Man Behind the Mask by Stan K. Sujka | Book Review

Author: Stan K. Sujka

Publisher: Balboa Press

Published: October 2020

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 90

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“I listen to your / Motionless chest / The drum of life.” – Stan K. Sujka

Slowing down is a treatment people should follow more often. Those who have not received it consider a pace akin to trickling molasses a symptom rather than a solution. When the modern push and pull of life draws near, burning candles at both ends, a diagnosis would say burnout is the cure and anything below the speed of a hare is the disease. Overdosing on elucubration is fatal; it does not take a doctor to see that. Doctors do however see life at its peak, precipice, and pitfall. Urologist Stan K. Sujka, MD in his poetry collection Man Behind the Mask witnesses and celebrates bittersweet remedies for the trauma of memory.

Simple, heavy imagery through a confessional yet congressional tone explores the lifework (seen and unseen) shared by Sujka. A paleographic approach and motif of keeping the faith resounds in his vignettes. The poem “The Woods” observes the Jewish atonement ritual of Tashlikh, blending spiritual and secular beliefs. A baptismal rebirth and liminal dilemma take place after stepping into the past for forgiveness and leaving its pain behind for the future. In contrast, “The Featherless Birds” offers a peaceful protest against commercialized nature through the invention of the plastic flamingo and its inventor Don Featherstone. The Floridian symbol also serves as a twofold ironic one: a kitschy reminder of a beautiful bird and a fun-loving memoriam of a man who suffered from Lewy body dementia.

Dissonance between how memory and history represent truth presents a needed disquietude and sobering clarification. Sujka handles this through the event and theme of death. Deferred to solemn reverence, Sujka prefers to see death as a hopeful new beginning or a source of enlightenment. The life and death of Ernest Hemingway in “The Last Bars of Hemingway” illustrates the famous writer’s tactile dread on and off the page. Sujka wears his heart and heritage on his sleeve, creating a communion between the clinical and the clerical. His Holocaust poems such as “Aurora Borealis” (an account of the death marches of concentration camp inmates), “Kharon” (the fate of pediatrician Janusz Korzek and his orphanage), and “Auschwitz 2013” (the generational gap and synchronicity with the conflict between ancestry and anachronism) manifest a full-bodied tapestry of the nadir and zenith of humanity.

There exists a sterile sameness that blinds people to the unobserved life. There also exists artificial distractions, overbearing and misleading, straying away from the natural world’s simple pleasures (“Cow That Swallowed the Moon”). All in moderation still experience the abject and fragile impermanence of life. Among the dead and dying, beyond sentimental platitudes, knowing life goes on after death (“The Shroud”) affirms that faith without works is dead. Under the auspices of an augur and his bird watching, Sujka and Man Behind the Mask devote time to the observed life, touching moments with kind, discerning eyes and giving a name to the nameless.

Final Rating:

Green Rose

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Exclusivity by Assia Lau’ren | Book Review

Author: Assia Lau’ren

Publisher: Self-Published

Published: January 2023

Genre: Prose Poetry

Pages: 133

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Former U.S. Army Veteran, actor, and poet Assia Lau’ren has written her second poetry collection Exclusivity on the concept of boundaries. Her prose poetry dissents with a progressively perverse reflection and declaration on the use and abuse of these transgressive and liminal states. Love transposes her poems and, in all its definitions, serves as a means for diverse, equitable, and inclusive discourse. Lau’ren places the subconscious follies and fallacies of people on a conscience plane of discernment.

She faces the dissonance of her own beliefs and problems with those of societal expectations and limitations. The challenge she poses does encroach thoughtfully albeit into a diatribe at times, but it is done out of a genuine need for reformation and stability. Her self-talk or stream of consciousness questions the status quo of relationships, politics, and individuality through prescient post-modern self-awareness. Exclusivity is an aperture and exposure, capturing the half-truths, setting them on the path towards truth, and reconciling the false truths that separate and condemn with understanding’s light and darkness.

