The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, part 21: Kristi Carter

 

2021 Pleasures
by Kristi Carter

 

I know I'm not alone when I say 2021 wasn't as much of an improvement on the previous year as we'd all hoped. Still living in the surreal confines of a pandemic era in a very red state in the Midwest is no easy task for anyone. That said, it's good to be invited to dwell on the positive from this last year. 

Because I'm employed as an adjunct, much of my reading and viewing is concurrent with what I assign students. This year we enjoyed analyzing the social implications and rhetorical choices of the incredibly entertaining Wild Wild Country documentary on Netflix. The series follows a community, perhaps cult, of people in Oregon during the 1980s and the way they clash with the sleepy town of conservatives nearby. Some of my students joked about taking a field trip to the now repurposed site of the commune or dressing up as sannyasins for Halloween. In a mandated English course, it was a pretty impressive level of engagement.

We also read Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age, a novel that focuses on the shortsightedness of white allies whose investment is more rooted in their own white fragility than genuine investment. Though the novel is set in 2015, the events and implications feel effervescently current with the events of the last two years.

Aside from teaching, my partner and I made time to watch the new Netflix series Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes. This is a speculative series set in current day Norway revolving around a woman, Live, and her family who owns their small town's funeral home. It's hard to get into this without too many spoilers, but what I will say is the writing never dwells too much on terminology and categorization, but more on how the characters' lives have been impacted by the supernatural. Exchanging rigid rules about what makes someone a certain kind of monster for family lore was refreshing, to say the least; also, its dark humor is well-landed in every episode.

The most disturbing film I watched this year was Things Heard & Seen (starring Amanda Seyfried), based on the novel All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage. There are supernatural elements in this film, but as it progresses we come to understand that like any good ghost story, it's the living who are the real villains. Perhaps because so much of my life has been in academia, the events following the male lead and his narcissistic terrorism hit close to home. I keep thinking about the events and imagery of this film months after finishing it. 

In reading, I've been enjoying a lot of nonfiction lately. I'm currently making my way through Nancy Marie Brown's The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women in which she interrogates and dissects the sexist codification of viking lore to prove the presence of female warriors was more commonplace and respected than most of us understand in our mainstream perception of vikings.

I also loved Undress me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman. This memoir revolves around two recent college grads who visit China shortly after the cold war cessation on travel is lifted. The memoir investigates American privilege and nationalism, but also the way that the two young women relate to one another under high levels of stress in the face of the unknown. Gilman's writing is sensitive without being overly expository, which can be hard to find in nonfiction.

We're big Kelly Link fans in our house and this summer I was able to finish her collection Pretty Monsters. Like most of her work, there's a balance of magical realism and postmodern deadpan humor that runs through the stories.

The last two works I read this year worth noting were two novels: Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder.

Moore's novel follows a young college student who babysits an adopted child of color for a white family. The book is set in 9/11 era America and pokes at some uncomfortable truths about the sidestepping of diversity that attitudes of "tolerance" create. Much like Reid's Such a Fun Age, the author refuses to give us easy answers and the characters are highly developed.

Last but not least, Nightbitch by Yoder has a special place in my heart because it was gifted to me by a friend, but also because, much like my books have been described, it is a difficult text by a woman about being a woman, specifically a mother. Much like Things Heard & Seen, the unnamed protagonist called "the mother" quarrels with the shortsightedness of systems in the humanities, though she's far from being a monster like the father in that film. Instead, the mother has to decide not just how sexism in child-rearing and economics impact her, but eventually, how she can defy them through her art and her life. This is all to say, the novel has an inspiring end, but the reader can't get there without enduring the intense --rightfully so--emotional work of the rest of the novel.

Kristi Carter is the author of Aria Viscera (April Gloaming), Red and Vast (dancing girl press), Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press). Her poems have appeared in publications including So to Speak, poemmemoirstory, CALYX, Hawaii Review, and Nimrod. Her work examines the intersection of gender and intergenerational trauma in 20th Century poetics. With James L. Brunton she edited Transnarratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience, published in 2021 by Canadian Scholars Press.   

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 20: Kristi Carter

 

 

Reading in 2020
by Kristi Carter

 

This year has been traumatic and memorable to say the least. In the spirit of pleasure though, I want to share the highlights from my reading this year. With the increased need to stay plugged in to maintain social distancing and sate the ever present need to stay informed, I found print to be a welcome relief from screen fatigue, physically, mentally and otherwise.  

While I will get to my favorite reads in a moment, I must (excitedly) note that my collection of poems, Aria Viscera, was published this May by indie press April Gloaming. It's a joy to have it out in the world and I look forward to re-celebrating its publication once the vaccine is more available and life resembles pre-Covid a bit more.  Those who have (and haven't) read my book of poems with Aqueduct, Cosmovore, may find the book of interest. Both are gory and unapologetically feminist, ha.



In no particular order, these were some of the titles that resonated with me this year:

The good people - Hannah Kent

Women - Chloe Caldwell

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell (I do still plan to read Wendy C. Ortiz's Excavation, which is now inseparable from conversation about Russel's book.)

