3 Good Books from June (and one not so good 🙊)

Featuring Luster, Hamnet, and more

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)

O’Farrell wrote the pants off this interpretation of Shakespeare’s early life and her theory on how he might have navigated the grief of losing his young son. The playwright, though a main character, is never actually named, and it’s through his wife and children’s eyes that we see him grow up, withdraw from their lives, and return a few years later with a hit play that might be the key to his altered interior life.

Luster by Raven Leilani (2020)

Edie is an underemployed 23-year-old with a weird roommate in a gross apartment in Bushwick. As is canon for twenty-somethings in Brooklyn, she has a history of questionable sexual relationships that lead her to Eric, a married man who has opened his marriage with the *blessing* of his wife, Rebecca.

Though fully aware of the situation, Rebecca grows increasingly territorial over the course of several run-ins with Edie. Still, when Edie loses her job and faces eviction, it’s Rebecca who offers her refuge in the family’s guest room. It’s only then that Edie finds out Eric has an adopted Black daughter, and that Edie might be the only other Black person she knows.

These relationships weave through a mercurial economy of attention, each character dangling, withholding, and showering their attention on each other as they decide how and if they can exist together.

The Clearing: Poems by Allison Adair (2020)

I can’t recommend this collection any better than the opening poem does. The themes of womanhood and shared histories start here and repeat throughout the book:

there’s the girl, lying in a clearing we’ve never seen
but know is ours.

It is at once a retelling and a warning.

—————

The Clearing
by Allison Adair

What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops
teeth, her own, what else does she have, and the prince

or woodcutter or brother or man musty with beard and
thick in the pants collects the teeth with a wide rustic hand

holds their gray roots to a nostril to smell the fresh
feminine rot, fingers the bony stems of her

fear, born of watered-down broths, of motherlessness,
of an owl’s sharp beak crooking back around into itself?

The wolf licks his parts with a sandpaper tongue
and just like that we’ve got ourselves a familiar victim.

It is written: the world’s fluids shall rush into a single birch
tree and there’s the girl, lying in a clearing we’ve never seen

but know is ours. Undergrowth rattles like the shank
of a loose pen. We’ll write this story again and again,

how her mouth blooms to its raw venous throat—that tunnel
of marbled wetness, beefy, muted, new, pillow for our star

sapphire, our sluggish prospecting—and how dark birds come
after, to dress the wounds, no, to peck her sockets clean.

Courtesy of Southeast Review

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Editor’s Note: I couldn’t in good conscience recommend A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. That does not mean you won’t find it enjoyable. It just didn’t transport me in the way other works have. Please reply if you’d like to talk further smack about this book 😉