Final Rating:

Red/Blue Pill

The Sound of the Broken Wand by Tiki Black | Book Review

Author: Tiki Black

Publisher: Self-Published / No Sugar Added Records

Published: May 22, 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Magic Realism, Poetry

Pages: 84

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“We are… as we should teach our children, in the image of life.” – Tiki Black

The Sound of the Broken Wand is a triage of finding, deciphering, and unlearning the bias filters through which conditioning entraps and indoctrinates us. Cameroonian-French poet and musician Tiki Black writes her emancipatory poetry collection in six parts: the blood (life and death), the cage (prison and refuge), the mirror (reflection and deflection), the crown (power and duty or debt), the shoe (journeys and unbeaten paths), and the wand (bewitchment and magic). The human condition is a catch-22 made of comforts and challenges. Black shares a thoughtful recognition of the dangers of living a life with an imbalance between the two.

In her poem “The Wound,” Black speaks of “the source” or the promise and pain of existence: “So, here I am hugging my wound / To dig deeper than who’s to blame.” Relying on comfort or sameness is willful ignorance in “In the Arms of Morpheus” and choosing power before self and others, as well as being speechless or powerless to injustice, leads to circuitous cycles of moral decay in “But I…” A healthy self-awareness paints this collection and each facet of life a different color, a new enlightened direction towards accountable posterity and away from declension.

However, most of the poems, idyllic yet grounded (the first more prevalent than the latter) in delivery, are whisked away in its rhyme scheme. The structure deflates and inflates the ideas until they have no more elasticity to breathe or extend into truth. They compartmentalize the feelings of these visual and cognitive biases but they fall prey to grandiose gestures that are broad and out of reach. “Home” felt generic with its vague memories and metamorphosis of home and house. Black’s poems read better as songs, this is apparent due to its intentional beats or refrains and insertions of sheet music.

Mixed media is not unusual; the comingling of song and verse separates this collection from others for the better. The discrepancy lies in the mechanics of each form clashing despite the flowery language. A shining moment came in the speculative essay “Blue” in which Black goes beyond language and cultural barriers to understand human nature and the misleading value systems we inflict on each other. We learn that consciously and unconsciously, survival (conditioning, mistrust, protection) supersedes thriving (exploring, creativity, possibility).

There is a Stoicism to Black’s work, it brings to mind French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel: “Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” The idea of suffering is challenged in this collection. In the case that suffering is unnecessary, suffering should be replaced with enlightenment, reformation, and reparation. Black’s poems are celebrating otherness in all of us, free of overbearing adulation and pomp with instead a humble camaraderie and kinship, individuality and community. The Sound of the Broken Wand has ideas of multiculturalism with a sober and selfless conscience interplaying with selfish and judgmental fears of discomfort and uncertainty interloped throughout, but these facets of life we are unaware of and become aware of, while acknowledged, are buried by the veil of magic it critiques and uses against itself.

Red/Blue Pill

seven years by Alyssa Harmon | Book Review

Author: Alyssa Harmon

Publisher: Self-Published

Published: October 11, 2022

Genres: Poetry, Relationships, Self-Help

Pages: 121

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“notice the labyrinth you feel… open your eyes.” – Alyssa Harmon

Love is not an exact science. To call love a science at all seems paradoxically counterproductive to the matters in the right hemisphere of our brain. Our second brain, the heart, attempts to make sense of emotions, searches for meaning between lines that were crossed. Justifications and expectations become muddled in the journey of the heart if one does not learn how to love themselves and the necessity of change. Love of another, unrequited love, and wanting to be loved a certain way have the potential to descend into selfish cases of bitterness. Reading the debut poetry collection seven years by Alyssa Harmon shows that heartbreak contends with healing in a conquest for change and consistency.

The title refers to the interval of time in which human cells are replaced. The poems are collected into corresponding years, each with their own mix of emotions. As a nonlinear narrative, the theme of change being the only constant is felt. The trauma of memory is accounted for in “some things never change” and “dog tag.” The first a longing for what was good or promising, and the latter a symbol, an albatross, of a militant background or pensiveness without being spurious. Similarly, “memorial day” deals with memory and history, what was and what is left behind. Harmon succeeds at capturing how one can easily overthink (sugarcoat or soil) the bad and good memories, the hindsight and foresight.

Imagery about heartbreak lends itself to cliché too often, however. In “tsundoku,” the idea of not letting go or returning to the same story is conveyed with a literal metaphor of books. Again, in “cereal boxes” love for the prize inside would be sincere if it was not compared to a toy one could play with. Unless they are strictly showing the hurt that can corrupt a person amidst heartbreak, comparisons like these are missed opportunities to show more of what an idea has to offer. Call a person the same old story, but what about the people who are books in the world that is a library? Ideas stop in the middle of development for what seems to be confessional pity parties. Heartbreak (cold, justifiable, yet hypocritically passive-aggressive in tone) obstructs the healing within most of the poems. Brevity as wit comes off as lack and explanation as clarity instead lingers in some cases throughout the years.