The Knockout Queen - Rufi Thorpe

Book of Little Axe - Lauren Francis-Sharma

Take me apart - Sara Sligar

Cuntry - Kristin Sanders

My year of rest and relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

The Earthquake Bird--Susanna Jones

The Vegetarian- Han Kang

Love Cake - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Such a fun age--Kiley Reid


I think Aqueduct fans will enjoy some of these titles. Take care.

Kristi Carter is the author of Aria Viscera (April Gloaming), Red and Vast (dancing girl press), Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press). Her poems have appeared in publications including So to Speak, poemmemoirstory, CALYX, Hawaii Review, and Nimrod. Her work examines the intersection of gender and intergenerational trauma in 20th Century poetics. Currently, she is editing, along with James L. Brunton, a collection for students consisting of scholarly and creative work on trans* studies and experiences. She holds a PhD from University of Nebraska Lincoln and an MFA from Oklahoma State University.   

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2017, pt. 17: Kristi Carter

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2017 
by Kristi Carter 


Entry into 2017 was surreal here in the Midwest. More record-breaking high temperatures for January didn’t mean there was any warmth for to be found as I toiled away on the last of my doctoral work indoors. I live in one of the reddest states in the US—a state famous to sociologists for its high ratio of interpartner violence when considering population distribution. A state where queer erasure is high despite the notorious murder of Brandon Teena.

As I closed the spine of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) in the first week of January, my mind was churning sluggishly in an effort to reconcile the outcome of the election in November with these other confines on my life, on my body. The stasis of reflection that the page provided had never been more necessary, for listening and for creating.

While the books I describe here only make up a portion of what I read outside of editorial work, work with my students, and myriad stand-alone essays, stories, and poems, there is an inarguable thread linking these titles that rises to the surface more clearly than it has in past lists of what I’ve read over the course of a year. The thread sits dense, more like a black rope, each book a notch I’ve clung onto in an effort to climb out of the vacuum opening up beneath myself and those like me. As a feminist, trauma scholar, a person who identifies as a woman, and a poet, I’m no less than obsessed with the way that violence shapes the realities of those outside the dominion of power—and recursively, I have witnessed time and again how insidious and commonplace that violence becomes by the refusal to name it, to plant it down with a name among those it’s used against. For women, for people of color, for LGBTQIA+ members, for those outside the traditional conceptions of able-bodied, for the socioeconomically disadvantaged, the feminist tradition of naming thrives as a reflection of its crucial purposefulness against dismissal, gaslighting, and erasure.

Regardless of the validation from Woolf, my mind was still in a reeling state of numbness underscored by a constant fear that I would be blacklisted for my pansexuality. At work, my eyes would drift to the classroom door as my freshmen and I worked diligently on fine-tuning their academic writing skills. While my gender studies students civilly disagreed about abortion and celebrated passages from Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” my pride was watered down by anxiety that my authority was displaceable, literally removable. I was tired.

As a poet, the novel provides a place for me to surrender to capaciousness without losing (hopefully) the much beloved architecture of the written text. As Anne Carson put it last year in an interview in The Guardian “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.” Bogged down by the Foucauldian themes aforementioned, I needed to read something that would throw cold earth on my racing mind.

Sara Flannery Murphy’s novel, The Possessions and All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda both follow female protagonists through their attempts to unravel the disappearances of women in their lives. Murphy’s protagonist is a highly talented psychic empath whose ability to step into the mental realm of the deceased operates as a mirror to her own habits of avoiding and suppressing her own emotions. In comparison, Miranda’s plotline is more hard-boiled, following the cognitive dissonance of a likewise avoidant female protagonist whose personal mysteries are meted out in alternating timelines. The minds and bodies of women when focused on crimes against other women become unmoored, vicariously fragmented vehicles of power that destabilize their positions as upstanding members of society. In other words, confronting the problem makes these women frightening to those around them, as empowerment often will.

“Where is the line between empowerment and reproduction of patriarchal rituals?” I wrote in my journal as an undergrad. It’s a question that Marie Calloway (the author’s pen name) explores in her multimodal series of essays What purpose did I serve in your life (Tyrant Books, 2013). The book received press that focused on Calloway’s veiled identity and unabashedly graphic sex scenes, but no reviewer noted the division between author and narrator that inevitably serves as a part of art, no matter how biographical. As if Calloway has no power in showing us her vulnerable open body, as if she does not create the body again for us, with intentionality. That old refrain, a body of the marginalized is nothing more: a woman’s body is a woman’s body.

Poet Sheila McMullin in her debut collection daughterrarium (CSU Poetry Center 2017) smashes the reader over the head with a song that spits out those limiting beliefs. The second poem "Bad Woman, thought drawer variation" opens with raw use of language—a reclamation of the speaker’s trauma narrative in the mode of a stark factual account: "A boy sticks his dick in her ass and then in her vagina," and later in response to the doctor’s infantilizing comments (disguised as advice) while treating her for a subsequent infection, "I know how to wipe my ass.” The lightning bolt of recognition that ran through me reading this book reminds me my female body is contested in stasis, a weapon in motion.

