&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�What do I hope // to unsee,â€� asks poet and translator Oksana Maksymchuk. First-hand witness to the ‘â€� that has befallen Ukraine under the assaults and bombardments from Russia over the past two years, her poetry collection Still City becomes a poetic space to capture such brutality as testament not only to the horrors of war but also the spirit of survival and solidarity. With a directness to the harshness and visceral horrors which â€�demands an expression suitable to its violence,â€� Maksymchuk chronicles the daily traumas of those in Ukraine while also hoping â€�that through love / the world is restored.â€� An important collection of stark realism that feels like a surreal nightmare, Still City shows poetry as a necessary act of witness and protest in a world that turns its head from suffering with Maksymchuk’s poetic voice grabbing our attention and ensuring such horrors are not forgotten.

Dark are the days ahead of us
and even darker--the nights

Hear it said: there'll never
be light again

Sun will blacken and fall
like a corpse of a god

distant, long dead
tossed by the tide of the sky

No more radiance--only
blank and inverted light

Ever darker--the night
every night, darker and darker�
â€Äì°ù´Ç³¾ Genesis

While this is a debut collection from Oksana Maksymchuk, I was familiar with her as the editor of the wonderful and harrowing anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, which I would highly recommend reading. The language in Still City is so vibrant in Still City, affecting a sense of horror in its imagery such as �darkness that falls / billowing out / like an inkblot.� Each page is strewn with imagery of death and destruction. As fellow Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk wrote in an , � Language is as beautiful as this world. So when someone destroys your world, language reflects that.� Here we can see language not only as witness but also as a resistance to war, standing strong even in �lines / blurred by terror� as war destroys everything around. In the poem Kingdom of Ends she describes the Ukrainian desire to uphold their own language:

to weave a language
out of the things we felt
mattered
for our future
as an impermanent species

Still, we can feel the war creeping in from all directions, feel the panic, feel the unease the lingers in the silences. It is so powerful yet, as Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky says of Maksymchuk’s works, �there is terrifying restraint in these poems of war wherein realism becomes a song, realism becomes hallucination, realism is a naked nerve set to a tune.� This makes me think about the Bertolt Brecht poem, Motto which reads � In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times. One can find a sense of musicality in Maksymchuk’s poems �like a tragic chorus� singing about the darkness and hard times. In her poem Tempo she writes:

What I didn't suspect about
war is that there'd be
music

Not the kind that compels you to move
in harmonious discord�
But the kind that irradiates
every surviving nucleus
rendering you a creature

absolutely new
facing the passage of time
naked and unashamed

In the intervals between
war and worse, we discern the score

These are poems that demand attention and are unapologetic for the terrors within them as they are lived horrors we must not turn away from. Far too easy is it to just push the thoughts of war aside for those far away from the blasts and Maksymchuk’s poems are pleas to stop looking away. �I don't know if the / images of bombings are what you yearn for / in your feed,� she writes in Algorithmic Meltdown, admitting she too would �prefer funny puppy videos,� but the sights and sounds and fears chronicled here are not ones she or other Ukrainians can just close out of like a phone app and these poems serve an important reminder of this.

Lingering Likeness

If you make an effigy
of cloth, paper, and sticks
and give it a name
and make it feel loved

I wonder
whether the girl who survived
the same immense blast
in a parallel universe

would feel anything?

There is a sense of unreality afoot from the way the unbearable reality becomes sinister and surreal. It is one thing to call the acts of violence monstrous but these aren’t mythical beasts raining down from the sky but the work of other people. �How do I take / the measure of business / so unmistakably human?� she writes. Maksymchuk has as using language to combat the �blur� and defamiliarization of reality under war:

�Line by line, stanza by stanza, I was trying to pinch myself, to wake up into a world that would make sense again.�

These poems are a reminder of the power of poetry. �Even inside a war / I'm still at work / making life delicious,� she writes on the act of poetry and crafting her vibrant verse even amidst the violence of war. �There's hardly time for the business of poetry,� she admits in Puppets of God� yet reminds us that it can be �vital / for survival of / what is human inside us.� And whike it can capture the darkness and violence of humanity, it can also capture the joys that are often left out of the history books, much as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote saying �history is not the soil in which happiness grows, the periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.� Here we find that �happiness / is a kind of silence,� the quiet between wars and bombs, the quiet of calm and peace. We must all hope that peace returns and we must ask � how to begin / again.�

A powerful collection full of passion and intensity, Still City is an important work of poetry and poetic witness from an increíble voice. These are poems that look at the destruction of land and language but keep language ringing out with �the force of a scream suppressed,� and it is a voice we should certainly listen to.