Much of it leads to confusion, a feeling one with heartbreak would come across, but it rarely evolves or explores that confusion. Some poems settle for obvious imagery that are familiar and nostalgic at the risk of being juvenile. Being stuck in the past becomes too repetitive, self-involved, and self-referential for healing to take place. Is it a necessary phase in the healing process? Granted growth happens after hesitancy, denial, and leaving ego at the door, there is still a stage that has not been reached or held onto: acceptance. Accepting the fact that everything and everyone is a work in progress, seven years is a mixed bag still making its way out of the bag.

Final Rating:

Red/Blue Pill

Unplug. In-Power. Recreate: Transformative Poetry by A*K² | Book Review

Author: Archana “A*K²” Karthikeyan

Publisher: Self-Published

Published: May 4, 2022

Genres: Poetry, Self-Help, Philosophy, Nonfiction

Pages: 245

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“Here I fit, in my slot, / A tiny but irreplaceable puzzle piece…” – A*K²

Poetry collections are apt at capturing a running theme only to set it free to follow its every move ad infinitum. Opposite to cat-and-mouse antics, poetry delivers a message that belongs to someone and everyone. With poetry, a message becomes the message, which in turn becomes Message. Each message can change interpretation or ideation with each new reading. Upon reading Unplug. In-Power. Recreate: Transformative Poetry by Archana Karthikeyan (A*K²), the invitation for change is painted with a broad brush.

Truths are shared, images are presented, but they suffer from association and a lack of correlation. Relationships between truth and image to establish any metaphor with far-reaching consequence is replaced with pithy platitudes. The mortal sin of writing is to tell and to tell too much. The damnation of that sin is the curse of knowledge; the assumption that a student knows and experiences knowledge the way a teacher does. For example, the poem “Smoke & Mirrors” sets up two promising pictures that could serve concrete meanings but ends in an obvious if-then, cause-and-effect pay-off.

Poetry should teach not just through telling, but showing. In equal measure, although with partial leaning towards showing as a rule of thumb, explanation should clarify while pictorial language should simplify. Poetry is not meant to be a counselor. Poetry is not meant to be an advice column. However, one can find counsel from a poem without it being too didactic, generic, or redundant. The poetry in Unplug takes on conversational and confessional tones, as if the speaker has been the recipient of response poems and written response poems from a place of respite and resolve.

A*K² makes good on this in “I Don’t Fit In” where being accepted and accepting yourself are ideas in conflict with each other. It uses a problem and solution text structure that gets its advice across concretely and abstractly, but this form is relied on and recycled often in this collection, giving a hollow ring to truths. The father-to-son advice from “If—” by Rudyard Kipling balances the well-meaning (sentimental) with the discerning (practical) that begins broad (truth) and paces that truth in considerate, specific circumstances (imagery) reflective of its subject, theme, and audience. Stating the truth without exploring the truth leaves the truth starving in a devolved, stagnant, mitigated, and less meaningful state. Unplug unfortunately undermines its truths in a long string of advice sans enough practical examples that would meet its calls to action.

Final Rating:

$2 Bill

Step Lively: New York City Tales of Love and Change by Sherri Moshman-Paganos | Book Review

Author: Sherri Moshman-Paganos

Publisher: Self-Published

Published: May 12, 2022

Genres: Memoir, Historical Fiction

Pages: 148

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“I would give you all of my heart if you loved me!” – Sherri Moshman-Paganos

New York City is a hotbed of possibilities. Many have made it a tourist destination, an indulgent escape for entertainment, and a tamed overgrowth of expressionism performed with modest and courageous finesse. Others find the mythologized Concrete Jungle to be just that: hurdles of concrete and habit-forming jungle. Sporadic, sultry, serpentine, seedy, qualities that seem inescapable in The City That Never Sleeps. It is easy to feel wayward in a bustling place that people somehow call home. Step Lively: New York City Tales of Love and Change challenges and romanticizes the chase of living your dream through vicarious and pernicious vacillation in an idyllic and robust cityscape.