Another preeminent theme McMullin works with is the relationship between mothers and daughters as a facet of understanding their own societal agency. Written about in depth by Marianne Hirsch in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1989), the feminist tradition of exploring the gendered conditioning of daughters functions as a way to disrupt the archetypal mother-daughter relationship in literature as one devoid of nuance and growth, a relationship in which replicas of the mother are produced ad infinitum as a function of the heteroreproductive imperative.

I’ve written about this trope, and my lived experience of it, a lot myself in my own poetry and scholarship. Myth and history rear up over and over in these narratives, one often threatening to eclipse the other, that power struggle a metaphor of purpose in the hands of the silenced whose access to fact is erased, stolen, or otherwise suppressed. Those relationships between women shine through in Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand (1995), wherein the blurring of ancient and contemporary timelines keenly illuminates the queer youth who are invisible in their adolescence and otherness, as well as the fox spirit who elects to remain invisible until she reanimates dead young women to commune with the living.

For those whose lives fall outside the privilege of the ‘norm,’ reality is already inherently surreal, incredible to those in power. Writers that take on this dimension of life through formal means that echo this displacement or by using realism as a means of holding up the unjust truth like a flawed jewel to the light, each flaw’s refraction a reminder of the larger problem. For these purposes, I have intentionally avoided the word “escape” throughout this piece, though it is referenced as one of the vestiges of recreational reading. Right now, that therapeutic method is not necessarily wrong, but even in a house not on fire, one must look squarely at those who live inside, at how they live, at how they don’t.

In January 2017, Orwell’s quintessential dystopian 1984 experienced a spike in sales so high the book was momentarily sold out on mass distributor Amazon. Who can forget the consummation of Winston and Julia’s lust in an illegal act of recreational sex?—or moreover, her prophetic pillow-talk afterward when she declares they will be caught and punished for their rebellion? Some are shaking their heads—it isn’t that dire—some are nodding. There is purpose to this caution and memory. As Lorde wrote in “Sister Outsider” (the poem that shares a title with her later, famous essay collection) which appears in the galvanizing and emboldening The Black Unicorn:

your light shines very brightly
but I want you
to know your darkness also
rich
and beyond fear. (1995)

In a time of “alternative facts” and “fake news” simply existing feels like a thoughtcrime, so we might as well think, and read, together, sharing the dark and the light.

------------------ A partial list of titles I read in 2017:

A Room of One's Own- Virginia Woolf (reprint by Martino Fine Books; April 4, 2012)
The Possessions - Sara Flannery Murphy (Harper; February 7, 2017)
All the Missing Girls - Megan Miranda (Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition January 31, 2017) What purpose did I serve in your life - Marie Calloway (Tyrant Books; June 4, 2013)
Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Books; Reprint edition August 16, 2016) Comfort Woman - Nora Okja Keller (Penguin Books; reprint March 1, 1998)
My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout (Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition October 11, 2016)
Mother Love - Rita Dove (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition May 17, 1996)
Edwin Mullhouse - Steven Millhauser (Vintage; Reprint edition April 16, 1996)
Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition June 25, 2013)
The Hearing Trumpet - Lenora Carrington (Exact Change; February 2, 2004)
The Collector - John Fowles (Back Bay Books; Reprint edition August 4, 1997)
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin (Vintage Books; reprint edition 2013)
Fun Home - Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books; Reprint edition June 5, 2007)
Lolita-Nabokov (Vintage; reprint 1989)
The Price of Salt-Patricia Highsmith (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition 2004)
When fox is a thousand-Larissa Lai (reprint by Arsenal Pulp Press; September 1, 2004)
Hands That Break & Scar-Sarah Chavez (Sundress Publications, 2017)
Oranges are not the only fruit-Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press; August 20, 1997)
sad boy/detective-Sam Sax (Black Lawrence Press; September 28, 2015)
daughterrarium - Sheila McMullin (Cleveland State University Poetry Center; April 1, 2017)
The Black Unicorn - Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition August 17, 1995)
A Theory in Tears - Cassandra Troyan (Kenning Editions; 2016)

Other texts cited above:

“Anne Carson: 'I do not believe in art as therapy'” Anne Carson interviewed by Kate Kellaway. The Guardian. Oct 30, 2016.
The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism - Marianne Hirsch (Indiana University Press; Oct 22, 1989) “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1997)
1984 – George Orwell (Penguin; 1949)

Kristi Carter’s poems have appeared in publications including Alyss , Gertrude, So to Speak, poemmemoirstory (now Nelle), CALYX, Nimrod, Naugatuck River Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place (Sundress Publications), and Hawaii Review amongst others. Aqueduct recently published her narrative collection of poems, Cosmovore. In literature, art, and life, she is deeply invested in depictions and subversions of motherhood (and daughterhood), mother-daughter dynamics and tropes, sexual politics and agencies, LGBTQ experiences, embodiment, memory, heritage, history, music, myth, violence, and trauma.