4.5/5

Stolen Time

Trapped in a plan
of another's making
we're squandering time
awaiting the war

Perfectly formed evenings
of navigating between the dark silhouettes of trees
against the purple snow

Weekend afternoons of
urgent love-making, voices
seeping through half-drawn curtains
adorned by shadows of

migratory birds-
jubilant and remote
citizens of a world
shared in shards"

&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love.â€�

�I have written love narratives and loss narratives,� Winterson writes, �it all seems so obvious now � the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother.� Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she �wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.� From her harsh upbringing, her breaking away and plunging into literature and, many years later, seeking out her birth mother, Winterson chronicles her life and insights into a memoir that bombards with both humor and emotional blows to deliver a memoir that is as page turning and searingly beautiful as her best novels.

Really all I want to do is get a soapbox and shout how wonderful Winterson's work is, something anyone who knows me has likely endured lately. Her works have the right combination of soaring beauty with grit and teeth. I don't know what I can accomplish here beyond recommending her, because she is an author that has totally consumed me lately and I'm so glad of it. Love is the gravity of life and at the center of each Winterson work and here we see how the vast depths of love can also toss you asunder as waves of pain dash against you. Yet for those who hold fast and sail on til morning, love can rise again from the horizons of uncertainty.

�Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.�

Written in real time for the latter half, we can read Winterson reading herself with the writing as a therapeutic act as much as it is a literary portrait of an undeniably amazing artist. �I was writing the past and discovering the future,� she says, and her faith in the written word to heal and instruct is infectiously lovely. �Books have always been light and warmth to me,� and across the whole of her memoir we see several instances where books, be it reading or writing them, become an anchor as well as a ladder to climb as an escape and a path upwards to the future. When Mrs. Winterson discovers her secret stash of books—she was forbidden from reading any book beyond the three her mother okay’d—she burns them in the backyard. �‘Fuck it,� I thought, ‘I can write my own,’� she says, contemplating how her attempts to collect the half-burned scraps, �these fragments I have shored against my ruin� quoting from T.S. Eliot, came alive in her own novels that seem a collection of �scraps uncertain of continuous narrative.� This book dredges up the childhood that made her works possible, and the journeys of the heart that mapped the way.

�I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.�

As much as books were a rock for Winterson, her own works have been a comfort for many readers to come. �I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,� she says, �When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.�

�Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity…Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety.�

Through these words she delivered what she refers to as a �cover version� of her childhood in Oranges, with the reader discovering here that many of the events were much harsher than presented in the novel, and from it her past and relationship with her mother became bestseller stories to the general public (the book opens with a phone conversation with a horrified Mrs. Winterson after the release of the book). �It isn’t ‘my past�, is it,� she states, �I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments,� and examines the beauty of self-mythologizing. �I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact,� she repeats across the book, which is an idea that is a root to her own novels where reality and history are blended with magical realism to become a sort of fairy tale. And what better way to examine a life and turn writing into a therapy for trauma than a storytelling medium where size and shape is often �approximation and unstable,� and feeling unwanted or cast out—as she was from her own home—can become a heroic act to survive.

There is also a lot of religious trauma to survive, and Winterson examines how growing up leaving presents out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or embroidering 'the summer has ended and we are not yet saved' on her bag certainly set her apart from her peers. But it also becomes something that attempts to alienate her from herself, attempting to make her feel shame for her very natural attraction to other women. They perform a straight up exorcism on her, it's a lot. But the real kicker is seeing, once again, love not be there when it should be. Her adopted mother, then her girlfriend who renounces her. It's a tragedy, and one far more heartbreaking than was seen in novel form.