Told in vignettes, Sherri Moshman-Paganos presents a sidestep to the “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” trope of countless New York iterations. Jill, an artistic, ESL teacher, and Alex, a tidy, punctual lawyer, are the young New York couple who serve as the novel’s through line. Outside these vignette’s fuzzy edges, Jill and Alex experience the archetype characters, street vendors, store clerks, bums, and idiosyncratic apartment dwellers. The love in the stories can be categorized into want and need. The latter is missing and is overshadowed by the former. Diametrically opposed, Jill and Alex gripe and bemoan more than they give love and attention. Their relationship puts the “opposites attract” bid to rest in unceremonious ways; rather than understand each other and celebrate their differences (a love of need) they try to change each other indirectly and sarcastically (a love of want). When events happen to them, it comes from a passive and woe-is-me frame of mind. When they cause events to happen, it feels ordinary, obvious, and overbearingly referential to the point of cliché. References to New York are made, but they do not change the characters. New York anachronisms more or less solidify them.

Step Lively is written with the lens of a 1980s zeitgeist, its title referring to the exclamation of conductors for passenger pushers to board passengers onto subway transit. The phrase was introduced in 1904, then changed to “press forward” in 1908; either way, the experience described is linguistically pleasant rather than hurriedly unpleasant for Jill. Granted a trip down memory lane may always be the same, sometimes memory lane goes through bittersweet changes. The watershed moment of John Lennon’s death was used to good effect, presenting a metaphor of a good thing dying, innocence being lost, and the mixed, turbulent feelings of the characters at that time. Lackadaisical moments are far more prevalent however, trapping characters in the past. Grandmother Sadye haphazardly remembers her experiences growing up as an immigrant from Ellis Island and in New York. What is unbelievable and too convenient is Sadye’s lack of memory of a particular French tower. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France and the Eiffel Tower is also from France; even someone uneducated, a European immigrant, no less, could recognize this world famous landmark, either mentioned in passing or by image alone, after all this time. It is as if characters are so innocent that they are excused from consequences. A great deal of time is spent on emotional appeals and the logical side of things are safely overanalyzed, lambasted, and tucked away in a classroom. The times change, but the characters do not; if they do change, it is in minute, inconsequential ways.

Memory may not be reliable, but the angst and admiration it stirs cannot be ignored or idolized, only experienced. Step Lively holds the belief, to paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard, that it is better to experience reality rather than to solve its volatility. Margaret Atwood said we all become stories in the end, and as an addendum, memory will continue and change our stories for better or for worse. Step Lively shares that memory better to the detriment of reality.

Final Rating:

Red/Blue Pill

Crushing by Sophie Burrows | Book Review

Author / Illustrator: Sophie Burrows

Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Published: January 2022

Genres: Graphic Novel / Young Adult

Pages: 160

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Somewhere in the hustle and bustle of a British city, two unnamed protagonists, a modest man and woman, toil through with a wistful longing for connection and understanding. Social norms and societal pressures pervade their conscience, leaving subliminal cues they cannot fulfill. Modern romance and relationships become a hapless hunt for happiness. Sweet and innocent curiosities are soured by the invasion of indiscriminate idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks of human nature, that taint the experience of being with and knowing someone. Complications ebb and flow between the need to connect and the want to be alone. Their activities explore the mundane and humdrum facets of life, the vast chances and possibilities in a crowd of doubt, and the moments of loneliness and love that cripple and create our will to rise again.

Sophie Burrows gives her Crushing the silent film treatment. Each page is a vignette told in a muted colored, Etch A Sketch frame of mind. The fading hues of black and grey make the touches of red an interesting motif in motion. Life is subdued, painful, worrisome, but measured and malleable, momentary and momentous. The characters can feel existence expanding and shrinking as they have their awkward encounters. The man, perhaps a penciled Ed Sheeran, performs odd jobs and errands that require small talk and scripted dialogue which drains him. He is at once unassuming but emasculated and challenged by his masculinity, attempting to find some deeper, meaningful purpose. The woman, perhaps a penciled Mara Wilson, is a café waitress who is challenged by her femininity but is not unaware of her grace. She feels safe belonging in certain venues that celebrate personality rather than idolize superficiality. Subtle glances, strong advances, and a surreptitious sundry of steep satisfaction sully and spoil sexuality and anything sultry for silly and serious reasons. Both creatures of habit are homebodies by heart and are made to think that they are a problem rather than a solution. Although, them being a solution to a problem is not too farfetched and not too feasible either.

