway Editions 2022).
As I struggle to be grateful for even the oxalis overtaking my garden once again
by Heather Bourbeau
I.
Today, we will gather outside, say brief thanks, share bounty baked and brined. Jackets and gloves. Selfishly, we will thank gods for the dry.
Tomorrow, we will pray for rain. We will have leftovers, complain of bellies too full. Groomed to Augustus Gloop, drown in chocolate.
II.
Today, hand in butter, I stare out at my garden, make mental list to rip from roots oxalis, nasturtiums, wayward vines before I see the rose. Yellow. Audacious.
Fragrant. Out of season. A summons. To honor the testament to water, hail the return of spiders and worms to a lush, low lying green.
A young camper will brag, “I have already kissed five banana slugs, and I am only seven.” I will see how blind I have been, how much I need to catch up.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her writings have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. A contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, she has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
Originally from Ireland and living in Australia, Anne Casey is the author of five poetry collections including one co-authored book. Her work is widely published internationally in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, Rattle, American Writers Review, Nimrod, Australian Poetry Anthology and The Canberra Times among others. Her recent awards include the American Writers Review Prize, Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Poetry Prize. She has a Ph.D. in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from the University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
In String (LSU Press, 2023), Matthew Thorburn chronicles a teenage boy’s journey through an unnamed war. Thorburn brings a breathless quality to the entire volume, with almost no punctuation in any poem. Lines break randomly in the middle of sentences and phrases. Concrete poems seemingly resemble nothing while still floating strangely on the page. Disorientation and urgency ring all throughout Thorburn’s poetry collection,.
String is divided into four parts, each one roughly corresponding to the narrator’s experience of this war. Part 1 depicts the happy life before the war alongside the anxiety as war looms and Part 2 describes the devastation of living in a war zone. After beginning with rich, nostalgic narratives, Thorburn plunges unexpectedly into violence in, mirroring the way that conflict envelops civilian homes. In “They,” Thorburn creates the idea of a generic, violent “them” consisting of soldiers who “liked to throw things” such as “a woman down a well” (11). After establishing a serene, happy setting, Thorburn destroys any sense of security the characters possess and depicts the awful descent into chaos that occurs for the victims of conflict.
Thorburn’s outright refusal to name who or what is happening forces us into the lived experiences of conflict. We never learn what war or what part of the war String occurs in. We have no semblance of timeline or how long these characters suffer, nor how long the conflict itself endures. We aren’t allowed to think about politics or death tolls; the ideologies of any single side blends into a single wave of violence that falls upon the narrators’ home. Thorburn focuses us entirely on a single life and the devastation that war inflicts on that life. String is a deeply emotional, personal book in a place that seeks to rob its inhabitants of any sentimentality.
Part 3 guides the reader through the narrator’s choice to leave his home. Consisting of a single extended poem, this section investigates the string which ties the narrator not only to the people who love him, but to the past and present. Over the course of the poem, his string takes the form of a fuse, soldiers’ razor wire, a cursive line, and even an umbilical cord (Thorburn 43-54). This string represents the hold that the narrator holds on his world over the course of this conflict, as well as the sense of self that he maintains during his displacement. As he notes, “this string / I follow / and follow and / know I can / never stop” (Thorburn 52). This moors him to the present and past, but also tugs him relentlessly into an uncertain future; to end the collection, Part 4 investigates what it means to come back to one’s home after war.
String is not only about the disorientation that inhabitants of a warzone (and refugees) feel, but also about the way that comfort morphs in a war-stricken environment. Pianos, for example, are a symbol of comfort early in the book through depictions of the narrator’s family and friends playing together, and he revisits pianos in later poems as a way to show how comfort can rupture in times of war. After a bomb strikes, the narrator recalls how:
“bits of paper swirled behind my eyes
some with treble clefs with quarter
or half notes Uncle Albert penciled
years ago.” (Thorburn 34)
When the narrator’s physical home is obliterated, his mental comfort is as well. Perhaps no poem encapsulates this as well as “Shatterings,” which in part catalogs Uncle Albert (who was previously skilled on the piano)’s stroke. After the stroke, a gorgeous flow of notes becomes “a stutter of / knots nots notes nights / and days” (Thorburn 33). Much like war, the stroke turns order into disorder, blowing to pieces what made so much sense before.
Thorburn’s narrator can never really escape in spite of scattered efforts to either lighten the mood or escape reality entirely. Even as the narrator’s family friend tells him that “those wishing to sing / will always find a song,” the narrator recognizes that “only he spoke” (Thorburn 13). The narrator’s mother remains terrified in that scene as onlookers are completely unmoved by this man’s display of security. In another scene, the diversion of a magic show is repeatedly interrupted by war-related details like “the splintered tree out back,” bringing readers back to the painful reality of conflict (Thorburn 17). Reflecting on an old photograph of the narrator’s father, Thorburn remarks:
“Time stops the camera
says let me show you
how time hurtles on leaves
only this creased piece
of cardboard little square.” (6)
String as a whole is the narrator’s “cardboard little square,” the fleck of memory and hope he intends to pass on to the next generation.
All through his book, Thorburn is painfully aware of the frailty of nostalgia, the weaknesses present in any recollection. In language rich with horror and hope, Thorburn truthfully renders the human costs of war through the eyes of a single teenager.
Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.