�A tough life needs a tough language � and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers � a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.�

Interesting as well are Winterson’s stories of her education and eventually going to Oxford. While she says she was not a great student �I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.� But if being a lesbian was what had her cast out from her childhood and shunned by her neighbors, she discovered that in academia simply being a woman was a barrier. �Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned,� she writes of the books taught there, �it was a conspiracy of ignorance.� An English teacher tells her �when a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose,�� and during this period we see the origins of many of her critiques on gendered society and misogyny start to take shape. Not only that, but she observes how much gatekeeping pushes people out, being told on her first day that she is � the working-class experiment� while her friend is the �Black experiment.� Though she sees these barriers and academic circling of the wagons as a challenge to overcome and overthrow, which is also very present in her narratives.

�Later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you are good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.�

Something Winterson does so well in this book is keep the reader firmly gripped by the waves of prose, rocking us through anecdotes and humorous observations about a life safely behind her, so that when the storm comes we are too far out at sea to turn back and must weather the maelstrom of emotions with her. �There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you,� she observes, �The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.� The second half of this memoir is the real treasure. While more chaotic than the first, and admittedly written in real time, it chronicles the emotional journey of trying to find her birth mother. Following a breakup and a period of sorrow where �I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life,� Jeanette takes on her quest, complete with companions who join along the way such as , who would be her partner for many years (I screamed when it was revealed author Ali Smith told Jeanette to �just kiss her and see�). She learns that �People’s lives are less important than procedure,� as legal hiccups thwart her and prolong the process to the point of emotional pain. But it is a beautiful tale of discovering what she needed to hear all along: �You were wanted, Jeanette.� I think this beautiful sentiment makes the whole book worth reading.

�to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater��

The problem with real life is that it isn’t a fairy tale and there are no tidy endings. But that is also what makes it beautiful, even if tragically so. Winterson’s emotional journey is quite the tale, one that has more open ends than questions answered. I was particularly moved by her examination of a life that never was but could have been and how, even compared to the trauma of her past, she was happy to be the person she turned out to be. �I would rather be this me,� she confesses, �than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way.� Even to Mrs. W she observes that �she was a monster, but she was my monster,� and this line has really stuck with me.

There were times when I worried it was beginning to romanticize mental health struggles and coming from a place of trauma, but right then she delivers one of the best lines in the book: �Creativity is on the side of health � it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.� She writes beautifully about how in times of mental health struggles we have to confront the creature within us, and she finds the best way for her to do so is through writing. We are all lucky to be able to observe these moments.

As much as I love her story, some of the best moments are simply Winterson talking about literature and about the ways it interacts with time and humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book as much as this one and you will likely be finding Winterson quotes pop up in many of my reviews forever now. Here’s a taste:

'Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.�

This is an essential read for any Witnerson fan, but also for any lover of literature in general, and she provides an excellent list of other books to check out that were pivotal to her growth as a reader and writer. I was glad I read this directly following Oranges, and honestly this ranks with the best of her works. She has such a strong voice and the fragmentary aspects of this memoir, often told jumbled along the timeline, isn’t all that different than her novels. This is a work of startling beauty that plunges canyonous emotional depths and all I can say is Jeanette Winterson is an absolute icon. I love her, I love her works, and I can’t wait to read more.

5/5

â€�The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.â€�&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;

&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�History is like a horror story,â€� wrote Roberto Bolaño and Tommy Orange chronicles the long history of â€�America's war on its own peopleâ€� in Wandering Stars. Moving through the horrors of the past across generations of violence, genocide and institutional or social erasures and on into a present day of lingering traumas and addictions, Wandering Stars works something like a Godfather Pt 2 to his 2018 novel, There There, being simultaneously a sequel and prequel to the events of that book. We last encountered Orvil Red Feather as yet another victim to gun violence in the final pages of There, There, though this story on the legacy that brought his bloodline to that moment of bloodshed as well as the volatile recovery in the aftermath could just as easily be read as a stand-alone. Still, it was delightful to revisit familiar characters as well as many new ones, each with an impressively distinct voice in a narrative propelled by Orange’s extraordinary acrobatic use of language. Wandering Stars is a sharp critique on a bloodsoaked American history, tracing trauma from colonization and forced assimilation into addictions and fractured histories, though there is still a light and a heavy hope â€�making this place more than its accumulated pain.â€�

�Surviving wasn't enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.�

Where There, There was caught in a breakneck inertia spiraling towards impending disaster, Wandering Stars does a lot of, well, wandering. We move across history through the many generations of the Red Feather family, taking us from the and into the forced assimilation programs or prisons. This is juxtaposed with a narrative set in the present following Orvil and several other familiar characters. It meanders but never flails, stepping in wide rings of time, sending its prose to swoop and soar, until finally you find a rhythm moving underneath it all and the narrative becomes a sort of dance. A celebration amidst the sadness, a tribute to the past and a plea for the future.

�Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.�

While this is a larger story made up of the amalgamation of multiple stories, this is also—in many ways—a story about stories and why they matter. Charles� notes that his incomplete memories are nothing more than �a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces,� which nudges a central theme on how we use histories or stories as ways to understand our pasts and ourselves. A boy asks �why there weren’t any Native American superheroes,� or a woman in midcentury America is told by a librarian there doesn’t seem to be any books written by indigenous authors. Instead they must see the world through the narratives of people who look like the �very kind of men some of us had seen wipe our people out.� It’s why publishers need to ensure , its why we should make space for more voices lest we choke off storytelling as another form of silencing. That the character Jude witness so many atrocities but is mute and unable to vocalize them is a powerful metaphor, especially juxtaposed with the personal memoirs Charles is able to leave behind. Language and writing become a haven, and it is in learning to read and copy the Bible that we find the titular wandering star of the novel:

�Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.�

That Orange is a superb storyteller makes it all the better. Orange has a dynamic range of voice, moving between characters as well as from fiction to nonfiction passages. Orange has often in authors like Roberto Bolaño, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, or Javier Marías because they are � not afraid to be really cerebral but also somehow have excellent pacing at same time,� though many of the passages in Stars feels closer to the mechanics of one of his other favorites: José Saramago. Such as this passage which meticulously weaves languages while winding its way through the halls of history:

�When the Indian Wars began to go cold, the theft of land and tribal sovereignty bureaucratic, they came for Indian children, forcing them into boarding schools, where if they did not die of what they called consumption even while they regularly were starved; if they were not buried in duty, training for agricultural or industrial labor, or indentured servitude; were they not buried in children’s cemeteries, or in unmarked graves, not lost somewhere between the school and home having run away, unburied, unfound, lost to time, or lost between exile and refuge, between school, tribal homelands, reservation, and city; if they made it through routine beatings and rape, if they survived, made lives and families and homes, it was because of this and only this: Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.�

He is speaking of the in boarding school programs that ran under the slogan �Kill the Indian, Save the Man� in an attempt to push �the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.� This is why survival becomes so key in the novel, though merely surviving is often not enough. Often survival is its own trade off with destruction, such as how the granting of citizenship and assimilation was an effort to dissolve�'a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians'—the tribes and erase tribal identity. The forced full citizenship as a way to end federal recognition of tribes and transfer reservation legal jurisdiction over to the federal government, all despite indigenous peoples already being granted citizenship in 1924. As is often the case, language becomes a mask for cruelty.

�I think I needed to feel the bottom to know how to rise. Maybe we're all looking for our bottoms and tops in search of balance, where the loop feels just right, and like it's not just rote, not just repetition, but a beautiful echo, one so entrenching we lose ourselves in it.�

The novel is wracked with scenes of addiction, poverty and heartbreak but also the dilemma of a disconnect with the past. A large theme of There, There touched on how indigenous identity was often difficult to pin down in the modern world, a theme that continues here. While there is the recognition that �no Indians from when they first named us Indians would recognize us as Indians now,� even Orvil admits that in the present day many of the historical indigenous practices they keep alive �can feel corny, and fake, or like trying too hard for something that wasn’t really there.� Times change, identity shifts, and how can one feel the pulse of the past when the nation spent so much effort and violence into erasing their stories. Though this is not necessarily a complete loss as the novel notes that change is natural and life flows into life, such as the family lineage going from Stars to Bear Shields and eventually Red Feathers. The family marches forward through time even when beleaguered by external aggressions or internal struggles.

Ultimately, Wandering Stars captures �the kind of love that survives surviving.� It is the thing that keeps us going, the heavy hope we are willing to carry. This is an ambitious novel, a bit quieter and looser than its predecessor, and it seeks to capture the truly expansive ideas and questions on identity and history. While perhaps it overreaches at times and can occasionally feel like checking as many boxes of themes as possible instead of thoroughly exploring a tighter few, Orange manages to carry his ideas into fruition and craft an engaging novel that achieves its goals.

4.5/5

'Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American and a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.'"