Crushing feels superstitious in tone, as if being in a relationship is this forbidden yet fortuitous stage to stand on. However, the performance is nothing one can chalk up to a Disney movie or romantic comedy. Relationships are not this fantasy to live in, they are made tenable to be made fantastic. What is more, relationships do not have to become a fantasy; there is something to be cherished in the ordinary. Expectations should be real, not overblown or done without. Sometimes those expectations are corroborated, calibrated, or even discovered later unexpectedly until they become shared values. There is no easy way to desire, establish, or keep a relationship. Small acts of kindness are enough to be like a relationship, ever so briefly, even if a relationship does not begin, continue, and develop from them. Burrows expresses this, the caveats, and necessity of a relationship in one’s life: to find the person that compliments, not complicates, life or the relationship. Isolation is not always the best answer, being alone can be better, but togetherness can be the thing that saves you.

Final Rating:

It’s Lit!

How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino | Book Review

Author: Genzaburō Yoshino

Illustrator: Carla Weise

Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Published: October 2021

Genres: Children’s Fiction / Young Adult

Pages: 288

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“We gather together to create the world, and what’s more, we are moved by the waves of the world and thereby brought to life.”

– Genzaburō Yoshino

In pre-World War II Japan, a boy named Honda Jun’ichi loses his father, leaving him socially perplexed about his place in life. His fun-loving creativity leads Honda to troubling yet curious questions about and for the world. He decides they are not enough for one mind to think of, so he seeks council from his uncle, his mentor and father figure. From one discovery to the next, Honda is relieved and ready to explore the boundless knowledge and cultures of the human race through the lens of his own life and life itself.

How Do You Live? is a bildungsroman Japanese tale translated to English for the first time since its original publication in 1937. While its resurgence will garner new readers, it has also brought the acclaimed animator of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, out of retirement to make one last film based on this classic, his childhood favorite, and just in time for Ghibli Fest. The story acts as a time capsule that remembers not only the idyllic past, but a promising future. The novel is careful not to be overbearing with its historical and political context as it serves a necessary, metaphorical, and practical ethos. The book also takes aims at groupthink, selfishness, and the suspension of disbelief with considerate measures, thoughts, and defenses against their extremes. Put simply, Yoshino writes with metacognition, depicts a progressive multiculturalism while recognizing the dark side of human nature, and celebrates ideas, the people who have them, the people without them, and the people who misuse them. It is also a celebration of celebration itself, the ability to be grateful, to exhibit gratitude for the actions, feelings, and thoughts we have. In this way, the life lessons presented by the characters become one bridge rather than a border between each other and a story that they tell together and apart, knowingly and unknowingly.

The reader cannot help but be caught unawares by the selfless mindfulness and truthful awareness that can easily be overlooked due to the immediacy of the present moment. By the same token, it is also a time to live in that moment, to reflect before and after one acts, to never squander the meaning around one’s self and inside others. A most befitting and prominent example of this is when a character grows ill at one point. The expected writer of this novel was initially Yūzō Yamamoto until he too became ill. Here Yoshino adheres to both philosophies of life imitating art and art imitating life. How the uncle and Honda create their own nomenclature for behavior, ethics, history, science, religion, philosophy, and other studies helps them to think of themselves less, not less of themselves, and think of others’ lives in the process of knowing what life is. Their many talks also lead to Honda’s affectionate nickname, Copper, after their discussion about Copernicus and his heliocentric theory. The experiences of Copper are at first hand, unfiltered, and brand new while his uncle takes a journalistic approach, documenting the moments as their own individual and interconnected events. The remarkable and clever attributions of the world’s leaders, martyrs, saboteurs, saints, and thinkers’ efforts from hundreds of centuries and millenniums ago to one’s life now and its purpose moving forward is not just Yoshino’s story, it is everyone’s story, the story of the human race. Beyond wishful thinking, more than the vicarious absence of self, How Do You Live? prepares a slice of pie in the sky you can reach out and taste. By accepting and elevating one’s sensations for each doubt, fallibility, fear, foible, folly, forgiveness, misery, regret, sadness, suffering, and joy, there will be discovery and self-discovery for life’s big question: what does it mean to be truly human?

Final Rating:

It’s Lit!

Egg Marks the Spot (Skunk and Badger #2) by Amy Timberlake | Book Review

Author: Amy Timberlake

Illustrator: Jon Klassen

Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Published: September 2021

Genres: Children’s Fiction  

Pages: 160

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“One minute everything is dark, and you are sure the worst possible end is coming. And then – suddenly! – a spot of blue sky.”

– Amy Timberlake, Skunk and Badger #2

The desultory duo from North Twist return with their staple sense of comedy and camaraderie, this time on a rock-finding expedition. Badger, the austere geologist, is conducting important rock work when Skunk, the goading happy-go-lucky chef, notices a rock missing from his Wall of Rocks: agate. Badger’s cousin, Fisher, a treasure dealer, purloined the rock that started Badger’s sedimentary hobby and career. In Egg Marks the Spot, Skunk and Badger seek to complete the collection before enjoying the Sunday New Yak Times Book Review over breakfast. With familiar and new faces, extended backstories, and a lesson or two met with mystery, the series continues to make strides for all ages.

A year later and this sequel has not dulled the original’s rustic panache. It maintains the hyperbolic world of the animal kingdom Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen have cleverly depicted. Throughout this tale, themes of greed and glory take precedent in subtle and solemn ways. Skunk overprepares, overpacks, and overwhelms Badger with his towering backpack in slapstick fashion. At one point, Badger worries so much that he forgoes nourishment from one of Skunk’s fantastic meals. Moments where actions speak louder than words and where words are measured twice and cut deeply are laudable. The only exception to this is perhaps in the exposition. It felt Skunk and Badger’s time in the woods was short-lived, despite the foretold danger of bears and the secrecy behind the chicken’s Quantum Leap powers, which has a bittersweet payoff. The pacing is convenient and simple, yet curious and expectant, but never cheap or forced. More unexpected turns as well as more background into Skunk’s personal history would have been welcome leading up to a promising albeit jam-packed ending.

Final Rating:

Green Rose

Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle | Book Review

Author: Jill McCorkle

Illustrator: Steve Godwin

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published: July 2020

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

Pages: 320

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“A story is easier to fall into than your own life…”

– Jill McCorkle, Hieroglyphics

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Memory and history share a disingenuous and diverting crossroads, much of which becomes a diluted and dilatable personal history. Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle, recounts the elder couple, Frank and Lil (look to the past), the first a history professor and the latter a dance instructor, from Boston, Massachusetts. They possess an unsaid understanding communicated on the visage of blunt and esoteric notes that last into their retirement in North Carolina. The younger couple, Shelley and Brent (look to the present), a stenographer and car mechanic, have an unofficial divorce, leaving this mother and wife to rear her unenlightened and impressionable son, Harvey, in North Carolina. Frank has unfinished business with his past and to complete it, he must visit Shelley’s home, his childhood home.

Two tragical epochs, Boston’s Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942 and the Rennert, North Carolina train wreck of 1943, challenge these tragical couples as they overlap each other in a time-bending way through mementos, keepsakes, notes, and personal effects. Much of Hieroglyphics is headspace work, a tedium that promises and processes mundanity. In this sense, memory is made a personal history where the past catches up with the present and vice versa. The innate truth (the absence of identity) and the adaptive truth (the loss of innocence) create a transformative internal conflict. The value of Lil’s hording tendencies and her hair-splitting plurality is not without its sincere reasons, as notional as they often are. Frank is a believable history buff, lost in times not his own as he comes to terms with a rocky childhood and an avalanching adulthood. Similarly, Shelley’s and Harvey’s inappropriate but wholesomely exaggerated use of escapism leave the mother and son stilted and siphoned as a family unit.

McCorkle’s novel succeeds in its sparsity or narrowness but also suffers from it. Circuitous paths lead to an ineffability, one that poses memory, however unreliable or indelible, as akin to living beyond any timeline’s marker. The bottleneck then, and a necessary one, is knowing what to part with and what to hold onto. The trouble is knowing and remembering the fragility and mystery of words said or written and unsaid or unwritten. Deciding between meaning and meanings, death’s forgetfulness and life’s displacement or life’s forgetfulness and death’s displacement, for posterity. Hieroglyphics leaves more unsaid than said through memory as history, leaves the pieces behind to be picked up again by the impromptu historians, and runs out of track long before the train has left the station.

Final Rating:

Red/Blue Pill